by James Ellroy
Her grandparents were German-Jewish émigrés. They came to America and settled in New York. Isidore Klein traveled to South America and became immersed in Green Fire lore.
He was a borderline mystic. He was every inch a Red.
Red bandits hit the Muzo Valley mines. The men called themselves quaqueros. It meant “treasure hunters.” They dug tunnels into the mining companies’ tunnels and dug out stones for themselves. They warred with company goon squads. They looted emeralds routinely and were routinely trapped, tortured and killed. There were dozens of quaquero bands. Some were politically identified. Isidore Klein bought his emeralds exclusively from them. He earmarked a portion of his ultimate profits to South American insurgent groups. He sold his emeralds in fine jewelry stores throughout the United States. He grew wealthy. He gave away small fortunes to anarchist cabals and left-wing labor organizations. He lived comfortably. He lived more modestly than other immigrant arrivistes. His rise to wealth matched a young lawyer’s rise to power. The man’s name was John Edgar Hoover. He was a Justice Department drone. He was brilliant and sensed opportunity in wildly unfolding events.
The post–World War I Red Scare granted him History. The attorney general’s home was bombed. Hoover took it from there.
The Red Raids. Civil liberties suspended, abrogated, quashed, interdicted, suppressed. First Amendment rights shat upon. Political roundups, false imprisonings, deportation at whim. A concurrent resurgence of nativist groups and the Klan. John Edgar Hoover saw the force of fear and exploited it. His power grab succeeded commensurately.
Isidore Klein had one son. His name was Joseph. He was born in 1902. Isidore raised him RED. Joseph married Helen Hershfield Rosen in 1924. Helen had been raised RED. Their daughter Joan was born on Halloween night, ’26. Her parents and grandfather raised her RED.
The FBI was recently chartered. The old Bureau of Investigation had been deemed moribund. J. Edgar Hoover took over. He was an organizational genius and a PR whiz. His mandate was smother dissent. He honed his techniques during the madcap boom decade. He understood the metaphysical value of the Enemy. He knew that Reds could serve in that capacity. Gangsters were picaresque touchstones for the public imagination. They lacked the pervasive force of the Reds. The boom became the Depression. The American Left mobilized. Hoover sensed an insurgent shift and reacted. He stepped into the public arena with flair. He preached an anti-Red message and ignored organized crime. He made himself a national hero. He unleashed a tidal wave of illegal surveillance, official scrutiny and false arrest. Isidore Klein took full notice of him.
The name Hoover reigned ubiquitous. He recalled the name spoken by savaged comrades in 1918. He began to study Hoover. He developed a sense of Hoover as his personal enemy. He acted in the public arena. He utilized the stones.
He bought subversives out of stir. Small and large emerald gifts unlocked jail doors. Emeralds supported Joseph, Helen and the child Joan. They camped in socialist meeting halls and distributed leaflets in bread lines. They housed and fed fugitive leftists. They skirmished with goons on picket lines and endured three- and four-day detentions. They fought their war. Isidore Klein fought an increasingly recognized war against J. Edgar Hoover.
His weapon was words. Emeralds bankrolled the clandestine publishing of anti-Hoover tracts. Isidore Klein pushed the tracts in significant quantity. Mr. Hoover took enraged note of it and began a lockstep surveillance. Isidore’s printing operations were repeatedly raided and Isidore was repeatedly jailed. Emeralds bought him out of custody. The stones were trinkets, talismans, keepsakes and bribes. The Depression raged. A small emerald carried a cop’s family for months. Green Fire was the flame of magic and revolution. Mr. Hoover knew it. He failed to interdict the flow of the emeralds and thus the flow of the tracts. He believed that Isidore Klein held an emerald stash at his home on East 63rd Street. He ordered a squad of New York City agents to ransack the house and steal them. It was 1937. Joan Rosen Klein was ten years old.
The squad was led by Special Agent Thomas D. Leahy. He was a widower with a sixteen-year-old son named John. The squad tore Isidore’s home apart. They found twenty-three pounds of the highest quality Muzo emeralds and stole them. Isidore arrived later that night. He discovered the theft and suffered a fatal heart attack.
Joseph and Helen Klein were now without resources. They knew that Hoover directed the burglary and told Joan the story in full detail. Hoover kept the emeralds. He dispensed small quantities to his toadies as quid pro quos. The quaqueros found less controversial gemstone importers. Hoover emerald-gifted strikebreak captains and subversive-group infiltrators. He hoarded the sum of the stones for himself.
Isidore Klein’s death devastated Tom Leahy. He became horrified of Mr. Hoover. His fear and revulsion ran equal with his guilt and self-disgust. A gear clicked the wrong way or the right way inside him. He became radicalized.
He covertly assisted left-wingers and warned them of impending Fed raids. He acted with great caution and covered his tracks. Agent Tom became a cherished secret of the leftist underground. The Kleins had heard of him. No one knew that he’d led the emerald raid. Hoover had quashed all public mention of it. Agent Tom confessed the deed to Joe and Helen Klein and their daughter. Joe and Helen forgave him. A deep friendship evolved. Agent Tom took their forgiveness to heart. It spawned inspiration. He was a gifted lawyer and criminal investigator. He knew how to log information and build information to the indictment stage. He decided to build a massive file on J. Edgar Hoover and take it public.
He queried other agents, Hoover’s minions, law-enforcement colleagues and rivals. He took depositions from witnesses to Hoover’s negligence and planned obfuscation. The file grew to several thousand pages. It catalogued covetousness, pettiness, the large-scale violation of civil liberties and rampant power abuse. Joe and Helen Klein read the file. The young Comrade Joan read the file and became enraptured and enraged.
It was now fall 1940. Joan was fourteen. Tom Leahy’s son Jack was now almost twenty. Tom Leahy was a Red with an FBI badge. He was grooming Jack to become a cop revolutionary. Mr. Hoover was forty-five years old. He had the emeralds. He was ascendant. He possessed the power he had always craved.
He had created a myth. Newsprint and radio waves spread it for him. He adroitly read the times he lived through. He created a tale of moral sureness and his own supremacy. It was tailor-made for the Depression and the onset of World War II. It posited the unseen other as epidemically everywhere. It vouchsafed the FBI and his stewardship for as long as he could render the myth real.
Hoover had informants everywhere. He learned of Red Tom’s betrayal and the anti-Hoover file. He heard that Leahy was off taking depositions. Leahy was isolated at a leftist campground in the Catskills. The moment was perfect.
He paid off a squad of New York State troopers. They were expedited with parcels of emeralds, no cash. The troopers raided the campground. Several inhabitants resisted. The troopers rounded them up and burned down the women’s bunkhouse.
Joseph and Helen Klein resisted. They were arrested and severely beaten at a state police jail near Poughkeepsie. They died from their injuries.
Joan was home in Brooklyn that weekend. A veil of rage and horror fell over her.
New York City agents stormed Tom Leahy’s apartment. They found his file. Hoover read it and burned it. His informants helped him build a sedition case against Tom. The war was newly raging. Hoover played a trump card: “national security.” He had Tom Leahy arrested and tried sub rosa. Tom was convicted by a hastily impaneled judge and jury. He was sentenced to six years at Sing Sing.
Tom Leahy’s file was comprehensive. It was diligently annotated and superbly constructed. It begat Mr. Hoover’s devouring file lunacy.
FBI paperwork accrued to ten tons yearly. Tom Leahy died in prison in 1943. He drank himself dead on rotgut toilet brew. He had been repeatedly beaten. The guards who beat him all wore emerald rings.
Tom’s son Jack disappeared and live
d anonymously. He attended college and served in the U.S. Navy. He entered Notre Dame Law School. He was wholly and committedly RED and equally committed to sustained vengeance. He laid out a paper trail of obscure name changes and came all the way back to the defiant John Leahy. The trail was built from his date-close birthday up. His father’s file taught him how to build paper. His father’s access to Hoover’s files taught him to build paper fraudulently. He got through the FBI background-check process. He was appointed to the Bureau in 1950.
Special Agent John C. Leahy—RED.
He worked routine Bureau assignments. He kept up with his father’s subversive friends. He covertly redacted his comrades’ files and diverted FBI interference. Jack Leahy: Fed toady by day. Jack Leahy: RED provocateur by night.
Jack reconnected with Joan. She had gone underground and gone criminal. Her sense of vengeance had gone scattershot. She had remained fixedly RED.
She recruited on college campuses. She proudly retained her own real name, much as Jack did. The sporadic use of aliases muddied her trail. She met Karen Sifakis. Their deep friendship began. A floating dialogue defined it. Karen advocated non-violence. Joan nearly always disagreed.
A strikebreaker pulled a gun on her. She hit him with a two-by-four. She sustained a scarring knife wound.
Two Legionnaires cornered her at that Paul Robeson concert. She took a savage beating. She waited nine years. She shot and killed the two men in their sleep.
She loved the thrill of armed robbery. She planned the jobs and steered clear of the jobs as events. She was conscious of herself as a woman. She crouched in certain shadows as she raged RED.
Jack fed her inside scoop on payroll jobs and bank vaults. She always donated her heist takes to the Cause. Joan and Jack became comrade-lovers. They shared a family story and a family hatred. They moved together and in circles overlapping. Joan became Williamson, Goldenson, Broward and Faust and always returned to Klein. Jack remained a G-man under his real and entirely fictive name. Jack got Joan out of jail. Jack utilized municipal PD contacts for criminal-records deletes. Joan conceived two textile-plant jobs in L.A.—’51 and ’53. Dragnets caught her up. Jack got her out and blitzed file reports. Joan conceived a heist in Dayton, Ohio. Jack bought off key investigators and got most of the paperwork expunged.
Joan roved and toured revolutionary hot spots. It was a breathless errand and a blood duty of great urgency. Her dialogue with Karen Sifakis curtailed her worst urges. A lust peaked and sent things bad: ’51, ’56, ’61. Only Karen knew the details. Only Karen knew the price she paid to continue at her mad pace.
She moved heroin to finance left-wing coups. She fomented revolt in Algeria and Cuba. She was heedless, reckless, vindictive and in many ways ideologically unsound. The death of her great love Dwight Holly taught her things. Her arc left matched his arc right in hate and specious rigor. She should have told him that before she ran from him.
She roved. She ran from and toward J. Edgar Hoover. She thought about the emeralds near constantly. She heard out rumors and cribbed lore and supposition. She exerted common sense and followed the trail.
Jack followed it with her. They shared information and came to this:
Hoover sold the stones to a Paraguayan fascist after the war. It was greed and political payback. El jefe hid Nazi scientists the U.S. wanted. El jefe knew brilliant gemologists. They knew of the stones and had their own designs.
They studied the emeralds. Their findings comprised a thesis on exploitative mining techniques. A straight bore-through-rock technology evolved. It was successfully employed and brought an end to the quaquero raids. El jefe was afraid of overt quaquero vengeance and ordered massacres. Scores of quaqueros were slaughtered.
The bore-through-rock technology caused massive worker layoffs. Enhanced emerald profits financed right-wing coups throughout South America and the Caribbean.
Green Fire served to sustain Rafael Trujillo’s power. The Goat became obsessed. He had to own the initial Muzo-Klein stones outright. The provenance consumed him. He wanted the story to end with him.
Trujillo hoarded Dominican money and grabbed Haitian-owned land. Papa Doc Duvalier had been emerald-financed and wanted the gems for himself. Trujillo and Duvalier hated each other. Trujillo murdered Haitian refugees. Duvalier enacted reprisals. The two führers discovered their mutual longing. They decided to trust each other on the acquisition of the stones and nothing else. Joan tracked the arc of the emeralds to this point and no further. She went to the D.R. in early ’59.
She found a country ripe for revolt. She found Celia.
A leftist network supplied the introduction. Celia was a gone-bust United Fruit heiress. She was half American, half Dominican, all old money. She used her father’s surname of Farr and her mother’s maiden name of Reyes interchangeably. Gretchen and Celia came and went at whim. Joan preferred the latter name. Celia was a casualty of revolution, left- and right-wing. Castro nationalized the cane fields and bankrupted her father. The Goat robbed her mother in a recent land grab. Celia was a nationally ranked polo player and a bunco artist extraordinaire. She was omnivorously intelligent and not quite brilliant. Joan considered her ripe for conversion. One thing told her this.
The emeralds. Celia was crazed over them.
They became comrade/lovers. Celia was headstrong and tractable, independent and willfully submissive to the concept of revolt. Celia was a mystic. Joan was not. Celia dabbled in Eastern philosophy and more than dabbled in voodoo. Celia believed in the spiritual force of the emeralds. Joan did not. They reconciled their differences and traveled to Castro’s Cuba. They began plotting the 6/14 invasion.
The invasion failed. A rebel named María Rodríguez Fontonette betrayed the Cause. A Tonton Macoute man named Laurent-Jean Jacqueau assisted the Cause. Jacqueau secretly emigrated to America and changed his name to Leander James Jackson. Joan and Celia were captured, imprisoned and bribed free. Joan had stashed a robbery take in an L.A. bank vault. Jack Leahy tapped the cash and found the right officials.
Joan and Celia flew to America. The Goat was assassinated. Juan Bosch and Joaquín Balaguer succeeded him. They were repressive and much less garish rulers. Balaguer inherited the Goat’s emerald fixation. He was then a government lawyer eyeing the presidency. Papa Doc remained in power and remained emerald-fixed.
The men found each other. They collaborated and cut a side deal. They learned the identity of the Paraguayan el jefe. They gave him a down payment on the Muzo-Klein emerald stash. El jefe was near-broke and in poor health. He wanted to sell. It was December ’63. Fate intervened and fucked it all up.
Balaguer had a financial setback. Papa Doc had a financial setback. They lacked the cash to outright buy the stones. They looked for a rich American to consign them to.
The right-wing grapevine supplied a name: Dr. Fred Hiltz. He was a hate pamphleteer and an emerald-myth worshiper. They contacted Dr. Fred. He paid off el jefe with a bank draft. The stones were messengered to Santo Domingo. Balaguer and Papa Doc met there just to touch them. They did not trust messengers to hand-deliver the stones. Dr. Fred insisted on an armored-car drop. A Haitian man was hired to fly the emeralds to L.A. It was now 1/16/64. He could not leave until 2/21/64. Balaguer and Papa Doc enjoyed the delay. They got to touch the stones more.
SUDDENLY:
A Tonton Macoute thug learned of the shipment. He contacted his old Tonton frère Leander James Jackson. Leander knew his old comrades 0Joan and Celia. Serendipity: Celia’s brother Richard Farr worked at Wells Fargo in L.A.
Jack Leahy ran the FBI’s L.A. Office. Richard knew the armored-car route. Richard predicted the cash take along with the stones. Jack knew expendable criminal scum to leave dead at the scene. The greatest hurdle was obscuring their IDs. Joan knew a brilliant chemist named Reginald Hazzard. She had mentored him at the Freedom School. She had bailed him out of jail the month before.
The plan was developed. Reginald concocted a bone-deep burning solution. Jack recruited an exp
endable Klansman named Claverly and an expendable hood named Wilkinson. The plan was now fully formed, but:
Reginald wanted to be there. He told Joan and Jack this. Joan and Jack conferred and tried to dissuade him. Reginald insisted. He thought his chemical expertise marked him invaluable and immune to deceit. He was right and he was wrong. Joan and Jack argued. Jack argued for compliance as Joan argued for termination. Jack won. Reginald would go in and Reginald would survive. The plan was now fully formed, but:
Reginald feared a double cross. Reginald harbored a hurt-child resentment. His comrades trusted him to develop deep-burning compounds, but not to be there. He was there that day. He impulsively popped a bank tab and let loose jets of ink. Jack impulsively shot him.
His flame-retardant precautions saved his life. Soft-point bullets hit him, regardless. His chemical compounds worked erratically. The palliative pellets in his mouth circumvented damage. The anti-flame chemicals enhanced flames paradoxically.
So he lived. So Marsh Bowen and the doctor saved him. He grabbed handfuls of inked cash as he went down. He gave them to the doctor.
He hid in East Los Angeles. Scotty Bennett led the LAPD Task Force. Jack worked FBI-adjunct. The newspaper accounts and crime-scene reports shocked him. There were two dead robbers at the scene.
Jack wanted to find Reginald and kill him. Joan told him, “No.” The debate raged for days. Comrade Joan won. She searched for Reginald and found him. She begged for his forgiveness. He told her he wanted to live in Haiti and study herbal chemistry. She gave him the emeralds and told him to serve the Cause.
Joan and Jack now possessed millions of dollars. A dozen ink bindles had leaked. Stains rendered the cash unpassable for some time. They waited. Jack heard a rumor: pilfered heist cash had been laundered through the Peoples’ Bank. He told Joan. She asked around about Lionel Thornton. She learned that he was mobbed up. She learned that he came out of the Detroit labor struggle, circa ’40. She arranged a meeting with him.
