The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  Copyright © 1988 and 2020 by Charles Brandt

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 31 Hanover Street, Suite 1

  Lebanon, New Hampshire 03766

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Ebook ISBN 9781586422646

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  For Tripp, Mimi, and Jenny Rose; Laura and Denis

  PREFACE

  A street crime wave hit the major cities of the US starting roughly in 1961. At first those of us living in New York were told it was an illusion created by new methods of recording crime. There weren’t more crimes, just more crimes being reported.

  Across the country, chiefs of police, on the other hand, said that the increase in street crime was real and had been created by new US Supreme Court rulings that, it was felt, diminished the rights of policemen to search and to interrogate, each a major tool of police work. The rules increased the rights of criminals to be free from searches and questioning, rights my pals and I never had as teens.

  Women found tighter and safer ways to carry their pocketbooks. Soon there were fewer and fewer pocketbooks being seen on the streets.

  As a welfare investigator in East Harlem, I watched my territory’s streets become more dangerous due to the crimes related to the 1960s epidemic of drugs that were sold on the top floors of the apartment buildings I entered to make home visits. By the time I left East Harlem to go to Brooklyn Law School in 1966, it was no longer possible to blame the crime wave on better methods of crime reporting.

  My goal was to be a prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Then a month prior to graduation during a speech on the importance of ethics to lawyers by the Brooklyn DA Eugene Gold,1 a classmate with whom I was very close leaned over and said, “Listen to this bullshit; my husband delivered a bag of cash to him on Atlantic Avenue. He split it with Aaron Koota,” the prior DA who’d become a trial court judge.

  I called friends in Delaware — where I had gone to college — who had been urging me to become a prosecutor there. Overnight I moved to Delaware to do just that. Delaware was and is a state judged to have the highest ethical standards at the bench and bar.

  Unexpectedly, I found that the Delaware I had known in college, ten years earlier, had become riot-torn and with a high murder rate, no longer a safe place, not even close to the relative safety of Brooklyn.

  In Delaware the Office of the Attorney General has jurisdiction over every single crime, from speeding tickets to first-degree murders. On May 1, 1971, Attorney General W. Laird Stabler, Jr., swore me in as a deputy attorney general. The chief of police of New Castle County stood beside Stabler as he explained to me that he expected his deputies to provide assistance to the police in the field, especially in murder cases. The police were to have our unlisted phone numbers. We could expect to be called as soon as a body was found. This was necessary because of new rulings that were coming down from the bench with regularity restricting police. We prosecutors were to ensure that a rule violation did not cause a good murder case to be thrown out of court. We were to carry guns when appropriate.

  Then Stabler had the chief swear me in with the powers of a policeman. After three years in the office, thanks to the detective work I did in the field and the jury trial work I did in the courtroom, Laird swore me in as his chief deputy attorney general. I was to carry Badge Number Two as the second-highest law enforcement officer in the state. Laird’s successor as attorney general, the experienced and talented Dick Wier, kept me on in that capacity for two more years. We worked eighty-hour weeks in the AG’s office, and more than five years I participated by my count in more than fifty homicide and attempted homicide investigations. I had a knack for interrogation and for working my way around the new rules governing murder cases, staying within the law. I had expert tutoring by outstanding detectives such as Stan Friedman, the supervisor of the Wilmington Robbery Squad, whose jurisdiction included homicide. Stan’s badge adorns the front cover of this book.

  Recently, talking old times on the phone, Stan said to me: “I can’t believe you were in the office only five years. If I had to guess I would have said twenty, all the shit you did.”

  The book in your hands is fiction, but it’s based on some of the actual “shit” I did, including interrogations and confessions that convicted the shooters of a policeman in the head and the near strangulation of a child by a young drug user who, on release from jail, shot both of his own parents to death.

  When I left the AG’s office in 1976 to start my own law practice, I continued to work murder cases, now as a defense attorney, while I concentrated on medical law. I represented Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a Mafia hit man chronicled in my book I Heard You Paint Houses,2 and got him released from prison many years early on medical grounds.

  The Right to Remain Silent is a novel written and to be read for entertainment, but it also encourages study of the art of interrogation and contains the line that “confession is one of the necessities of life, like food and shelter.” To quote my interrogation mentor, the late Wilmington detective Charlie Burke, “They want to tell you, Choll.”

  Though the big Irishman, Frank Sheeran, had been indicted along the way for the murders of Robert “Lonnie” DeGeorge, Fred Gawronski, and Francis “Big Bobby” Marino, he was never convicted, and he had never talked about his life of violence to an outsider. Whenever he was hauled before a grand jury as a suspect in the murder of Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights. He read this book while serving a long sentence for convictions on lesser crimes, and its major theme triggered his own sense of remorse, a remorse I would prey on to obtain confession upon confession to his participation in twenty-five to thirty murders, including those of Hoffa and Joey Gallo, and to his guilty knowledge of th
e Mafia’s role in the assassination of President Kennedy, all portrayed in I Heard You Paint Houses. His decision to hire me to pursue his early medical release from prison was made with the knowledge that, like the fictional hero of The Right to Remain Silent, Lou Razzi, I had cracked cases through interrogation and confession. The five-year process during which I would handle the Irishman like a hostile witness had its genesis in 1988 with this novel.

  Charles Brandt

  Ketchum, Idaho

  January 2020

  1 In 1983, Gold would would confess to molesting a child.

  2 Steerforth Press, 2004

  1

  January 9, 1961 7:40 P.M.

  “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro,” I said to myself and took my foot off the gas. “That’s no way to make a friend.” I lowered Elvis’s latest hit record on the car radio and had to pump my brakes to keep from sliding. The City of Wilmington snowplows hadn’t yet reached the bottom of French Street. Had I kept inching my way home and ignored Figaro, the next fifteen years would have been different, but facts are facts.

  John Figaro in plain view under a streetlight — white male, age twenty-two, apprentice number writer — had just kicked a lone little girl’s sled out of his path on the sidewalk. It made the child cry. She leaped past Figaro after her runaway sled. He paid no attention to her crying or to her sled, even when it bumped into the white concrete stoop of an old brick row house. Figaro had a look on his face that said that nothing was going to stand in the way of this badass tonight. He was content. One kick was good. A man of purpose, he strutted down the block toward Janasek’s Hotel.

  I adjusted my rearview mirror a little at a time to keep his back in sight while I steered to the curb and parked by a hydrant. Figaro had been had for many crimes in his brief life. And now sled-kicking. They’re writing grand opera, John, but not about you, and from the looks of things they never will.

  I clicked the radio all the way off. Elvis would have to wonder if she was still lonesome some other night.

  Figaro passed into the yellow glare coming from the glass door of Janasek’s melancholy excuse for a hotel. In the lighting, his camel’s-hair topcoat looked new. And it fit poorly, like a stolen coat bought off the back of a truck. I noticed a bulge inside the coat under his left arm. Bearing goodies larger than number sheets, I’d say, John. With a skip he lightfooted up the steps and disappeared into the hotel.

  “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro,” I said again and stared at the hotel entrance. Have you been naughtier than usual?

  To begin with, I asked myself, what is John Figaro doing with a camel’s-hair anything? What the hell, Figaro. You look collegiate. That’s the word, collegiate. Sis, boom, bah. And right then I decided to follow him. I got out and quietly closed the door of my ’56 red-and-black Ford convertible.

  The little girl, no more than eight and snowsuited, lay across her old rusty sled, shielding it from the Figaros of the world the way the Secret Service protects the president from gunfire. Her big brown eyes looked up in wonder at my blue uniform. She appeared to be a Gypsy, probably from one of the families that used to move in and out of the flats around the corner on Front Street.

  “Sled okay, honey?” I asked as I squatted to her.

  “Curse him,” she whimpered defiantly, tears still filling her eyes.

  “Let me take this one, partner.” I touched her light-brown cheek and straightened up. “I’m good at sled-kickers.”

  There, now I felt like a detective again. I’d spent this day off of mine working a private-pay job, directing traffic for society wedding guests. My uniform smelled of mothballs. I hadn’t worn it in three years, and I’d never worked a private-pay job before. Rent a real cop in a real uniform with a real gun, for those times democracy doesn’t provide enough privilege. You see, my wife, Marian, was unplanned-pregnant and going around the house singing songs with the word money in them. So at the age of twenty-eight, at the dawn of the New Frontier, I signed the duty roster for private-pay jobs. Now, on my way home, I figured I had the right to stop off for a little real-cop nightcap.

  By walking to Janasek’s four-story reddish-brown brick hotel instead of backing up my car, I’d be giving Figaro enough time to get settled into whatever he had in mind. Figaro always had a sly way of looking up to no good, but on this blustery night he looked to be overachieving. Even so, I didn’t figure him for a stickup of one of Janasek’s marathon crap games, or anything as sis, boom, bah as that. You don’t kick sleds on your way to a robbery.

  Janasek’s Hotel, long since demolished, was near the southern border of the city, a half block up from the Pennsy Station. A nice convenience for high rollers from New York City. They’d take the two-hour train ride south to roll the dice at Janasek’s Hotel in Delaware, then indulge their lower torsos in a little salt-and-pepper lust at Janasek’s other joint, the appropriately named Body & Soul Lounge across the state line in Chester, Pennsylvania. It was a regular package deal. Rumor on the job had it that old-time actors like George Raft and Lawrence Tierney still came down for the tour. No, the little raisin might be up to something big, but he couldn’t get into the crapshoot at Janasek’s, much less stick it up. Figaro was a Lincoln Street Little Italy cool guy who up until tonight had always given the impression of knowing his place and keeping it.

  He’ll leave the New York gamblers alone, I thought, and so will I unless I can’t avoid them. Actually, I felt a little sorry for them. The New Yorkers had had enough trouble last October with Mazeroski’s World Series home run. Besides, gambling’s belonged to Vice since the beginning of time, and detectives have always stayed out of it with pleasure. And, too, Janasek supplied Vice with so-called valuable information, and he kept his prostitutes across the border at the Body & Soul. He’d earned the right to be left alone in Wilmington, or so they claimed.

  I opened the glass door, and the smell of a century or more’s accumulation of tobacco attacked my nostrils. I moved into the hazy, overheated lobby and patted snow from my dress blues. It melted when it hit the green floral-design linoleum.

  A trail of probably Figaro’s melted snow led to a flamingo-pink Formica reception counter. On a stool behind it, next to an antique brass cash register painted high-gloss pink, sat Janasek himself. His shiny red face was full of smooth, rounded fat and topped by fluffy white hair. It made him look like Santa Claus without the beard. He had on an orange flannel shirt buttoned at the neck. His double chin hung over it. He wore black suspenders. He grunted through the gray hairs coming out of his nose, put down his dog-eared copy of Peyton Place, and peered at me from wire granny glasses.

  “Where’s your fuckin’ luggage, rook’?” He snarled like a pit bull at a cocker spaniel. “You gotta have luggage to register here. You better go check with Vice before you go hangin’ out in my joint. Scarin’ my guests. You gotta be new. You don’t like walkin’ around the snow, you shoulda been a bartender. This ain’t the little town of Bethlehem, and I ain’t runnin’ no fuckin’ manger.”

  I took off my patrolman’s hat, raised my head and displayed my full face, and said, “Jingle bells, Janasek.”

  He took off his glasses and cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything.

  “You wired tight with Vice?” I asked. “My new partner just moved in out of Vice. I’m going to make a point of asking him all about your luggage requirement. Do you know Detective Rocco DiGiacomo?”

  He opened his mouth, about to answer, but inhaled through it instead.

  “Don’t ever hold back with me, Janasek. Know my partner, or don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I know him.”

  “I’m going to ask you a different question. Point blank. Janasek, are you a godless communist?”

  I waited with my mouth open, kind of dopey, adenoidal. He folded his granny glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

  “They’re for readin’,”
he said casually, leaning on the counter, cozy, as if it didn’t matter whether it was me or some rookie cop. “These glasses fuck up my straight-ahead vision. I couldn’t tell it was you. How come you’re wearin’ a uniform?” He hadn’t responded to my communist question, and he didn’t wait for me to answer his uniform question. He steadied his voice and his gaze, and then said, “You want something from me, Detective Razzi? Seriously, what do you want?”

  “Your mouth sounds dry, Janasek. Getting the heebie-jeebies?”

  “No. You don’t worry me. Why should I be worried? It’s just funny we never met before. In a small city like this. Seriously, what are you actually here for? You ain’t in Vice now or nothin’, are you? Ah, what am I talking about? I know you ain’t in Vice.” He chuckled softly. “The uniform.”

  “Are you a communist? It’s a simple question. Let me put it another way; do you support Mao Tse-tung or Chiang Kai-shek? Or do you not give a shit?”

  Once again he ignored my nonsense. He ground his teeth audibly. He barely heard me, a sign of a man more interested in protecting whatever is on his own mind.

  “Look, I ain’t got nothin’ to hide,” he said. “I’m just sayin’, you know. I seen your picture in the paper all the time. Always solvin’ some murder. ’S funny we never met or been introduced or nothin’. Let’s forget about before. Put that totally behind us.” He paused to chuckle. “All them smart remarks about luggage and Vice and all. That’s me. I’m just sittin’ here by myself. Then the next thing you know I start gettin’ grouchy.”