Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  Against that muddled backdrop, Wyman's guess from last year proved correct, when the New York Eight won acquittal on August 5th, cleared of all the Bureau's fanciful conspiracy charges.

  Ironically, the year's most destructive and notorious bombing hadn't been touched off by leftist subversives, but by the Philadelphia Police Department. Fed up with complaints about John Africa's MOVE cult—incessant noise, festering heaps of trash, alleged stockpiling of illegal weapons—Mayor Wilson Goode and Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor declared MOVE a terrorist group and acted accordingly. On May 13th, some 500 cops converged on Osage Avenue, standing ready while Sambor read a long speech for the TV cameras, beginning, "Attention MOVE: This is America!"

  After Sambor's moment in the limelight, firefighters tried and failed to flush out the cultists with fire hoses, a lá Bull Connor in Birmingham, but no one emerged. Next, when teargas also failed, Sambor had the bright idea to drop two "entry devices"—C4 plastic explosives—from a police helicopter onto the roof of MOVE's row house, allegedly topped by "bunkers." The resultant blasts started a fire that razed MOVE headquarters and sixty-four adjacent homes, which officers were able to evacuate before their final blitz. While firemen stood and watched the neighborhood go up in flames, eleven cultists died: John Africa, five of his adult followers, and five children ranging in age from seven to thirteen.

  With every TV network in the nation beaming images of the disaster globally, Mayor Goode and Commissioner Sambor found that their firestorm was only beginning. Snide editorials called Philly "the city that bombed itself," while police charged four MOVE survivors with parole violations, contempt of court, illegal possession of firearms, and making terrorist threats. Goode's vow that 250 neighbors could return within twenty-four hours went up in smoke with their homes. Complaints of MOVE's disturbing all-night racket went down the drain with official admission that their bullhorn broke three weeks before the bombing. Sambor resigned in November, disgraced but still calling himself a scapegoat "surrogate" for Goode. Goode's hastily appointed Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission described Sambor's cops as "grossly negligent" and deemed the bombing "unconscionable." The mayor still had two years on his present term, but Gantt thought he would have to do some fancy talking if he hoped for reelection.

  The MOVE debacle had distracted Wyman from examining reports of neo-Nazi activity from northern Idaho, where sometime Aryan Nations hanger-on Randall Weaver had moved his insular family to a compound on Ruby Ridge, near Naples in Boundary County. Wife Vicki was the clan's "religious leader," home-schooling their four children in a weird mixture of Mormonism and apocalyptic, racist "Christian Identity." Randy, an army veteran who'd once hoped to join the FBI but couldn't afford college, supported the family by working at a local John Deere factory and selling guns on the side.

  In January 1985 Randy allegedly sent a threatening letter to President Reagan, but since then, no one could produce it. That smacked of bullshit to Gantt, but two G-men interviewed the Weavers in February, joined by two Secret Service agents, the county sheriff, and his chief investigator. Randy denied stockpiling weapons and no charges were filed. In May, the Weavers wrote to Reagan, claiming enemies may have forged their signatures to a threat against him, but the original letter remained elusive.

  Gantt knew the situation would bear watching, but he found it difficult to credit that a backwoods family focused on making it through the Apocalypse deserved much more attention, in the absence of persuasive evidence that they'd committed any crimes.

  Little Italy, Manhattan: December 20, 1985.

  Dom Giordano had begun to think the best gift he could get for Christmas this year would be dodging an indictment.

  The year had started badly for Gotham gangsters, with RICO charges filed against leaders of the city's Five Families in February. Feds were calling it "the Commission Case," and the title rang true. Defendants included bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Philip Rastelli, Carmine Persico, Gennaro Lengella, and Paul Castellano. Underbosses charged were Aniello Dellacroce, Anthony Corallo, and Salvatore Santoro. Lucchese Family consigliere Christopher Furnari also made the list, along with soldiers Anthony Indelicato and Ralph Scopo from the Bonanno and Colombo Families, respectively. Specific charges included extortion, labor racketeering, murder for hire, and operating a stolen car ring that shipped vehicles as far away as Puerto Rico and Kuwait. The trial convened on October 10th, expected to be a long-running affair.

  Before those opening statements, on September 30th, the Pizza Connection case went to trial in a separate Gotham courtroom. One defendant, Gaetano Mazzara, had already lost big-time, when gunman executed him in Sayreville, New Jersey, on December 1st. One day later, brain cancer killed Aniello Dellacroce—"Mr. Neil," to his admirers in the Mafia. And two weeks after that, upstart John Gotti's soldiers capped Paul Castellano and bodyguard Tommy Bilotti when they stopped for dinner at Manhattan's Sparks Steak House.

  Where would it end?

  Maybe in Florida, for Dominic, if he intended to escape the toxic New York atmosphere.

  Chapter 3

  Birmingham, Alabama: August 27, 1986

  Dave Jordan had begun to wonder if his time was winding down in Dixie, if he had accomplished all that he could manage in the Cotton State and he should turn his thoughts toward heading home.

  Or maybe not.

  Nothing of import waited for him back in New York City. Cousin Dominic, head of the Giordano crime family Dave's father had once served as consigliere, had pulled up stakes and moved to Florida, leaving his younger brother Angelo behind to mind the store—and when had that ever gone well? Dave didn't miss them, but if he moved east, it would mean leaving Fee O'Hara, likely never seeing her again. But on that side of the equation, what remained?

  He turned his thoughts away from loss and focused on the year's positive gains. In early April, Governor George Wallace had addressed reporters, vowing that he wouldn't seek a fifth term as governor. That made sense at age sixty-six, with Wallace in declining health and rumors claiming that his third marriage was now on shaky ground. His son—George III, but commonly called "Junior," though that was in fact his father's appellation—was running for state treasurer and favored to succeed, his sights clearly focused on higher office, trading on his father's name.

  Beulah Mae Donald, mother of 1981 lynching victim Michael Donald, was still pursuing her federal lawsuit against the United Klans of America, its Mobile chapter, and two longtime front groups, the Alabama Rescue Service and the Anglo Saxon Club Inc. Also named as defendants were "Imperial Wizard" Robert Shelton; "Grand Titan" Bennie Jack Hays (who'd allegedly ordered the killing); convicted lynchers Frank Cox and James Knowles Jr.; alleged accomplices Thaddeus Betancourt, Frank Ginnochio, Teddy Kysar, and William O'Connor; plus "unknown defendants K-1 through K-50, who are Klan members and others who participated in the events set out in this complaint and whose names are unknown to the plaintiff at this time." Filed with the U.S. District Court for Alabama's Southern District in June 1984, the case had been amended in August 1985 and likely wouldn't be resolved until sometime next year.

  Omitted from the lawsuit was convicted killer Henry Hays, son of Bennie, presently caged on death row at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. He'd appealed his sentence, imposed by Judge Braxton Kittrell Jr. after the trial jury recommended life imprisonment, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals had overturned the sentence in August 1985. Yesterday—one year later—the state's supreme court had reinstated the sentence, writing, "We cannot imagine a case in which the death penalty is more justified."

  Ironically, Beulah Donald had supported the racist killer's appeal, saying, "You can't give life, so why take it? You kill an innocent person, that person stays with you day and night." No one could claim that Henry Hays was innocent, but Jordan guessed that Donald had been thinking of her son and cosmic debts that made life imprisonment worse torture than "Old Sparky" or lethal injection.

  Clearly, most Alabamians would disagree w
ith Donald. Their courts imposed more death sentences yearly than Texas, a state with five times Alabama's population. "Pro-life" Christians in the Cotton State had no qualms about executing prisoners, but now and then, a victim such as Beulah Mae tried teaching them the lesson of forgiveness.

  Jordan, personally, doubted that he'd ever have that kind of strength.

  FBI Headquarters: November 4, 1986

  Agent Wyman Gantt didn't spend much time in Washington, the city of his birth, and didn't miss it when assignments took him on the road, to courts or crime scenes near and far. Eleven months had passed since the last UNABOM attack and first fatality, the terrorist apparently returning to some kind of hibernation, but that didn't mean Gantt had anything resembling down time in his personal crusade against subversives.

  On March 4th a prison snitch reported a conversation with former Mafia boss of New Orleans Carlos Marcello, serving seventeen years on his 1981conviction in the Bureau's Operation BRILAB—bribery of labor union officials—sting operation. According to the cellblock rat, he'd asked Marcello if he planned JFK's assassination in Dallas. Carlos supposedly replied, "Yeah, I had the sonofabitch killed. I'm glad I did it, but I'm sorry I couldn't have done it myself." Unfortunately, one con's word against another's wouldn't stand the evidentiary test in court.

  Also in March, still trying to salvage his career in the wake of last year's MOVE bombing, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode had formally apologized to his constituents—but not before Philly's D.A. charged Ramona Africa—sole adult survivor of the cult and its former Minister of Information—with conspiracy and rioting. Cops claimed she'd shot at other cultists trying to escape the firestorm started by police. Jurors convicted her in April, resulting in a seven-year sentence, minus eleven months she spent in custody awaiting trial.

  In April, lawyer Stephen Bingham faced his own trial for the 1971 San Quentin riot that killed Black Guerrilla Family founder George Jackson and five others. The state charged Bingham with murder and conspiracy but had no proof he'd smuggled a pistol and Afro wig past hopelessly negligent guards. Jurors acquitted him and he went free.

  In northern Idaho, various agencies were still shadowing survivalist Randy Weaver, with Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms getting in on the act. In July, an overzealous ATF agent invited Weaver to the World Aryan Congress, held yearly at Hayden Lake by "Pastor" Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, and Randy complied with his first visit to the armed compound. Nothing had come of it so far, but T-men hoped to catch Weaver with outlawed weapons and send him to prison, leaving his family stranded at their retreat on Ruby Ridge.

  Native American activist Leonard Peltier, serving double life for the 1975 murder of two FBI agents plus seven years for a jailbreak in '79, saw his latest appeal rejected on September 11th. Ignoring most of the muddled facts in that case, Judge Gerald Heaney pinned his denial on a single cartridge case allegedly ejected from a rifle Peltier supposedly owned. Granted, the slain agents suffered seven wounds between them—their car hit another 125 times—and no projectiles could be matched to Peltier's presumed weapon, but what the hell? Short of a presidential pardon, he wasn't going anywhere.

  In Florida, Hebrew Israelite cult member Robert Rozier faced murder charges on Halloween, turning talkative in custody. He'd bargained for his life, blaming cult founder Hulon Mitchell Jr.—aka "Yahweh ben Yahweh" ("God, son of God")—and his hand-picked "Death Angel" disciples for murdering whites at random, the killers bearing trophies, usually severed ears or fingers, to please their Lord. Miami homicide detective had a list of seventeen "ear murders" dating from April 1986, most of the victims homeless indigents. Rozier's reward for testifying: twenty-two years in prison versus life or the chair. So far, police in Florida and California hadn't tried connecting Yahweh's Death Angels with a Black Muslim sect of the same name, blamed for racist "Zebra" murders in 1973 and '74.

  Religion, Gantt decided, had a tendency to drive some people batshit crazy—and he'd have to say the same for politics.

  Take the M19CO's "Resistance Conspiracy," for instance. Seven members were convicted in March, on multiple felony accounts related to terrorism, but one—Marilyn Buck—had appealed her verdict to the U.S. Second Circuit in August, claiming that G-men couldn't prove she'd carried weapons interstate because surveillance was sporadic, with no physical observations of her smuggling guns across state lines. Alas, when G-men busted her they'd found a letter in her own handwriting, self-described as a "detailed sequence of events" preceding her arrest. That confession included Buck's admission of driving guns across a state border. Case closed again, with her appeal rejected yesterday.

  Sometimes, despite their heavy rhetoric, the radicals who hid out "underground" were just as dumb as any other perp.

  FBI Field Office, Manhattan: November 13, 1986

  Agent Stephen Barnes—born Stefan Babin in his father's dacha near Moscow—was working late with no request for overtime, to catch up on his paperwork and sneak more photographs of Bureau files on Russia for his KGB handler, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Bobrik. He'd become accustomed to it, had the whole routine down pat, and still felt reasonably safe.

  As long as there was no sign of Agent Erin O'Hara anywhere around.

  Barnes still believed she was suspicious of him, but no word or action from their mutual superiors suggested that she'd passed those feelings on to higher-ups. Barnes followed protocol, of course: no phoning Bobrik from the office or his home, changing the public telephones he used each time to frustrate taps. There wasn't much else he could do…until he felt the need for his colleague to have a nasty accident.

  Meanwhile, there was no end of news regarding Soviet activity abroad. Supposed defector Dmitri Polyakov, retired Major General of the Red Army's Main Intelligence Directorate, had remained stateside long enough to burn a few spies, then scuttled back to Moscow and arrest on charges that he'd served as an amerikanskiy double agent from 1955 to 1980, codenamed "TOPHAT" by the Bureau and "BOURBON" by the CIA. He was facing treason charges, probably a firing squad, but he'd been ignorant of Barnes's treachery inside the FBI, the only thing that mattered now.

  Russia's losing war in Afghanistan dragged on, a matter of indifference to Barnes, although his handler constantly craved new intelligence about the Bureau's insight into what was happening 6,700 miles from Washington and Gotham. Barnes knew the CIA had been arming mujahideen with FIM-92 Stinger infrared homing surface-to-air missiles for use against Soviet "Hind" helicopters and the occasional civilian aircraft. Moscow claimed that Washington "greatly exaggerated" the new weapon's importance, but dispatches from the battlefront spoke volumes: prior to introduction of the Stingers, native guerillas had never won a pitched battle against Russian troops, but since their distribution, guerillas had never lost one.

  To redress that imbalance—and forestall a coup d'état against President Babrak Karmal's regime in Kabul, Russia had vastly inflated domestic military forces: 302,000 soldiers with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan's army, 132,000 at the Ministry of Defense, 80,000 for the Ministry of State Security, and 70,000 with the Ministry of Interior. Or so it read on paper, but Barnes knew all four armies were plagued by desertion—an average 32,000 per year for the DRA army alone. Against that, UN observers claimed that heavy fighting had killed more than 15,000 noncombatant civilians so far in 1986.

  Chief among the mujahideen warlords was one Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen whose billionaire father hailed from Yemen before settling in Jeddah and founding the Saudi Binladin Group in collaboration with his adopted nation's royal family. The family business had started off refurbishing mosques at Mecca and Medina, expanding to become a global oil and equity management conglomerate grossing $2 billion annually, ranked the largest construction firm in the world, with offices in London, Dubai and Geneva. One of Osama's half-brothers was also involved with the newly-formed Carlyle Group, an up-and-coming multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in Was
hington that counted George H. W. Bush among its advisors. CIA spokesmen denied any dealings with Osama's Maktab al-Khidamat (Afghan Services Bureau), but it didn't take a genius to see past the smoke and mirrors.

  A major distraction from Afghanistan came on April 26th, when a "routine safety test" at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in northern Ukraine, went disastrously wrong. Plant managers simulated a power failure on the graveyard shift, intending to run through a standard recovery checklist, but reactor flaws generated a massive steam explosion inside reactor No. 4, followed by an open-air graphite fire. The result: Earth's first-ever Level 7 event—the maximum on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Moscow acknowledged thirty-one workers killed outright by the explosion and fire, with 237 cases of acute radiation sickness, but where would it end? The fire blazed for nine days, its updrafts sending plumes of radioactive material across the western USSR and Europe. Pregnant women in Ukraine were demanding abortions, terrified of birthing mutant monsters, and the toll from cancer would take years—perhaps decades—to quantify. So far, 500,000 workers were endeavoring to fix the mess at a cost of some 18 million rubles—call it $538 million—and Pripyat was deemed uninhabitable until further notice.

  As for U.S. relations with Moscow, Reagan and Gorbachev had met in Reykjavík, Iceland, initially agreeing to remove all intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe, then parting tersely when Reagan refused to abandon his "Star Wars" boondoggle.