Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  Three weeks after that breakdown, on November 3rd, a Lebanese magazine blew the whistle on Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, documenting American arms shipments to "enemy" Iran at the same time seven U.S. hostages in Lebanon came home. Ten days later, Reagan had interrupted TV network broadcasting for a litany of half-truths and outright lies. He claimed, "My purpose was to convince Tehran that our negotiators were acting with my authority, to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between us with a new relationship." To that end, he'd authorized "modest deliveries of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran."

  Although Reagan's speech was formally titled "Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy," he'd failed to mention Nicaragua even once, and stolidly ignored reports of cocaine trafficking encouraged by the CIA, and he'd closed with a pipe dream: "At the same time, we undertook this initiative, we made clear that Iran must oppose all forms of international terrorism as a condition of progress in our relationship. The most significant step which Iran could take, we indicated, would be to use its influence in Lebanon to secure the release of all hostages held there."

  Anyone who swallowed that line, Barnes supposed, would doubtless vote for Reagan-Bush again in 1988.

  Harlem: December 14, 1986

  Sergeant Payton Sawyer sipped Wild Turkey bourbon in his bachelor apartment, trying to convince himself he wasn't getting old. TV ads for Clairol Loving Care hair dye assured mostly-white women that they weren't aging, only getting better—but where in hell did that leave him?

  At fifty-seven, he was still eight years away from monthly Social Security checks, with thirty-five years on the NYPD and most of that serving undercover with "BOSS," the Bureau of Special Services. Despite sporadic storms of protest since the latter Sixties, Boss was still in operation on the down-low, still surveilling Gothamites and growing stronger with aid from the Reagan Justice Department.

  One thing Sawyer had lived to see was the last gasp of the Black Liberation Army. In February, onetime BLA leader Anthony Coston—aka "Lumumba Abdul Shakur"—had been shot dead by unknown home invaders in New Orleans. Two days later and 1,900 miles away, in Los Angeles, G-men had finally captured fugitive Mutulu Shakur (no relation to Coston, born Jeral Williams), extraditing him for trial in the 1981 Brink's robbery and murders.

  Paging though the various "Shakur" files, Sawyer realized how convoluted—some might say incestuous—the Black Power revolution had become. Coston had founded New York's Black Panther chapter in concert with Billy Gaston and Alice Faye Williams. Coston and Alice Faye married shortly before lawmen charged the "Panther 21" with a mythical terrorist conspiracy in Manhattan. Soon after their acquittal, Alice bore a son initially named Lesane Parish Crooks, but her marriage dissolved when Coston discovered that Billy Garland was the boy's biological father. By that time, Alice/Afeni had renamed her son Tupac Amaru Shakur, for an 18th-century Peruvian revolutionary executed by Spanish conquistadors. Imprisoned Panther Geronimo Pratt was little Tupac's godfather, and Afeni had married Mutulu Shakur in 1975, making him Tupac's stepfather. Try as he might, Sawyer couldn't discover where Tupac's original surname of "Crooks" had come from.

  In other news, a Bronx dweller named Larry Davis, aka "Adam Abdul Hareem," had shot and wounded several cops on November 19th, escaping unscathed from what NYPD called a standard drug raid. Davis surrendered with his lawyer and reporters in tow on December 7th, spinning tales of a police drug ring whose members had tried to murder him and rip off his stash, promising his trial next year would bare details of a police narcotics ring that strong-armed black and Puerto Rican youngsters into pushing drugs for rapacious Narcotics Division detectives.

  And if that turned out to be the case, would anyone in Gotham really be surprised?

  Yesterday, six days after Davis surrendered, news broke that BLA assassin Donald Weems, aka "Kuwasi Balagoon," had died in prison. The cause: Pneumocystis pneumonia, a yeast-like opportunistic infection of the lungs most often seen in acquired immune deficiency syndrome victims. That revelation confirmed rumors of Balagoon's bisexuality and turned another spotlight on AIDS, identified by scientists in 1981 but blithely ignored by the Reagan White House until September 1985 as a "gay plague" of no interest to self-righteous Christians.

  Weems had been thirty-nine years old, and only now, Sawyer supposed, might something beneficial come out of his hectic life.

  Bogotá: December 18, 1986

  Colombia was wearing thin for Hardy Gantt, but he had orders. Langley wanted him to stay, and with the rash of media reports detailing CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, Gantt wondered if he'd ever manage to escape.

  Barry Seal hadn't made it. Sentenced to community service at a Salvation Army facility in Baton Rouge, the drug pilot and DEA informer had been gunned down on February 19th, outside the church's office on Airline Highway. Police nabbed three Medellín shooters as they tried to leave Louisiana, indicting them for Seal's murder on March 27th. Small loss to the cartel back home, but their sacrifice closed the DEA's file on Seal and his Colombian connections. That didn't stop President Reagan from holding a press conference nine days before the indictments, showing off Seal's photos of a coke cutting plant, suggesting that Sandinista leaders—rather than his own drug-dealing Contra cronies—were behind the traffic flowing stateside.

  On the same day as Ronnie's TV speech, March 16th, the San Francisco Examiner reported 430 pounds of blow seized from a Colombian freighter docked at Frisco, linking the cargo to Reagan's pet Contras. A month later, the Associated Press revealed an FBI investigation into Contra drug-running, with interviews conducted in five U.S. states. Finally, on April 17th, the White House issued a three-page report admitting knowledge of some Contra-cocaine connections in 1984 and '85, blaming a hostile Congress for the fact that Nicaraguan death squads were "particularly hard pressed for financial support" after military aid was terminated. The report added, "We have evidence of a limited number of incidents in which known drug traffickers have tried to establish connections with Nicaraguan resistance groups," then ended with a blatant lie that drug-running occurred "without the authorization of resistance leaders."

  Needless to say, it never mentioned Ollie North.

  All that intrigued Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, whose Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations now planned a leisurely investigation of the Reagan administration's involvement in drug trafficking.

  That wouldn't be a quick process—hell, might drag on for years, in fact—but there'd be no way to avoid casting aspersions on the CIA.

  More paper-shredding time, more trips to the incinerator, but Gantt wouldn't be around to help his colleagues cleaning house at Langley.

  Instead, Hardy would focus on staying alive, no mean feat in modern Colombia. Pablo Escobar's gunmen remained active, killing Supreme Court Justice Hernando Baquero in Bogotá on July 31st; assassinating Colonel Jaime Rodriguez of the National Police anti-narcotics unit in Medellín, on November 17th; and bouncing back to Bogotá on December 17th, to murder Guillermo Cano, publisher of El Espectador for his editorials condemning the cartel.

  Would they hesitate to kill a lowly CIA agent?

  Not even close, Gantt thought.

  FBI Field Office, Manhattan: December 18. 1986

  Agent Erin O'Hara—just turned forty-one, with fourteen years of Bureau service—still had fourteen years before she fell under mandatory retirement, but she was taking time to read the newly issued rules from both the Civil Service and Federal Employees Retirement Systems. The axe would fall on Erin's birthday in 2002, assuming she survived that long, although the Director could extend her deadline to age sixty if he deemed it "in the public interest," and headquarters had limited authority to add another five years for no more than fifty employees per year.

  That said, living to reach retirement from the FBI was still no picnic. On April 1
1th, in Miami, the Bureau had suffered its bloodiest day since the Dillinger era, two agents slain and five others wounded in a shootout with gun-crazy army vets William Russell Matix and Michael Platt. They'd forged a friendship in the service, later took turns murdering each other's wives, then embarked on a series of bank and armored truck holdups, killing one armed guard and wounding another, also executing two strangers whose cars they'd stolen as getaway rides. A rolling stakeout finally cornered the bandits, and while they were outnumbered four-to-one, both killed in the exchange, Matix and Platt had still inflicted heavy damage.

  That experience had headquarters testing semiautomatic sidearms to replace the Bureau's standard six-shot revolvers, considering heavier weapons to stash in the trunks of cruisers. In the meantime, waiting for her new orders and hardware, Erin kept track of the spies brought down by G-men in the past two years.

  Jurors had convicted Chinese agent Larry Wu-Tai Chan on February 7th, but Judge Robert Mehrige never got the chance to sentence Chan. On February 22nd a prison guard found Chan dead, the apparent victim of self-suffocation using a plastic bag.

  On June 4th, Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to one count of conspiracy and apologized to the court, adding that while his motives "may have been well meaning, they cannot, under any stretch of the imagination, excuse or justify the violation of the law, particularly one that involves the trust of government. I broke trust, ruined and brought disgrace to my family." Sentence was deferred until next March. Wife Anne, addressing the judge, simply said she'd done "what at the time I believed to be correct."

  Disgraced Bureau agent Richard Miller pled not guilty and may have been relieved when his first jury deadlocked for a mistrial, but a second panel—unimpressed by his claim that he'd hoped to infiltrate the KGB as a double agent, unknown to his superiors—convicted him of bribery and espionage on June 19th, resulting in two consecutive life prison terms plus fifty years. Soviet handlers Nikolai and Svetlana Ogorodnikov were likewise convicted, Svetlana drawing eighteen years, while hubby Nikolai got off with eight.

  Five days after those sentences were rendered, Washington courier Randy Jeffries pled guilty as charged on one count of espionage, facing a maximum ten years for the single document delivery he'd never managed to complete.

  Last on the traitor's list was Robert Pelton, whose trial began on May 27th. Taking the stand eight days later, Pelton admitted that he might have jeopardized lives when he'd compromised Operation Ivy Bells but denied telling G-men he'd exposed four other operations. Prosecutors won conviction without spilling any of the secrets he'd revealed to Russian handlers, and on December 17th Pelton received three concurrent life terms plus ten years and a peculiar $100 fine.

  A lousy C-note, Erin thought, when he'd received $35,000 from the KGB?

  Whoever said you never knew how judges would react had been precisely right.

  Miami: December 24, 1986

  Christmas felt funky in South Florida, despite the standard decorations going up in stores and restaurants, along the streets, and outside homes that ranged in size from palaces to cookie-cutter boxes in the suburbs. It was warm, of course, no hint of snow, and that was fine with Dominic Giordano.

  He was well established in Dade County, didn't miss the New York cold a goddamned bit. And all he wanted for the holidays was one short, fat Colombian vecchia signora dead once and for all.

  Okay, she wasn't that old—only forty-three—but from a copy of her DEA file Giordano knew she was an inch short of five feet and looking bloated on the north side of 150 pounds. Her birth name was Griselda Blanco, but most people called her La Madrina, the Black Widow, or the Cocaine Godmother. She hailed from Cartagena, moved to Medellín, and pulled her first ransom kidnapping at the ripe age of eleven years. She'd moved to Queens with her second husband at thirty-something, then wound up in Miami when he and most of his gang went down for narco-trafficking. Today she had a network spanning the U.S., rumored to earn $80 million per month, while her reckless, violent style had prompted multiple murder attempts by rivals.

  The "lady" was a freak, no doubt about it, credited with some 200 murders on the business side of the ledger, even worse in private life. If you believed the streets, she'd killed three former husbands, plus assorted strippers who were ordered to have sex with random guys for her amusement in the final hours of their lives. She was a stone addict, consuming tons of smokable cocaine nicknamed "bazooka," and her favorite possessions, Dom had been reliably informed, included a pearl necklace once worn by Argentina's Eva Perón, a tea set formerly belonging to the England's queen—and a gold-plated MAC-10 submachine gun studded with emeralds.

  Crazy, right…but lucky, too. The DEA had busted her last year, after a Cuban colleague gave her up, but jurors turned her loose when the star witness grudgingly admitted his own sister had participated in one of Blanco's more sadistic killings—the torture slaying of a female crony whom they first robbed of $1.8 million. Next, the Miami-Dade State Attorney charged Blanco with three more murders, only to drop the case when a phone-sex scandal snared three of his own secretaries and the state's key stoolie. Blanco was finally convicted on a third go-round in November 1985, sentenced to fifteen years, but it was on appeal, Griselda's lawyers claiming that she'd been denied a "speedy trial" while she was hiding out under a phony name.

  Someone would have to end that charmed life with a bullet soon, but Dom wasn't prepared to try it on his own. Between the steady flow of cocaina from Miami to Manhattan, where his brother Angelo was managing their smallish family, and all the legal shit that had been raining down on Gotham's leaders of La Cosa Nostra, Dom felt no immediate desire to press his luck.

  Up north, the "Pizza Connection" case was still grinding along, short one more defendant after Sicilian Giuseppe Ganci died in February, with the trial in progress. Death had also continued ravaging the Gambino Family's leadership, claiming capos Robert DiBernardo (shot) and Frank DeCicco (blown up by a car bomb).

  And the hits in court kept coming, from January's conviction of five Chicago Outfit leaders plus bosses from Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Kansas City, all sentenced for embezzling millions from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund. In Gotham, three months later, Tony Salerno and fourteen other Gambino Family members were indicted on multiple racketeering charges, sold out by turncoat soldato Vincent Cafaro. On June 13th, federal jurors convicted nine Colombo Family leaders, including Carmine Persico and his son, on sweeping RICO charges that would put them all away for decades.

  Then came September's kicker, with commencement of the federal Commission Case, with eight of the original eleven mafiosi showing up in court. Gambino Family leaders Paul Castellano and Neil Dellacroce had prior appointments with death from last year, and Bonanno Family boss Phil Rastelli had won severance of his case from the larger trial. That didn't mean he was home free, of course. Before the ink was dry on that court order, the feds had charged him with another RICO case, roping in underboss Joey Massino.

  Even new Gambino Family boss John Gotti—killer-successor of Paul Castellano—

  couldn't catch a break, brought to trial for the third time in his life, charged with counts of gambling, loansharking, armed robbery and murder dating back to 1968. Lawyer Bruce Cutler was doing a great job for Gotti in court, but who knew what the feds would pull from their trick bag in this era of legalized wiretaps and rats?

  And the hits kept coming: more Colombo Family indictments in October, climaxed by convictions in November. The same month saw Harold Davidoff, vice president of Lucchese-run Teamster Local 851, convicted on RICO charges including cargo thefts from JFK International Airport. Three days before Thanksgiving, Genovese Family leaders faced yet another RICO case for pulling strings to have Reagan White House advisor Jackie Presser elected president of the Teamsters, then manipulating him to reap more profits for the Mob.

  Christmas? The frozen fools up north could keep it. Dom had all the snow he needed coming in by boat and plane from Medellín, believe it. And th
e only chill he felt this season came from counting all that cash.

  Chapter 4

  Miami: July 19, 1987

  Dom Giordano wasn't big on reading. He could read, mind you, but he'd always shied away from it, and truth be told, he'd always hated it the same way he had hated every other thing a bunch of stuck-up teachers tried to make him learn in school before he'd finally dropped out.

  Today, though, he was studying a story in the New York Times, which he bought daily from a news stand down the street from his condo, keeping up on news of trials and other crime news from New York. The piece that caught his eye this morning was about his new hometown, though, with a headline asking, "Can Miami Save Itself?"

  The author noted that throughout its history, Miami had depended on its glossy image for survival. That image had taken a serious beating over the past decade, thanks to the coke wars broadcast nationwide on TV news and in weekly episodes of Michael Mann's shoot-'em-up Miami Vice series. Fidel Castro had dumped a ton of Cuban criminals and psych ward rejects on the city with his Mariel boatlift, and while they had dispersed across country, many stayed where they had landed, played up big-time in the movie Scarface. Even so, the murder rate was down, but Dom thought most of that improvement was creative bookkeeping at City Hall. Instead of saying one in four Miami homicides were drug-related, now the cops claimed that killings with "unknown motives" had increased 1,000 percent since 1984.

  Just slap another coat of whitewash on—or, in Miami's case, stylish pastels.

  Griselda Blanco remained locked up in prison—not as good as dead, but still better than wandering the streets. Smart money said she still ran her drug business from inside, when not preoccupied with heart attacks.

  Up north, on March 22nd, jurors had convicted all but one of the Pizza Connection's twenty-two defendants. The lucky winner was Vito Badalamente from Cinisi, busted with his dad in Spain, in exile from Sicilian Mafia wars since 1981. As for the rest, including Vito's dad Gaetano, they'd pulled sentences ranging from one to forty-five years. Evidence compiled against them, starting with the testimony of FBI Agent Joseph Pistone, aka "Donnie Brasco," also included hundreds of wiretaps, plus surveillance videos, undercover drug buys, and tons of financial records from Switzerland. Other trials were pending there, in Spain, and in Italy.