Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  And good luck proving anything, Gantt thought, much less putting Gaddafi in a cage where he belongs.

  Chapter 6

  Birmingham, Alabama: June 23, 1989

  "Four more years of Reagan," Fee O'Hara said.

  "That's Bush," Dave Jordan corrected.

  "Same thing. Remember back when they were going head-to-head and Bush had balls enough to call out voodoo economics?"

  Dave had watched the president's inaugural speech on television, expecting no surprises and receiving none. He began by thanking Reagan—"a man who has earned a lasting place in our hearts and in our history"—then weakly compared himself to George Washington and led a smarmy prayer about "the peace that yields this day," wherever that might be. He trotted out the "thousand points of light" again, then praised the GOP's America as "a decent and civil place, engaged in high moral principle, a place we cannot help but love."

  Dave would've bet the farm Bush didn't pay attention to the nightly news.

  The real knee-slapper came when Bush proclaimed, "Great nations like great men must keep their word. When America says something, America means it, whether a treaty or an agreement or a vow made on marble steps."

  Try selling that on reservations, in the ghettos, or in countries we've invaded, Jordan thought, unable to suppress a scowl.

  Incredibly, he'd gone from there to blasting drugs, specifically cocaine—"a deadly bacteria" ravaging America's body and soul—ending with an order to nobody in particular: "This scourge must stop!"

  To which Jordan had answered back aloud, "So tell the CIA to stop importing it, why don't you?"

  Screw it, anyway.

  The case against young victim Michael Donald's lynchers in Mobile had nearly run its course. While Bennie Hays recuperated from his courtroom heart attack, prognosis grim, Frank Cox had faced a final jury, convicted on May 19th and sentenced to life imprisonment this very morning.

  That might not be a point of light in Bush's world, but at the very least it had snuffed out a fiery cross.

  The Brooklyn Bridge: August 31, 1989

  Payton Sawyer stood back from the two contending mobs: riot police on one side; protest marchers on the other, mostly black, ready for an attempt to cross the bridge from Flatbush Avenue. They chanted, ''Whose Streets? Our Streets! What's Coming? War!'' A uniformed, helmeted NYPD captain answered through a bullhorn, giving them another warning to disperse.

  The march had been billed as a ''Day of Outrage and Mourning." Its leader, Sony Carson—ex-convict, lately founder of the Black Men's Movement Against Crack—had merged anger over to recent killings: Huey Newton murdered on August 22nd, out in California, and sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins, killed on the 23rd by young white thugs in Bensonhurst. When it came to blows, as Payton expected, it would be twenty cops against an estimated 7,500 protesters, but he was staying out of it, no matter what.

  That was the standing rule with "BOSS": observe, subvert whenever possible, but don't engage where anyone can catch you at it, most particularly not on camera.

  Now there came a surge from the black ranks, and Sawyer could see nightsticks swinging, cracking against skulls, the marchers striking back with fists and placards. Edging farther back, he merged with shadows and continued to observe.

  It wasn't Gotham's first "Day of Outrage" this year; far from it. Tempers were still running high citywide, certain would-be ghetto "leaders" still claiming Tawana Brawley had been gang-raped, maybe by police, although her story had collapsed under the crushing weight of lies. In April, Newsday had released an interview with her ex-boyfriend, telling how Brawley had planned and carried out the whole thing to avert another beating when she'd violated curfew. Al Sharpton and his legal eagles had moved on to other things by now, but on the streets, some people simply couldn't let it go.

  And speaking of die-hard fanatics, there'd been a last gasp from the Black Liberation Army in April, when a New Jersey state trooper pulled over an erratic driver in Neptune. BLA veteran and twice-convicted armed robber Arthur Lee Anderson Jr. came out shooting but scored no hits, likely due to his heavy drug use. He'd still escaped on foot and was at large today, no friends or former neighbors willing to betray him yet.

  Matter of time, thought Sawyer, as he watched the melee winding down. They all get busted in the end.

  FBI Field Office, Manhattan: October 24, 1989

  Agent Erin O'Hara glowered at the memo on her desk, reflecting that some losers never cease trying to wriggle off the hook once they've been busted. This time it was Robert Miller, ex-G-man who'd been on thin ice with the Bureau for his slovenly ineptitude even before he got caught selling secrets to the KGB, convicted and hit with two consecutive life terms plus fifty years in 1986. Just yesterday, an appellate court had overturned that verdict, ruling that U.S. District Judge David Kenyon erred in admitting polygraph evidence during the trial. A new trial had been ordered, and Miller would soon be walking free on bail.

  That was how the "justice" system always seemed to work, favoring scumbags over victims, but O'Hara knew it could be worse if some demented politician started whittling provisions from the Bill of Rights.

  And sometimes justice caught up with the assholes, even if their worst crimes never went to court.

  Carlos Marcello was a case in point. Hit by a series of strokes, he'd been comatose in February when prison infirmary workers heard him muttering profanity. Moving closer, they'd heard him say, "That Kennedy, that smiling motherfucker, we'll fix him in Dallas. I want to see Provenzano in New York." No charges would result from his delirium, and Marcello claimed ignorance when agents interviewed him later. Now, an appellate court had tossed out his BRILAB conviction, sending him home to the prospect of imminent death.

  Before that ruling came down, in June, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh had done some tinkering with ethical guidelines at Justice. It came as no surprise, since he'd been appointed by President Reagan, now serving Bush—both shady characters, in Erin's opinion—when Thornburgh ruled that federal compliance with state ethics laws was "strictly voluntary" on the part of individual prosecutors. That sounded like a license to lie, but just to be on the safe side, Thornburgh added that his decision "was not legally binding."

  Good call, Erin thought, since it stank to high heaven.

  At Bureau headquarters, Director Sessions was winning public hearts and minds with a perky new slogan—"Winners Don't Use Drugs!"—that was a comfortable counterpart to Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No." Incredibly, considering the time and money wasted on debating it, Congress had passed a law mandating that the new bromide must be affixed to all imported arcade games released stateside, flashing onscreen each time a player scored a victory.

  No such provision covered games made in America, or course. That would have cost producers money that was better spent on contributions to political campaigns.

  On the more practical side, Sessions was pushing the FBI Laboratory to develop a top-flight DNA crime-solving program, while also funding IAFIS—the Integrated Automated Fingerprint System. In theory, at least, that would prevent snafus like the two-week delay in learning that Martin Luther King's alleged assassin was fugitive James Earl Ray, not mythical "Eric Starvo Galt."

  Progress, she thought, watching one of her colleagues, Agent Stephen Barnes, sorting through KGB files at his desk. But Christ, I wish that we could just read minds.

  Miami: October 31, 1989

  Dom Giordano reckoned it must be a sign of the times, trick-or-treaters dressing up like actors from Miami Vice, the boys in baggy suits and loafers minus socks, the girls resembling preteen hookers like that Taxi Driver actress who had motivated some whack-job to shoot the president.

  Crazy. And parents didn't seem to give a shit, likely because their brains were toasted on cocaine that Dom and his competitors were bringing in from South America.

  God bless free enterprise.

  President Bush claimed that he meant to stop that traffic, never mind that he'd been neck-deep in it when the
White House staff was covering for smugglers who kicked back a portion of their profits for the favored goons in Nicaragua. Bush was acting all self-righteous now, creating an Office of National Drug Control Policy that sucked up more federal dollars, led by a character Bush liked to call his "drug czar." Newspaper editors and TV talking heads kept trying to remind him that the U.S. Constitution banned titles of royalty—much less one cribbed from Russia—but the White House didn't care.

  Meanwhile, Forbes magazine listed the real drug czar—Medellín's Pablo Escobar—as seventh-richest man in the whole freaking world.

  Up north, mafiosi kept killing each other and picking off rivals. In May, Russian mobster Michael Markowitz got the chop in Brooklyn for turning rat against his Colombo Family cohorts in a gasoline bootlegging racket. A month later, cops pulled Patriarca Family underboss William Grasso from the Connecticut River. In August, shooters took out Richard Costello, president of ILA Local 1964 and a longtime Gambino Family friend. Just this afternoon, Nicky Scarfo Jr. had been wounded by a gunman in a Batman mask, while dining at a restaurant in Philadelphia.

  One of the biggest hits on record—Jimmy Hoffa's—still remained officially unsolved, although the FBI's top agent in Detroit had told reporters, "I'm comfortable I know who did it, but it’s never going to be prosecuted because we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources."

  Same old crap. Duck and cover.

  One thing the Bureau wasn't shy about revealing was a bug they'd planted at a Patriarca Family hangout in Medford, Massachusetts. If you could believe the FBI, their electronic ear had overheard a new soldato getting "made," recording the whole ritual as it dragged on. Supposedly, the guy swore that he'd kill his brothers on command, adding a promise that "I enter alive and I will come out dead." From that, the media was spouting crap about the "Mafia Code" and some rule book Giordano still hadn't seen after all his years in the life.

  What the hell? It just went to prove what his old man always used to say—namely, that everybody's got some kind of racket and they work it till the day they die.

  FBI Headquarters: November 30, 1989

  The Unabomber hadn't made a peep for going on three years now—since a Utah witness had reportedly glimpsed him at work in February 1987—and now Agent Wyman Gantt was hoping he'd been killed, or maybe locked up on some unrelated charge. That would spare future victims, while resolving squat.

  And Gantt wasn't one of those folks who loved a mystery.

  While he waited for the psychopath to rear his head again, Wyman was busy sorting through old cases that continued making news. In March, ex-Black Panther Wesley Cook, aka "Mumia Abu-Jamal," had lost his death sentence appeal to Pennsylvania's Supreme Court for killing a white cop eight years ago.

  Another weak blast from the past was the Republic of New Afrika, with two of its ex-leaders making news these days. Founder Richard Henry, alias "Imari Obadele," had done his time for conspiracy, resulting from a Mississippi shootout back in 1979, but now a federal court had dismissed his $2.4 million lawsuit against the Bureau for harassing him with bugs, wiretaps, and alleged entrapment.

  Another RNA survivor, Herman Ferguson, had been convicted in New York with comrade Arthur Harris back in 1967, for allegedly conspiring to kill moderate civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young from the National Urban League. Hit with a sentence of 3½ to seven years, he'd fled to Guyana instead, spending nineteen years there as "Paul Adams," establishing the paramilitary Guyana National Service in 1971, retiring as a lieutenant colonel before moving on to the Ministry of Education. This April, he'd finally come home at age sixty-eight, presently bouncing around between prisons as authorities sought payback for two decades of embarrassment.

  A month before Ferguson returned stateside, Justice had appealed the 1988 victory of radical inmates Silvia Baraldini, Susan Rosenberg and Alejandrina Torres that released them from special "control units" in prison. D.C.'s Appellate Court had listened to both sides in March, then overturned that ruling on September 8th.

  From Oakland, California, happy news had reached Gantt's desk in August, when Black Guerrilla Family member Tyrone Robinson shot and killed Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton. The feud between those groups went back some twenty years, but local cops were calling it a personal spat over the price of crack cocaine.

  On the "Aryan" front, ATF agents had their sights set on Idaho's Randy Weaver, trying to hook him with pipe dreams of an underground army formed to fight "ZOG"—the "Zionist Occupation Government" in Washington. Weaver invited one spy, Aryan Nations security guard Rico Valentino, to his Ruby Ridge home in July and allegedly sold him two sawed-off shotguns in October, but they somehow got "misplaced." No problem there, or with Valentino's November exposure as a stool pigeon. The missing guns would still be listed when Treasury issued a warrant for Weaver's arrest.

  Another kind of radical, Lebanese national Fawaz Younis, faced trial for his 1985 airline hijacking in March, convicted in the first courtroom test of the Bureau's "long arm" kidnapping program. On October 5th he got thirty years for aircraft piracy and conspiracy—one year behind bars for each year of his short life to date, but he could still be out in eight with time off for "good behavior."

  Finally, just yesterday, United Freedom Front members Richard Williams, Raymond Levasseur, and wife Patricia Levasseur had been convicted of racketeering in Massachusetts. Jurors acquitted all three of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and "hopelessly deadlocked" on charges of conspiracy, but it was still enough to put them all away. Before their marathon trial, other members of the "Ohio Seven" had copped pleas or seen their indictments dismissed.

  Can't win 'em all, Gantt thought, and wondered if the DOJ believed its $60 million had been well spent, dragging out the trial for nineteen months.

  At least it wasn't coming out of Wyman's salary.

  Central Park, Manhattan: December 30, 1989

  "What do you make of the events at home?"

  The question from Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Bobrik came as a surprise to Bureau agent Stephen Barnes. "Nothing," Barnes said, after a moment's thought. "I focus on my work and get it done."

  But the events in question had been preying on his mind.

  In January, Czech authorities had smothered demonstrations and arrested dissident leader Václav Havel. Two months later, in partially free elections, several non-Communists won election to Russia's Congress of People's Deputies. In April a Polish "Round Table Agreement" restored Solidarity's legal status, and May saw fences separating Hungary from Austria removed. Free Polish elections in June produced a landslide victory for Solidarity over the Communist Party, while Chinese tanks and troops killed an estimated 1,022 protestors, losing twenty-three soldiers and cops in the process, at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

  August had continued Eastern Europe's "Singing Revolution," some 2.2 million persons joining hands to form a "Baltic Way" stretching from Tallinn, Estonia, across Latvia to Vilnius, Lithuania. October witnessed mass protests in Leipzig, East Germany, and parliament's declaration that Hungary was a republic. Berlin authorities lifted travel restrictions in November and began dismantling the twenty-eight-year-old dividing wall. That same month brought a "Velvet Revolution" to Czechoslovakia, with Party leaders renouncing their monopoly on power.

  December completed the downhill stampede toward "freedom." On the 1st, Mikhail Gorbachev met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Six days later, Lithuania ended Communist Party control. On the 16th, protests swept through Romania, climaxed by the executions of Red tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, capped yesterday by Václav Havel's election as president.

  "You're still collecting information?" Barnes asked Bobrik.

  "Da. Always."

  As usual, most of the Bureau documents that Barnes had photographed focused on the continuing fiasco in Afghanistan and CIA denials that it was involved beyond occasional disbursal of "humanitarian aid." March had brought a new mujahideen offens
ive on Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border. Langley had formally ended its Operation Cyclone when the last Red Army troops withdrew, but now Afghanistan had plunged into a civil war between Muslim guerillas and Mohammad Najibullah's government. Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's Inter-Services Intelligence group was fighting on "God's" side, covertly supported by the CIA, Britain's MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and Chinese advisors. CIA Director William Casey had sneaked into Pakistan several times, urging its leaders to flood the Soviet Union with propaganda highlighting—sometimes fabricating—Red Army atrocities against Afghani Muslims.

  The war's toll, summing up, included 14,000 Russian soldiers dead or missing, with another 53,753 wounded and 415,932 disease-stricken, out of 620,000 deployed. Moscow also admitted losing 451 aircraft, 147 tanks, 1,341 other armored vehicles, 11,369 trucks, and 433 artillery pieces. On the civilian side, death estimates ranged from 562,000 to 2 million. Half of all Earth's refugees were now Afghanis, 2 million homeless in their own nation, another 5 to 10 million living in Iran and Pakistan. Land mines had killed 25,000 civilians, and some 15 million of those buried explosives still remained in place, the gift that keeps on giving.

  At present, guns and money flowed through Pakistan from Langley, London and Riyadh to four main Muslim factions: the Jamiat-e Islami, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir"; Gulbuddin "Rocketyar" Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami ("Islamist Party"); Jalaluddin Haqqani's eponymous Haqqani Network; and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda ("The Base," or "The Foundation"). Of the hour, Haqqani spent the most time knocking off rival mujahideen, while Al-Qaeda seemed more prone to turning rage against its Western benefactors in a gross show of ingratitude.

  The microfilm changed hands, and Barnes moved on without a backward glance at Bobrik. He had much to think about, but his resolve to bring the Bureau down remained unchanged, unwavering.