by David Howard
Fuller immediately understood the ramifications. If the promoters delivered banks and insurance firms, the mafiosi could provide protection and enforcement. That would be handy for Pro when people started banging on his door, demanding refunds. “The wiretap delivered evidence on a grand scale, all over the city, and it connected to all five families,” Fuller said. “We had a great picture of how organized crime was working with con men.”
As the wiretap’s court-mandated run neared its end, Fuller hatched grander plans. On July 25, Weinberg, at Fuller’s request, called a meeting with Joe Trocchio regarding Brookhaven, the mortgage company the mob was trying to acquire. Fuller and his colleague John Hauss attended, posing as buyers working for a Lebanese sheikh who, they claimed, wanted to invest his oil fortune in stolen securities, phony CDs, and counterfeit money.
It was the first meeting of what would become one of the most sensational investigations in FBI history.
—
That same day, Phil departed on a second trip to Haiti, leaving Jack and J.J. in New York to babysit Pro for the balance of the Seven Oak money. Pro had started working with Andy D’Amato on the endlessly discussed takeover of the Fontainebleau Hotel. As they all lounged on Trident’s easy chairs, the door opened and a Francis Ford Coppola movie walked in. Gabe Cicale introduced everyone to Ralph Cantone, Ron Sablosky, and John “Sonny” Santini.
Santini in particular made an impression. He was five-eight and stocky, with thinning hair and a blotchy red face. He moved aggressively into the agents’ personal space, talking close and peering at them as if scrutinizing scientific specimens. J.J. recognized his accent as full-blooded Bronx. As if to make sure no one misunderstood who he was, Santini launched into a story that involved shaking down a mark for payment. “The motherfucker wasn’t doing what I asked,” he said, “so I get an icepick and stick it in his fuckin’ ear.”
His scams took on a far more menacing tone. He’d been a ringleader in an early 1970s scheme to artificially drive up the stock price of a shell corporation named Elinvest, then used deception and threats of violence to foist the worthless shares on investors. Eventually he and his co-conspirators cashed out. He moved on to an advance-fee operation run out of a midtown restaurant, Perilous Pauline’s. On one occasion, he and Pro extracted $2,500 from a concrete contractor. When the mark hesitated, Santini snarled, “We spent enough time with you. You better come up with the money or we’ll break your head.” Then he would tell victims that he couldn’t deliver the promised loans because the courier carrying the paperwork had come down with appendicitis or had a heart attack.
Over time, Pro had become ensnared in Santini’s tentacles, and he now kicked a percentage of everything to his “partner.” Santini had installed a “girl” to answer phones at Trident to make sure Pro didn’t stiff him on any payments.
—
Jack was holding a gun, and J.J. went at him.
They were back in J.J.’s apartment in Griffith, working on ways to manage the suddenly elevated level of risk in their operation. They had never worried about their safety with men like Phil and D’Amato, but now they were hanging out with guys who carried ice picks around.
To prepare for potential confrontations, they began practicing techniques for disarming a wiseguy. They knew from their training that when someone pulls a gun, the natural reaction is to back away. The agents drilled each other to do the opposite: They practiced instantaneously moving to within an arm’s length of their assailant, grabbing his hand, and breaking a finger or wrist. Speed and surprise were essential. As long as they were able to get within an arm’s length, the agents believed, the gunman couldn’t react fast enough to counter an attack. It was action versus reaction. After practicing the moves hundreds of times, switching roles back and forth, Jack and J.J. believed in their decisive first strike. Still, to survive that kind of situation unarmed, they would need skill and luck. The agents would need to be close enough to reach the gunman within a second or two, then survive the subsequent struggle.
FBI officials were coming to the same realization about OpFoPen’s elevated risks, thanks in part to Fuller’s wiretap. In late July, the bureau approved the Indianapolis office’s request to designate the case as a Bureau Special. This top-tier classification mandated that every supervisor around the country dispatch agents immediately to support the investigation and pursue any leads within his region. Each office had forty-eight hours to shuffle their caseloads to make this possible.
Soon after that, headquarters came up with another, even more meaningful designation for the undercover operation: Major Case Number One. This meant that the FBI was designating Fountain Pen as its top priority, signaling a further move into a new kind of policing. The bureau would finally provide the computer support that the besieged Indianapolis office had been requesting for months.
—
Phil returned to New York at one-thirty a.m. on July 27, reporting that First National Haiti was nearly ready. He’d obtained government approvals in Port-au-Prince, set up a telex machine and phone and hired someone to handle them, and reserved space in the offices of a friendly attorney. It was his version of an Old West town on a Hollywood set: There was nothing behind the facade, but it looked impressive from the outside. The next step would be to extract $100,000 from investors to meet the minimum capitalization requirement.
This left Phil feeling jaunty. That night, they went to dinner at the Essex House with D’Amato, Pro and his Trident pack, and a clutch of women. Such gatherings infused the promoters with a certain brio, and by the time dessert arrived D’Amato was jousting with Pro over who was the bigger operator and bragging about the Eurotrust’s $10 billion in assets. Phil leaned over to J.J. and said, “Ten billion in assets? Let’s see how many fucking assets he’s got in his pocket.”
He told J.J. and Jack to excuse themselves to make a call and to meet him in five minutes in the lobby. At the appointed time, Phil led them out onto Central Park South, where they watched through the window as the waiter approached with the check for more than $300. Phil laughed as D’Amato noticed their absence and gazed at the bill, his face suddenly pale.
They were sitting in Trident’s offices around noon the next day when an unexpected visitor appeared: Bernard Baker. Until recently, the Kansas farmer had been unsure of what to make of Pro’s machinations. “I couldn’t say that I felt that he wasn’t trying,” he recalled, “but I had the feeling that sometimes he wasn’t.”
His patience was now gone. He’d flown in from Kansas to collect a $110,000 refund and threatened to go to the FBI if he didn’t get it. His bank was pressuring him to start paying the money back.
Pro tap-danced for a while, enumerating the challenges involved with securing multimillion-dollar loans. But when he realized that Baker wasn’t going away, he wrote a check on his Merchants Bank of New York account for $109,000 (subtracting a thousand-dollar processing fee).
Baker departed, and Gabe Cicale arrived with news: Sonny Santini wanted to see Phil the next morning.
Phil sat back. This would be a delicate meeting, he said. He was cautious in his interactions with the Outfit. During one deal that had gone sideways, someone had tried to push Pro out of a twenty-ninth-floor window of the Park Lane Hotel. “Sonny is a heavy guy,” Phil said. “We got to be very careful in dealing with him.”
When they all sat around a table at the Windjammer Bar at the Essex House the next morning, Santini objected to Jack and J.J.’s presence. Phil explained that his protégés would be the new bank’s officers and needed to be there. Santini relented and got to the point: He wanted in on the Haiti vehicle. He was expecting an advance-fee windfall soon, and proposed putting in $100,000 in return for the right to sell the bank’s paper.
Phil nodded and said he would be happy to have Santini as a partner—but FNCB would be a poor investment. The bank, as Sonny knew, would be a vehicle for fraudulent paper—which meant that eventually, inevitably, it would vaporize. “Any money in there is goi
ng to be lost,” Phil said. “You need to know that, Sonny.”
The agents had seen Phil execute these sorts of diversionary tactics many times. He might tell a client, “Okay, when we sign the appraisal and you give me $10,000, we’ll have everything in place.” Before the client could protest, Kitzer would steer the conversation away, and later he would come back and say, “Now, as you indicated before, this would be the time to give me the check for $10,000.”
Phil’s black lullabies were always remarkably effective. He would present them so seamlessly and change the subject so quickly, the mark had no hope of keeping up. By the end of the conversation, the victim would be convinced that the $10,000 payment was a bargain—even his idea to begin with.
In this instance, Phil had another suggestion for channeling Santini’s talents. Pro had agreed to pay $200,000 for Seven Oak, but so far he’d handed over less than $25,000. If Santini wanted to collect the balance, Phil would happily split it with him. Santini liked that idea; collections were his specialty. Phil then pivoted to other deals. One involved a Southern California precious-metals refinery run by his friend Jack Elliott. Santini, who had run a gold-prospecting scam in Las Vegas, was intrigued.
Before the meeting broke up, Santini shared a story about a recent money-collection episode. Neither the debtor nor the money was present when he arrived, so Santini dangled the guy’s child out of a window several dozen floors up until someone delivered the cash.
Kitzer had dealt with organized-crime figures before. (He’d recently talked with legendary mob lawyer Morrie Shenker about issuing paper for a refinance of the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. Shenker was a close Jimmy Hoffa ally.) He was happy to make money with Santini—as long as he didn’t come out of it with Sonny owning a piece of him. On the way to the airport, Phil said that a friend in the Outfit had warned him about Santini.
“Don’t ever owe Sonny a nickel,” the friend had said. “He’ll kill you.”
—
Sifting through his wallet one morning in New York, Jack discovered something that scared him more than anything else he’d experienced undercover. He’d kept a scrap of paper in there with the phone number for Becky’s apartment.
That paper was now missing.
Jack pondered various scenarios: Maybe it had fallen out and was lost. But maybe Phil had found it, or one of the mob guys had gone through his wallet. Each possibility seemed worse than the last. He was angry with himself for keeping the paper, because by then he’d memorized the number.
Becky was busy with the boys when the phone rang. She’d just traveled back from their Florida vacation—driving solo after Jack had bailed out—and the baby was rattling around, now less than three months from his scheduled arrival.
She was tired, but for the moment her outlook was sunnier than it had been over the winter. She and Jack had slowly rebuilt their relationship—as much as that was possible right now. They clung to the idea that life would improve when OpFoPen was over. Jack had also realized that the case could be his ticket out of Gary. He and J.J. had been exposed to dangerous characters, which might mean a transfer for everyone’s safety.
She was at first relieved to hear Jack’s voice, but she immediately picked up on the worry in it.
“That paper with your number on it,” he said. “It’s gone.”
“What do you mean? What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find it.”
She had no clue about the ramifications. They had maintained a code of silence about his work. A friend of a friend worked for the local paper, and she feared that if she knew anything, she might let an idle comment slip and a story would turn up on the front page.
Jack faced a dilemma. He didn’t want to scare her, but he also had to be brutally clear about the stakes. “Some of the people I’m with are…pretty bad,” he said. “Do not let the boys say ‘Brennan residence’ when they answer the phone. And when you answer the phone, just say hello. If someone you don’t know asks for me, say, ‘I don’t know who that is. You have the wrong number.’ ”
Jack told her he loved her and that he had to go. He knew that Becky was smart and believed she would handle the situation well, and he couldn’t afford to worry. That would mean being distracted, which was not a good idea with the promoters. That was when you slipped up.
Becky had, many times, idly wondered what he was doing. She still had no idea, but now she knew for certain that it was dangerous. She felt frustrated about being shut out—unable to evaluate the risks, ponder the timeline, circle a date to try to get to, after which they’d finally be clear of it.
But this was her life now: Her husband was in danger. And as she placed the receiver back in its cradle, another realization washed over her like a surge of electricity: As of that moment, she and their children were in danger, too.
20
Fool’s Gold
JULY 30, 1977
J.J. Wedick hustled into the lobby of the Registry Hotel in Irvine, California. He’d been in his room, fiddling with the Nagra that Bowen Johnson had handed off to him on the far side of the hotel after they’d landed at Orange County Airport the night before, and now he was late. For this trip, J.J. had decided to wear the recorder differently so that he could keep the remote control in the vest of his three-piece suit. This required running the wire for the remote up over his shoulder instead of around his torso. The setup allowed him to avoid cutting a hole in his pants pocket.
He felt mildly exasperated to be wearing the suit at all; it wasn’t an easy look to pull off in Southern California in July. But he and Jack and Bowen Johnson had all agreed that it was important to record that day’s conversations. The plan was to meet with Captain Jack Elliott to discuss Vincent Carrano and the Swiss Vaults heist.
The Registry was a ten-story, 293-room behemoth that had opened the year before. J.J. wandered through the lobby, looking for the atrium decorated in the French Provincial style where they planned to meet. When he paused to gain his bearings, Phil and Elliott approached from behind, and Elliott, a gregarious Scot, clapped him on the back.
A bolt of adrenaline shot through J.J.’s body. Elliott’s hand had just missed the recorder but instead struck a wire, causing the remote control to pop from his vest and fall inside his suit. J.J. felt it dangling against his stomach. He caught his breath and shook hands with everyone, then assessed the situation as they took seats. He instantly knew he wouldn’t be able to reach the remote without unbuttoning his shirt and fishing around. And without the remote, he couldn’t start the Nagra.
Elliott alone was worth the tape. A stocky man in his forties who had relocated to Costa Mesa several years earlier, he had jet-black hair and spoke with a jaunty brogue. Jack and J.J. immediately grasped why he and Phil worked well together. Elliott was gifted at talking his way into various businesses, then sinking his hooks into them. He operated something called the Commercial Corporation of London, registered in Panama and run out of his home, which he claimed was just down the street from John Wayne’s. He purportedly owned a small airline and a ski resort and golf club in Salt Lake City. He’d recently run into trouble in England for handling two fraudulent bills of exchange worth $2.4 million written on the Bank of Swaziland. But Elliott had a Kitzeresque confidence in his ability to skate free.
Carrano was topic number one. Elliott launched into a play-by-play account of the staged robbery. Over the past year, Carrano had looted the place for more than $600,000, carrying out hundred-ounce gold bars and bags of silver coins and replacing them with twenty-six thousand metal washers. In early July, a customer had come in demanding access to his silver. In Elliott’s retelling, what happened next was screamingly funny: On a Saturday afternoon, Carrano and several associates disconnected and rewired the burglar alarm; then someone taped Carrano to a chair and tipped it over, leaving the 350-pound promoter lying on his side with his mouth taped shut. Phil and Jack doubled over in hysterics as Elliott told the story. Carrano wanted to sell off the vault it
ems that were taken in the “robbery”—but the police were sniffing around.
Holy shit, I can’t believe this, J.J. thought. It was like a replay of when Fuller’s surveillance team prematurely turned off the wiretap. J.J. now faced a dilemma: Listen to the story without recording it—again—or leave and fish the remote control from his suit. A film of sweat materialized on his forehead.
Phil looked at him. “What’s the matter with you, J.J.?”
“I gotta go to the men’s room,” he blurted. “My stomach’s bothering me.”
He lurched to his feet. Inside the restroom, he latched the stall door and fumbled with the buttons on his shirt, then lifted out the device and put it back in place. He forced himself to sit for a few minutes—it had to be a plausible bathroom break—before returning to the group.
J.J. attributed the mild case of dysentery to the Southern California food. “My stomach was bothering me so much I couldn’t even listen to you guys,” he said. “So, what happened?”
—
The late-day California sunlight caramelized on the floor of Phil’s hotel room. They were between meetings, wrestling with jet lag, when the phone rang and Phil answered. He perched on the edge of a bed, and it was immediately apparent that something serious was going on. Jack wandered out to get some ice while J.J. lounged on the other bed, listening. He inferred that Phil’s wife, Audrey, was on the line. Phil went silent for a long stretch, looking at the floor. His face drooped. Phil said, “I can’t get you that now.”
He apologized and said he would try to figure something out. When he hung up, he stared toward the window and said his six-year-old son, Jeffrey, needed an urgent medical procedure that would cost $2,000. Phil had the money, but he wasn’t carrying much on that trip, and whatever he had stashed away was out of reach for the moment. The man who had purportedly owned so many banks couldn’t write a check.
