by Greg Dinallo
“Not you, Scotto. You’re tough as nails, aren’t you? You would’ve blown that child right out of his running shoes.”
She smiles. “Maybe, maybe not. The agent backing up Woody had no choice.”
“I imagine you two were quite close?”
She bites a lip and nods. “Woody was my partner before I took this job. It’s like being married. You squabble, share things, support each other. I asked for him when I got into this case. If I hadn’t, maybe . . . maybe he’d . . .” She groans and lets it trail off.
“Really. You can’t blame yourself.”
“Yes, I can. I sent him down there.”
“To be killed?” I prompt facetiously.
“Of course not. As we say in this business, he was following the money. Trying to anyway.”
“Whose money?”
“Drug cartel. We’re talking big, real big, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“If? I’m afraid we’d better settle this right now, Scotto. No ifs. We’re joined at the hip, as they say. You show me yours. I show you mine. Deal?”
“Two conditions,” she fires back. “Like the INS guys said, you publish nothing here; and whatever you do publish waits until the operation’s over.”
“Fair enough. Now, as you were saying . . .”
The light changes. She nods and tromps on the accelerator. “Montreal to Miami, New York to St. Louis, we figure the cartel’s raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred K a minute—that’s six million an hour, a hundred fifty million a day, fifty billion a year—that’s billion.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe it.”
“But before they can spend it or invest it, they have to launder it; and before they can do that, they have to collect it, count it, package it, and store it until they can move it. The fifty-billion dollar question is ‘Where?’ We keep looking for it. They keep moving it. We call it Operation Shell Game.”
“How does this teenage gunman fit into that?”
“Indirectly. Woody and his partner were checking out a warehouse. The kid was riding shotgun for a drug deal going down in the junkyard across the alley. They just happened on it.” She shakes her head in dismay. “We lost him over a couple of crummy vials of crack.”
“And the warehouse?”
“Empty, unfortunately. We’d been informed it was being used by a certain corporation—one of several we’ve linked to the cartel.”
“The ‘cartel.’ Another one of those nameless, faceless words like ‘organized crime.’ The company wouldn’t be called ITZ, would it?”
“No. Why?”
“It has a rather nasty habit of turning up in Vorontsov’s documents.”
“Really? Never heard of it.”
“I’m afraid you have. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who put me onto it.”
“Me? I think I’d remember.”
“Rubineau . . . Rubinowitz . . . ITZ. Follow?”
She whistles, clearly impressed, and makes short work of what’s left of the drive to her office.
FinCEN is headquartered in Arlington, a few miles from the cemetery on Fairfax Drive. U.S. and Treasury Department flags hang stiffly from a pole on the corner. The nondescript concrete box would fit right in with the drab housing blocks on Moscow’s Kalinin Prospekt. Its four-story precast facade dwarfs a lone tree and a brick building across the street that has a stove-pipe chimney from which gray smoke curls.
“Burn, baby, burn,” Scotto mutters, turning into the parking lot behind FinCEN. “That damned barbecue’s going all day.”
“Barbecue?”
“It’s a funeral home. They do cremations. Sorry, it’s my way of dealing with—” She bites it off when a media horde surrounds the car, pushing TV and still cameras against the windows as Scotto pulls into a parking spot. She can barely get her door open. “Back off, guys. Come on, back off.” She slips out and charges across the pavement.
The media pursues, shoving cameras, tape recorders, and microphones into her face. “Can you tell us who you’re investigating?”
“Not without tipping them off.”
“What was Agent Woodruff doing in that junkyard?”
“Giving his life for his country.”
Scotto darts down a colonnade toward the entrance, the reporters at her heels, the questions coming rapid-fire: “Several witnesses claim the kid was trying to surrender when he was shot? Is it true he had no criminal record? What about his family’s claim he was unarmed? As Woodruff’s former partner, can you tell us how you’re feeling right now?”
Scotto stonewalls it until we reach the entrance, where uniformed guards restrain the reporters from following us inside. “That’s your competition, Katkov,” she growls, glaring at them through the glass door. “I’ll make any deal you like, but if you’re counting on me to keep those animals from beating you to the punch, you’re nuts.”
“Mind telling me what you have against journalists?”
“I did, once. Obviously you didn’t want to hear it. You all think as long as you tell the truth, you’re not responsible for the consequences.”
“Sounds like someone burned you rather badly.”
“I’ve lost count. Frankly, I don’t know a single person who’s talked to a reporter and wasn’t either misquoted or quoted out of context.”
The lobby is a cramped space with few chairs and a gray steel reception desk that looks like it was lifted from someone’s office. A black felt board with letters pressed into grooves serves as a directory. Sections of ceiling tile have been removed, and workmen on ladders are pulling thick cables through a utility chase. The guard has me sign the register, then clips a plastic visitor’s badge to my parka.
“That was easy,” I remark, following Scotto to the elevator. “No lie detector test, no background check, no strip search?”
“And no smoking,” she says smartly, stabbing a finger at a forbidding sign. “As far as security goes, we already pulled your skivvies—twice. Once when I looked you up in Moscow, and again after you called. I think the director has a soft spot for people who did time in the gulag, especially for subversive writings. You’d be cooling your heels in the lobby if he didn’t like what he read.”
“He actually read my articles?”
“Some of them. He thought the one on athletes was particularly on target. We discard them here too—usually right after college.”
The elevator deposits us on the fourth floor in an institutional gray corridor lined with file cabinets. More open ceilings. More workmen on ladders pulling cables. More NO SMOKING signs. Scotto parks me outside her office for a few moments and changes into street clothes, then leads the way to the director’s office and introduces me to her boss.
Joseph Banzer is a heavyset fellow with thinning hair, wearing a medium brown suit that blends with the wood paneling behind him. He seems to possess a certain absentminded cunning and comes off more like a distracted law professor than relentless investigator.
“This is very interesting, Mr. Katkov,” he says softly as he peruses Vorontsov’s documents. “We’re familiar with the holding company for Rubineau’s hotel operations, but—”
“Travis Enterprises,” Scotto interrupts. “It’s an acronym: Tahoe, Reno, Atlantic City, Vegas, Isabelle, and Sarah.”
“Isabelle and Sarah?”
“His granddaughters,” she replies.
“Whatever happened to widows and orphans?”
“But,” Banzer repeats commandingly, putting an end to the levity, “we haven’t come across ITZ Corporation yet, have we, Agent Scotto?”
“No, it never turned up in our data, let alone linked to Rubineau.”
“I’m afraid you won’t find a link in those either,” I confess a little apprehensively. “It was pure deduction on my part.”
“Best kind,” Banzer says smartly. He glances at me with a puzzled look, then shifts it to Scotto. “Where’d you say he was from?”
“Moscow.”
&nb
sp; He drops a perplexed brow and nods. “That’s what I thought you said. Anyway, it’ll take some time to run these deals and determine whether or not they’re legitimate; but ITZ is either Rubineau’s company or it isn’t—we can run that one right now.” He slips the documents into a folder and heads for the door. “You see, Mr. Katkov,” he explains as he lumbers down a corridor, “Systems Integration is the key to FinCEN’s operation. That means we have immediate access to multiple data bases, including records of federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies like DEA, BATF, FRB, OCC, OTS, RTC, SEC, not to mention commercial repositories like Dun and Bradstreet, TRW . . .”
Scotto’s rolling her eyes. “I covered some of this ground, Chief.”
“Oh,” Banzer says, a little disappointed at having the air let out of his balloon. “Well, to make a long story short, in partnership with other enforcement agencies, FinCEN detects and supports investigations and prosecutions of financial crimes. Our primary mission is to identify national and international money-laundering schemes, mainly those involving the proceeds of narcotics trafficking. . . .”
Scotto leans to me and whispers, “Right out of his congressional budget proposal.”
“Don’t remind me,” Banzer warns, overhearing. “This damned deficit crunch has cut us to the bone. We’re already outgunned and outfinanced. Out-of-business is next, if we’re not careful. Budget meeting at two, Scotto. I want you there.”
“Been burning a hole in my calendar for a week.”
Banzer cuts a corner, pushes through a set of doors into the Operations Center, and wraps up his orientation lecture with “State-of-the-art computer technology’s the key to our effectiveness. This place is up and running damn near twenty-four hours a day.”
The room is alive with the steady hum of central processors, the zip-zip-zip of printer heads, and the probing questions of analysts who shoulder phones, freeing their hands to dance over keyboards. Rows of work stations—each with computer terminal and communications console—run down the center of the cramped space. Study carrels line the perimeter. There’s just enough room between them to roll back a chair. One wall is covered with clocks set to various time zones, another with official-looking insignia, each about the size of a dinner plate. Scotto explains they represent the enforcement agencies that have signed information-sharing agreements with FinCEN.
Banzer turns Vorontsov’s documents over to Ops Center Section Chief Tom Krauss, a tall, clean-cut fellow with sharply chiseled features and precise diction. He spends a few minutes at his keyboard accessing a data base before the printer next to his console comes to life. We’re all hovering over it like expectant parents. I’m so preoccupied, I unthinkingly pop a cigarette into my mouth. Scotto’s look is all the reminder I need. This is going to be torture, pure torture.
Banzer tears off the printout. “ITZ Corporation . . .” he announces with a dramatic pause, “President and CEO, one Michael A. Rubineau . . .”
“Way to go, Katkov,” Scotto enthuses.
“Born Grodno, USSR, nineteen thirty-one; came to the USA with his parents at the outbreak of World War Two—”
“He’s a Russian,” I blurt, energized by the revelation. “A Russian Jew.”
Banzer nods and continues. “Magna cum laude, Harvard Law, ’fifty-five; disbarred in ’fifty-eight for consorting with known gamblers.”
“Lansky.”
“Then,” Scotto chirps. “Your friend Barkhin, now. Old habits die hard.”
“ITZ,” Banzer concludes, “was recently spun off from a subsidiary of Travis Enterprises—a suspiciously complex network of companies, I might add, with offices in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.”
“Did you say Tel Aviv?”
“Uh-huh,” Banzer replies. “He lives there part of the year, according to his tax returns.”
“Well, we know where he’s going if things get too hot for him at home,” Krauss observes.
“You remember Shevchenko?” I ask, directing the question to Scotto. “According to him, the fellow who was hired to kill me was an Israeli. A Jew who recently emigrated from Russia.”
“That doesn’t mean Rubineau was behind it,” she counters. “Doesn’t even implicate him. It’s circumstantial at best.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, I recall your saying our friend Rubineau was connected to the Jewish mafia?”
“Yeah, thirty years ago. It doesn’t mean a thing now. We need hard evidence, something specific even to question him.”
“Real hard,” Krauss chirps, his eyes taut with frustration. “Just to access information, let alone act on it, we’re up against all kinds of civil liberties laws, the due process clause, reams of tight regulatory and statutory guidelines: the Privacy Act, Freedom of Information Act, Bank Secrecy Act.”
“We can’t just walk in and rip things apart like they do in your country,” Scotto adds sharply.
“That’s changing, and you know it,” I protest a little too defensively.
“What I think they’re trying to say, Mr. Katkov,” Banzer says in a conciliatory tone, “is that legal restraints come with the territory, and we make every effort to stay within them. Why? Because: a) Individual rights are what this country is all about. b) We might destroy someone’s reputation or livelihood if we mistakenly accuse them of wrongdoing. c) We might lose an otherwise solid prosecution on a legal technicality.”
“D) Not necessarily in that order,” Krauss quips, eliciting laughter from the others. “See, it’s not only cops and robbers. It’s cops and lawyers. Our position is: If there isn’t a law that says we can’t do it, we can. Their position is: If there isn’t a law that says we can do it, we can’t.”
That stops me for a moment. It gets to the core of democratic rule. There aren’t any positions in a dictatorship, only subservience. “Who usually wins?”
“They do,” Banzer replies without rancor. “Our successes are in spite of legal restraints, not because of them. Makes it all the sweeter when we win one.”
“Well, you folks may need hard evidence to question Rubineau, but I certainly don’t.”
Looks dart between the three of them before Scotto challenges, “Run that by us again, will you, Katkov?”
“I’m a journalist writing a story on private investment in Russia, correct?”
“If you say so.”
“I’ll interview him.”
“Interview him?” Scotto echoes. She tears off a page from the printout and hands it to me. It lists over a dozen corporate and residential addresses. “That mean you know where to find him?”
“No, but I’d wager one of your computers does.”
“Maybe,” she muses with a look to Krauss, who nods and takes the printout across the room to one of the intelligence analysts, a perky young woman with short-cropped hair, who goes to work on her computer terminal.
“You said Rubineau tried to kill you,” Scotto goes on. “Why would he give you the time of day?”
“Because I’m a Russian, because I’m Jewish, because he missed.”
“You sure it was him?”
“No. I don’t have any proof but—”
“If he agrees to see you,” Banzer interrupts in a prescient tone, “I’d say chances are pretty good it was him. If he won’t, I’d say it was someone else.”
“Well, one thing you can be sure of,” Scotto says with a dramatic pause. “If it was Rubineau, he won’t miss twice.”
22
I catnapped on the plane, and it’s barely noon; but jet lag, the eight-hour time difference, and nicotine deprivation have taken their toll. I’m ready to fall facedown on the nearest horizontal surface. I’d settle for the sofa in Scotto’s office, but it’s going to take some time to track down Rubineau. She suggests the Ramada Inn a couple of blocks away on Stafford. I jump at the chance to get out of the building.
I’m lighting a cigarette with one hand and holding the lobby door open for Scotto with the other when some media stragglers appear and unleash another
barrage of questions. She responds with a terse “No comment,” and makes a beeline for the parking lot.
“Come on, Scotto, give us something,” one whines.
“Yeah, we’re on deadline,” another shouts.
Scotto stops and whirls to face them. “Okay, here’s the lead: Gay KGB spy in Oval Office.”
A cacophony of protests rises.
“No kidding. That visit to Russia in the sixties? Clinton had a homosexual affair and defected.”
“Come on, Scotto, stop jerking our chain.”
Scotto grins wickedly at a thought and gestures to me. “And this is his Russian boyfriend.”
Their eyes brighten.
She whirls and leaves me surrounded by hungry reporters, pencils poised, cassette recorders thrust forward. For the briefest of instants I can see the looks darting between them, see the wheels turning, see the questions in their eyes. Is it? Could it? Possibly be? True? Then they emit a collective groan and drop off, as I hurry to catch up with Scotto.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“Why not? Can’t you take a joke?”
“Not me. Them. They wanted to believe you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You’ve a lot to learn about journalists.”
“I know enough not to make public statements that might come back to haunt me in a criminal proceeding.” A trace of that wicked grin breaks across her face. “I might have to revise my seminar. I mean, you guys are even easier to manipulate than I thought.” She opens the Buick’s door, then pauses and removes a sheet of yellow paper from beneath the wiper. It looks like an advertising flyer. She’s about to discard it when her eyes widen. “The hotel’s on hold, Katkov,” she announces suddenly.
“On hold? Why?”
“Get in and button it, or you’re walking.” She slides behind the wheel and tosses the sheet of paper into my lap. Printed neatly are the letters J-P-S-E.
I’m closing the door when she starts the engine, backs out of her parking spot, and rockets into the street. She makes a left into Fairfax and runs the light at the next corner, spraying several pedestrians with slush. A series of lefts and rights follow. After we’ve gone about a mile or so, Scotto slows at the intersection of Jackson and Pershing and pulls to the curb on the southeast corner.
