Mortal Sin

by Paul Levine

  “Good. Because I want to give you a chance. I’m offering you the benefit of my wisdom and experience, and you sit here and crack wise. Don’t you see what I’m trying to teach—”

  “Rule number two,” I said. “Co-opt the enemy. Infiltrate, buy ’em off.”

  His smile seemed genuine. “You got it right. I want to keep you where I can see you.”

  “Which is where?”

  He stood up, swinging a leg over the back of the chair and spinning it away. He walked over to the sofa and looked down at me. “Stand up, Jake.”

  Now what?

  Diaz moved a little to his left, getting Florio out of his line of sight. Or was it his line of fire?

  I stood. I had become so obedient so quickly.

  Florio extended a hand. I reached out, tentatively, and he shook it firmly. “Welcome aboard, Jake.” He turned toward Diaz. “Hey, Guillermo, let go of your gun and shake hands with my new partner.”

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  The Loophole

  DAWN WAS AN ORANGE GLOW TO THE EAST, A CHATTERING OF birds, a succession of splashes and ripples in the water below. In the distance, I heard what sounded like thunderclaps, but after a moment they seemed to be a series of dull, thudding explosions. The morning light cut across a table in what could have been a bedroom in the southeast corner of the house. But there was no room for a bed. A table took up most of the entire room. It held a larger version of the scale model of Cypress Estates that Charlie and I had seen at the bingo hall. The same shops and apartments, burger palaces and gas stations, the lagoons and wood storks. But other things, too.

  The golf course.

  Parking garages.

  Miniature buses. Dozens of them.

  And a huge building on stilts, a cream-colored flying saucer of a building that looked like a domed stadium. Next to it, connected by a shaded catwalk over the water, was a miniature version of the same building.

  “Know what you’re looking at, Jake?”

  “Looks like a modern sports complex, a football stadium next to a basketball arena. Kind of like the Vet and the Forum, except your stadium is domed.”

  “This ain’t Philadelphia, Jake. The small building will be the Living Everglades Museum. The roof is retractable, lets the sun shine in. Rain, too. It’ll have a zoo, a herbarium, a living garden, an aviary, an electronically controlled habitat of every species of life found in the Everglades. We’re going to grow the plants and raise the animals and make it all accessible. I’m the guy who’s going to preserve the Everglades. I was going to make Tupton the executive director of the museum and living habitat. I’d fund everything. Now look at this.” He pointed to a remote section of the model, a hardwood hammock with several airboats pulled up to a dock. Models of dark-skinned men and women sat around campfires near miniature chickee huts. “Our authentic Indian village. No alligator wrestling, no T-shirt stands. The real thing. Indians living and fishing and cooking for everyone to see the old ways.”

  He saw the look I was giving him. “You didn’t think this stuff was important to me, did you, Jake? You thought it was all about money. Well, you’re wrong. You and Tupton and all the do-gooders think in clichés and stereotypes. A man’s a developer, he must be a robber baron who doesn’t give a shit about the birds. Damn, it’s not that simple. I grew up hunting in the forest near Ocala. I used to fish for bass in Lake Okeechobee. Don’t you understand I agreed with Tupton on the goals? It’s his methods that sucked. Lawsuits against developers, a freeze on building permits in Monroe County. Double the impact fees in Collier County. Lying down in front of the bulldozers for the TV cameras. That’s all crap.”

  “I don’t get it. If you were going to do all this, why was Tupton fighting you?”

  “He wasn’t, not at first. I needed his support for the project, and in the beginning he was receptive. At least, he said he’d listen.”

  “Until he saw the golf course…”

  “Fuck the golf course! The golf course is diddly-squat. Until he saw the casino.”

  Florio pointed to what I thought was the domed stadium. “Look at it, Jake. Forget bingo. Say hello to blackjack, roulette, craps, slots, keno, poker, the whole works. And look what else. Unlike Vegas, it’s got windows, a walkway three hundred sixty degrees around the building and into the museum. Bring the kids for a nature walk. You can look out over the slough, commune with nature, watch snowy egrets soar…”

  “Draw to an inside straight,” I said.

  “It’s not funny, Jake. I had everything lined up, but Tupton blows it.”

  Nicky Florio sat there thinking about it, and I waited for him to tell me the story. It didn’t take long.

  “At the party, Tupton wanders into my den and sees the plans for the casino. When he came across the estimates of the number of visitors, he nearly fainted. I had told him we were going to bring gambling to the project, but maybe he didn’t comprehend what that meant. He wanted the museum and the habitat so much, maybe he closed his eyes to the rest. But now he sees the ten-year projections, and they stagger him. Widening Tamiami Trail, two thousand buses a day, Phase Two of the housing plan, high-rise condos, apartments, town houses. It blew his mind, but what could he expect? How did he think I was going to pay for the museum?

  “Selling alligator wallets at the souvenir stand,” I suggested.

  “We’re talking forty-five million for construction and other capital expenditures, another fifteen in start-up costs, and ten to twelve million in shortfall revenue per year. I couldn’t pay for it with greens fees.”

  “So you killed him.”

  Florio shook his head. “Wrong! Christ, don’t you know I told you the truth about Tupton? The guy was drunk. He wandered into the wine cellar, popped a few corks, and passed out.”

  “We’ve been over this,” I said. “Why didn’t the caterers find his body?”

  “Damned if I know. Maybe he wandered off and came back after the caterers left, who knows? Maybe somebody moved him, but it wasn’t me. Jake, I liked the guy, I really did. I tried to tell him we could have it all. In addition to everything else, I promised him fifteen percent of the casino profits for preservation of endangered species. Do you knowhow much money we’re talking about? Shit, they could create new species with the cash flow. We’re talking ten million visitors a year.”

  “Which is what he objected to.”

  Florio nodded. “Not even willing to listen. He was going to run to the papers with news about the casino. It would’ve blown sky-high.”

  “Sooner or later, it’ll happen anyway,” I said.

  “But I’ll choose when and where. It’s the only way to keep the media from screwing everything up. There was a headline the other day that the Florida Keys coral reef is dying, and who do they blame? Builders, because everyone wants simple answers, and we’re the guys who bulldoze the mangroves, dredge up the sediment. It doesn’t occur to these smart guys that hurricanes, cold fronts, black-band disease, and a bunch of other natural causes can kill the coral. Why the fuck shouldn’t the coral die? Everything in nature dies. Maybe a hundred years from now, another coral reef will form somewhere off Australia, but they don’t consider that. We’re so damned intent on preserving nature that we don’t let nature take its course.”

  “You’re saying the alligator kills the wood stork, so why shouldn’t you?”

  “I’m saying nature is deadly. In the Glades, some Australian pine trees are so toxic their falling leaves will kill other plants along the canals. That’s Mother Nature, pal. Lightning hits a hammock of slash pines and turns the shrubbery into kindling. But once the shrubs are burned up, the sunlight reaches the ground where the pine seedlings are just taking root.”

  “So you’re just another lightning bolt?”

  “As usual, Jake, you’re missing my point, which is that developers are easy targets. We’re as despised as…”

  “Lawyers.”

  “Yeah, almost. We make better villains than the farmers.
Why don’t they take on Big Sugar? You knowhow much of the Everglades is planted with cane? I’ll tell you, five hundred thousand acres. You can’t even imagine it until you see the fields. The runoff of phosphorous has done more damage to the ecosystem than all the condos ever built.” Florio stared out into space. “Fucking De La Torre.” He turned to me. “You know him?”

  “President of National Sugar, but I always thought his first name was Carlos.”

  “The prick fucking owns Tallahassee. Between government price supports and paying slave wages, he’s gotten filthy rich.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  “Yeah, well, I gotta pay union wages and bid on jobs. But it ain’t all sweet with sugar. The new free-trade treaty with Mexico, the imports from Cuba when Castro falls, the GATT treaty, they all keep De La Torre awake at night. So he wants a sideline, some extra security for the future.”

  “What’s that have to do with you?”

  “De La Torre’s the only one who could have stopped us. He held me up like a highway robber, but I greased his palm, so he’s on board, just like the Indians. Christ, I had everybody in my pocket except Tupton.”

  Something was gnawing at me. “What about the legislature? You can’t buy ’em all, and I don’t see how you’ll get a gaming bill passed. You’ll be up against the unholy alliance of racetrack and jai alai interests plus the fundamentalist Christians. The hotel industry’s been trying to pass a casino law for thirty years and has never come close.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Jake. We don’t need a law.”

  “Of course you do. Casinos are illegal in Florida.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? We don’t need permits. We don’t need impact statements. We don’t need zoning variances or business licenses or special laws.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Jake, why the fuck don’t you listen? We ain’t in Florida. This is Injun country.”

  Nicky Florio explained it to me. By the numbers.

  One: In 1962, the United States secretary of the interior approved the constitution of the Micanopy Tribe. Seventy thousand acres of land were now under the exclusive jurisdiction of the tribe’s general council. Tax-exempt land with some soggy farms and lots of alligators and not much the white man wanted.

  Two: Florio began doing business with the Indians in the seventies. He built low-cost housing for them in hard-to-reach areas. He fished with the Tiger family and became friendly with council leaders.

  Three: Florio purchased an option for a ninety-nine-year lease on ten thousand acres for the housing, commercial, and recreation ventures. The lease is boilerplate and all-inclusive, granting everything from construction and air rights to mineral rights. The tribe will get 10 percent of pretax profits. He smiled a pickpocket’s smile.

  Ten percent of Florio Enterprises’ profits, Florio emphasized. But that company assigned the long-term lease to a holding company, which assigned its rights to a Cayman Islands Trust. Florio Enterprises only gets a management fee from the holding company. The real profits, hundreds of millions, will be passed through, and the Indians don’t get a cent of them.

  A red cent, Florio said.

  Four: The mixed residential-commercial town went off without a hitch. No permits needed, except from the tribe’s general council.

  Five: the law.

  “You ever hear of the Federal Indian Regulatory Gaming Act of 1988?” Florio asked.

  “I don’t pay attention to statutes unless they have something to do with fender benders or burglaries.”

  “The Act allows Indians to run the same gambling allowed by the state.”

  “Fine. Open a racetrack or a fronton. Florida law doesn’t allow casinos.”

  “Sure it does, Counselor. The churches hold Vegas night for charity all the time. It’s right in the law. How do you think we operate a bingo hall with cash awards? Because churches are allowed to. It’s the same principle.”

  I thought about it. A loophole, Nicky would call it. But that’s what lawyering is all about, drawing parallels between your client’s quirky facts and those from a case that goes your way. Making analogies, sidestepping distinctions, taking exceptions and making them the rules, and in general patching holes in the water bucket that is your case.

  “You’ll still face a court challenge,” I said. “The state attorney general or the racetrack folks or someone will want to keep you out.”

  “I expect that. So be my lawyer. Give me an opinion. Who’ll win, and no bullshit about needing time to research it. Rely on your instincts.”

  My instincts hadn’t been very good lately, but I gave it a shot. “You’ll argue that the state can’t allow a church to operate a casino, even one night a year, without letting the Indians do it full time under the federal statute. It would be discriminatory to bar equivalent gambling games on Indian land. The law is just one side of the equation, of course. Politically, the strength would be with the opposition. On your side, you’ve got a few thousand Indians who live in a swamp and want to lease you land for a casino. On the other, some big moneyed interests in horse racing, jai alai, and dogs will fight you every step of the way. Even the teachers’ unions will be against you, since the state lottery benefits education. I’d be willing to bet that you’d have a drastic effect on lottery revenues.”

  “A forty to fifty percent decrease, according to our studies,” Florio said, “plus we’d cripple racing and jai alai within three years. Hell, we’ll hurt Vegas and Atlantic City, too. With no state or federal taxes to pay, our slots can increase the payoff and give a higher rate of return than anything there. On the games that have some room, we’ll give better odds.”

  “That’s why you’d be such a threat,” I agreed, “and I don’t have to tell you that the courts are moved by political realities. If the attorney general decides to sue, you could be tied up for years. The state could argue that you’re the real operator of the casino, not the Indians, so the whole setup is a sham. Your response is that the state has no legitimate concern how the profits are divided or who runs the gambling. In fact, the judicial inquiry must be limited to the narrow question of whether casino gambling is permitted under state law. If so, no state or federal court has the power to inquire further. The Indians can allow casino gambling on their land, and it’s simply none of the government’s business.”

  Florio was beaming at me. “Gina was right about you. You’re smarter than you look. Anything else? Anything you need to know?”

  “I don’t understand what Carlos de La Torre and the sugar industry have to do with this.”

  Florio showed a sour smile. “The Indians foolishly gave up a piece of their sovereignty to the Water Management Board. They signed a damned compact. No new development in land covered by the board’s jurisdiction without board approval. Part of the move was to help the tribe’s image after the big-game fiasco.”

  My look told him I didn’t understand.

  “The Indians were going to bring in lions, tigers, elephants, and let the yahoos blast them out of the saw grass for five thousand bucks a pop. No way the state could stop them, but the public furor made ’em back down. Then the tribal council agreed to submit all plans that will affect the environment to the Water Board, and to abide by its decisions. It’s a binding compact. The board doesn’t do anything without the sugar industry’s approval, and that means Carlos de La Torre. All he cares about is water for the cane and money for his pockets. But I’ve got him covered, and a damn good thing, too. The board meets next Tuesday, and that’s when we submit our proposal.”

  “You’re going to make the casino plan public?”

  “It has to be done, sooner or later, but that’s what I meant about timing. The papers won’t have anything about it beforehand. Most meetings, it’s just some tomato farmers feuding with the cane growers and your usual assortment of fruitcakes from the Audubon Society. The board meets in a school gym up in Belle Glade on the edge of a cane field, in case the commissioners forget who pays
the freight. There’s an agenda item that simply says, ‘Micanopy land-use plan.’ We’ll have the vote recorded before the newspapers go to print. So I’m not worried about Big Sugar or the Water Management Board. But you tell me, Jake. What about the state cabinet?”

  “The governor will ask for an AGO, an attorney-general opinion, as to the legality of the planned casino. The attorney general is Don Russo, but he hasn’t read a law book in thirty-five years. Either he’s on the golf course, or he’s taking his secretary to Sanibel Island at taxpayer’s expense. He’ll turn to Abe Socolow as the local state attorney.”

  “Socolow’s a friend of yours, isn’t he, Jake?”

  “‘Friend’ is maybe too strong a word. We’re adversaries, have been for years. Let’s just say we have a healthy respect for each other.”

  “C’mon, Jake, you’re too modest. You’ve been involved in his election campaign.”

  “I’ve endorsed him. That’s all. Me and a thousand other lawyers.”

  Florio helped himself to the scotch bottle. “I’m a supporter of his, too. Contributions strictly legit. All reported, none above the legal limit. The guy’s a straight arrow.”

  Florio was right. Abe Socolow had been appointed acting state attorney when Nick Wolf was indicted for playing footsie with major drug dealers. Before then, Socolow had been chief of the major-crimes division in the office. A working prosecutor, not a paper pusher or a politician, Socolow had a messianic drive to rid the streets of murderers and other hoodlums. He looked like an undertaker but was seldom as cheerful. He was long and lean, sallow and mean. And honest.

  “Look, Nicky, if you’re thinking of bribing Abe Socolow, you’ve been out in the sun too long. The guy’s untouchable. He’ll indict you. He’ll set you up and sting you with TV cameras popping out of the ceiling.”

  “I wouldn’t even consider bribing Mr. Socolow,” Florio said, solemnly.

  “Good. For a moment, I was afraid you—”

  “That’s your job, partner.”