******
Bright and early the next morning we were still yawning and sleepy as we drank water from plastic bottles and ate pretzels and potato chips on the street a little ways down from the entrance to the gated subdivision where either Martin or his lady friend lived. We were still in the Ford and Norm had it pointed in the direction we assumed he would drive when he went to work. What was interesting and caught my attention was the long line of older cars and pickup trucks parked along the road waiting to enter, probably fifty or sixty of them. They were obviously construction workers and most were Hispanic.
“We gotta go shopping and stock the car with more than just this shit,” Norm said as he reached for another pretzel; “and get a couple of thermoses for coffee.”
“Iced coffee,” I said. He nodded.
Norm and I waited until after nine in the morning before Martini’s familiar baby blue Cadillac came out of the subdivision gate. We’d almost given up on him, thinking that perhaps this is where the woman lived and he’d left last night after we did. But then here he came and the woman was not with him.
******
For the next two days we followed Martin to his office, and then to lunch and to a bar after work, and then to his home. Nothing. We gave up after two days of following him around Tucson.
“I was afraid of something like this,” I told Norm as we drove in the Ford back to our motel room. “We can’t keep this up because sooner or later he’ll spot us. So we’re going to have to get in another way if we’re ever to get him alone—we’ll have to have either him or someone else drive us in. Maybe the construction workers who go in early every morning.”
******
After much discussion, we decided against trying to go in with the construction workers, almost all of whom were Hispanic and were being checked off one by one as they came through the gate. We would to try to grab Martin somewhere other than at his home.
“Maybe we should just whack him as he comes out of the bar at night or slows down to go through the gate to get to his house,” Norm suggested.
“We can’t, goddamnit. We need to know if it was him who decided to get us because we did that job a couple of years ago or if he was just following orders because somebody’s kid got clipped. We’ve got to know who wants us dead.” I was getting a little sore because this was the third or fourth time Norm had suggested hitting Martin and calling it a day.
At the end of our second long day of following Martin, we drove both the Ford and the Lexus back to Phoenix. I had a new plan.
******
On the fourth day, Friday, we drove back down to Tucson from Phoenix and waited once again for Martin to come out of his office building door to get his car and drive somewhere for lunch. This time my disguise was something new.
We’d stayed in Phoenix and gone shopping Thursday at a big fancy air conditioned mall. Early this morning, I’d driven back down to Tucson in my Honda SUV safe car with Norm following in the Ford. Norm waited while I filled up the Honda with gas and a supply of water and food and then parked it in a safe covered garage, meaning it had no security camera.
The Lexus was in Phoenix and all wiped down to eliminate our fingerprints. If my plan worked, we’d never see it again.
“You never know,” I told Norm when he suggested leaving the keys to the Lexus in its ignition so it would be stolen and disappear. “This may not work and we may still need it.”
Today I wasn’t wearing my baseball cap with a fake blonde ponytail; instead, I was wearing shiny new black leather shoes, neatly pressed grey slacks, and, despite the heat, a blue FBI-style windbreaker over a shoulder holster and a long-sleeve white shirt with a clip-on tie and button cuffs instead of cuff links. Norm was similarly attired and didn’t think much of it.
“I look like a fucking mope,” was his sardonic comment as he stood in front of the mirror in the motel bathroom and looked at himself.
My grey-flecked dark brown hair had been dyed white with some “color stripper” Norm had bought at Walgreens, and we were both wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and an FBI-looking baseball cap. In addition, I was temporarily wearing a black tooth cap that made it look like I had a missing front tooth and contacts that gave me very blue eyes. Because of the security camera we’d long ago spotted, I ’d also pushed so many swimmers' earplugs of soft putty between my teeth and my lips and cheeks to distort the shape of my face that it hurt and made me feel uncomfortable.
A Bluetooth ear bud was sticking out of one of my left ear and I had a paste-on mustache, and a bad haircut that Norm himself had given me. Only if you looked closely would you realize that the right-hand cuff of my shirt was unbuttoned.
I figured I’d be caught on at least one security camera so I’d also padded my waist with a pillow strapped on with duct tape. The only thing real about my appearance were the wet spots from sweat under both my armpits. Without a doubt, I looked like a big beefy guy who was at least a hundred pounds heavier than he should be and had gone to seed—in other words, I looked just like several of the feds I met in the past under less enjoyable circumstances.
We got there early so my missing tooth, extra weight, and blue eyes could get caught on the security camera when I walked into the lobby of Martin’s office building and looked at the building directory. Then I walked back out, all the time limping and grimacing from the big stone I slipped into my shoe. Norm was appalled at me letting myself get caught on the security camera until I explained about the tooth, blue eyes, and limp.
“Hey, that’s a great idea. It really will fuck up a search or a prosecution if you get caught. I might try it myself the next time I’m on a gig and you’re not around.”
******
Martin drove up about an hour later and parked in his reserved space.
“Mister Martin? Just a minute please,” I said as I held up my wallet so he could see my creds and badge in a way that would also let him catch a look at the gun in my shoulder holster. I had limped over to him with my head turned so the security camera couldn’t see my face. My missing tooth and face putty had disappeared; the extra weight had not.
“My name’s Roberts, Special Agent Roberts. I’m with the FBI and that’s my partner standing over there, Special Agent LaGrande. We need you to go somewhere with us so we can talk in private.” I kept my mouth shut as I limped up to him and then stood with my back to the security camera. The black tooth cap was gone because an FBI man would have dental insurance but the stone was still in my shoe.
“FBI? I’m not talking to you without my lawyer present.”
“Fine. That’s your right. But if you won’t talk to me and listen to my offer, I’m going to arrest you for securities fraud and put cuffs on you and search you, and I’m gonna do it right here and right now. So it’s either you come with me and listen to my offer or everyone coming into or out of your building is going to see you get arrested and cuffed, and that’s the end of it. You and your company will be the headline story in tomorrow morning’s paper for sure, and so will the Martini family in New York.”
Martin jumped and turned a little white when I mentioned New York and the Martini family, but he carried on gamely, I’ll give him that. He became even more visibly shaken as he stood there trying to figure out what to do. Standing in the hot sun didn’t help either.
“What offer are you talking about? What’s this all about. I’m an honest businessman. I want my lawyer.”
“And we want your help in trapping a local man who’s been stealing money from a federal defense contractor and investing it with your advice. At least that’s what we think he’s doing. So it’s either him or you who's going to be arrested today. Why don’t we go to your place and talk about it privately. Agent LaGrande can follow us. If you don’t like what we offer, you can call your attorney as soon as we book you and get a news conference scheduled.”
With that I moved towards the passenger’s door of Martin’s Cadillac and motioned for him to get in on the driver’s side.
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For a second I thought he wouldn’t go for it, but he did. Martin used his key to click open the door locks and climbed into his car with an exasperated sigh.
“Where to?” he said as I slipped on a pair of gloves and got in at the same time he did. He was visibly distraught and didn’t notice the gloves. He would have gotten out of the car right then and there if he had noticed them and understood what they meant—no fingerprints.
“Your place, of course. That way you’ll feel safer about talking off the record,” was my response. “Agent LaGrande will follow us. Tell the gate guard to let him in.”
******
The gate guard raised his thumb and left the gate open when Martin rolled down his window and shouted that the guy right behind him was his guest. We rolled right in, made a left turn at the first intersection, and drove about four blocks. It was definitely a high end residential community. The green grass of a golf course could be seen behind most of the homes including the one whose driveway Martin turned into. He pressed a little button on his car’s dashboard and one of the garage doors began going up. It was a five-car garage. There was an old Porsche 911 in one of the stalls and a Tesla in another. The other two were empty.
“Open up one for Agent LaGrande's car,” I ordered Martin as I pointed to the empty stall next to his Cadillac.
“Agent LaGrande, my ass,” was the snarling reply. Martin had regained some of his composure and figured out the gloves.
“You guys aren’t FBI, are you? They wouldn’t be driving an old Ford and you don’t look like a fed. What is this, a kidnapping?” He’d looked over at me a number of times as he drove home and obviously hadn’t liked what he’d seen.
“We’re trying to save the taxpayers’ money,” I said as I pulled out my revolver from the shoulder holster under my blue windbreaker and gestured at him with it as the garage door came down behind his car.
“Just do what you’re told and you’ll be alright.”
I didn’t show him the derringer on my wrist or the little pistol in my ankle holster because I didn’t want him to know I carried them; hopefully, the only people who’d ever know would be people I wanted to threaten or kill—and they wouldn’t find out until it was too late to save themselves.
******
On the way over to his home, Martin had assured me we could talk privately as no one else would be home until his girlfriend, a realtor, came home to change before they met for dinner and drinks. His cleaning lady, he said, wouldn’t be back until Monday. But I saw the Porsche and I began to wonder. So did Norm. He put his gloved hand on the hood over the car engine and pronounced it cold. Even so, both Norm and I had our pistols drawn as we entered the house. The garage opened into a little corridor with a laundry room to the right and the kitchen straight ahead.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll talk right here.” I gestured for Martin to walk into the laundry room. I wasn’t about to take a chance on Martin having a silent alarm somewhere. This looked like the most unlikely place in his home for an alarm to be located.
“Who are you guys?” Martin demanded. “Don’t you know who you’re dealing with here? You take off and we’ll forget about your mistake.”
“We can do that, but only if you’re honest with us,” I said with the most honest look on my face I could muster. “But you gotta be honest.”
“Okay, okay. What do you want to know?”
“I want you to tell us who ordered you to set up the recent diamonds for drugs deal in Chicago, the one that went bad because you tried to piggyback on it and use it to hit the guys who’d broken up the deal a couple of years ago, the one where your cousin and another guy got killed.”
“How’d you find out about that? You work for Chappie, don’t you?”
“Chappie? Who’s Chappie?” I said it with a smile and a shrug that suggested he might be correct. “And it don’t matter who we work for; what matters for you is telling us everything we want to know. So who told you to have Jack Douglass tell Robbie about the diamonds-for-drugs deal in Chicago and send his wife to find out where the buyer was staying?”
“I don’t know, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. You guys don’t know who you’re fucking with here.”
“Sure you do, Roberto, sure you do. And you’re gonna tell us.”
He was still shaking his head ’no’ when I shot him in the knee. It must have really hurt because he sat down on to the floor in front of the clothes dryer holding his leg and started screaming and yelping out words all at the same time.
“You shot me; you shot me.” ... “Oh God, it hurts.” ... “Why did you do that? Okay. Enough already. I’ll tell you; I’ll tell you.”
“That’s great, Roberto; you tell us what we want to know and we’ll go away and you can call an ambulance and get something for the pain. But one lie, and I’m gonna shoot you in the other knee. And remember, we already know about your uncle and the Bonnano family in New York. What we want are all the details, every goddamn one of them, about your participation in the recent diamonds-for-drugs deal, every little detail starting with day one. You gonna tell us or not?”
“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. ... Oh it hurts. ... Don’t shoot again for God’s sake. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.”
******
We talked to Robert Martin and listened and asked questions for more than three hours as he wept and screamed in pain and begged us to call for an ambulance. Once while we were talking, his eyes rolled up and he passed out for a few minutes. It took all afternoon of listening to him beg and plead but, in the end, he told us everything, at least I think he did.
He’d grown up in New York City and been sent to Tucson to head up a money management and laundering operation because he was the only one who’d gone to college, Yale for a couple of years until there had been a “misunderstanding about a girl” and he had to leave. Despite his lack of a degree, his uncle had been able to get him a job with Goldman Sachs because it was managing the money of various members of the Bonanno crime family including some of his uncle’s money.
He had been at Goldman’s for almost six years as an account manager, he told us, but had to leave when the feds started nosing around and asking questions. That’s when he was sent out to Tucson where the Bonanno family had operated with a small crew for many years and many of its retirees and senior soldiers had winter homes. They had been here ever since Joseph Bonanno, the founder of the crime family that still bore his name, had suddenly retired to Tucson “for his health.”
According to Martin, his uncle Joe, also known as Joseph Martin and Joey Dollar, was the capo of an important crew of Bonanno soldiers in New York and had been greatly embarrassed and seriously pissed when his son, Martin’s cousin, had been killed while he was turning over some diamonds in payment for some heroin the family intended to resell into the New York market. His uncle had tried to keep the loss of the diamonds a secret but he couldn’t because of the death of his son.
“My uncle was afraid,” Martin told us, “that the family’s new boss and the other capos were beginning to think of him as weak and vulnerable because he didn’t revenge his loss and get the diamonds back. It was one of my uncle’s lieutenants who had come up with the idea of trying to find the guys who killed my cousin by dangling a similar deal in front of them.
“One of my guys’ girlfriends was sent to deliver the diamonds to my uncle’s drug buyer and find out where he’d be after the deal so one of my uncle’s crew could steal them back and wait for the guys who killed my cousin a couple of years ago.
“It almost worked. I pulled off my part of it,” Martin explained almost proudly at one point. “It was that asshole Antonio who blew it and got himself killed. My uncle was happy about us getting the drugs and keeping our diamonds, but he was really pissed about the guys who killed his son getting away again—not at me, thank God.”
Then he sealed his uncle’s doom without even knowing it.
“He’ll get them thou
gh, sooner or later he’ll find them; my uncle never gives up. That’s why he’s a capo.”
I congratulated Martin for having such an admirable uncle and said I’d like to know more about him since, despite our differences, “maybe we could put our misunderstanding behind us and do some business with you and him.”
Then I asked so many questions about his uncle Joe and where we might find him that Martin finally began to understand that we might be the guys his uncle was trying to find and began clamming up. That’s when I shot him in the side of the head with the little .22-caliber pistol from my ankle holster. I didn’t do it until I was fairly sure we knew all we needed to know about Giuseppe Martini and his Bonanno crew.
“I never knew you carried an ankle gun,” Norm said as Martin’s heart kept pumping and he rapidly bled out into a pool of blood that covered the utility room floor. “Pretty smart.”
Chapter Eleven
We drove the Ford straight from Martin’s house to our Honda safe car in the covered parking garage where it was waiting fully gassed and ready to go including water and snacks, a police scanner, a small reserve of emergency cash taped under the dash in a zippered plastic bag, and a couple of five-gallon fuel cans. There were even a couple of cheap plastic containers with screw-on lids for pissing into and a roll of toilet paper.
As we were driving to get the Honda, I took apart my little ankle .22, carefully wiped off the pieces, and threw them out the window one at a time. As usual, we were still wearing our gloves and had everything with us that we wanted to keep. Our old disguises were long gone; our gloves would come off and be gone after we got out of the Ford and abandoned it with the keys in the ignition after we picked up the Honda.
“Damn it’s hot out here,” Norm said as I put the window back up after flipping another part of my ankle .22 out as we turned a corner. Just rolling the window down for a brief moment had flooded the Ford with hot air. Worse, we were driving into the sun and being “hot housed” by the sunlight coming through the car’s front windows.
Cage's Crew Page 9
