Columbo: The Hoffa Connection

by William Harrington

  “Maybe good enough,” said Columbo. “Maybe he doesn’t have to be so good. We got other stuff. You’ve been pretty good about explaining the time when this and that happened. But you can’t have been off as much as you say. A neighbor heard Regina screaming at 1:23. He’s a neighbor who sometimes got annoyed at the noisy parties she had. He says that night it was awful, but it got quiet by half-past twelve or something like that. Then at 1:23 he heard her screaming. You’ve said you were working in the house at that time. How could you not have heard her screaming, if a neighbor heard her?”

  “Maybe I’d gone to my room, to go to the bathroom or something.”

  Columbo glanced around at the others in the room. “Okay, Mr. Visconti. The maid found the body and called the police. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was in bed. I’d been up late. I didn’t wake up till a cop banged on my door. As a matter of fact, it was Sergeant Zimmer. She went around and knocked on all the doors.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “I used the bathroom, got dressed, and went downstairs.”

  “Did you go out by the pool?”

  “No. But I looked out the window.”

  “Okay.” Columbo used a hand to flip his hair back off his forehead. “You’ve had an easy answer for everything so far. Let’s see what your answer is for this. You said you knew I was pullin’ some kind of funny on you when I asked you for a blood sample to match some blood found on Regina’s terry-cloth robe. You told me you knew there was no blood on that robe. How did you know that?”

  “I looked out there and saw it.”

  “No, Mr. Visconti,” said Columbo with an air of wounded patience. “No, you didn’t. Before Sergeant Zimmer came into the house and started waking people up, she’d already had the terry-cloth robe packed in a plastic bag and taken away as evidence.”

  Johnny closed his eyes for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t have a very good memory for little details. Maybe actually I woke up earlier and looked out.”

  “Sure. You went down the hall, then through the crosshall, and went out on the balcony so you could see past the palm tree. And got a good look at the robe, while you overlooked the body lying at the bottom of the pool. You tell a jury that,” said Columbo.

  Johnny lowered his eyes and stared for a moment at his handcuffs. “I guess I’ll have to take my chances,” he said.

  Columbo nodded. “Yeah, I guess you will. I guess we’ll just have to put you in jail and let the D.A. develop his case.” He stood. “So. Anything you wanta ask, Captain? Martha?”

  The two shook their heads solemnly.

  “I’ll get somebody to take him.” Columbo opened the door and looked up and down the hallway. He closed the door. “Oh, there is one more little thing I meant to ask you, Mr. Visconti. One of those things, you know, that kinda sticks in a man’s mind and bothers him.”

  Johnny stared at Columbo, abruptly apprehensive. “How well did you know a fella named, uh”— Columbo reached into his pocket and pulled out a small note—“named Carlo Lucchese?”

  Johnny shook his head quickly. “I never heard the name.”

  Columbo nodded. “You got that big, powerful gun. They’re doin’ some ballistics tests on it right now. The slugs fired from your .44 magnum won’t match the slugs that killed Carlo Lucchese and a couple other fellas, right?”

  “ Lieutenant Columbo, what the hell do you want from me?” Johnny screamed.

  5

  Columbo suggested a short break while someone brought Cokes. Johnny could manage his by tugging his belly chain up and bending forward. He could drink from a can, or scratch his nose if he needed to. Then he needed to go to the bathroom, and two uniformed officers took him to a men’s room and unhooked him while he urinated. Back on his chair, he was no longer the confident young man he had been when he had first come in.

  While he was out of the room, Captain Sczciegel had grinned at Columbo and said, “Guess the chief can call his news conference, huh?”

  Columbo shook his head. “I wouldn’t. We know who killed Regina, I think. But we don’t know why. And that’s what everybody’s gonna want to know.”

  “And the key to that, I suppose, is the identity of the old man who lived upstairs.”

  Columbo nodded.

  “Do you think he knows? I mean Johnny. Does he know?”

  “Maybe not. But maybe he thinks he can cut a deal.” Which was exactly what Johnny thought. “What do I get out of it if I give you complete cooperation?” he asked as soon as he was seated again.

  “Same thing anybody gets that cooperates,” said Columbo. “I’ll give the word to the D.A. and the court that you cooperated.”

  “Meaning nothing,” Johnny said bitterly.

  “Well, there’s the difference between concurrent and consecutive sentences,” said Columbo. “And there are different slammers we can send you to. I’m not gonna tell you any of them are fun, but—”

  “Ask your questions.” Johnny bent forward and raised his hands far enough to rub his eyes.

  “You know what the big questions are. Who was the old man? And where is he?”

  “He wasn’t her grandfather,” Johnny said.

  “Never figured he was,” said Columbo.

  “He was a big man,” said Johnny. “A powerful man. A rich man.”

  “A drug dealer,” said Sczciegel.

  “Nothin’ like,” Johnny sneered. “You always look for the easy answers.”

  “What was his name?” Columbo asked.

  “What’ll you do for me if I tell you? Hey! Be real, man! If I tell you and they found out I told you, they’ll get me, even inside. I gotta have a better deal. I don’t figure on ever gettin’ out. But I don’t want to die in the joint, maybe beaten to death. Send me where guys that do that kind of thing don’t go. Send me to a country-club joint.”

  “Don’t forget, Johnny, we do have the death penalty in California,” Sczciegel said.

  “You never do it.”

  “We will. We’ve got more than three hundred people on death row. You don’t have to worry about getting beaten to death there, ’cause you never get out of your cell.”

  Johnny glanced at the stenographer. “What are you tryin’ to do to me? She’s takin’ this down! There’ll be a record of what you said to me.”

  “Just suggesting you face reality, Visconti,” said Sczciegel.

  “Well… that’s up to Johnny,” said Columbo. “Isn’t it? You want some time to think it over?”

  “Yeah,” said Johnny. “Yeah. And I guess I better talk to a lawyer.”

  Columbo nodded. “When you say that, the interrogation is over. I’ll have them take you— Wait a minute.”

  6

  Bert McCloskey was at the door. Columbo got up and stepped outside.

  “Bingo!” McCloskey laughed. “You’ve closed my case. Does it close yours?”

  “C’mon in and let’s see.”

  McCloskey was a tall white-haired man with a long, jolly face. He was a career man with LAPD, who had started as a patrolman riding in a black-and-white and worked his way up. There wasn’t a chair for him, and he stood.

  “Mr. Visconti,” said Columbo, “I wanta introduce you to Lieutenant Bert McCloskey, a man you may be seeing a lot of. He’s in charge of the investigation into the death of that fella I mentioned a while ago: Carlo Lucchese. It seems the bullets fired from your .44 magnum automatic match the ones taken from the body of Lucchese and one of the other men found dead in a warehouse on Washington Boulevard. You’ll have your chance to explain to him why that is.”

  Johnny bent forward and shook with sobs.

  “I can’t imagine why a man would keep a murder weapon,” said Martha. “Wouldn’t you think getting rid of it would be the first thing he’d do?”

  “There’s no understanding it,” McCloskey said. “But it happens. You go back through the files, you’ll find that in twenty or twenty-five perce
nt of murders with a gun, the murderer still has the gun when we nab him.”

  “That’s because he thinks we won’t be able to nab him,” said Columbo.

  Nineteen

  1

  The way the case had developed suggested to Captain Sczciegel that they should move the questioning of Johnny Visconti to a larger room and bring in a bigger cast of characters. When the interrogation resumed after about an hour, Robert Brady of the FBI was in the room, as was Paul Trevor, resplendent in the gold-trimmed uniform of a deputy chief, LAPD.

  Also, they had brought in Mickey Newcastle. Dressed and chained the same way Johnny was, he sat beside Johnny at the conference table. He Seemed not entirely to understand where he was and why.

  During the hour, Johnny Visconti had given Bert McCloskey a written statement, confessing to the murders of Carlo Lucchese and his two henchmen. By now he seemed totally defeated. He shuffled in his leg irons and seemed to have diminished inside his blue coveralls.

  “There’s just one thing left in this case,” Columbo said when they were all seated around the table and the stenographer was working at her Stenotype. “Who was the old man, Mr. Visconti? If there’s any way at all that you can help yourself, it would be by telling us who he was and where he is.”

  “He’s dead,” Johnny muttered.

  “Are you confessing to a fifth murder?” Sczciegel asked incredulously.

  “Carlo killed him.”

  “Who was he?” Columbo persisted.

  “He was Jimmy Hoffa.”

  2

  Johnny sat hunched, the comers of his mouth turned down, and watched them express their skepticism, vocally or with frowns and shaking heads.

  “What good does it do me to tell you that, if it isn’t true?” he asked.

  “Jimmy Hoffa died twenty years ago,” said the rotund Chief Trevor.

  “Really?” asked Johnny. “Where’s the body?”

  “You tell us,” said Columbo.

  “It’s at the bottom of the San Pedro Channel. In an oil drum filled with concrete.”

  “Where of course we can’t find it, so what you’re saying can’t be proved,” said Chief Trevor with a gesture of contempt and dismissal.

  “It makes no difference to me if it can be proved or if you believe it,” said Johnny. “It doesn’t lay anything more on me—or take anything away.”

  “Why did he want Regina dead?” Columbo asked.

  “That’s the one thing I don’t understand exactly,” said Johnny. “It was stupid. He insisted he was gonna get rid of her, even when we told him it was a bad idea. He told us when to do it and how to do it, and he was gonna pay us very well. Hey— If Mick and I hadn’t taken the job on, he’d have gotten somebody else. He’d made up his mind. How could I have stopped him?”

  “You must have some idea why,” said the deputy chief.

  “Yeah. He made her what she was, with his money and influence. She owed him everything. Face it, Regina had no great talent—except for bamboozling him and a hell of a lot of other people. Jimmy paid for her buildup. He called in favors to get her bookings. Without him she wouldn’t have been anything, and he didn’t think she was grateful enough.”

  “Pygmalion—” Martha suggested.

  “What about jealousy?” Columbo asked. “She, uh, distributed her favors pretty widely.”

  Johnny nodded. “Yeah. He was jealous. Not so much if she was gettin’ something out of it—I mean, advancing her career, getting herself something he didn’t have to pay for. But… other guys—” Johnny shook his head. “He didn’t know about Regina and me. Can you believe it? She slept with that old man every night, almost—a lot of times after she’d already been with me. When I first knew them, he was still very able, I think. She could make any man able. Lately… I don’t know.”

  “Threatened in his manhood,” said Sczciegel. “What’d he expect at his age?”

  “She didn’t make things any better by the way she got to treating him. It was one thing for him to pretend to be her grandfather, but it was something else entirely for her to call him ‘gran’pa,’ which she did.

  “What about a money angle?” Columbo asked. Johnny nodded. “He was supposed to get a percentage of everything she made. I don’t know what percentage, but I heard him talk to her about it. He got in his head the idea she was cheating on him, cookin’ the books. It preyed on his mind. He got so he actually hated her. Hey, he got so he hated everybody. He got bitter, very bitter, toward the end.”

  “I think,” said Columbo, “that what we better do is start at the beginning. I think you better tell us everything you know about that old man. Maybe there are things we can check out. And after a while we’ll be able to tell if he was Jimmy HofFa or he wasn’t. I guess you could be wrong about it, couldn’t you?”

  “I suppose I could. I knew him for more than six years. I was told he was Jimmy HofFa, and I always believed it. Anyway, it won’t do me any harm—or any good—to tell you what I know.”

  3

  “Start with this,” said Johnny. “The old story is that Jimmy Hoffa was murdered in the parking lot of the Red Fox Inn in Detroit on July 30, 1975. Over the years a lot of guys have said that was bullshit. Why would anybody have wanted to kill him? They just didn’t want him taking control of the Teamsters Union again. Hey. Jimmy was a great man for his members. They loved him. They had better wages, better safety, better perks; and if Jimmy had made himself a millionaire, that was strictly okay with them.”

  “He didn’t live like a millionaire,” said Brady.

  “He had enough brains not to,” said Johnny. “Anyway, while he was in the slammer, some other guys had taken over the Teamsters and were skimming off the dough, and they didn’t want Jimmy comin’ back.

  “One of the guys who didn’t want him back was Anthony Provenzano—Tony Pro. He was a connected guy, ya know, and the head of a big local in New Jersey. He had soldiers. He sent some to Detroit. They didn’t kill Jimmy. They snatched him.”

  “And hid him out for twenty years?” asked Chief Trevor. “C’mon!”

  “So don’t believe it! Makes no difference to me.”

  “Go on with the story,” Columbo urged.

  Johnny smiled wanly at the rumpled but solemnly listening Columbo. “The one smart guy in the room. He wants to hear the story. Okay. Tony Pro was waiting in a house in Grosse Pointe. The guys took Jimmy there, and Jimmy and Tony sat down for a talk. Tony Pro explained to Jimmy that there was no way he was going to get loose and stand for election again. No way. To the bottom of the lake first. On the other hand, Jimmy could have an honorable retirement. Well, they talked. And they talked. I heard they talked all night.”

  “Where were you when this was going on?” Brady asked.

  “Man, when this was goin’ on, I was nine years old! I was told about all this. By others, but some of it by Jimmy himself. Anyway, they made a deal. Jimmy was to turn over to Tony Pro all the money he’d skimmed off the union, in return for which Tony Pro would support him in style for the rest of his life. Jimmy gave over the names and numbers, and what I hear Tony Pro collected from Jimmy’s accounts was $12,000,000. A week or so later, he had Jimmy flown to Acapulco, where he would have the whole top floor of a luxury hotel.

  “This upset Jimmy’s calculations. He’d figured Tony Pro would put him in Vegas and he’d live like Howard Hughes—until he figured out a way to get loose. Acapulco was somethin’ else. Jimmy didn’t speak Spanish. Most of the guys that guarded him spoke nothin’ but. So there he was.”

  “How’d he get from Acapulco to Marino di Bardineto?” Sczciegel asked.

  Johnny jerked on his chains, frustrated in an effort to make a scornful gesture. “I’m cornin’ to that,” he said. “Jimmy’d handed over $12 million, but he had a lot of other money that Tony Pro didn’t know about—some of it overseas. Also, he had friends. He had friends that would have whacked out Tony Pro in a minute if they’d even suspected he was holding Jimmy Hoffa prisoner. Y’ see, T
ony Pro was a captain in the Genovese Family. The Gambino Family—later the Gotti Family—was one of the families that wouldn’t have liked it a bit. Sam Giancana wouldn’t have liked it either. And so on. I don’t know how Jimmy got his hands on some of his money, but he did. He bribed Tony Pro’s guards, and they looked the other way while he got the word out.

  “It took a while. Meantime, something else happened. In 1979 Tony Pro went to the slammer in California. He died there in 1988. From 1979 on, Jimmy could do whatever he wanted to.”

  “Like come back,” Brady suggested.

  Johnny shook his head. “By then he didn’t want to. His wife was sick and didn’t have long to live. He told me he loved her, but he figured it would do her more harm than good to have him rise from the dead. Besides, it was very convenient to be ‘dead.’ Nixon had pardoned him for some crimes; but if he hadn’t been ‘dead,’ he’d have been asked to explain where some millions of dollars went. Anyway, he’d acquired some new tastes. All his life he’d lived—what’s the word?”

  “Abstemiously,” said Brady.

  “That’s the word. But when Tony Pro set him up in Acapulco, he gave orders that Jimmy was to have the best of food and wine and liquor—and lots of nice young broads. Hotel living bored Jimmy. He indulged. He found out there were things in this world besides living with one wife and fighting your way up in a union. He decided to stay ‘dead.’ ”

  “He had forged passports,” said Columbo.

  “Right. He had friends and money. He left Mexico and flew to Palermo, with a Brazilian passport. In Sicily he lived in a villa: a guest of the Honored Society. He called in his IOUs—and he had a lot of them; he’d used his political clout to help guys, better’n he was ever able to use it for himself. Guys came to visit him, from all over. He knew an awful lot about a lot of people. He still knew what strings to pull. He did important favors for some powerful guys, and they did important favors for him. He lived very well in Sicily. He enjoyed it.