He said, "I'll be goddamned!"
"Yeah," Mr. Rosselli agreed. "At that point, right, a good gambler, a goodsober gambler, would know it was time to quit, right?"
"You said it!"
"This guy let it ride," Mr. Rosselli said, awe in his voice.
"Don't tell me he hit again?"
"Okay, I won't tell you. With the kind of luck you've been having, it would be painful for you."
"He hit?" Vito asked incredulously.
"You understand how this works, Vito? Let me tell you how it works: A small place, like Oaks and Pines, it's not the Flamingo in Las Vegas, we have to have table limits."
"Sure," Vito said understandingly.
"On roulette, it's a thousand, unless the pit boss okays it, and then it's twenty-five hundred. Except:"
"Except what?"
"You can let your bet ride if you win," Mr. Rosselli explained. " You're a gambler, you understand odds. The chances of anybody hitting the same number twice in a row are enormous. And hitting it three times in a row? Forget it."
"Right," Vito said.
"The house understands the odds. And it would be bad business to tell the players when they're on a roll, that they can't bet no more, you understand?"
"I understand. Sure."
"By now, the pit boss is watching the action. They do that. That's what they're paid for, to make judgments, and to keep the games honest…you would be surprised, even being a cop, how many crooks try to hustle someplace like Oaks and Pines…"
"I wouldn't be surprised," Vito said solemnly.
"So the pit boss is watching when this guy hits three times in a row. And he knows he's not a crook. He's a rich guy, coal mines or something, from up around Hazleton. But when this guy says 'let it ride'…and he's got thirty-two thousand, thirty-three, something like that, the pit boss knows he can't make that kind of a decision, so he suspends play and calls Mr. Clark. You know Mr. Clark?"
Vito shook his head, no.
"Mr. Clark is the general manager of Oaks and Pines. Very fine guy. So the pit boss calls Mr. Clark, and Mr. Clark sees what's going on, and he makes his call. First of all, he knows that the odds against this guy making it four times in a row are like…like what? Like Paulo here getting elected pope. And this guy is a good customer, who'll be pissed if they tell him he can't make the bet. So he says, ' Okay.' Guess what?
"You won't believe it. Double Zero. It pays sixteen times the thirty-two, thirty-three big ones this guy has riding."
"Jesus!" Vito said, exhaling audibly.
"Can you believe this?" Mr. Cassandro asked rhetorically.
"So that's eighteen times thirty-three, which comes to what?"
"Five hundred big ones," Vito offered, making a rough mental calculation.
"Closer to six," Mr. Rosselli said.
One of these days, Vito thought, I'm going to get on a roll like that.
"So, as I understand it, this is what happened next," Mr. Rosselli went on. "Mr. Clark has just decided he cannot let this guy let six hundred big ones ride. Maybe the fucking wheel is broken. Maybe this is one of those things that happens. But Oaks and Pines can't cover a bet like that, and even if it means pissing this guy off, Mr. Clark is going to give him the money he's won: you understand, Vito, we have to do that. We run an absolutely honest casino operation. Mr. Clark has just decided to tell this guy he's sorry, that's all the casino can handle…"
"I understand."
"When the guy starts pulling all the chips toward him, Mr. Clark figures the problem has solved itself, so he don't say nothing. The biggest problem he figures he has is how to tell this guy that he don' t have six hundred big ones in cash in the house, and he's going to have to wait until tomorrow… you understand how that works, don't you?"
"I'm not sure what you mean," Vito confessed.
"I'm surprised, you being a cop," Mr. Rosselli said. "But let me tell you. If there is a raid, by the local cops, the state cops, or the feds, and the feds are the ones that cause the trouble, they're always after gamblers when they should be out looking for terrorists… If there's a raid, they confiscate the equipment and whatever money they find. So naturally, you don't keep any more money around than you think you're going to need."
"Yeah," Vito said thoughtfully.
"I don't mind telling you how this works, because you're a good guy and we trust you. What we do up there is keep maybe fifty big ones in the cashier's cage. If somebody has a run of luck, and there's a big dent in the fifty, which sometimes happens, then we have more money someplace a couple of miles away. We send somebody for it. You understand?"
"Yeah, sure."
"In the other place, there's a lot of money. Two hundred big ones, at least. But not enough to pay off this character who's won six hundred big ones. You understand?"
"So what do you do?" Vito asked, genuinely curious.
"You know what the interest is on one hundred big ones a day?"
"What?"
"I asked if you ever thought how much the interest on a hundred thousand dollars is by the day?"
"No," Vito said, now sounding a little confused.
"A lot of money," Mr. Rosselli said seriously. "And on a million, it's ten times that a lot of money."
"Right."
"So keeping two hundred thousand around in a safe, without getting no interest, is one thing, it's the cost of doing business. But a million dollars is something else. You can't afford to keep a million dollars sitting around in a safe someplace not earning no interest, just because maybe someday you're going to need it. Right?"
"Right," Vito replied.
"My glass's got a hole in it or something," Mr. Rosselli said. " You suppose I could have another one of these, Vito?"
"Absolutely. Excuse me, I should have seen it was empty."
"Get Paulo one too, if you don't mind. He looks dry."
Vito took the glasses and went into the kitchen and made fresh drinks.
He wondered for a moment what Gian-Carlo Rosselli wanted from him, wondered if despite what he had said at the house about not having to worry about making the markers good, he was here to tell him that had changed and he wanted the money, but that was quickly supplanted by the excitement of thinking about this guy at Oaks and Pines who had hit four times in a row.
Jesus Christ, winning six hundred big ones in four, five minutes! If I had that kind of luck, I could get my own place somewhere, maybe in Bucks County. And have enough left over to invest, so there would be a check every month, and I wouldn't have to raise a finger.
He carried the drinks back into Tony's living room. Gian-Carlo Rosselli had moved to the couch, and now had his feet up on the cocktail table. Vito, after a moment's hesitation, sat down beside him.
"I was telling you about this guy who hit his number four times in a row," Mr. Rosselli said.
"Yeah. I sure could use a little of that kind of luck."
"Yeah, you could," Mr. Rosselli said significantly. "Luck's been running against you, hasn't it? How much are you down? You mind my asking?"
"No. I don't mind. I'm down about twelve big ones."
"What the hell, it happens, but twelve thousand is a lot of money, isn't it? And what are your markers?"
"I think it's four thousand," Vito said, hoping that it looked as if it was unimportant to him, and that he had to think a moment before he could come up with the figure.
"Yeah, right. Four thousand," Mr. Rosselli said. "Pity it's not a hell of a lot more. We could call them, and pay off the million two we owe the guy at the Oaks and Pines."
"Million two?" Vito asked. "I thought you said he won six hundred big ones."
Mr. Rosselli looked as if he were surprised for a moment, and then said, "No. It's a million two."
"You said the general manager cut him off," Vito said.
"Mr. Clark. What I said, I guess I stopped before I was finished, was that Mr. Clarkwas going to cut him off, but when he started collecting his chips, he figured he didn't have to. An
d then the guy changed his mind…"
"He bet six hundred big ones?"
"No. Just the bet. Just the thirty-two thousand whatever it was. He took the nearly six hundred thousand off the table, and then said, 'One more time, just to see what happens' and bet the thirty-two thousand."
"Don't tell me he won?"
"He won. Which meant another nearly six hundred thousand we owed him. Altogether, it comes to a million two."
"And then the manager shut him off?"
"Then the guy said he was going to quit when he was ahead."
"And walked out with a million two?"
"No. He's a good customer. He knows how it works, and he sure didn't want to take a check. You pass a check for that kind of money through a bank, and the IRS is all over you."
"Yeah," Vito said. "So what did Mr. Clark do?"
"He took the croupier out in the woods and shot him in the ear," Mr. Rosselli said, smiling broadly.
Mr. Cassandro laughed appreciatively.
"Kidding, of course," Mr. Rosselli went on. "No, what Mr. Clark did was make a couple of phone calls to get the money."
"I thought you said there was only a couple of hundred big ones in the other place," Vito asked.
'There was," Mr. Rosselli replied, and then asked, "Vito, what do you know about offshore banks?"
"Not a hell of a lot," Vito confessed.
"The thing they got going for them is their banking laws," Mr. Rosselli explained. "They don't have to tell the fucking IRS anything. How about that?"
"I heard something about that," Vito said. "Fuck the IRS."
"You said it. So what happens is that if you have to have, say, a couple of million dollars where you can get your hands on it right away, instead of a safe, where it don't earn no interest, you put it in an offshore bank, where it does. Understand?"
"Yeah," Vito said appreciatively.
"So Mr. Clark makes the telephone calls, and says he needs a million two right away to pay a winner, and it's set up. It's really no big deal, it happens all the time, not a million two, but five, six hundred big ones. Once a month, sometimes once a week. It goes the other way too, of course. Some high roller drops a bundle, and we put moneyin the offshore banks."
"Yeah, sure," Vito replied.
"But this time, we run into a little trouble," Mr. Rosselli said.
"No million two in the bank?" Vito asked with a smile.
"That's not the problem. The problem is moving the money. A million two is twelve thousand hundred-dollar bills. That's alot of green paper. You can't get that much money in an envelope, and drop it in a mailbox."
Vito tried to form a mental image of twelve thousand one-hundreddollar bills. He couldn't remember whether there were fifty or one hundred bills in one of those packages of money with the paper band around them. But either way, it was a hell of a lot of paper stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills.
"So what we have is people who carry the money for us," Mr. Rosselli said. "I guess, you're a cop, you know all about this?"
"No," Vito said honestly. "I figured it had to be something like that, but this is the first time I really heard how it works."
"It's a problem, finding the right people for that job," Mr. Rosselli said. "First of all, you don't hand a million dollars to just anybody. And then, with IRS and Customs watching-they're not stupid, they know how this is done-you can't use the same guy all the time, you understand?"
"I can see how that would work," Vito said.
"Anyway, the way it usually works, we take the money out of the bank, offshore, and give it to one of our guys, and he goes to Puerto Rico, and gets on the plane to Philly, and somebody meets him and takes the bag."
"Yeah," Vito said.
"The problem we have is that we think that IRS is watching the only guy we have available," Mr. Rosselli said.
"Oh," Vito said.
"So the way those IRS bastards work it is they make an anonymous telephone call, anonymous my ass, to either Customs or the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and tell them somebody, they give a description of our guy, is smuggling drugs. So when he's picking up his bag at the carousel, they search his bag. The Narcotics guys don't have to have the same, what do you call it, probable cause, that other cops do. You know what I mean."
"Probable cause," Vito said. "You need it to get a search warrant."
"Well, they don't need that. They can just search your bags, ' looking for drugs.' They don't find no drugs, of course, but they do find all that money."
"And then what happens? You lose the money?"
"No. Nothing like that. It's just a big pain in the ass, is all. They take it, of course. And then you have to go to court and swear you won it gambling in Barbados or someplace. And you have to pay a fine for not declaring you have more than ten thousand in cash on you, and then you have to pay income tax on the money. Gambling income is income, as I guess you know."
"Yeah, right. The bastards."
"But there's no big deal, like if they caught somebody smuggling drugs or something illegal. The worst that can happen is that they keep the money as long as they can, and you have to pay the fine."
Mr. Rosselli took a sip of his drink.
"Vito, you got anything against making a quick ten big ones?" Mr. Rosselli asked.
Vito looked at him, but did not reply.
"The four you owe us on the markers, and six in cash. It'd pay for your plumbing problem."
"I don't understand," Vito said softly, after a moment.
"Now, we don't know for a fact that this is going to happen," Mr. Rosselli said. "But let's just say that the IRS does know our guy who will have the million two in his suitcase. And let's just say they do make their anonymous fucking telephone call to Customs or the Narcotics cops, giving them his description and flight number. Now, we don'tknow that's going to happen, but we're businessmen, and we have to plan for things like that."
"Yeah," Vito said softly.
"So what would happen? They would wait for him at the baggage carousel and search his bags, right?"
"Right. I've seen them do that. Sometimes they call it a random search."
"Right."
"So they search his bags and find the money, and we have to go through the bullshit of paying the fine and the income tax on a million two. And also have to get another million two out of the bank to pay the guy in the Poconos. Right?"
"Yeah, I understand."
"So, I figured we could help each other. We don't want to take the chance of having to go through the bullshit thatmight happen. Including paying the IRS tax on a million two of gambling earnings. And you need money for your fucking plumbing, and to make good the four big ones you owe us."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Just make sure when our guy's airplane lands at Philadelphia, one of his bags don't make it to the carousel. There will be nothing in his other bag but underwear,if and I keep saying,if they search it."
Mr. Rosselli paused.
"Look, Vito, we know you're a cop and an honest cop. We wouldn't ask you to do nothingreally against the law, something that would get you in trouble with the Department. But you got a problem, we got a problem, and I thought maybe we could help each other out. If you think this is something you wouldn't want to do, just say so, and that'll be it. No hard feelings."
Vito Lanza looked first at Mr. Rosselli and then at his hands, and then back at Mr. Rosselli.
"How would I know which bag?" he asked, finally.
****
"Jesus, Carlo," Mr. Cassandro said to Mr. Rosselli as they left the apartment building. "I got to hand it to you. You played him like a fucking violin!"
"That did go pretty well, didn't it?" Mr. Rosselli replied. "And he wants in. That's a lot better than having to show him the photographs and the Xeroxes and all that shit."
"Yeah," Mr. Cassandro agreed.
"It's always better," Mr. Rosselli observed philosophically, "to talk people into doing something. If it's their id
ea, they don't change their minds."
Neither Mr. Rosselli nor Mr. Cassandro noticed that the four-yearold Pontiac was still parked halfway down the block on the other side of the street.
TWENTY-FOUR
Special Agent C.V. Glynes woke at seven a.m., which, considering how far they had lowered the level in the bottle of Seagram's 7-Crown before they went to bed, was surprising.
He went down the corridor to the bathroom and made as much noise as possible voiding his bladder, flushing twice, and dropping the toilet seat back into the horizontal position as loudly as he could manage.
He heard the creak of bed springs and other sounds of activity in the Springs's bedroom, and went back to his room to finish dressing and to wait for the Springs's announcement that breakfast was ready.
Logic told him that he was not likely to find anything at all, much less anything of interest to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when he got Deputy Dan Springs out into the Pine Barrens. And that meant that this whole business would have been a waste of time, and moreover would cause some minor difficulty with H. Howard Samm, Jr., the special agent in charge of the Atlantic City office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
"Sam Junior," as he was known by his not-too-admiring staff, liked to have what he called "his team" present each morning for an eightthirty conference, aka "the pep talk," and Glynes knew he wasn't going to make that.
On the other hand, finding a chunk of three-eighth-inch steel with a link of chain imbedded in it by the force of high explosives was not an everyday occurrence, and Glynes had a hunch he was onto something. Sometimes his hunches worked, and sometimes they didn't-more often than not they didn't-but they had over the years worked often enough so that he knew that he shouldn't ignore them.
Sam Junior's pontifical pronouncements vis-a-vis scientific crime detection to the contrary, Glynes believed what really did the bad guys in was almost always sweat, experience, luck, and following hunches, in just about that order.
In other words, Glynes felt, he just might find something of professional interest to ATF out in the Pine Barrens. He was either right or wrong, but in either case, the sooner he got out in the Pine Barrens the better.
The Assassin boh-5 Page 40
