You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  Mr. Muggles was the agent in charge of the background investigation of Attorney General Randolph Gunderson. His promotion, a jump of three steps in GSA grade, came only one week after he testified before the Senate Justice Committee about that investigation. When those hearings were reopened, it appeared that the FBI had information that Mr. Muggles admitted had been “overlooked.”

  The Committee’s senior minority member, Senator Orin Steele, said, “Overlooked, my petunia. The man is an old-fashioned country liar.”

  A Justice Department spokesman said that Mr. Muggles’ promotion “has not been withdrawn, it has only been suspended, pending.”

  “Anyway,” Des went on, “the allegations started piling up. Gunderson got up and said he wanted it settled once and for all. Innocent or guilty. His day in court. He called for a special prosecutor in the Leon Jaworski mode. You remember Jaworski,” he said to Kimberly.

  She looked a little blank. Very cerebral, but light in history.

  “The special prosecutor that was appointed to investigate Watergate, Richard Nixon, and all that,” Des explained. She nodded with more positive understanding than I think she actually felt. “That was a tragedy,” Des said, talking about Gunderson again, “for us newsies. Senate hearings are wide open. What the hell—they’re not fact finders, they’re publicity forums. But you move the thing into a grand jury room and everything is secret. So there’s no news, and if you’re Gunderson, no news is good news.”

  “But with two witnesses getting rubbed out … ”

  “You really didn’t catch my story on the Six O’Clock Report?” he said, as if it actually surprised him. He looked at his watch. “They have TVs in the back. We’re going to watch ‘The Hot One, on 8 at 10.’ ”

  Four giant screens graced the walls of the video room. Three of them were tuned to MTV, which was broadcasting the new White Rapper video, Talk Show Hostess. He had a John Travolta face and a Rodney Dangerfield body. Women with long legs and smiles tossed batons around red and white satin crotches. I Love Lucy silently filled the fourth screen. There were individual TV sets at various tables. It was a place for people who don’t want to sit home and watch TV.

  Des found an unoccupied table and switched the TV to Channel 8.

  Action News, with the Action News Team, had, like most TV news shows, developed to a point beyond parody. They spent more time telling us what they were going to tell us than they spent telling it to us. And when at last the story came, it was less than what they’d promoted it as. For example, they promised “Action Tape” of the President’s bowels.

  The Gunderson story was promoted four times. “Coming up,” the anchorette said breathlessly, “Desmond Kennel with Action Tape. Surprise finale,” she said four times, “in the Gunderson trial.” Although it was not a trial.

  When at last the tape came, it displayed Randolph Gunderson standing on the steps of the federal courthouse, raising his fingers in a “V” sign. Just like Winston Churchill. Or Richard Nixon. “The court has ruled. I am Innocent. This is Vindication.” Reporters tried to ask questions. “I have been the victim of politically motivated innuendo and a campaign of smears. The court has seen justice done. Let the scandalmongering stop. I’m going back to Washington to do the job the President asked me to do.”

  Then they switched to Stanley Fenderman, special prosecutor. “The court does not rule that someone is innocent,” Fenderman said, rather limply. “That is not legal phraseology.”

  “How would you describe the court’s decision?” Des asked him on camera.

  “The court did not make a decision,” Fenderman said. “The grand jury made a finding.”

  “Which is that you found Gunderson innocent?”

  “I would say—which is what our report says—that there is insufficient corroborated evidence to indict.”

  “ ‘Insufficient corroborated evidence to indict,’ ” Des said. The live Des, not the previously recorded Des. “What the hell kind of unstatement statement is that? I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not good copy. What does it mean?”

  “Why don’t you wait for the report to come out?” I asked him.

  “Ah hah,” he cried. He flung open his briefcase. “Take a look,” he said, waving a printed report as thick as a book. He dropped it on the table and it landed with a thunk I could hear even over the White Rapper.

  4/5/83

  Report of the Special Prosecutor and the

  Findings of the Grand Jury

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs RANDOLPH L. GUNDERSON

  HON. DUDLEY R. DAMSKY DISTRICT COURT

  SDNY

  U.S. COURT HOUSE

  SPECIAL PROSECUTOR STANLEY FENDERMAN

  Appointed under 1978 Ethics in Government Act

  SANFORD L. TOMPKINS III

  STEPHEN EKISIAN

  ALICIA BRONSTEIN

  WILLIAM F. CROOKE

  NATHANIEL SIMONOV

  PETER DIMMER-LODES

  SYDNEY COBERLAND

  The Special Prosecutor was appointed on October 5, 1982, by a Federal Appeals Court Panel under the procedures established by the 1978 Ethics in Government Act to conduct a Grand Jury probe of possible violations of federal law by Randolph L. Gunderson.

  This investigation was intended to examine the specific allegations arising from or included in the testimonies of ________________________________

  Gerald Maldonado, Peter Ciccolini; _________________________________ transcripts of authorized federal wiretaps of ________________________pursuant to the investigation of the _____________Crime Group, of _________________________ , ________________________________ pursuant to investigations labeled FBI Case #2397-78; but not limited thereto and inclusive of any such other information and matters that the Special Prosecutor and the Grand Jury might deem relevant under the charter of this investigation. …

  “One hundred and thirty-six pages, and eighty-four pages are deleted!” Des said. “Protecting protected witnesses and ongoing FBI investigations. Now what kind of report is that—eighty-four pages of investigations and the kind of witnesses that have to be kept secret, and the guy is proclaimed innocent.”

  “You read it?”

  “Just flipped through in the cab, picking up Kimberly, and then on the way here. It’s not good copy. That”—his finger jabbed at a black block—“under there, that’s the good copy.”

  The recently deceased Greg Diamond had found us, bringing another round of drinks with him.

  “You should be able to get a copy of the original,” I said.

  “You think so?” he said. Excited.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

  “Fabulous,” he said. “Absolutely fabulous. I knew I came to the right man. How would you do it?” he asked.

  And I figured that he had come to the point. At last. “Well,” I said, “the first thing I would do is find a client to pay me to do it.”

  “Could you get it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, sipping at my beer, feeling fuzzy but certain.

  “OK then,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the key. We’re looking at opportunity here, you and I. We need something, something big, something hot, to kick my show open. To get these syndication guys to wake up and realize Des Kennel is the man to back. … This is it!”

  “I’d love to help you, what with you buying all these drinks … ” And by then we were on the third round. Or the fourth.

  “I thought we were in this together. I thought you were on board,” Des said. “The Insiders. That’s us.”

  “Des, you know my rate.”

  “What the fuck,” Des said, and added, “Pardon my French,” for Kimberly.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ve heard the f word before. And cock. And cunt. And all of them. You boys just go on and have your conversation.” People have different ways of showing their inebriation.

  “I don’t work,” I told him, “on the come.”

  “And that word too
,” Kimberly said. She was reaching under the table, groping for Des.

  “I can’t pay you,” he said. “You know that. Even if I wanted to. Journalistic ethics.”

  “Des is very ethical,” Kimberly said.

  “You know what I think,” Des said. “I think you just realized that you were shooting your mouth off. That you’d be in over your head. I’d lay money you couldn’t get it.”

  It was a very juvenile ploy. “How much?” I said.

  “Fifty bucks,” he said. I shook my head. He offered a hundred.

  “Look,” I said, thinking very rationally, “I gotta figure it would take me, I don’ know, two, three weeks, maybe, to nail it. So what we’re talking about, we’re talking about three, four grand to make it worth my while. So if you want to bet four grand that I can’t get it, then we’re talking.”

  “My four grand against your four grand. Can you afford it?”

  A sober, cold sober, thought cut through the fuzz. The thought was: No. But I was very clever. Very clever indeed. “Your money against my time,” I said. “All I got to sell is my time and my smarts. If I go looking for all this deleted stuff and I don’t find it, then I’m already out four grand. Plus it costs me a grand in expenses.”

  “That’s a crummy bet,” he said. “If you lose, I don’t win anything.”

  “Yeah, but if I lose, I lose,” I said. “And if I win, you win too.”

  “Life is tough, then there’s a commercial break,” Kimberly said.

  “The two of you,” I asked her, “how long have you been together?”

  “A week,” she said. “Well, we haven’t been together for all week. We met a week ago.”

  “It’s gotta be two weeks,” Des said. “News gets old real quick. You’d have to do it in two weeks.”

  “You got a bet,” I said.

  3.

  A Polish Hypothesis

  IN THE MORNING I regretted the bet. That’s what people get high for. To do things they’ll regret in the morning. But a bet’s a bet.

  The report was full of government secrets. As with most government secrets, a lot of people knew them. Eight attorneys. Their support staff—secretaries, stenos, typists, researchers, paralegals, proofreaders. The FBI had to read it to censor it, and the director of the FBI reports directly to the attorney general, who was Randolph Gunderson.

  As did a judge, his clerk, a bailiff, a court reporter, and sixteen grand jurors.

  With that many people, there was no question that someone could be gotten to.

  When the group reaches the size of five, a traitor is a statistical inevitability. Jesus was lucky that he only had one out of twelve. As a son of God, he knew the odds, and that is why he was so phlegmatic about the event.

  STANISLAW ULBRECHT, Centripetal Forces in Group Dynamics (University of Grenoble Press, 1961)

  I had studied with Ulbrecht for one undergraduate semester. According to his thesis, the forces of cohesion can be quantified, and the forces of dissolution are open to statistical analysis. Which sounds like babbling academia. But it’s just different language for the way cops and prosecutors operate, which is more like: “If there’s two scumbags on a job, one’ll rat out the other to save his own ass. If some junkie whore doesn’t rat him out first for a nickel bag.”

  Ulbrecht’s ideas were fascinating. And disturbing. It was hard to tell which side of fascism he was talking from. But his statistical methods were flawless. Which he pointed out. The undergrads naturally nicknamed him “Flawless Slawless.” I would have taken more courses with him, but when Stony Brook was shut down by the students in ’69 one of the issues was the discovery that the CIA was paying all or part of Ulbrecht’s salary and he resigned.

  It was not a question of if someone would spill, but how to target my limited resources in a limited amount of time. The best bets, simply because I had their names and because they were the most likely to have the actual physical document, were Fenderman and his seven associates.

  The morning paper had a profile of Fenderman as a sidebar to the Gunderson story. Colby College. University of Chicago Law School. Federal Appeals Court clerkship. Senior partner with Wharton, Scully, Fundament & Elhaus. His clients all had initials: IBM, LTV, T&A, GTE, ITT, RVS, B&D. His assignment as special prosecutor had been temporary. A citizen soldier serving his country in her hour of need. In fact, he had donated his billable hours, $200,000, bringing the cost of the investigation down to only $1,200,000. His staff was, likewise, a temporary posse, enlisted for the duration of the pursuit. Personally selected. Four of them, Tompkins III, Crooke, Simonov, and Dimmer-Lodes, came from Fenderman’s firm. Ekisian and Coberland had been borrowed from another Manhattan firm, Wilfree, Madison, Madison, Montague & Reach. Ms. Bronstein had been on loan from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

  Once again, I had to wait until after three, when Thayer got out of school, to run a credit check.

  Remarkable things, credit reports. The staccato abbreviations and coded designations are dot matrix abstracts of character and life-style. They catch the truly significant points in the human lifelines. Not birthdays or anniversaries, but the points where income soars or floors, where spending is under control or running like blood from an open vein.

  All of them had Visa/Mastercard/Amex Gold/Diners Club/Brooks Brothers/Bloomingdale’s/Exxon/Sears cards, margin accounts, mortgages, Keoghs and/or IRAs. They were lawyers.

  When Ulbrecht developed his theories, he was a prisoner in a concentration camp. In fact, he wrote the first draft of his first book there, a way of taking the foulest and most dehumanizing experiences and, by dealing with them on the plane of the intellect, transforming them into an affirmation of human capacity. His later studies, and those of the academics who followed up on his theories, were conducted in police states or in police situations, where force in varying degrees could be employed. I didn’t have the power of the state behind me. But the theory remained the same. Find the soft points and then apply leverage.

  Of the seven, three seemed to have potential.

  COBERLAND, SYDNEY: 121 E. 74 St. NYC // Emp. Wilfree, Madison, Madison, Montague & Reach // salary $98K // outside income $42K // Mortgages, Old Westbury and New Hampshire // Auto, leased, Mercedes // C/S (child support) $54K // A (alimony) $30K // SLC (auto loan, co-maker) $10K and $7K. // 4 Judg Vacat // Suit Dismd // 2 Suits // Age: 48

  Four judgments vacated, one suit dismissed, and two suits in court. Syd was a very litigious guy. A fighter. Yet after the alimony, child support, and mortgages on two homes he didn’t seem to live in, his $140,000 was down to thirty or forty thousand a year. Before taxes.

  No question, his wife had something on him.

  DIMMER-LODES, PETER: 234 Third Ave. NYC // Emp. Wharton, Scully, Fundament & Elhaus // salary $58K // outside income $60K (’83) // outside income $12K (’82) // Mortgage, 234 Third Ave. // Auto, leased, Saab. // Age: 28

  In 1983, Peter’s outside income had jumped $48,000. Maybe he’d gone long in yen. Maybe his rich spinster aunt had died. Or maybe it was something interesting.

  BRONSTEIN, ALICIA W.: 182 Hicks St. Brooklyn, N.Y. // Emp. District Attorney, Kings Co. // salary $28.7K // outside income $0 // Auto loan $3.6K, Mitsubishi. Age: 30

  Alicia stood out because she made less than half what anyone else made, because she was a law enforcement professional, and because she was a woman. I like women.

  I went after her first.

  The old-time machine is dead in Manhattan. Now Manhattan belongs, quite nakedly, to the real estate interests.

  But it’s different in the boroughs. In Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, the machine lives. With patronage, no-show jobs, the rake-offs, kickbacks, schemes, scams, and a boss. Andrew Skelly in the Bronx. Gerry Gutman in Queens. Alfonse Alioto in Brooklyn.

  Beneath the bosses, there are district leaders. That is an elective office. Obscure, unsalaried, with few defined duties, they are the capos, the cardinals, of urban politics. Gene Petrucchio has been one, in that p
art of Brooklyn called Sunset Park, for twenty-five years or more. His financial condition is probably “substantial,” and substantially unknown. He lives in a modest one-family house on a residential street, surrounded by other neat one-family houses. It is remarkable only in that the entire block is very clean, with sidewalks in good repair, and there is not a single pothole in the street.

  We met at Dom & Angie’s Luncheonette on Prospect Avenue. It was three in the afternoon. Two men were at the counter; Gene was alone at a table in back.

  Gene knows people. It’s his profession. He knows my partner, from when Joey was a cop. And he knew my father. All of which made me a paisan. Someone who could be spoken with. Casually, off the record, up to the point of indictability.

  “You’re looking more and more like your father every day,” Gene said.

  “You’re looking good, Gene. You’re gonna run Brooklyn forever.”

  “Hey, Tony, I don’t run no Brooklyn.”

  “Just your part of it.”

  “I wish it were like that. I wish it were like that. I work real hard. You gotta stay on top of things.”

  “I know that, Gene. You do. You work real hard.”

  “You want some coffee? Sandwich or something? They got a meat loaf special today. Side a spaghetti. Dom makes it, so it’s pretty good. So long as Angie don’t make it, it’s pretty good.”

  “Just some coffee.”

  “Nothing else? A danish? A roll?”

  “Just the coffee.”

  “Hey, Angie,” he called out. “Coupla coffees.”

  “How’s Donna?”

  “The wife’s real good. Had a little trouble with her back, you know. Regular doctor couldn’t seem to do nothing. Had her in a corset. Ever seen one of them things—a medical corset, I mean? Like something outa the Middle Ages for torturing. Maybe something the priests put you in, you didn’t say enough Hail Marys, did too many venereal sins. So we tried a chiropractor. The health insurance covers that now, and I think he fixed her.”

  “And the kids?”

  He sighed. “Anita, she’s getting a divorce. I don’t know, we brought her up right. Two kids and she’s getting a divorce. I tried to talk to her. The wife tried to talk to her. Talkin’ to your own children, sometimes that’s the toughest thing in the world. Sonny, he’s up at RPI. Doing real good. Gonna be an engineer. Which leaves me batting .500, I guess. Which isn’t bad in life.”