Funeral Hotdish

by Jana Bommersbach

  When she walked into Chief Tomayer’s office, two things struck her. The room itself looked like a country club smoking lounge, big leather chairs around a massive oak table, a desk in the back that was clean as a whistle. This was a man who ruled by meetings, not paperwork. Photos of the chief with every important person in Arizona covered the walls—all smiling, all puffed up. Joya couldn’t read the award plaques from a distance, but she fully expected one declared that Chief Tomayer walked on water. The chief himself looked regal—all he needed was his hat—and pranced like he was ready to take her to the woodshed. Only his jaw muscles gave him away as he ground his teeth continually.

  Lawrence Tomayer had a Hollywood-handsome face. Standing six-foot-five, maybe two hundred pounds, black hair specked with gray, cool blue eyes, a chin dimple that Kirk Douglas would envy, he was a fine specimen of a man. Joya guessed, correctly, that he’d tasted success early in life and never lost his appetite. She’d seen him triumph at City Council meetings, milking money for his department from a dry cow. Other city departments envied the pull he had at City Hall. He was not only Phoenix’ top cop, he was Phoenix’ top dog.

  Joya was both pleased and anxious to see him now grinding his teeth. Venting. Threatening. “No possible way, young lady. You cannot be inside this investigation. That’s absurd. When it’s all over, then I’ll give you access to my men. But not before then.”

  “That sure doesn’t work for me,” she told him, pretending to be calm and collected when she was praying he couldn’t hear her heart pounding. Even for an experienced, tough reporter with awards and a fierce reputation, when it came to facing off against that uniform, that badge, that gun and all those medals, it was as intimidating as hell is hot.

  She knew she held all the cards, and now she had to be careful. Like the song says, Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.

  “I know Sammy the Bull is in town. I’ve seen him. I know he’s supposed to be hiding out under the witness protection program. I know your department thinks he’s running an Ecstasy drug ring. I know you’ve got other federal agencies working with you—not the FBI, but everybody else. I know all that right now, and the only way I don’t write that story is if we work together.”

  The chief glared like he wanted to find some reason to arrest her.

  She recognized the look. But she had an ace in the hole. Here was a police chief whose department intended to humiliate the FBI by arresting their all-time favorite snitch before they knew what hit them.

  In public, no law enforcement agency will speak badly about another. But in private, other peace officers hate the FBI. They’re renamed “Fucking Bumbling Idiots,” notorious for being selfish and never sharing information back. As one rap goes, “We’re the FBI—we’ll give you the sleeves off our vests.”

  So what the Phoenix PD was planning to do took balls. And balls are connected to the ego.

  Joya played her ace. “If anyone can pull this off under the noses of the FBI, Chief Tomayer, it’s your guys. Now, if the Scottsdale police were trying to do this, I wouldn’t even bother working with them, because those buffoons couldn’t find their way down a lighted runway. But Phoenix PD is a different story. You’re probably the only police force in this state experienced enough to do this. I can’t think of anyone else that’s got the balls—excuse me, sir, I mean the skills.” She paused for effect. “Now, that’s the story I want to tell. We’re not just talking about an arrest—we’re talking about an incredible undercover effort to stop a major crime. The public needs to see that. They need to see the Phoenix Police Department at its best. The bragging rights you guys will earn with this are incredible. The public’s going to eat it up. You’re gonna look great. It’s one helluva story.”

  She watched the slow smile warm his eyes as her flattery took the edge off. She had him.

  “If you think you don’t like this, you should have heard my editor,” she confided, rolling her eyes at the mighty battle she’d already fought back at the paper. “I’ve convinced him that this is a fabulous story that we can’t break until Sammy is behind bars. But my editor only buys that if he knows I’m inside, getting the scoop on this case. If he thinks you’re trying to stiff me, he won’t let me hold off. Now, neither of us wants that. You have my word. You have his word. You just have to keep up your end of the bargain.”

  Sensing agreement, she spoke slowly, laying out her plan. “Let me hang out and watch what happens. I promise I’ll stay out of the way. You won’t even know I’m around. I won’t bother your guys if they don’t want to talk to me. But someday, Chief, the public will eat up the story of how dogged you guys were to catch Sammy. They’re going to lap up every morsel about how smart you guys were. And I personally can’t wait to see those FBI guys with egg all over their faces.”

  She was convincing and she was right. There weren’t many other options. She and the chief shook hands. When they walked out of his office, a half-dozen officers busied themselves, as if they hadn’t been eavesdropping. Rob looked like he’d put down a five hundred-pound weight.

  “You son of a bitch, this might actually work to your advantage,” one of the detectives whispered to Rob as they took the elevator up to the fifth floor.

  ***

  Joya quickly learned the first lesson of detective work: it amounts to hours and hours of tedium. Worthless tedium. She thought they’d catch him red-handed—tipped off by wiretaps that told when a drop was coming and where. Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy.

  The first couple weeks, not much happened. Nobody was making any drug deals, nobody was talking about Sammy. The word “bull” was never uttered.

  She was given a gray metal chair at the back of a small, windowless room and told to stay quiet. There was usually one guy at the large monitoring desk filled with recorders. Sometimes the officer wore a headphone so only he could hear what was being said over the tapped line, but normally, it was turned on for the room to hear. Detectives popped in now and then to see what was going on.

  The captain in charge clearly didn’t like having her there. When she brought in a cup of coffee, he barked, “Don’t spill that.” When she had a coughing jag, he snarked, “If you’re going to make noise, get out of here.” She learned the first day that when they brought in sandwiches for lunch, there wasn’t one for her. So she packed her own lunch and acted like she wasn’t a stranger in a strange land.

  Then came the second lesson of detective work. Sitting for hours, getting nothing of value, inspires war stories about days when something actually happens. And in this case, the guys doing the telling were sometimes the guys who had stumbled onto Sammy with all innocence, just as she had.

  She’d eventually write:

  The first time Phoenix undercover agent Jim Cope was told the drug ring he was trying to bust was headed by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, he thought it was just puffery.

  Having grown up in New Jersey, Cope certainly knew the reputation of the Mafia underboss who’d become famous turning on John Gotti and sending the “Teflon Don” up the river.

  But come on, this is Phoenix, Arizona. This is a drug ring catering to the Rave and Scottsdale club scene. Cope has no reason to believe Sammy can be anywhere near the state. Besides, the guy is in his fifties now—far too old to be clubbing it.

  “I thought, if I went back and told the guys that Sammy the Bull was involved, they’d laugh me out of the station house,” Cope remembers. “They’d think I was nuts.”

  So the police sergeant asks around, quietly, cautiously. More names keep coming up and the questions keep mounting. Is Sammy in Arizona? Why is he here? What’s he doing? Does he have a son named Gerard? Is that the Gerard Gravano who’s making the club scene with a druggie named Mike Papa?

  Joya knew exactly how the cops felt. She’d sold this story to her editor on the basis that Sammy was heading up this dru
g ring. Now she was discovering the police still weren’t sure. Jesus, she thought, maybe this drug stuff is all a wild goose chase and the only story here is simply that Sammy’s in town. But she didn’t let on to anyone back at the paper that she had any doubt about this story. Her gut told her the pompous guy in the coffeehouse wasn’t a solid citizen—he loved his bad-ass reputation. And Rob assured her that all his senses told him Sammy was involved in drug activity.

  Others weren’t so sure.

  “No, we don’t know Sammy’s involved at all.” Joya felt her stomach fall when the hostile captain shared his thoughts. They were sitting in the monitoring room one day when nobody was saying anything important on the taped phones. The captain—tall, skinny, cold—had told her he never wanted his name in any story, and she agreed. She could quote him, but not name him. So far he hadn’t said anything worth quoting, but he clearly had been in on this stakeout from the start. She had to find a way to soften him up, so she started small talk.

  “You’d think for something this important, they’d give you guys a better room to work in,” she joshed. “Look at this place. It could be a cave. No windows. Egg-carton walls. Uncomfortable chairs. Bet they haven’t painted for years. They should give you guys big, plush chairs and decent coffee. Now, that would make monitoring wiretaps more pleasant.”

  The guy actually smiled. Small win. Then she posed a simple question. “Were you surprised to find Sammy had gotten into drugs?”

  That’s when he unloaded, and Joya prayed her big “scoop” wouldn’t come back to bite her.

  He said, “We know guys are bragging in the clubs that they’ve got a ‘New York guy’ as their backer, but really? You know how guys will say almost anything to get laid. So are these guys hinting about Sammy to up their odds of scoring? Or are they really working for Sammy? It’s easy for a twenty-year-old kid to say ‘I’m backed by Sammy’ and poor Sammy doesn’t know a thing. I know these kids are dirty, but is there new dirt on Sammy? I still don’t know.”

  She saw him watching her face and he seemed to enjoy the dismay she couldn’t hide.

  “But we had to look into it,” he added.

  “When’s the first time you thought it might be true?”

  “When we found his whole family was here.”

  “His family’s here? I heard they refused to go into the witness protection program with him.”

  “Well, they did come. His ex-wife, Debra, has a restaurant in Scottsdale. Get this, it’s called Uncle Sal’s Italian Ristorante, and guess what the slogan is? ‘The best kept secret in Scottsdale.’” They both roared.

  Tracking the fifty-ish Debra, with her big hair and New Jersey nails, took one trip to the Corporation Commission that keeps records on Arizona businesses. Hanging around at Uncle Sal’s soon revealed the pretty thirty-ish woman with an endowed chest and low-cut blouses was daughter Karen. And nobody could miss the twenty-four-year-old tintype of his father, Gerard.

  To top it off, Detective Cope thought the Marathon Construction Company in Tempe sounded familiar. Wasn’t that the name of Sammy’s construction company back in New Jersey? Another trip to the Corporation Commission found the firm had opened in 1995 and was owned by “Jimmy Moran.”

  “We staked out Marathon,” Cope told Joya, “and one morning this forty-thousand-dollar Lexus drives up and out pops Sammy, wearing a white tee-shirt and black leather jacket. He looked just like his picture in the book. You’d have to be blind not to see it was him.” She knew the look.

  “We sent someone in to price a remodel job, and sure enough, Sammy introduces himself as Jimmy Moran.”

  Discovering Sammy was indeed in town was enough to launch a full-press investigation.

  “Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier just to go to the FBI and ask them if they’d stashed Sammy here in their witness protection program?” she asked the captain one day, pretending to be clueless.

  “Go to the FBI? Are you nuts? The first thing they’d do is run to Sammy and tell him Phoenix PD was looking at him. Or they’d move him out of town. Talk about queering the whole thing. No, of course we wouldn’t go to the FBI.”

  Joya already knew that, but the quote was worth her guise of innocence. The more she got this guy to talk, the softer he got on her being around.

  She also knew Phoenix PD had gone to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs. All were in on the hunt. “This is our case,” another officer stressed, pounding his middle finger on the table.

  She knew something was up the first time she heard the name “Shorty Whip Wop.”

  “Are they talking about who I think they’re talking about?” she gingerly asked.

  “Who do you think it is?” the captain quizzed.

  “Sammy.”

  He cocked his finger at her like she’d hit the target.

  “Boy, if he knew that was their name for him, he wouldn’t like it,” she declared, and the captain laughed. Another small win.

  Joya left the fifth floor at night and hit the computer in her home office, writing up scenes like how Sergeant Cope stumbled on Sammy—this wasn’t a story she’d compose in the usual way. The way Joya normally worked, she’d do all her interviews and gather all her documents and then sit down and map out the story. She wasn’t a journalist who made up her mind and then went looking for the evidence to support that—she worked the opposite way, wherever the evidence led, that’s where she went.

  But this story was different. This story had a plausible premise that was yet to be proved, but if it were, would be a blockbuster. When this story broke, she wouldn’t have the luxury of days or weeks to write a story, she’d have only hours to get it in print. This wasn’t a comfortable way to work and she prayed she wasn’t skating on thin ice. She hoped that by writing as she went—writing while the words were still fresh in her ears and her notes made total sense—eventually she could string the scenes together.

  One of the ways Joya passed the time on the fifth floor was reading Sammy’s book. She knew he hadn’t really written it, but Peter Maas had taped him for hours and then transcribed his thoughts. The stories were riveting. She created this scene for her story:

  If you ever read Sammy’s book, you came away realizing there really are people whose value systems are out of whack.

  Nobody dares get too haughty here about how ruthless and revolting that subculture of crime is; after all, much of America wallows in it most Sunday nights when HBO runs The Sopranos.

  So it’s not surprising the book sold well. Time’s review probably summed it up best: “Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can’t get enough of.”

  In the book, Sammy talks about killing nineteen people without emotion—even supplying the detail that his first kill was to the radio playing a Beatles song. He talks about his indescribable joy at becoming a “made man.” He talks about feeling justified in betraying Gotti because Gotti had betrayed him.

  But nowhere is he more animated than when he talks about how his family reacted to his decision to turn on his friends.

  To quote from the book: “I called them to come see me [in prison], my wife and daughter, not my son, who was only fourteen. I told them I was going to cooperate.

  “Debbie says, ‘No!’ She’s shocked, she’s scared, she’s everything. My daughter is hysterical. Completely and totally. Her idol, her father, is about to join forces with the enemy. And I’m thinking, Jesus, how did I fuck up my whole life so badly? She’s crying, ‘No, Dad, please!’ and she runs right out of the visiting room.

  “My wife’s eyes are full of tears. She says, ‘I have to tell you, Sammy, I’m not going into any witness protection program. I’m not going to be part of this. I was never part of that part of your life, and I’m not going to be part of this. I’m not going to be part of anything.’

&
nbsp; “I said, ‘Deb, I understand your position and I respect it. You’re a mother, not a gangster. You do what you got to do as a mother and I’ll understand it one hundred percent.’

  “She gives me a hug and she leaves. My heart is breaking. I’ve never been through anything like this, never thought it could happen. But I know in my gut that for the first time in my life, I’m finally doing the right thing. I was going the route I chose. I wasn’t turning back.

  “I was thinking of my son. I was worried about him. I had all kinds of thoughts about him. His father, the underboss, is going to jail. His father is a big hero in the neighborhood. And my son might try to follow in my footsteps and I can’t stop it because I’d be in jail. He’s going to be running around, his father is this big underboss, and people are going to cater to him and he’s going to wind up in the fucking life. He’s a tough kid, but a good kid. He’s not for the life. I had always sheltered him from it. And if he winds up in the life, he’s sure to end up either being whacked or going to jail himself.”

  ***

  It surprised Joya that she felt sick to her stomach when she learned Sammy was right to worry about his only son.

  It was the day she heard on the wiretap, “Do you have the money for Shorty Whip Wop?”

  The captain was tilted back on his chair, twirling a pen between his fingers, when he plunged his feet to the floor and started scribbling. He snapped his fingers at her and pointed to the door. She ran out and yelled to the other detectives, “He wants you in here now.”

  They rushed in, listened, looked at the notes, and started slapping each other on the back.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” someone chanted, under his breath so they wouldn’t miss any phone chatter. These were the words they were waiting to hear. It was the day Joya started breathing easier. Because the known drug dealer named Mike Papa, who hung around with Sammy’s son, was asking Gerard if he had the drug money for Sammy.

  Drug deals are done in code. Nobody’s so dense they’ll say something stupid like, “Do you have the money that’s owed to Sammy the Bull who’s heading this drug ring?”