Blood of My Brother

by James Lepore

  “I spoke to Barbara this week,” said Jay when Frank did not answer. “I went to her house, actually.”

  Frank smoked and looked at his young friend.

  “She won’t let me see the boys,” Jay continued, “and won’t take the cash Danny left them.”

  “The eleven grand?”

  “Right.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I bought annuities in the boys’ names.”

  “How old are they now?”

  “Twelve and fourteen.”

  “The husband’s a little twerp.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Frank said. “When are you leaving?”

  “To Florida?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow at two, on American.”

  “You’ll have to stay with me tonight, at Lorrie’s. She has a pullout couch.”

  “Fine. What about your job?”

  “I’ll call in sick, then I’ll send my resignation in from down there.”

  Jay said nothing. He looked squarely at Frank, who, conscious that he had just made, on the spur of the moment, one of the biggest decisions of his life, and of the chaos in his soul that had brought him to it, returned his young friend’s stare. He’s a smart kid, he thought, keeping his mouth shut.

  “What about Dick Mahoney?” Jay asked, breaking the stare and the silence. “Did you talk to him?”

  “He came up empty.”

  “So it’s not organized crime.”

  “Probably not. He did tell me one thing. He reads the papers, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “The attorney general of Mexico is named Lazaro Santaria. He has a brother named Herman Santaria.”

  Jay packed, and they headed to Lorrie Cohen’s apartment in nearby Clifton. Frank often saw Lorrie on Sundays, using work, or breakfasts with Jay and Danny—which he sometimes actually made—as excuses for getting out of the house. Not that he needed any. His wife, Margaret, had multiple sclerosis, and often couldn’t get out of bed. Her sister, Rose, who lived with them and took care of Margaret full time, was always happy to see him leave. She didn’t even listen to his excuses, he knew. He also knew, as a cop for almost forty years, that to hunt, and be hunted, were distractions almost otherworldly in their intensity. The thing was, was it Jay that needed the distraction, or was it him?

  22.

  8:00 AM, December 14, 2004, Bloomfield

  Early the next morning Jay borrowed Dunn’s car and drove to Glendale Cemetery in Bloomfield to visit Danny’s grave. Near the cemetery was a nursery that was selling Christmas trees, and there Jay stopped and bought a grave blanket—dark evergreen boughs laced with holly and tied together with a red velvet ribbon—which he carried with him as he walked along rows of headstones looking for Danny’s. When he found it he was out of breath. The air was bitter cold, the snow deep, and there were no landmarks on the barren hillside to guide him to the spot where his friend lay. Breathing deeply he stood motionless for a moment before reading the inscription on Dan’s headstone and then kneeling to place the wreath on the grave.

  Jay’s parents’ airplane had taken a long ten minutes to fall thirty thousand feet. Dan, too, had suffered before he died. And Kate Powers? Bewildered by the turn her life had taken, miserably unhappy—a client whose trust he had betrayed by sleeping with her twenty-two-year-old daughter—had she known she was about to be beheaded? What was Jay’s suffering, his loneliness, compared to all of that?

  No doubt Al Garland and Chris Markey had their reasons for lying to him and to the public about their noninvolvement in the Powers and the Del Colliano murder cases, and no doubt they would be angered by what he was about to do, and would try to stop him; and no doubt the two young men who had killed Bill Davis and almost certainly Danny and Kate Powers would now want to find and kill Jay. No doubt: a nice, simple, uncomplicated state of mind.

  Looking down at Dan’s inscription again: Daniel Michael Del Colliano, Born 1962-Died 2004, Son, Father, Friend, Jay said, “I waited too long, Dan. I’m sorry. If I was the one killed like that, you’d have started the next day. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I’m starting now.”

  23.

  2:00 PM, December 14, 2004, Newark

  Chris Markey’s career in the FBI was not typical. Born in South Boston in 1948 to working class parents, he realized in high school that the barricaded Southie culture was not for him. The day after graduation, he enlisted in the Air Force, and by 1969, while his contemporaries were getting high and protesting the war, he was flying covert operations for the CIA in Cambodia and Laos. In the mid-seventies a program was instituted to recruit military intelligence and CIA people with international experience into the FBI. Markey made the switch and embarked on a career of special projects involving Latin American countries. In the eighties, the Agency’s focus in those countries, especially Columbia, Panama, and Mexico, shifted from political corruption and sabotage, to the explosively growing drug trade.

  After twenty years in the trenches, Markey was under no illusions that the war on drugs would be won. The American people did not have the will. He would leave it to the sociologists to figure out why. His job was to enter the fray on orders from above. When faced with a choice between the follow-the-rules mind-set of the FBI and the no-rules philosophy of the CIA—except deniability—he chose the CIA’s way.

  The bad guys did not grapple with moral dilemmas. To them the end always justified the means. Unfortunately for Markey, the core principal of the Irish Catholic ethic in which he had been raised was that the end never justified the means, and when his young daughter died he saw it as divine retribution for a long list of mortal sins.

  His current battle was the biggest of his career, with orders coming from the very top. He had had to apply the maximum pressure—a call from the United States Attorney General to New Jersey’s attorney general—to get the local prosecutor, Al Garland, to subjugate himself and his staff to the authority of Markey’s task force in the Powers murder investigation. And he had had to instigate a major court battle—guaranteed to generate a ton of unwanted publicity—with the Star-Ledger, over the reporter, Linda Marshall’s notes and sources, pitting the first amendment against necessarily unspecified “national security” interests. And these were only procedural skirmishes.

  In the real arena, the one that civilians knew nothing about, where life and death were on the line all the time, Markey knew, despite his newly awakened conscience, that he would continue to use whatever means were necessary to achieve his objective. He knew who killed Dan Del Colliano and Bill Davis, and probably Kate Powers as well. The people they worked for had ordered murder, maiming, and torture as a matter of course over many years. If he ever got the Feria brothers into custody, he would not hesitate to do the same to secure their cooperation.

  Given this state of affairs, he would certainly brook no interference from Jay Cassio. If the wiseass young lawyer’s anger over his friend’s murder led to the demise of his practice and of his own health, that was his business; but if it spurred him to inject himself into Markey’s investigation, as Markey feared he had already done, then Cassio would be in for a great deal of trouble.

  These were Markey’s thoughts as he entered Room 412 in the Peter W. Rodino Federal Building in Newark at two p.m. on the Monday after Bill Davis’s murder. Already in the room, seated around an oak conference table, were Markey’s two top assistants, Ted Stevens and Jack Voynik, and Phil Gatti, a DEA agent who had spent five years undercover, working the streets and back roads of Mexico’s drug scene from Tijuana to Mexico City to Guadalajara. Markey walked to the head of the table and placed the clipboard he was carrying in front of him. He looked around, nodding to the members of his team, before speaking.

  “Forensics?” he asked, addressing his question to Stevens.

  “No prints, except Davis’s,” Stevens replied. “The bullets taken from the body match the one in the hallway. Time of death, around
five p.m. Nothing under the nails, no sign of a struggle, no toxins.”

  “The airports?”

  “Nothing,” Voynik said.

  “I can’t believe they had the balls to come back,” said Gatti.

  “Let’s talk about the witnesses,” said Markey.

  “Out of the people in the lobby—a hundred or so—three definitely ID the Ferias,” said Stevens.

  “I didn’t see their names in any of the papers, did you?” said Markey.

  “No,” Stevens replied. “We don’t think they’re known.”

  “Have they been spoken to?”

  “Yes. They won’t be talking to any reporters.”

  “Who’s the cop that spoke to the reporter Marshall?”

  “A kid named George Rodriguez. He came forward this morning. He’s been suspended.”

  “What about Cassio?”

  “He was identified by four people.”

  “He’s being brought in as we speak,” said Markey. “I hope.”

  “He wasn’t at his house or his office,” Voynick replied. “His secretary says she hasn’t heard from him and doesn’t know where he is.”

  “The Feria boys may have stayed around to do him,” said Gatti. “My guess is he surprised them upstairs, they took a pop at him and missed, and he escaped in the crowd.”

  “So let’s find him,” said Markey, “and bring him in. We’ll talk to him and let him go, and then follow him for a few days. We may get lucky.”

  “How would the Ferias know who Cassio is?” Gatti asked.

  “They wouldn’t,” Markey answered. “But maybe we’ll publish his picture in the paper: ‘Possible Witness to Newark Murder.’ That should give them a leg up. This kid wants to help find his friend’s killers? Here’s his chance.”

  Markey made one last check mark on his clipboard. He did not have to look up to know that his three subordinates were staring at him. What he was proposing was against all the rules, and probably a crime itself. Gatti, the new man, would have to get over his discomfort, which Markey could feel across the room, or quit the team. Recruited six months earlier, he had had sufficient acumen to obtain photographs of two young punks as they were getting into a limousine in front of a high-class apartment building in Mexico City, knowing that one of Markey’s targets kept an apartment there; and he had the street contacts to be able to identify them as Jose and Edgardo Feria, killers for hire who collected heads as trophies.

  Markey looked into Gatti’s eyes for a second and then said, “But if he does draw the Ferias out, remember, I don’t want them killed. Make sure everyone involved knows that. We can sacrifice Cassio, but not the Ferias. This Donna Kelly woman is either dead or in deep hiding. Without her, the Ferias are our only shot at the guys running the show.”

  24.

  5:00 PM, December 15, 2004, Miami

  On the evening of December 14, Angelo Perna and his brother Sam, in separate cars, picked up Jay Cassio and Frank Dunn at Miami International Airport, returning in one car to El Pulpo, Sam’s restaurant in Little Havana, leaving the other for the Jersey guys to use. The next day, Angelo caught the last three races at Hialeah with Miami PD homicide detective Gary Shaw, his friend of many years. Afterward, over drinks at the Paddock, a nearby bar, Angelo asked Shaw for an update on the Del Colliano case, first telling him that his detective buddy, Frank Dunn, and a lawyer, Jay Cassio, both good friends of the victim, were in Florida and were hoping to be filled in on the case.

  “Why can’t the Jersey people call Miami Beach?” Shaw asked.

  “There’s no case in Jersey. The Powers thing was closed out as murder-suicide.”

  “Why are these two guys here?”

  “I don’t know,” Angelo answered. “Fish, swim, play the horses.”

  “Will you be helping them with all that?”

  “Yes. I’ll be like a tour guide.”

  “Fuck.”

  Angelo remained silent, eyeing his friend, whose dark brown face was lined with thirty years of a cop’s worries. Shaw’s pale eyes, set in this face like amber or opal jewels, were half-lidded, as always, vaguely contemptuous, wary of the human frailty he saw all around him.

  “Does Dunn know what he’s doing?” Shaw asked.

  “Yes,” Angelo answered. “He’s a good cop.”

  “What about the lawyer?”

  “Dunn says he’s smart, and a good kid, but of course he doesn’t know shit.”

  Angelo had been smiling during most of this conversation, grunting after each sip of beer, as was his habit, but he rearranged his face after this last statement. The first time he asked Shaw for information about the Del Colliano murder he didn’t mention the close connection between the Jersey private eye and his friend Frank Dunn, who he had gone through the police academy with in New York in 1968. Now he had no choice. Dunn would be off the reservation in Florida, illegally flashing his Jersey ID on someone else’s turf. He and Shaw both figured Del Colliano’s murder to be drug related, connected to one of the Mexican cartels that were running wild along the border and doing increasingly lucrative business in South Florida. These cartels had an army of killers at their disposal. So Shaw needed to know.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” Shaw asked.

  Shaw, Angelo knew, was planning on retiring at the end of the following year. The last thing he needed was any kind of a jam at this point in his life. Dunn or Cassio, or worse, a civilian, getting hurt or killed, with a trail leading back to Shaw, could cause him a lot of heartache.

  “There was another murder in Jersey last week,” Angelo replied. “Dunn and Cassio believe the victim had ID’d two Mexican punks who they think killed Del Colliano and the rich guy and his wife. They say it’s obvious, yet the Powers case is closed. That’s why they’re interested in the status of the case down here.”

  “Where are they now?” Shaw asked.

  The check had arrived. Picking it up, Angelo said, “This is on me. You picked nothing but losers today.” He took a twenty dollar bill out of his wallet and put in on the table.

  “I guess you’re not telling me where they are,” said Shaw.

  “I don’t know,” Angelo replied. “I just have a cell number.”

  “Is someone in law enforcement looking for them, Ange?”

  “They haven’t broken any laws,” Angelo answered.

  “That you know of.”

  “Correct.”

  “How close are you to Dunn?”

  “We’re close. Like you and me.”

  “I’ll call you,” Shaw said. “Tell your friends to be careful. We don’t want any more Jersey guys killed down here. It’s bad for the tourist industry.”

  25.

  5:00 PM, December 16, 2004, Miami

  Larry Warner, the detective who handled the Del Colliano case, had since had open-heart surgery and retired to New Mexico. Gary Shaw did not consider that he knew or trusted anyone else at the Miami Beach PD well enough to simply call and ask for the status of a case, especially now that the two Jersey guys would be in the area doing their own investigating. He would need an excuse, and, luckily, he was handed one on his drive home after his drink with Angelo. Over his police radio came word that one of his squad’s informants, a heroin addict named Princess Di—he was a transvestite as well—had been found dead in the street that afternoon in the Overtown section of Miami. The uniformed cop who was dispatched to the scene, recognizing the Princess and knowing his role, notified Shaw’s squad desk after getting him into an ambulance. One of Shaw’s detectives later went to the morgue to identify the body, and it was his call back to the desk, confirming that the deceased was in fact the Princess, that Shaw overheard.

  That same detective had pulled Princess Di in, on a pretense, two days earlier, to question him about a triple homicide that had occurred in Shaw’s district the week before. While the Princess was at headquarters, Shaw had spent a few minutes alone with him. Jumpy, needing a fix, the addict claimed to know nothing about the tri
ple killing, which was thought to be drug related. Shaw had known the Princess for ten years, had observed him as he pathetically changed wigs each time the real Princess Di changed her hairstyle. He had hoped that if he sat alone with him, he could get something coherent from him, but that did not happen.

  When he arrived at his office the next morning, Shaw put a call into Miami Beach, and asked to speak to the detective handling the Del Colliano homicide. A few minutes passed before he was connected to a Detective Ron Hernandez.

  “Lieutenant Shaw?” said Hernandez, “what can I do for you?”

  “Actually,” said Shaw, “I have something for you. How’s Larry Warner doing, by the way?”

  “He’s well, pretty much recovered.”

  “Does he call you guys?”

  “Once in a while I have to call him.”

  “Tell him I said hello. We went through rookie training together about a hundred years ago.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll tell you why I called,” Shaw said. “I was interrogating a snitch a few days ago, an addict. He mentioned something about ‘the Italian dude from Jersey, with all the cash, who was offed on the Beach.’ It didn’t ring a bell at the time, but then I remembered the case from talking to Larry a couple of times, so I thought I’d pass it on. What’s up with the case?”

  “What’s the snitch’s name?”

  “He goes by the name Princess Di. He’s a transvestite.”

  “Does he have an address?”

  “Not really, but he’s always around.”

  “Hold on. Let me get the jacket.”

  A minute or two passed, and then Hernandez returned to the phone.

  “Lieutenant Shaw?”

  “Yes.”

  “It says here, ‘Case taken over by FBI. Jurisdiction: Title 14. No further activity without authority of Special Agent Chris Markey, Newark Field Office, phone: 201-533-1333. Capt. Jankowski, 10/5/04.’”