Zachary Lazar

by Evening's Empire

  Ed sat down in a chair fronted by what could only be described as an old-fashioned wooden school desk. They told him to face the jurors when he answered the questions, not to face Cantor, who sat to Ed’s left with the court reporter, both of them crammed together behind two other similar desks. You had this strange arrangement then of hearing questions from over your left shoulder, but answering them to an audience, who looked at you like an exhibit on a stage. They were only a couple feet away, so close there wasn’t even a microphone.

  Three hours in the tiny room, with a couple of recesses. The questions were mostly about Great Southwest—the circumstances of its formation, Warren’s hidden interest in it, the control he had over James Cornwall. Most of the other questions were about the payments to Talley. No questions about Harry Rosenzweig or Barry Goldwater. Nothing significant about CMS and Chino Grande and Jack Ross, though Ed had described the deal in detail to McCracken and even called it a “fraud.” They told him they would like to talk to him again next Tuesday, January 14. Everything he said appeared in summary the next morning in the newspaper under Al Sitter’s byline.

  I don’t think they killed him for what he said, or even for what he might have said later, in further testimony. The initial police theory was that they killed him to deter others from testifying. I think perhaps they killed him simply to show they could do it. They were all planning Phoenix—Warren, the DiFrancos, and the Toccos—all of them with their own motives. In the murder of a witness, their interests happened to coincide. They were going to shake the bush and get the lion to jump out. They were pretty sure the lion didn’t exist anyway, and this was a chance to prove it.

  Fred Pedote waited in the bushes with the gun in his lap, rain dampening his nylon jacket and the front of his slacks. He’d been drinking and he couldn’t sleep and then he drank some more and drove across town to Lazar’s house on West San Miguel. It was not just raining but cold, more like Chicago than Phoenix—he didn’t think it could be this cold. He was there. It had to do with the use of careful preparation to stop thinking, something like that, or maybe the self-discipline of not feeling drunk when he knew he was drunk.

  The only way to leave the house, he thought, was out the front door, then through this courtyard with its cactuses and bougainvillea. The door to the garage was on the courtyard’s west side. Pedote wiped his face and closed his eyes against the rain. He would be sitting there as he sat now, on the ground with his legs out in front of him, his back against the wall, looking straight at that door, night turning into day, the cul-de-sac gradually coming alive around him. The straight-laced Jewish accountant, sunlight on his business suit—shoot him right there in the courtyard as he left for work. Stand up out of the bushes, then kneel beside him on the ground and put three more in his chest. That was the photograph: the victim sprawled on his patio, his briefcase tipped over on its side. In the moment it happened, everything would be different in all kinds of small ways, Pedote’s heart beating too fast, his mind a jangle of color. He would have to walk very calmly around the side of the house to his car in the back alley. Then he’d have to drive out of there in no hurry, past the garbage cans onto San Miguel.

  His hands were numb, but he stayed there for a long time. Maybe it was four o’clock in the morning when he got up, staggering a little in the branches and tearing his foot out of the vines. He walked across the puddles on the tile and unlatched the iron gate. It squeaked a little, as it had when he came in, and then it squeaked again as he latched it behind him. That was when the front door opened and a voice, aiming for deepness, asked who was there.

  The iron gate at West San Miguel

  He was never afraid. He would joke to Susie sometimes that he would not want to meet Ned Junior in a dark alley, but they never took the jokes seriously. He told the man who sold him life insurance that year that he would not pay the extra few cents a month for a double indemnity clause because it would be a waste of money. “Nothing ever happens to accountants,” he said, perhaps a little defiantly. He bought the policy on January 31. He had given his first grand jury testimony on January 9. Nothing had happened to him in twenty-two days. It was the salesman who made the one and only monthly payment—Ed had either forgotten to mail it in or decided he didn’t want the policy after all. It didn’t cost the salesman much to protect the commission on his new sale.

  Ten thousand dollars and no more conversation that Freddy Pedote was selling drugs, that he knew too many people, that he had a mouth and was a risk. Ten thousand dollars after the split with Verive and then Tocco’s cut. After he killed Lazar, Freddy was going to keep right on with the coke business anyway, they could all fuck themselves.

  From a summary of an interview of John Harvey Adamson conducted by Lonzo McCracken, August 8, 1979:

  A short time later Adamson met Pedote in Pedote’s apartment. Adamson asked Pedote where he’d been and Pedote said he’d been sick and in St. Joseph’s Hospital. Pedote then explained that he had the contract on Lazar and got pneumonia laying in the bushes watching Lazar to determine the best place to kill him. As a result Pedote said that he had to fly someone in to kill Lazar.

  20

  He wanted everybody killed. That was just all he thought about. They were plotting it just like mafia criminal people, Lee and Kaiser, and that’s the way they plot. Someone wanted that contract and they asked someone else and then they brought it to Lee. There was something about this guy, he was doing something to somebody that was affiliated with Dominick DiFranco. He was a real estater. A couple of times Doug and Lee went places and the guy never showed up, he wasn’t around there, so Lee—they’d go back by Kaiser’s house and Lee would go in and the old lady would go back in the kitchen and then Lee would ask him, what the fuck is this, and then the Old Man would tell him, well I’ll find out or I’ll go see this guy or see that guy—and they’d exchange names but Doug didn’t pay no attention to the names.

  Doug was led to believe that the guy in the garage was a killer. That he killed people. That he killed people for Joe Bonanno. And do you know what, it wasn’t that way. In the staircase, that guy in the staircase was a fucking coward, okay, but you know what? You can’t bring the guy back.

  —from the Hardin transcript

  Ed washed his hands and looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. A last stop before he left for work, he dried off with a towel and smoothed out his eyebrows. He had an eleven o’clock appointment and a one o’clock appointment, lunch in between with his colleague, Ira Feldman. In the kitchen, in his briefcase, were two tax returns he’d brought home on the pretext of putting in a few hours last night—it was tax season—but he hadn’t bothered with them. Instead, he’d played tennis in the evening and relaxed after dinner with Susie and the kids. On the sink in front of him now was a scallop-shaped dish holding five miniature rounds of soap and on the wall beside it hung three decorative towels with a cursive L embroidered on them in silk. Things you didn’t use but only looked at, sometimes still with the strange recognition that your own house was a kind of mystery, lavender-scented, silent. He liked to make a last bathroom stop before leaving for work, the minute or two alone a time to clear his head and start thinking about the day. He looked once more in the mirror and switched off the light. He wore a gray suit, a blue dress shirt with his initials on the cuffs, a red tie with a small diamond pattern. He wore black high-top mod-style boots, for he was not your average CPA.

  He went back out into the kitchen and kissed Susie and the kids good-bye, then he opened the front door and stepped into the courtyard.

  Carol Nichols was in her front yard watering a lemon tree when she saw Ed back his car out of the garage, a white-and-maroon Pontiac Grand Ville. She turned to say hello, as she often did, when Ed got out of the idling car to shut the garage door behind him.

  “I forgot something,” he said. “My breakfast bars.” He smiled at Carol in that way that implied so many things: the banality of breakfast bars, his craving for them, the day-to-day
thrum of neighborhood life that he relished partly for its innocuous role-playing. He wore a gray suit, a crisp blue shirt, a red tie. He was in a little bit of a hurry, because it was tax season and he had a lot on his mind.

  Susie put the breakfast bars in his briefcase on top of the papers, and he took an extra one for the car. She kissed him again and he told her, “You’ve already done that once.” She gave him a playful pinch and told him that she would kiss him anytime she wanted to. Then he went back out to the courtyard. He stepped through the door he had left open and walked through the garage to the driveway, where his car was running, the extra bar in his hand, eating it out of the foil wrapper as he said hello again to Carol Nichols. Then he closed the garage door and got in his car and left, this time for good.

  Q: Did Lee kick this guy?

  A: Yeah.

  Q: Where’d he kick him?

  A: In the ass.

  Q: Was this after he’s dead?

  A: After he’s down, yeah.

  Q: How many times?

  A: Actually I thought I walked away and started looking around and it seemed like Lee was back there piddling with him. But see anytime Lee was around and somebody got shot, Lee always done something to him. Kicked him, drug him, went through his pockets. He’d take the gold out of the teeth, if he had time.

  Ed avoided Camelback Road because of the morning traffic and took Bethany Home Road instead. On the radio, the news was oil prices, the recession, a stimulus package in the House, a different one in the Senate. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas had entered the presidential race for the Democrats—even in the wake of Watergate, the defeat in Vietnam, the oil crisis, and the recession, the Democrats had no one inspiring enough to win so far.

  He passed the Chris-Town Mall—the Piccadilly Cafeteria with its tiki-house roofs, Guggy’s Coffee Shop, Montgomery Ward and the Broadway and JCPenney, where Susie shopped for the kids. There was Orange Julius and Pizza D’Amore and the Court of Birds, with its vast cages of parrots and parakeets suspended from the ceiling.

  Lee DiFranco was thirty-nine years old, short and stout, his hair going white, especially at the sideburns, thinning to a dark frizz on top. He had blue eyes and a straight nose, like the nose on a war mask, a mask of glee. He waited on the second underground level of the parking garage, his partner, Doug Hardin, on the level above it. They waited without anxiety—neither of them drank alcohol or smoked, neither of them was the nervous type. Lee had strangled someone to death three days before in the back of his brother Dominick’s Cadillac, a man who was probably named Jack West, whom Lee and Doug called “the Canadian.” I have a photograph of Lee DiFranco. I know less about Doug Hardin’s appearance. He’s in the witness protection program now, if he’s still alive. In 1981, Lee DiFranco was beaten to death with a baseball bat and left in the trunk of his Mercedes. Doug Hardin was of medium height and weight with wiry brown hair. I have the 214 page transcript of his scattered recollections of this period, which I had to read three times before it made any sense at all.

  Ed turned down North Central Avenue. On the passenger seat was the morning paper, folded over to another headline about the Warren scandal, centered this time on the county prosecutor’s investigator, George Brooks. It had been more than a month since Ed had given his grand jury testimony. There had been a series of postponements, but tomorrow he was scheduled to go back for his next session. Last night, he’d received a strange phone call from a man who introduced himself as “Weinstein,” a man who claimed to be looking for an accountant for a friend. The call had gotten more and more perplexing and hostile as it went on. Would Ed be in his office tomorrow morning and at what time? Where did he work again? He would be there tomorrow morning? Finally Ed had hung up.

  The squeaking gate. The strange phone call. Perhaps there was a reason he’d played tennis yesterday evening instead of looking over the tax returns. Perhaps the reason was that he was trying not to let it get to him.

  He crossed Camelback Road and turned left into the parking garage at 3003 North Central Avenue, the First Federal Savings Building. There was a place he liked to park on the second underground level, near Catalina Street, where there were never many cars.

  Lee walked over from the stairwell and was standing above him as he opened the door of the Pontiac. He told him to put his briefcase down. He said not to say a fucking word. Then he put the gun to the base of his skull and they walked back toward the stairwell and Lee told him to open the door.

  The garage is still there. You can see that my hand was shaking as I took some of the photographs. I parked aboveground on a weekday morning in the middle of rush hour, not much later in the day than he would have arrived. There was sunlight on the level I parked on. I waited outside for an elevator to take me down two floors, holding my camera, feeling conspicuous and morbid while a group of secretaries smiled at me. I was concerned that the garage would not be the same. I was repelled by my desire for it to be the same. At the second underground level, I got out of the elevator alone and started taking the pictures. By now I knew that the garage had not changed in thirty years. At the back corner, off Catalina Street, there were fewer cars. I pushed open the stairwell door and went inside.

  It was so small there would have been barely enough room for two people, let alone three. Gray concrete, a filthy fluorescent light bar, like the one that had been unscrewed thirty years ago by Lee DiFranco or Doug Hardin. The stairwell was not wide enough for two people to stand side by side. It was very cold the day I was there, and the narrow space reeked of mildew and dust, as if the door had not been opened in a very long time. I knelt down on the first step—I knew I would do this and now I was doing it almost as a formality. The step was so solid that I felt an immediate pain in my knees and shins. I was shaking. My father would have been shaking, forty years old, a young man, not much older than I was that day. The shape of the stairwell suggested a coffin. It was a tiny cement box in which to be executed. Forty minutes later, the dust was still in my mouth and my nose.

  Warren turned white when he heard that Ed was missing. They thought he was having a heart attack. He canceled a business meeting and walked out of the room and went home for the day, and perhaps he wasn’t faking. Three people witnessed it and they all tell the story the same way.

  He had set up a kind of alibi for himself more than a month before, on the same day my father testified before the grand jury. That evening, Warren had asked Bill Nathan, one of the investors who had bought Consolidated Mortgage, to swear out a complaint against Ed Lazar with the attorney general’s office, charging Ed Lazar with fraud. He thought this might neutralize the testimony Ed Lazar had just given that morning. He asked Nathan to tell this to Lonzo McCracken. He also asked Nathan to tell McCracken that he was looking for a deal. He was ill, he had a heart problem, he was afraid he would be convicted and go to jail, he would be completely broke from the legal bills. Perhaps he believed in this version of himself in the moment he presented it to Bill Nathan. Within a year he would be making comments about how Ed Lazar was probably killed by a jealous husband, or because he was selling drugs.

  Around nine o’clock that morning, a lawyer named Rad Vukichevich parked in the second underground level of the First Federal Savings Building, where he noticed a Pontiac Grand Ville with its front door open, a briefcase and a set of keys lying on the ground beside it. He informed the parking lot assistant manager, Ruben Lopez, who eventually brought the briefcase and keys to the office of the building manager. Lopez noted the parking permit number on the Pontiac, which could be used to trace its owner. About three hours later, around 1:15, after Ed had missed his eleven and one o’clock and lunch appointments, his office called Susie to ask if she knew where he was. She thought at first that he had just wandered off somewhere, which he did sometimes, often to her annoyance. Around two o’clock, she called the county attorney’s office to see if they might have called him in for any further questioning. Around 2:15, three Phoenix police officers were dispatched to the garag
e and a missing person file was opened. It was about 3:45 when the briefcase and keys finally made it to the office of Harold Toback, Ed’s boss, who called Susie again. About seven hours had passed since Lee DiFranco and Doug Hardin had driven off in their station wagon. Detective Wallace Sem discovered the body in the stairwell at 4:47. The Homicide Detail arrived almost two hours later, at 6:40.

  It’s somewhere around this time that the current span of my memory really begins, in fits and starts, as if some clock in my mind had been reset to zero on that day.

  21

  On my last night in Phoenix, I met Chuck Kelly, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, at a restaurant in Scottsdale. A few weeks before, Kelly had done me a great favor by sending me more than a hundred pages of photocopied news clippings in which my father’s name appeared. Looking through that sheaf of papers, I’d had the sense of reading a baroquely plotted crime novel composed of found documents, a cacophony of names and faces, facts and suppositions, and in the silent gaps, as if in some occult code, the story of what had happened.

  Joining us at the bar before we ate was Jon Sellers, a retired detective from the Phoenix Police Department. He had worked my father’s case for several months in 1975 and 1976. Kelly and Sellers had known each other for over thirty years, since at least June of 1976, when one of Kelly’s fellow reporters, Don Bolles, was murdered by a car bomb in the parking lot of the Clarendon Hotel in downtown Phoenix. The murderer turned out to be John Adamson—now always referred to as John Harvey Adamson. The most likely scenario is that he’d been hired to do this by a man named Max Dunlap at the behest of a wealthy Phoenix businessman named Kemper Marley. The story is byzantine and takes in dozens of names and in some ways it dovetails with the story of my father and Warren. Bolles had been lured to the Clarendon Hotel that afternoon with a tip from Adamson about land fraud, allegedly involving the usual suspects, Barry Goldwater, Congressman Sam Steiger, and Harry Rosenzweig.