Nobody Rides For Free

by Neil S. Plakcy

  It was easy to stay a few car-lengths behind them and my brain kept buzzing, trying to make connections between Eric and Dimetrie, but I didn’t know either of them well enough to figure anything out. Were they boyfriends? Dance class friends? Did Eric know about Dimetrie’s porn work? Was Eric acting in porn, too? He was too old and too masculine for the kind of stuff I’d seen, but it was possible that the powers behind Gay Guys LLC had different channels for different tastes. Jonas had said that Eric did odd jobs and had a weird schedule. Was that because he had to be online sometimes, jerking off for the camera?

  It seemed like a huge coincidence that a guy my roommate had a crush on was friendly with someone involved in my case, but that was the nature of the small world of Wilton Manors. It was why I had told Colin Hendricks I couldn’t go undercover at gay bars in town—there was too high of a chance that someone, even at a bar I’d never visited, would recognize me from Lazy Dick’s and know I was a Federal Agent.

  Wilton Manors was an extremely gay-friendly place, with openly gay elected officials, cops, and business owners, so it made sense that all kinds of homosexuals would gravitate there—from young guys like Jonas and me, to the older men I saw clustered around the bar at Lazy Dick’s.

  I was so caught up in those ideas, that I almost didn’t notice Eric turning off Wilton Drive into a neighborhood of small single-family homes. I managed to turn in time to follow him, but he’d already slowed down, then stopped in front of a nondescript bungalow in need of a good paint job.

  Rather than call attention to myself by stopping behind him, I passed as Dimetrie was getting out of the Mustang. I pulled into a driveway a few houses ahead and twisted around to watch. Dimetrie said something to Eric, then closed the door of the Mustang and walked over to the mailbox. He pulled out what looked like a stack of junk mail, then walked up to the front door of the house, leafing through it.

  Eric gunned the Mustang and zoomed past me as Dimetrie went inside. I backed out of the driveway and cruised slowly past the bungalow, noting the street address. Was that where Dimetrie lived? It didn’t look like he was being held prisoner there and being forced to perform, if he was able to go out for dance class.

  I stopped across from the bungalow and took a couple of quick photos, then drove home. Before I jumped to conclusions, I needed to make sure that the two guys I’d seen coming out of the high school were Eric and Dimetrie.

  • • •

  At home, I downloaded an app for my computer that would let me compare pictures, and then cropped a good shot of Dimetrie’s face taken outside the high school to the same dimensions as the screen capture from the porn video.

  Though his hair was longer and he was facing more to the right side in one picture, it was clear that it was him.

  It was harder to verify Eric’s identity, though. I couldn’t find the commercial for the car dealership online, and without Eric’s last name, I couldn’t look for photos of him. I tried uploading the photo I’d taken of him to Google’s image search, but couldn’t get a close enough match.

  While I waited for Jonas to get home so I could show him the photos, I switched tactics and went to the Broward County Property Appraiser’s website. I plugged in the street address of the bungalow where Eric had dropped Dimetrie, and I wasn’t surprised to discover that it was owned by an LLC.

  Gay Guys LLC, to be exact.

  I sat back in my chair. So the company that ran the webcam site owned the house where it appeared Dimetrie was living. Was Ozzy living there, too? How was Eric connected to this business? Was he selling the flakka? And most important, did I have enough evidence to justify a search warrant? Sadly, I knew the answer was still no. But I wasn’t done yet.

  17.

  Imminent Danger

  Jonas burst in the front door of the house like an over-excited golden retriever. He’d shucked his tie, and his shirt was open a couple of buttons, showing off his hairy pelt.

  “He asked for my phone number!” he crowed as soon as he walked in.

  “Who?”

  “Eric! Who do you think?”

  “Eric, the hunk from the gym? Why would he ask for your number?”

  “Fuck you, Angus.”

  “I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” I said. “Where did you see him?”

  “I was on my second happy hour margarita at Lazy Dick’s when he walked in.”

  I looked at the clock. I’d seen someone who looked like Eric drop off Dimetrie about an hour before, so it was quite possible that Eric had gone directly from the porn house to the bar. “Did you see what kind of car he was driving?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t stalking him, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Jonas said. “He walked past me and I guess I had some Dutch courage from the tequila so I said hello. He smiled and said that he recognized me from the gym.”

  Jonas was glowing like a Halloween pumpkin. “I told him that anytime he needed a spot either before or after work, or on the weekends, he just had to call me.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “You’re putting yourself out there, and I think it’s awesome. It’s time you recognized you have a lot of good stuff going on.”

  He beamed. “So I gave him my number and he gave me his. We’re probably going to work out together this weekend.” He proudly showed me his phone, with a new contact for someone named Eric Morozov.

  I meant what I said to Jonas—he’d been losing weight and taking more care of his appearance, and I was glad that he’d been gaining more self-confidence, too. But in my experience, hunks like Eric didn’t have much use for ordinary guys like Jonas, and Eric’s interest worried me.

  “Funny, I think I saw Eric earlier today.” I pulled up the photo on my phone. “This is him, isn’t it?”

  Jonas nodded eagerly. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “Where did you see him? And why were you taking his picture? You’re not stalking him, are you?”

  I explained about the dance class at Fort Lauderdale High, then following Eric as he dropped Dimetrie off.

  “You think he’s doing porn?” Jonas asked. “Sign me up!”

  “This is serious, Jonas. That kid with him isn’t even eighteen yet.”

  “But you don’t know for sure that Eric is involved. He could have offered this kid a ride home from dance class.”

  “I know.”

  Part of me wanted to caution Jonas about getting too friendly with Eric, because I didn’t trust Eric’s friendship with Dimetrie and worried he might be more involved with the porn house than I could guess.

  We agreed to heat up a big frozen pizza to share, and while it cooked, I looked up Eric Morozov in every database I had access to. He had no criminal record and little employment history that I could find. Several different addresses popped up, all of them around Wilton Manors, and I couldn’t tell which was the most recent.

  According to his Facebook profile he was from a small town outside Jacksonville and he’d studied at the University of South Florida. His relationship status was single, and he liked bands called Tenement and Destruction Unit. Without “friending” him, that was as much as I could learn.

  The oven dinged and Jonas and I shared the pizza. The computer verification system at work was still giving him trouble, and he’d spent most of the day working with the data entry operators he supervised to get around the issues. It was boring stuff but it kept us from talking about Eric.

  After dinner I went back to my research, but I couldn’t find anything more about Eric Morozov. If he was hanging around teenagers, though, maybe Shane or one of the kids at Lazarus Place had run across him.

  I called Shane and told him that I’d spotted the other boy from the videos earlier that evening. “He was with a body builder named Eric Morozov,” I said. “That sound familiar to you?”

  “Nope. Another teenager?”

  “This guy looks like he’s in his late twenties. He was at a dance class with Dimetrie and dropped him off at a house in Wilton Manors. The address match
es the one on record for the company that runs the porn site. It didn’t look like he was being held captive there—he was pretty nonchalant about picking up the mail and going inside.”

  “Do you think Ozzy could be living there with this other kid?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Give me the address,” Shane said. “I’ll go over and see if Ozzy’s there.”

  “Hold off for a bit,” I said. “We don’t want to spook them.”

  “But what if they’re hurting him? We have to stop it. And there could be other boys there, too. Can’t you get a warrant or something and go in and arrest them?”

  “All the evidence I have is circumstantial,” I said. “I can’t get a warrant until I have something concrete.”

  “You mean until one of those boys ends up in the emergency room with a perforated bowel or an STD? Would that be concrete enough for you?”

  “Shane. Calm down. I promise you, I’m pushing forward on this. We’ll find out what’s going on and get any boys there out and into someplace safe. I just need a little time.”

  “Give me the address. I promise you, I’ll be discreet. I can pretend to be a Jehovah’s Witness or something.”

  “Please. Let me do my job, OK? You focus on those kids at Lazarus Place. They need your full attention.”

  We argued for a while longer and I continued to refuse to tell him where the house was. Finally, he hung up.

  There was something creepy about his insistence on rescuing the boys right away. Yeah, it wasn’t a healthy environment for them, but I had no evidence that anyone was in imminent danger.

  As long as they were smart enough to stay away from flakka.

  18.

  Additional Evidence

  I stayed up late that night, checking the webcam site, but still no Ozzy. The next morning at work I tracked down Roly as soon as I could. I explained about following Dimetrie back to the house and then discovering that it was owned by the same LLC that ran the website.

  “Is that enough for a search warrant?” I asked. “Ozzy said in his e-mail that he got the flakka from the house where he was living. I can ID Dimetrie from the movie, and I can document that he’s under eighteen.”

  “But you don’t know that this kid Ozzy is living in the same house, so you can’t connect the other boy to the flakka. And this dancer isn’t being held prisoner at the house, right? You saw him come and go freely?”

  “He wasn’t on his own. What if the guy I saw with him was guarding him?”

  “You’re enthusiastic and that’s great, but you can’t let your imagination run away with you, not at this stage of the investigation. This Eric guy could be his friend, giving him a ride to his dance class.” He leaned forward. “You still don’t have enough to convince a judge. One more piece of evidence, something that clearly connects the property to underage sex or drug distribution and you’ve got it.”

  “Could I set up surveillance on the house? See who comes and goes? Maybe that way I can establish who’s living there and what they’re up to.”

  “Not without that one piece of information that would tie everything together. Go back to the materials you’re collecting for the subpoena for the Russian agent’s bank and phone records, and when you have it ready, show me.”

  I walked back to my office and called Colin Hendricks at the DEA. Maybe he’d be able to get a search warrant for the house when I couldn’t. Unfortunately, he said the connection was still too tenuous—I didn’t know for sure that Ozzy was in that house, and I had only his word in a private e-mail stating where he’d gotten the flakka.

  It was frustrating, but I had to follow Roly’s direction and go back to collecting material for the subpoena. After lunch, he read over all the supporting documentation and when he was finished, he nodded. “This is good work, Angus. Send it to the U.S. Attorney’s office and see what they say.”

  • • •

  While I waited for the attorneys to prepare the subpoena, I reviewed my list of all the LLCs that showed Alexei Verenich as registered agent. Many appeared to be named after the property that the LLC owned—18883 Collins LLC, for example. I found a couple of others with gay-sounding names, like Lambda Licenses and Pink Triangle Productions, and I set those aside for further research. There were another two dozen that I couldn’t easily identify, entities like More Better Best, Over the Moon, and Changing Ways. My favorite was Little Lord Cheeses, LLC, which owned the building where a cheese shop with the same name was located.

  I did a Google search for the gay-sounding companies and came up nearly blank, with nothing more than I had found in the Florida state database. Then I went through all the others, one at a time. Again, nothing interesting. There had to be thousands of these limited liability corporations in Florida and odds were most of them were either defunct or simply not indexed on the Internet.

  Time for a different approach. I organized them chronologically and discovered that the first LLC Verenich served as an agent for had been formed eight years before for the purchase of The Isle of Capri, a motel on Collins Avenue south of the 163rd Street causeway. Though I was stepping over the bounds into Katya’s case, I had an itch to follow the money.

  As with the other paperwork, Verenich’s name was the only one in the records. I went back to Google and searched for the property name. Most of the results were for a motel in North Wildwood, New Jersey, but I did find a squib from the Herald’s real estate section that mentioned the sale of the motel in Sunny Isles Beach.

  Verenich was quoted in the article, one of those bland comments that populated the business news. He announced that the purchasers intended to construct a condominium tower to be called Blue Heron Landing.

  I followed that lead. The property’s name had been changed twice, first to Heron Landing, then to Heron Beach Club. But none of those articles mentioned the names of the person or persons behind the LLC.

  One of the last results on Heron Beach Club was an article from a monthly magazine called Florida Russian. It was a scan of an article from the printed paper in the Cyrillic alphabet.

  I couldn’t use automated translation tools because it was a picture, but I saved a copy of it and e-mailed it to Katya. Then I opened a Word document and painstakingly typed in the headline using the Cyrillic characters from the “insert symbol” feature.

  Then I was able to translate it into something like: “Vadim Kurov to Build New Condo Tower.”

  I was pleased with my ingenuity, but I wasn’t going to spend the next few hours copying the text character by character.

  Google quickly informed that the tower had been built, and was popular with the Russian-American community. An ad for a condo for sale bragged that there was a Russian café in the lobby and that the concierge spoke all three of the main Russian dialects.

  There was no mention of Kurov at the condominium’s website, so I broadened my search. Finally, I got some results. Kurov was a colorful figure in the Russian community, outspoken in his anti-Soviet sentiments, a donor to charitable causes, and a frequent guest at community events.

  He had no criminal record, and was frequently referred to as a wealthy real estate investor, though I could find no reference to actual buildings or properties he had developed beyond that single connection to Heron Beach Club.

  It was time to check in with Detective Wells in Palm Beach. “It’s Agent Green from the FBI,” I said. “Were you able to get a search warrant for Verenich’s boat?”

  “I went over it yesterday with a couple of our best crime scene technicians. Picked up a bunch of fingerprints and two distinct blood samples. One of them is Verenich’s.”

  “And the other?”

  “Can’t tell without something to compare to.”

  “How about the fingerprints? Able to match them to anyone?”

  “Yeah. One of them is a real estate broker who says he often went out sport fishing with Verenich. He has an alibi for the day we think Verenich went out on his one-way boat trip. The other
matches a New Yorker with a minor rap sheet. I’m trying to track him down now.”

  I thanked him and was about to hang up when he asked, “Any leads from your investigation that you’d care to share with me?”

  “Honestly? Nothing yet. I have a request in to the U.S. Attorney’s office for a subpoena on all Verenich’s financial records, phone logs, and so on. If we find anything I can share with you, I’ll let you know. But you do realize that under the Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction section of the United States Criminal Code, we have authorization to investigate Verenich’s murder in tandem with our case.”

  “I know that. But until someone tells me to halt my investigation, I’m going to keep looking.”

  “I understand that, and I have no intention of trying to stop you.”

  After I hung up, I sat there staring at my computer screen, until my phone buzzed with a text from Katya. “Need to talk to you ASAP. Can you come to SIB?”

  I texted back that I could, and she suggested we meet at the Starbucks on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach in an hour.

  That worked, I thought. I’d be closer to home by the end of the day.

  • • •

  After a long, slow drive I reached the shopping center, which held an international mix of stores—from a sushi restaurant to a Latin café to a clothing store with Cyrillic writing in the window.

  Katya was by the window, talking on her phone, so I got a café mocha and joined her. As I sat down, she ended her call. “How come you’re looking into Kurov?” she asked.

  “I researched all the LLCs that Verenich fronted for and Kurov came up. You read the article?”

  “It’s from ten years ago, you know. About the development of a condominium tower called Heron Beach Club. A standard press release about how wonderful the property will be. It mentions Kurov, who is a big shot in the Russian community.” She looked at me. “How did you find this article if you don’t speak Russian?”