When the tape played out, a defiant Paddy Holiday said, “You went to a lot of trouble for nothing, Stuart. You don’t have shit on us.”
Kirby turned around and looked into the squad room. The sight of the empty room appeared to give him new courage. He turned to Stuart. “You haven’t notified anybody in the Big Building that you’re holding me here. If you had, this place would be jumping with brass. What the fuck kind of game you playing?” He made a move to get up.
Jones pushed him back down.
Stuart glowered at the pair, picked up the tape deck, and stood. Beckoning to Kirby and Holiday to follow him, he entered the squad room and perched on the edge of a desk. He motioned Kirby and Holiday to sit in a pair of rickety chairs fifteen feet away from where he himself sat. Jones, Kahn, and Borrelli trooped in and found seats.
After suctioning the tape deck’s rubber recording plug onto the top of the earphone, Stuart put the phone to his ear. When he punched in the number for the Internal Affairs Bureau, his call was answered promptly by a woman detective. After identifying himself, he asked to speak with Deputy Chief Aaron Flieger.
“Lieutenant Stuart, Chief. I got something I think you might wanna hear.” He placed the phone’s mouthpiece over the silver screen on the front of the tape deck and pushed the play button.
When the taped conversation ended, there was dead silence on the other end of the line. Kirby and Holiday hadn’t moved a muscle. Stuart pushed the record button. Finally Flieger said, “What does it mean, Lou?” The uncertainty in his voice was palpable.
“It means that one of your lieutenants is an accessory to a double homicide, and he’s apparently been in bed with the pinky-rings for a real long time, is what it means,” said Stuart. “Along with his friend, our former colleague Holiday.”
“What about those things he said he got in the department mail?” Flieger asked. “Did you send them to him?”
“No, Chief, I didn’t,” Stuart lied. “A confidential informant gave up the meet, and on the basis of his information we applied for a court order to eavesdrop.” There was a brief silence at the other end while Stuart watched Paddy Holiday gnaw at a fingernail.
“Are you sure about that, Stuart?” Flieger demanded.
“Hey, Chief, like I told you the other day, I’m from the ol’ school. I don’t lie to my bosses. I told you the truth the other day, and I’m tellin’ it now.”
“Good, good. About that GO Fifteen thing, I think I can take care of that problem for you and that detective, the female.”
“I’d really appreciate that, boss.” Stuart smiled over at Kahn and winked.
“About this thing with Kirby,” Flieger went on, “I think it’d be better for the Job if we handled it as an internal matter.”
Stuart shifted his glance to Kirby, escalating it into a significant glare. “Whatever you think is best, Chief, but I gotta tell ya that that might be a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“The CI who gave us that meet is also a confidential informer for the FBI,” Stuart said. “My vibes tell me they’re on to Kirby. I expect they’re the ones who sent him that shit in the mail.” He shot Kirby an evil grin as he heard Jones emit a little giggle.
“I wonder why they’d go to all that trouble?” said Flieger.
“Who knows all that Kirby is into? Or who’s into it with him? If anyone else is involved with him, they got a problem. That guy’ll cave in the first time the feds question him.”
“Why don’t you cut ’im loose? I’ll start my own investigation into his activities.”
“You got it, Chief.” Stuart hung up and pressed the stop button. He stood then, facing Kirby and Holiday. “You two can go now. But I wouldn’t make any long-range plans. I’m making copies of this tape and sending them to Lupo. Whaddaya think he’s gonna think after he hears it?”
Jones chimed in, “The man’s gotta figure you sold your shield to him for money and that you sure as hell will spit him up to stay out of the joint.”
Borrelli smacked his palms together.
Kirby looked as though he were ready to pass out.
Stuart held up a finger. “The first one of you to roll over will stay alive. The other’s a dead man. My money’s on you, Paddy. You’re a survivor.”
The two sullen men stood up and started to leave.
Kahn stepped forward, glared at Kirby, and slapped his face with her open palm. The force of her blow snapped his head back. They looked at each other for a few seconds, then he nodded, dazed by her rage. Looking away, he pushed past her. The mark of her blow had left a red blotch on his cheek.
20
A brown panel truck pulled up at the curb in front of Albertoli’s. Hippo, Joey Hershey Bar, and a short, bald-headed pinky-ring climbed out. They stood around the truck with their hands stuck in the pockets of their multicolored warm-up suits, checking out the street. A locomotive was being coupled to the first of the three boxcars on the siding. Four unhitched trailers lined the curb back to back.
Hippo walked into the street, looking up at the rooftops. He walked back to his friends and said, “Youse guys wait here.” He walked inside the plant. “I wanna see Angela,” he told the bookkeeper with the steel gray hair wrapped into a bun in back.
Angela came out of her office, looked at him, and thought, This goon looks right out of Central Casting. Smiling, she waved Hippo inside. As soon as he came in, he handed her an envelope, saying, “Dis is for you.”
She grabbed it out of his hand, walked over to her desk, and fanned through the stack of one-hundred-dollar bills. She put the money back into the envelope and slid it into the top drawer of her desk. Walking past him, she said, “Follow me, handsome.”
She led him through the plant and into the refrigerator unit that contained the real cheese wheels. “Here’s Lupo’s cheese. Get it out of here.”
“How am I supposeta carry all that out to the truck?” Hippo said.
Angela called over two forklift drivers and told them to move the wheels outside to Hippo’s truck. “It’d be easier if they drove their truck around to the parking lot,” said Driscoll, driver number one.
“Yeah,” said the second driver, one Salvatore Garibaldi.
Hippo walked outside and told his friends to drive around into the lot. Driscoll and Garibaldi drove into the refrigerator and began loading the cheese wheels onto their forklifts. They rolled through the plant and out the side door that led out into the parking field. The driver of the van opened the back door, and Driscoll and Garibaldi began unloading the cheese inside the truck. Hippo and the other pinky-rings stood alongside, watching the cheese being loaded into a rented van. They paid no attention to the unhitched semi parked in the back of the parking field.
During the early morning hours, Driscoll had stood by and watched DEA electronics wizards insert battery-operated transceivers into each wheel of cheese. Every vehicle on station inside the surveillance grid would be equipped with tracking devices that would receive the transceivers’ broadcast. The signals, which consisted of a beeping noise and a signal strength indicator, broadcast a five-digit numerical code that allowed each vehicle in the grid to home in on the signal. In addition to the tailing vehicles that would leapfrog the suspects’ vehicle, surveillance vans—equipped with videocameras with telescopic lenses and dish antennae on their roofs that bounced scrambled signals up to the CIA/DEA law enforcement satellite, where the signals were picked up and bounced back down to a transmitter that unscrambled each as it spilled across television monitors—were on station along the entire surveillance grid.
The unhitched trailer parked in the rear of Albertoli’s back parking lot had the name SEABOURN painted on its sides. It was DEA’s command and control vehicle. One wall of the long trailer was crammed with sophisticated communications equipment, which included fax machines and three computers, each with CD-ROM drive capabilities that projected photographs of streets in any city in the country onto a screen on the trailer’s wall. T
he computers had the ability to enhance the image down to a single building. The trailer’s underbelly was lined with powerful lithium batteries that served as the backup power source. The main source came from thick black electrical cables that snaked out the rear of the trailer and were tapped into overhead electrical cables that ran some thirty feet beyond the back fence.
Driscoll and Garibaldi drove their last load over to the truck. Driscoll tooled up close and drove the twin forks inside the truck’s open door, where he lowered them and drove back in reverse, leaving the load planted safely inside. Garibaldi followed suit.
Hippo ambled over to the two drivers and handed them twenty bucks each. “Thanks, guys,” he said, and climbed into the truck. As soon as the truck drove out of the parking lot, three dish antennae unfolded out of the trailer’s roof and pointed skyward.
Hippo kept checking the rearview mirror as he punched a number into his cellular phone. Frankie Bones’s gravel voice came on the line. “Yeah?”
“We got the stuff,” Hippo said.
“No problem?
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Hippo said with a trace of annoyance.
“You know what to do,” Frankie Bones said, and punched the-his cellular. He looked over at Lupo, who had both feet resting on his desk. “Hippo’s got it. No problems.”
“Good. Now what about your nephew?”
“I hadda talk with Isaac Ham. Stuart wasn’t bullshittin’ us. Carmine went into business for himself.”
“Where is he now?”
“I sent people to his house. Him and his wife have disappeared.”
“Find him, Frankie. He can hurt us, bad.”
“And when we do?”
“Tell him that his uncle ain’t gonna let anyone hurt him. Make sure you get all the records he has on our business, then do him and his wife.”
“Done like a dinner,” Frankie said, scratching his big nose.
“What did you do with Isaac Ham?”
“I sent him to Haile Selassie’s heaven.”
Lupo swung his feet off the desk and picked up the tape cassette. “Whaddaya think of this tape Stuart sent up?”
“I think we gotta problem we gotta get rid of. I never trusted a cop, it makes no difference if they work for us or not. They’re still cops.”
“You’re right. Find out who this Ken guy is, and then get rid of him and Holiday.”
“And Stuart?”
“No. At least, not yet.” Lupo walked over and sat on the sofa next to his friend. “I’m getting bad feelings about what’s happening, Frankie. I think we gotta start thinking about the people who could hurt us.”
“Makes sense.”
“What about that girlfriend of yours? Does she know anything that could hurt us?”
“She knows about Andrea, but not much more. Hey, we’ve been together a lotta years. She’s good people, Danny.”
“I was only askin’.” He looked at Frankie and remarked casually, “If you figure she’d do time for you, that’s good enough for me.”
Driscoll and Garibaldi stood inside the command trailer with their arms folded and their eyes fixed on the wall, watching the panel truck drive across the New Jersey Turnpike Extension that spanned Newark Bay. “They’re not heading for New York,” Garibaldi said.
“I think they’re making for the airport,” Driscoll said. As they watched, the rented van passed under a large green sign reading NEWARK AIRPORT EXIT 14.
When the truck sped off Exit 14’s ramp, Driscoll stepped across the aisle and picked up a thin headset with a pin-drop microphone at the tip. He slid it over his head and radioed, “All units, this is Mother Hen. Subjects appear to be heading for the airport. I want the identification number and description of any plane they use. Unit Two, when we have the plane IDed, check their flight plan with traffic control.”
“Do you have the capability of following a plane to its destination?” Garibaldi asked.
Driscoll smiled and lighted a cigarette. “We have the ability to watch the bastards fly into hell.”
High waves rose up out of the Atlantic Ocean and rolled toward the beach, gathering speed until the surf pounded the shoreline. The frothy mass of water was then swiftly recalled by the tides and formed up into another wall of water that came crashing back with relentless regularity.
An old beachcomber was sifting the sands for the summer’s lost treasures.
Stuart walked up the Bay Sixteenth Street ramp leading onto Coney Island’s boardwalk. He looked up and down the wooden promenade. The Cyclone ride loomed in the distance, its serpentine tracks rising and falling against the gray, overcast sky. Most of the concession stands along the boardwalk were boarded up for the winter.
Stuart crossed the boardwalk, heading for the young man standing at the end of Pat Auletta’s Steeplechase Pier. It evoked old memories. The pier had been named for a local politician who had worked tirelessly for the community and whose son, Ken, was currently a prominent journalist. Stuart recalled the awe he had felt as a child when he first saw the intricate web of the long dismantled Wonder Wheel. Now, when he looked up and down the long stretch of wood, all he saw was urban decay, a few joggers, and aged people from nearby nursing homes. He went up to the railing and stood beside the man. Looking up at gulls wheeling over the shoreline, he said, “You wanted to see me, here I am.”
“I didn’t think cops were supposed to set people up to get killed,” Carmine Marino said, staring out at the ocean.
“You thunk wrong, Carmine. We play by different rules today. It’s like the old pirate days: no quarter given, none asked. Whaddaya want?”
“I want to walk away clean. No arrest, no testimony, no witness protection.”
“What makes you think your uncle’s people will let you walk away clean?”
“I knew this day was coming, and I’m ready for it. In case you don’t know, wiseguys aren’t wise, they’re dumb. The only thing that makes them special is their willingness to kill anybody who gets in their way.”
“I figured that out myself a long time ago.”
Marino looked sideways at the lieutenant. “It’s cops like you who worry me, Stuart. You’re smart, and when you want someone real bad, you know how to use your department’s resources to find them. You’re the kind of a guy who doesn’t know how to give up.”
“I don’t have the authority to make the kind of a deal you’re looking for.”
“I didn’t come here empty-handed.”
“Didn’t think you did.”
“I can give you the liquid milk hijack scam, the cheese futures scam, insider trading, gambling, drugs, money laundering, and the names of the brokerage firms that wash their money offshore.”
“You want to be allowed to vanish. To retire to some exotic place and enjoy the fortune you stole from them. I need more, Carmine, a lot more.”
“Let’s walk.”
They took off down the boardwalk, strolling toward the roller-coaster ride. A homeless man pushing his overflowing cart rushed by them with an air of desperation. Carmine leaned his head close to Stuart’s and said, “You don’t really know what you stumbled into, do you?”
“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“I wonder. Lemme ask you something. When your police commissioner wants to know the effect of one of his policies on the department, say, ten, twenty years down the road, what does he do?”
“He gives the problem to Intelligence Division, where an analyst studies it and reports back to the PC.”
“Did you know that soon after the Knight’s Roundtable meet in 1963, the police commissioner asked the Intelligence Division to tell him what would happen if the department did away with ‘good money’?”
“No.”
“Would you like to know what the report said?”
“I can guess. Crooked cops would then turn to drugs.”
“That’s right.”
“How do you know that?” St
uart asked.
“I read the report.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes before Carmine said, “There were a lot of high-ranking people in the police and the Five Families who wanted to get into drugs. But before the drug cartels could establish secure networks in the city, they needed police protection. Which meant they had to do away with the ‘good money, bad money’ philosophy. Can you figure out how they did it?”
Stuart clamped his jaw, swallowing his rising anger. “Yeah. I can. The bastards took a cop who was known throughout the Job for his honesty and put him into the most corrupt division in the Bronx. That cop’s name was Frank Serpico.”
“They created a scandal as a diversion. It was brilliant.”
“Serpico blew the whistle on corruption. And the Knapp Commission dealt the death blow to ‘good money.’ The Job stopped enforcing the antigambling laws, so no more payoffs. They closed down all the other things that brought in the clean money. And then the Palace Guard, pretending to stamp out corruption, prohibited uniform cops and precinct squad detectives from enforcing the narcotics laws. That opened the floodgates.”
“And the cartels opened drug supermarkets throughout New York City.” Carmine Marino took a deep breath of the crisp sea air. “I’m going to miss the beach.” He looked sideways at Stuart. “Did you know that every drug network in this town is assessed a monthly protection fee that only goes to the top brass of the NYPD?”
“The Calis? the Medellín? the Lo Fungs?”
“All of them. Even the Russians in Brighton Beach. And if they don’t cough it up every month, the police dismantle their operations. And they all pay because it’s chicken feed compared to what they’re raking in. Crooked cops come cheap.”
“‘Good money’ used to flow up the chain of command. Drug money comes in at the top and stays there.”
“Nothing lasts forever, Stuart, you know that.”
“How does this arrangement work?”
Pigtown Page 27
