No. Despite all that, he'd passed the bar, gone into private practice as a Legal Aid attorney in New York, and found a kind of love—or on-and-off romance, at least—with Fiona O'Hara, a fellow lawyer whose father and brother, against all odds, had both been FBI agents. He'd even managed not to lose her absolutely when she'd learned, through no fault of his own, about Dave's ancestry in Gotham's Giordano crime family.
But now…
He'd followed Fee to Alabama when she made the move, both seeking distance from New York for various reasons, and had been here now for some two decades, pressing civil rights cases that brought him death threats from assorted redneck groups and individuals who still thought Dixie won the Civil War—or, should have, anyway.
But it was getting old.
There had been wins along the way, of course. In February, Judge Braxton Kittrell Jr. had ignored a Mobile jury's recommendation of life imprisonment for Henry Hays, one of the Klansmen who'd lynched Michael Donald back in 1980. Kittrell had sentenced Hays to die, while sidekick "Tiger" Knowles, who'd turned state's evidence against his fellow murderer to give death row a pass got off with life imprisonment. Three months ago, Donald's mother had sued the Klan for her son's wrongful death, and from what Dave had seen, it looked like she had a good shot at bankrupting "Wizard" Bobby Shelton's "Invisible Empire."
What had Dave contemplating life's vagaries tonight was the outcome of America's quadrennial voting for president. No great surprise: the Reagan-Bush ticket had won its second term by 59 percent over ex-Vice President Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, while Republicans swept forty-nine states, losing only Mondale's native Minnesota. Mondale hadn't helped himself by choosing a liberal woman as his running mate, or by stumping for the Equal Rights Amendment that had been struggling in vain for ratification over the past seven years.
That double rejection of women's rights nationwide had enraged Fee O'Hara, but what could you expect when Reagan—now a confessed liar, embroiled in both the Iran-Contra scandal and frauds plaguing national savings and loan firms—won reelection by a landslide, claiming more Electoral College votes than any other candidate in U.S. history?
It was depressing all around, and executing one Klan killer—if his sentence ever got that far—came nowhere close to balancing the books. Lately, Jordan found himself wondering whether he'd do better in another country altogether, but where would he go?
One thing he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt: if he bailed out for who-knew-where, he would be flying solo all the way.
Little Italy, Manhattan: December 7, 1984
Dominic Giordano watched the TV news at his apartment on Mulberry Street and wondered how in hell a chain of pizza restaurants could do such damage to La Cosa Nostra.
To be fair, the racket feds and journalists were now calling the "Pizza Connection" had run smoothly for most of the time since it had started up nine years ago, enabling mafiosi in Italy, Sweden and Spain to ship cocaine and heroin valued at $1.6 billion stateside since 1975, but the principals had grown lax over time, missing signs of an investigation by the FBI, DEA, U.S. Customs and NYPD, collaborating with Italian National Police, the Swiss Federal Office of Police, and Spain's National Police Corps. No one had noticed anything amiss, apparently, until raiders began arresting thirty-five of those indicted in the second week of April.
As the feds described it—and as Dom already knew from dabbling in the trade himself—narcotics smuggled in from overseas to Gotham were distributed to local dealers through a string of pizzerias nationwide. Two of the top defendants were Gaetano Badalamenti, capo of his hometown Cinisi, in the province of Palermo, and his nephew Pietro Alfano, owner of a pizza joint in tiny Ogden, Illinois. In Sicily, squealers Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno had been giving up their old friends right and left, while FBI Agent Joe Pistone—incredibly allowed to penetrate the old Bonanno Family as tough guy "Donnnie Brasco"—had been working all along to crack the stateside Mafia from the inside.
Needless to say, that case hadn't turned out to be the Cosa Nostra's only problem for this year. In February, someone had machine-gunned Richard DiNome—a Gambino Family associate and sometimes crony of Roy DeMe—in his living room, reportedly suspecting he had turned informer for the feds. Three days later, a Kansas City grand jury had filed RICO charges against top members of the Civella Family, including counts of murder and skimming from Argent Corporation, owner on paper of the Tropicana hotel-casino in Vegas. Carl Civella and son Anthony pled guilty in September, receiving prison terms of thirty and five years, respectively.
Next up, in March, feds had indicted Gambino Family boss Paul Castellano and twenty-three others on seventy-eight counts including extortion, loansharking, and twenty-five murders committed by Roy DeMeo's outfit.
In April, the Bonnano clan had killed one of its own—Cesare Bonventre, youngest capo on record—on orders from rival Joe Massino, on the lam for ordering hits on three other family capos in 1982. Days later Milwaukee's Don Frank Balisterri had received a thirteen-year sentence on gambling and tax evasion charges, while his two sons got eight years apiece.
On May 15th, as Dom learned from an NYPD dick he kept on salary, G-men had observed a Mafia Commission meeting on Staten Island, noting the presence of Five Families bosses Castellano, Tony Salerno, Gennaro Langella, and Salvatore Santoro. Four months later, Corallo and twenty-one others, plus sixteen organizations, were charged with trying to monopolize garbage collection on Long Island, splitting the take with Paul Castellano. And finally, just yesterday, five Gambino Family soldiers—including three who bore the magic surname—had received 143 years in prison plus $300,000 in fines for drug-related charges.
Thinking about those trials now, and the freezing weather on the streets of New York City, Dom knew why Miami Beach looked better to him all the time.
Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands: December 31, 1984
Agent Wyman Gantt wondered why he'd been shipped to the Caribbean on New Year's Eve, when there was next to nothing he could do about the latest airline hijacking to Cuba. It was true the FBI had jurisdiction over airline piracy, but since he couldn't chase the perpetrator to Havana, Gantt regarded the excursion as a silly waste of time.
The hijacker—Ishmael LaBeet, alias "Ishmail Muslim Ali," was serving life for murdering eight Virgin Islanders twelve years ago—was bound for a New York prison under guard by three officers of the Virgin Islands Corrections Bureau when he'd complained of stomach cramps. His watchers removed LaBeet's handcuffs and followed him to the restroom, but upon emerging, he'd overpowered his three guards, seized their guns, and redirected American Airlines Flight 626 to Cuba. There, at José Martí International Airport, officials had seized Labeet, then refueled the DC-10 and sent it home with all the other passengers and crew aboard.
So it was all about the blame game now. Edwin Potter, director of corrections for the USVI territorial government, claimed removal of handcuffs in flight was "required by safety regulations," but he couldn't explain how LaBeet had disarmed three veteran guards described by Potter as "karate experts." As to how that controversy would shake out, Gantt neither knew nor cared, wishing he'd been left in peace to carry on his hunt for radicals.
The Unabomber was still on vacation, or whatever else distracted him from sending deadly packages to universities and random corporations, silent since his last attack in August 1982, but other terrorists had taken up the slack.
The most persistent and effective leftist group, if you could call them that, was the United Freedom Front. On January 29th they'd bombed the Motorola Corporation in Manhattan, a defense contractor, after calling twice to warn employees in advance. After the blast, police found UFF communiqués scattered around the scene, denouncing U.S. "imperialism" in Latin America"
On March 19th more warning calls preceded an explosion at IBM headquarters in Harrison, New York. That time, the fliers blame it on the company's involvement in South Africa, but somehow missed its dealings with the Third Reich during Wor
ld War Two.
April brought two bombings. On the 5th, the UFF hit Israeli Aircraft Industries in Gotham, doubly angry over Tel Aviv's mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs and its dealings with South Africa (ironically, a country run by neo-Nazis). On the 20th, another blast struck the Washington Navy Yard officer's club in D.C.
In May, UFF fugitives Thomas Manning and Richard Williams had murdered Trooper Carlos Negron along the same stretch of New Jersey Turnpike where Black Liberation Army members had slain Trooper Werner Foerster with his own service pistol back in May 1973.
Summer closed with an August 22nd bombing at General Electric headquarters in Melville, New York, causing substantial damage but no injuries. GE was America's fourth largest defense contractor, aiding in construction of U.S. warplanes and other martial equipment used worldwide—and sold for profit to "allies" including some of the worst authoritarian regimes on Earth. All in the name of "progress," where the bottom line meant more than any human deaths or suffering.
On September 26th, the terrorists were back in Gotham, bombing the South African consulate on Park Avenue, then rebounded the same day in Mount Pleasant, New York, causing heavy damage to a Union Carbide plant. The usual calls preceded and followed both blasts, detailing the UFF's reasons for choosing those targets.
FBI agents chasing that group took a break on October 17th, joining NYPD for a "preemptive strike" against suspected terrorists who'd so far done nothing but talk, arresting a handful of alleged plotters now hailed by their defenders as the "New York Eight." Gantt didn't like the Bureau's chances of winning convictions on that lot, but his FBI forebears and personal experience had taught him that incriminating evidence could turn up overnight like magic, while exculpatory items likely to confuse a jury might vanish just as easily.
While that case wound its way through New York's courts, the UFF had fallen on hard times. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on November 3rd, agents had raided a mini-warehouse, arresting members Timothy Blunk and Susan Rosenberg with 200 sticks of dynamite, 100 gel explosive cartridges, 100 blasting caps, and 24 bags of ammonium nitrate blasting agent. One day later, a second sweep in Deerfield, Ohio, bagged founder Raymond Luc Levasseur and wife Patricia Gros, co-leader Jaan Karl Laaman and girlfriend Barbara Curzi, plus sidekick Richard Williams. Seize with them were more bomb-making components and various communiqués identical to those strewn about former detonation sites.
So, was it over? Not so fast. Another UFF prime mover, Thomas Manning, and his wife were still at large, presumably still plotting ways of taking down "The Man"—whoever that might be, at any given time or place.
A kind of afterthought to days gone by had also recently occurred, when leftist lawyer Stephen Bingham turned himself in to the Bureau on outstanding charges of providing "Soledad Brother" George Jackson with the pistol he'd used to set off a deadly San Quinten riot—and get himself killed—back in August 1971. After thirteen years on the lam, Bingham was ready for trial, likely knowing that the state had no more evidence against him than it had when the riot occurred.
There were too many nagging questions, Hardy realized. If Bingham had smuggled a gun into prison, perhaps with the Afro wig officials claimed that Jackson used to hide the piece atop his head, who was to blame? Guards must have missed those items when they searched Bingham's person and briefcase on arrival, not to mention multiple pat-downs of Jackson before and after he met with his lawyer.
Smoke and mirrors, Gantt decided. Or, as Shakespeare wrote in Act 5 of Macbeth, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
At least, he thought, they can't pin that on me.
Chapter 2
Mobile, Alabama: April 11, 1985
Dave Jordan rarely drove the 257 miles south from Birmingham to Alabama's self-styled "City of Six Flags," but he had taken a day off from Legal Aid chores to be present for the sentencing of Benjamin Franklin Cox.
Cox was the third Klansman convicted so far in the lynching death of young Michael Donald, a black man picked at random four years earlier to "make a point" about Klan power in the Cotton State. His killers had been dumb or arrogant enough to hang his corpse across the street from local Ku Klux headquarters and brag about the slaying afterward. So far, Henry Hays had been sentenced to die for the murder, James "Tiger" Knowles had turned state's evidence in exchange for a life prison term, and trial was still pending on "Grand Titan" Bennie Jack Hays, elderly father of Henry and father-in-law of Ben Cox.
There'd been a wrinkle in the Cox case when he was indicted for conspiracy last December, then saw the indictment dismissed in March, based on an archaic Alabama statute imposing a three-year statute of limitations on conspiracy charges. Unrelenting, Mobile County District Attorney Chris Galanos had filed a new indictment for murder, the one crime with no statutory limits nationwide, and jurors had convicted Cox last week, making it three strikes in a row against the Klan. When Judge William Hand had slapped Cox with a sentence of ninety-nine years, defense attorneys instantly announced they'd be appealing on the grounds of double jeopardy, but Jordan didn't like their chances of succeeding in the present atmosphere.
Now he was eating lunch at Dauphin's, on the 34th floor of the Trustmark Building, with a panoramic view of Mobile Bay to the east. He'd started with paella and was working on fried catfish now, with a side of southern greens and garlic mashed potatoes, loving every mouthful as he told himself that maybe, finally, the color bar in Alabama might be breaking down.
Convictions of white Alabama defendants charged with killing blacks were as rare as hen's teeth, and the last ones sentenced to die for that crime had been hanged back in 1913. Of course, their case was "special," since their victim trained rich white planter's champion fighting cocks. In fact, the rednecks had been hanged for violating rules of "sportsmanship," rather than murdering a "nigra."
So, yes, maybe Dave was living in a whole new age. Even George Wallace, midway through his fourth term as governor, seemed bent on erasing the past. From his wheelchair, the onetime champion of "segregation forever" had named two blacks as cabinet members and backed four others for appointment to committee chairmanships in the State House of Representatives.
Of course, he also claimed that Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. was a "personal friend," and named his "best friend" as a black manservant who wheeled his chair around the state capitol, so maybe he was just senile—or faking it.
No matter how you sliced it, Jordan thought that if Heaven existed, George would roll up to its gates expecting a "WHITES ONLY" sign.
One Police Plaza, Manhattan: October 3, 1985
NYPD Sergeant Payton Sawyer finished reading an article in the New York Times, headlined "Klan Figure Met with Farrakhan," and thought it proved what his father had told him more than twenty years ago, shortly before he died.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
That maxim hadn't been original to Ike Sawyer, of course. In college, Payton had discovered that it was translated from French author Jean-Baptiste Karr, way back in 1849, but it rang true down through the years of Payton's ancestry.
His father had begun in law enforcement as an agent with the Bureau of Investigation, long before it morphed into the modern FBI. He'd been assigned surveillance of black "radicals," including Marcus Garvey, whom he'd helped imprison six years prior to Payton's birth, and Ike had talked about Garvey's backdoor relationship with Klan leaders who shared his goal of leading black Americans "back to Africa."
That hadn't worked out for either group, but spinoff Black Muslims had still been courting the Klan in the 1960s, when Payton's brother Fred followed their father's footsteps and became a G-man. One of Fred's assignments had been spying on the Muslim firebrand Malcolm X—who had agreed to meet with Georgia Klansmen in a bid to negotiate peace between their outfit and Elijah Muhammad's equally racist Nation of Islam.
Again, it hadn't worked, and Malcolm had been murdered two years later—some said by the Muslims, others pointing fingers at the
U.S. government.
This time around, NOI leader Louis Farrakhan had shared a tête-à-tête with California's ex-"Grand Dragon," one Tom Metzger, and graciously accepted a $100 contribution to his sect from the "white nationalist" mouthpiece after an NOI rally in Los Angeles. These days, Metzger preferred swastikas to fiery crosses, leading a tiny group he called the White People's Political Association, but he'd found a kindred spirit in Farrakhan, né Louis Eugene Walcott. They shared a strident anti-Semitism in common, Farrakhan publicly reviling Judaism as "a gutter religion" and praising Adolf Hitler as "a great man."
Farrakhan's right-hand man in Gotham, Mosque No. 27 leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad—born Harold Moore Jr.—agreed with his boss, calling Jews "bloodsuckers" and referring to Pope John Paul II as "a no-good cracker." Meanwhile, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of L.A.'s Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, regarded Farrakhan as "the most dangerous anti-Semite in the United States today."
It almost brought a smile to Sawyer's face, thinking that Farrakhan had no idea Der Führer would've gassed his people right along with Jews, but then he frowned instead, wondering how some people survived to middle age being such total goddamned fools.
Mendota Heights, Minnesota: October 9, 1985
Erin O'Hara hadn't visited the Gopher State before, and she'd seen little of it on this trip, landing at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and driving six miles eastward to the town where Robin Ahrens had grown up.
She'd missed her chance to know Ahrens, of course, despite the fact that both of them were special agents working for the FBI. Robin had been twelve years behind O'Hara when she passed through the Academy, shipped out immediately to the Phoenix field office in June. Now, four months later, she was dead.
And not just dead, as in car crash on the job or after work. No, Robin Ahrens had been gunned down on the job while still a rookie, and that still wasn't the worst of it.
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