by Marc Rainer
He had looked for somewhere civilized but off the beaten path, a place with friendly banking and tax laws. He had found one that had all those things, and with some decent skiing and food as well, a place where capital gains taxes were only ten percent for starters, and zero if you knew how to play the games. It was also a place where the bankers had learned from the Swiss and kept both their mouths and account books closed. He just had to get there.
Beretta paid the cabbie and headed for the customs desk. He filled out the IRS Financial Investigation (“FinCEN”) Form 105, answering most of the questions truthfully. Everything had to match his passport, after all. His one lie was a replay of his former excuse for carrying a lot of cash overseas, just in case the agent from his earlier encounter had entered something into a government computer.
“I’m an art collector,” Beretta told the customs official. “I just found a Goya in Madrid that I’ve been after for years. The seller wants cash.”
An hour later, he was on board an Air Portugal flight to Newark. To his relief, no one questioned him there, and he was soon over the Atlantic, with tickets to Madrid after a connection in Lisbon. He landed at the Madrid-Barajas International Airport, cleared customs, and headed for the Budget Rent-A-Car counter. His status as a regular got him an upgrade into a standard size SUV, and he was out of Madrid and heading north in twenty minutes. He finally took a deep breath when he crossed the border into the little postage stamp nation that he had chosen to be his new home.
Kansas City, Missouri
Trask took the call on his desk phone.
“It’s Jose Velasco, Jeff.”
“Hi. What’s up?”
“I got a call from the impressions expert here at the crime lab, so I came down here to look at what he found. We have a match from the tracks at the murder scene where they found that kid from casino security—Benny—and one of the tires on Beretta’s Audi. I’ve got the report right here. It says the tracks were from a set of Pirelli Scorpion Verde tires, and based on the size and tread pattern they were 255-60-R18s.
“I checked the photos we took at the airport and that type of tire is what Beretta had on the Q7. The photos of the left rear tire on the Audi showed an irregularity in the tread where the tire had probably been patched as the result of picking up a nail or something, and the lab guy here found that same irregularity in the track impressions they took at the riverfront park. He’s pretty certain it’s a lock. I’m going to drive him up to the airport so that he can see the actual tire for himself.”
“Great work, Jose,” Trask said. “Looks like we’ll be handing a bow-tied homicide case to Jackson County.”
“You can’t keep it?”
“Not without some evidence tying it into the dope conspiracy. For now, it’s a state case, but a solid one. You have the admissions by Beretta that Collavito heard, and now we have some good forensic corroboration.”
“Okay.”
“I’m headed down the hall to brief Mr. Barrett on things now. Thanks for handling this.”
Trask was in the United States Attorney’s office five minutes later. He told Barrett about the tire evidence linking Beretta to the murder. The conversation then shifted to the drug conspiracy.
“We’ll be indicting Beretta, the three Dellums, and Fontana and his three soldiers from New York,” Trask said. “We’ll have at least seven at trial, eight if we can find Beretta.”
Barrett stood up and faced the window and started thinking out loud.
“He left town before he had any reason to know we were onto him, so we can’t open a case in the grand jury for unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution. That means that we can’t hit the airlines with any subpoenas to find out where he went.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Trask said. “On top of that, he could’ve just flown to St. Louis for something. Right now, we don’t even know if he left the state.”
“And his car’s still at the airport?”
“Yep. Parked in the short-term lot. I think we have to figure, however, that he’s heard about the arrests of the others by now. He might come back to town to fight the case, but I wouldn’t if I were in his shoes. I’d run.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He has to figure that either Cannon or Collavito—maybe both—have flipped, otherwise we’d never have grabbed his friends in New York. He has his juice bar here, but no real, biological family. He’s single and his parents are both dead. His professional family—the mob—is probably as pissed at him as we are, maybe more so. If we believe the intel that John Foote has, Fat Tony Minelli is from the Mafia camp that has never approved of dealing dope because it’s bad for their other businesses. It brings too much heat, like the recent rash of kitchen inspections at the juice bars. Beretta has crossed that line, and he’s also crossed one other line that gets guys in his position killed.”
“That is?”
“The mob bosses hate it when their rules are broken. They hate it more when their soldiers are running scams and aren’t sending the bosses’ cuts up the line. If Minelli never approved the dope racket, Beretta was breaking that rule, and Minelli wasn’t getting paid. You ever hear of an east coast mobster named Carmine Galante?”
“Can’t say that I have. I’ve never worked organized crime cases.”
“Neither have I; not until this one, at least. I make it a point to study the history of any organization we’re targeting. Anyway, Galante was slinging heroin in New York back in the seventies and was keeping the money in his own pockets to fund a takeover of the Bonanno family. The other bosses found out about it and had him whacked. He was gunned down in his cousin’s restaurant.”
Barrett nodded. “Okay, so what’s the next step in finding Beretta?”
“We indict him with the others and get a warrant out for his arrest. He’ll be the lead defendant in our indictment anyway, since he’s the one who put the conspiracy together. Once that’s done, the Bureau will have notices out for his arrest all over the U.S. If my hunch is right, that won’t help because he’s not here anymore.
“After we get the arrest warrant, we can go to ICE and TSA to see if he left the country on any international flight. I’ll also contact Interpol and have them put out a Red Notice on him. I’ve had to do that with international fugitives before. It’s their version of an all-points bulletin. We’ll see what that stirs up. Some of the foreign police agencies aren’t as hamstrung as we are getting records like airplane manifests, since they don’t have to worry about laws like the Privacy Act.”
“When’s your grand jury scheduled?”
“Early next week. We have to wait for our guys to make the drive back from New York. I’ll go ahead and file a complaint on all the defendants, and we’ll do a preliminary hearing on the Dellums brothers and their cousin this week. They’re local and they’re all in custody. Jose Velasco can be the witness in the preliminary hearing for that end of the case. The Marshals Service will have to get the New York defendants here on Con Air. They’ll probably spend a week or two in Oklahoma at the prison in El Reno before we see them here, since that’s the Marshals Service transfer station.
“We’ve also got to get Cannon and Collavito set up in the Witness Security Program. In the meantime, we’ll lock them down in a local county jail and make sure they’re separated from any other prisoners or detainees.”
“Understood. Nice work, as usual. Thanks.”
Lee’s Summit, Missouri
After an afternoon drafting a mountain of paperwork that included the complaint, a prosecution memorandum, a draft of the indictment, and the two witsec applications for his cooperating defendants, Trask met Lynn and the pups at the dog park before heading home.
They watched the normal routine unfold as Boo and Tasha hit the ground running after they were unclipped from their leashes. Nikki followed them in her slower trot.
“Boo’s still moving a little slower, isn’t she?” Lynn asked.
“Yeah. I don’t think she’s fully
recovered yet. We’ll give her some time and all the diabetic-friendly food we can find. She’ll hopefully be back to normal once she puts the weight back on and gets her strength back.”
“What if she can’t do that?”
Trask looked at Lynn’s eyes. They were welling up with tears.
“I don’t want to think about that until we have to,” Trask said.
“I know. Neither do I, but I don’t want her to suffer, either. When the time comes, we have to be ready to make the hard decisions for all the girls. We can’t be selfish and put them through pain.”
Trask just nodded. He was getting too choked up to speak.
Hotel Montana
Incles, Soldeu – Andorra
Beretta looked out at the alpine valley from the valley of his hotel room. It was early spring, but the valley was still covered with snow, and the ski runs were still open. It was a beautiful, quiet, and peaceful setting, and Beretta felt himself relaxing more than he had in years.
The hotel was a good starting point for him. It had everything he needed to serve as a temporary home until he could secure something larger and more permanent. There was a good plasma television in the room, a fridge, a comfortable bed and bath, and the room had a decent internet connection. The hotel also provided both room service for meals and a laundry service, and the food was good.
He had checked the news in Kansas City on the web and had seen that his instincts had been correct. If he had stayed, he would have been arrested with the rest, and he would be in jail now, probably headed to a federal pen for the rest of his life, and that was if Fat Tony let him live at all.
My mistake was misreading Collavito. I thought he’d be smarter, stronger, but once Little Dom was out of the way, Sammy was the only one who could move the dope. My name’s on the top of the indictment. Cannon didn’t know me, so Collavito had to flip. He had to have given them the boys in New York, too.
He had toyed with the idea of trying to reach out in some way and having Sammy whacked, but he had thought better of it. Any attempt to contact anyone in the states meant risking revealing his location.
Better to let things die down. The feds can’t reach me here, and Minelli will get back to being his fat lazy self if I give him enough time. Better to stay out of sight, out of mind.
He looked up at the side of one of the mountains. Several figures were carving their ways down the white slopes. The sun popped out from behind a cloud. Beretta went inside and checked the forecast on a weather app.
Looks like a nice day.
He decided to put on his ski clothes.
Kansas City, Missouri
Cam and Mike Furay were right. This guy is huge, Trask thought, looking at the very large man in front of his desk.
Trask held out his hand to Joe Perina, the postal inspector. Perina’s giant mitt swallowed Trask’s hand like it was a snack-sized candy bar. Thankfully, the big man held back on his evident power during the handshake, leaving Trask a working appendage.
Cam called him “a refrigerator with a head on it.” Furay said he was “a walking eclipse.” They certainly weren’t wrong.
Cam finished the introductions.
Trask looked at his watch and saw that it was almost eleven-thirty. He’d always found that a good meal was a good way to get a good read on a critical witness, assuming the witness was not a cooperating criminal in custody.
“What do you say we take Joe out on the town for some of our famous cuisine?” Trask asked Cam and Furay. “What do you feel like sampling for lunch, Joe?”
“This is Kansas City, ain’t it?” Perina asked in the thickest Brooklyn accent Trask had ever heard. “Bar-be-que, of course!”
“You want the upscale, sit-down version, or the much more casual, traditional stuff?” Cam asked Perina.
“Do I look like the formal type to you?” Perina asked Cam.
“Arthur Bryant’s it is!” Cam announced.
“We can take my car,” Trask said. “It’s downstairs in the basement.”
“Oh, so you’re one of those guys, are ya?” Perina asked. “A big shot with a parkin’ spot?”
“One of the few perks of having a job that requires me to take cases like this one,” Trask answered.
They took the elevators down and piled into Trask’s Jeep. On the drive to Bryant’s, Trask could have sworn that he felt the Jeep leaning to the right, the side where Joe Perina was sitting in the passenger seat.
I may have to rotate my shocks after this.
Twenty minutes later, they parked in the very small lot beside the very small—but very popular—little restaurant.
“We got the last space,” Trask observed. “Just beat the rush.”
They walked through the first-floor corner door of an aging, two-story brick building on the corner of Brooklyn and 18th.
“The old stadium was a couple of blocks away,” Cam said, conducting the tour. “The Chiefs and the old Kansas City A’s used to play there before they built the Sports Complex out on I-70. The Chiefs moved into Arrowhead, the A’s moved to Oakland, and the Royals became our baseball franchise and got their own park. Metropolitan stadium got torn town, but the food here was famous by then, and this place just keeps on keepin’ on.”
“Whaddaya recommend?” Perina asked Trask.
“I always get the brisket sandwich,” Trask said. “It comes with a ton of meat and a big pile of fries. All the sauces are on the tables.” He nodded toward the collection of small, 1960s-vintage dinette sets spread around the floor.
“Okay. We’ll try the brisket, then,” Perina said.
They got in line and placed their orders. Workers behind the counter piled three-inch heaps of meat between two slices of white bread and added a mountain of French fries to the plates before putting them on the trays. Trask paid for the lunches, and they carried the trays to a table.
“Looks great,” Perina said.
Trask watched as the big man squirted some of the hotter sauce from one of the bottles over the top of the meat, and then picked up the monster sandwich, which disappeared four bites and about thirty seconds later.
“Damn, Joe,” Furay said. “I’ve never seen one of those vanish like that. Was it good?”
“Great stuff. Great stuff.” Perina was working on the mountain of fries. They were gone almost as fast as the sandwich.
“You guys excuse me,” Perina said, pushing his chair back and standing. “I’m gonna get another one of those.”
Trask looked at Furay and Cam in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anybody eat two of those things, have you?” he asked. “It’s all I can do to eat the sandwich. I usually just munch a couple of fries, and I have to leave the rest.”
“Joe is a big boy,” Furay said. “He’s also a nationally-ranked power lifter. He has quite the set of guns coming off those shoulders, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“My hands aren’t as big as Joe’s. If I don’t use a knife and fork on this thing, I’m going to be wearing half of it,” Trask said, digging into his own sandwich while they waited for Perina to get back from the serving line, which was now twenty customers deep.
“Just your basic, big, loud, friendly New York Italian,” Furay whispered. “He told me he grew up in a mob neighborhood on Long Island, but his folks raised him right, and he was always big enough to avoid being bullied into doing anything wrong.”
“I can see that,” Trask said, nodding and chewing.
Trask and the others did their best to finish their meals. As usual, the size of the thing defeated Trask, who left half of the sandwich and most of the fries on his plate.
Perina returned to the table, and his second sandwich and fries were gone as fast as the first.
“Good grief, Joe.” Trask laughed, unable to contain himself. “How’s your cholesterol?”
“It’s fine, smartass,” Perina said, laughing himself. “With all the working out I do, it ain’t a problem. All the levels are good.” He looked at Trask’s plate. “You gon
na finish that?”
“Help yourself,” Trask said, sliding the plate across the table.
He watched as Perina disposed of the half-sandwich and fries.
“What are you going to want for dinner tonight?” he asked Perina.
“A good steak would be nice.”
“Just another beef torpedo for your bloodstream, huh?” Trask said, laughing again. “What size are you looking for? I’ll buy a sandwich for you, but I’m not springing for a steak.”
“Back on Long Island, I can get a good forty-ounce porterhouse for about thirty bucks. That’s with—you know—a good police discount.” Perina winked at Furay.
“Forty ounces?” Trask asked. “Two-and-a-half pounds of meat at one sitting?”
“I already told ya that I work out,” Perina said.
“Yeah, that’s what you said,” Trask agreed. “So, I understand that you know the defense attorney for Victor Fontana?”
“Yeah. What an asshole,” Perina said, shaking his head. “He’s one of those big-lie guys. You know? He thinks that if he repeats a lie in his questions a few hundred times, then the jury or the judge will start believin’ it. Ya know what I mean? He got in my face outside Fontana’s house. He’s lucky I didn’t deck his fat ass.”
“I’d say that was certainly true,” Trask agreed. He noticed that the mere mention of Bernstein was enough to raise the volume on Perina’s already loud voice. They didn’t need to make a public scene, or to give anyone a reason to get back to Bernstein with any usable fodder for cross-examination.
“Let’s get back to the office so we can prep you for the suppression hearing tomorrow,” Trask suggested. “That is, if you’re sure you got enough for lunch?”
“Yeah,” Perina said, considering the issue. “I think I’m good for a little while. Thanks.”
Hotel Montana
Incles, Soldeu – Andorra
Paul Beretta finished another day of skiing, showered, changed, and caught up with the latest news from the states on his computer. A review of the online version of the Kansas City paper confirmed that he had been indicted with Fontana and the others, and that Collavito and Cannon had been named in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirators.”