Rampage

by Justin Scott

  RAMPAGE

  A NOVEL

  JUSTIN SCOTT

  For Amber Edwards

  FOREWORD

  Like all readers, I have a long and happy list of books I’m simply glad I read. I’m anxious to add to it, so I consume new stuff voraciously. The result is I spend much less time than I might re-reading my old favorites. But as I get older, I’m wondering whether I should alter that balance. It seems to me a mathematical question: are there likely to be more good books written in my personal future than were available in my personal past? Unfortunately, time is not on my side. Unless I live well into my 120s, I have to conclude the past is the more fertile field. But even so, it’s hard to change the habit of a lifetime.

  But on this occasion I had help. The good folks at Pegasus Books announced a new edition of Justin Scott’s Rampage, and asked if I would write a foreword. I said yes, because I remembered the book with great affection. It was first published in 1986, but I had a kid and a mortgage, so I waited for the paperback and read it in 1987—thirty years ago. It made a strong enough impression that I could have written this piece from memory. But I felt I would write it better if I read the book again. So I did.

  And what a pleasure it was.

  Like all enduring novels, Rampage is many things at once—some of those things wildly contradictory. For instance, it’s totally, gloriously 1980s. That was a slick, glossy decade—“Miami Vice” was on TV—and the novel bathes in it shamelessly, all plate glass and little black dresses and plenty of money. But it also carries with it an older, more traditional sense of history, dating from much earlier in the century, about what it means to be Irish or Italian in America, and what it means to be family, on both sides of the law, and about Brooklyn, for instance, before Brooklyn was a thing.

  And it’s also completely timeless. Ultimately it’s a character study, about both the joy and corrosion of revenge, and the complications of love and loyalty Those are ancient themes, and Scott handles them as if well-aware of their various origins and histories.

  Which illuminates another seeming contradiction—this novel has relentless pace, endless energy, and crazy action. No challenge is ducked. Every set-piece is bigger than the last and played to the maximum. If it were a movie, it would have cost $400m to make—even back in the 1980s. You could put it in a time capsule as an example of what a breathless thriller should be. Yet it’s exquisitely written, by an author who clearly cares passionately about language, cadence, rhythm, and vocabulary. Should that be a contradiction? Not in theory, but in practice it’s rare to find a thriller in which literary finesse is both crucial and self effacing.

  Geologically, the result is a novel that defines the space between the very end of the cracking-wise Raymond Chandler-era and the start of the hyper-procedural Thomas Harris-era. And, of course, it’s set in the world of 1980s New York real estate, so it must be mentioned in passing that, as a little 2017 bonus, we see our current president appearing as a watchword for all the few virtues and many vices that world contained. But that’s the least of the reasons to re-read it. Or read it for the first time. In which case, lucky you.

  —LEE CHILD, NEW YORK, 2017

  PROLOGUE

  THE PRIVATEER

  The witness before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime wore a hood over his new face. Metal detectors had greeted spectators entering the columned rotunda of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan and U.S. marshals had erected screens to shield him from the TV cameras. He testified through an electronic voice distorter, which made him sound like a cheerful child in another room.

  The commissioners—business people, criminal justice professors, congressmen and -women, and law enforcement experts—faced him from tiered tables covered by periwinkle-blue cloth. Counsel directed questions from the center of the front table. A grizzled old judge chaired from the back.

  Christopher Taggart, the youngest commissioner by far, sat in front. The seal of the commission, prominently displayed, had a Latin motto that meant, the lawyers told him, Pluck Out Evil by Its Roots. He was armed for the task with a pad for the notes he kept in a clear hand, a gold pen that he began tapping impatiently, and a microphone, which he seized with sudden exasperation.

  “Mr. Counsel? This witness isn’t telling anything about the Mafia that Jimmy Breslin hasn’t already published in the Daily News.”

  Members of the press laughed, and counsel, an urbane former federal prosecutor vaulting the rungs of government service two at a time, doled out a smile with the correct proportions of respect and superiority. Christopher Taggart seemed to have forgotten again that he asked the questions, witnesses answered under threat of contempt citations, and commissioners listened politely.

  “Be assured, Commissioner Taggart, that this witness is eminently qualified to assess the effect of the Federal Organized Crime Strikeforce on the Mafia.”

  The witness, a bold man with the garrote before he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program, hastened to agree with the chief counsel. Taggart assumed he enjoyed these occasional outings and wanted to be invited back. The mouth hole in his hood flapped and the cheery child sounded earnest. “Two years ago I was a capo in the Cirillo family here in New York.”

  “But you were already in the slammer last year when the Strikeforce indicted every boss of the Mafia’s ruling council,” Taggart shot back. “The important question is, who’s taking their place? I don’t see New York’s Mafiosi lining up for unemployment.”

  “You’re gonna see more and more surprising guys testifying for immunity,” the mobster promised. “The Strikeforce is flipping some heavy hitters. They’re scared shitless—excuse my French—about who’s going to inform undercover. Even the Cirillos. Every place they move, the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Agency’s waiting with an army because they’ve infiltrated the street crews. It’s war out there and the mob is losing.”

  Taggart interrupted again. “The agents are doing a great job. But the mob still controls heroin, cocaine, unions, extortion, hijacking, and gambling. When the Strikeforce puts one leader away, five more step up to replace him. Who’s taking over, Mr. Witness?”

  “Hey, you don’t knock ’em off in a year or two—or even ten. But don’t think it’s a bed of roses for the bosses. It’s not like changing mayors. They gotta fight each other for the job.”

  “As a businessman, I’d like to see my law enforcement tax dollars going to more than making Cosa Nostra mobsters uncomfortable.”

  “I just wanna say I never heard the words ‘Cosa Nostra’ except on television. What I was in, we called it the rackets.”

  “And I’m calling a recess,” Judge Katzoff interrupted. “Would the marshals clear the room?”

  A dozen marshals escorted the man in the black hood from the witness table, cordoning him with their bodies. An easel displaying a chart of organized crime leadership in New York City crashed to the marble floor with a loud bang. Federal agents plunged anxious hands into their jackets and handbags.

  Taggart smiled. He was dressed like a rich, busy man blessed with a stylish woman or two who looked after him; his navy-blue suit, expensive and conservative, off the rack from Paul Stuart, was greatly enlivened by an interesting shirt that enhanced his blue eyes, and an Italian silk tie and handkerchief. His blond hair was short and fashionably groomed in the style he called stockbroker punk. The harsh television lights revealed a faint scar that creased both his lips, and another that furrowed his brow.

  “Mr. Taggart,” the chairman said, when reporters, technicians, and elderly spectators had trooped from the rotunda, “I’m on a tight schedule.”

  “I’ve got four Manhattan skyscrapers on tight schedules, Your Honor. For all I know, they’ve fallen down. I haven’t seen ’em since our dog-and-pony act hit town Mond
ay. I didn’t volunteer to showboat. I joined this commission to expose organized crime and find ways to hit back. But all we’re doing is rehashing old news for the benefit of TV. We’re asking this turkey to tell us what we already know about old men who’ve already been arrested.”

  The old judge, who had made a name for himself jailing Vietnam war protesters while Taggart was in junior high school, flushed.

  “What about the new ones?” Taggart demanded. “Do you know how smart they’re getting? Last night, the New York State Organized Crime guys busted a Cirillo bodyguard who was carrying more antibugging equipment than a KGB agent. They buy the same sophisticated surveillance receivers, bug alerts, and telephone analyzers that the government does. There’s a new breed, as vicious as the old, but hipper, and getting harder to catch. These guys are not going to fall for a mike in their girlfriend’s panties.”

  “I’ll instruct counsel to schedule a technical witness,” the judge replied dryly.

  “I’d rather hear about the government leak on that Sicilian deal.”

  “What leak?”

  Katzoff looked at the staff members who had collected around his chair at the center of the rear table. They looked at each other in panic.

  “Who told the press that the Strikeforce had asked the Coast Guard to surveille a Greek freighter? The ship happened to be carrying Sicilian heroin, which the smugglers moved to another ship when the story broke.”

  “I can explain, Your Honor,” said the commission’s chief investigator, a slick New York Irishman in his thirties, who had been temporarily detached from the Drug Enforcement Agency. He circled the witness screen, shaking his head at Taggart. “Your Honor, somebody in the Treasury Department wanted to be sure he got credit for his agency. It was a stupid bureaucratic screwup, but those things happen. What I want to know is how the hell did Commissioner Taggart find out about it? It wasn’t in the paper about the dope.”

  “I do my homework,” Taggart shot back. He turned around and faced his fellow commissioners. “Look, when I asked my friend Governor Costanza—or should I say my father’s friend?” —he hesitated, and those who knew him best glanced away. “When I asked Governor Costanza, ‘Get me on this crime commission, get the President to appoint me,’ I did it because I believe that the Mafia, or the rackets, or call it what the hell you want to, threatens everyone in the country. I build buildings and I see Mafia extortion every day. They’ll kill construction like they killed the New York harbor. The investigation I was talking about that got leaked would have been the biggest Cirillo bust since the Strikeforce got their last underboss. What can our commission recommend to prevent such fuckups? You’ll notice, unlike our tame witness, I’m not asking you to excuse my French.”

  “All right,” said the judge. “Let’s break for noon recess.”

  Taggart stuffed the morning’s press releases in his briefcase and hailed the chief investigator. “Hey, Barney. Lunch?”

  “You paying?”

  “Sure. You got it last time. How ’bout Windows on the World?”

  “Last time was Blarney Stone.”

  “So live a little.”

  “Seriously, Chris. How the hell did you know about the leak? Did your brother tell you?”

  The smile went out of Taggart’s eyes and he said coolly, “You know damned well Tony never leaks. Especially to me.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Barney apologized hastily.

  Taggart threw his arm around Barney’s shoulder, gave him a slow grin and a friendly finger. “Hey, I’m just a businessman.”

  “I know, I know. And you hear things.”

  “From guys like you who talk too much. Hoods and cops, you’re all the same, you can’t keep your mouths shut.”

  At the restaurant atop the World Trade Center, Taggart took a table facing uptown. It was a muggy May day and the skyline appeared hazy and distant. Taggart’s gaze fixed on it nonetheless, and in the powerful north light Barney noticed that his big hands were impeccably manicured, the nails buffed to a satiny sheen.

  “What’s it like looking out there and seeing your own buildings ?

  Taggart’s glittering eyes, powerful Italian nose, and sensual mouth gathered in one of his infectious grins, reminding Barney that he was barely thirty years old. “Almost as much fun as being a cop.”

  While they were drinking their second martinis Taggart asked casually, “Did they really find the leak?”

  “Better. They found the dope.”

  “Nice going. How?”

  “Criminal intelligence.”

  Taggart laughed. “In other words, you turkeys got a tip.”

  “Hey, hey. Who’s this?”

  Jack Warner, a burly police detective attached to the Strike-force, opened one eye at the whisper in the dark. When the camera clicked, he opened the other and heaved himself out of the musty chair where he had dozed intermittently through the long night. Another car was approaching the abandoned parking garage that he and three federal agents were watching from a defunct metalworking shop on the other side of Forty-fifth Street. Thirty pounds of Sicilian heroin that the Strikeforce had lost track of earlier had surfaced in the garage, or so said a tipster.

  The FBI agent in charge fired off a second round of film and stepped back to give his partner from the Drug Enforcement Agency a look. The telescope was aimed through a hole they had peeled in the tin that covered the door. A street lamp glinting between the boards that covered the window lit the room dimly.

  “I don’t know him,” the DEA agent said.

  Warner waited his turn while an IRS criminal investigator stooped over the telescope and adjusted the focus. He too shook his head. “Never seen him before.”

  “Jack will know,” the FBI man said. “Warner, get your ass here. Who’s this guy?”

  Jack knows. Damned right Jack knows! Thirty-eight years old, eighteen on the New York police force, with fourteen in Organized Crime Control, Jack Warner knows more than anybody about the Mafia. He knows who’s up, who’s down. He knows wiseguys their own mothers don’t know. But he especially knows that tonight’s hot tip is very hot indeed, because he phoned it in himself.

  Warner rotated the eyepiece a quarter turn to compensate for the nearsighted IRS man. A car’s image hardened in the lens—a black 1986 Chevy Caprice straddling the sidewalk, with New York plates 801-BD. The driver in profile, big nose and pompadour hair, was checking the block. The door of the supposedly empty building slid up and the car moved into darkness. At four o’clock in the morning, during false dawn before the Memorial Day weekend, the street was so quiet they could hear the metal door rattling in its tracks.

  “You know him?” the FBI agent asked.

  Warner yawned. “That’s a Cirillo hitter who runs security for their stash pads. He’s been moving up lately. Started out bouncing in their clubs.”

  His Strikeforce “colleagues,” as Warner enjoyed dubbing the Feds, exchanged testy looks. All night the cop had been batting a thousand.

  “Is there any hood in New York you don’t know?”

  “That’s what your local policeman’s for.”

  And no help from the tip, thank you, for he was proud that he had recognized the hood legitimately. It was a point of honor with him that he knew more about the Mafia than the Feds. He practically lived with the wiseguys, one jump ahead of the Mafia—two jumps ahead of the cops. Like his brother the priest who complained that he served two masters, God and the bishop, Detective Warner also had two bosses, the New York City Police Department and another who paid better.

  “You know you look like one of them?” the IRS man grouched. “How do you pay for that shit you’re wearing?”

  Good question, Warner thought; and if you don’t like my clothes, you’d hate my Swiss bank account. It was a hot, muggy night and Warner had removed his suit jacket, exposing, in addition to his belly gun, a pure cotton shirt tailored to his girth, gold-nugget cufflinks, and a brand-new black-and-gold Baum and Mercier wristwatch.
His shoes, handmade in Italy, had set him back three hundred bucks each.

  “I been a cop eighteen years, so I make a decent buck. All I got to spend my salary on is one rent-controlled room. But don’t worry, Internal Affairs gets on my case every time I take a girl to dinner, so if I ever go on the take, they’ll be the first to tell you.” Good answer, he thought.

  “It always looks funny on a cop around dope.”

  “But at least I don’t look like a cop,” Warner replied mildly, “Half the wiseguys in town figure I’m on their side. Guys like to talk and I listen.”

  “I don’t look like a cop, either.”

  Warner’s quick eyes catalogued the hair too long over the ears, the tie that had turned up at Christmas, and the shoes cracking under the shine. “You look like a guy paying bills for a wife and three kids in the suburbs. Good cover. Suits you.”

  He peeked through the crack in the tin, but the street was empty. It was dumb to piss off anyone who might know something useful some day. “Hey,” he apologized, “when you love this city you want to own it—hold it! Like in your hand. Guys try different ways. A politician runs to be mayor. An actress wants her name on Broadway. Big builders like Trump and Taggart, they change how the sky looks. But the only way a cop can own the city is know it. Knowing who’s who makes me feel like New York is mine.”

  The telephone rang. They jumped. Ma Bell had come across. The FBI agent answered, listened, covered the phone, and asked Warner, “Would you mind, Jack?”

  An assistant United States attorney, one of the Strikeforce prosecutors, was writing warrants for the bust. Warner gave the kid the background, street names, and home addresses of the heroin traffickers they had spotted going in the garage.

  “You wearing a computer?” the lawyer asked.

  “Yeah. The FBI gave it to me. Fits in my heel.”

  It was an axiom of the drug trade that deals and dealers were always late. But the arrival of a stash-pad guard suggested to Warner that things were going to break, so he offered to relieve the man on the telescope. He knew, of course, the general drift of what was going down, but it was impossible to know everything, because lately strange things were going on in the rackets and a lot of people on both sides seemed to be running around with a bag on their head.