__________________
In response to an invitation from Leon, the Riffraff sent three delegates, each representing one aspect of the whole, to the station on Monday afternoon: The brains, Joshua Simcha, was five feet tall in dress shoes. At sixty-three, he had hands the size of a child’s, round spectacles, a mouth shaped like a wide beak, and the nervous, thin musculature of a bird. The brawn, Daniel Simcha—thirty-two, a six-foot-two block of solid, swollen muscle, with a full head of hair and a tinny, nasal voice completely incongruous with the rest of him. The beauty, Hadassah Simcha, forty-nine, resembled a hybrid gone bad: she had Joshua’s beak and his bad eyes, Daniel’s stature and pectorals, and it went downhill thereafter. She arrived wearing a white skirt suit—purchased at Ross Dress for Less on Westwood Boulevard and first worn at her eldest daughter’s bat mitzvah some ten years earlier. Under the jacket she sported a black cotton dress shirt she had bought from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills on the day of the historic “everything must go” sale in 2009 when, according to eyewitness and police reports, fully grown women from one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world had broken into fistfights over $5,000 Chanel purses at 50 percent off.
Hadassah had a firm handshake that bordered on aggressive. Daniel looked everywhere but in Leon’s eyes, twitched and rocked and shook to release tension from his muscles like a basketball player before a game. Joshua wore a kippah and carried a box of Persian nougat he had just bought from one of the half dozen Iranian grocery stores on Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire. He put the box on Leon’s desk and sat down in one of two lightweight aluminum chairs without armrests.
The bearing of a gift, usually nougat or pistachio nuts, was one of those gestures that had been de rigueur in Iran: you never called on another person, or asked a favor, without bringing an offering of sweets, or a bundle of flowers, or, if dealing with government officials, cops, or the police and military, a paper bag stuffed with cash. In the early years after the revolution, white people in America and Europe received more boxes of nougat and packets of pistachios than they could have consumed over an entire lifetime. Everyone from the bank teller to the hairdresser to the traffic court judge in areas with large concentrations of Iranians had a stack of brown and yellow boxes of gaz-e Esfahan—nougat from Esfahan—on their desk. The whites had no idea what to make of these offerings, and they were too polite to ask. The Iranians, in turn, sensed the white people’s discomfort and were embarrassed, but couldn’t understand why. It took a year or two for most to realize that offering gaz-e Esfahan to a police detective in the midst of an investigation could be construed as a cheap and ill-advised attempt at a bribe. Three decades later, the Simchas still hadn’t received the memo.
Joshua Simcha told Leon that he and his siblings were second cousins by marriage to Raphael’s Son. Their father, thanks to Hashem, was a big landowner in Iran, and he had provided the seed money for their many investments in America.
“We did okay, thank God.” He adjusted his kippah in hopes of drawing Leon’s attention to it. “Lately, we’ve been hurting because of my cousin who ripped us off.”
Like the handful of other Iranian Jews who had embraced orthodoxy in America as a business decision—good networking possibilities, and a general assumption that people of faith were more honest than others—the Simchas played the religion card whenever possible. They told Leon that they too had been victims of Raphael’s Son’s Ponzi scheme, only they had been singled out and blamed by the other creditors because of their family ties with him.
With Hashem as their witness, every last one of them had stayed in Palm Desert the entire weekend, plus Monday, and were nowhere within fifty miles of Holmby Hills.
They had no idea who could have committed such a heinous crime, only Hashem decides when and how we die. What they knew for sure was that the killer couldn’t have been an Iranian Jew, and that’s because, simply put, Iranian Jews did not kill.
You could go back three thousand years, study the entire history of the tribe, and, with the exception of those who had served in the army and fought in wars, you would not find a single instance—not one—of an Iranian Jew committing murder. Once every decade or so there might be a blow to the head or (more recently, in America) a shooting, but they all involved mentally ill people who avoided being medicated for fear of losing aabehroo. And there might have been a few suicides, but we’ll never know for sure because the families would never admit to that, again because of their aabehroo.
Here, the three Simchas took a break from their narrative, exchanged a few pregnant looks, mumbled to each other in Persian, and finally came to a consensus.
“If I were you,” Joshua reached over and put his own child-size hand on Leon’s, “I’d look outside ourselves for the culprit.” He was whispering—in Persian—and glancing to his right and left from the corners of his eyes for anyone within hearing range who might understand the language. “God forbid I should commit the sin of lashon hara, but you know, Mr. Soleyman had some dealings with that gangster, Jimmy Lorecchio.”
__________________
Jimmy Lorecchio was a half bald, grossly overweight, never-learned-how-to-button-up-his-pants, sixty-nine-year-old alcoholic with only a high school diploma and a red, bloated face marked with pus-filled red boils oozing teenage acne. Barely anyone outside city hall had heard of him or would have recognized his Buddha-like figure with the much-too-small head where, in a futile attempt at vanity, he dyed what little was left of his hair a greenish blond. He would have been better advised to work on his teeth, or whatever internal fumes caused the intense sulfuric smell that lapped out of him every time he so much as opened his mouth as he sat at his desk, already at work on his Wild Turkey, by three every afternoon.
By five p.m. he would be on the phone, yelling obscenities at any and every person foolish enough to take his call at that hour, and by seven he was passed out on the couch in his office, or behind his desk. His wife had divorced him and obtained a restraining order two decades before, his children had changed their names and moved away, and his only living relative, a sister in Florida, hadn’t reached out to him or returned his calls since Christmas 2001.
And yet, in spite of his atrocious physique and unsparing halitosis, Jimmy Lorecchio held the mayor, the fifteen members of the city council, the five county supervisors, and every other elected official in LA in a permanent state of terror. As head of the largest and most powerful union in the city, the International Brotherhood of City Workers, he could single-handedly swing any election by ordering his workers to vote a certain way. He traded on his reputation, well deserved, of being pathologically vindictive, unreasonable, and interested only in showing anyone who dared challenge him who held the ultimate authority in the city.
For years, there had been speculation that Lorecchio resorted to more than the plain old bullying of politicians to keep his fiefdom in check. Employees who left before they were fired often found themselves unable to find another job anywhere in the city; managers who so much as questioned a single decision he made were accused of everything from unethical behavior to flat-out madness, and summarily fired. Rumors abounded about unexplained house fires, illegal electronic surveillance, and accidental falls from the roofs of twenty-story buildings. No one—not the police, nor the district attorney, nor even private business owners who needed Lorecchio’s support to obtain city contracts or advance their agenda before the city council—dared mention the rumors aloud, much less try to verify their accuracy. Even the mainstream press, struggling to survive the electronic age and weary of the possibility of a union strike, bent over to avoid offending the boss.
* * *
“Jimmy Lorecchio had some dealings with Mr. Soleyman,” Hadassah Simcha said, joining her brother in not committing lashon hara.
Leon knew where she was going with this, but wasn’t about to make it easy for her.
“That is,” she said, “they knew each other through Lorecchio’s deputy, that guy everyone cal
ls Snake.”
Luci’s right-hand man was a ninety-year-old professional grifter known, not at all affectionately around city hall, as the Rat in the Hat. “Rat” was for his protruding yellow husk-like front teeth, and for his shifty, disloyal character; “Hat” was for the greasy, fraying, ill-fitting cowboy hat he wore day and night, indoors and out. The other was a dark-skinned chauffeur-turned-spy from East Asia who reeked of incense and bore an uncanny resemblance to a Bengali water buffalo. His name was Naji, but he was so openly devious, habitually deceitful, and instinctively mean, most people referred to him as “That Fucking Snake.” Together, they carried out the unsavory tasks Luci did not wish to be linked to directly.
Hadassah was still waiting for Leon to exhibit a sign of recognition. Next to her, the younger brother had gone back to contemplating his knuckles, and Joshua remained still, mouth half open and eyes darting behind the glasses.
“You know that missing $30 million they wrote about in the papers awhile ago?”
Leon nodded.
For years, Jimmy Lorecchio had had singular jurisdiction over the union’s funds and other holdings. He spent as he pleased, to support candidates he could control when they assumed office or to prompt other unions to back his own stance on issues, and God only knows what else, legal or not, because no one from the union, the press, or the city was going to risk alienating him by demanding an accounting. Among his many expenses was a special fund set up in the year 2000 to “help facilitate greater understanding between labor and business.” At the time of its establishment, Lorecchio transferred $30 million from the union’s coffers into the fund. After that, no one heard about the fund for thirteen years.
In 2013 a Los Angeles Times reporter asked about the fund and was told that it was empty. He asked what the money had been spent on and did not get an answer. Normally, that was as far as the matter would go, given Luci’s sway. But courage comes from the most unlikely places. The paper pursued the question throughout the year. In 2014, a new city comptroller—apparently not angling for reelection—committed blasphemy by asking the courts to order Luci to open the fund’s books or otherwise report on the fate of the $30 million. The last anyone knew, Luci was accusing the comptroller of union busting and had called for a citywide strike.
“Well,” Hadassah sighed, as if truly saddened to have to break such news, “I’ll bet you can guess what happened to that money once Mr. Soleyman declared bankruptcy.”
* * *
According to Hadassah Simcha and her two brothers, Raphael’s Son had enticed Lorecchio to entrust him with the fund’s money. They had met in 1998, when Raphael’s Son wanted to buy a piece of land that belonged to the union. Technically, the property wasn’t officially for sale, so Raphael’s Son followed the informal protocol of reaching out to That Fucking Snake with an offer to be taken to the boss. The land was purchased for $10 million, well below market value. Luci’s permission to sell the land was purchased for $2 million, deposited by Eddy Arax in a numbered account in the Caymans. To Raphael’s Son, this was just the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.
He prevailed upon That Snake to arrange a meeting with the Rat in the Hat. He, in turn, carried a message to Lucifer. At a time when banks offered an interest rate of 3.5 percent on a CD, Raphael’s Son guaranteed a 10 percent return. From that profit, he suggested, Luci could reimburse the union its 3.5 percent and keep the difference for himself.
They started with smaller deposits—a few hundred thousand dollars at a time. Once a month, the Rat would bring a stack of cash and hand it to Eddy, pick up the interest payment on the existing deposit in cash, and be gone. But Luci got bolder. The deposits became larger. The fund was established. Thirty million dollars was transferred into its coffers, then promptly handed over to Eddy Arax.
“But you see, Mr. Pulitzer,” Hadassah offered her best Goldie Hawn smile, “you don’t cross Jimmy Lorecchio and expect to get away unharmed.”
And besides, Leon carried the thought to its logical conclusion, who knew what Raphael’s Son would be willing to reveal in order to buy himself immunity from prosecution or enter a plea deal if the trial wasn’t going his way?
__________________
To see if he could learn any more about either the Riffraff or Lorecchio, Leon paid a visit to the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee.
Not the most popular person on the block, the trustee and his army of lawyers, forensic accountants, and sundry other experts had so far collected close to $80 million by suing every investor who ever withdrew money (whether capital or interest) from the pool. They had also billed the account and received close to $80 million in fees.
In return for their services, they had managed to unearth the following facts: a) that Raphael’s Son had lost or misplaced $500 million of “investors’” money; b) that he had kept no written record of how or why the money was lost; and c) that the trustee suspected most of the money was misplaced in overseas accounts, and the rest of it in the accounts of twenty-seven of his family members.
Many a page of the Pearl Cannon had been devoted by Angela to the simple observation that the trustee’s $80 million worth of “discovery” could have been related, to any judge with an IQ of ten or above, by any one of Raphael’s Son’s victims. That the only people benefitting from the trustee’s investigation were the trustee and his crew. That the victims should stop fighting each other and trying to make nice with the trustee so he wouldn’t sue them again, and instead band together and demand that the judge who appointed the person rein him in.
Five years later, the trustee’s divide-and-conquer tactics were still paying off (for him), and the judge still took no interest.
* * *
The office was on the twenty-fourth floor of a tower in Century City, across the street from where Raphael’s Son had been. The ground floor and half a dozen others were occupied by the Creative Artists Agency, hence the frenetic energy in the lobby and the throngs of attractive young men and women, all dressed like Ralph Lauren models, carrying cups of coffee or lugging laundry bags. Like everyone else in LA with a pulse, Leon thought of CAA as a near-mythological place run by diabolical madmen and more difficult to penetrate than the inner bowels of the Pentagon. Before they moved their headquarters from Beverly Hills to Century City, Leon had tried twice to get a close-up glimpse of America’s Forbidden City. Even with a detective’s badge, trying to approach the agency’s gatekeepers had been an exercise in humiliation. This time he did his best not to look toward the (was it really bulletproof glass?) door, but in the short distance from the street to the elevators he caught himself fantasizing that one of the agents who specialized in selling books for film adaptation had intercepted him and was asking him—Leon—for a meeting.
* * *
In his office, the trustee sat across from Leon with his elbows resting on a glass desk and his hands touching at the fingertips. He seemed more like a bad therapist, Leon thought, than a good lawyer. He wore a loose white cotton dress shirt over loose black pants, the obligatory two-tone Rolex, the kind of expensive eyeglasses television news anchors were modeling of late because they thought it made them more credible.
He told Leon that, as far as “the trust” had been able to establish, Raphael’s Son had maintained 113 corporations, most of them unregistered, over a twenty-year period. He moved money around from one to the other until it was untraceable, and he didn’t keep written records of the most important ones because he and Eddy were both products of the Iranian education system where memorization was king.
“I’m told that over there kids have to memorize entire books, first word to last, including punctuation, to get through school. To pass the college entrance exam they have to retain ten thousand math problems and be able to spew them out instantaneously. They don’t need Quicken to keep track of their money.”
It was true, Leon knew. Especially for someone as bright as Raphael’s Son. Then again, what a waste it had been—all that work so he could be the
human equivalent of some kind of bookkeeping software designed to steal from orphans and widows.
“The bookkeeper maintained a log.” The trustee raised an eyebrow to emphasize how much contempt he had for this manner of record keeping. “Written by hand. In pencil. And good luck making sense of it.”
Leon asked about a relationship with Lorecchio.
The trustee smiled mechanically. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Leon asked if the trustee had obtained records of a $30 million deposit, circa 2003.
“Compared to some others, that’s chump change.” The trustee touched his fingertips again.
“This is a wealthy community.” He said this as if being rich was an automatic sign of corruption.
“This is a wealthy town.” Leon challenged the implied criticism of Iranians for being successful. “You wouldn’t hold it against the people?”
The trustee smiled. He didn’t say no, or yes. For Leon, that was the last straw.
“In fact, I’m told you’ve become quite wealthy from this one assignment alone,” he spat, then stood up.
He was almost at the door when the trustee said, “I wouldn’t cross Lorecchio over this.”
Leon turned with his most indignant look to the trustee. Was it not his job, for $80 million, to look into the provenance and fate of creditors’ assets?
“You know, Mr. Pulitzer, the Iranians ask me why the Madoff trustee wrapped up that investigation in three years, and mine is still ongoing.”
Leon waited.
“I tell you what I tell them: because Madoff’s plan wasn’t nearly as complicated.”
__________________
Before he joined the academy Leon had changed his surname from Pooldar to Pulitzer because he thought other cops would take him more seriously if they didn’t know he was Iranian. He also felt it did a better job of defining him as a person, since pooldar means “one who has a lot of money”; Leon had been close to broke at the time.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 21