“You need to make the time,” Mars said seriously.
“I wish it was that simple.”
“It is,” Mars said.
Keshari shook her head at the ridiculousness of the man’s persistence. The entire situation that appeared to be transpiring between the two of them was ridiculous, especially considering the steadily mushrooming set of circumstances in her life that remained barely within the fringes of her control.
“There is no way that you can deny that there was a connection made between the two of us the other night,” Mars said. “No… not just the other night, but from the moment we met. I can honestly tell you that I don’t ever remember a time when I’ve felt such…compulsion…to get to know a woman, spend time with her, be a part of her world, and have her be a part of mine. I mean, let’s be very clear here. I don’t make a habit of showing up at powerful women’s offices unannounced and throwing myself at them.”
Keshari allowed herself to smile at Mars’s last remark.
“Look,” Mars said, getting up and going to Keshari, “just tell me that you don’t want to see me again and I assure you that I will make myself cease to exist for you. Look me in the eye and tell me that I made a mistake coming here today, that you have absolutely no interest in me, and you will never be bothered by my presence again.”
Keshari didn’t say anything.
“Tell me,” Mars insisted.
He got no response.
“Tell me,” he said again, backing Keshari up against her office door.
Still, she said nothing.
“Yeah. Like I thought,” Mars said.
He kissed Keshari as he had the night they’d had dinner, spontaneously, passionately, and Keshari found herself kissing him back. Ricky had been right. She couldn’t explain it and it would be so corny and ridiculously cliché to call it “kismet,” but there was a strong connection between the two of them that had started on the night that they’d met entirely by accident. She was so fucking attracted to him and she was so tired and frustrated with living a life that was so damned restrictive that she constantly had to shut off her emotions and the possibility of forming an emotional connection with someone else.
For a moment, she lost herself in the amazing feeling of him kissing her. Then, just as quickly, she pulled away, completely conflicted, her heart screaming one thing and her mind calmly and rationally telling her the safest, wisest thing to do.
“Okay, now what?” Mars asked in exasperation.
Thoughts flashed through Keshari’s mind about what had happened to her Range Rover, what Ricky had said to her, and she didn’t even have to think about what would happen if she continued to try him. Even though her entering into a relationship with Mars Buchanan would have nothing at all to do with the affairs of The Consortium, Ricky would make it an issue. It was all about control with him and what he called “loyalty.”
“Serious romantic relationships cause crime bosses to slip,” Ricky would say. Quite a contradiction since Keshari and Ricky had once been very seriously involved and had emotional ties that continued to exist from their relationship to that day.
“I can’t do this,” she said, as much as a huge part of her wanted to. “I’m serious. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into, trying to get involved with me…and I’m at a place in my life right now where getting involved with you is simply not feasible.”
“Tell you what,” Mars said, equally seriously. “I’m not going to continue to engage in this very circular discussion with you. I have to fly to our New York offices for two weeks and I have a speaking engagement at Howard University in D.C. You’ve got fourteen whole days to get the most pressing matters on your schedule squared away. When I get back, I’ll call you and we’ll get together and do something…and I won’t accept ‘no’ for an answer.”
“You know, you make a lot of aggressive demands for a man whose position in my personal sphere is new, extremely precarious and very expendable,” Keshari said semi-jokingly.
“Oh, it’s like that?” Mars asked teasingly.
“It’s like that,” Keshari responded.
She was already relenting.
“Well, let’s just say that I know what I want, I go after what I want, and I am abundantly aware that the really good things in life generally only come through hard work and much persistence.”
“Your pursuit of the really good things in life is going to wind you up with a restraining order against you,” Keshari quipped.
“Oh, you’ve got jokes.” Mars smiled, completely undaunted by the remark.
He planted a kiss on Keshari’s forehead.
“I’ve got to go. I cancelled my schedule to come here this morning. I’ll call you as soon as I get back into town and you’d better be prepared to deal with me.”
After he was gone, Keshari was still very conflicted.
“You know you should have ended it,” she said to herself.
LTL’s PR and legal departments had reviewed the information contained in the press release and Terrence was busy at the fax machine, prepared to launch the news to media. The nationwide talent search was a go. It would be the largest, most expensive single project that Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment had ever undertaken. The project would conduct auditions in ten U.S. cities and the auditions would kick off in one month in Los Angeles, at Universal Studios. The first billboards were going up that day on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and at Universal Studios. Then an enormous, digital billboard on top of the Sony building on the world famous Times Square in New York City had been leased to announce the event to the East Coast. Keshari had a meeting in LTL’s main conference room that day with a senior staff writer for Billboard magazine to discuss the launch of the talent search project. A & R executives were visiting major, urban music radio stations across the country over the next four weeks to hype the launch of the talent search project to radio listeners.
Ricky received notification of Machaca’s decision to terminate their business dealings with The Consortium via a letter from Keshari delivered by his attorney. The letter was written in a cryptic numerical code that many crime organizations developed to communicate, particularly when members were imprisoned. Ricky had learned the code, which changed constantly to keep law enforcement from learning to decode it, during his early gangbanging days and, in turn, he had taught the code to Keshari.
The news regarding The Consortium’s exclusive supplier so infuriated Ricky that he hurled a chair against the window of the small room that he and his attorney used to confer about his case. He yelled obscenities in fury and was immediately restrained and escorted back to his cell. Ricky’s attorney was instructed by the sheriff’s officers to strongly advise his client to control himself and the attorney was told that he could return to meet with his client, provided that Ricky had his temper fully under control, the following day during visiting hours.
It is an everyday occurrence for cocaine to be transported into the United States and circulated throughout the country. In the United States alone, on average, about 250 tons of cocaine are consumed by users annually. Benjamin Arellano Felix of the infamous, Mexican Arellano-Felix cartel once stated that “as long as there exists that kind of demand for cocaine, there will always be a supply of it” and virtually every conceivable group engaged in the business of organized crime participates.
The United States is one of the only nations in the world with an organized tactical force of law enforcement agents numbering in the thousands who are engaged in a continuous “war on drugs,” yet, after more than twenty years of a changing political arena, stiffer laws and sentencing for drug-related offenses, along with millions and millions of dollars earmarked specifically for the fight, the so-called “war on drugs” is still no closer to being won than it was when the whole war started. A number of factors weigh into such a dismal outcome, one of them being the United States’ covert and not-so-covert involvement in, and profit from, the international drug trade since the beginning
.
A freight trailer backed up to the loading dock at FLOSS Auto Customizing in Inglewood. The driver hopped from the truck’s cab and opened the trailer’s rear doors. Three FLOSS employees came out to the loading dock to help the truck driver and his partner unload. Twenty-six pallets containing stacked cases of eighteen-, twenty-and twenty-two-inch designer auto rims, along with 300 well-concealed keys of 80 percent pure Colombian cocaine, worth nearly $15 million once it was completely distributed to The Consortium’s client base, had made its way unscathed from Bogota to Mexico, from Machaca’s warehouses right outside Mexicali, all the way to the first point of delivery in Los Angeles.
Keshari arrived at FLOSS with Marcus Means. Javier Sandovar, along with four of his men, arrived shortly thereafter. It was the first time that Keshari and Javier had come together since their two organizations had parted ways and the meeting was tense, but Javier needed to be present to confirm that each segment of the shipment arrived in full and intact. They talked briefly before they each went to their separate corners to conduct discussions on their cell phones and wait for the offload work to be completed. It would take two to three hours for all of the auto rims to be unloaded, unpacked, disassembled and all of the valuable product removed from them by FLOSS employees. Once the delivery had been counted, it would be loaded into the door wells, bumpers, wheel wells, and secret compartments of various automobiles owned by Consortium members, including the black Suburban that Keshari was driving. Then the product would be transported and delivered to several “processing houses” owned by Ricky and The Consortium all over Los Angeles, where the keys would be broken down, most of them diluted, repackaged in accordance to the orders of the client base, and then flown to various areas of the country for delivery and collection of payment.
It was 1 p.m. when Keshari and Javier confirmed the count of the shipment. The two also confirmed their next meeting in two days at AESTHETIC, Ricky’s Baldwin Hills art gallery. Javier and his men left. Keshari began issuing instructions to the small group of men and a woman who’d arrived to assist in driving the divided product to the processing houses.
It was a very bold and dangerous mission, moving that much cocaine across the city in a relatively small time window on a single day, both from a law enforcement standpoint and from the standpoint of rival gangs gaining access to information and attempting an ambush. Everyone, including Keshari and Marcus, wore bulletproof vests. All of them carried scanners in order to hear communication between police officers in the field and dispatchers at nearby precincts. The Consortium had acquired special coding that enabled them to switch from channel to channel to pick up the police communications at more than one precinct. All of them came heavily armed, prepared to do battle in the unlikely event of an ambush. They all worked with the full understanding that they were required to guard the product with their lives. If there was a loss of product and it was determined that the product was lost due to someone’s own negligence, the repercussion would be a final one. The Consortium’s loss ratio was a very small one.
“Okay, let’s move,” Keshari ordered. “I need an update from all of you in thirty minutes. I’ll contact each of the processing houses in precisely two hours. Each of the segments must have been delivered, fully received and documented by then. No exceptions. You need to call me immediately if you think you even smell what might be a problem.”
A little way up the alley from FLOSS, a telephone repairman sat, belted near the top of a utility pole directly outside his open repair van, with a high-powered camera, snapping shot after shot of the seemingly routine delivery at the auto customizer, from the moment that the freight trailer backed up to FLOSS’s loading dock to the moment that the black Suburban that Keshari was driving pulled out of the garage, followed shortly thereafter by five other customized SUVs, a sports car and a sedan, headed for The Consortium’s processing houses.
In a serious, navy Armani Collection suit, Richard Tresvant, surrounded by his personal “dream team” of attorneys and a team of professional bodyguards and sheriff’s officers, made his way into the side entrance of Superior Court in Downtown Los Angeles. A throng of newspaper and television reporters, all of them posing questions at once, scurried quickly after the group.
“No comment,” Larry Steinberg, Ricky’s lead attorney, told the media, and then the group quickly hustled into the building, the reporters barred from entry by the sheriff’s officers who maintained the busy courthouse’s security.
It was day one of People and the State of California v. Richard Lawrence Tresvant. His charge was first-degree murder. The victim was prominent, Los Angeles corporate attorney Phinnaeus Bernard III of the prestigious Carlyle, Brown, Von Klaus & Pennington Law Firm. The Honorable Phelton Bartholomew was presiding.
“All rise,” the bailiff said to the packed courtroom, and court was in session.
Ricky sat at the defense table, suavely poised as if a camera was directed at him. He stared straight ahead, except when he leaned over from time to time to converse with one of his attorneys. His facial expression was grave, as it should have been in consideration of the brevity of his charges, but his reputation for arrogance and a hair-trigger temper when crossed had far preceded him to the first day of his murder trial. Spectators in the courtroom watched his every move, his every gesture, waiting for his facade to slip and expose the murderous gangster who’d managed over and over and over again to slip through the grasp of law enforcement for numerous, heinous crimes to which he was reputedly connected or for which he was directly responsible.
Members of Phinnaeus Bernard III’s family sat right behind the prosecution table. Phinnaeus Bernard’s wife was elegant and dignified, her suit and hair flawless. Phinnaeus Bernard’s two children, were polished and well-educated and seemingly beyond immediate reproach, like a politician’s family.
Partners at Carlyle Brown, Phinnaeus’s law firm, had mutually come to the decision not to make themselves visible in support of the Bernard family over the course of the trial until completion of the firm’s independent investigation into the scandal surrounding Phinnaeus’s death, particularly since the scandal may have been linked to the business affairs of the firm. Carlyle Brown maintained a stellar reputation in the field of corporate law and they would not have that reputation tarnished by one attorney gone bad, even if he was a partner. Partners and associates at the firm sent their condolences and words of support to the Bernard family, but all were noticeably absent at the opening of the trial.
Richard Tresvant’s support system was noticeably absent as well. With the exception of his very sizeable legal defense team, no family, friends, nor business associates were present, although several of his business associates were expected to testify on his behalf, including one business associate who would corroborate Ricky’s alibi.
Although neither the prosecution nor the defense had any objections to live television coverage of the trial, Judge Phelton Bartholomew promptly banned live coverage in his courtroom and granted only a handful of press passes to media, without the presence of cameras, to cover the trial. Judge Bartholomew remembered the O.J. Simpson trial and was adamant that neither the judicial process nor his courtroom would be turned into a three-ring circus.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley stood and took the podium. His team of supporting attorneys stopped whispering among themselves and looked on. The opening statement was a crucial part of the trial. It was the one part of the trial, with the exception of the closing statement, in which both the prosecution and the defense had the most latitude to swing the jury in their favor without objection or rebuttal.
The prosecution knew that spectators, as well as members of the jury, were anxiously awaiting the defense’s opening statement. Therefore, the prosecution’s opening had to have maximum motivating impact on the jury. Richard Tresvant had a team of legal “all-stars” defending him, from Larry Steinberg, Richard’s lead attorney, to Barry Scheck, on forensic evidence. These people were s
ome of the greatest legal minds in the country and were guaranteed to bring as much drama to the trial as the highly sensational murder case itself.
“Organized crime is complex beast,” Steve Cooley stated. “Organized crime is so complex, so insidious, that it is becoming more and more difficult to prove, and organized criminals are becoming more and more difficult to apprehend, indict, and convict. Millions of dollars are spent annually by local, state, and federal law enforcement to bring down organized crime. Millions of dollars more are spent by organized crime rings to continue building their empires of dirty, often blood-soaked, money without interference. It’s a never-ending battle that is glamorized in books, movies and in current rap music.
“And what does any of this have to do with the execution-style murder of prominent, Los Angeles, corporate attorney Phinnaeus Bernard III? In the complex and vile machinations of criminal business enterprises and the laundering of criminals’ dirty money, innocent people sometimes get caught most unfortunately in the undertow. One of those people was Phinnaeus Bernard III.
“On March 11, 2005, at approximately 10 p.m., Phinnaeus Bernard III was murdered in the underground parking garage of his workplace at 300 South Grand, right here in downtown Los Angeles; two bullets to his chest and one bullet to his head.”
Steve Cooley stepped over to a giant, life-sized photograph of the crime scene. Spectators in the courtroom gasped in horror. A close-up, blood-spattered view of Phinnaeus Bernard inside his Mercedes with its driver side door ajar glared like a spotlight at the courtroom. Phinnaeus Bernard’s wife wept quietly while the family comforted her. Steve Cooley moved back to the podium and the crime scene photo was removed.
“Phinnaeus Bernard III had a thriving career as a corporate attorney. He was a partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. Phinnaeus Bernard III had no criminal record, no criminal history. Nonetheless, he came to know Richard Lawrence Tresvant…and Mr. Tresvant possesses a lengthy history of run-ins with the law. He sits here now in his expensive suit, with his legal ‘dream team’ and he looks almost like he’s a pillar of the community. But, I repeat, Richard Tresvant has had NUMEROUS run-ins with the law and there have been repeated allegations, complete with indictments, that have brought him to court on multiple prior occasions to fight charges related to major involvement in California’s narcotics pipeline, as well as major affiliations to various other organized criminal enterprises. Each time, he comes to court with high-priced, well-known defense attorneys to fight his case and, every time, he manages to slither right under the radar of conviction. He’d like you to believe that he is a legitimate, affluent businessman with multiple, lucrative business enterprises, who is perpetually persecuted by Los Angeles law enforcement because he is Black…”
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