Saints Of New York

by R.J. Ellory

  'So what does this have to do with Marty?'

  'Lou buys off Marty with a tip about Lufthansa and the money, and Marty takes it to Jimmy Burke, king of hijackers. Jimmy acts nonchalant: he might be into it, he might not. He doesn't want Marty to know he's interested because he hates the guy. I mean, really hates him. Jimmy was an insomniac, and sometimes when he was watching late-night TV, he would see Marty in these wig commercials himself, and he bitched about the fact that Marty had money for TV ads, but not for protection money for his store. Apparently Jimmy had tried to get Marty to pay protection, but Marty threatened to go to the DA. After that Jimmy never trusted him.

  'Regardless of that, the amount of money that Marty was talking about, what could Jimmy Burke do? Was he going to pass up on something like that because of a wig salesman? He had his buddy Henry Hill speak with Marty Krugman, and Marty dealt with Lou Werner. Everything was distant, everything was twice- removed. Jimmy didn't even want Marty to know that he was going to be doing the airport job himself. But there it was, the biggest robbery in history. This was US dollars, all random and unmarked, coming in from West Germany. This was money spent by American servicemen and tourists over there. It comes back here on Lufthansa flights, it's stored overnight in the cargo bays, and then it gets moved out to the banks.

  'Lou Werner gives them the names of all the employees and guards. They know the name of the terminal's senior cargo agent, the name of the night supervisor, the only employee with the right keys and combinations to open the double-door vault. They know there's a primary door, and if the secondary door was opened before the primary door was closed, then a silent alarm would be activated at the Port Authority police office. They knew everything.'

  'And what did they get away with?'

  'Five million dollars, cash. And then another eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of jewelry. And Burke kept it very tight to his chest. He shut everything down once they hit Lufthansa. No-one said a word, no-one breathed a word, that was his order. No-one spent anything, no-one discussed it in their homes, their cars, their back yards.'

  'But it didn't go as planned?'

  'Oh, the robbery went as planned. The robbery went exactly as planned. They had the place down cold, they knew it off by heart because of Lou Werner's detailed information, and they were in and out in an hour. The difficulty was that this was now a very high profile case, and all over the news. December 1978, five million dollars? I can't even begin to imagine what that would translate to now. Anyway, Jimmy was paranoid. He knew that with the number of people involved, and the very long sentences that would come down if they were caught, there was always the possibility that somebody might strike a deal with the DA to keep themselves out of jail. Organizationally, he had managed things well, and there was only one person who had ever met Lou Werner face-to-face—'

  'Marty Krugman.'

  'Well, no. The only one of Burke's gang that ever met Lou Werner was a guy called Joe Manri, but Marty was the mouthpiece. He was the one making all the noise, and so Burke killed Marty Krugman first. And once he'd killed him, it sort of set the precedent for anyone else who said anything out of turn. Jimmy Burke had connections into the OCCB, one of which was my father, and he let it be known that if anyone came in blabbing about the Lufthansa heist he needed to know about it. All told, there were ten murders as a result of Lufthansa, and though the general belief is that Jimmy and his people killed them all, I can tell you that that was not the case.'

  'Your father—'

  'My father knew all about it. He condoned it, and even if he hadn't had to kill anyone himself he would have assigned people to do that for Jimmy Burke.'

  'And Jimmy Burke paid him?'

  'Yeah, he paid him.'

  'How much?'

  'I have no idea. A hundred grand, maybe two hundred and fifty grand. Burke had five million dollars. He had however many accomplices who were vanishing at a rapid rate. I'm sure that Jimmy Burke wound up with most of that money all to himself.'

  'And the investigation?'

  'Well, the Feds sent in a hundred agents in the first forty-eight hours. They had police from the NYPD and the Port Authority; they had insurance company investigators; people from Brinks, Lufthansa's own internal security crews. Everyone was down there. The FBI got Burke's name somehow - not enough evidence to arrest him, but enough to put surveillance on him and a few of the others who had done the robbery - but Burke and his people managed to lose the helicopter traces by driving into FAA restricted flight zone areas at JFK. The Feds bugged their cars, but they had whispered conversations in the back seats with the radios turned up full volume.'

  'Did they get any of them?'

  'Well, they knew right from the get-go that it had to be an inside job. Burke's crew had hit precisely the correct warehouse out of a possible twenty-two on a three hundred and fifty-acre site. The cargo agent and the night supervisor told the investigators that the gunmen had known their names, the layout of the building, known about the vault doors, the whole works. Lufthansa's security people had given over Lou Werner's name within hours of the robbery because he'd already been a suspect in an earlier foreign currency robbery. That time there had been insufficient evidence against him, but this time Werner had actually stopped the Brinks security truck from collecting the five million dollars on the previous Friday night. He told them that he needed the signature of a cargo executive to let them take the money, which was not the usual procedure, but he forbade them to take the shipment and kept them waiting for an hour and a half. They were eventually ordered to continue their round without the Lufthansa cash, so the Feds knew that not only had Lou arranged that the cash was still there, but he was pretty much the only person who knew it was still inside the vault.'

  'They arrested him?'

  'Well, they put surveillance on him, they bugged him, they interviewed people he knew. They spoke to his wife, Beverley, who had left him some time before, and she told them that Lou had called her up, told her that he was coming into a great deal of money, and that she would seriously regret leaving him. Lou also told his best friend about the robbery a month before it even happened, and agreed to give him thirty grand for his taxicab business. Then he found out that this best friend was actually having an affair with the ex-wife, and he called up this guy and said he could go fuck himself as far as the thirty grand was concerned. Once the robbery was all over the newspapers, Lou told his girlfriend all about it, how clever he was, how proud she should be of him, but she panicked, told him that he would wind up in jail. Lou was really upset about her reaction. He hoped she'd be impressed with what a smart guy he was, but she went all crazy and hysterical so Lou, all down and depressed, goes to his favorite bar and tells the barman all about it.'

  'So he was not the smartest guy in the world.'

  'Well, he was an amateur. He wasn't Jimmy Burke, that's for sure. And this old buddy of his - the one that was screwing Lou's wife - well, he was so afraid that his own wife would find out about his affair with Beverley Werner that he agreed to help the FBI any which way he could. It was a straightforward job from there. They got testimony from half a dozen different people that Lou Werner had spoken to and took him in.'

  'And he informed on Burke and the rest of the people?'

  'Well, that's what they thought he would do. The assistant US attorney who was heading up the case, a guy called Ed McDonald, got the name of a Lufthansa cargo employee called Peter Gruenewald. Word was that Werner and Gruenewald had put the plan together. McDonald interrogated Gruenewald, who denied everything, but they found out that Gruenewald had applied for tickets to Bogota, and then on to Taiwan. Then they found one of the guys that Gruenewald had approached as a possible contender for carrying out the job that he and Werner had planned. They had enough to tie Gruenewald in with Lufthansa, so he elected to cooperate with McDonald.

  'Well, McDonald thought that Werner would just roll over on everyone involved. He'd talked about nothing else but Luftha
nsa before he was arrested, but the moment they took him in he closed up like a clam. He said he had nothing to do with the robbery, that he had merely boasted about it to his wife and his girlfriend to satisfy his own ego. Until they confronted him with Gruenewald. Werner damned near had a heart attack right there and then, but he still insisted that he knew nothing about the robbery. Regardless, with testimony from Gruenewald, from Beverley Werner, from Lou's girlfriend, from the bartender, McDonald went to trial. May 1978, a ten-day trial, and Lou Werner was found guilty of organizing the Lufthansa robbery. Now Lou could go one way or the other. He could give up Joe Manri, and Manri could then give up Jimmy Burke and the rest of the crew, or he could keep his mouth shut.'

  'What did he do?'

  'Well, he didn't get a chance to make a decision. The same night a squad car unit in Brooklyn found the dead bodies of Joe Manri and another colleague of his, Robert McMahon, in a car on the corner of Shenectady and Avenue M. Both had been shot with a single .44 in the back of the head.'

  'You're going into a lot of small details, Frank. Why is that?'

  'Because . . . well, because I think . . . Well, if my father was involved directly in any of this, then I think it might have been that. I think he might have killed Manri and McMahon and prevented Lou Werner from ever giving Ed McDonald the connection he wanted to Jimmy Burke.'

  'You actually believe he might have done that?'

  'I think so, yes.'

  'Why?'

  'It was April of '79 when Lou Werner was tried. I was nearly fifteen years old, and I remember my father coming home that evening. We'd been following the thing on the TV. It was a big deal, you know, and they'd been going on about it for days. Anyway, he came home, and there was some feature or news program, and the guy was saying that Werner had been convicted and was waiting sentence, and there was a possibility he might cooperate with the US Attorney's Office in an effort to reduce his sentence.'

  'And your father was watching it with you?'

  'He was. It was some hours before the report came in about the two dead guys in Brooklyn, and my dad just smiled to himself, like I wasn't even there, and he said that it didn't matter what happened now. He said that it didn't matter what Lou Werner said now, that they would never get the guys who did it. And I looked at him right after he said it, and there was this expression on his face, you know? I thought then, and I think now, that he was the one who shot those two guys in their car and got Jimmy Burke off the hook for Lufthansa.'

  'Oh my God—'

  'You don't need to tell me. This was the guy with all the citations and commends. This was the guy, the hero, who headed up the Saints of New York.'

  TWENTY-NINE

  Parrish took a walk after his session with Marie Griffin. It was a little after ten. Radick had not yet arrived, and there was no message at the desk. Ordinarily, Parrish would have chased him up, but this morning - this of all mornings - he wanted some time and space for himself.

  It took him twenty-five minutes to reach St. Michael's. He stood outside for a few moments, and then he made his way in, staying back behind the pews, traversing left and walking down the outside aisle. He stopped halfway, took a seat, and listened to the sound of nothing.

  Father Briley saw him from the chancel, nodded in acknowledgement, and just when Parrish believed he might be left alone the priest started walking down towards him. Briley was an old man, late sixties perhaps, or early seventies. Parrish understood that he'd been offered a transfer elsewhere many times, and each time he'd refused. Briley had been here since Parrish was a child, when his father had brought him to church some Sundays because he, John Parrish, was a just-in-case Catholic.

  'Frank.'

  'Father.'

  'I can sit?' asked Briley.

  Parrish smiled.

  'You are well, Frank?'

  'As can be.'

  'Seems we speak too infrequently these days, don't you think?'

  'Yes, Father, I do.'

  'You are working too many hours, I imagine.'

  'The work doesn't stop. You know that as well as anyone.'

  Briley smiled. He reached out and gripped Parrish's forearm. 'We appreciate your generosity, Frank, as always.' 'I do what I can.'

  Briley hesitated, and then he looked at Parrish directly. 'You have about you the air of a man defeated.'

  'Defeated?' Parrish shook his head. 'Frustrated perhaps, defeated no. They haven't broken me yet.'

  'You must take better care of yourself.'

  'Why do you—'

  'Frank, I see what I see. I've been here too long to be fooled anymore. You do not eat well. I imagine you do not sleep. And there's the drink . . .'

  'I'm doing what it says in the Bible, Father.'

  Briley laughed. 'That old line?'

  'You know it?'

  'Of course I do. Proverbs thirty-one, chapters six and seven. "Give strong drink to him who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more." You can't be the priest in an Irish community and not have heard that line a hundred thousand times before, believe me.'

  Parrish looked away towards the end of the pews.

  'And your family?' Briley asked. 'How are the children? Clare?'

  'Clare is Clare, and my children are so far from children it's hard to imagine that they ever were children. They survive in their own ways, as we all do.'

  'And you are troubled by your work?'

  Parrish was silent a moment, thoughtful, before he answered, 'Yes, I suppose I am, to some degree perhaps. We see the worst of it after it's been done, you know?'

  'And the burden grows heavier with time I should think.'

  'Either that, or you become inured and weathered to it all.'

  'Like your father?'

  Parrish looked up at the priest.

  Briley nodded. 'He came here alone sometimes. Not for mass, not for anything but a little peace and quiet. I spoke to him on a number of occasions, and he looked like you look now.'

  Parrish frowned.

  'As if he was carrying the same kind of burden.'

  'I can tell you now that he was carrying an entirely different kind of burden,' Parrish replied. 'More a burden of guilt than anything else.'

  'Why do you say that, Frank?'

  'Because he was not an honest man, Father. He was a corrupt and self-serving man. He knew his job well enough to see the lines, but he chose to step over them.'

  'You know this?'

  'Yes.'

  'And you've always known?'

  'Pretty much, yes.'

  Briley leaned back. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. 'How do you deal with something like that, Frank? When someone so close is believed to be a paragon of decency and honesty and you believe they are not?'

  'I don't think that you can deal with it.'

  'And you feel differently about this now than you have in the past?'

  'I'm trying to feel differently about it. I'm talking about it with someone. I've never talked about it before.'

  'Talking is good.'

  'I'm sure it can be. Right now it's doing little more than making me angry at him. It reminds me of all the reasons I had for hating him.'

  Once again Briley gripped Parrish's forearm. 'Hate—'

  'Is one of the seven deadly sins?'

  'No it's not, Frank. It was a close runner but it didn't make the last hurdle.'

  Parrish smiled.

  'Hate is a powerful emotion/ Briley went on. 'Sometimes justified, I am sure, but in my experience it tends to do more harm to the hater than the hatee.'

  Parrish laughed. 'Well, the hatee is dead, so I don't think there's a great deal more harm that can come to him.'

  'Yet sometimes the memory of the man is more powerful than the man himself. The strength of reputation, of what other people think of him.'

  'It wouldn't do any good to dispel the myth. As you know, my father was a self-proclaimed Samaritan and all-ro
und good guy.'

  Briley smiled sardonically. 'I know he was neither one of those,' he said.

  'I think the only person's well-being he was interested in was his own—'

  'You don't need to tell me, Frank, you really don't.'

  'I feel like I have to tell someone. Someone other than—'

  'No,' Briley interjected. 'You don't have to tell me because I already know.'

  Parrish raised his eyebrows.

  'Don't look so surprised, Frank. Really, you'd be amazed the things people will tell a priest, even outside the confessional box. Your father was here a month or so before he was killed, and he alluded to certain things, certain events, that troubled him.'

  'L-like what?' Parrish asked, his voice catching in his throat, his disbelief evident in his expression.

  'Nothing specific. No names, no dates, no places. I don't remember precisely what he said. This is - what? - fifteen, sixteen years ago? He began with the usual explanations and apologies for missing Mass and Confession. I asked him if he wanted to confess, and he said he didn't, that it was too late. He said that he had done some things, that he had abused his position of trust, that he had taken advantage of the fact that he was a police officer. He said that he had taken things that did not belong to him, that evidence had been suppressed, even destroyed, and people who were guilty had walked away as free men.'

  'And what did you say?'

  'What could I say? I acknowledged him. I told him to seek repentance. I suggested he take Confession, that he attend Mass, take Communion . . . that he should work to rectify the wrongs and make good.'

  'And did he? Come to Mass, confess . . . ?'

  'Not as far as I know. He certainly didn't come here again. Like I said, it was only a month or so before he was killed.'

  'And when you heard he'd been killed?'

  'Well, I pondered on what might have brought that about. Whether he had finally been overcome by his own torment and put himself in a situation where he could be killed, or if he had tried to change things . . .'

  'Change things?'

  'I wondered whether he'd said or done something that worried those around him, those who wanted to stay in whatever business they were involved in. I wondered if he'd said something that I made them feel he couldn't be trusted anymore.'