That’s where it got complicated.
The Italian government was only too happy to accept the help (and resource support) that came with running a joint operation with the Americans. But that feeling of cooperation did not permeate to the operational level. This might indeed be a different kind of operation, but Tenente Colonnello Mauricio Bruni didn’t see it that way. Bruni was an officer in Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, which had the lead for investigating crimes involving the mafia. His unit was attached to a joint organization, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, or antimafia police, which was comprised of Italy’s three police forces: Guardia, the Polizia di Stato, and the Carabinieri.
Danzig had given up trying to puzzle out Italian law enforcement.
Bruni was an asshole and a chauvinist. In Danzig’s experience, one tended to follow the other, but Bruni seemed especially adept at both. He resented that their informant wouldn’t talk to any of his people, resented that he had to let the Americans play along, and really resented the fact that he had to involve them in his decision-making. Max Silva, the LEGAT, warned her this morning that Bruni was starting to make waves with the command element at DIA, complaining about having to cooperate with the FBI and that they were withholding critical information.
Namely, Sergio Mazza’s identity.
Mazza was Cannizzaro’s bank manager and chief accountant, but interestingly he was Roman, as opposed to Sicilian. Perhaps that wasn’t novel; the Cannizzaros moved their operation to Rome in the nineties and cut ties with the Sicilian mafia afterward. Even though he’d been in the organization for close to twenty years, Mazza told her that he always felt like an outsider. Still, he had managed to work his way up and into if not Cannizzaro’s inner circle, certainly a position of trust. After all, Mazza was the banker. The Commerce Bank of Rome was already bent like a U-turn when Salvatore’s father, Vincenzu Cannizzaro, took it over in the late nineties. The fact that he even could was still mind-boggling to Danzig and her team, but from what they understood of Rome at the time, governmental oversight wasn’t exactly a core competency. Now, Mazza ran all of the money-laundering operations and managed the books for Cannizzaro. That was how Mazza came to be an asset of Giovanni Castro’s. Castro was paid to keep the Italian financial police away from the bank. It was only natural they’d cross paths.
It was with that on her mind that she and Choi walked into the DIA’s headquarters in the Department of Public Security building, a long, tiered structure that was laid out like a stretched-out S. The grounds were located about fifteen miles to the southeast of Rome proper. They arrived at nine thirty for their ten o’clock morning briefing with Bruni and his team. Danzig had a squad of four here TDY and they’d been detailed here for months. While everyone at home understood that investigations took time to put together and each had their own unique rhythm to play out, Danzig knew that she was under pressure to show tangible results soon in order to justify the continued investment in time and resources. Bruni causing problems didn’t help. She knew there was mounting pressure to just hand Mazza over to the Italian officials and let them deal with it. The only thing keeping them in the game was the Russian.
The Bureau was shifting its focus away from counterterrorism and was now concentrating on the highly complex, hydra-like threats posed by China and Russia. If Salvatore Cannizzaro could lead them to Gennady Sokolov, the US government was still very interested. If he couldn’t, they couldn’t continue to justify this operation. Sokolov had emerged as one of the major players in Russian transnational crime in recent years. The word was that Sokolov and Putin were rivals in the KGB. The former left the service in the nineties and established himself as a businessman, making a literal and figurative killing. Putin despised him because he believed that Sokolov represented everything that Putin hated about the post-Soviet era. That embodiment of overt criminality made them appear weak in front of their rivals in the West.
Danzig was read in on Operation Flipside, at least the parts she needed to know. Flipside was the Bureau’s idea that they could capitalize on the rift between Putin and Sokolov. Sokolov owned a shipping business and, more importantly, a large digital media company. Officially. Unofficially, it was a cybercrime outfit that targeted the West, but in Russia that was largely a matter of semantics. Sokolov was currently too dangerous a rival to dispatch, even for someone like the Russian president, but the intel was also that Sokolov believed his days of operating safely within Russia’s borders were limited.
That’s where the diamonds came into play.
The intel assessment on Sokolov was that he believed Putin’s days were numbered and that the president was going to force a disastrous confrontation with the West. One that Russia couldn’t possibly win and would result in Russia being reset to basically 1994. Sokolov wanted to insulate himself for when that happened. While Sokolov had hundreds of millions in business assets, very little of it was liquid and almost all of it tied up inside Russia. If Putin decided to shut him down, he could (however disastrous that might be for him), or if this confrontation with the Americans actually happened, Sokolov was looking for a safety net. The gem trade was attractive to him for all of these reasons. The Bureau hoped to snare him in a joint sting with the Italians, the latter getting the Cannizzaro mafia and all of the public corruption, money laundering, and smuggling that entailed. The Americans got a chance at turning a Russian crime boss into an asset that might just give them the best source of intelligence on the Russian president they’d ever had.
The only thing currently standing in their way was a self-righteous Italian police officer who didn’t want to deal with a woman.
The FBI wouldn’t share those details with their Italian counterparts at any level, so it fell on Danzig to navigate those waters herself. When Danzig spoke with her section chief back in New York, she was advised to just grind it out. There was too much riding on them getting access to Sokolov.
“How much are we going to tell them?” Choi asked.
“No more than we have to for now,” Danzig said. “If Bruni is going to keep this shit up, we’ll do the same.”
“That’s not going to get us far.”
“No, but until he earns some trust…,” Danzig said and let her voice trail off. They’d learned information last night that was throwing the entire operation at risk, and she didn’t feel comfortable enough with Bruni to share it.
“So, we’re going to share information with a thief but not a cop?” Choi asked.
They’d been through this, a lot, over the last two or three days, but Choi still wasn’t comfortable with how much they’d shared with Burdette. While he certainly understood that they weren’t going to share top secret, code word–level operational details with Bruni, he was completely uncomfortable with the level of information they’d given Burdette. Choi didn’t agree with them flying all the way to see him themselves and didn’t understand why they couldn’t have tapped someone from the San Francisco or Sacramento offices to do it. In his eyes, it was a waste of time, energy, and money. Now they were jet-lagged in both directions, if such a thing was even possible.
Danzig left the bait where it was and decided not to carry the argument further. It wasn’t going to get either of them anything, and both of their positions were entrenched at this point. Danzig could justify the action in her own mind, and that’s all that mattered to her.
Back to the topic at hand, Cannizzaro had lost the diamonds and apparently only had a few days to get them back.
Danzig had spoken to Sergio Mazza last night. He was edgy and scared and nearing the point of doing something stupid. Mazza told her that the diamonds were in America. Cannizzaro sent his people to get them from Vito Verrazano and found that he was gone. They found someone else in his house, Mazza didn’t get the name, in fact these were all things he’d overheard or had eavesdropped to find out. That was why he was on the edge of panic now. Cannizzaro sent men to America to retrieve them. Her team was putting the word out now in the Bureau for any
information on large diamond buys. The other name Mazza gave her was Niccoló Bartolo, Cannizzaro’s cousin and the thief who originally stole those diamonds in Antwerp in 2003. Apparently, the cousins had kissed and made up, and Cannizzaro enlisted Bartolo to lead the search.
Verrazano was a onetime accomplice of Reginald LeGrande, whom Danzig confirmed was now out of prison. Her squad had calls into his parole officer. LeGrande was based out of Long Beach, so if Verrazano had taken the stones to America, it seemed logical that it was to team back up with LeGrande. That didn’t mean they’d attempt to sell the stones there, but LA did have a jewelry district and did a fair amount of diamond trade for the West Coast. It was equally likely they intended to hold them for the trade shows in Tucson or Vegas.
If Verrazano and LeGrande were successful, and Cannizzaro’s people couldn’t get the diamonds back, he wouldn’t have anything to sell Sokolov and Operation Flipside was over.
Danzig couldn’t believe she was in a position to actually have to root for the bad guys.
Mazza told her that Cannizzaro seemed scared. He was starting to act erratic, was having Mazza move money around and set up accounts in other places to make sure he could access it. He told Mazza to “have a fucking bag with him,” which meant, be ready to travel. Cannizzaro was getting ready to run.
Danzig could guess why.
Cannizzaro had an impressive operation in Rome. He had judges, cops, and politicians on his payroll. He controlled a bank. He’d somehow gotten control of a small shipping company that serviced routes between Italy, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa. Using that, he’d set up a small but growing smuggling operation. Cannizzaro could’ve stayed at this level for the rest of his life and was likely insulated enough that he’d never face prosecution. But he tried to put himself into a different orbit by making a deal with Gennady Sokolov, and that had consequences that the mafia boss was only now becoming cognizant of. Sokolov himself, a man increasingly facing existential pressures, was not a man who was going to accept that Cannizzaro couldn’t deliver.
Danzig and Choi waited in silence to be let into the briefing room.
These were held daily now and were intended to coordinate activities between the DIA’s part of the operation and the FBI’s. Danzig felt distinctly that they were made to feel like their presence was a tolerable inconvenience. She stopped bringing the rest of her squad. They knew how she was being treated, but Danzig didn’t particularly feel like they needed to see it firsthand anymore.
One of Bruni’s men opened the door about five minutes prior, and people started filing in for the ten o’clock briefing around 10:01. The room was laid out like a classroom, with rows of tables that faced the front. This was not where Bruni’s squad operated from, however, and there were none of the elements of a large investigation in this room. There were no mugshots with names and KAs beneath them, taped to a wall, organized by their relationship to the target. There were no maps. There weren’t even the signs that dedicated people were working furiously against a clock—Styrofoam cups, leftover foot wrappers, torn sheets of paper with scribbled notes. The room was empty because the DIA squad worked elsewhere and Danzig and her team weren’t permitted to see it.
Danzig and Choi sat at a table up front and kept to themselves. They were largely ignored by their DIA counterparts who milled about and talked while they waited. They were in the Guardia di Finanza’s duty uniform, which was a dark gray jumpsuit, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a bright yellow ascot. Green berets were left on tabletops. Some of them acknowledged her and Choi eventually.
“We have to tell them something,” Choi said.
She knew he was right, as much as it galled her to admit it. If word got back that she was intentionally withholding relevant information that the DIA was cleared to have, there would be serious repercussions.
Bruni walked in at ten after. He wore his service uniform today, a dark gray jacket with his rank outlined in gold on the epaulettes, the Italian equivalent of an American lieutenant colonel. The uniform also sported a bright yellow design on the lapel that nearly ran to the collar. The jacket was over a white shirt and crisply knotted black tie. There were badges and pins throughout the uniform that no one bothered to explain the meaning of. Bruni had a wheel cap with a thick gold braid across the brim tucked under one arm.
Bruni carried a smug expression on his face, a teacher that knew the answers to the tests because he had the book in front of him. He wore a thin beard and had dark brown hair, cut short, though he was starting to bald. His eyes were wide set on his face. He greeted his men in Italian and then offered a perfunctory, “Good morning” to Danzig and Choi in choppy English. Bruni began the briefing by sharing what his surveillance teams had picked up the previous day, which was not much. They had teams watching the bank and Cannizzaro’s villa outside Rome. The FBI provided them with a small surveillance drone that you could control with a laptop. It was about the size of a smartphone and from a distance would look like a bird to human eyes. This gave the DIA the ability to look into Cannizzaro’s backyard, where he took most of his meetings. They couldn’t record the conversations but could at least see who he was meeting with.
“Cannizzaro appears to be staying put,” Bruni said, addressing the room. He stood behind a podium at the front with the Department of Public Security seal on it. Bruni gripped the sides of the podium as though he were delivering a lecture on policing. “He hasn’t left his compound in four days. We’re not picking up anything useful on the taps that we have on the mobiles or on the house line. Unfortunately, he’s being very selective about what they discuss on the phone. Cannizzaro himself hasn’t been to the Commerce Bank in two years.”
That didn’t surprise Danzig much. These days, most criminals knew to use encryption apps or messaging via the dark web. Wiretaps could certainly be effective, but normally for people who didn’t think they were under surveillance yet.
Bruni leered over the podium. “Agent Choi, what do you have for us?”
Daniel cleared his throat.
Danzig’s cheeks and the back of her neck felt hot. Fury roiled up inside her, but Danzig wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing her react to it.
“I believe Supervisory Special Agent Danzig has the Bureau’s update prepared,” Choi responded icily. He muttered something under his breath, but Danzig didn’t catch it. Choi was fluent in Korean and often swore in it when he wanted credit for saying something aloud that no one else could understand.
“I spoke with our informant last night,” Danzig said, pushing out her chair and standing. She wasn’t going to address Bruni sitting down. Instead, she walked to the side of the room and turned slightly so she could also see the other DIA men. This was stupid and petty and it was getting in the way of their mission. “The diamonds are in America,” she said. Danzig hadn’t intended to tell them, but she realized that was a mistake. She was letting herself get caught up in Bruni’s pettiness.
Their reaction was worth it.
“Maybe if you’d shared your information with us, we could have set up a sting,” Bruni said, trying to recover his own embarrassment at not knowing.
“No,” Danzig said flatly. “He just found out. And as far as information sharing, you and I both know that’s bullshit. We’ve been nothing but transparent with you. The only thing, the only thing I’ve held back is the name of my informant, which you don’t need.”
“How can I trust the source if I can’t prove who he says he is?” Bruni countered snidely.
“Because you can trust that we wouldn’t bring it forward if we didn’t think it was credible. You have obstructed us every step of the way, and because of that, these stones slipped right out of your grasp. Your agency polices smuggling in this country, not mine. Now, we can keep bickering with each other, you can keep up your petty bullshit, or we can try to cooperate.” Danzig looked down at her watch. “I have somewhere to be, and I’m running out of patience.”
“Well, if the dia
monds are in America, the investigation is over. Congratulations. I hope you get him.”
“Cannizzaro sent a group of people to the States to get them back, including Niccoló Bartolo.” Her initial outburst subsided, Danzig made sure to address the entire team so it didn’t look like she was just parrying with Bruni. “We think that Vito Verrazano went to America to meet with a thief and con man named Reginald LeGrande. They’ve been working together, on and off, since the late 1980s, with the exception of two stints LeGrande has spent in prison. One of those courtesy of me. We rolled up LeGrande’s passport forging operation and he’s on a watch list, so we don’t think he’s going to risk leaving the US.”
“Can they sell the diamonds in the United States?”
“They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t think they could, so this has likely been in the works for some time. That said, I think it’s unlikely that they could find a buyer. Certainly not before Cannizzaro’s men find them.”
Bruni narrowed his eyes, but she couldn’t tell if it meant he was concentrating or was getting angry. “So, you think that Cannizzaro’s men will find the diamonds and bring them back here?”
“We do,” she said, nodding slightly. “Cannizzaro knows what happens if he doesn’t deliver for Sokolov. He won’t stop just because he thinks LeGrande and Verrazano gave him the slip here.” She paused and directed her comments to the room. Bruni and the DIA knew about Cannizzaro’s intention to make a deal with Sokolov, they just didn’t know about the FBI’s larger operation surrounding it. “Gentlemen, neither of our country’s interests are served if those diamonds are sold in the States. The FBI is committed to helping you arrest Salvatore Cannizzaro, and these diamonds are our best chance. That also gives the FBI the opportunity to target another international gem pipeline, which is a priority for us, as you know. We can’t question Cannizzaro if you don’t have him in custody.”
Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3) Page 19