by Tom Fowler
“I’m desperate for fashion and grooming tips,” I said.
Rich snorted. King looked at me for a second and grinned. “You’ve come to the right place, then.” He jerked his thumb at Rich. “This fucker dresses too much like a square.”
“A square?” Rich said. “What is this, 1965?”
I steered us back toward the task at hand. “Rich tells me you’ve enjoyed a varied career,” I said to King.
“Little of this, little of that,” he said.
“How about organized crime?”
“I was on a task force for a while.”
I sipped some coffee. Its strength impressed me. I should have added a little more creamer. I couldn’t get any now, though. Rich always chided me for not drinking my coffee black, and he wouldn’t let me live it down for weeks. Pride goeth before the coffee.
“Couldn’t get Tony?”
King let out a chuckle, but I couldn’t hear any humor in it. “I don’t think we could have gotten him even if it was the goal.”
“Too connected?” I said.
“Tony’s old school,” said King, “and he’s been in charge for-fucking-ever. Yeah, he has cops in his pocket.” Rich frowned at the remark but didn’t say anything. “I’m sure he’s got people in the state’s attorney’s office. Judges, too, if push ever came to shove. Tony knows the wheels to grease. He’s probably taken more pictures with mayors than their wives have.”
“So what happened?”
King sipped his coffee. “Tony doesn’t have everything on lockdown,” he said. “You’d think he might. Baltimore ain’t the size of New York or anything. But you see some . . . pockets of resistance pop up every now and then. Someone tries to grab a piece of something.”
“What does Tony do?”
“Sometimes nothing. Sometimes, he does what you might expect.”
“So your task force took care of those . . . pockets of resistance, as you put it.”
“Basically, yeah. If you take a cynical look at it, we did Tony’s dirty work for him. We took down the people who were making money he could have been making.”
“Seems like a shitty outcome,” I said.
“The task force can say it did something,” Rich said. “They made arrests. They got criminals off the street. Mission accomplished.”
I shook my head. “You ever hear of Alberto Esposito?” I said.
“Name’s familiar,” King said. He frowned and sipped some coffee to fuel his thoughts. I liked his plan so much, I had some coffee too. “He was with Tony a few years ago, right? Then he left.”
“About four years ago, he went to Cleveland.”
“What the fuck is in Cleveland?” King said.
I filled them in on Esposito’s story. “I’d never heard of him before he came to my office,” I said. “He wants me to write some malware for him.”
“Like a virus?” Rich said.
“More or less.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“Of course not.”
“Guys like Esposito ain’t used to being refused,” King said.
We watched a couple of college girls come in. They wore tank tops and spandex shorts. There were few things to love about summers in Baltimore. Once you tossed out the heat and humidity, the list consisted of girls in summer clothes and Orioles games. Pretty girls in small clothes topped the list. “I don’t think they have any concealed weapons,” King said after a minute.
“You can never be too vigilant,” Rich said.
“I need the practice,” I said. “You two are more experienced detectives than I am.”
The girls got their coffees and left. Reality resumed.
“So Esposito is interested in a virus?” King said.
“Sounds like it. When I told him no, he said he’d give me time to think about it.”
“Could you write him what he wants?”
“Sure.”
“I’m glad you’re not going to,” Rich said, frowning at King.
“He shouldn’t need me to,” I said. “He could find what he wants online and download it.”
“Why come to you, then?” King said.
I sipped some more coffee. Now I wished I had a pastry to go with it. I eyed the last quarter of Rich’s danish with envy. “He said he remembered me from Tony’s poker games,” I said. “And he remembered I was good with computers.”
“It ain’t always nice to be remembered,” King said.
“Now I’ve told him no, I’m worried he’s going to find someone else. There are less principled people out there who could do what I could do.”
“Even less principled than you?” Rich said with a grin.
“Hard as it is to believe, yes,” I said. “I think he’s already looking for one.” I told him about Chris Sellers and the Town Car leaving the coffee shop.
“Is there a missing persons report?” Rich said.
“Yeah, but he lives in the county.”
“You working with Gonzalez?”
“So far.”
Rich finished his pastry. I might need to get one to go. “What are you going to do now?” King said.
“I was thinking about getting a danish,” I said.
“Good plan. Maybe you can buy one for Esposito and get him to leave you alone.”
“Right now, my plan is to keep telling him no,” I said.
“What if he insists?” Rich said.
“Then I guess I’ll have to insist, too,” I said.
Bobbi Lane told me some interesting things about Chris Sellers. I looked into him with more depth once I got back home and finished the danish I took with me from the Daily Grind. He submitted his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins. The subject? The increasing modernization of Eastern European crime syndicates and its potential effects on organized crime in America. His thesis might as well have served him up on a plate for someone like Esposito.
I found his dissertation was under consideration, but I couldn’t find the text of it anywhere. It may have been for the best: I would have been tempted to read it and didn’t want to get wrapped up in a long paper. If Esposito were looking for Chris Sellers, I couldn’t afford to waste much time.
Like most computer science people, Chris Sellers wrote his own code. And like most computer science people, he posted it online. His handle on repository websites matched the one on his Gmail account. I wondered if Esposito found any of the code this way. It didn’t take any special knowledge of anything related to computers. Sometimes, the easiest hacks are the best ones to use.
I wanted to look at the programs Chris Sellers wrote. Considering their nature, I built a new virtual machine just for this purpose. It’s the same thing I did when working on my own code. Over the years, malware has gotten smarter and some can tell when it’s being run in a VM; it will disable many of its features to make evaluation harder. I didn’t want the program to execute, however.
I downloaded a bunch of Chris Sellers’ code and looked at it. He wrote all of it in the C programming language. A man after my own heart. He made copious comments in it, as well, which was another thing I liked about him. The specific piece I looked at was a basic backdoor, designed to maintain access to someone’s computer. From what I could tell, it would be very effective and impossible to detect.
From there, I looked at more of what Chris Sellers had written. Some of his programs did simple things like email automation. Spammers had similar tools available, but this would be a good one to have in their back pockets. It would make a great platform from which to launch a large phishing attack. After a couple hours, I hit the mother lode. Chris Sellers started working on a new piece of ransomware. His comments mentioned analyzing samples from Russia, Ukraine, and other places in Eastern Europe. He made some impressive innovations with the code, making it much harder for traditional anti-malware and anti-exploit tools to stop. He hadn’t finished it. By my guess, he had about half of it written. Then there would be more time for testing, development, and refinement. It wou
ld require weeks, but at the end, this would be an impressive piece of ransomware.
This would be something Alberto Esposito would want. No wonder he had taken an interest in Chris. I would need to find him and keep him away from Esposito. With a tool like this, Esposito could raise a lot of money quickly and try to usurp control of the city from Tony. And then he could do something about yours truly who spurned his request for ransomware.
I couldn’t let it happen.
Compared to Chris Sellers, Alberto Esposito had a minimal online presence. He was one of about nine people in America who still had a MySpace page, but he hadn’t updated since early in Obama’s first term. His Facebook page looked equally old and was also locked down to the point I couldn’t see any pictures. Given time, I could get around his settings, but I doubted it would be worth it. LinkedIn listed Esposito as a “self-employed business consultant.” His profile there remained reasonably current with over 200 connections. I wondered if anyone like Esposito had ever been busted or gotten anyone else busted just from social media profiles.
I took some screenshots and notes based on the connections, especially the ones added recently. Maybe Esposito would turn to someone else to write his ransomware for him. Maybe I would find a “self-employed persuasion consultant” who would work over Chris Sellers until he did what was asked of him. Regardless, I found some names to run through the BPD’s databases.
During my first case, Rich left me alone with his work computer for a few minutes. Since then, I’ve maintained an easy way into their network. Every now and then, they try something new to secure things, but those measures never deter me for long. I fed the fifteen names I wrote down into the BPD’s database. Ten came back with criminal records, mostly for crimes in the assault family. Add in a few gun felonies and the occasional sexual assault, and you had a bushel of real peaches.
I looked at the list I made and found the one Esposito had known the longest: Raymond Delcoro. There was another Delcoro on Esposito’s contacts list as well, Michael. The BPD told me they were brothers with Michael being the older, and both showed similar criminal records. I also learned they shared a house in Gardenville, a neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. For lack of any other avenue to explore, I got in the Caprice and headed for Gardenville.
The Brothers Delcoro lived on Mayview Avenue near the bottom of the hill where Mayview dead-ended at Todd. I could see their house from Todd, so I sat and waited for something to happen. No cars were in their driveway or in front of the house. I waited some more. I drank some water. No activity near the house. I found a zombie-killing game for my phone and butchered some undead while I staked out the place. If this PI thing bored me into quitting, maybe I could reinvent myself as a zombie hunter. All I’d have to do first would be invent zombies.
I got hungry about an hour in. Water wasn’t cutting it. Just as I looked for nearby convenience stores on my phone, a car came down Mayview and pulled into the Delcoros’ driveway. One man got out and went into the house. The car, a silver Accord resembling a million other cars on the road, backed out of the driveway a few minutes later, continued along Mayview and made a right on Todd. As it went past, I got a look at the driver: Michael Delcoro. When he drove away, I fired up the Caprice, used Mayview to help my U-turn, and followed him.
Michael Delcoro wormed his way through some depressing neighborhoods. For all the gentrification happening in some parts of Baltimore, neighborhoods like Gardenville still had the interrelated problems of poverty and crime. Apartment complexes were full of people who wanted something better and were too beaten down to hope it would ever happen. I was guiltily relieved when we got onto Moravia Road and more businesses and industrial areas sprang up.
He got onto 95 South. Hanging back so as to not tip Michael Delcoro off, I got onto 95 South, too. Ahead, I saw two silver Accords. One of these days, I would have to get more observant of things like tag numbers. Both Accords exited at Boston Street because of course they did. From there, they went in different directions. I picked one to follow, hoping my mental coin flip came up correct.
I soon discovered it had not. The Accord I followed pulled into the parking lot of a large Best Western hotel. A slender, attractive Asian woman got out and walked toward the hotel. I would much prefer following her to following Michael Delcoro. She, however, was not useful for my case. I had no idea where Delcoro had gone once he exited at Boston Street. I didn’t have anyone else to follow at this point, so I headed back to 95 and went home.
On a lark, I decided to look at Chris Sellers’ incomplete ransomware again. I created a new virtual machine and uploaded the code. About a third of the way into it, I found what I had been looking for.
Ransomware holds a computer and its files hostage via encryption but is easier to defeat than many people think. Reimaging the hard drive or using system restore is often enough. Of course, you have to be able to boot to a CD or USB drive to do it. If you can, the ransomware can’t stop you from reimaging or restoring and getting rid of it.
Chris Sellers’ could.
One of the first things his program did was delete any system restore points, taking the easy option off the table. Next, the program corrupted the partition table and master boot record. Even reimaging the hard drive wouldn’t get rid of the ransomware; with its hooks in everything, it would just show up again. Replacing the hard drive would be a solution, but by the time users thought of it, they might have simply paid the ransom and cut their losses.
I was impressed. More importantly, Alberto Esposito had been impressed. I wondered how he ever heard of Chris Sellers and his work. Esposito was a more modern thinker than Tony Rizzo and maybe more modern than a lot of guys in Tony’s position. He could have been savvy when it came to programming, though nothing in his history suggested such aptitude. I was curious if someone put him on to Chris Sellers. And now with Chris disappearing, I wondered what Esposito had to do with it and what his next move would be.
Chapter 5
I woke up the next morning hungry for information and thirsty for justice. In addition, I was hungry for breakfast and thirsty for coffee. Resolving the second set first, I whipped up a quick omelet with wheat toast and a local dark roast. While I ate, I pondered how Chris Sellers found himself on Alberto Esposito’s radar. Chris seemed like an upstanding guy, and I couldn’t imagine them moving in the same circles, which meant Esposito had to cast a net. I wondered who besides Chris Sellers swam into it.
After breakfast, I looked at Esposito’s LinkedIn page again. This time, I wasn’t interested in gangsters hiding amid clever euphemisms. I wanted someone at Hopkins or at the contracting company where Chris Sellers worked. I hoped it wasn’t Bobbi Lane. She’d make a good running partner and interrogating her about Esposito afterward would be a downer. A name jumped out at me: Danny Esposito worked at Hopkins as an admissions officer for graduate and doctorate programs.
I went back to the BPD’s system. Danny was Alberto’s youngest brother. He showed one DUI but otherwise lived a clean life, apart from feeding his brother information. He had to know what his brother did for a living, even if he may not have known why Alberto wanted someone like Chris Sellers. At some point, I would need to talk to Danny.
Right now, I wanted to exercise. I hit the dojo, where I worked over a bag for twenty minutes and sparred for about as long. Then I went home and ran two miles around Federal Hill Park. Only completing the testosterone trifecta with a trip to the shooting range would have left me feeling manlier. I thought about building something with power tools when I got home but settled for taking a shower.
I needed to see someone.
For as long as I had known Tony Rizzo—which would be over half of my coming-up-on-29 years—I knew he was a gangster. I watched too many movies, and stereotypes get to be stereotypical for a reason. Tony had been in charge of organized crime in Baltimore for decades, probably the duration of my life. On top of it all, he and my parents were friends forever, and he always let me eat for fre
e in his restaurant. I harbored many reasons for wanting to keep him around and in charge.
I parked near Il Buon Cibo, Tony’s restaurant, and walked in. The lunch crowd filled about a third of the first-floor dining room. As usual, Tony sat alone near the fireplace, which held no fire during summer lunches. Tony’s table sat apart from the others, save two placed nearby, each occupied by one of Tony’s goons. They were used to me by now, so they merely practiced their glares as I approached. Tony looked up from his cup of coffee and local section of the Sun. He smiled and nodded at the chair opposite his. I sat.
“C.T., good to see you,” Tony said. I believed him. The smile reached his eyes. Tony hadn’t been happy to learn I worked as a PI, but none of my cases conflicted with his interests. I hoped to stay on his good side.
“You too, Tony,” I said.
“You come hungry?”
“Starving, actually.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you came to see me for free food.” Tony snapped his fingers, and a waitress appeared. She was a pretty college girl and wore the white shirt unbuttoned precisely enough to be interesting.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
“Give my friend whatever he wants,” Tony said, inclining his head toward me.
The perks of sitting at The Man’s table. “Do you need a menu, sir?” she said to me.
“I’ve been here enough,” I said. “Veal parmesan, whole wheat pasta, side salad, unsweetened iced tea. Please.”
“Certainly, sir,” she said, taking notes on her pad and vanishing as quickly as she materialized.
“Whole wheat pasta?” Tony said. “You becoming a fucking health nut?”
“I’ve been a health nut for years,” I said.
Tony laughed. “So you have.”
“If you offer it, I’m going to eat it.” I looked around the restaurant. The décor conjured images of a ristorante in Italy, or so the decorator wanted us to believe. It looked authentic enough to me, but I had never been to Italy. Tony’s resembled many in Brooklyn, which I guessed was authentic enough for most people. “How’s the lunch crowd?” I said.