The cops ran that license-plate number, and it led them to a Mrs. Robert Dantzler, in a modest house in the outer reaches of Queens. The Plymouth was in the driveway, with a new Corvette parked behind it. They asked the young woman who answered the door if they could speak to her mother, but that was Mrs. Dantzler: a plain-faced twenty-year-old in clingy pajamas at noon. She was unfazed by the insult. Her husband (a retired beat cop and licensed private investigator) and her big brother (Vernon K. Rougatis, who was “between jobs”) had gone away suddenly on what they’d called a business trip. They’d packed in a hurry and taken a cab. She didn’t know if business trip was code for something else. All she knew, she said, was that she was getting tired of her husband’s “bullcrap” (“Mr. Dantzler’s [nonsense],” according to the newspaper of record). The house was crammed with things: new appliances, new furniture, and one whole room full of expensive china dolls. Later, there would be feature stories about how these dolls had been a comfort to her. Mrs. Dantzler stayed on the periphery of this story for a while, unsuccessfully suing to get her husband’s surveillance photos back and to get paid by anyone and everyone who had published them. Even after that, she was a regular guest on The Joe Franklin Show.
The sheer amount of material goods—her Corvette had only eighty-three miles on it—seemed beyond Bob Dantzler’s means, but apparently the only sinister element lurking behind all that was a mountain of consumer debt. The finished basement was Bob Dantzler’s part of the house, she said, but police didn’t find anything there that was of much use. Mrs. Dantzler said that in addition to a suitcase, her husband had taken a “really big” satchel with him on his trip. He did have a sizable arsenal down there—sixty-one guns, rifles, and shotguns, as well as hundreds of boxes of ammo, which led to many people’s assumption that he’d been a contract killer for the Mafia, and not merely a man enjoying the bejesus out of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Dantzler’s personnel file—he’d spent twenty-five years on the force—revealed no ties or noteworthy run-ins with elements of the Mafia. Neither did the interviews with the men who’d worked with him. He’d been regarded as a capable, unambitious cop, remarkable only because he got divorced and remarried every few years, the way movie stars do.
Days after the search of her house, the plain young woman in the pajamas, the fifth Mrs. Bob Dantzler, found out that she was the last of the line.
Responding to an anonymous tip, police found Bob Dantzler and his brother-in-law on a garbage barge in New Jersey, docked but as yet unloaded. Each man had been shot twice in the back of the head and wrapped in a bedspread. The bullets came from a .45, more gun than was usually used for such assassinations. Their wallets were still in their pants pockets. No acid or quicklime had been used to accelerate decomposition. Their heads, hands, and feet were still attached. Whoever killed them obviously wanted them to be found.
The brother-in-law had A-negative blood, which occurs in only six percent of the American people, the fourth-rarest type. Judy Buchanan’s blood was O-positive. The other blood type found at the scene, which must have come from the shooter, was A-negative. There seemed to be a strong circumstantial case that these were the killers and that the investigation should focus on who had hired them.
“It’s just simple common sense,” Sid Klein pointed out to a group of reporters assembled outside his law office, “that these deaths have nothing to do with my client. What, after all, did Mr. Hagen have to gain from killing the killers? Nothing. No tie between him and these men has been or will be found. What did the people who hired the killers have to gain? Everything. Is it time to look beyond my client and try to find the person or persons behind these heinous crimes? It is. It is past time.”
Nonetheless, the garbage had been loaded at a city sanitation facility only a block from where Tom Hagen lived. That, of course, meant nothing—garbage came there from all over the East Side—but it certainly didn’t look good.
What about the allegation that the police had evidence that showed that Judy Buchanan had been a kept woman for almost ten years, that Hagen had even paid for the bills incurred by her mother and her son?
“It’s a misunderstanding,” Klein said. “Minor accounting blunders, is all that is. The payments in question were perfectly legal fringe benefits she had been given. These payments should have been funded by a company for which Mr. Hagen was a signatory, not by Mr. Hagen personally. It was an honest mistake, and the accountant who made these mistakes has been fired. He accepts full responsibility for these errors, however, and he’s prepared to admit to them, under oath, in a court of law.”
MANY OF THE EFFORTS TO BUILD A CASE WERE VISIBLE to the naked eye, and it seemed safe to assume that any number of behind-the-scenes things were happening, too. An arrest seemed to be getting closer every day.
And kept not happening.
As the investigation dragged on, it started to seem to some observers that the law-enforcement officials in charge—and it was challenging, from the outside looking in, to discern just who was in charge—seemed more interested in keeping the drama before the public than they were in solving the actual murder.
Exhibit A: the hapless NYPD detective initially on the case might never have been replaced at all if not for a newspaper column that revealed corruption galore in his past. Federal prosecutors threatened the columnist with jail if he did not reveal the “underworld kingpin” who’d been his anonymous source, which he refused to do. Years later, however, in the deeply moving and often hilarious memoir Hard-Bitten, he claimed he’d been contacted by an expensive public-relations firm in lower Manhattan, which had then coordinated his interview with Eddie Paradise, who had committed to memory the intricate details of the many payoffs the detective had accepted—from the Corleones as well as several other New York Families. They’d all checked out.
According to the book, at the time of the murder, Paradise had no idea that the detective was under his friend Momo Barone’s thumb. He also had no idea that the Roach, his best friend, was conspiring against him. That—and the famous lion—all came out later. At the time, the way Eddie Paradise saw things was that he’d found a progressive and bloodless means of hurting the detective, someone he believed to be a threat to the Corleone Family, and the little guy was intemperately proud of himself for his own cleverness. The chapter begins this way: “Little Eddie Paradise was the first mobster to ever hire his own P.R. flak. He would not be the last.” Later in the chapter, Hard-Bitten chronicles the troubles that fateful column unleashed: “It was all just theater. I was acting tough, but that’s all it was—an act. And the sabers the Feds were rattling came straight from the prop department. Fool that I was, though, it all seemed real to me. I was a young man with three kids to feed and a long-suffering wife, so from where I stood the blades on those sabers looked pretty sharp. I had to look inside myself, but back then all there was to see was booze and fear. So I just played my part, like the enterprising red-blooded, true-blue American fake that I was. I put on a brave face, spent a few nights in jail, and when it all blew over, I was a hero. A poster boy for the First Amendment. A couple years later, I won a Pulitzer Prize. Anyone who says this isn’t a great country can kiss my saggy white ass.”
The men the NYPD next assigned to the case were skilled and respected straight arrows well known to anyone on the New York crime beat: Detective John Siriani, one of the most decorated Italian-Americans on the force, and Detective Gary Evans, a brush-cut telegenic blond of no discernible ethnicity. From the beginning, though, there was something peculiar in the set of their jaws, some oddly glazed look about them, as if they were two proud star ballplayers stuck on a team that’s given up on the season. They were not men given to self-pity. If they ever asked why me, there is no record of it. They would have known full well that there were any number of reasons two homicide detectives with astronomically high clearance rates might get assigned to a case that, among other things, was preordained to bring that rate down.
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br /> It became possible, though, for even casual observers to see some of what was behind the deadened look in the detectives’ eyes. Every few days, some public official called some kind of press conference or made some statement about the case that was clearly calculated to make news; each time it happened, it must have driven home to the detectives what pawns they were. The coroner came to work every day with TV makeup on. The mayor and several members of the NYPD’s top brass—including Chief Phillips—were unshy about discussing the case and, more so, what it represented. The district attorney’s office installed a new bank of telephones for their friends in the press. The increasingly reclusive director of the FBI reversed field and discussed the case as part of an hour-long interview with the dean of the network-TV anchormen.
Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea, of course, was engaged in his quest to go down in history as the man who brought down the Mafia, to destroy the sorts of men who’d made his family filthy rich, who’d helped fund his Ivy League education, and without whom his meteoric ascent to becoming the youngest attorney general in American history would never have been possible. It was therefore natural that in the speeches he made at college graduation ceremonies and in the proximity of the petty arrests his people were racking up, he might at least in passing mention this high-profile case with its supposed Mafia ties. He also spoke not once, not twice, but three times at fund-raising events for a lowly New York State Senate candidate—a man who just happened to be the prosecutor assigned to the case. On all three occasions, Danny Shea mentioned “the scourge of organized crime” in general and “the tragic events surrounding the death of Mrs. Buchanan” in particular. In the third, he actually used the term “hit men.”
MICHAEL CORLEONE MET WITH SID KLEIN OVER lunch in the upstairs back room at Patsy’s, an old-school red-sauce Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street. Michael’s office was almost certainly free of wiretaps, by dint of Al Neri’s love of gadgetry, and Michael often cooked lunch himself for meetings there, but Rita Duvall was there with two nuns visiting from France. (She’d been raised in a convent after her mother shot her father and then herself.) The law prohibited wiretaps in lawyer’s offices, but Michael was wary of relying on that, as was Sid Klein—who, amazingly, had no office. He got by with a photographic memory and a file clerk who worked in a converted bank vault in Chinatown. Klein never took notes and rarely carried a briefcase.
They arrived separately, came in through the kitchen, and took the back stairs to their table. Patsy’s knew how to make things easy for important people who didn’t want their meals interrupted by the intrusion of the public.
Al Neri sat alone at the next table.
“He could join us,” Klein said.
“He’s fine,” Michael said.
“I should get a man like him,” Klein said. “A person can’t be too careful these days.”
“‘These days’?” Michael said. “When was it ever different?”
“Ah, a philosopher,” Klein said. “A history buff. I like you. Where’d you find him, anyway? Not through a service, I bet.”
Michael suspected Klein already knew the answer. “He was a cop,” Michael said.
“I thought people in your line of work hated the cops.”
Neri chuckled softly.
“What line of work would that be?” Michael said.
“You tell me,” Klein said. He held up his hands. “Or better yet, don’t.”
“You’re on retainer,” Michael said.
“That’s true,” Klein said. “But I only want to know what I want to know, and when I want to know it, I ask. Keeps my life simple.”
Michael lit a cigarette. What people never seemed to understand about him—even people who knew enough to know better—was how little of his time was taken up with things that might be considered criminal. A typical day in the life of Michael Corleone was indistinguishable from that of any other successful private investor and real estate developer. He was, in fact, a little bit of a history buff, though. He understood that while a man’s life is made up of typical days, it is only the atypical days that history can use.
Sid Klein opened his menu. Michael didn’t and wouldn’t. It was something he’d learned from his brother Sonny. Any fine restaurant will try to make you whatever you ask for. Just ask.
“This is what’s beautiful about the Italian people,” Klein said, jabbing a finger at the menu for emphasis. “At all your important discussions, you sit down, break bread. I shouldn’t say just bread. Great food and plenty of it.”
Michael ignored this.
“Enlighten me, counselor,” Michael said. “Isn’t there a rule of law that requires the police, the prosecutors, either one, to turn over evidence to you?”
“And who am I?”
Michael frowned.
“I’m nobody,” Klein said. “That’s who I am. I’m Tom Hagen’s lawyer, but he’s not charged with anything, he’s not indicted, nothing. So until there’s a real trial on the horizon somewhere—which I’m sure you don’t want that, a trial—but until that point in time they don’t have to give anybody anything. If you ask me, they’re playing this out the way they are because they don’t have anything.”
Which is one of the many points Sid Klein was making in the many interviews he was granting to what seemed like anyone who asked.
“So is that why you’re conducting so much of your business—which in this regard is often my business—on the front pages of the newspapers?”
“Ah, all right. I see. That’s why you asked me here. Though I have to wonder why you didn’t just ask Tom, or why you didn’t ask him to ask me.”
Michael Corleone’s smile was disconnected from anything happy or amusing. “I asked you here, as I thought I told you, because I got a call from the chef himself that said the veal would be good today.”
“I’m getting the gnocchi, extra sauce.” He pronounced it ga-no-chee. “I love that stuff, can’t get it at home. I’ve had it here before, actually.”
Michael corrected his pronunciation.
“Are you sure?”
“How could I not be sure about a thing like that?”
“Let’s ask the waiter.”
“I only corrected you because you said you loved the stuff. I didn’t want you to embarrass yourself.”
“You’re aware of what I do for a living, right?” Klein said. “You think I’m real worried about embarrassing myself? Let’s ask the waiter.”
But when it came time to order, he neither asked the waiter nor mispronounced it.
“Is there anything I’m saying,” Klein said when they were alone again, “when those notebooks and microphones are in my face that isn’t positive for Tom and by extension you and your business? I hardly think so. They’re playing this whole thing out in the press, and if there’s never a trial, who’s going to be in a position to rebut all those false allegations? Nobody. As Tom’s lawyer, I’d have to forbid him from doing it, and if he did so, I’d have to resign. You can’t do it, either. Commenting at all would look like an admission of guilt. I’ll tell you what, the thing I’d really like to say is that this isn’t what a contract killing looks like. This isn’t how it works in the…in the line of work they’re talking about. Those men who killed her would have been Italian, for one thing, and—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry, I’d never say things like that in public. But it’s true that the public has very little idea about how all this works, the mechanics of it. Even the cops don’t understand it, but if I could just—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. So maybe you shouldn’t talk about it.”
Klein rubbed his chin. He looked over at Al Neri. Neri smiled, in the manner of a patient cat who knows it will eventually get its shot at the mouse. “All right,” Klein said to Michael. “You’re right. I was out of line.”
Michael lit another cigarette and took his time doing it.
“How sure are you,” Mich
ael said, “that they aren’t going to charge Tom with this?”
“A good lawyer is careful to never be overly sure of anything,” Klein said. “As for how sure I am, I’m bad with odds-making, which I’m sure you’ve heard from some of your associates.”
Michael had, of course. Klein was a lousy gambler who bet often and fairly small and thus never had any trouble covering his losses. That the betting didn’t escalate, that he didn’t dig himself deeper by trying to make up everything he lost Saturday on Sunday’s games, did show unusual discipline, which Michael admired. Still, few habitual gamblers manage to maintain such discipline over time.
Michael excused himself to go wash his hands and to give Klein a chance to grow anxious over not really answering the question. Silence was a fine tool for working over a big talker. Al caught his eye as he passed. He’d seen the tactic before.
“Please don’t misunderstand, young man,” Klein said when Michael returned to the table. “I’m not being coy with you or…what’s the term? Busting your balls? I’m confident that there’s not a good case here, but they’re going to make sure it gets played for everything it’s worth and then some.”
“Curious: who’s they?”
“C’mon. Who do you think?”
“I want to hear your perspective. I’ve paid for it.”
“If they charge Tom Hagen with this horrible crime,” Klein said, going into an impression of James K. Shea’s phony Brahmin accent, “they shall suffer an ignominious defeat on the field of battle.” He sounded more like Morrie Streator, the Vegas comedian who’d popularized the impression, than he did a Shea brother. Klein shook his head in self-deprecation. “I’ll stop. But, see, if charges are never filed, they get to use this thing until they get bored with it. Sooner or later they’ll drop it—probably after the November election—but they’ll do it quietly, and therefore they’ll never look like they’ve suffered any sort of defeat—”
“Because the public’s memory is as short as a senile dog’s.”
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