“Sure. Been there, done that. We all have to pay our dues. How’s the weather back there?”
Scarne knew that people living in places with gorgeous weather always get off on hearing about lousy weather elsewhere. It wasn’t a bad day in New Jersey, but Scarne wanted to make Tighe feel good so he said, “Sucks.”
“Figures. Did they replace Bob Pearsall yet?”
“No. Mr. Popp said his shoes are hard to fill.”
That did they trick.
“He’s right about that. So, what can I do for you?”
“Well, I think I got everything from Sandy, but is there anything you found out that maybe you didn’t mention to her?”
Scarne could hear a woman’s voice in the background urging Tighe to get a move on.
“You mean other than finding Amelia Earhart’s body under Nathan Bimm?”
The kid had a sense of humor.
“Old news,” Scarne retorted, laughing. “But how about anything that would have gotten someone’s balls in a twist.”
“Not really. The track project was, and I guess still is, controversial. But I mean a kid can’t open up a lemonade stand on Staten Island without some yahoo sounding off about it. My guess was that it’s never going to be approved. Bob wasn’t so much against the track as he was suspicious of anything Bimm had his hands in, which is why we looked at the Home Port, too. But I have to tell you nothing we came across looked illegal. Doesn’t mean that something wasn’t kosher, but what the hell in New York isn’t when big money is involved? If you spoke to Sandy, you know we had nada.”
Well, that’s that, Scarne thought, as the background female voice became more insistent.
“Uh, I really have to go, Mr. Scarne. Sorry I couldn’t be more help, but I think we were on a wild goose chase. I guess Bimm is an acquired taste, but I really have nothing against him. He was polite to me when I talked to him.”
“Sandy told me the interview with him fell through.”
“It did. But I called him separately about something I found on the Web.”
“What was it?”
“Nothing important.”
“Humor me.”
“Well, I came across some old news clips from the 1920’s about plans to build rail tunnels from Staten Island to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The entrances would have been located on or near the property for the Home Port or the NASCAR track. Some work was even started on the Brooklyn tunnel before they ran out of money or something. I thought it might make a humorous story, add some history and color to both projects. I asked Bimm whether he knew about it.”
“What did he say?”
“Said it was news to him.”
“Did you write it up?”
Tighe laughed.
“I ran it by Mr. Pearsall,” Tighe said, laughing at the memory. “He pitched a fit, which was unlike him. Said the Internet was a bottomless pit of cockamamie story ideas, and mine was one of them. He was right; it was a stupid idea. I never even mentioned it to Sandy.”
CHAPTER 15 – MOO SHU POKER
“Moo Shu” Silman was at the bar in the Richmond Hotel, reflecting, as usual, at how far he had fallen. The lounge at the Richmond Hotel is definitely not the “in” place to be on Thursday – or any – night. Small, dimly lit and usually vacant but for the occasional salesman too lethargic or discouraged to seek out Staten Island’s better nightspots, it stopped just short of being seedy. That distinction went to the lobby.
But not much could be expected from the hotel, one of the few independently owned hotels in the city of New York, if being mob-owned fit that description. A barely break-even operation, it survived on small government and corporate contracts (military recruits awaiting destination orders; pilots and attendants from a Bulgarian airline; tour operators who lied about the borough’s “proximity” to Manhattan), as well as ill-informed salesmen and, incredibly, given Silman’s checkered history, sequestered juries.
Without asking, the barmaid refilled his glass of tomato juice. She looked past him and said, “Oh, Christ.”
Dr. Nathan Bimm waddled in and sat next to him.
“You should lay off the menstrual fluid,” Bimm said pointing to Silman’s glass. “Isn’t that right, honey?” The barmaid gave him a tired look. She was used to Bimm’s vulgarisms. “Muddle me an Old Fashioned, Maker’s Mark, extra cherries.” He didn’t put any money on the bar, ran no tab and never paid for a drink, which annoyed the hell out of Silman, who managed the hotel.
“Chang cut me off the booze,” Silman said.
“The only thing he cut off was your balls. Serves you right for going to a Chink doctor. Is the room set up?”
“You ask me that every week,” Silman said, as Bimm reached for a bowl of trail mix, which he quickly emptied, and signaled for another. “And every week I tell you the room is the same as always. And the result will be the same. So can I skip the game and just give you my $300 now? I’ve got work to do.”
“Who are you kidding? This place is as busy as my colon and I can’t remember the last time I shit. What business you do, I send your way. I need bodies upstairs.”
The two men made small talk for half an hour, during which time Bimm inhaled three Old Fashioneds and three bowls of trail mix. Silman knew plenty of doctors who didn’t take care of themselves. Some even smoked. But he’d never met a doctor with more bad health habits than Bimm. Come to think of it, he’d never met an obese plastic surgeon. Bimm had his reasons for selling his clinics, Silman knew, but his girth probably prevented him from getting near an operating table anyway.
Silman’s real first name was Alfred. A onetime lavishly paid mob lawyer, he had been disbarred and served two years in Sing Sing for trying to poison a jury. Literally. The lead lawyer for several mobsters accused of over-billing the city for $10 million worth of windows in the third phase of a Bronx high-rise housing project, Silman had been genuinely outraged when the judge refused to allow him to introduce evidence that the minority contractors who monopolized such construction jobs during a previous administration had over-billed the city by $30 million for the project’s earlier phases.
“At least my clients put the windows in,” he had argued in the judge’s chambers, pointing out that the earlier contractors hadn’t even done that, with the result that blocks of buildings had turned into the world’s largest birdhouses. When his arguments fell on deaf ears – it didn’t help that the judge was a former black activist, Silman admitted – he hit upon a scheme to derail the trial entirely, on the theory that justice delayed might be justice denied. Witnesses often disappeared, judges could be bribed, elderly Mafioso could more reasonably act senile. Unfortunately, the scheme was more brilliant in conception than in execution.
It being a mob trial, the jurors were sequestered from the start in a Holiday Inn in Queens. They were allowed to order dinner out twice a week, alternating among three nearby restaurants: Italian, Mexican and Chinese. For reasons of national pride, the Italian restaurant was left out of the plot, which involved planting pliable (meaning threatened) undocumented kitchen workers in the other two establishments.
It was easy enough for Silman to find out from a court officer on what days jurors used a particular restaurant. On the day when it became apparent that, despite his best legal efforts, the guilty-as-sin defendants were going down the tubes, he passed a note – in a specially altered fortune cookie – to the designated kitchen worker in the Chinese restaurant. Following careful instructions, the worker had mixed up a batch of E-coli impregnated chicken, pork, beef and shrimp and put it in a blender. The resultant noxious stew was hidden among cartons in a storage room, where it continued to “ferment.” Since it was a Chinese restaurant, nobody noticed. When the time came, the worker, armed with an eyedropper, managed to taint an entire order of takeout, including a carton of Moo Shu Pork, which was the origin of the nickname with which Silman was now permanently saddled. He counted himself lucky that it wasn’t “Taco” Silman.
The timing was im
peccable. On the morning of closing arguments, one after another the jurors began to complain of nausea, fever, blurred vision and, most disturbingly in a courthouse short of workable toilets, projectile diarrhea. Two Federal marshals who were guarding the jurors also became ill, as did several members of their families who ate leftovers. Within an hour the courthouse resembled – and smelled like – the emergency room at Baghdad General. It was days before the trial could resume, and then, with three jurors and two alternates still in the hospital, a mistrial was declared.
Food poisoning was immediately suspected but the trail so obviously led back to the Chinese food no one considered foul play. The unfortunate restaurant was drummed out of business by the Health Department. (“The place didn’t even have a Zagat rating,” railed the frustrated trial judge. “What else could the cheapskate city expect?”)
Silman and his clients were home free – until the INS unexpectedly raided the Mexican restaurant and started deportation proceedings against the illegal immigrant who was the E-coli alternate. Anxious to stay in America, where his mother, father, wife and eight children lived, he called the FBI and proposed a deal. In return for a “get-out-of-jail-free, no deportation” card – and witness protection for his entire clan – the worker rolled on Silman. The lawyer took the fall but kept his mouth shut, which earned him respect from his employers.
The subsequent death of the worker in the Chinese restaurant compromised the case against Silman. Nothing nefarious was involved; the worker had neglected to wash his hands after handling the container of rotting E-coli soup and ate an egg roll so tainted that his immune system collapsed. With a major witness gone, Silman pled down to a felony charge of attempted assault and some misdemeanor health violations still on the books from the days of Typhoid Mary. After being paroled, Silman was too hot to handle in his home borough, so his mob contacts sent him to Bimm, a silent partner, along with the Lacuna crime family, in the hotel. It was the Lacunas, Silman subsequently discovered, who had financed the expansion of Bimm’s clinic empire.
“The hotel is perfect for you,” Bimm had told him. “Skim some from the lounge, but not too much. Lacuna can be touchy. Join the Rotary, the Chamber and all that bullshit and keep your eyes open. You’ll be back on top soon. Nobody out here gives a shit about your past. They’re too busy scamming. And if you get the urge to poison another jury, they’ll deliver one right to you.”
***
“C’mon, let’s head up there,” Bimm said now, as he struggled his 320 pounds out of his seat. Nattily dressed, in his signature white linen suit made in Hong Kong, with a pink Charles Terwhitt shirt and powder blue silk tie, he dwarfed the slightly-built Silman, who wore a beat-up sports jacket and didn’t feel particularly dapper after a day spent handling guest complaints and plumbing problems. Moo Shu also felt a cold coming on and wasn’t looking forward to his 90-minute drive back to the Bronx in the chilling rain. He often day-dreamed of running into the Mexican snitch in the witness protection program – somewhere in sunny Arizona no doubt – and shoving a chili pepper up his wetback ass.
As they passed the reception desk, Silman nodded at the assistant manager he’d inherited from the previous management. He fired the woman before he found out she was related to the politically active pastor of the largest African-American congregation in the borough. Forced to take her back, she now treated him will ill-concealed disdain. She picked up the house phone.
“Laurel and Hardy are on the way up. Make sure the room is ready.” She listened for a second and then, exasperated, said, “Moo Shu and Bimm the Blimp, dummy. Laurel and Hardy were silent film … oh, forget it.”
***
Bimm always sat with his back to the huge plasma TV on the far wall of the suite. By necessity most of the other players sat across or at angles to the big man, and could see the TV, which dominated the room and played a constant stream of porno videos. And not just any porno movies. Bimm had scoured the Internet for the most graphic professional hard-core videos available, and supplemented them with the raunchiest amateur downloads from Youporn.com and other sites. He loved porn and had a large collection in his home, but that’s not why he featured it at the poker game. The action on the flat screen was a distraction to the other players, and covered up his cheating.
The game featured a variety of poker variations, including the ubiquitous Texas Hold ‘Em. Most were played high-low, which meant that a player could win with either a high or low hand (the lowest being Ace-2-3-4-6, of different suits). Thus, pots were usually split two ways. Bluffing was an art form, since even the weakest low hand might actually wind up high, as a hidden straight or a flush. Mediocre players – Bimm, an expert card player, stacked the game with them – hardly ever folded. To win consistently, a player needed to concentrate. Hence, the porno movies. Deciding when to play, what cards to draw, what to bet and whether to declare your hand high or low wasn’t easy when some sexual stud was delivering his money shot on the chin of his naked partner on a plasma screen on the far wall. And none of the players would ask to turn the movie off, and risk being labeled wimps, or worse.
Only one other player could fit on the side of the oval table with Bimm, because of his girth and the fact that he kept the space between them empty of chairs. In that spot was a small chest in which he kept playing cards, chips and a ledger listing the amounts various players owed him. The top of the chest was crammed with the detritus of his disgusting lifestyle: a nasal inhaler that threatened to disappear up either of his huge nostrils when he jammed its tip in; an ugly green horseshoe-shaped ashtray in which resided a particularly pungent cigar; various mints, antacid tablets, peanuts and jellybeans in respective bowls; an ever-present half-eaten sandwich dripping with both mustard and mayonnaise; a box of Russell Stover chocolates – and Diet Cokes.
Bimm was always seated when the first player other than Silman arrived. It was Tony Porcini, a cousin of mobster Salvatore Lacuna. He ran a small property appraisal firm secretly owned by Bimm for the express purpose of providing above- or below-market appraisals on properties Bimm either wanted to dump or buy. He was Bimm’s regular poker shill, and was expected to play a staid, unspectacular game, occasionally losing a small pot to one of the other players to add verisimilitude to the proceedings. Bimm, who made sure he lost a few dollars in those pots, would then gripe loudly, so that the others would remember his loss. But Porcini’s main job was to catch unsuspecting players in a crossfire when he and Bimm had unbeatable hands high and low. That only happened a few times a night, but with unlimited raises the poor suckers could be stripped of hundreds of dollars on one pot.
Most times, the victims would fold disgustedly and switch their attention to the fellatio on the screen. Between the sexual distractions, the plethora of drinks and food (which everyone had to chip in for), the cheating and his own uncanny card memory skills, Bimm cleared, on average, $2,000 every week. He was wealthy, but $100,000 a year, undeclared, was not chump change.
Better yet, some of the players were soon deep in debt to Bimm, including the head of the local school board, a political reporter for the local paper and the president of the Chamber of Commerce. While gambling debts in private games did not have the power to ruin a man as they did, say, in Victorian England, being labeled a deadbeat in the closed society of Staten Island would be humiliating.
“So what’s new at the Chamber,” Bimm said, directing a smirk at a small, nervous man who was raking in half of a small pot. “How’s the contract negotiation going? They gonna fire your ass, or what?”
“Haven’t heard anything,” Press Stephens replied. “The exec committee is studying my performance review from the mentoring committee.”
“Mentoring committee, performance review, what kind of bullshit is that? What’s wrong with those jerks? Your membership is growing; the Chamber is showing a profit for the first time in years. They should kiss your ass in Macy’s window.”
Bimm knew he could afford to sound supportive. Stephens owed him se
veral thousand dollars and didn’t know that Bimm had instructed his political friends on those committees to deliberately make the Chamber president’s life miserable. In fact, the sadistic mentoring committee had been his idea. Preston Stephens, whose family on Staten Island went back seven generations, had to meet once a week with board members who critiqued everything from how many phone calls he made to the mileage he put on the Chamber’s leased car. It was humiliating to a 60-year-old man who had rescued the Chamber from near bankruptcy during his eight-year tenure. But that was the idea: The more distracted the president was, the less likely he could offer opposition to Bimm’s latest economic development schemes. We’ll limit him to one-year contracts from now on, Bimm decided. I can dump him if he gets too feisty.
***
The game was in its second hour when the door to the hotel suite opened and a young Hispanic woman wheeled in a tray of cold cuts and salads to supplement the chips, dips, drinks, wings and Swedish meatballs set up around the bar. She was young and nervous, with good reason. Bimm insisted that all room service be done by female employees. He liked to see their reaction to the pornography on the screen. As the girl uncovered the food, he fingered the remote to increase the volume. The grunts and groans from the porno film caught her attention – as intended – and her eyes widened.
“Put the cart over by the television, honey” Bimm ordered. On the screen a woman was being penetrated by two men and, not surprisingly, was yodeling loudly. “How about making me a plate. A little of everything. And ask the fellows if they want something.”
The girl looked plaintively at Silman, who knew what the fat man was doing. It was his regular modus operandi. An obese and perverted plastic surgeon. They must have broken the mold after him, he thought. But the bastard wasn’t the one who might be facing a harassment suit.
“Just make Dr. Bimm a plate, Rosita,” Silman said quickly. “We can make our own plates up.”
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