by Mike Dennis
Whenever Mambo heard something "through his family", you knew it was serious.
I replied, "I know he's powerful. And I've heard he's not too thrilled with me. But he's after Norma, me entendés?"
"The word is you interfered with BK's arrangement with her. And you also insulted Whitney in his home. That really pissed him off, from what I hear."
"Well, why, then, does he bring the top Russky hitman in the entire fucking country down here to dust Norma? His own goons can't do it? I mean, we're small potatoes, right? Fue solo un insulto pequeño. So what's the big deal? Why all the high-priced firepower?"
Mambo finally surrendered to the temptation of the Cohiba. He unwrapped it, then clipped the tip.
After going through his sniffing and lighting routine, he finally said through a cloud of smoke, "Para mandarte un mensaje."
"Send me a message? What message?"
"To make you think that killing both Sullivan and Norma was in response to your meeting with Whitney."
He puffed on his cigar, but I could tell he had more to say. I let him go on.
"I think Sullivan was killed for another reason altogether. And you came back to town at the right time, conveniently, to take the blame."
He took another big puff on the cigar, watching the smoke trail off to his right, toward the deserted pool table.
"¿Por qué, Mambo? Why was Sully killed?"
He contemplated that one for a minute. I could tell he was thinking of the right way to put it as he swigged from his beer bottle.
He carefully placed his Cohiba in a big ceramic tray.
"The Russian mafia is making preparations to bring their enterprise to Cuba once Castro goes. I mean everything. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, government corruption, everything. They've made a deal with Whitney to establish their base here in Key West using his influence, his real estate connections. Owning him, in other words. I think Sullivan got in the way somehow."
"Sully? He had no interest in the Russians. How was he in the way?"
"Maybe they wanted the building his bar was in. I don't know. But it was enough to get him killed. The Russians consider Key West a very important point of departure into Cuba. When Castro goes, they're positive they can move right across the straits and set up shop there without any problem. You know, because they're Russians, and because the Soviet Union was in Cuba for so long."
A wry smile slid across his face.
"But they'd be wrong?" I asked.
"Dead wrong."
His smile now a shade wider, he said, "What they don't realize is that, after more than forty years under the communist bootheel, and with Russian domination of Castro that whole time, the Cuban people have had it with them. I'm not saying the Russians will be thrown out on their asses, but it's going to be very, very difficult for them."
"How do you know this, man?"
His voice lowered a little through the thick cigar smoke. "The Key West-Cuba connection is much stronger, much deeper than anything they could come up with. Much older, too. Older than the Soviet Union itself. Tú sabes eso, mi hermano. Key Westers and Cubans share a special bond."
I gave him a nod.
He went on: "Our peoples have intermingled back and forth across the straits for over a hundred and fifty years. What I mean is, the Russians aren't the only ones waiting for Castro to leave power."
Up at the bar, the two guys watching the baseball game became aroused over a big play at the plate. They started shouting at the TV.
Mambo continued, his voice hushed. "My family has been preparing for that day for years now. We go to Cuba at least once a month to meet with our family members over there."
"I remember they were doing that when I was growing up. In fact, I remember seeing you and your brother leave on your family's boat from over in Key West Bight."
He nodded. "We've spent years making the necessary arrangements with the right people, the younger people, who will be in positions of power in the post-Fidel era. We've arranged to get the first gaming licenses awarded, and we've got our choice of hotels. Not only that, we've already got the rights lined up to import many necessary products like meat, liquor, and a lot of the things the big hotels and casinos are going to need. By the time the Russians get there, we'll already be in place, and they'll have to face a population that is fed up with Russians altogether."
This guy never failed to amaze me. Him and his whole family.
We talked a little more, then he ended with the caution, "But I tell you again, the Russians are not to be taken lightly. Ten mucho cuidado, mi hermano."
Mambo never tossed warnings around loosely. If he gave you the glare and told you to be careful, you better do it.
I left his place that night by the back door and returned to my rooming house, mostly by way of the little off-street lanes, staying in the shadows.
TWENTY-THREE
THE ringing phone jarred me out of a sound sleep.
I picked up right before the second ring, mumbling something like a hello.
"Doyle," Ryder said, "meet me at the Casa Marina for breakfast in thirty minutes."
My eyes could barely open as I shook myself awake.
"What time is it?"
"Six-thirty."
"Jesus! What — what the hell are you doing calling —"
"Your government never sleeps, pal. Just get your ass up and get over to the Casa Marina."
"And what's with The Casa Marina? That's one of the swankiest hotels in town. What are you, pulling some kind of expense account scam?"
"This is no scam. I've got something for you."
"Oh, you've got something?" I rasped as I finally snapped into second gear. "Then you can give it to me someplace where we won't be seen by any of Whitney's friends who might well be having breakfast in the Casa Marina themselves. Hmph! Where the fuck do they find you guys, anyway?"
"Well … where do you suggest, then?"
"Try the Waffle House on North Roosevelt. Think you can handle that, hotshot?"
"Okay, okay. Just be there in thirty minutes."
≈≈≈
There were the usual assortment of early morning types at the Waffle House, most of them slurping down coffee in order to catapult themselves into their day's work. No chance of encountering any of Whitney's crowd in here under the harsh fluorescent lighting.
Ryder was waiting for me. At least he had sense enough to take a booth in the back. I sat down and poured coffee from the pot on the table. Also on the table was his new cellular telephone, sitting upright between us like a plastic statue.
"Where've you been?" I asked. "It's been over a week."
"I told you it would take time."
"Yeah, and in the meanwhile, Vasiliev is running around on the loose."
Ryder poured cream into his coffee, then stirred it slowly.
"How do you know that?"
"Never mind how I know. Before you get started, let me tell you what I've come up with."
He sat back. "Okay. Let's have it."
I drew a warm pull from my coffee.
"Whitney and the Russians are working together, just like you thought. The Russians want to move into Cuba when the Beard kicks off. They're cutting deals with Whitney to use Key West as a preliminary kind of base camp. And when they move into Cuba, they're bringing their whole operation with them. Not just girls and gambling, but drugs, the heavy weapons trade, corruption, and all the rest of it."
Ryder picked up on it, showing surprise in his eyes.
"Which means they're essentially looking to retake Cuba for themselves."
I didn't tell him about the DeLimas' plans to inconvenience the Russians. Instead, I stayed on topic.
"And I'm told that Sullivan was killed because he was in the way, although I don't know how."
"I might have some information on that."
He shoved his coffee cup out of the way to make room for his briefcase on the table. He opened it and out came a plain manila folder. "But first, let me
show you this."
He opened the folder to reveal an eight-by-ten photo. "This is Vasiliev."
He handed the photo to me. I looked at the black-and-white surveillance picture of a youngish guy, maybe in his late twenties. He wore an expensive leather coat that came down to the middle of his thighs while he stood by a vehicle as if he were about to get into it. It was dark-colored.
A Land Rover.
Ryder moved that photo aside.
"And here's a closeup."
This was a tighter shot of his face. Not a mug shot, but one of him in a candid moment, like he posed for it with some other people at a party or somewhere. I could see blurry figures of other people in the background.
This close, I saw the beginnings of lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. His one-sided struggle with time had begun. I revised my estimate of his age to be around thirty-five.
But there was no mistaking one thing.
He was a killer, all right.
Even though he was smiling in the picture, he had that same cold, vacant look in his eyes that I'd seen in so many other eyes before.
Ryder went on. "He's thirty-five years old. He came to this country a few years ago with the first real wave of Russian mobsters. They were the ones who'd bought their way out of the USSR during the last years of communism."
I'd heard about the fall of communism while I was inside, and the subsequent mass arrivals of the Russian gangsters on our shores.
He said, "Anyway, we don't quite have all the names and numbers yet, but we do know that this Vasiliev is one of the top shooters for the entire US branch of the mob. The big boys up in Brighton Beach sent him down to Fort Lauderdale a couple of years ago when they were getting their Broward County operation set up. He runs a little group of thugs who provide all the muscle, and he's constantly seen in the company of the mob bosses. They turn to him whenever they have contracts on important people. Like the guy who was running for Broward commission last time out."
Ryder looked at me like I should know the rest of the story. My blank face told him I didn't, so he rolled his eyes, vibing lots of impatience.
"You may remember this. The guy was a real reformer type. Law and order all the way. He saw the threat the Russians posed, and he promised to send 'em back to Mother Russia."
"It doesn't ring a bell."
"Well, one night he and his wife were snatched in a brightly-lit restaurant parking lot. Local cops found their body parts a few days later stuffed into two 55-gallon oil drums in a dump in Oakland Park."
You know, it's one thing to do somebody who needs doing, or who really deserves it. But this politician, all he apparently did was mouth off to get some attention. They all do that, for Chrissakes. I mean, that's what politicians were born to do.
A little slapping around would've shut him up.
But then, to chop up his wife?
"Okay," I said. "What about Whitney and his Russian trip?"
"That took me a little time. I had to call Washington. Like I told you, I have a friend over at State. He went to —"
"State?"
"The State Department, Doyle. You know? Like, where the Secretary of State works?"
"Oh-h-h," I said, pretending this was all a great revelation to me.
If he was going to wake me up with the damn chickens, I was at least going to get a laugh or two out of the deal.
"Anyway," he continued, "my friend at State, he works for the Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs, and he had to call a friend of his at the Special Issuance Agency for the —"
"Shit, Ryder! Enough of the government mumbo-jumbo. Just tell me what you've got."
I had to take a big coffee hit. His bureaucratic doubletalk was making the room spin right before my eyes.
He got indignant on me.
"Look, I went to a lot of trouble to get this. And I violated FBI regulations by going interdepartmental. So don't give me —"
"FBI regulations? You mean like our little chat the other night in that abandoned bakery? That was in line with FBI regulations? Did J Edgar include that in his training manual? Or that part about how you were gonna frame me for a stickup if I didn't help you get Whitney? Is that in the new FBI playbook?"
"Bullshit, Doyle. That was —"
I shut him up. "Don't be pulling that righteous shit on me, G-Man. We're not kidding anybody here. We both want the same thing, and we're both willing to step over the line to get it."
The waitress brought his breakfast, some kind of omelet with toast. She asked me if I wanted a menu. I was hungry, but I didn't want to break bread with this asshole.
I waved her off, then poured more coffee into the thick white cup in front of me.
Ryder didn't say anything for a minute or two. He started fiddling with the eggs on his plate, buttering his toast, that kind of thing. Eventually, he looked up from his food.
"Two years ago this month, Whitney Senior flew to Miami, then to New York to begin his international mission of good will. Records show he spent the night in New York, although he could've made an easy connection that afternoon on a Lufthansa flight to Moscow via Frankfurt. He stays at a medium-priced hotel out by Kennedy Airport, then takes the very same Lufthansa flight the next afternoon."
"Any proof he saw the Russians in New York?"
"No. But whatever his reason for staying, it may well have been because he wanted to be near Kennedy Airport … which is very close to Brooklyn."
"Which is the American home … of the Russian mob."
"Bingo." He seemed quite surprised that I knew that. "So, the next day, Whitney flies to Moscow. He spends the night there, then on to Odessa the following morning. Now, Odessa isn't really in Russia. It's in Ukraine, but they all speak Russian there, because it used to be part of the old USSR, and Odessa just happens to be the headquarters for worldwide Russian organized crime."
He stopped talking for a second. It looked like he was going to dig into his breakfast, but he put his fork down instead and continued. "He's there in Odessa another day and a half, after which he makes the short flight down to the town of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea coast. That's the so-called sister city of Key West. He spends the afternoon shaking hands and cutting ribbons, then it's back to Odessa for two more days. Then, Moscow for another day, New York for a full day and night, then back home."
"In other words, a ten-day trip, all for a few hours in the sister city."
"Right."
He paused and finally took a bite of his food, which must've been getting cold by this time.
"Now, we don't have any record of who he saw or who he spoke with during his time in New York, Moscow, or Odessa, because we weren't tailing him. In fact, I'm damn lucky to have gotten this information at all. You know, Doyle, this stuff is really hard to come by, even within the government. All this happened during the Cold War, and there were strict regulations against —"
I put my hands to my ears.
"Spare me any more government bullshit. Please!"
"All right, all right."
He swirled some of his eggs around on the plate. They looked terrible. He apparently had the same idea because he didn't eat any more of them.
Instead, he pulled his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket and shook one loose. He torched it with his Bic, set at flamethrower level.
"And that brings us to your friend Sullivan."
I felt myself bend forward in anticipation. I was sure, though, that he didn't catch it.
"What'd you find?"
"Well, I have to tell you that it took me several hours on the phone. I had to lean on this guy I know at the Treasury Department. I say I know him. Actually, I barely know him. I really had to persuade him into helping me out. But he eventually steered me to the right person at the commissioners' office of the SEC, and let me tell you, that was no day at the beach. They shuttled me off to the Division of Investment Management. There, I got some twenty-one-year-old girl on the phone who put me through to the
Bureau of —"
"Ryder!"
He flinched. "Hey! You were pretty impatient, mister, with all your talk about me taking so long to get this information. You have no idea what it takes."
"Alright already. So I have no idea. Cut to the chase."
He calmed down a little. So did I. He paused for the all-important dramatic effect while he puffed on his cigarette.
Do they teach these guys this shit at the FBI Academy?
"It may interest you to know that on May 3, 1989, more than a year after you went inside, Sullivan opened a rather large account with a Miami investment management firm. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission records, a little over four hundred thousand dollars, to be exact."
I'll be damned. So Sully was telling the truth after all.
"Go on," I said.
"It wouldn't surprise me if that figure coincided exactly with what you guys took down in that swindle out in Las Vegas."
"Go on," I said again, waving smoke away from my face.
"Okay, you ready for this? The investment company that took your money is called Adams Securities. They appear to be only a semi-legitimate firm."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I say 'semi-legitimate' because, while they're licensed to do that kind of business, they hardly ever do any. They began operations exactly three days before Sullivan opened the account."
"Where you going with this?"
He smiled. "Right up Whitney's ass."
He finished off his coffee.
Then he said, "So I call Tallahassee. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. They look into Adams Securities. It's a hundred percent owned by a company called WA Financial Group."
"So what?"
"So this. WA Financial Group is a dummy corporation. It doesn't do anything except serve as a buffer between Adams Securities and the real owner."
"The real owner?"
"The real owner, the owner of WA Financial Group, and therefore of Adams Securities, is none other than Whitney-Adams Enterprises, Incorporated, a holding company which also happens to own all of Whitney's other businesses. Adams, it turns out, was his first wife's maiden name. She must've been some great pussy, huh?"