by P. G. Abeles
The drama, the excitement, the sheer spectacle and pageantry of that experience stayed with Miriam forever. When she later ran for political office, she always made it sound as if the idea had come coincidental to her work for civil rights, and in a way it had. But the desire to participate on a larger stage, to be smack dab in the center of pivotal events—was born right at that moment.
Every night at dinnertime, Miz Tummy said a modest grace: “Lord, let our crops and children grow.” And Miriam had grown until she was taller than all the girls and plenty of the boys. She ended up a formidable five foot ten inches tall. When Miz Tummy would see her slumped over, bowing her head, she would take Miriam’s chin in her hand “Hold yourself proudly, Miriam, the way God made you.
As a practical matter, her parents had always made their children’s education a priority; it was, they believed, the surest way for them to get ahead. Miss Amalia fostered something else—her imagination and curiosity. She taught Miriam to love books the way she herself loved them, as if they were alive. When Miriam graduated from high school in 1962, her parents would have been satisfied. Eight years earlier, the process of integration of the schools was a huge step forward for civil rights, but it had created a considerable backlash as well. Dr. Thomas Brewer of Columbus, Georgia, was well known all over the state for his relentless quest for racial integration in the schools and other public places. Shortly after the new legislation passed, he was shot dead in a warning missed by no one. But it was for their children that most southern African Americans feared most. Shy and sweet Autherine Lucy was beset by an egg and epithet-hurling mob when she tried to enroll at the University of Alabama. Many African American parents willing to wage the battle for civil rights themselves were dismayed by circumstances that still in the 1960s put their children on the front lines.
It was Miss Amalia who’d seen a wider world, who insisted Miriam attend college up north. She’d helped Miriam with her applications and she’d helped Big John with the money. By the time Miriam graduated from law school, Miss Amalia was already dying, but as incandescent and mischievous as ever. The disease didn’t change her, it just stripped her down to her essential elegance. Her body stayed straight and tall, her back and spirit unbowed, her large eyes bright and clear. Her belief in Miriam never dimmed: “You can change the world, Miriam,” she told her.
One morning, Miss Amalia never woke up. A big-city lawyer from Atlanta came out with the paperwork. Big John wanted to buy his farm; everything was all mechanized now. In the 1930s, it had taken a team of four horses 55 hours to plow a 40-acre field. Now a modern tractor pulling a 25-foot disc harrow could do it in an hour. But as it turned out, Big John didn’t need to buy it. Miss Amalia had left it to him in her will, as well as the farms he’d managed and the house itself.
In her will, she’d declined to give away Cotton’s grandson. Known to everyone as ‘Junior’, she’d left the ancient dog money “so he can settle where he will.” Some distant relatives considered using this provision to challenge the will, alleging incompetence. But after the first salvo, it hadn’t gone anywhere. Miss Amalia’s request might have appeared eccentric—but nobody in town—even the most pragmatic and hard-hearted—would agree that Cotton’s descendant should be treated like an ordinary dog. For herself, she’d requested an unadorned stone marker in the graveyard without name or date—inscribed with nothing but a mis-transcription of one of the psalms. Of course, they’d ignored that, and put her name on the large granite slab, anyway, but they’d used the curious translation of the psalm, just as she wrote it out.
“I said to myself, ‘I will confess my rebellion to the Lord.’
And you forgave me. And all my guilt is gone.”
Psalm 32.5
In later years, Miriam would return from the city to visit her parents and find her father sitting on the porch of the beautiful antebellum house. An elderly man, still tall and handsome, but bone-sore and weary, thoughtfully keeping company with a stately curly-haired old dog. A snow-white dog just like his grandpa, dignified and circumspect as a judge.
When Miriam first started campaigning, she thought she needed to wear red to stand out in the crowd. As it turned out, Miriam stood out plenty in any color, but she liked red, so she just kept wearing it. People responded to her energy, enthusiasm, and endemic integrity. Of course, she was also notorious for providing all who crossed her path—famous and sundry alike—with a list of suggestions. Improving yourself ought to be everyone’s lifelong goal, thought Miriam. Impressed with her accomplishments as a civil rights attorney, the good citizens of Atlanta made her the first African American woman to be elected to Congress from Georgia.
In her late thirties, she married a good and wise man, a fellow attorney. He liked to tease that he’d mostly kept up with her for twenty-five years. That they’d never had children was a sorrow to them both. Her husband’s public joking that he could never hold her still long enough hid the private pain of many years of disappointment. But the experience that broke so many couples had made them stronger. They’d had a wonderful and full life. They’d enjoyed a rare marriage of passion and regard that had changed over the years, but never diminished. In her personal life, Miriam always considered herself blessed.
But, although few would agree with her, she considered her professional life less of a success. Entrenched special interests made effecting change difficult. With real regret, Miriam had come to believe that most politicians didn’t really care about the constituents they served. After almost twenty years in politics, she simply hadn’t seen many candidates that weren’t animated by self-interest. But Claire McCracken was different. When Miriam met Claire McCracken, she was the first candidate for national office—black or white—who really seemed worth a damn.
Chapter Twenty-Two
March 2008
Medford, Oregon
CONNOR MURPHY WAS SITTING ON HIS DECK, sipping an overpriced coffee from the local yuppie emporium, investigating criminals. How times had changed, he thought. When he’d started his career as a federal investigator, every lead had been gained by painstaking legwork. If you wanted to check records, you inevitably presented your badge to a suspicious older woman in a dusty, under-heated county clerk’s office, who grudgingly pointed you to rows and rows of files in vertical hanging stacks and advised you in humorless tones not to make a mess. You then began the tedious process of sorting papers and reading files. It was like shifting sand.
Now everything was on the internet. That’s how Connor found Okono’s early campaign finance documents. All the reports claimed that Okono had—virtually since his first contest—been rolling in money—but the numbers didn’t bear that out. If anything, Okono seemed strangely under-funded.
What seemed odd was that despite the constant re-telling of the Okono mythology that his success was based on grassroots community activism, campaign finance records told a different story. It had not been individuals making small-sum contributions that had financed the early campaigns, but PAC’s and lobbyists—at a rate of almost 10 to 1 to individual contributions.
Regardless of its source, Connor found it hard to believe that Okono had run successful campaigns with so little money. In 1997, he collected $12,000 from PACs and $4,000 from individuals. In 1998, $13,500 came from PACs and a measly $1,500 came from individual contributions. Curiously, in all the years from which data was available on the Federal Elections Commission website, virtually half of the contributions designated as being “from individuals” were from one person—Joey Ali.
The Feds were going after Ali, and presumably the governor, but there was strangely little interest among the press corps in unraveling Ali’s links to Okono. Newsweek had sent a reporter to cover Joey Ali’s upcoming trial, but most media outlets seemed to have accepted the Okono campaign’s explanation of their relationship as a kind of benign acquaintance, without investigating further. But Connor felt certain that there was some way that Ali was transferring money to Okono, he just didn’t know
how—yet.
Connor picked up the phone and left a message. Lacey called him back with the information he’d requested within the hour. Neither mentioned the name of her contact.
She paraphrased their conversation from her scribbled notes: “He says $16,000 would have been low for a state senate seat. But Chicago is a one party town, so once you win the primary, you’re home free. So maybe for the first year, but after that it would go up a lot—to about $50-$60,000, as contributors start to want to jump on the bandwagon.”
Connor rubbed his chin. “But it doesn’t, it goes down,” he told her.
Lacey continued: “I asked about that. His guess is, it’s not on the level. Okono had to be taking in and spending more money than that. Running a campaign in a densely populated city is expensive. You’ve got to have storefronts, the media buys are more expensive. It adds up.”
Connor was puzzled. He asked: “Okay, so why hide the money? Why not report the income if he’s gotta spend the money anyway?”
Lacey paused, considering. “Hmmmmm.”
“What?” Connor asked. He could almost hear the wheels turning.
“Well, I was just thinking…” Lacey replied “What if he didn’t need to pay for it?’
“But you just said—”
She continued: “I know. Someone had to pay for it. What if it wasn’t Okono?”
It was late. Connor was tired. “What? I’m not following.”
Lacey asked: “Did Joey Ali make any charitable donations?”
“Sure,” Connor replied.
She continued: “To foundations? The Driver or James Hunt Foundations, for example?
“Yeah. Both of them,” said Connor.
“You said Okono was sitting on the boards of those foundations, right?” Lacey questioned.
“Yeah,” said Connor slowly.
“And those foundations gave millions of dollars to groups like SEED, right?” asked Lacey.
“Yeah,” Connor said.
Lacey continued: “Well, does SEED have a big ‘get-out-the-vote’ operation in Chicago?”
Connor laughed. “The biggest. It’s huge.”
Lacey laughed. “Well, there’s your missing money.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chicago, Illinois
AT FIRST, WHEN HARRISON HAD GOTTEN THE CALL, he’d thought the guy was putting him on. The stranger on the other end of the line wanted to talk about Joey Ali. Harrison had assumed the guy was a reporter on a fishing expedition—there’d been lots of news in the local papers about Joey Ali and his cozy relationship with Okono—but hardly anyone in the national media was really pursuing it. Harrison had tried to persuade the guy that he was wasting his time, but when the man insisted that he needed to talk to Harrison, Harrison had grudgingly agreed to a meeting. Harrison was more than a little surprised when the guy’s credentials checked out. Connor Murphy, former federal agent. Good guy, people said. Trustworthy. Serious. Murphy explained that he was recently retired, claimed he was pursuing this on his own. Harrison was skeptical—figuring that Murphy was more likely to be one of those guys with a comfortable retirement that started work as a PI to avoid the golf games and boredom. Harrison had asked his Bureau contact point blank: “Is this guy an adrenaline junkie?” To be honest most of the good ones were. You either thrived on that kind of stress or it destroyed you. The response came with a cynical laugh, “No more than anyone else.”
He’d agreed to meet the guy at a bar close to the airport. Murphy said he was in town for a few days. Harrison hated to take time away from the Antwone Green investigation, but they’d reached a kind of impasse. No witnesses. Superiors claiming —despite the evidence— no obvious signs of foul play. New paperwork for other cases was already starting to pile up on his desk.
Kevin DuShane, the boyfriend, had disappeared. If he was hiding out in the Caribbean, they hadn’t been able to find him. No credit card receipts, no ATM use. It was theoretically possible, of course. But in our cashless society, it was harder and harder to hide from authorities. Even if you were able to pay for your hotel in cash, most still insisted on a credit card imprint. It was unusual for someone innocently on holiday to carry that much cash—especially when it was now so easy to hit an ATM when necessary.
Of course, the authorities loved ATM transactions. Not only did they leave an electronic trail of exactly where a ‘person of interest’ had been, but once flagged, investigators could then pull up the ATM’s video for information on all kinds of things that would make tracking the suspect easier: their appearance, whether or not they were injured, or if they were with someone. Better still, many Caribbean countries had video cameras on major thoroughfares. So if authorities traced a suspect to a nearby ATM with the handy time stamp, they could sometimes pick him up on street surveillance cameras, as well. If Kevin DuShane had been in the Caribbean on a straightforward vacation for a few weeks, it was incredibly unlikely that there would be no trace of him.
People shoved and jostled as the bar started to fill up with the happy-hour crowd. Murphy was waiting for him in a booth at the back. Trim, handsome, bright blue eyes, only his grey hair identified Murphy as a man in his fifties. Strong handshake, looked Harrison right in the eyes. Harrison thought: so far so good. Murphy had been waiting, already had a beer. Harrison gestured to the waitress who, he noticed with amusement, was being particularly attentive to the good-looking Murphy. Harrison ordered a draft.
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
Murphy was not the type to waste time, he saw. He pulled out a small leather satchel.
“Actually, I think I can help you.”
Harrison started to feel like he was being set-up, but was too smart, and too cautious, to betray any impatience.
“Great…what with?” Harrison asked.
“The Bureau has been tracing Joey Ali’s money,” Connor said simply.
“I figured.” Harrison wasn’t surprised. The Feds were trying to build a case against Ali and a number of his political cronies. There were rumors that the ties went as high as the governor’s office.
Connor continued: “Some of the money went to the Jehovah Ministry.”
“I’m not surprised. There’s a cost to doing business around here,” Harrison said, shrugging his shoulders.
Connor continued, “…and some of the money went to a landlord of a derelict building on the South Side,” he said.
“Again, I’m not surprised…there are lots of political favors being paid back, here,” Harrison replied.
“For four months rent,” Murphy continued.
“O—kay…” said Harrison, cautiously.
“For a tenant by the name of Kevin DuShane,” Connor said. Harrison paused, stunned in spite of himself. Connor continued, pulling more copies from the satchel. “I understand that Mr. DuShane is a person of interest in a murder case you’re investigating?”
“He is.”
“And Mr. DuShane is currently on vacation in the Caribbean?”
“So they say,” Harrison replied evenly.
Murphy looked at Harrison steadily. “So, Detective Harrison, can you explain to me why Joey Ali is paying some rent-boy’s rent?
Harrison smiled at Murphy. This might turn into an investigation after all.
After Harrison’s brief explanation of what he and Johnson had discovered in the Antwone Green case, Murphy slid copies of statements showing wire transfers across the table to Harrison. The most important thing was the cash. The Feds had used marked bills, but so subtly, Harrison was unable to distinguish the marks they’d used. Connor showed him the list of serial numbers and then a photograph showing the same serial numbers deposited in cash one week later in the landlord’s LLC account. The time stamps told the story—if the lag had been longer, the money might just (arguably) have entered circulation, and it would be tough to prove a link with Joey Ali. The fact that the transaction happened so quickly—considering that four of the seven days would have been accounted for by the b
ank’s internal record-keeping (surprisingly, banks were less efficient at moving cash than processing checks) —an experienced investigator would consider it an open and shut case.
“Can I use this?” Harrison had to be careful; whatever capacity Murphy was working in, it wasn’t official.
“Sure. These are just copies. You’d have to put in a formal request. But all the evidence was gathered using Bureau protocol. Connor looked at Harrison closely: “Will you use it?” he asked quietly.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Harrison felt defensive under Murphy’s steady gaze. Was this a reference to him having worked Area 2, Harrison wondered?
Connor smiled slightly, trying to defuse the situation. His question had clearly offended Harrison. “Well, you must be wondering why you’re seeing this from me and not through official channels?” he offered.
“Yeah, well, I guess I am wondering that,” Harrison replied.
Connor raised his eyebrows slightly, resigned. “Apparently, there’s been a decision made not to pursue this.”
“I see,” said Harrison
Connor continued: “Just like there’s been a decision made not to implicate Okono in any of the ‘pay to play’ case against Joey Ali.”
Harrison was surprised but said nothing. Of all the politicians in Illinois, it was well known that Ali had the closest ties with Okono. If Joey Ali was dirty—and few in law enforcement doubted Ali was dirty—Okono was up to his sparkling white smile in it.
“Look. I have a bias, here, I won’t deny it,” said Murphy.
Harrison looked up: “You’re working for the McCracken campaign?” he asked.
Connor responded: “No, not in any official capacity. I’m a supporter, that’s it. But because of my background, I guess my nose just kind of leads me around when I sense something’s not on the level. And Joey Ali is about as far out of plumb as you can get.”
Harrison laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got a nose like that. It’s gotten me in no end of trouble, sometimes.”