The Gun Runner's Daughter

by Neil Gordon

  In a neutral voice, she answered with some respect: Bob knew how to be blunt.

  “Daddy represents the Falcon Corporation in America. The Falcon Corporation is an Israeli defense manufacturer and dealer. The New York office brokers deals for the Israeli defense technologies, works codevelopment deals with American companies, and handles fulfillment of U.S. sales, grants, and other transfers to Israel.”

  And yet while she recited, she heard another account, Pauly’s account, as he had once delivered it, drunk, at a Yale party when someone had asked him what his father’s company did. “Falcon Corporation? Why, Falcon sells Wide Area Penetration Tools for use in Soft-Target-Rich Environments, of course, as well as Very Large Potentially Disruptive Reentry Vehicles and Violence Processing Equipment. All of it is in the interest of something called National Security, which is a term that seems to make the most sense to the people making large profits by it.”

  Bob brought her back to the present, speaking conversationally.

  “Alley, honey, your dad’s charged with illegally selling military supplies to the Bosnian Muslims in contravention of the U.N. embargo.”

  She listened, watching out the sun-flooded window, her green eyes, catching the morning light, nearly on fire. Even she, who tried not to know about such things, knew this was untrue. Clinton was known to oppose the embargo, in fact, had recently sent Warren Christopher to try to overturn it.

  “Bob. I don’t care what my father was arrested for, so I certainly don’t need to be lied to.”

  “I’m not lying.” Stein spoke very slowly now, and carefully. “There’s either something we don’t understand, or the arrest was a mistake. Either way, we’ll have him out tonight. It’s the Fourth of July weekend, for Christ sake.”

  Standing again, she opened her bag and unpacked her father’s things under Bob’s suddenly attentive eye. “You do that, Bob. Now, there’s my dad’s stuff, okay? Can I go now?”

  “Go where?”

  “To the island. I got a four o’clock ferry at Woods Hole.”

  4.

  She did not need to be lied to. She had always known about it. Once, for a month, the entire building staff of their apartment block in Borough Park had been replaced by Secret Service agents; once the Hebrew day school on Forty-ninth Street where she was in fifth grade and Pauly in third had been ringed for a full week by the NYPD. Years later, Leslie Cockburn reported that each occurrence had been to protect against a death threat, the first against her father by the Tupac Amaru when the Falcon Corporation had been selling helicopters to the Peruvian military at Carter’s behest; the second against her and Pauly by a business competitor based in Lebanon.

  In those days, she had a kind of respect for him. Her classmates’ fathers were chemists, shopkeepers, small businessmen. Hers was a romantic, elusive figure, in and out of the country day to day. But that was long ago. When Reagan came, there was no longer any need for that kind of person; the industry in which her father had made his fortune came entirely above ground, and slowly her respect for him waned.

  That was the difference between Allison and her younger brother: she knew him before Reagan, he only after. To Pauly he was just a businessman who dealt in instruments of death. Once she had tried to tell him, but he’d shrugged it off with the insolence of the young.

  “Don’t give me that, Alley. Death dealing isn’t Zionism.”

  “You don’t get it. Ben-Gurion built an arms industry when no one else in the world would arm them. The ’48 war, right after the Holocaust: Pauly, it was life or death, you know that. And because they had to arm themselves once, they think they have to be able to do it again. No matter what it costs.”

  “No matter what it costs other countries, you mean. It’s bullshit, Alley. It’s 1990, not 1948: Israel’s about as likely to be annihilated as New Jersey. They sold to the Shah, to Mobuto, to South Africa. Now they can’t give arms exports up for the same reason Bush can’t: they need the fucking money.”

  Pauly, after all, had been able to forget Borough Park, the neighborhood of her own childhood where Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian are spoken more than English and which harbors more camp survivors per capita than anywhere else in the world—a population that included Ronald Rosenthal’s parents, survivors of Dachau. He had shed the past as quickly as he’d removed his kipah and abandoned David—a king’s name—for Paul the first day of school in their new neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, where Rosenthal had moved his children in 1980. God, how she’d hated to see him do that, or rather, hated to see the ease with which he’d done it. Still, she too had introduced herself in the new neighborhood, and ever since, as Allison rather than her given name, Esther. Pauly was too hard on his father. They’d both adapted to the new surroundings, and so had he.

  He had had to. Those who could not change to Reagan’s way of doing business were replaced by people who could: people from the department of defense, or lawyers, or MBAs. Her father’s Yale law degree was more important, now, than his army service: more lucrative, too. And under Clinton there was no longer any need for cloak-and-dagger because nothing, virtually, was illegal anymore. In the interest of the balance of trade and keeping the vast Cold War arms industry healthy—a vital constituency for Democrats and Republicans alike—Clinton’s State and Commerce departments were there to facilitate any little problems with end-user licensing and Arms Export Control Act limitations people like Ronald Rosenthal might encounter. That was when her father completed his trajectory from Borough Park by moving to Park Avenue.

  Riding home from Bob Stein’s office in a cab, she reflected that that would be what so surprised Bob about the arrest. Her father had made a fortune by his fine knowledge of what the government could be induced to allow: his entire expertise was in identifying market niches in unacknowledged government operations. And Clinton’s tacit support of the Bosnian Muslims had been a campaign promise, for God’s sake. He had accepted the embargo only to placate the allies in the NATO peacekeeping force, all the while tacitly approving the many pipelines supplying the Bosnian Muslim militias, to the great profit of the many Turkish, Croatian, and former-Soviet dealers involved. The Israelis, she had no doubt—America’s traditional representatives in such matters—resented being left out of that extremely lucrative proxy position. Her father, she had no doubt, had confidently expected to be cut in.

  Allison remembered a winter’s night in their Brooklyn Heights townhouse at Grace Court, when she was in high school. She’d woken up thirsty and come down the back stairs to get a bottle of seltzer. Through the swinging door in the kitchen, she had seen him sitting in front of a rocks glass and a bottle of Absolut vodka at the dining room table. He had, it was clear to her, just come in, for his overcoat was still on, his tired face with its thinning hair emerging, used and lined, from the bulk of the black cashmere.

  “Hello, my Essie. Congratulate me, doll.” He was too drunk to attempt to dissimulate his loneliness: with the move from Borough Park had come the departure of his wife, who had gone one step further than her husband in their flight from their roots by moving to California and marrying a goyish art dealer.

  “Hello, Daddy.” She sat down across the big oak table from him. “What for?”

  “Becoming a billionaire.”

  “Congratulations. Ready for bed now?”

  “Yeah.” He drained his drink and stood, unsteadily, while Alley rounded the table and took his arm. She smelled Yves Saint Laurent on his cashmere coat, tobacco and booze on his breath. Supporting him gently up the stairs, she breathed deep his smells.

  “So are we really billionaires?”

  And now her father laughed, happily. “With seven figures to spare, doll. It’ll be in tomorrow’s papers.”

  But in his bedroom he stopped, staring out the window over Grace Court for such a long time that Allison began to grow alarmed.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?”

  And in a soft voice, no longer drunk, he whispered: “Nothing. I just wish Abba�
��d lived to see it.”

  Abba. His father. Later, upstairs in her attic room, her father safely asleep, she had allowed herself to feel what Pauly had both understood and misunderstood: the simplicity of her father’s ambition, the extent to which money mattered.

  The next day the New York Times reported the sale of twenty-four rebuilt Mirages to Honduras. The sale, since the Israeli rebuilds used a U.S.-manufactured engine, had been signed off by Ronald Reagan, three weeks into his presidency. And the commission to Ronald Rosenthal, U.S. representative of the Falcon Corporation, was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

  5.

  That afternoon, in Arizona, the grand jury indicted her father on three counts: one violation of Arms Export Control Act, two violations of Arms Export Administration Act. Her father was arraigned, and bail hearings were held, at which Bob Stein presented the court’s bailiff with three million dollars of Falcon Corporation money in six suitcases. Thereupon her father was charged and released. The national news reported it that night.

  Allison watched it from her apartment on Jane Street—despite what she had told Bob Stein, she had no intention of facing the summer community on Martha’s Vineyard while her father was in the national spotlight. She had a fairly good idea of what was next.

  And indeed, the next morning the papers reported that Ronald Rosenthal had left Phoenix on a chartered helicopter, and that his whereabouts were now unknown. The helicopter, she thought, would have taken him to the Texas coast, from where a private boat probably took him to Havana. From there he would travel to Europe, then to Tel Aviv, where he was not terrifically worried about extradition: he was a citizen, he owned both influence and property, and there was a Labor Knesset seat available to him for the asking. The only mistake, she thought, was that he had already been arraigned. That meant, if she remembered correctly, that he could be tried in absentia.

  July 4th. The summer day liquid. The summer night alive with explosions. The phone ringing endlessly, unanswered. Outside the window a television camera set up, filmed her window, did a spot, left. She waited out the day reading by the throbbing of the air conditioner as if it were nothing more than a dream from which she had been awoken by the phone, at night. When she’d finished her assigned reading—Bill Dykeman at the law firm where she was interning believed in continuing education—bored, she booted her computer, logged into Dykeman’s Lexis account, and read some Arms Export Control Act law. That confirmed her apathy. Her father would never come to trial: pleas would be bargained, assets exchanged. This was business as usual.

  That she thought this was because she did not yet know how deeply her father was in trouble, and how dearly he was going to be made to pay.

  Nor could she. The percolation of events that would, by Thanksgiving, erupt again on the front pages of every major newspaper in America was, for the moment, so removed, so secret, that even Bob Stein had no inkling of it.

  Which was, in many ways, fortunate.

  For as the summer of 1994 crept across New York in a suite of indistinguishable days of ferocious heat, an epic dry spell that was breaking all previous drought records, days of high cerulean skies at noon and brilliantly clear starlit nights, it was, for Allison Rosenthal, the end of a kind of innocence she wasn’t aware she possessed but which she would miss for a long time to come.

  6.

  Michael Levi, her father’s second in command and lifelong friend, was arrested in mid-July. The press missed the importance of it and Levi’s problems were relegated to section B, city news.

  Allison didn’t get it either. She read the item in the morning over coffee and juice at Brigitte’s on Greenwich, the morning sun splashing through the high windows onto the newsprint. She was tired of how long they were taking to settle her father’s messy, embarrassing problems. And for the first time the prospect of sitting in the offices of Dykeman, Goldfarb & Barney struck her as attractive: it would stop her thinking about her father.

  When, a week later, Levi turned State’s evidence in return for limited use immunity, the papers missed that too.

  That evening—as every evening—Allison met Martha Ohlinger at a table in the Corner Bistro. At the New York Observer, Martha reported on Wall Street and Washington, and had often told Allison things she didn’t want to know about her father. In doing so, of course, Martha was immeasurably helped by the fact that her own father was no less than the national security adviser and a close confidant of Clinton, as he had once been of Carter. Pushing back to Allison through the crowded room in jeans, sandals, and a black silk blouse, Martha sat and threw a copy of the Observer onto the table.

  “You seen this, Alley girl?”

  Allison watched her friend shaking her black curls free from under a baseball cap, letting them fall in a frame around her dark, complex, sharply delineated face. Her eyes, black and alive, were showing excitement, and not for the first time Alley thought that what made Martha attractive was intellect more than any of her more obvious assets. Just now, she was very attractive indeed.

  “Martha? If you’re going to tell me about my father, I don’t want to know.”

  “You’re going to want to know this, Alley.”

  The paper carried the story that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York had announced her intention to pursue a conviction of Ronald Rosenthal, in absentia, using Michael Levi’s immunized State’s evidence.

  And still, Allison Rosenthal did not understand.

  “Big deal. My dad’s sitting in a million-dollar house in Jerusalem. They’ll never convict him, Marty. Peres’ll come over and whisper a word to your dad, Falcon’ll pay a fine. It’s just making rain for Bob Stein.”

  Martha shook her head emphatically. The two had known each other since Alley’s first day, eleven years old, at St. Ann’s, and since then they had shared not only every emotional experience, but almost every intellectual one, arguing their way through to joint American studies B.A.s at Yale before their paths diverged, Alley to Paris, Martha to the London School of Economics.

  “I don’t think so, Alley, and unlike you I know what I’m talking about. The case has been given to Shauna McCarthy. U.S. Attorney, Southern District.”

  “And McCarthy’ll make a deal. It’s not about foreign policy, Marty. It’s about an exchange of assets.”

  “That’s just it. It is about foreign policy. And it worries me that you don’t understand.”

  “Marty.” Alley lowered her voice, as if explaining something embarrassingly simple. “Foreign policy is conducted by the Executive. Criminal prosecutions are the business of the Justice Department. Come off it.”

  “That’s exactly my point.” Calm and methodical, like a doctor administering unwelcome medicine, Martha counted off on her fingers. “McCarthyism. The destruction of the Black Panther Party. Watergate. The Iran-contra pardons. Paula Jones’s tax audit. I got an example for every decade since the war of an administration abrogating to itself the tools of the Justice Department, Alley girl. Now, what exactly do you have to prove this administration’s different?”

  For a moment, Alley thought. Then: “Have they appointed a prosecutor?”

  Martha nodded. That, to someone trying to gauge the seriousness of the government’s intentions, was exactly the right question. “Not yet.”

  “Then don’t worry about it. Okay?”

  “Alley, I heard that Dee Dennis is under consideration.”

  She didn’t answer that, but raised her eyebrows at her friend, who went on nearly unwillingly, her voice lowered.

  “Christ sake, Alley girl. Ed Dennis is White House counsel. And his son is just looking for a job after five years on the Walsh prosecutions. Dee’s probably as well qualified as anybody in the country to argue this. And he’s a damn sight better connected.”

  For a moment, the two stared at each other, and the expression between them was one that had first been there over fifteen years before. Then Alley wiped her hands over her eyes.

  “L
et me alone, Marty, okay? I’m already like a goddamn pariah. You know what it’s gonna be like going to DG&B tomorrow? I can’t help what they’re doing to my father.”

  But Martha was not calmed. “I don’t give a fuck about your father, Alley. I’m worrying about what they’re going to do to you.”

  7.

  Still, she simply did not see. Nothing was happening to her: a couple reporters, so what. Nor could she see that her father risked much. A very great portion of his business took place in Israel and Europe, and those things left in America had earned their keep long ago. All through the month since his arrest, his checks had continued to arrive from his secretaries at his offices abroad, checks in bizarre amounts—$4,562.17; $12,603.50; $2,998.89—yielded by that day’s exchange from deutsche marks, shekels, pounds sterling, checks drawn on Bank Leumi, Barclay’s, Crédit Lyonnais.

  By day, she went to work at Dykeman, Goldfarb & Barney; by night she went out with Martha, or read, or slept. True, it surprised her how increasingly many people, at work, now avoided her as the extent of the government’s determination to prosecute her father came clear. Surprised her, but did not otherwise affect her. She had always been solitary. And she knew that soon the story would fade.

  But as July passed into August, it became clearer and clearer that her father’s affairs were far from disappearing from the media. She could judge the story’s prominence by the treatment she received at work. And Martha, over drinks each night at the Corner Bistro, continued to feed her the most important points, like medicine to an unwilling child.

  Allison was grateful, in her way. Sidney Ohlinger had told Martha to stay away from Allison after her father’s arrest, and Martha had told him to take his regular chair in the Oval Office and shove it. Watching her friend one such evening at the bistro, Allison smiled at the memory, with gratitude, with affection. When Martha had woken one morning a few years back to see a front-page picture of Ronald Rosenthal testifying in front of the joint committee on Iran-contra, all she had said was: “You see? It’s like I always told you, we both got crooks for old men.”