“Did Ethan ever bring a woman to any of these meetings?” I asked.
“Not once. Nobody did. Don’t get me wrong, Alex. No reason it couldn’t have been that way. Nothing improper. It was just a throwback to the old boys’ club kind of thing that Moses Leighton thought would be amusing every now and then.”
“Which politicians were involved?” Mike asked.
“We had some councilmen from each of the boroughs, a congressman from Queens. And we had the former police commissioner, before he crashed and burned.”
“Bernie Kerik?”
“Yes. A real gent,” Donny said, sarcasm dripping from his words. “The guy was a misfit in that group from the first time I met him. You got that feeling his big disgrace was just around the corner, if you could only put a finger on it. When the feds arrested Kerik, that was like the third strike for the Leighton tontine.”
“Running clean out of gentlemen, huh?”
“Ethan told his father it was time to let it go. We actually raised a good amount of money for these historic trusts.”
“Where had you met?”
“The first dinner was at Gracie Mansion, of course. Bloomberg wasn’t involved, but he let us use the dining room, since that house is the real star of the trust—the most elegant of the old estates. I think our next dinner was in the Bronx, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion on Pelham Bay.”
I knew the fashionable old property, renowned for its Greek Revival details and its extraordinary gardens.
“And others?” Mike asked.
“King Manor.”
“The Kings of Queens?”
Donny tried to smile. “Yes, Chapman. Rufus King was a member of the Continental Congress. He was a senator from New York and later ambassador to Great Britain. I hadn’t known anything about him.”
“Where’s the manor?”
“It’s not grand, like Gracie. It’s an old farmhouse, off Jamaica Avenue. King was an early and outspoken opponent of slavery.”
Donny thought he was lulling Mike into a history lesson, and while he was testing the information, Mike was leading his charge exactly where he wanted.
“Was the Hamilton Grange one of your meeting places?”
“Yes. Yes, it was.”
“But Kendall Reid had nothing to do with that evening?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing him at dinner.”
“A little odd that the phantom funds that Reid’s alleged to have stolen are for a fictitious Save the Grange organization. Or was that part of a Moses Leighton plan?”
“Odd, how?”
“That your all-boys club was about getting money for this handful of fancy old houses, and Kendall Reid’s council scam arose out of the same concept.”
“Hey, maybe that’s between Reid and the Leightons,” Donny said. “Maybe that’s exactly where Reid got the idea for his own swindle, from a corruption of the plan that Moses Leighton had. I’m sure Paul Battaglia will figure that out without your help, Chapman.”
“I’ll just leave it alone, Mr. Baynes. I won’t even breathe the word tontine to the district attorney.”
“You know why it was named that? I’ll tell you. It had nothing to do with schemes and swindles,” Donny said, standing up and staring out the window, over the seaport of lower Manhattan. “Right down there, at the corner of Water and Wall streets. That’s where the old Tontine Coffee House was located. Ever heard of it?”
Neither Mike nor I had.
“I was a securities litigator before I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, handling stock frauds, among other things. The Tontine Coffee House is where the New York Stock Exchange was organized, two hundred years ago. It was built by the merchants of the Tontine Association—Archibald Gracie was a charter member—as a daily meeting place.”
“Legal and aboveboard?” Mike asked.
“Absolutely. Gracie, Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr—the prominent leaders of the time met there from twelve to two, almost every day, when they were in town.”
“All the guys who owned your fancy houses.”
“And more. It’s where the merchants and power brokers of New York gathered, the hub of politics and business. It’s the part of the city’s history Leighton wanted to recapture. That’s why he used the name Tontine, because the coffeehouse was the most important gathering of the city’s men in its day. That and the fact that these very men whose homes he wanted to preserve were the original members of the association.”
“I’ll have to start making house calls,” Mike said. “History’s my thing.”
“Gracie owned a large oceangoing fleet, as you probably know. The coffeehouse had a bell system and a spyglass, so the members could watch the great merchant ships arriving in New York Harbor, look for their own men coming back from sea.”
There was no stopping Donny Baynes now. He liked being in charge of the information flow.
“As soon as a ship’s captain reached the docks, he was required to come in to the Tontine to register his cargo. All the companies that outfitted, insured, and owned the boats had agents waiting here, just like Gracie, to account for their goods.”
“Coffee, tea, sugar, cloth,” Mike started to list the inventory of imports.
“Fine furniture, cotton, molasses,” Donny said.
“Blackbirders too?”
“Sorry?”
“Did they track their black ivory?” Mike asked, looming over Baynes’s chair.
“I don’t get it, Chapman.”
“You should, Donny. Being in charge of human trafficking and all. Those very same merchant ships carried slaves to the port of New York. Men, women, and children. Their human cargo was referred to as black ivory, in case you didn’t know it. And the snakeheads of the day were known as blackbirders.”
Baynes’s jaw slackened.
“The Wall Street Slave Market was at the very same intersection of Water and Wall streets. The Meal Market across the street from your coffeehouse, I guess, was the place where the enslaved Africans were sold.”
“I—I had no idea.”
“It’s helpful to know how your gentlemen’s club came to be, Donny. That original Tontine Association? It must have thrived on human trafficking.”
THIRTY-NINE
“Now you’ve got something to give Battaglia,” Mike said. “It’s the perfect time to call him and tell him you were tagged with a GPS. He’ll lose all interest in you once you explain how much ground we’ve covered.”
We had walked out the door of the U.S. Attorney’s Office just after six o’clock and made the left turn that put us directly in front of police headquarters.
“Better than that, he’ll be putting the knot in his black tie for whatever event his wife’s dragging him to tonight. It’s a good idea.”
I waited until we reached the quiet lobby of One Police Plaza and were waved in by the cop at the security desk.
The call was a quick one. I assured Battaglia that I was fine, that the NYPD had me covered, and that the small device attached to the rear of my car had a tampered ID number, so it would be difficult to trace.
As Mike predicted, he was far more interested in our meeting with Ethan Leighton, furious that we had stepped on Tim Spindlis’s toes by talking to Kendall Reid, and intrigued by the conversation with Donny Baynes. I had bought myself lunch with the district attorney at noon on Monday.
The Latent Print Unit was on the fifth floor of One PP. It ran 24/7 with some of the smartest detectives in the city.
I was from the new generation of prosecutors, spoiled by the revolutionary techniques of forensic DNA, which had only been introduced to the criminal justice system two decades before. But like many other young lawyers, I expected it to solve an increasing number of cases as its methods were refined and its variety of applications expanded almost explosively.
Mike’s training, and the fact that he had learned from his father since earliest childhood, kept him centered on good old-fashioned policing techniques. He was skilled a
t detailed interrogations and he used traditional applications, like fingerprinting, that were updated with high-tech computer assists.
He opened the door to the unit where several detectives were at work.
“Yo, Patty,” he called out across the room. A tall, thin redhead with a platinum streak in her long hair was standing next to her desk, thumbing through a pile of fingerprint cards.
“Hey, Mike. How lucky can I get on a Saturday night?”
“Patty Baker, meet Alex Cooper. You could get very lucky if you’ve got the right answers.”
“Remind me to wake up my husband and tell him. What’s happening? And if you’re asking me to jump the line, I’ve got way too much Golden Voyage business going on to help you.”
“We’re working that case. Nobody told you they think it’s connected to the broad who went headers in the Gracie Mansion well?”
“That’s the skinny.”
“I want you to take a look at these things for me.” Mike lifted the plastic bag out of his pocket, holding it by a corner.
“CSU see it yet?”
“Nobody has. It wasn’t found at the scene. Coop and I have a feeling it may be connected, but it was dumped somewhere else and a couple of guys have already had their hands on the bag before it got to us.”
“You have used up just about every last favor in the bank,” Patty said, sitting at her desk. She looked over at me with her intense blue eyes. “We were in the same class at the academy. That’s how come he gets special treatment. Mike knows way too many secrets about me.”
“I can relate to that.”
Patty put on her gloves, slid back the blue plastic zipper, and spread the bag apart. She set out a clean place to work and rolled the three items out onto the desktop.
Normally, the crime scene officers retrieved pieces of evidence like these. They dusted them with powder, as every television viewer seemed to know—white powder on black surfaces and black on white. Then they placed tape over the powdered area, and lifted it, attaching it to a three-by-five-inch index card. It was up to the latent-print examiners to determine if the retrieved image was of sufficient value to be useful.
Patty readied the white powder as she examined the three makeup cases.
“Forget the compact for the moment. Lipstick too,” she said. “The mascara wand is my best bet. I can probably get a good thumbprint off that. What do you think, Alex?”
She was holding an imaginary eye makeup case in the air, grasping it with her thumb.
“It never occurred to me, but it looks like you could be right.”
Patty did the lifts herself, taping them onto a card. She was a lefty, and it seemed as though she was doing everything backward as she went about her work.
Then she picked up a magnifying glass and examined the marks carefully, studying three cards. “I’ve got a nice clean one here. A couple of partials but one good print.”
On two of the index cards Patty placed a red dot—a notation that they were of no value. NV is how they would be filed.
“I can try for a match with this one,” she said about the single lift from the mascara wand that was OV—of value.
“Go for it,” Mike said. “Salma Zunega—that’s the woman whose body was in the well—is she in the system?”
The techs at the morgue would have rolled all ten fingers of the dead woman onto a card before she was autopsied, to preserve for identification purposes.
“Yep. Her inked prints were loaded yesterday on the day tour.”
“You eyeball them?”
“Me? No. But I saw the entry in the case log. Salma’s in. I’d do a visual comparison to the inked card myself, but the boss must have it under lock and key. I can’t get in his office tonight either. He’s squirrely about his evidence.”
SAFIS—the Statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System—was a giant computer databank that went into operation in 1989, the same year that DNA was accepted in American courts as a valid scientific technique. In tandem, the two sophisticated processes were able to resolve an unimaginable number of cases.
“Can you upload this one now?”
“You have a date or something?” Patty asked, continuing on with her meticulous work. “Patience never was your strong suit.”
“I want to know whether to wait or not.”
“Take a load off. There are fingerprint images of more than three million people in this computer brain. He’s pretty fast, so just calm yourself down.”
“We’re in there, too, aren’t we?” I asked.
Every prosecutor, cop, government employee, elected official, and federal agent was in the system. We all had to be fingerprinted as part of our ordinary background check.
“You bet,” Patty said. “I’ll scan this in. You know where the vending machines are, Mike? Feel like springing for hors d’oeuvres?”
“Sure.”
Patty yawned. “Get me two sodas—whatever promises the most caffeine.”
Mike left the lab and I stayed riveted at Patty’s side, following her from her work space to the giant machine that would perform the search. “Mind if I watch?”
“Not at all. You get this?”
“I hope so. I’ve had so many of your colleagues on the stand, I’ve had to relearn it as each technique has been developed to make it clear to the jurors.”
Prints usually appeared as a series of dark lines, representing the high peaking portion of the friction ridge skin. The white spaces—the shallow portions—were the valleys in between. The identification and matching is based primarily on what are now called minutiae—the location and direction of ridge endings and bifurcations along the ridge path.
“I’m going to scan this in, Alex, see? Sir Francis takes it from here for a while.”
“Sir Francis?”
“The best partner I ever had. And he’s not a ball breaker like Mike. Give me a nice, quiet computer any day,” Patty said. “Francis Galton was the first guy to define the characteristics for a scientific identification of unique prints. Galton Points—loops, islands, whorls, deltas—they make up the minutiae from which comparisons are made.”
Patty finished scanning, hit the Search button, and walked back to her desk.
“What’s Francis doing now?” I asked.
Mike walked back in with an armload of soda cans, bags of chips, and candy bars. “Cocktails are served.”
We each grabbed a soda and something to eat, while Patty explained. “He’s assigning a numerical value to the fingerprint I just submitted. And he’s searching the Latent Cognizant database. Give him a few minutes.”
“Is he as good at it as you?” Mike asked, tousling her hair.
“Not always,” Patty said. “Sir Francis is a genius—don’t get me wrong. But we do things differently. He assigns values to things that I sometimes disagree with. Hey, you—keep your crumbs off my desk, Mike.”
Those of us in law enforcement talked about fingerprint identification as a science, but it was much more accurate to call it an art. The skill of the examiner, the ability to distinguish between blindingly similar ridge endings and bifurcations, was something far too complex to take for granted.
“There are a lot of holes in the net,” she went on. “Garbage in, garbage out. Had a case last month—a homicide in Staten Island. The perp’s been in the system for a lot of years, but his inked prints were done so badly back in 2003 that Sir Francis here missed him. Couldn’t get a read at all.”
“But you did?” I asked.
“It wasn’t easy. We just don’t always see things the same, Francis and me.”
Mike was on his second candy bar. “How about the plastic bag, Patty? You think you could get any lifts off that?”
“Not my job, sweetheart.”
“By the time I find Crime Scene on a busy Saturday night and get them over here to dust it, I might as well go to a double feature, take a nap, come back all fresh in the morning. Like that.”
She reached for the corner of
the bag with her gloved hand. “You fall for his bullshit, too, Alex? I’m telling you, he wheedled everything out of me except my virginity.”
“That was so long gone by the time you got to the academy, Detective Baker, not even Sherlock Holmes could have found a trace of it.”
“Then why’d you spend so much time looking?” Patty was bent over again, moving her hand over the bag with her magnifying glass. “Plastic’s great for prints. What are you hoping to get?”
“I guess you’re going to tell me pretty soon whether Sir Francis can put the mascara case together with Salma.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she’s not the one who dropped it at City Hall, ’cause she was already dead. I’d like to think the guy who handled the bag might have left his prints on that.”
“You got a load of partials on here. But they’re mostly smudged. Overlaid on each other. You might have multiple handlers.”
“Two tickets to the Super Bowl?”
“You got ’em?”
“Find me a killer and I’ll put you on the fifty-yard line.”
“See what I mean, Alex? And still I go for the bait.”
Patty took the bag over to a larger workbench against the wall and turned on a brighter lamp. “Here’s my advice. I’ll break the rules for you, Mike. Again. If I get anything of value, I’ll give you a call immediately. My guess is that I’m going to get an endless bunch of overlays.”
She was already at work, dusting the first side of the bag and taking her lifts.
“We know at least one guy in the Parks Department picked it up out of a ditch,” Mike said. “No telling how many hands have been on it.”
Patty handed Mike the first of the index cards she was making after marking it with a red dot. “No value.”
“You gotta find me one,” Mike said. He was throwing back M&M’s now, washing them down with soda. “Just one that great big brain can read.”
“I’m giving you something better, okay? When you leave here, you going uptown?”
“Yeah.”
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