by Clare Morgan
Early Monday morning, I received a FedEx form Mr. Marsh with a cashier’s check for $20,000 and a contract with Myriad Software. The contract was for 3 years at $75,000 per year.
Yeah, I was suddenly a functioning member of the American middle class, and it felt pretty damn great.
Chapter 9:
It was my old man’s great big retirement dream to spend his golden years out in Arizona. Like most mid-westerners, my old man had spent a week of his life in the Grand Canyon State when he was a teenager and fell in love with it because he hiked and camped in a big hole in the ground. For forty years the old man carried around that dream, he even carried a snapshot he took with my grandfather of the two of them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon smiling and sweating as a reminder of what he worked for day-in-and-out. Arizona was where he wanted to be, and he would do anything to get there.
Well, he did do anything and everything in the last ten years of his career to make sure him and mom could afford a condo out in Scottsdale. But when mom got breast cancer and then died two years later, something in my old man died, too. He stopped caring whether he made it out to Arizona. Hell, he stopped caring if he made it out of Chicago alive let alone retire, and because of his lack of caring, he got sloppy, too sloppy, and then he got bust by internal affairs for running numbers, and they ended up bringing him up on corruption and RICO charges. 25 years-to-life in Joliet, plus they stripped him of his pension and cleared out the hundred grand he had stashed in his retirement account because they figured it was his pay off dough. I know it wasn’t, I know that the money in his bank account was him and my mom going without new clothes or car for ten years at a stretch and squirreling away money. I also know that my old man would never be stupid enough to stash dope dealer money in the bank. I men, seriously, you’d have to be half retarded to make that kind of dirty money traceable. I figure he’s got it tucked away in some safe deposit box or buried somewhere. Because the fact is you don’t only make one-hundred grand when you’re rolling dirty. It’s actually probably closer to half-a-million. But I don’t ever press the old man about it when I go to visit him. Because who knows, the state of Illinois just might decide that he’s done his bid and let him out, and that money will actually let him live out his golden years in some kind of comfort.
But I’ll tell you what, if my old man felt the sun beating down on him like I did when I got off my plane at Sky Harbor International Airport, my guess is he would’ve scrambled back on the plane and would’ve demanded that the pilot take him back home.
May in Chicago is absolutely freaking gorgeous. Seriously, it’s the best and only time that the city is truly livable. In the winter it’s a freezer and in the summer it’s an absolute toilet, but in the spring, particularly in May, it’s breathtaking. Temperatures never rise above 70 and at night it only dips down into the 40’s. It’s basically sweater weather. It’s the time of year where young couples take long walks out by the gold coast and fall in love; it’s the time of year where everybody leaves their windows open to let in the fresh air. And yeah, it’s the time of year where you spend the weekend in shorts and head out to the parks to have a picnic and ogle all the college girls in their bikinis as they try to tan their sun deprived bodies.
But May in Phoenix, goddamn, it’s a freaking cesspool, and I’m being kind when I say it’s a cesspool, because it’s actually about as close to Hell as a living human being is going to get.
When I stepped off the plane it was 95 degrees, and that whole “it’s a dry heat” thing, that’s a crock of crap piled on top of crack. When we landed, the sky was equal parts burning, blistering sun and ominous gray clouds full of rain. The problem was it was so hot that even if it tried to rain, the drops would just evaporate in the heat. Even inside my terminal while waiting for my luggage and standing in the cool confines of the air conditioned nightmare that is Sky Harbor International Airport, I was dripping sweat like Dom DeLuise after playing two games of racquetball.
And it only got worse once I was outside trying to hail a cab so I could get out to the hotel Junior was putting me up in out in Scottsdale. Virtually every cab stand was vacant and I stood out on the concrete and asphalt turning into a stinky puddle. After thirty minutes, a cab finally showed up and took me to a swank hotel Junior booked me in called the Valley Ho in Scottsdale. It was retro in all the annoying ways you think of retro, except for the pool are which was pack to the gills with hard bodies dancing waist deep in the water. Not a bad way to cool and sport a hard-on while you gyrated to techno beats pressed against a wannabe stripper with a spray tan in a thong. I would definitely be checking it out later, but for the moment I needed to get out of the heat and get myself into the proper mindset to work.
Ever since I started “working” for Junior, I hadn’t been taking on much work as a PI. In fact, I hadn’t taken a single job since falling into the service of the Vecchio family and mostly kept a roof over my head from hand outs and skimming a bit here and there from my unaccompanied pick-ups. But when you’ve been at the PI game for as long as I’ve been, digging and discovering information is as easy to slip back into as slipping into a warm bath.
Junior hadn’t sent me out to the desert entirely empty handed as far as information was concerned. The first thing he’d been able to provide me with was the rental application of the lick and grab twins. Neither of them was on the lease other than the basic information that they would be the ones occupying the apartment, but their folks were the ones footing the bills. Despite being a complete dirtbag, Junior was also a fairly shrewd and thorough business man. The rental agreements he gave me were, to say the least, comprehensive. Of course, when you’re renting a 900 square foot, two bedroom apartment for $3000 a month, you wanted to make sure whoever was doing the renting could actually afford to live there. Combine that with the fact that the said same apartment building was also a combination drug lab/porn set/trick pad, you also wanted to make sure that who you were renting to had nothing to do with law enforcement.
The lick twins were named Nicolas Stills and Patrick Myers, both of them originated from a town called Carefree. A quick Google search on my laptop brought the city’s website up, and it was a mere thirty miles from where I was currently sitting. According to the website, Carefree had started out as an artist community, but over the years had transformed into an oasis of the insanely rich of Arizona, and was the home of a few former movie and rockstars I didn’t know anything about, and a couple of politicians I knew even less about, except for that Dan Quail guy, and who could forget that dumb ass excuse for a vice president.
I dug into the Stills and the Meyers a little bit, which was easy enough to do considering the amount of information the families had to provide for Junior’s rental agreement, including home and business addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and social security numbers. All the vitals someone would need to steal your identity and bleed you dry, and chances were that’s exactly what Junior planned on doing once his tenants vacated their high priced luxury apartments.
I think that’s what drives me the battiest about the idle rich. Hell, about the middle class in general, they’re so damn trusting. They fill out applications and input information into websites without the slightest clue of who’s actually operating things behind the scenes and what, exactly they’re doing with all that precious information. Don’t get me wrong, 99% of the businesses and websites currently running are entirely legit and aren’t going to do a damn thing with the information they’ve gathered other than store it in some dusty file cabinet or on a server so secure that not even the best and sleaziest hackers couldn’t penetrate it. And maybe Junior had absolutely zero plans of scamming his tenants (which I doubted, that guy’s always working an angle), and he was coming at these apartments as a completely legitimate business. Most gangsters own legitimate business so they can launder money through them without the IRS getting wise about where the money was actually coming from.
But whatever, I shrugged it off an
d searched for the Stills and Myers, and neither one of the families were hard to find because both of them had Wikipedia pages.
The Myers came from old East coast banking and garment district money and had moved out to Arizona during the coper and silver booms in the early 1940’s and made even more money than they had come out here with. The current generation of Myers were well known real estate investors and had one son, Patrick. Patrick was the kid who’d let me into the apartment. The pictures I saw of him online were of a clean cut and rather conservative young kid who looked like he was going to spend his life pursuing public office. I guess college had really changed the kid?
The Myers family was tight. There wasn’t a single negative article or rumor about them online which most likely meant they paid someone to keep their family name out of the media and off of the web. Which probably meant they were too tight to approach once I started sniffing around about the green dope I’d found in their apartment.
The Stills, on the other hand, were a completely different story. The Stills were incredibly new money. The mother and father, Michael and Dorothy, were the authors of a best selling series of children’s books about a cowboy armadillo named Maurice. Michael wrote the stories and Dorothy illustrated. Michael was also once a well known investigative journalist who hung it all up once the kiddie books hit it big. He was big time and had won a couple of Peabody awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer. The couple had two children, the aforementioned Nicolas who was attending the University of Chicago on a full chemistry scholarship (I was thinking maybe the kid might have something to do with the manufacturing of the green dope. But who knew?), and a daughter named Allison who was attending Arizona State University down the road in Tempe. The family was basically an open book who had a public website and more social media than you could shake a stick at. They would be the ones I approached once I got around to them.
My biggest concern, however, was contacting Junior’s cartel people. Those folks gave me more than a bit of heart burn. Okay, more than just a little bit, the Mexican cartels flat out frightened me.
Let’s jump into a little more Organized Crime 101, shall we? (And I promised I won’t be as thorough as I was about the Vecchio’s, but it’s important for you to understand why I’m so scared of these people.)
Back in the early 70’s during the waning years of Nixon’s second term as President, good old Tricky Dick wanted to appear tough on crime because so many of the GI’s he’d sent off to die were coming home hooked on Cambodian heroin. Now here’s the thing with Tricky Dick, the guy was a complete and paranoid nut job and the student of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Like most people of his generation, Hoover had a real hard-on about black folks. His hard on mostly had to do with the blacks asking for more rights, better pay, and the same chance at a bright future for their children. But Hoover translated this basic human desire as big old black guys wanting to screw white women and polite the white race with their black genes. (Yeah, I know, it sounds idiotic and barbaric, but it’s how a lot of these old timers thought, this is including my own grandfather, who was a Chicago police detective for nearly forty years.)
Nixon had inherited this paranoia of the black race infiltrating the white race from Hoover, and he tried his damnedest to make sure no race mixing would happen and that the blacks would stay in their neighborhoods and remain shiftless and uninspired. And the way he would do this was by flooding the streets of black neighborhoods and cities with heroin. More specifically, heroin shipped into the states from Cambodia by the CIA. Quick history question? Have any of you ever heard of Air America? Chances are you might remember the movie with Mel Gibson and Robert Downy Jr. Well, in the movie, Air America was portrayed as these whacky scamps who dumped pro-democracy fliers all over the Cambodian jungles.
But what Air America really was a CIA backed organization that smuggled millions of pounds of heroin into the states to distributed throughout various ethnic communities, but mostly to black neighborhoods. It was just Tricky Dick’s way of keeping down the darkies and honoring his mentor.
The big issue was that with Vietnam winding down, there was no way the CIA could keep transporting the stuff into the states so easily. And like I said before, with so many GI’s coming home hooked on junk, Nixon needed to start addressing the issue he’d pretty much single handedly created. But the thing is he couldn’t go after the CIA and Air America, nor could he afford to put more attention on Vietnam, because we were getting our asses kicked over there, and there wasn’t a single American who wanted us to stay over there to fight the dreaded Communists let alone a problem like heroin that most white, middle class Americans were barely aware of.
So instead of focusing on the real drug problem coming out of Vietnam and Cambodia, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency and decided to go after Mexico.
Now during the 70’s, there were drugs coming out of Mexico, but it was mostly pot and a little bit of black tar heroin. Mind you, not huge amounts, but just enough for Nixon and the newly formed DEA to scare people with. Anyway, Nixon went on TV, spouted off about how the biggest threat to the American people was illegal narcotics, blah, blah, blah, and the DEA teamed up with the Mexican Federales and burned a few poppy fields to ash. It was a great piece of PR, and it was the begin of America’s nearly fifty year old war on drugs.
Let’s go ahead and fast forward five or ten years to the 1980’s and the cocaine boom. Now as most of you probably already know, America had a bit of a cocaine problem during the 80’s. I mean coke was everywhere. It was in the suburbs, the cities, the ghettos, everywhere, and the guy supplying most of it was a dude named Pablo Escobar. Of course, as most of you probably already know, good old Pablo was Columbian and was the most vicious gangster in the history of gangsters. I mean, this guy wouldn’t just kill off entire families if you betrayed him, he would wipe out entire villages. The man was ruthless, and because of this ruthlessness he remained the cocaine Kingpin of the world for well over twenty years.
Escobar had a lot of business partners, including the US and Mexican governments. Escobar’s partnerships in Mexico were used mostly for transportation, and he used a few key families to transport coke from Columbia through Mexico and into the United States. Yeah, these key families were basically nothing more than glorified mules. But these families were extremely competitive in courting Escobar’s favor and warred against each other constantly, and all of these families took a page right out of Escobar’s books of horrors and used them against one another.
However, once the DEA, ATF, and Columbian federal police teamed up to take Escobar down and they assassinated him, and the world finally began to broaden for the Mexican families who were originally nothing more than cargo shippers. With Escobar out of the picture, South American drug culture became the wild west. Okay it became the wilder west … Alright, that’s not even a fitting description, South America became flat out anarchy. See, the one benefit to have Escobar in power was that he kept all of the key families in line of out of fear. If you stepped out of line, he’d kill you without a second thought. But with Escobar gone, they could do whatever they pleased. But out of all of the countries and families who worked with Escobar during his time of ultimate power, it was the Mexicans who learned the most and applied his principles to the brave new world of the South American drug trade.
By the time the Feds took Escobar down, the cocaine fad was winding down because of stiff laws and penalties imposed for the possession of cocaine within the United States, particularly for crack, which had become the prominent form of the drug in the inner city and black communities. (You see a trend here, right?) And because of this, in the 90’s the Mexican cartels started flooding the states with black tar heroin again along with millions and millions of tons of marijuana, which had never lost its broad popularity in the states despite the stiff penalties most states levied on possession of it.
By the 2000’s heroin started to disappear and meth became the scumbag drug of choice. The biggest
issue with meth and the Mexican cartels was that anybody could make it with common household items and cold medicine. Almost overnight literally thousand of independently run labs started popping up in the trailer parks of America, and the worlds #1 provider of illicit narcotics, the Mexican cartels, had no way of controlling it unless they started going into the United States and “regulating” the manufacture and sale of it. Most of the inland cartels wouldn’t dare try something so bold as invade the United States and take over the sale and distribution of a drug. But the Tijuana and Juarez cartels, well, they didn’t see a problem with it. These trailer park chemists were cutting into their bottomline, and they needed to be stopped.
So the Tijuana and Juarez cartels started doing little raids into California, Texas, and Arizona. They would track down labs and burn them to the ground. They would recruit cooks from the rink dinky operations and tell them: “Work for us and you’ll make millions. Don’t work for us, we’ll cut off your head.” Most choose to work. They even did this to pot growers. Within five years, they controlled meth and marijuana throughout the west coast and mid-west, which is where he got the bulk of his product. Sure, he had labs set up throughout Chicago to refine it and cut it, and do a little side manufacturing, but only a little. Because if Junior’s cartel contacts found out about his labs, they would come after him hard, and Chicago would be entirely under Mexican control.
Before I left, Junior had given me a burner phone with only one number programed into it for what he said was his former cartel man’s bosses. I’d been putting it off calling the number because God knew what they would do to me. I mean, I was a stranger, and I had no idea if Junior had put in a call to let them know I was coming or what. I hope he did, because I didn’t want these caballeros thinking I was drunk dialing them or something like that. Finally after taking a couple of quick shots of bourbon from my rooms mini-bar, I hit the number and then send.