I told her the steps I’d gone through, including typing the headline out character by character. “You are a very determined guy, Angus,” she said.
“So they say. But I’m still struggling to figure out how your case and mine are connected.” I sat back in my chair. “Let me lay out a couple of facts. We have a pornographic video featuring two boys who are under eighteen. There’s also a gay webcam site where one of the boys performs.”
I took a sip of my coffee. The caffeine worked its magic on my bloodstream and I felt energized. “I tracked Dimetrie Beauvoir, one of the boys in that video, to a house in Wilton Manors. Because Dimetrie performed with Ozzy Perez in that video, I’m drawing a dotted line that connects them and the house.”
“Makes sense.”
“Ozzy indicated in an e-mail that he got the flakka he gave to Brian Garcia from someone in the house where he’s staying. So if we assume that Ozzy’s in the same house as Dimetrie, then that’s where the flakka came from.”
“An assumption based on the connection between the two boys. But it’s only an assumption until you can establish that Ozzy is in that house.”
“I understand. But I think the connections are there. The house is owned by the same LLC that runs the webcam site, Gay Guys LLC. Verenich is the registered agent for that company.”
“And Verenich is also the agent for a number of the LLCs that I think are laundering money for the Organizatsya.”
“Do you think a Russian mobster is behind the porn sites? Maybe this guy Kurov?”
“It’s too early to say. Yes, the Organizatsya has fingers in a lot of pies, and it’s not surprising to find them involved in pornography, or in the distribution of flakka.”
“There’s a long history of connections between gay businesses and organized crime,” I said. “At one time, a lot of the gay clubs were owned by the Mafia, or at least the clubs were paying protection to them.”
“But that doesn’t mean that Kurov is involved with the Organizatsya, or that he is behind the porn business.”
“So what can we do?” I asked.
I was waiting for Katya’s response when my phone rang and I recognized Shane’s number. “I need to take this,” I said. “It’s one of my sources.”
“He’s at the thrift shop,” he said as I answered. “I’m on my way there now.”
“Hold on. Who’s where? At what thrift shop?”
“Out of the Closet. The bright pink building on Sunrise Boulevard at US 1.”
I shifted the phone away for a second and said, “I’ve got to go,” to Katya. I grabbed the messenger bag I carried to and from work and kept talking as I walked out. “Who’s there?”
“Ozzy Perez. Since you told me you thought he was in Wilton Manors, I’ve been looking for him, showing his picture to everybody I know. I left a copy with a clerk at the shop, and he just called and told me Ozzy’s there with some big bodybuilder.”
A bodybuilder? Eric Morozov?
“I’m in Sunny Isles Beach, so it’s going to take me at least a half-hour. Don’t do anything until I get there.”
“Fine. But I’m not letting him get away from me.”
I could have reminded him that he wasn’t law enforcement, that he had no right to stop any other citizen from carrying out his own business, but I didn’t want to get into that argument. I wanted him to avoid getting hurt, or getting Ozzy hurt.
19.
Understanding
I used all the tactical driving skills I’d learned at Quantico as I made my way up US 1, darting around slow-moving Canadian tourists and senior citizens so short their heads didn’t show over their seat backs. The Mini Cooper was a front-wheel drive car, which meant my turning capabilities were more restricted, and it didn’t have as much acceleration as the cars I’d driven in training, but I focused on the road looking for advantages I could exploit.
I didn’t relax until I had to idle at the traffic light where US 1 veered right and merged with Sunrise Boulevard. I used that break to call Shane. “What’s going on?”
“Ozzy’s trying on clothes,” Shane said. “I tell you Angus, that other guy isn’t even a friend of his. Ozzy keeps showing him stuff and the guy doesn’t care. He must be some kind of guard.”
Eric had chauffeured Dimetrie to his dance lesson, and he’d mentioned to Jonas that he did odd jobs for the car dealer and his friends. Was he a driver? Or something more?
“I’m almost there,” I said. “Listen, I don’t want to engage Ozzy or this other guy in the thrift shop. I want to follow them when they leave. If they go to that house where I saw Dimetrie, then I’ve got concrete evidence that I can use to get a search warrant.”
“You’re going to let him go?”
“It’s a free country. I have no cause to detain either of them.”
“I need to talk to him. I want to make sure he’s all right.”
“Does he have any visible evidence that he’s being abused? Broken arm, black eye, anything?”
“He looks OK,” Shane admitted. “I haven’t seen him up close. I’m hanging out in the office at the back of the store so that he can’t see me.”
“Hold on. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
It felt like I could stop holding my breath when I pulled into the thrift store parking lot. As I walked in, I spotted Eric, and before I could turn away he recognized me. “Hey, you’re Jonas’ friend, right?” he asked. “I’m Eric.”
“Angus.” I shook his hand.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Shane lurking at the back of the store, but I didn’t want to approach him while Eric was watching me.
“You doing a little retail therapy?” I asked Eric. He looked like he’d come from the gym and was dressed in a tight tank top that emphasized his bulging pecs and biceps.
“Nah, just helping out a friend,” he said.
The boy I recognized as Ozzy Perez came out of the dressing room, carrying an armload of T-shirts and skinny jeans. “I’m done,” Ozzy said to Eric. “Can I have the money?”
Eric pulled a roll of bills out of the pocket of his jeans. “Ring him up,” he said to the clerk.
That was my cue to get away from him. “Good to see you,” I said to Eric.
“Yeah, say hi to Jonas for me.”
“I will.” I walked toward the back of the store where Shane met me behind a circular display of short-sleeve shirts.
I held my finger up to my lips. We watched the clerk ring up Ozzy’s purchases and Eric hand over some cash. Ozzy looked happy and excited, not like someone being held hostage or being forced into anything. He grabbed his bags and followed Eric out of the store.
“I’ll drive,” I said to Shane.
He waved his thanks to the clerk as we hurried out behind Ozzy and Eric. “I want to talk to him,” Shane said.
I grabbed his arm. “I told you, we have to wait.”
“You’re not my supervisor,” Shane said, trying to break loose.
“No, I’m a Federal Agent investigating a case. And if you interfere, I have the authority to arrest you. Which is not going to do you, Ozzy, or those kids at Lazarus Place any good.”
“You’re bluffing.”
I spotted Ozzy and Eric getting into Eric’s Mustang. “Shut up, Shane, all right? Just get in the car with me.”
We’d only been on one sort-of date, and here we were, squabbling like an old married couple. Not my idea of a fun relationship.
Fortunately, Eric didn’t notice us in the parking lot, or recognize that we were following him. Since I already had a good idea where he was going, I was able to fall back, keeping several cars between us. Sure enough, he parked in front of the house where I’d seen him drop Dimetrie, and the two of them went inside.
“You’re going to let them go in there?” Shane demanded, as I cruised past the house.
“I am.” I pulled up along the curb. “Listen to me, Shane, because I’m only going to say this once. We have no proof—none at all—that anythin
g bad is going on in that house.”
He started to argue but I put my hand up.
“You and I may believe that someone in that house is forcing Ozzy and Dimetrie to perform in pornographic videos. But the law says we have to have reasonable proof that is happening before we go busting in.”
“I can go up to the door and ask to speak to Ozzy.”
“You could. But what if whoever is in charge freaks out and moves the kids and the video equipment out before I can get a warrant? Then we’ve lost the only lead we have and the kids are possibly worse off. I’ve seen Dimetrie go to dance class. We’ve seen Ozzy go shopping. We can reasonably assume neither of them are being chained up in a bedroom in fear for their lives.”
Shane took a couple of deep breaths. “I hate to see anybody hurt like that,” he said after a while. He turned to face me. “I need you to understand why this is so important to me. Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“Sure. Lazy Dick’s?”
He shook his head. “No. Somewhere more private. Take me back to my car and then come to Lazarus Place with me.”
I agreed, and neither of us spoke as I drove him back to Out of the Closet. It was after six by the time we reached Lazarus Place, and the smell of fast food burgers in the living room floated past us as we climbed to Shane’s third-floor room.
He opened his door and walked in, then sat down on his bed, his legs crossed in front of him. “I don’t tell many people this, but I feel like I can trust you,” he said.
I sat on the chair across from him.
“I come from real white trash people,” he said. “Born in West Virginia. You’ve heard of the Hatfields and the McCoys? My mom was a McCoy, and I grew up worried that somebody would come along and wipe out my family. My granddad used to take me out shooting squirrels, and then my grandma would cook them up for dinner.”
Made my childhood sound idyllic.
“My mom was an alcoholic and never told me who my dad was. I figured she didn’t know herself. When I was ten, she was driving drunk and caused an accident where an old lady was killed.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “You weren’t with her then, were you?”
“No, I was home by myself. I didn’t know what happened until my aunt came over and told me I had to go home with her. Just like that, my whole world fell apart. I moved in with my aunt and uncle and my cousins. Had to share a twin bed with my cousin Derrick, who was fifteen and mean as sin.”
He gulped. “He raped me a couple of times a week for nearly two years until I finally ran away.”
“My god. I’m so sorry, Shane.”
“Cops picked me up and took me back to my aunt’s. When I tried to say what Derrick was doing, my uncle called me every kind of name in the book. Then, to punish me for lying, he took a strap and beat the living shit out of me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Sorry seemed so inadequate.
“That night, Derrick told me I was never going to get away from him, and he held me down on the bed and raped me again, harder and meaner than ever before. The next day, I tried to slit my wrists but my aunt found me before I could finish. She took me to the social service office and dropped me off.”
He took a deep breath. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me. I jumped through a couple of foster families until I found a good one, where the people cared about me and pushed me to finish high school and go to community college. That professor I told you about recommended me to a therapist who helped me work out some of my issues and encouraged me to get my degree in social work.”
When he looked at me, I saw he’d been crying silently. “That’s why this matters so much to me,” he said. “I can’t stand by while some other kid goes through what I did.”
I moved over to the bed and put my arm around him. “I know,” I said.
He rested his head on my shoulder, and we sat there like that for a while.
20.
A Reason for Torture
Shane’s confession shook me, and I felt so terrible I couldn’t eat dinner or focus on anything. I went out for a long walk around my darkened neighborhood, looking at the lit windows and wondering what was going on behind them. The sound of air conditioning compressors mixed with someone blasting the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. An elderly man passed me, walking a goofy-looking labradoodle, whose big head was too large for his long spindly legs.
The man said hello, and I answered him. In the glow of a streetlight, I saw how carefully he’d combed his hair, how neat his clothes were—even for walking his dog—and my gaydar pinged. What had it been like for him to be gay, back when homosexuality was the love that didn’t dare speak its name?
As a teenager, for a long time, I felt like the world was conspiring against me. My dad was dead, and I was never going to have a happy life because I was gay and everyone would hate me if they knew. By the time I got to college, I began to realize how lucky I was, and that so many other kids had it a lot worse.
That feeling only accelerated after I joined the Bureau. Everyone whose arrest I participated in, seemed to have been a victim at some point who suffered some horror or loss that had doomed him or her to criminal action. I was fascinated by the background research I read as each time I tried to establish the turning point that had led to this activity.
I thought about taking some online courses in sociology, because I was so curious about the patterns I saw. I also began to understand myself more, recognizing my reaction to my dad’s death and the responsibility of looking after Danny as my mom struggled to take care of us. I analyzed his behavior, too. Had I spoiled him? Had I doomed him to a life in which he expected someone else to make big decisions for him? And might that lead him to fall in with people who didn’t have his best interests at heart?
My stomach finally stopped churning after I’d exhausted myself, and I ate a salad and went to bed.
• • •
Wednesday morning I felt better, but I was still haunted by Shane’s story. It made me even more determined to rescue Ozzy and Dimetrie—to do for them what those good foster parents and college counselors had done for Shane.
When I got to work, on Wednesday morning I called Colin Hendricks at the DEA. I reminded him of how I’d seen Dimetrie go into that house in Wilton Manors, and that the evening before I’d seen Ozzy Perez there, too. “The best I can do is go to that address and talk to the guys there,” he said. “You said the guy’s a porn performer, so I don’t trust anything he wrote in an e-mail. And we have no evidence that there are drugs on the premises at this time.”
I groaned. Following the letter of the law was frustrating. “Don’t go there yet,” I said. “I’ll keep gathering information.”
I sent a text to Shane reminding him that I was on the case, and that if he contacted Ozzy he’d jeopardize my investigation. Short of locking him up, that was the most I could do to keep him from spooking Ozzy and whoever was with him.
A couple of hours later I received an e-mail from the Assistant U.S. Attorney who had prepared the subpoena. It had been delivered to Verenich’s secretary, who had spent the day before organizing and photocopying his business checkbooks and the other records we had asked for. They had been delivered to the attorney’s office that morning, and would be sent to me shortly.
Verenich’s secretary had also downloaded PDF files of his bank records, and attached them to the e-mail. I separated the records by account and created spreadsheets to track the flow of money. I loved that kind of mindless work—at least in small doses. I got into the zone, shutting out everything else and focusing on the numbers in front of me. Interesting patterns began to develop.
Each LLC that Verenich managed was initiated with a large deposit from an offshore account. Some were from the Cayman Islands, others from Switzerland, a few from the Bahamas, and Bermuda. In each case, all I had was an account number where the money had come from. I knew it would be very difficult to identify who owned the account or where the money in it had co
me from because of bank secrecy regulations in those countries.
Verenich took a percentage off the top of the deposit as his fee and transferred that money to his business bank account. Then, each quarter, each of the LLC accounts were charged administrative costs. I didn’t know much about the operation of an LLC, but it seemed like he was charging quite a lot for a guy with a small office and only one secretary.
I matched up the debits from the accounts to the property acquisitions and I was surprised to find that each of the LLC accounts still retained a cash balance in the form of CDs or money market funds after the sale was consummated. Of course, Verenich charged a fee for each transaction.
A lot of cash had been parked in those LLC accounts, though they were being drained each quarter by Verenich’s charges, which were greater than the balance’s accumulated interest.
I met up with Roly and explained what I’d found so far. “This is good stuff,” he said, when I’d shown him all my spreadsheets. “Do you think this is what got Verenich killed?”
“I can’t tell yet if one person or organization is behind all these LLCs,” I said. “It could be that Verenich had a bunch of different clients. But if there was one individual…if it was me, I’d get pretty pissed off if I realized my accounts were being plundered like this. And if there’s a connection to the Russian mafia, you’d have an angry guy who’s accustomed to using violence.”
Roly nodded. “That would be a good reason for someone to torture Verenich, too. To punish him, as well as to get him to return the money. Make sure you get this information to Agent Gordieva.”
“I will.”
As I walked back to my office, I wondered who was going to take over as the agent for the LLCs now that Verenich was dead. Had he left a succession plan behind? Or would the owners of the LLCs have to come forward and claim them? From what I understood of LLCs, all someone had to do was keep filing annual reports. And almost anyone could do that. Was there anything, anywhere in the data that would lead me to another human being, one who could also be involved with the porn house and the flakka distribution?
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