“But you can do it, though,” Rascob said.
Sexton’s metallic voice actually sounded happy. “For the right price,” he said, “anyone can do almost anything. And will.”
7
SHORTLY AFTER 5:00 P.M. THE SAME day, FBI special agent Jack Farrier shut off the Ampex reel-to-reel audio recorder on the Officemaster Rentals grey steel desk he as senior agent in charge of the installation had chosen for himself as one of the four least dreary locations in the squad’s temporary quarters. For the foreman of the College Muscle Furniture Movers he had signed the General Services Administration delivery invoices “Ronald Clayton, Int. Div.,” satisfying the young guy’s curiosity by saying, “Intelligence. IRS. Actually—special audit unit. Local. That’s all I’m allowed to say.”
The foreman had looked alarmed, then nodded knowingly. “Of course. Tax time coming up next month. Some poor bastard has to get it. Scare the shit out of the rest of us.” Farrier had smiled.
The desk was next to the window at the southeast corner of the third-floor short-term rental space of the McClatchy Medical and Professional Building on the westerly side of Route 1 in Norwood. Every hour Farrier had a view of women in spandex leggings passing between their cars in the parking lot and Forever You Fitness on the first floor.
“Not all of them’re fat,” he told Hinchey (Hinchey had no window). “Some of them’re in very good shape—come here three times a week to stay that way.” Through his shoes he could feel the floor begin to pulse at 5:00 every afternoon, when some forty women started synchronized aerobic step-exercises in the basement.
Taylor at the second window had mildly disagreed, saying Farrier’s eyes must be going bad; most of the women he saw going back and forth were heavy. Taylor called the 5:00 P.M. session “bouncing blubber hour.”
“You’re not crew chief, Taylor,” Farrier had replied. “Quitcha looking out the window—keep your mind onna tapes.”
By removing his padded black earphones and straining slightly, Farrier could hear the women shouting “hut-hut, hut-hut, hut-hut” in time with some throbbing disco music that he couldn’t identify. He smiled and put the earphones down on the yellow legal pad next to his ballpoint pen. To the left there was a stack of 25 black-and-white 3M boxes face up, to the right a stack of six face down. He pushed his chair back and stood up, turning toward the window. Rush hour on Route 1; as usual traffic clogged three lanes southbound and three northbound. The lights made two broad skeins, like bunting, white headlights at the top and red brakelights the bottom, in the dark blue winter twilight.
Fifty-one; 6′2″; 189. Farrier had lost most of his black hair; he combed the remainder uselessly over the bald spot. He’d developed four brown liver spots on the back of his right hand. On his left wrist he wore a Tag Heuer diver’s matte black watch his first wife had given him at Christmas 1981, when he was assigned to the Buffalo, N.Y. Strike Force, about to go free-diving off Key West in January with three colleagues who played golf and skied. “More active in those days,” he’d recall, with some regret. “People there were closer.” He wore a pale blue broadcloth shirt with an eighteen-carat gold collar pin, a blue tie of Italian silk gabardine, and dark grey flannel trousers.
The collar pin had been a no-special-reason gift in 1994 from his second wife, Cheri—she’d been a secretary in the Buffalo field office—when they’d been together two years, about a year before their divorces became final and enabled them to marry. In those days she was still surprising him with vanity presents, and he still came home with flowers.
There were eleven other Officemaster Rental desk-and-chair sets in the room. At the northerly end: three long grey steel tables holding three videotape editing machines, boxes of 3M videotape, and six straight grey metal chairs. Each of the other desks also held an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder and two stacks of 3M audio tapes. Taylor was out with the flu; besides Hinchey there were eight other well-groomed middle-aged men bowed over their work at the other desks—six white, two black, also wearing shirts and ties. Now that they had heard or glimpsed Farrier knocking off, after a short but decent interval they’d begin to shut down their machines.
Hinchey at the desk ahead of Farrier’s shut off his Ampex, turned his swivel chair, put his glasses on, clasped his hands over his fly, and said: “I don’t believe these LCN guys. How much braggin’ they do.”
Hinchey was completing his first year assigned to the Organized Crime Field Office of the FBI Boston. Farrier as senior man on the squad was his rabbi. Hinchey was forty-six, exactly 6’ tall, 170. He’d retained most of his curly blond hair, and was resisting awareness that the hearing loss he had developed in his right ear after being struck on the temple by a foul ball at fourteen in Pony League ball had recently begun to worsen. He wore a white button-down shirt with a dark blue figured necktie and blue wool trousers. Megan, the youngest of his three childen, a sophomore at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, had just celebrated her twentieth birthday and was living off campus with her boyfriend, twenty-two, but Hinchey had logged sixteen years of dedication to the cause of divorced fathers denied adequate access to their children, and still reserved Thursday evenings for meetings of the Natick chapter of Fathers for Justice. He thought his selflessness—“My own childen’re grown now, but the courts’re still shafting daddies”—made his arguments stronger, and never failed to mention it when he lobbied legislators, represented divorced fathers on bar-association panel discussions, or commented publicly to reporters when another father skipped with his children during visitation.
Farrier laughed. “War stories, Bob,” he said. “Somebody recorded us, they’d get the same kind of shit. Put it behind you. Means this time we hang the bastards, using their own words. Make America a place where the Mafia’s extinct.
“Course it also means we’ve spent another day we’ll never see again sitting on our big fat asses, turning little dials. Marking places where what’s on that frigging tape might as well be in mandarin Chinese, all the sense it makes to me—fuckin’ accents and the TV blarin’ all the time. All I’m doing is assuming that it’s got to be in English, probably with some Sicilian dialect thrown in, just to confuse me—fact is, I don’t know. But now for a few hours that won’t matter. This part of this day is over.”
He bent at the waist and stared at Hinchey. “Here is the meaning of life,” he said. He patted the short stack of 3M boxes face down on the right. “Tonight there’re two more boxes on this side’n there were this morning. Two more eventful days and fun-filled nights in the rich and varied life of capo Carlo Rizzo and his evil henchmen, but only one day out of mine. While on this side”—patting the tall stack with his left hand, each box with a small white sticker on the upper right front corner carrying a black notation of the date it was made—“there are actually two fewer.
“Few men can measure out their days and accomplishments, however humble, with such hair’s-breadth precision. I am a fortunate fellow. Though because this particular day is only just beginning, not one excessively blessed.”
“Late dinner with the lads for you and Darren, I take it?” Hinchey said. “Little walk on the wilder side tonight with our peerless leader?”
Farrier nodded. “Affirmative,” he said. He frowned and shook his head, looking down at the surface of the desk and moving the pen an inch to the right. He looked up. “I still don’t know,” he said.
“How he’s taking it?” Hinchey said.
Farrier nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “As my dear mother used to say, back when she was teaching, drew a kid who didn’t get it, matter how much help she gave him—‘He’s willing enough but he’s not an apt pupil.’ Brother Stoat plays well with others, shares his pail and shovel, doesn’t hit or bite, and follows instructions well, but he just doesn’t seem to show the consistent steady progress that we like to see. And I suspect, that wife he’s got, this guy hurts for money. Never a hopeful sign.
“Now, I realize he’s still new at this, whole new different world. Twiligh
t all the time—everybody needs some time, get used to being in it. I needed time, get used to it, when I first was breaking in, I know guys must’ve wondered if I’d ever make the grade. I don’t care what you were doing, ’fore you started doing this—you weren’t ready for it. That’s a fuckin’ given.
“Where most of us come from; kind of people that we are; want to join the FBI—we tend to be pretty straight-arrow types. Have to be honest with ourselves, with each other, at all times. See ourselves for what we are. Recognize our limitations, imperfections—how they influence our judgment. Law enforcement implied power—that was what we wanted. Thought we’d handle power well; kind of people who should have it; that authority was meant for. And how what’s happened to us since has to have affected that kind of person.
“Ordinarily by the time a guy makes it into OC, he will’ve had his rougher edges worn down from the other stuff he’s done. Lost his naiveté. You know, ITSP, ISMV, couple years bank-robbery squad; you’ve been there yourself, so you’ve got some idea, you know? You find out what’s going on. What kind of people do these things, what these guys’re like. Because those other categories, yeah, they’re mostly isolated, individual acts, guys freelancing in a life of crime.
“Well, they’re also the kind of things that OC guys do, too, but they do them all the time.
“If you’re going to do this work, that concept is key. That’s the central difference with them—the ordinary, boring dailiness of it all. Robbing banks and armored cars, bringing in a tonna dope, hijacking long-haul trailers? ‘Yeah—what else is new?’ These are not big events to them, like they are to other people.
“Regular law-abiding, lawn-mowing, fence-painting, snow-shoveling, kid-raising people—the closest they ever get to that kind of excitement’s when they see it on TV or in a movie. And even then, unless it’s somebody’s shaky handheld home video, shows a cop whaling the shit out of some poor-bastard minority guy, gave him some lip—in which case you can’t see that much—they know it’s only actors, make-believe.
“To your basic career hoodlum, sticking up banks and shaking down smugglers, shooting a guy in the head or actually emptying a thirty-round banana clip into him—those’re things they do—not on TV, real life. Normal routine; their occupations—just like restocking cookies and chips in aisle twelve, correcting thirty-two science tests or getting ready for the annual going-back-to-school sale, the kind of things that normal people deal with every day, and every year, their lives.
“Robberies, smuggling; hijacking and fencing; the odd murder now and then, like shooting some guy in the face?. While he’s looking at you? And probably talking to you, begging you please not to shoot him? These’re just the normal things that the hoodlums’re always planning, like we plan and shop for cookouts, New Year’s Eve parties. Stealing a getaway car, set of plates somewhere else; making sure you got a gun that can’t be traced and a good supply of bullets—this is the way they live. But now, when somebody gets caught, he’ll almost always sell a friend to save his own white ass.
“Stoat doesn’t understand this yet. He saw the goddamned movie. But The Godfather is history. Don Vito Corleone really is dead. Marlon Brando ain’t runnin’ ‘this thing of ours’ anymore. Isn’t like it used to be, as Stoat still assumes it is; omerta rules the day. It doesn’t. Just the opposite, in fact. Once OC gets involved now, and we bag one of them, someone’s going to snitch. It’s practically a footrace to see which rat talks first. The old days of rispetatto’re over.
“You got to get to know this type of guys, how they think and how they act, how they’re liable to react, any given situation. Because they do think different, and they act different, too, like they’re wired another way.
“Darren Stoat has not done that. He had never been OC until he came up here. As the man in charge. He’s got no sense of things, all right? The confidence that makes you feel like you know how to make decisions—and they won’t always be wrong. May not always be right, no, but you won’t always be wrong. How to act around these guys. So when you’re around them, in each other’s company, and you both know who you are, you’re not saying things or, you know, doing things, that will make them … that they will then look at each other and say, ‘Whoa, what the hell is goin’ on here? What the fuck is this guy doin’, tellin’ me is happ’nin’ here?’
“Because the minute they start doin’ that, your little parlor game is over. When these guys play Monopoly, they play it with real money. They draw the ‘Go to Jail’ card, they know it’s not in fun—they’re really going to jail. The rules say you can take away from them every single thing they got? By doing what they do? They know if they get careless, give you half a chance to do that, that is what you’re gonna do.
“And at the same time they assume that you know if they can, they are gonna do exactly what will get them all the stuff they want. Hot babes and the cars, and their own safe houses when the heat’s on, down the Florida west coast. The tuna boats and Vegas trips, Kentucky Derby, Super Bowl—everything they want.
“What they want is what counts. They do not do resignation. So if getting what they want when they want it means they’ll do anything they have to do to get it, up to and including killing people, well okay then, it takes that. And they do it. And then when they get away with it—and we have to face it here, generally they have, or will at least until we get these tapes transcribed and enhanced so the jury doesn’t have to be Sicilians to understand them—they do not quite laugh right in your face, no; that would be impolite.
“But when they see you on the street, they smile when they say hello. That smile means, ‘So far we’ve got you beat.’ And you have to be able to smile right back. ‘I know it, but just “so far.” Not forever. Don’t get cocky yet.’
“Carlo—that bastard, for years he’s been smiling at me. You think I’m not gonna smile at him, the day we bring him in? Bet your sweet ass I am.
“You don’t go in knowing all that shit, what you are is fuckin’ doomed. You cannot be friends with these guys. You can respect them—hell, you have to respect them, if you want to get anywhere. You don’t, well, you’re finished. They can smell disrespect, like dogs smell fear, and once they get a whiff of it on you they won’t give you another thing from that day forward. Even on a guy they hate, their own worst enemy that they think is worse than dogshit—if they don’t first think you have respect for them, they’ll be toast before they’ll tell you anything that he did or plans to do.
“So, even though you don’t think that, you don’t in fact respect them, you still have to act like you do—convince them that you agree that they’re just as important, just as powerful, doing what they do, on their side of the law, as we are on ours.
“But then that is it. Mutual respect. That’s as far as it can go. You can horse around with them, shoot the shit and have some laughs, but you can’t be buddies with them; they can never be your pals.
“That kind of stuff Stoat don’t know—where you draw the fuckin’ line and how the fuck you draw it. And that’s what worries me. At first I didn’t understand why he reacts the way he does when you tell him something. Like say you drop a two-oh-nine interview report on him, all right?
“Like this case, all right?” Farrier made a sweeping motion with his left arm to encompass the room. “Make believe none of this’s goin’ on. Go back eleven months or so in your mind, all right? It’s now nineteen ninety-six again, ninety-early-seven, and you aren’t you, now, you’re me.
“You haven’t been in the Boston office that long, never mind this squad. Three years. Two careers ago, in the old days, you didn’t have the turnover that you’ve got today. Guys got on this squad and stayed forever, fifteen years or so. Three years then was yesterday. All right, but times’ve changed. Fogarty’s only gone six-eight months or so, and you have not been here that long, but now you be da man, as they say. Fogarty made that clear.
“When he retired he said, ‘I do bequeath you all of my right, title and interest in t
he, ah, what to call it, collegial relationship that first Albert A. DeMarco, may his memory be ever green, and then I, with his tutelage, have built up, cultivated, nurtured and developed, with two professional gentlemen of first Al’s and then my longtime acquaintance, whose occupations, some would say, border on disreputable. If not felonious.’
“Okay, now I know I got it, but I’m not exactly sure yet what exactly this thing is.
“Then Stoat comes out of nowhere, no experience at all, and gets Fogarty’s job. Naturally I’m pissed off; sulk a week or so. But then, ‘Well, okay, can live with this. I’m a career guy; too many years in onna pension, kiss it all off now. I can work with anyone. Maybe he’s all right.’
“Gradually, I find out he’s not.
“I make a routine contact with a low-level guy I’ve known a while, about a hundred years. Could’ve been an accident, bumped into him on the street, or maybe he called me—wasn’t anything I’d planned. Drops one on me for nothin’. Says something that I know means it might not do me any harm to go and noodge another guy, tomorrow or the next day—see what more pops out.
“So I dictate the two-oh-nine and it goes in the pipe, and a day or so goes by and I do some other things I had on my list to do, but also in the meantime also make damn sure I see this other guy. Really nothing yet, but still, know from my experience, the first guy I talked to—sure, he may be lower echelon, but when he tells me something it’s at least warm when you touch it. Not something that’ll keep—fact generally it’s hot. Thing to do is run it down, soon as possible.
“Say the first guy’s Abe, which he wasn’t, anna guy I went to see because of what Abe laid on me’s Bob. Also not his name. By the time Darren’s read my two-oh-nine, what Abe said to me—and keep in mind that all of this’s still strictly maybes at the point where I did that memo, nothing definite—but now things are taking on a shape. I’ve talked to Bob, and now as a result of what he gave up to me, first thing I’m gonna do when I get in tomorrow, I’m gonna see what kind of activity there’s been lately in shipments of high-fashion women’s clothes.
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