Tragic

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

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  To those blessings in my life:

  Patti, Rachael, Roger, Billy, and my brother, Bill;

  and

  To the loving Memory of

  Reina Tanenbaum

  My sister, truly an angel

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my legendary mentors, District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and Henry Robbins, both of whom were larger in life than in their well-deserved and hard-earned legends, everlasting gratitude and respect; to my special friends and brilliant tutors at the Manhattan DAO, Bob Lehner, Mel Glass, and John Keenan, three of the best who ever served and whose passion for justice was unequaled and uncompromising, my heartfelt appreciation, respect, and gratitude; to Professor Robert Cole and Professor Jesse Choper, who at Boalt Hall challenged, stimulated, and focused the passions of my mind to problem-solve and to do justice; to Steve Jackson, an extraordinarily talented and gifted scrivener whose genius flows throughout the manuscript and whose contribution to it cannot be overstated, a dear friend for whom I have the utmost respect; to Louise Burke, my publisher, whose enthusiastic support, savvy, and encyclopedic smarts qualify her as my first pick in a game of three on three in the Avenue P park in Brooklyn; to Wendy Walker, my talented, highly skilled, and insightful editor, many thanks for all that you do; to Mitchell Ivers and Natasha Simons, the inimitable twosome whose adult supervision, oversight, and rapid responses are invaluable and profoundly appreciated; to my agents, Mike Hamilburg and Bob Diforio, who in exemplary fashion have always represented my best interests; to Coach Paul Ryan, who personified “American Exceptionalism” and mentored me in its finest virtues; to my esteemed special friend and confidant Richard A. Sprague, who has always challenged, debated, and inspired me in the pursuit of fulfilling the reality of “American Exceptionalism,” and to Rene Herrerias, who believed in me early on and in so doing changed my life, truly a divine intervention.

  PROLOGUE

  ROGER KARP GRIMACED AS HE stretched one of his long legs into the aisle next to his seat. He rubbed his knee until the ache—a frequent reminder of an injury sustained as a star college basketball player many years earlier—subsided and he could turn his attention back to the stage in front of him.

  His wife, Marlene Ciampi, looked at his leg and then his face. She frowned as she whispered, “You okay, Butch?”

  “Yeah, just a little stiff,” he replied quietly with a smile. “These seats seem to get harder every year.”

  Marlene smiled back. “I was just thinking the same thing and hoping it had nothing to do with age.”

  They were sitting six rows up from the stage, just off-center, at the Delacorte Theater, an open-air amphitheater in the middle of Central Park. Situated on the southwest corner of the Great Lawn, with Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle as a backdrop, the Delacorte could not have been a lovelier spot to watch a play on a warm late summer evening, even if the tiered rows of wooden seats were not designed for comfort. A sliver of a moon rose behind the castle and a slight breeze stirred the leaves of the trees that surrounded the amphitheater and the shadows beneath—a perfect setting for that season’s Shakespeare in the Park offering of Macbeth.

  Karp and Marlene were with their twin teenaged sons, Zak and Giancarlo, who’d been dispatched that morning to stand in line for the free tickets that were handed out starting at 1:00 p.m. for the evening performance. That had allowed Butch, as he was known to family and friends, and Marlene to arrive just before showtime by taking a yellow cab to the 79th Street entrance of the park and then follow the footpath to the theater. The boys would be rewarded for their efforts after the play with a stop at the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street, a dozen or so blocks north of Times Square, where they could do battle with legendary hot pastrami and corned beef sandwiches, chili cheese fries, and New York’s finest cherry cheesecake.

  Attending each season’s Shakespeare production, including the post-play stop at the deli, had been a family tradition since the days when Marlene was pregnant with their first child, Lucy. She was absent that night, back home in New Mexico with her fiancé, Ned Blanchett. However, Karp was pleased that his sons were still willing to indulge their parents by “sitting through some old play where they don’t even speak real English,” as Zak, the more macho and impatient of the two, groused when reminded of the date. Fortunately, Macbeth had a fair amount of witchcraft, ghosts, murder, and intrigue to hold their attention.

  Act 2, scene 1 was just winding to a close. The Scottish Lord Macbeth stood alone in the dark hallway of his castle trying to summon the courage, and cold-bloodedness, to murder King Duncan as he slept and seize the throne at the urging of his power-hungry wife, Lady Macbeth.

  The Shakespeare in the Park productions were always first-rate, and Karp enjoyed the Bard’s frequent theme of man’s battle between his good and evil natures and, of course, how justice eventually prevailed. He’d come by his love of theater, as well as of movies, thanks to his mother, an English teacher, but had also learned to see evil as a real entity, not some theoretical sophistry to be debated in church. When Karp’s mother died of cancer at an early age he learned to fight evil vigorously. In fact, the crusade against evil was the driving motivation behind his actions as the District Attorney of New York County.

  Onstage, a hologram of a dagger floated—a bit of technical wizardry—above the actor playing Macbeth, who tried to grasp it while it remained just out of reach. Karp knew from discussions with his mother that the ghost knife eluding Macbeth was a metaphor for his troubled conscience as the deadly moment of truth approached.

  Is this a dagger which I see before me,

  the handle toward my hand?

  Come, let me clutch thee.

  I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

  Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

  To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

  a dagger of the mind, a false creation,

  proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

  In his seat, Karp repeated the words “heat-oppressed brain” to himself. He’d used that very description in his summation at a murder trial he’d just concluded to explain the motive behind the prosecution’s star witnesses’ testimony against the defendant. That and Macbeth’s lament in act 2, scene 2 that he’d “murdered sleep” when neither he nor his wife could find peace due to the guilt that weighed on them.

  “So why did they take the stand and testify without any sort of deal being offered or attempting to lessen their own guilt?” Karp had asked the jury as he faced the defendant. “Because, ladies and gentlemen, what they did—the part they played in the conspiracy to commit murder—was evil, but for them it came at a high price to their consciences. To paraphrase William Shakespeare, they could not escape their ‘heat-oppressed brains.’ They couldn’t enjoy life, or forget, or close their eyes at night and rest. As Mr. Shakespeare wrote, they had ‘murdered sleep’ as surely as they and the defendant murdered the victim. But evil comes in shades of gray.”

  In some ways, Karp felt a certain degree of sympathy for Macbeth. The man wasn’t a murderer by nature; he’d been courageous and faithful defeating a traitor in defense of Duncan. But his ambition had driven him to commit a crime that initially accomplished his goal, and in the end spelled his doom.

  Onstage, the actor grabbed again at the knife, but it danced just out of reach. There’s still time to walk away, Karp thought as he had when he was a boy and wished that Macbet
h could make a different choice leading to a happier ending. But onstage, even as Macbeth worried about getting caught, he chastised himself for being a man of words and not actions.

  Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,

  Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

  And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

  Which was not so before. . . .

  Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

  Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts,

  And take the present horror from the time,

  Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives;

  Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

  Karp reflected on how, in some ways, the themes inherent in Macbeth were mirrored in the trial. The corruptive influence of power. The shades of evil. The eroding power of conscience on guilty secrets. And the consequences of sin.

  It even broke down into acts and scenes, he thought. The conspiracy, the murder, the investigation, the swift-paced plotting of confrontations, violent reactions, and bouts of conscience that led inexorably to the dramatic climactic moment in a New York City courtroom, and its inevitable epilogue.

  A bell rang offstage. Lady Macbeth letting her hubby know that the chamberlains, who she’s set up to take the rap for Duncan’s murder, are asleep and it’s time to do the deed, Karp thought as the actor suddenly straightened and resolved to go forward with the plan.

  I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.

  Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell

  that summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

  With that, the actor turned and stalked off the stage toward where the audience knew King Duncan slept. Too late, Karp thought. It is too late for everyone involved. The scene came to an end and the stage went dark so that the stagehands could change the set for the next scene.

  All of the players acted out their roles on the courtroom stage, too, he thought. It all began with act 1, scene 1 . . . three young men sitting in a car on a cold winter’s night, nine months ago, contemplating a horrific deed.

  1

  “PRA KLYAST,” THE YOUNG MAN in the backseat of the Delta 88 Oldsmobile said in Russian. “Is fucking cold, man!” He leaned forward and tapped the driver, another young man, on the back of his head. “Turn the car on and get heat!”

  “It’s a waste of gas and we’re already low, unless you want to throw in some money,” the driver, a freckle-faced redhead named Bill “Gnat” Miller, said. “And keep your frickin’ hands to yourself.”

  “Relax, sooka,” Alexei Bebnev sneered from the backseat. Twenty-seven years old and slightly over six feet tall, he liked to think of himself as a ladies’ man. But his light blues eyes were set too far apart in his round-as-a-basketball face, an unfortunate feature accented by a wide flat nose above a scraggly mustache and crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. Bebnev looked at another young man sitting in the front passenger seat. “Hey, Frankie, I thought you say your friend was cool?”

  “Gnat’s cool, he’s cool,” Franklin “Frankie” DiMarzo assured him.

  “What’s sooka mean?” Gnat asked, scowling as he looked over his shoulder at his antagonist.

  “Means ‘bitch,’ man,” Bebnev said. “You my bitch.” He laughed and made a kissing expression with his lips.

  “Fuck you, Bebnev, I’m out of here,” Gnat snarled and reached for the key in the ignition. “This guy’s a nutcase. It ain’t worth it!”

  DiMarzo reached over and grabbed his arm. “Chill, Gnat, we’re gonna get paid, and that’s going to make your old lady happy,” he said before turning around to plead with the Russian. “Give him a break. We’ve never done anything like this. He’s just a little nervous, that’s all.”

  Alexei Bebnev laughed derisively again and took a drag on a cigarette before blowing a cloud of smoke at the back of Miller’s head.

  “And don’t throw your fucking butts on the floor of my car again,” Miller complained.

  Bebnev flipped him off but rolled the window down just enough to flick the butt out at the curb before rolling the window up again. He held up a snub-nosed .38 revolver. “Is easy. I stick this in the asshole’s face and ‘BANG BANG,’ asshole is dead! All you have to do is drive car and keep watch.”

  “Put that thing down before someone sees you or you shoot one of us,” Miller said before spitting a stream of brown tobacco juice into a beer bottle.

  “Is nasty habit,” Bebnev pointed out with a look of disgust.

  “My girlfriend don’t want me smoking around the baby, so I chew.” Miller shrugged. “Besides, I’d rather eat cat food than smoke whatever it is you got there. What the hell is that shit?”

  “Belomorkanal cigarette,” Bebnev replied as he shook another from the pack and lit it. “Good strong Russian smoke, not pussy shit like American cigarette.”

  The three young men fell silent. They were parked next to the curb in front of the Hudson Day School in a well-to-do neighborhood of New Rochelle, keeping an eye on a large split-level house down a hill and across the street from where they were parked, waiting for the occupants to come home.

  Although it was only six o’clock, it was already dark outside and the neighborhood was glowing with Christmas decorations. But there were no lights on in the house, just a porch lamp and a fir tree on the front lawn adorned with twinkling blue Christmas lights. So they waited, sipping on beers to keep their courage up, lost in their own thoughts.

  Miller had been called “Gnat” since elementary school due to his small size and inability to sit still for any length of time. It didn’t bother him. What did was the fact that he was a twenty-two-year-old, out-of-work housepainter with a six-month-old infant and a teenaged girlfriend, Nicoli Lopez, who was constantly reminding him that she was tired of living off food stamps in the basement of her parents’ house in Brooklyn. He hoped that the money he’d been promised for this job would allow him to find them an apartment of their own and prove he was man enough to support her and their child. He’d buy them both something nice for Christmas and life would take a turn for the better.

  Sitting in the car, he was preoccupied that his Delta 88 stood out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood. He was nervously aware that not a single car that had passed them since they got there was older than a couple of years, while his old car’s green paint job was faded and in some places covered with gray primer. He wished he was home with his girlfriend, even if her father had referred to him as a “no-good bum” from the moment he walked in the door.

  Next to him, Frankie DiMarzo was contemplating heaven and hell, and what it would do to his parents if he got put in prison for murder. The DiMarzo family was staunchly Roman Catholic. His mother kept a small shrine to St. Jude in her living room and went to Mass at least five times a week, most of the time to pray for Frankie’s soul. Even his four sisters, all of them older, went to Mass at least weekly and, as his father liked to point out, had never been in trouble with the police.

  Frankie, a good-looking young man with dark hair and Mediterranean features, was the black sheep of the family and had strayed frequently. In the past, he’d go to confession, do some penance, and all would be forgiven. But it was hard seeing how each new run-in with the law aged his mom and dad.

  And that was back when it was all penny-ante bullshit, he thought. No matter what the priests said about God’s unconditional forgiveness, he wasn’t so sure that murder could be easily absolved. He shook his head.

  DiMarzo had grown up in Red Hook, a neighborhood on the northwest side of Brooklyn on the Hudson Narrows and about as rough as it got. He was a tough kid, only twenty-three years old, and lived by the code of the streets: he didn’t rat on nobody, and he didn’t take shit off of nobody either. But he had a soft spot for his momma, and knew that a murder rap would probably kill her, and that his old man would disown him. It troubled him greatly and, like Gnat, his best friend since they’d met in a juvenile prison in upstate New York about eight years earlie
r, he too wished he was somewhere else. But he was tired of never having any cash in his pockets and of having no prospects for anything better than part-time construction work when the weather got nice. At least not until Bebnev had come to him with a job that would earn him and Gnat seven thousand bucks each.

  DiMarzo had met Bebnev a few months earlier at a pool hall down in the Oceanside Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, otherwise known as Little Odessa because of its large Russian immigrant population. The young Russian talked a big game about the women he’d had and often hinted that he was a hit man for the Russian mob that controlled the area. DiMarzo thought he was all talk until his new friend pulled out a small newspaper clipping about two old men who’d been shot dead in their apartment by an unknown assailant. Bebnev hadn’t said anything, just wiggled his eyebrows and grinned with his crooked brown teeth as he pulled his jacket to the side to reveal a revolver stuffed in the waistband.

  When Bebnev had come to him a week earlier with his offer the Russian had made it clear that he was going to shoot someone and was being paid well to do it. He hadn’t said much about where the instructions or money was coming from, just that a “friend” named Marat Lvov had set him up to meet two men, “Joey and Jackie,” in Hell’s Kitchen, who hired him to kill some union boss. Bebnev had said he wasn’t told directly who ordered the hit, but had overheard the other men tell Lvov that “Charlie wants it done ASAP.”

  DiMarzo had balked until the Russian convinced him that all he had to do was find someone to drive and then act as a lookout. “Don’t worry, my friend,” Bebnev had assured him. “I do dirty work. You make easy money.”