The seven-mile cab ride along Bovoni Road to the Bolongo Bay Beach Hotel was not scenic but quite bumpy; so rough that Bermudez felt as though he were on the strenuous Mexican Baja off-road racing circuit. Saturated in sweat from the jungle-like ninety-seven degrees, he thought for sure his dentures might rattle loose. He hung on to the safety strap handle, his knuckles white as sugar. The taxi had passed four to five miles of bramble and shrubbery on the sides of the road when it came to a clearing. “We comin’ up da hotel, mohn,” the black driver said in a cross of French and Haitian accents.
The Bolongo Bay Beach Hotel, where Jaegermeister awaited Bermudez in a suite, was a two-story string of rooms and bungalows overlooking the splendid Bolongo Bay, the sun in the azure sky sizzling as if it were a giant heat lamp. The term suite was an overstatement; these were small rooms with bathrooms and terraces. Within the multiplex of buildings were poolside bars and cabanas, chaise lounges scattered on the beach, palm trees swaying mildly in the damp southerly zephyr.
Clint had insisted for Bermudez to bring his entire assortment of the jewelry and not just a sample or two. If Jaegermeister’s expert valued it minimally at $950,000, he, Jaegermeister, would button up the sale right there and then, and tender Bermudez forty-five percent of the appraised sum minus Clint’s five percent commission. Hence, the sly cop would fly home resting his head on a hefty $380,000 in US dollars.
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The concierge directed Bermudez to Waldo Jaegermeister’s suite, one that fronted an enthralling view of the bay. Bermudez knocked, and Jaegermeister opened the door in a brown velvet house robe and slippers. “I’m Waldo. Mr. Bermudez, I presume?”
“Oh yeah. That’s me. Been that for forty-nine years, and hope I’ll be George Bermudez for the next forty-nine years.” His worn clichés amused him, and he thought they amused everyone else. He felt the welcoming coolness of the air conditioner, his skin quickly drying of perspiration. “It’s a hell of a lot more humid here than Florida.”
“Well naturally, here we’re closer to the equator,” Jaegermeister said.
Bermudez saw a second and a third man on a couch. Nodding toward the two, he asked Jaegermeister, “Who are they?”
“Good question. Adam on the left is my appraiser. And a damn good one. And the one on the right is my manservant, Lance.”
The three greeted warmly, and the appraiser, a six-foot-two, wide-shouldered person who spoke in a rugged Brooklyn accent, said to Bermudez, “Make yourself comfortable and let’s see what you got. This may take a while.”
“Oh yeah. I brought everything.” Bermudez, dressed for the tropics in khaki shorts, a flowery short-sleeve shirt, and sandals, dumped a briefcase full of gems onto the coffee table, confidence beaming in his eyes in knowing the high quality of his cargo.
“You brought it all! Good!” Jaegermeister said, a thrill in his voice as if nothing could’ve made him happier.
Adam the appraiser took a loupe out from a pouch and reached for a pad and pen on a side table. Someone knocked on the door, and Lance, who hadn’t spoken a word, opened it for the caller. It was a waiter carrying a platter of hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of Moët & Chandon. He laid the food tray on a coffee stand and dunked the champagne bottle in a metal ice bucket, droplets of condensation forming on it.
The waiter walked out, and Waldo Jaegermeister, pointing at the delicacies, said, “Mr. Bermudez, please have some. You must be hungry. That’s why I ordered somethin’ to nosh on and champagne for your parched throat.”
“Eh . . . thanks. Call me George.”
Jaegermeister’s manservant poured the Moët in two fluted glasses, handing one to him and the other to Bermudez, who raised it as a toast. “Salut, Mr. Jaegermeister.”
“Salut, George. Welcome to St. Thomas.” The host gestured with the glass at his guest. “I think we’ll do business today, and we’ll all be happy.” And he smiled amiably as though Bermudez was the most important person to him.
Adam, humorless and immersed in inspecting the contents of the briefcase, passed on the champagne. He was itemizing each piece of jewelry, a painstaking chore.
Jaegermeister and Bermudez were engaged casually in elementary talk, consuming an hour, in which the former New York detective had downed three glasses of champagne. Before arriving at Jaegmeister’s suite, Bermudez had had no idea what kind of individual this buyer might’ve been, and an uneasy feeling perturbed him. But the alcohol helped soothe the tension.
The room was the size of a lion’s cage, and four people occupying it restricted everybody’s movements. Thankfully, Adam finished his assessment of Bermudez’s possessions. “Waldo,” he said, “I wanna talk to you in private. Why don’t we step outside?”
Jaegermeister said to Bermudez, “George, you mind if he I and have a private talk?”
Bermudez, feeling lightheaded, shook his head slowly. “Not at all. Take all the time you need. I’ll have another glass of . . . what’re you call it? Moe Shanghai?”
“It’s Moët & Chandon. Drink as much as you want,” Jaegermeister offered magnanimously.
Adam closed Bermudez’s briefcase and went out into the common breezeway, Jaegermeister behind him. Bermudez found himself alone with Lance, who, stone-faced, hadn’t yet said a damn word. Why is this manservant so quiet? Maybe he’s an introvert. But who cares?
Ten awkward minutes clicked by, and at last Adam and Jaegermeister came back into the so-called suite. They stood practically over the dodgy detective for what felt to him too long a pause in silence. Sensing a forthcoming line of questions that he’d rather skirt, Bermudez shifted squeamishly in his seat. Jaegermeister snorted through his nose and asked, “George, I need to know where this treasure came from. I don’t wanna peddle hot merchandise to the wrong person, or bring it to the wrong place. Know what I mean?”
“This is not hot material,” Bermudez replied with an air of conviction as if he were offended. “It’s inheritance from my wife’s side. It’s not hot.”
“Well, that’s good news, George.” Jaegermeister joggled his chin in Adam’s direction. “He says everything you got in that briefcase is worth all of 950 grand, just as you said. I must tell yah, you’re a straight shooter.”
Bermudez, parked sloppily in his chair beside the couch, smiled disingenuously. “I told you. So what’re you gonna give me for all this?”
“We’re going to make you the deal of a lifetime, and you’re gonna be very, very appreciative,” Adam said. “Yes, you’re gonna be very appreciative. A sweet deal.”
“Oh yeah?” Bermudez uttered somewhat cheerfully but in a doubtful tone.
“This is the deal: We’ll take all the jewelry. We’re not goin’ to pick and choose the cream and leave you to worry about gettin’ rid of the lesser pieces. No, we’ll take all of it. Okay?”
“Uh, uh,” Bermudez mumbled, rocking his head as if it had come unhinged from the neck. “And what’re you guys gonna give me for everything?”
Jaegermeister cut in, “I’m a man of my word, too, George. Didn’t I say we’re gonna give you the deal of a lifetime? And we are. We’re takin’ all the jewelry, and we’re givin’ you your life.”
“What’re you mean?” Bermudez asked, a knot in his throat.
Jaegermeister looked at Adam, who side-glanced Lance. A still silence was hanging, and a bolt of apprehensiveness struck Bermudez, his heart pulsating faster. A sudden instinct alerted him something was wrong. And his perception was justified. Waldo Jaegermeister, a fictitious name, was really Donald Frankos. And Adam was Nick Sacco. In an instant, Lance yanked out a sawed-off shotgun from under the pillow of the couch. In sync, Sacco cocked his revolver, and Frankos dug his hand into the pocket of his house robe for his semiautomatic. And swiftly, the artillery was trained at Bermudez.
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The three gunners stared menacingly at Bermudez, his intestines in a convulsion. Sacco leaned down to him eye to eye. “I always had respect for cops and always will. But you’re a dirty cop, a
nd somebody should’ve drilled a bullet in your temple a long time ago. And you’re a liar, too. Inheritance from your wife’s family, my ass. We know where you got that swag. Sammy Nalo’s pad.”
“No, no . . . I swear . . . nothing was found when we searched Nalo’s place.”
“That’s because you had already cleaned out the joint before your pals got a warrant. So save the bullshit, George,” Frankos said.
“I would never do that. Even . . . even Nalo told Lieutenant O’Neil that he had no jewels in his house,” Bermudez said feebly.
“I gotta tell you, George, you’d make a great lawyer,” Frankos teased.
Bermudez saw no humor in the Greek’s joke, his face perspiring like a wet sponge.
Sacco scooped the jewelry off the coffee table and layered it neatly inside the briefcase. In the next second, Frankos leaped forward and tied Bermudez in a bear hug, and Lance, a collector for loansharks, patted him down. “He’s clean.”
Frankos said, “George, we’re gonna go for a ride and take you to where you can enjoy the rest of the afternoon in the sun.” The Greek dropped his hand hard on Bermudez’s shoulder, and he flinched.
“When we leave here, don’t try any cute tricks. Just walk along with us, and keep in mind that my friends and I have guns in our pockets, and we’ll blast some lead into your skull if you do anything stupid,” Frankos warned.
Frankos and Sacco were in stride alongside Bermudez as they walked through the ground floor terrace of the Bolongo Bay Beach Hotel, Lance following behind. They piled into a rented Chevy Nova, Lance at the wheel, and he drove onto a narrow, unpaved trail, a pathway pocked with ruts and potholes, Bermudez in the rear seat sandwiched between Sacco and the Greek. The bumpy three-mile road ended at a desolate fishing dock. A lone, old fishing trawler was lashed to two wharfs, rocking gently on the water. Lance parked in a dirt lot, and Frankos said to Bermudez, “All right, George. We’re goin’ fishing, but I gotta tie you up.”
“What’re you gonna do to me?” And Bermudez flew into a thrashing fit, struggling to free himself from his captors, kicking furiously the back of the car’s front seat. “Where’re you takin’ me? You bastards, where’re you takin’ me? I’m gonna have you all arrested.”
“Is that right, George? Are you gonna tell the police we stole your jewelry that you stole from Sammy Nalo?” Sacco asked cynically.
Bermudez didn’t think that was funny; he elbowed Frankos and the Cat, frantically thrusting and twisting his upper body to the left and to the right. The scuffle wasn’t under control until Lance climbed over the driver’s seat and lent a hand. Sacco managed to bind Bermudez’s wrists and feet, and Lance and the Greek carried him to the edge of the dock, hurling him onto a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. It was tied to the stern of the trawler, a wooden fishing boat in disrepair, engine clunking, blowing blue smoke from the smokestack. Bermudez bellowed a scream, and Frankos screwed a silencer into the barrel of his pistol. “You do that again, and you’re gone, George.”
The captain of the trawler, Reginald Stoneham, a black, gristly-faced seadog, a crop of nappy, white hair grazing on his scalp, stuck his head out the window of the pilot house. “I’mma ready to shove off. Y’all be ready to go?”
On the island of St. Thomas, Captain Stoneham was not known to do much trawling for fish; his niche was hauling contraband, drugs, stolen items, illegal immigrants, assault rifles, etc. In this instance, Frankos and Sacco had commissioned him and his rotting boat to tow Bermudez in the Boston Whaler twelve miles out to sea. Stoneham climbed down from the pilot house and jumped onto the dock to unfasten the lines from the wharfs. “I theenk you better put a lifejacket on dat dude. Jus in case, you know?” He pointed to the stern deck of the trawler. “You’ll find one over there.”
Lance took one of the lifejackets from a stowage bin, and he and Sacco jumped into the Boston Whaler. They untied Bermudez’s wrists, and Lance passed the yellow life vest to Sacco, who wrestled to strap it onto the wriggling detective. “If you don’t hold still, my buddy’s gonna whack you over the head with that huge gun of his,” Sacco said.
Captain Stoneham eased the fishing vessel from the dock and spun his tiller wheel, setting his magnetic compass on a northerly eighty-four degrees for the twelve-mile sail into the Central Atlantic, the Boston Whaler bouncing on the surface of the waves as the trawler towed it at nine knots (about eleven miles per hour). Frankos was standing on the stern of the fishing boat, his gun at his side. “Don’t make a sound, George. We don’t need to attract anybody’s attention. Do we?”
Captain Stoneham, a cigar in his toothless mouth, hollered from the pilothouse, “We’re six miles out.”
“Keep goin’ ‘til we’re about twelve miles offshore,” Sacco said. “Keep goin’.”
But why do they wanna go so far out? wondered Stoneham.
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Twelve miles into the deep ocean, the air was cooler, and the waves had grown to eight-foot swells, the trawler and the Boston Whaler in tow climbing and descending as if they were on a mini roller coaster. Standing on the aft deck, feet apart, Frankos holstered his revolver and stared down at Bermudez, who was lying on the fiberglass floor of the seventeen-foot runabout, grimacing and wiggling, trying to loosen the twine restraining his ankles and wrists. The Greek held a palm horizontally as a visor above his forehead and did a 360-degree scan of the horizon. No land in sight. “All right, George, now you can scream all you want. Only the sharks will hear you.”
“What’re you gonna do with me?” Bermudez asked in tears.
Stoneham eased on the throttle, and the trawler backed down to a near standstill, the Boston Whaler crashing into its stern. Floating motionless on the crests of the eight-foot swells, the fishing boat and the relatively small runabout were pitching and yawing fiercely as if they were toys in a bathtub. “Shit, it’s rough out here,” Sacco complained. “It feels like this thing’s gonna capsize.”
“No, mohn, it won’t capsize. Me boat built by me grandpappy,” the captain yelled back from the pilot house.
The scrawny Stoneham stepped down the ladder to the stern deck, a twelve-inch serrated knife in his mouth. He had his T-shirt off, and you could count his ribs, the man’s skin darker than dirty motor oil. The captain bent over the transom of the trawler and severed the line to the Boston Whaler.
“Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me,” Bermudez begged, angst on his face. “You can keep my jewelry . . . I won’t report you. Pleeeeease don’t leave me.”
Although it was late in the afternoon, the sun was intense. “This’ll give you a chance to get a good suntan,” the Greek derided. “And if you get thirsty, you got plenty of water around you. Adios.”
Stoneham went up to the pilot house, shifted the transmission forward, and shoved the throttle lever ahead. He rotated the tiller to a 272-degree heading for the return trip to shore, the diesel engine growling loudly, emitting dense smoke from the smokestack.
“Noooooo! Noooooooooo!” Bemudez howled, the trawler shrinking in the distance as the Boston Whaler soared and plummeted into the mountains of swells.
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On touching land, Sacco, Lance, and the Greek made haste to the airport. At the terminal, Sacco phoned the St. Thomas marine constable and reported that approximately twelve miles off the northeast coast of the island he had spotted a small boat adrift, a man possibly in it.
“What were you doing out there?” the constable asked.
“I was on a speed boat.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Look, I don’t wanna get involved. I’m just tellin’ you what I saw.” And Sacco terminated the call.
JUNE 1976
Nick Sacco retrenched from the nightlife in Manhattan and focused on his family. His bride, Nora, a pretty woman fashioning shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and big hazel eyes bore him two children, a pair of girls. He was loyal and loving to her, and cared immensely for the lovable tots.
The Pierre was a
long-forgotten event. Bobby Comfort had become a homebody in Rochester, and Sammy Nalo was serving his prison sentence. Bermudez, who had been rescued safe and sound, never recounted his calamity offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, praying the authorities wouldn’t reopen the investigation into Nalo’s lost jewels. And the timing was right for Sacco to resume his burglaries.
The Cat had befriended an insurance broker, Jay Burger. For a fifteen percent “referral fee,” Burger, who was in the know of his clients’ valuables he insured, was supplying Sacco the names and addresses of those customers. One such target was a house in Hewlett, a ritzy town on the south shore of Long Island, where a widow had a safe full of Tiffany & Co. designer jewelry. “Nick,” the insurance broker said, “this job is a cinch. The broad lives alone in a big house, and she’s never home during the day.” He waved Sacco into the coffee room of his office. “I don’t wanna talk out there. Anyway, her name is Lauren Baker, and she used to tell me that in the morning she goes to the gym, then to get her hair and nails done. Then she goes shopping in the Five Towns, spending her dead husband’s money. She’s running around the whole day.” Burger gave Sacco a piece of paper. “Here’s her address. Good luck.” And he slapped the Cat on the back.
Sacco and a novice burglar, John Marino, who was under the Cat’s tutelage, were set to undertake the robbery at the widow’s residence. The intended victim was an attractive woman in her early thirties. Recently, her rich husband had died at the age of fifty-nine. Sacco and Marino pinpointed Ms. Baker’s property. In the unlikely event she might’ve been at home, they had dressed as mailmen pretending to deliver a package. Marino knocked on the front door. No one answered, and on jiggling the door knob it was unlocked. He and Sacco looked at each other and shrugged. They poked at the door, and it opened. The two burglars entered and tiptoed about the ground floor to pinpoint the master bedroom. They did, and with the minimal illumination of a night lamp it was rather obscure in there. They could hear a faint hissing of running water. “Sounds like the sprinkler in the backyard,” Marino said.
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