by Thomas Perry
The Catrones had moved most of their money and people west thirty years ago. They owned resorts, casinos, cattle, timber, mines, and millions of acres of land. They were another extended American family that made enormous contributions to politicians who were most protective of wealth and its privileges.
The only family still heavily involved in the old businesses—theft, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and extortion—were the Scarpis, who were throwbacks. They had built power over five generations by having all their sons and sons-in-law join the business. The brothers had sons named Scarpi, and the sisters had sons named Catania and Calabrese and Pucci, but they were all the same. Many of them even looked the same—broad-shouldered men with wide faces, black wavy hair, and craggy, immobile expressions that were like masks of toughness.
The drugs they sold now were mostly painkillers diverted from commercial sources. Their extortions and kidnappings were still often crude and bloody, but the payments were sometimes in shares of stock or free goods and services. The prostitutes were now escorts who were advertised, scheduled, and protected while they dated rich men. The head of the family at the moment was a man named Dominic Santangelo. His picture could as easily have been a picture of any one of his uncountable cousins. The Scarpi family had very strong reasons to hope Carlo Balacontano didn’t get out of prison. Schaeffer decided that made them ideal for his purposes.
Schaeffer researched his plan. He looked at the pages of instructions for prisoners’ families posted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. They had stopped letting people send gift packages directly to prisoners. And while it was possible to order packages full of things that prisoners needed and have them delivered to the prisoner a certain number of times per year, that wasn’t what he wanted.
Next he looked for news articles about Carl Bala’s parole hearing and the recent appeals and complaints produced and submitted by his lawyers. Schaeffer now knew that the Balacontano family were the ones trying to have him killed. He supposed they thought he planned to stop Bala’s parole somehow. They were wrong. He had wanted nothing, and he hadn’t even known that Balacontano was going to have a parole hearing. But their course was set, and so his had to be too.
He kept reading articles that might tell him what was going on in Balacontano’s crime family. He read an account that consisted almost entirely of things he already knew. Then came the part he was searching for: “Amid the discussion and speculation about the parole hearing, there is no indication of how John Cocella, the reigning caretaker don, feels about the prospect of the old lion’s return.”
He noticed a line in small italic at the bottom of the story: “This is Part 1 of a three-part series called ‘Family Matters.’”
Schaeffer went to the same section of the newspaper and found Part 2, printed the next day, which covered the legal aspects of the story.
The article quoted Balacontano’s lead counsel, Andrew Wain Herren, who said that parole was the least his client could expect. He said it was possible his client would get a new trial that exonerated him and awarded him damages for false arrest, an unfair trial, and an improper conviction.
Schaeffer now had the names of the acting capo of the Balacontano family and Bala’s lead attorney. He looked up some addresses, and then packed and flew to New York.
The next day he took the subway and walked to the business address of Dominic Santangelo, the head of the Scarpi family. Schaeffer was not surprised when he saw the building. It was the old Bellissimo Products building, much remodeled. They had removed the old scrollwork at the top of the facade, covered the red brick with a sand-colored substance, and put in big windows on the upper floors. If he squinted his eyes, he could still see the exterior of the old building.
He walked around the back and saw a big white truck parked near a loading dock with its ramp down. The painted sign on the truck said “DOCU-SAFE SECURITY,” with the words “archiving and shredding” in small print beneath. A pair of workmen were loading the truck with rectangular cardboard cartons while four other workers from inside the building were busy bringing out identical cartons and leaving them by the ramp for loading. The cartons by the ramp were all labeled in black marker—1A, 2E, 4G, and so on. He looked at the building. There were eight stories. The bosses would have their offices on the eighth floor on the side with the best view. The big new windows were at the front, overlooking the street. That would probably put them at the beginning of the alphabet.
He waited until some boxes with the label 8A on them appeared. Then he watched for the moment when the faster workers would catch up with the slower workers and they would all be inside at once. That would also give the two-man truck crew a few minutes when they weren’t loading.
At last, the workers doing the loading were indoors, the driver was sitting in the cab behind the wheel, writing something on a clipboard, and the other man was in the bay arranging boxes. Schaeffer put on one latex glove, stepped to the box labeled 8A, slashed the tape seal, and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers, all in a plastic wastebasket liner. He put the plastic bag under his coat and walked down the street to the subway entrance.
He kept the papers under his coat for the length of his subway ride. In his hotel room, he dropped the papers and envelopes that he had stolen on the bed, put another latex glove on his other hand, and sorted them, searching for any blank sheets of paper that might have been used to cover a check or a bill, a business envelope, and a smaller letter envelope. When he found them, he put them in a folder and then into an empty drawer of the dresser.
He began the next phase of his research on his iPad. He learned that of all the active ingredients in rat poison, four stood out. Cholecalciferol caused kidney failure. Bromethalin caused a swelling of the brain. Phosphides produced a poison gas when mixed with stomach acid. And anticoagulants prevented blood from clotting. Over the next few days he bought four different rat poisons, each of which relied on a different formula. He put on his surgical gloves and used a small mortar and pestle to break the pellets of rat poison into a fine powder, mixed them together, and stored them in a paper cup in the drawer.
Next he prepared his letter to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. The outer envelope said it was for Carlo Balacontano and was from his attorney, Andrew Wain Herren of the firm Pfoel, Grebell & Herren. It said, “Special Mail—Open only in the presence of the inmate.” The Inmate Information Handbook of the Federal Bureau of Prisons stated that a counselor would open and inspect the letter and then hand it over to the inmate.
Schaeffer wasn’t sure whose fingerprints would be on the envelope and the sheets of paper in the letter, but it would be someone in the Scarpis’ building, and he was sure many people there would have their fingerprints on file with the federal government. Inside his letter was a fresh return envelope addressed to Andrew Wain Herren, the attorney. The letter asked Balacontano to write down the names of any friendly witnesses he hadn’t mentioned earlier, put the list in the stamped return envelope, and send it out in that day’s mail. The glue strip on the return envelope was coated with the fine rat poison, and there was a small amount of it stuck to various interior parts of the outer envelope.
Schaeffer finished his letter and mailed it on his way out to dinner. When he reached the restaurant, he devoted more care and time to washing his hands than usual, and then had an excellent dinner.
25
Schaeffer estimated that it would take three days for the letter to arrive and be routed through the prison mail system to Carlo Balacontano and then another five for the FBI to identify the rat poison, run the fingerprints on the paper and envelopes, and figure out their owner’s role in the Scarpi organization. When the eight days had passed, he called Elizabeth Waring’s phone at 2:00 a.m.
“Yes?” she said.
“It’s me.”
“How was Pittsburgh?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The two men you
asked me about, Sarcone and Pastore. Tell me you killed them before you talked to me about them.”
“Men have been trying to kill me, but these two failed. I don’t expect you to be as happy as I am.”
“I’m trying to solve your problem in the best way I can. You still have information that could be of use to the Justice Department. If you’re willing, I can introduce you to some people who are very good at making sure that men like Sarcone and Pastore don’t get close enough to you to become a nuisance. You would be kept in absolute safety and relative comfort in return for occasional testimony about how you spent your twenties and thirties.”
“Thank you, but I’m not interested in that kind of offer. Being inside a prison isn’t an option for me, even a comfortable prison.”
“I didn’t say it was a prison.”
“No, I did.”
“The alternative isn’t better.”
“No, but if I’m outside, at least I can fight back.”
She could tell that he was about to hang up, so she said, “Things are heating up out there in the underworld.”
“Oh?”
“A few days ago Carlo Balacontano got a letter in federal prison that was supposed to be from his lawyer. It was laced with rat poison, and had fingerprints and DNA on it that came from someone in the Scarpi family, a girl who works in the office of Dominic Santangelo.”
“That’s the best the Scarpi organization can do these days? Try to poison him by mail?”
“A poisoned letter could be something besides an attempt to kill him. It might be an insult or a warning. They might think the reason he’s getting a parole hearing is because he’s giving us information.”
“Is he?”
“No. He would if he were smart, but he’s not.”
“On that I’ll wish you a good night.” He disconnected the call and broke down his telephone. He put the pieces in a bag so he could throw them away next time he was out. It was now ten after two. He went to bed.
When he woke the next morning, he went back to work on the trouble he was making. Balacontano knew that he had been sent a poisoned letter in an envelope with a Scarpi’s fingerprints on it. Now it was time for the Balacontano family to retaliate against the Scarpis for the rat poison.
Schaeffer couldn’t assume it would happen naturally. Was Bala’s surrogate boss, John Cocella, able to see Bala in prison to get orders? In preparation for his parole hearing, Balacontano had been moved to Metropolitan Correctional Center at 150 Park Row, New York City. This was a much smaller prison than the one Balacontano was used to, with only eight hundred inmates. He was at Metropolitan because the court for the Southern District of New York was where Balacontano had been convicted of Arthur Fieldston’s murder.
Schaeffer bought a seat on a train from DC to New York, which took under four hours. He was careful not to draw the interest of other passengers. He dressed well and kept to himself, spending most of the time looking out the window at the greenery and studying small towns near the tracks. He judged the train’s speed by the frequency of the utility poles that drifted backward past his window. He had brought a copy of the New York Times, so he opened it and pretended to read.
He thought about death. He remembered Eddie saying, “Everybody dies. It’s a question of timing, and whether the pay for it goes to you or a bunch of doctors. It might as well be you.” The pay in the killing trade had been extremely good, but pay stopped being an issue to Schaeffer the day he had left for England thirty years ago. By then he had enough money and didn’t need anybody to pay him again. It had often seemed ironic to him that after all the killing he’d done to get rich, he had then accidentally fallen for a woman who had a fortune that made his money irrelevant.
He arrived at Penn Station a bit after 1:00 p.m. and took a cab to the hotel he had selected. The Hotel Mulberry was thirteen stories high and overlooked the prison. He walked to City Hall Park, where he could still see the prison. It didn’t look like much, a nearly featureless block of dark brown brick. Whenever a car passed into or out of the parking lot, a row of stanchions would sink under the pavement and then rise up again to block the next car.
He had read about people who had been incarcerated in this prison. The drug boss El Chapo was there now, and at one point Bernard Madoff had been here. The blind sheik who had ordered the first attempt on the World Trade Center had been here. Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself there while awaiting trial for sex trafficking. Like those people, Bala had probably been held in this prison for the convenience of the courts. But it was reputed to be an awful place.
Schaeffer walked back to his hotel and stepped out on his balcony to watch the prison. The people who came and went were divisible into groups: lawyers and prosecutors, police detectives, doctors and therapists, and visitors. He had managed to find seven photos of John Cocella on the Internet, but he saw nobody who looked like him.
Schaeffer gave up at five o’clock, when the traffic into the prison stopped. He got up in the morning to watch the prison entrance again. This time he saw more visitors. There were far more women than men. It made sense. When a family got dysfunctional and fragmented, the ones left were usually the women and children. It was the men who got put in a cell or got shot.
Just before ten o’clock, he saw a man he thought might be John Cocella. A big black Mercedes pulled up at the curb, and two large men got out, one from the right side of the back seat and the other from the front passenger side. They stood together looking around, and then another man emerged from the back seat, moving quickly so that when his first step touched the pavement, he was already launched toward the front entrance of the prison. He wore an expensive, well-fitted gray summer suit and a pair of brown shoes that glinted in the sunlight.
The two men walked on either side of him, staying with him all the way to the front entrance. One of the men pushed open the door so that Cocella could step inside without slowing down.
The two big men stayed outside. They were a very professional pair of bodyguards. The big black Mercedes drove off, but the two men remained, scanning the area they could see—the cars on the street, the foot traffic, the people leaving the building.
Schaeffer left his balcony and went inside his hotel room, turned on his iPad, and typed in the name Dominic Santangelo. In a few seconds he had photographs of the man, his address, and directions to his house on Staten Island. He found street-view photographs of the house and studied them. Then he looked at aerial photographs, studying the images for accessibility, hiding places, lines of fire, choke points, places to leave a car.
Schaeffer went back out on the balcony, spotted the two bodyguards, and watched them some more. A short time later, the front door of the prison opened, and the man Schaeffer had identified as John Cocella emerged. He was instantly flanked by his two men, and the three walked quickly toward the curb. The black car was not visible at first, but then Schaeffer saw it about a block off. Cocella and his men didn’t slow down or make a visible attempt to match their speed to the car’s. They simply kept moving and the car sped up to meet them. The two bodyguards reached for the door handles before the car even stopped and flung the doors open. Cocella sat, the bodyguards slipped inside, the doors slammed, and the car was off again. Schaeffer counted seconds, and didn’t get to five before the car was a block away and moving into the left lane.
Immediately, Schaeffer packed and checked out of the Mulberry Hotel. He knew that completing the next step could take two or three days, possibly even longer. He took a cab to the nearest car rental, which was at Battery Park, rented a small, dark gray Toyota. He locked his suitcase in the trunk and drove to Staten Island.
He ate dinner at a local restaurant and walked the commercial streets for a while. When he saw that the parking space he had selected in advance on the aerial pictures was now available, he moved his rental car into it. At 11:20 p.m., he went to the trunk of the rental car,
opened his suitcase, took out the disassembled AR-15 rifle with the telescopic sight, wrapped his coat around it, and brought it with him. He stopped in Dominic Santangelo’s backyard, assembled the rifle on the grass, inserted a loaded magazine, and sighted it in on the rear window of Santangelo’s living room.
He waited about forty-five minutes, sitting comfortably in the dark while Santangelo finished walking his dog, a fat cocker spaniel he addressed as Polly. Then Santangelo came into the house, sat down on the couch, and turned on a flat-screen television that was about six feet across.
Schaeffer placed the crosshairs on the center of the bald spot on the back of Santangelo’s head. He squeezed the trigger, felt the recoil, saw the red mist, and laid the rifle on the ground. As he had learned while working with Eddie, a single shot seldom spurred people to action. They waited and listened for a second shot, and if it never came, then they figured that the first shot must have been a backfire or a firecracker. Nobody came out of the house or appeared nearby, so Schaeffer removed the magazine, disassembled the rifle, and left.
He drove the rental car to a hotel along West 38th Street, checked in, and resumed his research and scouting on the Internet. He found out that John Cocella was officially the president of a Balacontano-owned restaurant supply business called Trans-Matic Supply, which Schaeffer remembered from about forty years ago. It used to be one of those businesses that forced lots of small restaurants to buy their packaged food, liquor, and linens, and then used the deliveries to transport contraband and pick up money. The current headquarters was in a big modern building on the east side of the city, and seen from the outside, the company might have been in any business or no business.