by Howie Carr
“Well, in retrospect that’s true I suppose. But at the time, when you get that target letter, you never know how it’s going to shake out, do you?”
A good answer, delivered like a pro. But I still didn’t show my hand.
“Listen,” he finally said, “can I sit down? I have something I want to run by you.”
“You can run it by me standing up.” I looked over at Hobart, motioned to him to come over, and then turned back to this Jack Reilly. “First, though, I just want to check something, if it’s okay with you, Jack.”
He nodded. He understood. I always wonder about guys who’ve been caught on wires, even if they had a good lawyer. I’m suspicious, just like with “unindicted coconspirators.” Maybe they got used to being taped. Maybe it was all a setup by the cops, to keep them on the streets with a short leash, very short. Hobart gave Reilly a quick frisk, pits to tits, and told me, “He’s clean.”
I told him he could sit down now, and he did.
“What do you want, Jack?” I asked.
“You know the casino bill that’s coming up for a vote?” he said. I told him I read the newspapers.
“I’m working for some people who want it passed,” he said. “Vote’s very close right now. And, well…” He paused. “Every time somebody else gets killed, a few more of the reps get cold feet.”
“And this concerns me how?”
“These people that have been killed, they worked for Sally?”
“You’d have to ask Sally,” I said.
Reilly took a deep breath. “I don’t know Sally.”
“And you think you know me?”
“Not really,” he said. “But my employers really want to put a lid on this thing, at least until after the vote.”
“Who are your employers?”
“Some concerned citizens. They’d really like to see everything quiet down, at least until their bill gets signed by the governor.”
I smiled. “You want to put a lid on a gang war so you can get a bill passed? I guess you don’t know much about gang wars, Jack.”
“What my employers figure is, and I’m just passing on their thoughts, is that you and Sally are having a war to figure out who’s going to shake down the casinos once they’re built. These guys who are voting, they’re state reps, from the suburbs mostly. They can’t take this kind of heat.”
“What’s your pitch, Jack?”
“The shooting stops, we make it worth your while.”
“Just me, or Sally too?”
“Whatever it takes to stop it.” He paused for a moment. “Look, I know how stupid I seem walking in here with no introduction or nothing. But I’m just an errand boy, you understand? I told them this was a fool’s errand, but they’re from the South, they’re businessmen, they’re squares.”
“And you’re not?”
“I’m broke is what I am.”
“How much they offering me?” I asked. “How much if I can stop it?”
“I think they’d want some kind of guarantee.”
A guarantee? I had to smile again.
“They want something in writing, do they?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t, Jack. I really don’t. Tell me.”
Hobart glanced over at me, scowling. I don’t think he could believe I’d been talking to this bent cop for as long as I had.
“You got this money with you now?”
“No, of course not. They just wanted me to sound you out.”
“Okay, Jack, you’ve done that. You go report back to your businessmen from the South that I’m thinking about it.”
“What does that mean, exactly? ‘Thinking about it’?”
“It means I don’t usually talk to people who just walk in here like you did, but I made an exception in your case, and I want to do a little checking.”
“On me?”
“On everything.”
“What can I tell my people?”
“Tell your people I’m doing a little checking.”
“When do I see you again?”
“When I have something to tell them. Or when you have some cash. Now screw.”
6
EX MARKS THE SPOT
I screwed.
A lot of people might have been taken aback to get that kind of brusque brush-off. But I didn’t take it personally. To take something personally, you really have to believe something’s on the level. I’ve been around too long to entertain such delusions. Bench was just playing his role—tough guy gangster. And I was playing mine—messenger boy. And I was already ahead of the game, having gotten paid up front.
On my way back to the South End, I called Kevin Caulfield to fill him in. He didn’t seem disappointed either; at least he had something to tell Westridge. I don’t think he’d been expecting much anyway. He was another guy who wasn’t operating under any illusions that anything was on the level.
I was glad for the business, but despite my alleged dodgy reputation, I don’t play in the same league as Bench and Sally. I’m just a State House hustler, and they’re wiseguys. Caulfield might have been able to come up with somebody a little more “in the element” as they say, but there’s a danger in dealing directly with wiseguys. They have a tendency to go rogue, especially if you give them cash. You could hand somebody $20,000 to deliver and then you’d never see them again, or if you did, they’d claim somebody ripped ’em off before they got to the Alibi and could you please give ’em another twenty large, no hard feelings? And no, they didn’t get a good look at the guys who robbed them. Everything with these guys is a scam, they’re even worse than politicians.
Caulfield was using me because he and I played by the same rules—State House rules. I had to answer to him, just like the guy who frisked me had to answer to Bench. Caulfield told me to keep making calls, see what I could turn up, and they’d keep paying me. Sounded like a plan to me, especially the part about getting paid.
Once I got home to Shawmut Avenue, I made a call to a House chairman who owed me. He’d paid me well for services rendered, but I’d gone above and beyond the call of duty. He’d been pinched in Boston for drunk driving, survivable in most years, but this particular cycle he’d just split up with his wife and he’d been running against a fresh-faced young selectman.
The cop who’d pinched my guy was a real blister, and I soon discovered why he had such a chip on his shoulder. He’d tried to move up to the State Police, but he’d been bounced out of the academy at New Braintree for reasons I was never able to ascertain. So he’d come crawling back to the BPD, which is allowable under union regulations, and soon was testifying in all manner of gun and drug cases, not to mention the occasional OUI.
When the lawyers first get a cop on the witness stand, or when he swears out an affidavit for a search warrant, he has to stipulate under oath how long he’s been a cop. For two years, since he’d come back to the job, this guy had been claiming he’d been on the job with the BPD “continuously since 2007.”
Well, no, he hadn’t. He’d been out for those three months in 2010. In other words, he had been working “continuously since 2010.” A defense lawyer would call it perjury, I’d call any and all of his subsequent testimony impeachable, and an assistant D.A. would say simply, “Your Honor, the Commonwealth moves to dismiss all charges.”
Well, that information got the charges dropped against my guy. Then the story got picked up by the defense bar, and it wasn’t long before the Department of Correction had to spring a few dozen really bad actors who were doing time on this cop’s testimony. The Globe harrumphed for a couple of weeks about the “corruption” in the department, the lying cop got bounced to the harbor patrol (where he wouldn’t have to testify anymore) and I was persona non grata at J.J. Foley’s all that summer.
You might have thought I’d have gotten a medal or a citation or at least a ribbon, if not from the Globe then from the ACLU, for my courageous gumshoe work that resulted in the return of all those fine upstanding d
rug dealers and drive-by shooters to the street. But apparently they looked me up on Wikipedia and … nothing to see here, folks, move along.
You know my old saying. No good deed goes unpunished.
Fortunately, though, at least one person remembered what I’d done for him, the state rep, who’d been reelected after all and was now Mister Chairman. I gave him a call and told him I needed a debriefing on the casino bill.
He explained to me how the various do-gooders were still trying to move reconsideration on the bill, and were trying to recruit more votes by throwing in all kinds of amendments, most of which involved handing out phony-baloney hack jobs for “addiction services” and “community outreach” in the affected cities and towns.
The leadership was closely examining every amendment, with an eye towards finding some particularly odious ones that they could present with some alarm to the casino lobbyists, who would then shower them with yet more money, to prevent the amendments from being attached to the main legislation.
Some of the amendments had undoubtedly been written by the legislative leaders themselves and given to the more compliant rank-and-file reps to actually file. The whole legislative process was nothing more than a giant conspiracy. If they’d ever put any of these bills or amendments in the mail, the feds could have charged them all with attempted extortion and mail fraud. It was only a matter of time—say, the swearing-in of the next Republican U.S. attorney—until all these reps and lobbyists were indicted for wire fraud (i.e., sending e-mails).
Anyway, my guy couldn’t get away from the State House, but he said he could meet me outside the House chambers. I got a cab and was there early, so I decided to watch a little of the debate. It was as dreadful as ever, guys in bad suits and worse haircuts yelling “Point of order!” at each other like it really mattered.
I was working on a medium-sized headache up in the spectators’ gallery by the time my guy made eye contact with me and motioned me outside. I went downstairs and we took the elevator to his fifth-floor office, the walls of which were covered with about a million photographs of himself with high school athletic teams and Kiwanis Clubs and congressmen who weren’t ever going to have a courthouse named after them, even in Worcester. I asked him about the casino bill.
“I thought it was a done deal three days ago,” he said. “Now I’m not so sure. Both papers are going crazy about how the gang violence, so-called, shows that the state doesn’t need another vice.”
“Is gay marriage a vice?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Look, tell me, who stands to benefit if the bill gets killed, and don’t tell me the gangsters.”
“Well, see, the thing is, the leadership’s been pushing it, of course. Especially across the hall.” That meant the Senate. “The bill as it stands now is basically theirs. But if it all starts over again next January, then everybody’s pretty much on equal footing again.”
Which meant every would-be casino operator and their lobbyists could be shaken down once more.
I asked him whose fingerprints were on the current bill. He didn’t have any skin in the game—nobody was paying him off—so he hadn’t exercised his customary due diligence in ferreting out the real beneficiaries of the legislation. But what it seemed to boil down to was that the state had been divided into three districts, with each district getting a casino. The Senate president, Mick Carberry, had personally drawn the lines to put Foxboro in its own district, along with the Indians who were guaranteed a casino. Boston had its own district—the mayor and the House speaker both wanted a casino at Suffolk Downs. The third district was almost all of the western part of the state, all the way east into Bristol County. Nobody cared as much about that one.
It was gerrymandering at its finest, and most of the big publicly held casino corporations had gotten screwed, blued and tattooed. They’d hired the wrong lobbyists, many of them former legislators, who’d robbed them blind. That’s what always happens, and the further away from Massachusetts the companies’ headquarters are, the more the local lobbyists charge. That includes Caulfield.
The casino interests pushing Foxboro seemed to have played their cards right. They had teamed up with the Indians and put all their eggs in Carberry’s basket. Now he was running for governor. Senate presidents never win statewide fights, but hope burns eternal, as the mayor of Boston has been known to say. Money would not be a problem in his doomed campaign.
Mistah Chairman walked over to his little dorm-room-sized refrigerator and returned with a Bud Light for me and a Diet Coke for himself, now that he was in the program. I pried off the cap and gulped from the bottle and pondered the situation.
“So a lot of people would like a mulligan on this thing, right?” I said, as much to myself as to him. “Big-money people.”
“Not just the casinos and the lobbyists,” Mistah Chairman said. “How about everybody in the legislature who feels like they missed a big payday?”
“Present company included?”
He shrugged. “Kinda risky, if you ask me. I mean, what’s going on with these shootings and bombings? I smell cops, and that means rats. There’s easier ways to make a buck.”
Mistah Chairman was one of those rarities at the State House. His near-death experience with the OUI and the selectman had chastened him. Most guys, if they skate on something heavy, they figure it means they have nine lives. They run even more wide-open than they did before they got lugged the first time.
“If the bill gets killed because of this alleged gang war,” I said, “then it starts all over again next January?”
“As do the payoffs,” he said.
“And whether Carberry wins or not—”
“He won’t—”
“Agreed,” I said. “So the new Senate president will be—”
“—Denis Donahue, also known as Donuts, and by the way that’s Denis with one ‘n’—”
“Because he didn’t have time to steal the second one. I know the joke. So you’re telling me he’s the one who has the most to gain, monetarily, if he can put a stake through the heart of Carberry’s bill.”
Mistah Chairman nodded. “The Speaker’s got his casino, in Boston. There has to be one here. Nobody gives a shit about the Indians, but they’re pretty much guaranteed theirs, in Foxboro. That leaves one slot open.”
Which meant Denis Donahue was the guy I needed to keep an eye on. He was from Worcester. I used to have an aunt from Worcester. I always thought she had some kind of learning disability, but then I realized it was just that she was from Worcester. Not a deep gene pool out there. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man shall lead. That was Denis “Donuts” Donahue, the one-eyed man.
“Donuts can’t directly go up against Carberry, can he?” I asked Mistah Chairman.
“No, he can’t. But he can wring his hands and commiserate with him if the bill starts taking on water because of the ‘war.’”
“Anything else I need to know?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Donuts is pretty much what you’d expect him to be, a garden-variety snake in the grass, your basic turd in the punch bowl.”
“You like him a lot, huh?” There seemed to be a pattern emerging here.
“Oh yeah, here’s something. He has season tickets to the Red Sox. I mean, good seats. Front row, right down the first-base line. Doesn’t use them himself every night, but you can tell who he’s doing business with by who gets ’em.”
“You got the exact seat numbers?”
He shook his head. “Just scan the first row and you’ll be able to spot ’em. If you’re indicted—”
“You’re invited. Yeah, I think I can figure out who’s in those seats.”
I thanked Mistah Chairman for his time. It was warm for early spring, so I decided to save the cab fare and walk home. Once I got home, I cracked open a real beer, a sixteen-ounce Ballantine Ale. Then I popped three Vicodin, turned on the satellite radio, sat down and waited for liftoff. I was trying to figure out how I coul
d approach Denis Donahue when the phone rang.
“What’s going on with Sally Curto?” It was Katy Bemis. If they ever name a street after her, it’ll have to be one way.
“Why are you calling me?” I said. “I thought we were finis.”
She laughed. “Finis, huh? That’s a hoot, you using Latin.”
“I keep telling you, I went to Boston Latin.”
“So you say. I’ve never checked, and I think you told me once your ex-wife got the yearbook in the divorce settlement.”
“Katy, as much as I enjoy what the movie reviewers would call the rapid-fire Hepburn-Tracy-style banter between exes, I do have other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe I have a date.”
Now she really laughed. “With who? Slip? Gonna catch a few wakes, go by Waterman’s and steal some dimes from a Chinaman’s bier?”
“A Chinaman?” I said. “That’s not very PC. You’d never even been to a Chinese wake at Waterman’s until you ran into me and Slip.”
“And it’s something I’ve been meaning to thank you for, believe me. What’s the old Bob Hope song? ‘Thanks for the Memories.’”
“Actually, I was thinking of Rod Stewart. To paraphrase, ‘I know you’re thinking that she must be sinking or she wouldn’t get in touch with me.’”
“Okay, you’re right. I do need something.”
“Don’t tell me the Globe doesn’t have any sources other than yours? And how would it look if you had to tell them that when you were at the Herald you sometimes took tips from a guy who won a photo finish with a federal grand jury.”
“Are you carrying a foreign load, Sunshine?” Another local-color expression she’d picked up from me. What must her family in Wenham, especially Uncle Dudley, make of her jaunty urban patter every November at Thanksgiving dinner?
She said, “I figure you must be on something. Most of the time you wouldn’t tell me or anybody else if their coat was on fire.”
“You called me, Sunshine. Feel free to call some of your other sources. I’m not stopping you.” I stood up and walked to the refrigerator to get another can of Ballantine.