by Don Silver
Finding customers wasn’t as easy, particularly because it involved Chuck calling people he’d known in his old life—the guy in charge of the softball team Puckman Security sponsored, the head of the Equestrian Academy where Chuck’s daughter, Ivy, had ridden, and a handful of ex-neighbors and business club members with whom he’d played tennis. His worst fear—that he would be regarded as a pariah—never materialized. People remembered him. They’d even heard about his difficulties. But they just weren’t very interested. He called his daughter’s friends’ parents, former suppliers he’d favored with large orders, even a couple of Eileen’s uncles with whom he felt some rapport. Nobody was the slightest bit interested until he got through to Sharon Gladstein—customer zero—as Rahim called her.
Ms. Gladstein was a waxy-faced, hook-nosed gossip and shopaholic, too homely to breed. In the early eighties, through the nuances of divorce law, Sharon turned a short ill-fated marriage to a low-level environmental lawyer into a lifelong pension and thereafter devoted herself to becoming a human Rolodex. She was also the best friend of Chuck’s ex-wife, Eileen. “Nu?” Sharon said, as if she’d run into him at a bar mitzvah.
“You’ve probably heard,” Chuck began, “the security business is in the crapper.”
“Anybody could see that from Eileen’s settlement,” Sharon said.
“Actually, I’m into this new thing where I got really top-shelf stuff from pawnshops and put it on the Internet where people can buy it at a fraction of its retail cost.”
“Say more,” she said, taking an earring off and pressing the phone against the side of her head.
“It’s really simple,” Chuck said. “The pawnshops get really upscale stuff, but nobody with taste wants to drive into their neighborhoods. I put it on the Internet at ridiculously low prices, which is probably why this thing is taking off….” He let his voice trail off. “I should have done this a few years ago.”
“So how does a girl get in on this?”
“You got a pen?” he asked, smiling.
Over the next few weeks, Chuck solicited dozens of pawnshop owners from Newark, Delaware, to Trenton, New Jersey, and west to Harrisburg, sending Ovella with a digital camera to take pictures of the booty. Back in the factory, Rahim and Ovella’s girlfriend, Gloria, uploaded the photos and typed in detailed descriptions, pricing merchandise between 20 and 40 percent over what the pawnshop owners told them they wanted. As Chuck hoped she would, Sharon Gladstein told everyone she knew, including former decorator clients, bridge and mah-jongg partners, women she played tennis with, and her girlfriends from the club. The first weekend online, there were eight purchases, ranging from a fourteen-inch color television for $25 to a twenty-four-piece set of cutlery for $80. Over the next few weeks, there were eight hundred hits and fifty-five sales, including a moped, a high-definition color television, a his-and-hers pistol set, a snowblower, and a trunkful of Elvis memorabilia. In the first month of business, they filled orders for more than a hundred items, with revenues to Softpawn.com of $3,700. When Chuck took ad space in a few upscale shopping mall circulars, sales increased another 50 percent. After paying quarterly real estate and payroll taxes, utility bills, and a couple weeks’ wages to Jose, Ovella, Gloria, and Big Lou, Chuck put $1,200 into an account for Gutierrez. By June, Chuck told his pawnbrokers they could ship directly to customers and be guaranteed payment while remaining anonymous. It reminded Chuck of dealing dope in college—or a hack some brainy student might have conceived as a joke—a novelty that started blossoming into something much bigger—something with upside, commercial appeal that could make something out of nothing. Rahim became more adept at writing computer code and developing the Web site. Almost by accident, he figured out how to hack into Web sites, tap into databases, even send and receive messages from e-mail addresses that weren’t theirs.
“Give me the name of some mail-order catalogue your ex-wife got, someplace you remember from the credit card bills,” Rahim said to Chuck one morning.
“What for?”
“Just give me one.”
“Lattie’s Under Covers.” Chuck was standing behind Rahim, reading a spreadsheet that summarized the prior week’s sales. A moment later, they were looking at a photograph of a teenage girl with thick lips and heavy eye shadow wearing a dark lace bra. Rahim went back to his desktop and clicked on an icon with a skull and crossbones.
“Perfect,” he said, a minute later. “Port Eighty’s open. Let’s see if we can get into the FTP.” He minimized that screen and opened up a new one that was blank except for a blinking cursor and a blank space into which he typed a string of characters. “Bingo. Port Twenty-two is open.”
Rahim typed a long string of numbers and codes—passwords, screen IDs, alphabetical and numeric iterations. When the CPU stopped crunching, the screen displayed a list of names, addresses, phone numbers, dress sizes, e-mail addresses, birth dates, marital statuses, and purchase histories. Next to one record was: “cashmere sweater with diamond studs.” Beside another: “two pairs of bathing suits—1 thong, 1 with skirt.” Next to a third: “tennis outfit.” “From behind the curtain, I can do anything,” Rahim said, sitting back and smiling.
“Do they know we’re doing this?” Chuck asked.
Rahim shook his head. “It’ll take me a few minutes to copy their customer list. I’ll merge it with our database offline. They’ll have no idea.” It took Rahim less than an hour to configure and merge it into the Softpawn.com customer database. Somewhere on the Internet, he’d found a program that let him send e-mail messages that were untraceable. “An IP address is like a fingerprint,” he said. “You want to leave it in as few places as possible,” he told Chuck as he typed. “While I’m doing this, you should come up with an e-mail we can send to Lattie’s customers.”
“Profit from Misfortune!” he wrote in the subject line. “Furs, Jewels, Electronics, Clothing, Valuables, and More. It’s your lucky day. Click here now.” For Chuck, selling had been an instinct inherited from his father, sanctioned by everyone around him. To have misgivings about it now seemed strange, silly, yet something about this was distasteful to him. For some reason, he pictured himself thirty years earlier, standing in Lorraine’s doorway in Boston holding his fake petition, her shoulders wet from the shower, her big eyes looking up at him, and something passed across his consciousness that felt fraudulent and bad.
Over the next five days, Rahim sent that e-mail to tens of thousands of individual addresses he’d surreptitiously acquired from unsophisticated online retailers. By the following weekend, they had over a thousand hits, which resulted in orders for almost $6,000 worth of merchandise. By July, word of their success had spread among pawn dealers, art and antique brokers, and money launderers. Chuck began getting calls from liquidators—people with excess inventory that hadn’t moved—which is when Fat Eddie asked him down to the Union League.
“Wilkie Crackford,” the man said, sticking out a meaty hand and winking. He was an affable fellow in his mid-forties with an ample belly, a handlebar mustache, and blue eyes that twinkled behind wire-frame glasses. “Wilkie, on account I’m from Wilkes Barre. Crackford because I’m a crack litigator.” Despite his disheveled demeanor and humble origins, Crackford graduated at the top of his class at Temple. He had an easy way about him and a voice that sounded like tiny bubble wrap crackling. Over vodka tonics, Fat Eddie made a ceremony out of telling them he would put up Crackford’s initial retainer so he could represent Chuck against any residual claims that arose against him. It was a pleasant meeting, not unlike many Chuck had taken over the course of his career. From a combination of success with Softpawn.com and the right dosages of alcohol and antianxiety medication, Chuck felt better than he had in months. They shook hands on the steps, agreeing to meet again after Crackford had a chance to get familiar with the file.
Chuck bought more computer equipment, food, nonprescription drugs, a couple of Thelonius Monk CDs, and some good weed. By the end of August, he’d put five grand in an acc
ount for Gutierrez and split another ten grand with Rahim. By the end of the summer, Softpawn.com was generating enough revenue for Ovella to quit her job. With a solid source of supply and a reliable schedule of online auctions now, Rahim put his cyber-capabilities in full service to Chuck’s case.
“What should we be looking for?” Rahim e-mailed Wilkie Crackford, once he’d been retained.
“Violations of the Clean Water Act, old trial transcripts, legislation, prior case law covering white-collar crime, even research and development by the chemical companies that make 1,1,1 TCE,” Crackford wrote back. Late at night, Rahim sat at the keyboard hacking into the search engines, downloading summaries of environmental law and reckless endangerment in the workplace, while Chuck paced behind him, a glass of vodka in his hand. Rahim ran his data through a statistical program someone had given him, entering the number of charges Chuck would likely be found guilty of against the average penalties, and e-mailed Crackford with the results. He did this with a determination that bordered on obsession. To Rahim, Chuck wasn’t just a friend in trouble. The factory that housed Softpawn, employing four people almost full-time, risen from the ashes of Puckman Security, was Rahim’s mission.
Meanwhile, Chuck grew more and more restive, spending his time surfing the Internet, drinking, getting stoned, listening to the steady drone of the Spanish-speaking radio stations, watching his fish, and waiting.
Fall 1999
Throughout the spring and summer, the bedside vigil continued, with visitors and members of the Gutierrez family sharing meals from plastic containers and watching daytime television while Ramon—or what was left of Ramon—stared into the abyss, connected by wires and tubes to all kinds of equipment, his body stiff and atrophying under the sheets. Every few days, Alverez Gutierrez, matriarch of the Gutierrez clan, would make a scene, declaring that if God wanted her son to live, He would enable the boy to breathe on his own, until finally, with the support of their priest, she convinced a doctor that the family really did want Ramon taken off the respirator. A day or two later, the doctor conferred with the hospital administrator, who notified the U.S. attorney in Allentown of the family’s decision.
On September 9, the very day Ramon Gutierrez was permitted to expire, a federal grand jury returned an indictment, charging Arthur and Charles Puckman Jr. with multiple violations of the federal Clean Water Act. Chuck was booked, fingerprinted, and then released on his own recognizance, while Arthur’s mug shot was printed and distributed across cyberspace and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
America loves to watch someone’s life disintegrate. There was a blurb on the Inquirer’s Society Page, identifying Chuck and Eileen Puckman as former sponsors of equestrian and floral shows, and a long article in the Business Section about various business practices that could result in his criminal prosecution. Chuck’s name was dropped from a few civic and art organizations he’d been a part of, and he was quietly removed from the online directory of Philly CEOs, a social organization made up of big cheeses looking to share tips about making money and living the good life. By fall, the accident at the Puckman factory had become a kind of socioeconomic parable and a topic on various radio call-in shows.
Then it seemed to fizzle. For one thing, the prosecution was unable to locate Arthur Puckman. In the nine months since he’d disappeared, there’d been no phone calls to his mother; no wire transfers; no sightings at airports, train stations, or bus depots—despite a material witness warrant and a search by a clerk at the FBI whose job it was to check ocean liner and airplane manifests, hotel registries, and Interpol. “The prosecution can’t introduce Arthur Puckman’s statement unless we have the opportunity to cross-examine him,” Crackford argued in a letter to the judge. “We see his flight as evidence of guilt.” More distressing to the Feds was that, even after drilling, sampling, collating, computer modeling, and analyzing soil samples around the factory, the EPA came up with nothing in the groundwater more toxic than heating oil and lead. So while Puckman Security had most certainly violated the Clean Water Act, the consequences simply didn’t amount to enough to warrant locking the owner up. On top of all this, Agent Keaton’s thoroughness had rendered Puckman Security defunct, with nothing in the way of assets for the government to seize. It was beginning to look as if Chuck would wind up with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, when the media started in again, making a mockery of the government’s ineffectiveness. Reluctantly, a week after Chuck’s arraignment, the U.S. attorney notified Wilkie Crackford that the government was going to drop the case.
Surprisingly, Chuck became despondent. Without the pressure of prosecution, his own aimlessness, his vulnerability, and his anxiety lay naked and exposed. In front of his bathroom mirror, he tried to feign jubilation, which seemed altogether inappropriate, given the fate of Gutierrez and his family’s role in all this. He made an expression of relief, sighing deeply and releasing the tension from his shoulders, but he didn’t feel it. Without the prospect of financial ruin, even jail time, he felt a strange surge of pressure, the phrase “Now what?” bouncing around in his head.
Three weeks later, after Wilkie Crackford and Fat Eddie Palmieri toasted Chuck’s good fortune, two policemen climbed the fire escape steps and banged on Chuck’s red door. Once again, he was handcuffed, pushed into a squad car, and taken to the Roundhouse, where he was fingerprinted and photographed. This time, he wasn’t released so fast. “The U.S. attorney turned his files over to a state grand jury who decided to indict you and your brother for murder in the second degree,” Crackford explained to Chuck over the phone.
“Which means what?” Chuck asked, irritated.
“Criminal homicide constitutes murder in the second degree when it’s committed while the defendant is a principal or accomplice in the perpetration of a felony. The arcane term is ‘depraved indifference,’ if somebody were to drop a brick from the Empire State Building—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Chuck said. He had swallowed twenty milligrams of lorazepam on his way out the door.
“Since they couldn’t nail you for a Clean Water Act violation, the Feds leaned on the state prosecutor to do something.” Crackford sounded concerned. “It’s politics, Chuck. We can probably plead it down to man three.”
“Where’s that leave me?”
Wilkie Crackford made a clicking sound with his tongue as if searching for an appropriate answer. “I’m not sure,” he said nervously. “Technically, no more than twenty years.”
Chuck’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
“I’m gonna try to get you a bail hearing tonight,” the lawyer told him, “but we’re gonna need ten grand. Try to hang in there,” Crackford said.
A heavy caseload kept Chuck from being arraigned until Monday midday. Over the weekend, Chuck saw a guy get beat up for not giving up a cigarette. Twice he was hassled until he gave up his seat on a bench. All night Saturday, he was regaled by ex-cons and junkies with stories about tattoos and hair dye and being somebody’s fuck-boy in the slammer. On Monday afternoon, after Crackford showed up with a gym bag full of cash from Fat Eddie, photographers caught Chuck looking up at the sky and covering his eyes, an expression of horror pasted on his face. Crackford told him to take a few days, get some sleep, and try to clear his head. He had to decide whether to go to trial or make a deal.
That same day, Chuck visited his father at Elysian Fields. There was a single fluorescent light over Charlie’s bed, and Chuck was surprised to see his father’s upper arm, once thick and muscular, looking like his own wrist. A TV flickered at the base of his bed, and his eyes, which were glassy, seemed to have difficulty staying open. When Chuck came in, the old man looked in his direction.
“It’s me, Pop.”
The old man nodded.
“How you feeling?”
Charlie Puckman closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then coughed a feeble, phlegmy little gasp.
The room had a rank, putrid smell. If only his father was strong enou
gh, stand-up enough to take the heat, to call Crackford and serve himself up to the D.A. “Has Artie been to see you yet?” Chuck said. Silence hung between them like a sheet of glass. There was a general announcement over the little intercom that hung over the bedrail. Charlie Puckman didn’t move. “How about Fat Eddie? Has he been here?” Nothing.
“They’re gonna put me away, Pop,” Chuck said. The old man closed his eyes. They’d removed his dentures since Chuck had last been to see him, and he looked as if he’d swallowed part of his face. “They wanna nail me for what we used to do.” Chuck could hear the clock ticking over the bed, the steady flow of oxygen from the tank pressing into his father’s body. “I need a hundred grand. Minimum. Maybe more. I got thirty in retirement, and Fat Eddie says he’ll give me twenty, maybe twenty-five. Of course, the building is mortgaged.” All his adult life, Chuck had been in this position with his dad—on bended knee, a grown man beholden to his father. “You got anything hidden anywhere, now would be the time to tell me.” Charlie Puckman, who couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to, dismissed his boy with an almost imperceptible wave of his index finger.
It was the last time they saw each other. The old man died in his sleep a couple of weeks later, leaving no assets, no cash, no life insurance, and no will—only creditors: a furniture dealer on Frankford Avenue, a Visa bill in the mid-four figures, and a bridge loan on a piece of real estate Charlie had long ago traded for cash.