Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  “Celina Galvin’s father was Humberto Parra Fernández y Guerrero,” Yeager said.

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  “The former governor of Michoacán, one of the Mexican states, and later on a major player in the narcotics trade.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. This is insane. Galvin’s an Irish guy from Southie. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d get involved in the drug business. Not at all.”

  “And you know this . . . how?”

  Danny paused for a long moment. “He just doesn’t seem the type.”

  Yeager gave him a long stare. “Neither do you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Goodman.”

  Danny’s heart was beating crazily, though he wasn’t sure whether out of panic or out of anger. He stood with his arms loosely folded. “What’s this all about?”

  “You are directly and financially linked to the international narcotics trade.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Danny.

  “That money links you,” Slocum said. “You are now officially a coconspirator.”

  “Hold on a second,” Danny said, raising his voice. “Tom Galvin was nice enough to lend me money for my daughter’s goddamned private-school tuition!” He paused, looked at each agent one at a time, then went on more quietly. “Two hours after I received the money from Galvin, I wired sixteen thousand dollars to the Lyman Academy. So maybe you can tell me how that fits into your theory.”

  “It makes no difference what you did with the funds,” Slocum said. “I don’t care if you gave it all to an orphanage in Rwanda. You received a wire transfer of dirty money, which means you’re implicated.”

  “Yeah?” said Danny. “And how was I supposed to know that?”

  “Look up ‘willful blindness’ or ‘conscious avoidance,’” Yeager said. “The court assumes you didn’t ask any questions because you didn’t want to know where Galvin’s money came from. You deliberately closed your eyes to the crime.”

  “Which means,” Slocum said, “you can be prosecuted even if you claim you didn’t know a thing.”

  Danny swallowed hard. The room seemed to tilt one way, then the other. “Prosecuted? For what? For innocently accepting—”

  “Please listen closely,” said Yeager. “We are a phone call away from making an appointment with the US Attorney. Once that happens, the toothpaste’s out of the tube.”

  “What the hell is this?” Danny’s mouth had gone dry. He was having difficulty getting the words out.

  Slocum gave a small, nasty smile. “This is conspiracy to commit money laundering, mail and wire fraud, and bank fraud. And that’s just for starters. You’re looking at thirty to forty years in prison.”

  “That’s federal time,” said Yeager. “Know what that means? No parole.”

  “Then again,” said Slocum, “I don’t think you’d last very long in prison. Our Mexican friends are going to worry about how much you know, whether you’re going to start cooperating. They have guys in our prisons everywhere. We can’t protect you.”

  “You don’t seriously think you can prosecute me on these bogus, trumped-up charges, do you?” said Danny.

  “I like our odds,” said Yeager.

  Slocum shrugged. “Even if these charges don’t hold up in court? You really want to spend the next five years of your life fighting the system? We’re the government. We’ve got hot-and-cold running lawyers and all the time in the world. You, on the other hand? You hire a half-decent lawyer to try to get you out of this, your legal bills could reach a couple million dollars by the time all’s said and done. Doesn’t look like you have that kind of money in the bank.”

  “And I wouldn’t count on your friend Galvin to bankroll your defense,” said Yeager.

  “Not once we seize his assets,” said Slocum. “And yours. Your condo, your crappy car, and that thirty-two K in retirement money? Gone. Poof.”

  “Sure, in the end, you might be able to persuade a judge and jury to acquit you,” Yeager said. “Though I wouldn’t want to bet on it, since the Department of Justice rarely loses a case. In the meantime, you and your family will be dragged through the gutter. Good luck trying to get your good name back. Your poor daughter—Abigail, right?—having to live under that shadow? Terrible thing to do to a kid.”

  Dazed, his head reeling, Danny sank down into a chair. “What the hell do you want?” he said.

  14

  “Your help, that’s all. We just want your cooperation,” Yeager said.

  “On what?” Danny said.

  “Access to Galvin. You seem to be one of the few people he spends time with.”

  “I barely know the guy,” Danny said. “Before last night, I don’t think I’d said ten words to him.”

  “Yeah?” said Slocum. “What happened to ‘he’s a friend, he trusts me’?”

  “Your daughter certainly spends a lot of time with his daughter,” said Yeager.

  “Keep my daughter out of this.”

  “I wish we could. But if you refuse to cooperate, we’ll have no choice.”

  Danny felt nauseated. “Meaning what? What kind of cooperation are you talking about?”

  Yeager looked like he was about to reply, but then he fell silent. He slid a piece of paper across the table toward Danny.

  Then Slocum said, “As soon as you sign the cooperation agreement, we’ll get into the weeds.”

  Danny scanned it quickly. It said Confidential Source Agreement and DEA form 473.

  It felt almost unreal, as if he’d stepped out of his ordinary life and into another world. Confidential source. The Drug Enforcement Administration.

  It was sickening.

  He tried to steel himself, to gather the resources necessary to fight back. “What do I get if I sign this?”

  Yeager said slowly, “A pass on prosecution. A chance for a happy ending.”

  Danny’s heart thudded and he felt acid rising in his gullet. Was there actually a way out of this nightmare? “But . . . what do you want me to do?”

  Yeager turned to Slocum, who nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  Slocum said, “We need an ear inside Galvin’s house.”

  Danny looked at him for a few seconds. “Jesus Christ. . . . You want me to wear a wire?”

  “Sign the form and we’ll talk specifics,” said Slocum.

  He shook his head. “I want to talk to a lawyer. I have that right.”

  Yeager shrugged, palms up. “Be our guest. But one word of warning?”

  Danny looked at him and waited.

  “You might want to be careful who you talk to.”

  “Actually, I’ll talk to whoever the hell I please.”

  Yeager shrugged. “Of course you will. But there’s a reason we brought you in the way we did. These cartels have eyes and ears everywhere. If the word gets out that you’ve been meeting with the DEA, your value as a CS is blown.”

  “CS?” asked Danny.

  “Confidential source,” said Yeager.

  “If they find out you met with us,” said Slocum, and he sliced a finger across his throat. He gave a leering smile. “So you might wanna be careful who you confide in.”

  For a long moment, Danny examined the floor, the worn gray industrial carpet. His head swam. He needed to gather his thoughts, get some top-notch legal advice, be very careful about his next move. Whichever way he decided to go, the consequences were serious and permanent.

  “If I decide to sign this,” he said, “how do I get in touch with you? Just . . . come back here?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Yeager. “This is a satellite office for our group. A gray site. Undisclosed working location.”

  “Think about it like this,” Slocum said. “The cartel keeps a close watch on the main DEA headquarters in the JFK
Federal Building—who comes and goes. They see someone associated with Galvin going in for a meeting at DEA? They’re gonna do something about that.”

  Yeager wrote a number on the back of his business card and handed it to Danny. “Call this number when you want to come back.”

  Slocum said, “You really don’t want to take your time about it.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or the deal’s off the table. And we come after you with handcuffs.”

  15

  Danny stumbled out of One Center Plaza into the blazing sunlight. He felt numb.

  He found a Starbucks and got a coffee and sat for a while and thought. He was, it seemed, well and truly screwed.

  He signed on to the Internet. Googled “sinaloa cartel.”

  Google’s autocomplete feature suggested a few similar searches:

  sinaloa cartel chainsaw

  sinaloa cartel members

  sinaloa cartel news

  Unable to stop himself, he selected “sinaloa cartel chainsaw.” He clicked on that link and clicked ENTER to confirm he was eighteen years of age or older, and a video started to play.

  It showed a couple of paunchy shirtless guys in Mexico. Talking in Spanish. Probably dope dealers or hit men for the Sinaloa cartel. Very bad guys, looking scared as children, tied up on the ground, against an adobe wall.

  Then someone comes out wearing military camo fatigues and starts up a chain saw, the kind you’d use to cut down a tree. In a few seconds, he beheads both of them. Once second they’re alive, the next they’re decapitated.

  They were snitches, the caption said.

  A confidential informant was a kind of snitch.

  This video had a sound track. A type of Mexican folk song called narcocorrido: guitars and trumpet and accordion, set to a polka beat. Narcocorrido ballads were odes to the murderers and torturers of the drug cartels. The folk heroes.

  Somehow that made it worse, the jaunty, galumphing happy narcocorrido sound track instead of the victim’s screams.

  Within a couple of minutes he’d seen photographs of fourteen cartel soldiers chainsawed into sections, legs and heads and torsos, arrayed on the ground like the parts of an expertly carved Thanksgiving turkey.

  Well and truly screwed.

  He needed to talk to someone, an expert. A criminal defense lawyer. But he didn’t know any.

  Sarah’s ex-husband was a lawyer. His ex-wife’s ex-husband. That was complicated and fraught enough to make his head hurt.

  No, thanks.

  Lucy’s college roommate was a corporate lawyer, a big shot in DC. Lawyers always knew other lawyers. Sometimes they knew only other lawyers. He took out his cell phone and hit the speed dial for Lucy.

  Then hit END before the call went through.

  Telling Lucy what kind of trouble he was in was a major decision, one he couldn’t undo. He needed to think that over.

  Not yet.

  He knew someone. A guy who’d lived across the hall freshman year. Jay Poskanzer spent most of his life in Butler, Columbia’s great library. Nerdy, tightly wound, brilliant, acerbic. He’d gone to Harvard Law and clerked for a Supreme Court justice and later became a hotshot lawyer in private practice.

  His specialty, Danny was pretty sure, was criminal law.

  He needed someone in criminal law. Someone really good.

  He picked up his phone again and made the call.

  16

  Jay Poskanzer was considered one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Boston. He regularly appeared on Boston magazine’s list of the city’s Top Power Lawyers.

  He was a partner at Batten Schechter, a powerhouse firm on the forty-eighth floor of the Hancock Tower. From the plate-glass windows of his office, you could see the Back Bay and the Charles River and the Financial District, arrayed in miniature like a raised-relief map. His office was cluttered with sports memorabilia: signed broken baseball bats, framed signed photos of Red Sox players in action, a framed piece of the old Boston Garden parquet floor.

  Poskanzer had frizzy reddish-brown hair with a lot of gray in it, balding on top. He had tortoiseshell glasses, a nasal voice, and a caustic manner. He was a successful lawyer now, but he was still every bit the nerd he’d been as a freshman in college.

  There was the obligatory small talk about their families. Poskanzer had a couple of sons a bit younger than Abby, one at Fessenden and the other at Belmont Hill, both private boys’ schools, “brother” schools to Lyman.

  “Hey, listen, I owe you a thank-you,” Danny said.

  “For what?”

  “For . . . Sarah—you know, your contribution. Sorry I didn’t have my shit together enough to send you a note.”

  At Sarah’s funeral, guests were asked to make donations to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, in lieu of flowers. Poskanzer had given something like a thousand dollars in Sarah’s name.

  “Don’t worry about it. I mean, least I could do and all that. You still . . . seeing . . . Lucy Lindstrom?”

  Danny nodded. He wondered if even Jay Poskanzer had privately lusted after the It Girl back in the day.

  “Lucky guy.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “So,” Poskanzer said behind his glass-topped desk, tenting his fingers. “I can see you’re nervous, Danny. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

  Danny took a deep breath, leaned forward in his chair, and started in, telling Poskanzer about the events of the past couple of days—his money troubles, the loan, the mysterious call, and the stunning discovery that the DEA was monitoring his bank records because of an ongoing investigation into Tom Galvin.

  “Wait a second,” Poskanzer said. “Thomas Galvin?”

  Danny nodded, unsettled by the urgency in Poskanzer’s voice.

  “You know him?”

  Danny nodded again.

  “So they’re saying—so Galvin is suspected of laundering money for Sinaloa—a Mexican drug cartel?”

  “Something like that.”

  Poskanzer put a hand out like a traffic cop. “Sorry, I’m trying to wrap my mind around that.”

  “It’s crazy, right?”

  He gave a low whistle. “Oh, Jesus, Danny. This isn’t good, Danny. This is bad.”

  Not what Danny wanted to hear. It hit him like a punch in the gut. Of course it was bad, but it was ominous to hear a criminal defense attorney say that. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “When Galvin transferred the funds, did you give him any kind of written understanding, a note, something?”

  “It was a loan. I’m going to pay him back.”

  “You have it in writing?”

  Danny shook his head slowly. “A friend lends a friend money, you usually don’t sign a contract, right?”

  “So the fifty thousand—it could be anything. A payment of some kind.”

  “It could be, but it’s not.”

  “You can’t prove it was a loan?”

  “They can’t prove it wasn’t.”

  “They don’t have to.” There was a long pause. “If the government suspects Galvin of laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel, or trafficking, or whatever—they’re going to use every weapon in their arsenal. Which means that sometimes the innocent bystander gets caught in the thresher.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You borrowed money from the wrong guy.”

  “Okay, but I don’t know the first damned thing about drugs or Mexican cartels or . . . I didn’t do a damned thing wrong! Isn’t that all that really counts here?”

  He exhaled slowly. “Unfortunately, no. You got caught in a major drug-trafficking investigation that has nothing to do with you. Like I said, the government’s gonna use every weapon they have, and in this case it means pressuring you until you agree to cooperate. The power, the advantage—i
t’s all on their side. It’s unfair, but there it is. You’re in a no-win situation. That’s the ugly truth.”

  Danny swallowed hard. “Jay, you’re supposed to be the best lawyer in Boston.”

  Poskanzer allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “Arguably.”

  “So you’re saying, what, we can’t fight this?”

  “Danny. Of course we can fight it. I’m here for you—whatever you want to do, I’ll do. But let me lay out the plain facts. The way the law works in this case, you do business with a criminal, the presumption is you’re a criminal. You can fight it, sure. But the odds are against you. When the US government decides to prosecute someone on narcotics charges? They almost always win. Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Do you know what the federal narcotics conviction rate is?”

  Danny shook his head impatiently.

  “Over ninety percent.” Poskanzer turned slightly and began tapping on his keyboard. “Here it is—ninety-three percent. That means ninety-three percent of people charged with ‘drug trafficking,’ however that’s defined, got convicted. Almost all of them did prison time. That means you have a nine in ten chance of ending up in prison. That’s the reality.”

  Danny almost leaped out of his chair. “Prison?” he sputtered. “Did you say prison? Are you freaking kidding me?”

  Poskanzer shook his head slowly. “Danny, come on, sit down, okay? All I’m saying is—if we choose to fight it in the legal system, the odds are extremely high you end up in prison.”

  Bitterly, Danny said: “So basically, I can get prison time for . . . just accepting a loan from a guy?”

  “When they call it a racketeering offense, you sure can.” Poskanzer swiveled his computer monitor around so Danny could read the screen. “Take a look.”

  A table of some kind. Words and numbers. “What is it?” Danny asked.

  “These are the federal sentencing guidelines for RICO offenses. Racketeering, as they call it. Given the amount of money involved—fifty thousand dollars—and the fact that it falls under the category of narcotics-related conduct, you could get three hundred twenty-four to four hundred months in prison.”