The Warriors
Page 6
“I’ll make arrangements for private security details to protect you day and night. Whenever Angelina leaves you, the Secret Service goes with her. You become just an ordinary civilian.”
“No, Hayes,” she said, moving to stand behind him and wrapping her arms around his chest. “It’s sweet of you, but I don’t want that.”
“Why? I love you. I don’t want a group of punks out there thinking they can hurt you. Christ, Raquel, they’ve already tried. Isn’t that why Theresa is dead?”
“I can deal with it—fear. I dealt with it for the first time with the cancer I had. The cancer was, I think, a deadlier killer.”
“I’m just talking about two big guys with hidden weapons shadowing your movements around town when the Secret Service has left with Baldesteri. They’ll be unobtrusive. They’ll become part of the atmosphere around you.”
“No. My real concern is a host of ethical problems. Do I have to tell the feds that two men they’ve been searching for, Caliente and Salazar, are within easy reach when I only know that because I’m the trial lawyer for Baldesteri? Or do the feds already know that? Are they playing some game to catch Baldesteri? To catch me? I’ve been a pain in the ass to them for years. My only job is to represent her, not to be a handmaiden for the FBI or to be concerned about myself. And what happens to Baldesteri, my client, if the feds learn that she’s partying with Sinaloa people, even if, to give her the benefit of the doubt, she does not know who they are? It would blow my defense of her out of the water.”
Hayes gently unclasped Raquel’s hands. He turned and embraced her. Instinctively they walked to his bedroom. They undressed. They lay in his familiar bed. They pressed as close together as possible to calm her. And they slept.
CHAPTER 8
ALTHOUGH SHE HAD served as a New York Senator for seven years, Angelina Baldesteri had never, in fact, lived in any city, town, or village in the State of New York. One year after Jimmy Young, her husband, had been assassinated on a sidewalk on the Avenue of the Americas after an interview on Fox News, a media nemesis of his, she had bought a large, somewhat run-down Tudor house in middle-class Larchmont in southern Westchester County. She had actually slept there four or five nights each year. But she’d quickly moved to establish the Larchmont house as her “permanent residence,” registered to vote as a New Yorker, and designated the Larchmont house as her address on all her tax returns. As a Larchmont resident, she, the former First Lady and stoic widow of a widely popular President, was twice overwhelmingly elected to the Senate. Like most Senators, she kept an apartment in Washington; it was a handsome place, not just a convenient hotel-style room, and it was there that she actually lived.
To deflect the media’s attention, she had allowed Ellen Samuells—a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to her—to live in the Larchmont house. There was so much security around the house of a former First Lady that even some of the agents didn’t fully grasp the ruse that Angelina Baldesteri was using a Hollywood-style body double. Those who knew said nothing. It seemed natural to them that the widow of a President killed by an ISIS suicide bomber would need multiple layers of protection, charades, and ruses, including the use of a phantom image. Ellen Samuells was well paid for her playacting by America Renewed; it was her only job, and she lived well.
Each night during the trial, it was Ellen Samuells, not Angelina Baldesteri, who slipped into the SUVs that drove on a variety of routes from Raquel Rematti’s office to the Larchmont house. Raquel knew that Senator Baldesteri, when she left the office, used the service elevator in the office building to make her way, heavily but discreetly guarded, to a suite in the Waldorf Astoria. Raquel had once met Ellen Samuells. Even Raquel, an acutely observant woman, was struck by the virtual physical identity between Senator Baldesteri and her look-alike. It was not Raquel’s business as to what security measures her client and her client’s Secret Service managers did or did not use. She was the Senator’s lawyer, not her bodyguard or friend. And it was not her job to disclose Government secrets. She never mentioned any of this even to Hayes.
The Waldorf Astoria, although in steady decline like a gracefully aging dowager, was still the hotel-of-choice of Presidents and their families as it had been since at least Franklin Roosevelt’s era. It had a variety of presidential suites, designed so that anyone with evil intentions could never be completely certain where the President actually was while staying there. Like a medieval castle, the building also had a bewildering multiplicity of internal hidden hallways, stairwells, and surprisingly located service elevators. And it still had the advantage, facing the business district of Park Avenue, of being one of the very few hotels in the heart of Manhattan.
By the time President Jimmy Young—his real and Mayflower-derived name was Josiah Pierce Young IV—was killed, Angelina Baldesteri detested him. He was so obsessed by politics, and with the mean-spirited necessity of concealing that he was gay, that in the ten years of their marriage, they had barely spent any time with each other, except at innumerable public events.
So, at the Waldorf Astoria, on all their fund-raising trips to the city and his appearances at the United Nations and elsewhere, Jimmy Young and Angelina Baldesteri had never stayed in the same suite at the Waldorf. The well-trained staff referred to the “His” and “Her” suites, not just to “His” and “Her” towels. On the night before he was spectacularly blown to shreds by the suicide bomber, Jimmy Young had stayed at the Waldorf while Angelina was in Seattle to give a speech to five thousand delegates at a NOW convention.
She and Jimmy had not made love, embraced, held hands, or kissed even demurely in years, except for public embraces and chaste media kisses. In truth, Angelina, although horrified by the way President Young had died, immediately thought his martyrdom would advance her own well-formed ambitions.
In the years of her husband’s presidency, she had at least twelve lovers, from A-list movie stars to one of the White House gardeners. Even in the age of the Internet, the mainstream media assigned to the White House, like the far more private, all-male club of journalists in the JFK years, had simply turned a blind eye. Jimmy Young, too, had carefully guarded his secrets. His attraction to men was hinted at, never exposed. No one had ever outed him. He certainly never outed himself.
When the Senator, wearing a New York Mets baseball cap, arrived at the Waldorf on that rain-soaked night after leaving Raquel’s office, and as Ellen Samuells was driven to Larchmont along the twisting and bucolic Bronx River Parkway in Westchester County, Angelina was surrounded by an almost phantom Secret Service phalanx. With women agents, she entered one of the Waldorf’s 1950s-style ground-floor public bathrooms. Through a narrow door that opened to what looked like a janitor’s room, she entered a smelly stairwell that, twelve stories higher, opened onto the floor where one of the several presidential suites was located.
She entered it alone. Standing near one of the ornate but now unusable fireplaces was Robert Calvaro.
“Robert,” she said, “how long have you been waiting?”
“Not long,” he answered. “It’s never a long time, Angie, when I’m waiting for you. I just think about what I know is coming.”
Without another word, she unfastened every button and zipper of the blue sweater and dress she’d been wearing all day and kicked off the high heels that had caused her pinching pain for hours, particularly on her fast, strong strides up the twelve flights of stairs to this suite.
Within five minutes she and Robert Calvaro were in the oversize bed that she and President Young had never shared. She loved what they did to each other. Pure bliss.
CHAPTER 9
“AGENT GROVER,” RAQUEL Rematti asked, “how long have you been with the FBI?” It was her first question on cross-examination.
“Eight years,” he answered. Grover looked and sounded like a routine Irish beat cop. But that was a craftily prepared façade. Raquel knew that she had to work methodically and carefully with him. He was skilled at the art of testifying.
“Right.”
“Assigned to the narcotics unit?”
“Actually, for the last three years, to a gang investigation unit. Not necessarily narcotics. Any gang activity.”
“The Crips and the Bloods?”
“Those were two of them.”
“The Young Lords?”
“Another of them.”
“MS-13?”
“That, too.”
“It was dangerous work, right?”
“Some people thought so.”
“Did you?”
“Not really. I was more concerned about smaller, newer gangs. Russian and Ukrainian primarily. They were the most violent. Nothing much scares me.”
“Did you make any arrests when you were with the NYPD?”
“Quite a few.”
“While you were with the NYPD, did you ever testify at trials?”
“Many times.”
“And were there convictions in those trials?”
“Almost all the time, Ms. Rematti.”
“How many trials at which you testified ended in convictions?”
“I didn’t count.”
“And were some of those convictions reversed on appeal?”
“Some.”
“How many?”
“Don’t know. Not many.”
“Were any of those convictions reversed on appeal because of something you falsely testified to?”
“I don’t know. I did read a few times that some appeals judges, who never saw me and who certainly were never cops and who had no idea what the streets are really like, were upset by what I might have said at a trial. I don’t pay attention to that. I just do my job.”
“Did any of those judges write that you falsified evidence?”
“Did they? I don’t know. It’s easy for a judge in a robe who has never been on the ground to get fantasy ideas.”
“You testified you left the NYPD to join the FBI?”
“I did.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Why not? It’s a better job. You get better resources with the feds. Better pay. More prestige. And nicer offices. Better pension. Stuff like that.”
“And you were assigned to a narcotics unit?”
“Right. I’ve had many assignments along my career path. But a gang is a gang. I know about gangs.”
“When did you first hear about the Sinaloa cartel?”
“Not sure. Five years ago, four years ago.”
“How did that come about?”
“Not sure. I was on a team that was given responsibility for assessing the location, evolution, direction of various foreign-based cartels. Sinaloa was one of them.”
“Where did Sinaloa rank?”
“Rank? Do you mean in terms of its power and reach? Or do you mean like the difference between a lieutenant colonel and a colonel?”
“Was Sinaloa a powerful narcotics group?”
“At first—say, five years ago—not a big factor. There was a lot of competition in the New York area.”
“Did that change?”
“It sure did.”
“In what way?”
“In just three or four years, Sinaloa, which was for a long time solely a Mexican operation, essentially wiped out its competition in the city. It was almost breathtaking.”
“How did that happen?”
Hunter Decker stood. “Objection. That question could lead to dangerous and confidential information.”
Raquel withdrew the question.
Naomi Goldstein gave an almost benign, admiring smile. She didn’t say a word.
Raquel asked, “You know the name Oscar Caliente, don’t you?”
“Certainly do. He’s been the head of the Sinaloa cartel in this area for four or five years.”
“And you told the jury that this morning when Mr. Decker was questioning you?”
“That’s right.”
“You called Mr. Caliente a terrorist, right?”
“I shouldn’t have used that word. But that’s how I see him. He’s a man who likes to have the people who work for him kill people he doesn’t like. And he often has people who work for him kill other people who work for him if he thinks his orders have not been carried out. He never does it himself. Word is that he throws up when he sees his own blood from a paper cut.”
“How do you know that?”
“As we grew more interested in Sinaloa, we took thousands of pictures and film footage of him and the people who kept company with him and who did what he told them to do, including murder. Many murders, in fact.”
“Did you ever see him?” Since Grover, quick-tongued and always eager to speak, hesitated, Raquel asked a subtly different question: “Isn’t it true you never saw him face-to-face?”
“That’s true.”
“You don’t know whether he has blue eyes, correct?”
“No. I don’t have much interest in the color of men’s eyes.”
Naomi Goldstein stirred slightly, as if preparing herself to reprimand Grover. But Raquel Rematti was accelerating and wanted no distractions.
“You don’t know how tall he is, do you?”
“No. In most of the tapes and pictures, the men around him are taller. Even some of the women are.”
“You don’t know if he wears glasses, do you?”
“In some pictures he does. In others, he doesn’t. He probably doesn’t need glasses. They’re artifices of disguise.”
“The man you say is Caliente changes his appearance a lot, isn’t that right?”
“Ms. Rematti, that’s what I just said, I don’t know for sure. I think he does. Lots of gang leaders change the kinds of clothes they wear, the color of their hair. And plastic surgery. They buy six-thousand-dollar wigs.”
“Does he have scars on his face?”
“Look, Ms. Rematti, what I know is this. Caliente is the boss of a cartel with an army of killers. Those killers take orders from him and only from him. By now, because of those killers, the only drugs that are sold on a large scale in Manhattan are from the Sinaloa cartel. There is no competition. Caliente has seen to that.”
“Mr. Decker showed you several pictures this morning, correct, sir?”
“Sure, he did.”
“And in one of those pictures you saw Senator Baldesteri, correct?”
“She was there.”
“And standing in front of her, you testified, didn’t you, was Oscar Caliente?”
“Yes.”
“But you never saw Oscar Caliente, did you, sir?”
“I saw Oscar Caliente hundreds of times.”
“But on videotapes, correct, sir?”
“And in still photos, too.”
“But never face-to-face, correct?”
“Like I said, never. What’s the problem?”
“Why didn’t you ever arrest him?”
“We concentrated on trying to flip one or more of his people—one of his inside guys.”
“Flip means an informant?”
“Sure. Like Sammy the Bull Gravano testifying against John Gotti, just to give you the biggest example. There was never a way to convict Gotti without Gravano.”
“Did you know a man named Juan Suarez?”
“We did. We weren’t certain of his name. But we knew there was a guy who was a major carrier for Caliente. And that he called himself, and other guys called him, Suarez.”
“When was the last time you saw Suarez?”
“Last time? This morning. He was in that picture. He was talking to your client.”
“Do you know that man’s actual name?”
“Not really. When we videotaped Caliente several years ago and the other guy was there, we just called him Juan Suarez. Suarez spent lots of time in downtown after-hours clubs. In the old Meatpacking District. And in what we used to call Alphabet City—Avenues A, B, and C on the Lower East Side—but now I guess it’s called
the East Village by the computer industry kids who live there and the real estate people who are tearing down the old slums and putting up nice new buildings.”
“Have you ever heard of a man called Hugo Salazar?”
“Not until a few months ago.”
“How did you hear it first?”
“When Mr. Decker began preparing for this trial.”
“And you heard Mr. Decker call him that when he put Government Exhibit 673 on the computer screen?”
“To me the guy is still, in my mind at least, Juan Suarez. He’s the guy. He could call himself William Shakespeare if he wants to.”
Raquel looked at Naomi Goldstein who was, as always, alert in her own way. “Your Honor,” Raquel said, “could I ask the videographer to post Baldesteri Exhibit 35 on the computer screens?”
“Any objection to that, Mr. Decker?” Goldstein asked.
“Let me first see what it is,” Decker said as Raquel handed him a glossy brochure. Decker flipped through it. “No objection.”
The exhibit instantly materialized on all the computer screens. Suddenly, the staid courtroom, in which the lights were now slightly dimmed, resembled a large video parlor because of the flicker of images on multiple computers.
“Do you recognize this exhibit, Agent Grover?”
“I recognize it, Ms. Rematti, only in the sense that it was shown to me by Mr. Decker and his team for probably a mini-second a week or two ago.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Only by glancing at the cover. It’s like one of those shiny annual reports or view books that companies and colleges put out.”
“This exhibit relates to America Renewed, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what it says on the cover.”
“When you saw this brochure with Mr. Decker and his team, did you open it?”