“Look, let’s—”
“Agreed?”
“All right,” he says. “Agreed. This is for my ears only.”
“Second, my name is never to be mentioned by you with respect to anything having to do with Nunzio.”
“I agree to that, too,” he says. “Anything else?”
“No notes. And no tape. You’re not taping me, right?”
He opens his jacket.
Sid Haltzman takes a deep breath, seems to relax a bit.
“I retired ten years ago, when I was fifty-five. A couple years before that, I found myself looking for a good story to wind up my career. I’d been a crime reporter for the Bulletin and then the Inquirer for almost thirty years. During that time, I’d broken some big stories. Shared a Pulitzer once for a series on the badlands in North Philly. But I’d gotten lazy in my old age and hadn’t dug deep on anything for a long time. One day I heard something come across the police scanner about a guy found himself doing the face-float in the Schuylkill River. I did a little digging and heard the guy tried to double-cross Jimmy Nunzio. And I thought, That’s the story. Not the floater, but Nunzio. Talk about a colorful character. Everybody in the city knows who he is, except they really don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know where he lives?”
“South Philly, I expect,” Tommy says.
“Oh, he has a row house there. A double house, actually. But where he really lives is on North Spring Mill Road in Villanova. You know, the Main Line’s golden mile. His house is fifteen thousand square feet of stone and marble. Indoor and outdoor pools, fourteen-foot ceilings, eight-car garage. George Clooney doesn’t live that well.”
Mick remembers what Vaughn said about Nunzio having his own jet and suspecting he was more than just another South Philly mob boss. “So he’s not what he seems to be.”
“No. He’s exactly what he seems to be. But he’s a whole lot more. Starting with the fact that the Nunzios aren’t just mafia, they’re mafia royalty.”
“I thought Nunzio’s old man was just a midlevel lieutenant,” Tommy says.
“I’m not talking Jimmy or his old man.”
“You’re saying Rachel is mafia, too?” Mick asks.
“I thought she was a Jewish girl from Penn who caught Nunzio’s eye,” Tommy says.
“That’s the story,” Haltzman says. “Nunzio met her at some campus bar he used to troll and fell hard. He married her, brought her into the life, her old man screaming the whole time.”
“You’re saying that’s not true?”
Sid Haltzman smiles, and Mick can tell he’s having a good time dragging out the tale.
“I feel like a marlin,” Mick says. “You’re pulling me in, letting me out, pulling me in.”
“I’ve waited a long time to tell this story to someone. Indulge me.” The reporter pulls out a pack of Camels and a lighter. “Mind if I smoke?” he asks, opening a small window.
“It’s kind of close in here,” Mick says as Haltzman lights up.
The reporter inhales, then blows a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth, toward the window. “Yep. Sorry.”
In his peripheral vision, Mick can see Tommy smiling.
The reporter looks from Mick to Tommy. “If you ask most people who was the most successful crime boss in America, who do you think they’d answer with?”
“That’s easy. Al Capone,” Tommy says.
“Capone was convicted of tax evasion and spent seven years in prison, during which he became increasingly insane from neurosyphilis, which killed him when he was only forty-eight.”
“Bugsy Siegel?”
“Shot down when he was forty-one.”
“Dillinger?”
“A crook, not a crime boss. Shot dead at thirty-one.”
“All right,” Mick says. “Who was the most successful organized criminal?”
“Ever hear of Lenny Maher? His nickname was ‘the mob’s bookkeeper.’”
Mick had heard of Maher. “Didn’t he work with Luciano?”
“They more than worked together. They ran the Jewish mob and formed the National Crime Syndicate with the Italians. Among all the bosses, Maher was the most successful. He owned points in casinos in Vegas, the Bahamas, Cuba, even London. Only spent a few years in jail. Died an old man, of natural causes, in his Miami mansion.”
The reporter pauses, takes a deep drag of his cigarette. “In business, Lenny Maher was a ruthless killer. But in his personal life, he was a good family man. Three kids, lots of grandkids. Happily married until the day he died at age eighty-one in the mideighties. That’s the official story, and it’s all true.”
“But in truth . . . ,” Tommy leads him.
Sid Haltzman nods. “There’s always a subtext. In Lenny’s case, her name was Jade. Last name unknown. She was a dancer in a casino he owned, and by all accounts she was wild and gorgeous—dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and pouty lips. She was eighteen when they first met. Lenny Maher was thirty-nine. A year later, the dancer gave birth to a daughter. Miriam.”
“And that was the end of Jade,” Tommy guesses.
“Not at all. Maher was lost in that girl. But he did make her give up the daughter. Miriam was handed over to the wife of one of Maher’s accountants, last name of Goldman.”
He hears a buzzing sound and watches as Haltzman reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his cell phone. The reporter looks at the screen and says, “I have to take this.”
“We’ll go outside,” Mick says, hurrying to stand and escape the smoke. He leads Tommy out, gulping deep breaths of the fresh night air.
“You wouldn’t last very long in half the bars I go into,” Tommy says.
He doesn’t answer.
A few minutes later, the reporter calls them back inside, and he leads Tommy through the blue haze to the table.
“Okay,” Mick says, bringing them back to where the reporter had left off. “So Lenny Maher has a secret daughter, Miriam Goldman . . .”
“And this is where the story starts to get interesting. Miriam wasn’t Lenny Maher and Jade’s only child. They had a son the following year. Maher placed him with another one of his associates, Phil Marx. The boy’s name was Hiram.”
Mick’s hackles go up. “Hiram. Uncle Ham,” he says, stopping the reporter cold.
“You know of him?”
“I’m pretty sure I just met him.”
“Do the Nunzios know this?”
“They set it up. At least, they put us in the same place at the same time.”
Haltzman studies Mick for a long minute, a strange look on his face.
“What?” Mick asks.
“Hiram Marx’s connection to the Nunzios is one of that family’s most closely guarded secrets.”
“So, if they let me in on it . . .”
“They either trust you implicitly or they figure they have leverage against you that will keep you from sharing what you know.”
Mick sits back. “Go on with the story.”
“Miriam’s adoptive father, Lev Goldman, died young. So her connection to the mob faded into the background. And when she was married off to a rabbi, her relation to Lenny Maher was forgotten completely.”
“And Hiram?” Tommy asks.
“More complicated. Maher played no part in Hiram’s life when he was younger. But at some point, Phil Marx revealed to the boy who his true parents were, and that he had a sister, placed with another family. Hiram approached Maher, wanting in the life, but Maher wasn’t having it. Hiram was stubborn and kept pushing. Maher got pissed off, and there was a big fight, after which the two men never spoke to each other.”
“And Hiram and Miriam?”
“It’s not clear when, but at some point after she was married, he approached her, revealed they were siblings. She told her husband, the rabbi, and he blew his top, forbade her to see her half brother. Then, the story goes, Hiram paid the rabbi a visit. He did or said something that scared the hell out of the man
. From that point on, Miriam and Hiram were close—but never public about their connection, which remained a family secret.”
“And Hiram Marx remains out of the life,” Mick says. “Until Miriam has a daughter, Rachel, who marries Jimmy Nunzio.”
The reporter nods. “And Hiram Marx finds an open door to the mob.”
“So Hiram’s in business with Nunzio,” Tommy says.
Again Haltzman nods. “You ever hear of a transportation company called HML?”
“Sure,” Mick says. “They’re not as big as UPS or FedEx, but they’ve been around for a long time.”
“If you asked your stockbroker to tell you who owns it, he’d dig and dig and get back to you in a week with the name of an offshore subsidiary. If you asked him who owns that subsidiary, he might get back to you in two weeks with the name of another subsidiary.”
“Let me guess,” Mick says. “The owners of the subsidiary that owns the subsidiary that owns the subsidiary that owns HML are Jimmy Nunzio and Hiram Marx. That explains where Nunzio’s getting the money for the giant house in Villanova, and the jet. So does that mean Nunzio’s playing the mobster role, but he’s mostly legitimate?”
The reporter laughs so hard he starts to cough.
“Did I say something funny?”
“You ever hear of the dark web? Well, HML is to transportation what the dark web is to the internet.”
“That’s crazy,” Mick says. “I see their trucks all over, delivering things to businesses, like any other delivery service. I’ve used them myself.”
“HML is just the face of a much larger enterprise. Hiram founded HML twenty years ago, after working for a couple of bigger shipping companies and studying FedEx and UPS’s business models. He started small and built the business over time as a legitimate enterprise. But Hiram has the blood, and he wanted to branch off into the under-the-table trade. He didn’t get very far because he wasn’t a made man and didn’t have the connections. To put it simply, the bad guys didn’t trust him. Then his niece marries Jimmy Nunzio, and in no time at all, trading on Nunzio’s name, HML forms secret subsidiaries around the country, then the hemisphere, and then the world.”
He recalls Rachel Nunzio’s remark at the lodge: There are much larger games afoot, Mr. McFarland.
“What do they ship?” he asks.
“Word on the street? Anything and everything. Weapons, drugs, currency, gold, sophisticated electronics to enemy states. Humans. You name it.”
“What’s Hiram’s relationship with Nunzio like?”
Haltzman smiles. “Let’s just say when Rachel married Nunzio, she got a husband, but Hiram Marx got a soul mate. Talk about two sides of the same coin. Ambitious, avaricious, and Machiavellian.”
“What about Rachel herself? Anything you can tell me about her?”
“Have you met her?”
“A couple times.”
The reporter locks eyes with him but doesn’t answer.
“Yeah,” he says.
Rachel doesn’t hide; she lets you see her coming. He asks the reporter what he knows about Christina.
“Not much. She was just a teenager when I stopped looking into the Nunzios. I do know,” he says, “that Nunzio and Rachel’s father, the rabbi, had words over her name. Christina.”
Mick sits back and waits for Haltzman to take a deep drag of his cigarette. “How did you find all this out?”
“It wasn’t easy. Took me two years. Two years in the shadows—clandestine meetings, endless phone calls, weeks on the road, public records searches, trading favors, outright bribery. Quite a few times, I personally tailed Nunzio, Rachel, and Marx.”
“The Inquirer paid for all this?” The newspaper has been strapped for cash for years.
“Are you kidding? My editor was ready to wring my neck after the first month. I paid for it all myself. Borrowed against my 401(k). Downsized my house. Why not? My wife had passed. My boy was grown. It became an obsession.”
“Why haven’t you gone public with it?”
The reporter’s face darkens. He lights up another cigarette, waves the match out, takes a deep drag.
“About a week before I was ready to show the series to my editor—and that’s what it was going to be, a ten-week series on the Nunzio family, going back to Lenny Maher—I got a call. It was Nunzio himself. He said he’d heard I was working on a story about him. Said he might have something to contribute.”
“Where’d he have you meet him?” Tommy asks.
“Kelly Drive. A spot just west of the boathouses. There’s a bench. You sit there and look out at the river.”
“The Schuylkill,” Tommy says, “right where they found the floater who’d pissed off Nunzio and started you looking into him.”
“A message,” Mick says. “The river.”
“The river was part of the message.” He pulls a small photograph from his jacket. It shows a young man in a suit and tie.
“Nunzio was at the bench, waiting for me. A couple of guys were with him. I was terrified. He motioned me to sit, and he sat down next to me. He told me my story was very good—”
“Wait,” Mick says. “How would he know that? It hadn’t been printed.”
Haltzman looks down. Then after a moment, he looks back up at Mick. “I’ve no doubt he knew the whole time that I was looking into him, talking to people, searching records.”
“But he waited until you were ready to publish to shut you down?” Tommy asks.
“I have a theory about that. I think he let me run loose to see what I’d come up with. What was out there that could be found out about him, his family.”
The reporter pauses again, and Mick asks, “The photo?”
“My son. His graduation picture from Lower Merion. Nunzio told me he appreciated all the hard work I did for him. He told me I deserved to be fairly compensated and handed me an envelope with a check in it. Thanked me for selling him the story. Then he told me I was not permitted to publish it. ‘Ever,’ he said. Then”—Haltzman nods at the picture—“he handed me this.”
“The other part of the message,” Tommy says.
Haltzman nods. “The other part of the message.”
Mick watches the older man stare at the photograph.
“Why are you doing this? Meeting with us?”
“Ask your brother.”
25
THURSDAY, MAY 30
The cemetery on the farm Lois Beal used to rent from her sister is an overgrown field with a dozen or so granite headstones bordered in the back by a small forest. Some of the headstones are sunken almost fully into the ground. Some are chipped at the top. All are worn, most to the point that their carved lettering is indecipherable.
Tommy looks at his watch. It’s just about 11:00 a.m. He glances to his right to see Piper and Susan huddled under the big golf umbrella he brought for them. The rain has been steady all night, turning the small field haunted by headstones into a swamp.
With them is Lois Beal, who flew up from Jacksonville the night before. Also present is Lance Newton, an FBI agent Susan knows from her days as a federal prosecutor, and another man he brought along to videotape the proceedings. Newton is going to take the hammer Lois claims is buried there for fingerprinting and DNA testing. The last two spectators are ex-chief of police Sonny Foster and his former officer, Melvin Ott. It was Susan’s idea to invite them, her strategy being to call them as witnesses if the prosecutor in Darlene’s retrial fights too hard against the admission of the hammer. Susan shared her plan with Ott, who is all for it, but kept it from Foster, who has made clear his view that what’s happening is nothing more than a “stunt.”
“There’s no way a judge is going to buy this and grant you a retrial,” Foster says.
“We’ll just have to see,” Tommy says.
“You’re the guy who’s been poking his nose into good people’s business up here.” The ex-chief takes a step closer to Tommy. “Not a smart idea.”
Tommy leans in toward Foster, shovel in ha
nd. “If they’re such good people, why’d their noses get so out of joint just by me asking a few questions?”
Out of his peripheral vision, Tommy sees Piper shift on her feet.
“Let’s get on with this,” Piper says. “Lois, show us where the hammer’s buried so Tommy can dig it up.”
Tommy follows Lois to the two largest headstones, sitting side by side. Ephraim and Ruth, a man and his wife, dates of death: 1894 and 1910.
Lois inches closer to the headstones. He watches as she looks from one to the other, then back again.
“It’s one of these two, but I’m not sure . . .” Her words trail off.
“No problem,” Tommy says. “I’ll dig in front of the one, and if it’s not there, I’ll dig down by the other—”
“No!”
The force of her injunction startles him.
What’s the big deal? he wonders.
Lois Beal takes another full minute, then says, “It’s that one. The one on the right that says 1910. That’s the wife.”
He positions himself in front of the stone, glances back at Lois to make sure. She nods, but the look on her face tells him she’s terrified.
He starts digging in the muck. It doesn’t take long before he feels the spade strike something solid. A metal box. He digs around it carefully, removing the heavy mud, then leans down, lifts out the box, and sets it on the ground. It’s about a foot square and four inches deep. Rusted black metal.
“That’s it.” Lois’s voice sounds behind him.
“Let me take it from here,” Lance Newton says.
His videographer moves up, pointing his camera down at the box. Lance opens the box with gloved hands and lifts out a paper bag sealed with duct tape. He opens it to reveal a red-handled claw hammer.
“Is this it?” he asks Lois.
Tommy glances at Lois, who breathes a sigh of relief.
“Yes. Yes. That’s it.”
Tommy stares at Lois now, watching her chest rise and fall with her deep breaths.
The FBI agent places the hammer back into the bag and then the box. He stands and faces everyone. “What happens now is I send this to the lab. They’ll test it, as we discussed. In addition to the DNA testing of any hair and tissue, the hammer will be tested for prints.” At the time of the crime, given that the house was going to be dusted, Sonny Foster had asked Cindy Dowd to be fingerprinted so that her own prints could be discounted. Her prints were stored on IAFIS, the national automated fingerprint identification system maintained by the FBI.
A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal) Page 22