Michaele did not get breakfast and could hear his stomach growling. He had known severe hunger during his POW days which should have toughened him against a privation technique. However, he had grown weaker instead of stronger over the years when it came to need for good food and warmth. He was coughing copious amounts of blood now and had a strong premonition that he was dying. He did not want to die alone in a strange country, and he did not think he could endure starvation or freezing again. His mind began to wander. His memories of Antoine began to narrow down to the times his fellow prisoner had stolen his food, took his blanket when he was sick and freezing, and when he berated him for being weak. He owed his superior officer nothing.
Two new officers entered the room—Dayne Brown, Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff and Sgt. Billie Wayne McAfee, Fort Worth PD Sergeant, took the shift for the late afternoon.
“Ya’ll look purty hungry,” Dayne said. “Wanna have somethin’ tah eat?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“This here’s a game of give a little and then git a little,” Billie Wayne said. “Like, you tell me where this Antoine fella is and ya’ll git a plate a gri-ets smuthed in buttah, little salt and peppah, and mebbe a little brown sugah. Sound good?”
Michaele nodded his head almost against his better judgment. He had no idea what gri-ets were, but they sounded good.
“Ya’ll unnerstan’ how this here game is suppos’ tah be played, raht, Dennis?”
“I don’t really know. That’s the truth.”
His stomach growled and began to ache. He was afraid to lie. It would not be very hard to trace Antoine’s movements, and it was only a matter of time. He shrugged his shoulders.
“I do have sort of an idea where he was going.”
“You mean after he dumped you here in this little hick hospital where you could catch some sorta deadly virus or somethin’ instead of getting medicine to help you’all beat this heah disease yuh already got? Seems like he wants to get as far away from you as possible. We think he was the mastermind for the Mexican hit, and ya’ll ah the fall guy in this heah muhdah. That about the sum and substance of it, Dennis?”
“I want to have some guarantees if I tell you about what you want to know.”
Dayne mentally clicked his fingers and shouted silently, still keeping a soda cracker expression on his face. “Gotcha!!”
Michaele paused for almost a minute.
Then, he asked the golden question: “What immunity and medical care and housing—that sort of thing—will you guarantee me if I give you everything I know?”
“Depends on what ya’ll know, how soon ya’ll get it out, and how valuable it proves to be. Ah can’t altogethah promise things; but since it looks like ya’ll ah about to go off to hell in a handbasket befoah the week’s out, Ah think immunity is on the table.”
“You might understand if I don’t feel completely trusting. I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll tell all for some guarantees; but every one of the police persons out there has to be present; and a secretary has to take down everything that is said. It has to be written down and signed by me, by the police persons in charge, and by the prosecutors—even the attorney general of the United States.”
“Ya’ll don’ want that much, huh, Dennis? Ah’ll get alla that goin’ in the next few minutes. Ya’ll get a little rest while Ah gathah up the troops and git on the horn tah the state capitol and to Washington DC. Written stuff takes a bita time. How ‘bout ya’ll make a compromise with me and agree to start talkin’ while all of the back and forths are goin’ on?”
Michaele looked a little confused.
“Sorry, but what does ‘back-and-forths’ mean?”
“Ah, shucks, pahtnah, that’s just Texas talk comin’ out. Ah mean the calls, the answers, the telegrams and all that;so, everythin’ is legal and in agreement with what ya’ll and me say tah one anothah.”
“Understood.”
Dayne made a beeline for the door to the hospital room and started all of the “back-and-forths” into motion. Abel Baird called INTERPOL, where Eugène Dentremont set up a phone tree to get agreement from the Germans, the French, the Russians, and the Argentines; Major Higgins contacted the attorney general of Alaska; Special Agent Xavier Gonzales-Soto immediately got through to DFBI Warren Brent Gaines, who passed on the message to AAG Spencer Reynolds, assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ of the US. Tom Packer ran to the hospital gedunk to call Texas Ranger Captain Reggie Cutler. Cutler contacted the governor of Texas, who called Tomás Delacruz, the governor of the State of Chihuahua in Mexico. Dayne himself had to call the Tarrant County sheriff on field phone while his partner in all of this—Fort Worth PD Sgt. Billie Wayne McAfee—dealt with the nearest locals which included getting a court recorder to the hospital in a police cruises with lights flashing and siren blaring.
It was a measure of the importance the law enforcement and prosecutorial members of the world’s governments placed on this mass murder case that the grants of immunity began flooding the Tarrant County Western Union telegraph office. Rural Texans living between Dallas and Fort Worth wondered if the cops were launching some sort of drug raid on the Elmwood Sanatorium what with all of the sirens and flashing lights converging on the sleepy little hospital.
Every officer in the hospital was waiting for the most important of all of the telegrams—that coming from the Department of Justice. It arrived in half an hour and was signed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy himself. It was a grant of immunity for everything the “Lord” wanted, but contained a proviso that any or all of the grant could be cancelled if the subject failed to fulfill his end of the bargain.
The law enforcement officers had a quick in-family argument about who should present the writ of immunity to the suspect and conduct the formal interrogation. Because the man might be most impressed by an agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the rest of the officers grudgingly agreed that Special Agent Xavier Gonzales-Soto would do the honors; and, as Dayne Brown and Billie Wayne McAfee said, have the fibbies take all the credit. Xavier signaled to Lydia Heppleweight, the court stenographer who rushed to the hospital from Fort Worth; and they strode into Dennis Cunningham Lord Downfort’s sick room.
Xavier introduced himself and told Michaele, “This is Lydia Heppleweight, court stenographer for Tarrant County, Texas. She will take down everything that you and I say to each other. Here is the grant of full immunity and guarantees of good hospital care in a pleasant location and provision of reasonable amenities for the rest of your life. Those things will occur only under certain conditions. First, you answer every question put to you honestly. Second, you leave nothing out. Third, you provide us with information that leads to the arrest and conviction of all of your confederates in the murders and other crimes we know about and any others we may not yet know about. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Michaele answered in a clear strong voice, having just cleared his throat with a prolonged bout of coughing.
“Do you agree to the terms?”
“I do.”
“Then, let us begin. What is your real name?”
“Oberführer der Waffen-SS Michaele Dupont.”
That got the FBI agent’s full attention.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Arbat Street, No. 83, Moscow, October 3, 1962, late morning
Antoine Duvalier was in trouble. His coconspirators—the “thievesin-law”—showed him new daily Pravda articles on the recent assassination of Lt. Gen. Dimitri Sobrieski which left nothing to doubt regarding the determination of the police, the KGB, the nomenklatura [the power elite of the country, corrupt officials all], and the military forces of the Soviet Union to apprehend and to interrogate anyone who was complicit in the murder. Antoine could imagine his own fate if any of the members of the russkaya mafiya who were presently hiding him capitulated under “questioning.” His death would not come quickly or easily. He shuddered at his thoughts.
From
the killing site at the Soviet Naval Aviation Office, A-253, Chapayevskiy Per., Dom 19, across from the Moscow Military District Headquarters, the mafiya killers, led by Avtoritet Krespin Brundinovich, had efficiently whisked Antoine in the trunk of an AZLK Moskvitch 401 to the safest of safe houses—the home of mafiya boss Leonid Zaslavskevich Breslava. Breslava decided the heat was too intense; so, he allowed Antoine only one night at his house then had him taken to one of the Solntsevskaya Bratva’s safe houses—Arbat Street, No. 83—near the trolleybus station and the city’s first metro station, an extremely busy section of Moscow where almost anyone could be lost in the crowd. No. 83 was an apartment building where an earlier comfortable single apartment had been made into a kommunalka, where more than one family lived together, glad to have a roof over their heads in the era of Soviet “transition.” One of the Bratva families served as caretakers of the apartment, and all family members knew how to keep their mouths shut.
Antoine knew his days in Russia were numbered, and the number was small and growing smaller by the hour. Pravda reported mass arrests and questioning at the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison—said to be the tallest building in Moscow, since Siberia could be seen from its basement. Pravda—the official newspaper of the Soviet Union—suggested that apprehension and arrest of the assassin was imminent. Antoine knew that Pravda echoed the party line without having an opinion of its own.
He approached Krespin with his interpretation of what needed to be done.
“Krespin, my drug [Rus. friend], I cannot impose on you and Pakhan Breslava much longer; and I cannot go back to Europe. I have contacts in Argentina where I can assume a new identity and be safe. From there, I can continue our profitable business arrangements with the Solntsevskaya Bratva; and our lives can get back to normal. Of course I will need your help, and I realize it require considerable expense.”
The stolid thick-bodied Krespin was a man of very few words. “Eight million rubles [$27,000],” he said tersely.
Antoine nodded. “I will contact my banker and have the transfer made today, if you can arrange communication.”
“Not a problem.”
It took a day to be able to make contact with Liert Beili Amstutz from UBS in Geneva. The money—plus $10,000 extra for incidentals—was wired to MNB [Moscow Narodny Bank Ltd] and recorded in the account of the Worker’s Cooperative of Arbat Section, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Solntsevskaya Bratva. Travel plans were necessarily complex and elaborate with cost overruns—the principal of which was the necessity to involve the cooperation of the ODESSA, officials of the Argentine government, and two agents of the KGB border patrol. The overruns came to a grand total of twenty-two million rubles [$74,000]—a price Antoine considered relatively cheap in comparison to his life and to his earning potential in Argentina.
Disguised as a workman with papers indicating he was Vasislav Andropovich, a mechanic for the Worker’s Cooperative of Arbat Section Heavy Machinery Company, Antoine was driven to the Odessa—the third largest city in Ukraine—the major Soviet seaport and transportation hub located on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. He boarded a Soviet oil tanker, The Red Star Petrochemical Vessel number 8503, leaving the port of Illichivsk southwest of Odessa bound for Helsinki. Aboard ship, he was identified with official documents as Ivan Nureyev, fourth engineer’s assistant. In Helsinki, he was met by one of Breslava’s men and given new papers including a Finnish passport bearing his photograph and the name Mikke Herppa Tuomala. Five days later, having exited Europe from Madrid, he landed at the International Airport Ingeniero Talavella, Córdoba, Argentina. He was on his own from then on.
Antoine was exhausted, but before he dared to sleep, he had to find a room where he would be anonymous. He knew exactly where to go because the ODESSA had instructed him carefully. From the Córdoba airport, he boarded an overcrowded normal bus to the city center, then caught a taxi to the red light district near Rio Suquía, known as the Ex Abasto because of the presence of the huge Mercado de Abasto market area. He took the most expensive room available for a week in the Abasto Transient Hotel because it at least offered a none-too-clean private bathroom and access to a telephone for a price, and because it was located about midway between the main metro station and the trolleybus station. He was also close to the river and its boats, which gave him three choices of escape routes if that became necessary.
He slept for the better part of two days, then did a thorough standing spit bath and changed clothes. He found a busy restaurant on Calle Lillo west of the market and near his hotel and feasted on the skimpy fare Argentines consider breakfast: a cup of café con leche, a few medialunas [croissants], and two shot glasses of agua con gas [carbonated water]. It was hugely unsatisfying; so, he purchased half a dozen containers of unflavored yogurt and some overripe fruit to tide him over until he could find real food. With his hunger pangs settled down for the moment, he telephoned Erich Boehme, former SS Hauptsturmführer, restauranteer, and current ODESSA officer in Bariloche.
§§§§§§
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, October 3, 1962, early afternoon
Xavier asked Michaele, “I don’t suppose you go around telling everyone your birth name or your SS rank or history. So, what name do you use in your private and business life?”
“I am known as Randolph Bellwether.”
“What is your occupation—the legitimate one?”
“President of European International Conglomerate.”
“I’ll need to know the address of your company.”
“No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London.”
“What exactly do you do for the European International Conglomerate, Michaele?”
There was a considerable pause. Michaele figeted for a few moments, obviously uncomfortable with the question and how to answer it. Xavier’s antennae went up, but he kept his facial expression completely bland.
Finally, Michaele answered, “I am the executive responsible for all imports and exports of the products we deal with. I manage the personnel, review the invoices, hire and fire people, attend in-house meetings and any meetings with senior executives from other companies.”
“What kinds of products, Michaele?”
“Armaments, heavy machinery, refrigerators, stoves, communications equipment, office furniture—that sort of thing.”
“All legal?”
Another pause.
This time Xavier interrupted, “You have immunity for everything you tell me and nothing you hide from me. Michaele, frankly you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving me everything.”
“It is difficult to say. We do some … quite a lot, actually … of business with the Italian and American mafia and organized crime people from France, Germany, and especially Russia.”
“Such as?”
“Prostitution, drugs, kidnapping, extortion….”
“And murder?”
“That, too. We have a unique position in the organized crime world. We never compete with the others; so, they use our influence to settle disputes. The way that works is that both sides have to agree to abide by our final decision. If they agree and then … how do you say … fail….”
“Renege?”
“That’s the word. Then, we have enforcers. All of the crime families fear us because we operate with total secrecy and with no mercy for offenders. We never give up, and we have never failed to find and punish a man or woman who … reneges. In reality, we seldom have to resort to violence … or killing, because of our reputation. No one wants to be on our bad side. They know they sign their death warrant if they make trouble for the other families after we have been involved.”
“I seem to recall something from Greek history like that.”
“Yes. The Italian mafia and later in America, the members saw themselves as Roman warriors, and they made reference to the Greeks who preceded them. They teach every new man about Omerta—the code of silence and also about how the Greeks would call in a particular Spart
an to broker a peace settlement. If one party failed to live up to the agreement, that city-state could find itself at war with Sparta—and nobody ever wanted that. If the Spartan were to be injured or killed by one or the other of the disputing parties, Sparta would seek a terrible vengeance. The word comes from the Latin invicta or ‘to vindicate,’ which in practical terms means ‘to avenge.’ Whole cities were reduced to rubble, all men were slaughtered, and all women and children who were part of the offending city were sold into slavery, and they did not live long. That is the understanding about our role—or main role—in the organized crime world.”
“You murdered for this purpose yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have partners?”
“Really, just one partner, but we had trusted and well-paid members of our organization who lived in multiple countries simply waiting for our call. They are very good at what they do.”
“You must have a great many enemies.”
“Hard as it is to believe, we don’t. We provide a critical service. Because of our role, gang wars and other hostile actions are relatively uncommon. The families can do productive work and make a great deal of money without having to look over their shoulders for the most part.”
“Why did you kill Rick Saunders in Mexico?”
“That was personal business for Antoine and me, not part of our crime syndicate work. He was a devil who did unspeakable things to us. We waited a long time to avenge those wrongs.”
“We suspect you of several other murders of former military officers. Did you do that?”
“Twenty-one of them. We were quite successful, but our work has not been completely finished.”
“I need you to write down all of the people you have killed for your personal reasons. You can do that after we finish our questions. You mentioned someone called Antoine … did I get that right?”
The Charlemagne Murders Page 49