The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  After Edelman left, she said: “Remember, you told me once how you always drank coffee with the cops as a crime reporter? That it helped you bond with them. Well, it’s the same with these guys. It’s all about the Italian food with them. Even if you’re not hungry, you eat it out of respect. They appreciate that.” She grinned. “Besides, the pasta at this place is really, really good.”

  She was right about that.

  Best Italian food I’d ever eaten.

  We stayed there for another hour eating it and drinking more wine.

  Everyone pretty much forgot about us after that. Nothing else happened that seemed particularly significant to me. No one shot anyone. No one took any underworld oaths or exchanged secret mob handshakes. No one sang any Mafia fight songs.

  When we left, Michelle and I took separate cabs, and I went home to wait to hear about my appointment to meet the most dangerous and feared man in New York City.

  Just another day at work for Jessie Tucker, crime reporter.

  Forty-Seven

  Dominic (Fat Nic) Bennato had an office in downtown Brooklyn, not far from Borough Hall.

  On the outside, everything seemed totally legit. There was a lobby with a directory that told me his office was on the ninth floor. I took an elevator up to nine, got off and walked down a long hall until I found a door that said, “Bennato Sanitation Services”.

  Inside, I found a secretary – a middle-aged, platinum-blonde-haired woman – who greeted me politely and then informed me that I could see Mr. Bennato in a few minutes.

  I sat down and waited. There was an array of magazines on a table in front of me. Everything from Time to The New Yorker to People. Soft music from a female singer – I think it was Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus, I wasn’t sure which – played on a speaker.

  Yep, it was all very businesslike.

  Except I knew the truth.

  Dominic Bennato’s business wasn’t sanitation services or looking for apartments or anything else legitimate. It was extortion, gambling, prostitution, drugs, loansharking, robbery and probably even murder – if you believed everything that had been said and written about him.

  Sitting there now and waiting to see him, I started to wish I’d brought Michelle with me. She’d been damned impressive the way she handled herself at that restaurant. She’d offered to accompany me here now, but I’d said no. I told her it was better for me to meet Bennato one-on-one, under the circumstances. But now I wasn’t so convinced that was a good idea.

  I pondered what I should do and how I should act when I met Bennato. It was important that I observe the niceties of the introduction, no matter what happened afterward. So did I call him Bennato? Mr. Bennato? Fat Nic? I quickly discarded the last one as an option. But did I shake his hand? Did I smile at him? Did I kiss his ring finger like a scene out of The Godfather?

  I knew it was probably a foolhardy move for me to just go to Bennato’s office alone like this.

  I knew I couldn’t be sure I’d be safe – Bennato was still a cold-blooded killer, even if this was the front for his public façade as a legitimate businessman.

  But that was the way I worked stories – like a bull in a china shop. I liked to just barge in and shake things up to see what would happen. And that’s what I was doing here now with Dominic Bennato.

  I tried to stay positive, but I kept thinking of worst-case scenarios. Him screaming at me. Him throwing me out. Him… well, I’d read about people disappearing after they went to meet with Dominic Bennato. Of course, nothing like that could really ever happen in an office building like this – with the secretary outside, the magazines and all the music playing, could it? I did my best to convince myself of that, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Mr. Bennato will see you now,” the platinum-blonde-haired secretary said to me, interrupting my reverie of everything that could go wrong.

  It was too late to back out now. I thanked her, followed her through a door that said, “Executive Office of Dominic Bennato” and went inside.

  Dominic Bennato himself turned out to be everything I’d heard about him. He must have weighed nearly four hundred pounds, with slicked-back dark brown hair and wearing a suit that was too tight for all his bulk. He was sitting behind a desk that was covered with food. It looked to be various kinds of pasta and meat and even some pastries. It was ten-thirty a.m. Well, maybe Bennato liked an early lunch. Or else it could have been a late breakfast.

  Michelle had told me at the restaurant how important it was to accept offerings of food from these guys to help bond with them, like I bonded with cops over coffee or beers. And so I was ready to join with him on the spread in front of me. But Bennato didn’t offer me any food. He didn’t shake my hand. He didn’t even get up from behind his desk.

  “What do you want?” he grunted, between bites of what looked to be linguini in some kind of meat marinara sauce.

  So much for the polite niceties.

  “I’m a friend of Michelle Caradonna,” I said.

  “I know that.”

  “She told me you’d helped her get an apartment.”

  “I know that too.”

  “I was hoping you could help me find an apartment for myself.”

  I’d decided to open up our conversation with the cover story and see how long I could maintain that with him. It turned out to be not for very long.

  “An apartment?” he asked. “That’s why you came to see me? For an apartment?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You went to all this trouble because you thought I could get you an apartment?”

  “Uh, I guess…”

  “You’re a newspaper reporter, aren’t you?”

  “Guilty as charged.” I smiled

  He didn’t smile back.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “So then, do you have anything?” I finally asked.

  “Do I have what?”

  “An apartment for me.”

  “I’ll tell you what I can do for you if you’ll do something for me, Ms. Tucker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell me the real reason why you’re here.”

  He wiped some marinara sauce off his cheek, pushed the plate of pasta away and stared directly at me across his desk. Dominic Bennato was all business now.

  “Maura Walsh,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Maura Walsh. She was a woman police officer. She was murdered a few weeks ago in an alley in Little Italy. It was in all the papers and on TV news. I’m sure you must have heard about it?”

  “What does this police officer’s death have to do with me?”

  “The spot where she was killed was right next to a building which had materials inside that indicated you did sanitation service for the construction crews at work there.”

  “My company does sanitation removal at a lot of buildings around town. Do you have anything else that would make you think I know anything about this?”

  “There is one thing. But you’re not going to like what I’m about to say.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You were paying Maura Walsh bribes from at least two of your businesses – an escort service and a strip club – to ignore violations and keep the places operating despite what I believe were illegal activities going on there.”

  I thought this was the moment when Bennato might explode at me, but he didn’t. He did smile now. Well, it was a sort of a smile. Not like he thought it was funny, more like he was bemused by all of this and by me too.

  “That’s a pretty outrageous accusation to make,” he said finally.

  “I told you that you weren’t going to like it.”

  I then went through everything I knew – or almost everything – about the payoffs at the escort service and the strip club. Also, about Maura Walsh taking payoffs at other businesses. And how I presumed some of them probably belonged to Bennato too.

  “I have a lot of businesses,” he said when I was finished. “I can’t know what every
one in all of these businesses are doing. If they were making payoffs to a police officer, I wouldn’t necessarily know anything about that.”

  “I find that hard to believe, Mr. Bennato.”

  “Are you saying I’m lying to you?”

  “I think you’re not telling me everything.”

  He kept looking at me as I talked. Staring even more intently now. The food on the desk in front of him was forgotten. Dominic Bennato was totally focused on me.

  “You’ve got a lot of guts,” he said. “Hell, if you were a man, I’d say you have a real pair of balls on you. Not sure how I say that to a woman. But not many people – man or woman –would walk in here and talk to me like that.”

  I suddenly had this recollection of a scene from an old Mary Tyler Moore Show. The first episode when Mary meets Lou Grant at a job interview. Mary talks back to him, and he tells her: “You know what? You’ve got spunk!” She’s happy at first, but then he snaps: “I hate spunk!”

  I wondered if that was what was going to happen now between me and Bennato.

  “I like Michelle,” he said. “I think I like you too. Do you know, I have a daughter about your age? She’s a lovely girl. I would hate if anything bad ever happened to her, as I’m sure you understand. An accident. A crime. A fire. There’s all sorts of bad things out there that I hope she never has to experience. Well, I feel the same way about you. I would hate if anything bad like that ever happened to you. I just wanted you to know that. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Oh, I understood him. Keep out of his business – or else.

  Once that message was delivered, he went back to shoving food into his mouth – as if I wasn’t there anymore. It seemed like our meeting was over. I stood up, thanked Bennato for his time and made my way out of his fancy office – past the secretary, down the elevator and back out onto the Brooklyn street.

  Forty-Eight

  Lorraine Molinski and I were eating lunch in the Tribune cafeteria.

  “What’s going on with the Maura Walsh story?” she asked in between bites of the chicken salad sandwich she was eating.

  “I’m not sure what I’ve got.” I sighed.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ve already gone through it all with Norman and Danny.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said again.

  I went through everything that had happened in the past few days, hoping maybe she could make some more sense out of it than I’d been able to do so far. My meeting with Dominic Bennato. My encounter with the two rogue cops, Shockley and Janko. My bizarre conversation with Russell Garrison at Internal Affairs.

  “Then there’s all the other stuff,” I said. “The discovery that Billy Renfro’s wife hired the murdered PI Walosin to spy on her. And Renfro’s own death, which the cops are calling suicide but I suspect he might have been murdered. Plus, we’ve got that whole strange business about Maura Walsh investigating her own little brother’s death in Saginaw Lake before she was killed.”

  “But what’s the story, Jessie?”

  “There’s a lot of stories there.”

  “Yes, there are. All very interesting stories too. But just pieces of the Maura Walsh story, not the whole story. Those pieces don’t fit together. Right now, it’s simply a bunch of interesting pieces of information. I don’t see a complete story there. You still need to find out the key answers about Maura Walsh. Who killed her – and why?”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh.

  “The cops haven’t confirmed anything about the Walsh woman taking payoffs before she was murdered?”

  “No. Aguirre won’t even talk to me about it. No one at the 22nd Precinct wants to hear anything about it either. There was that bizarre comment from the guy at Internal Affairs, but that was off the record. And I’m not sure what the hell it means anyway. So this is all I’ve got at the moment.”

  I plucked a crouton out of the Caesar salad I was eating with my fork and popped it into my mouth. I didn’t care that much about food when I was working on a big story. Eating was just a way to put fuel into my body so I could keep going on the job. I was consumed by the Maura Walsh story right now. Except I wasn’t sure where to go next on it.

  “You’re missing something,” Lorraine said.

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t be asking you about it.”

  “There’s nothing else, Lorraine.”

  “Sure, there is. You just haven’t found it yet.”

  Lorraine had finished off her sandwich and was working her way through a plate of French fries. She was a big woman, and she had a prodigious appetite. She was wearing a loose-fitting blazer over her blouse and a pair of baggy slacks. I wondered again about the stories of her carrying a gun. Maybe it was under the blazer she was wearing right now.

  “What’s the status of that interview you were supposed to get with Deputy Commissioner Walsh?” she asked.

  “Uh, that doesn’t seem too likely anymore.”

  “Because of going to the Walsh house and talking to his wife?”

  “Yeah, Norman was able to smooth some of that over and keep me out of more trouble with the newspaper owner Jonathan Larsen, who it turns out is Walsh’s big pal. But, if Walsh does give an interview to someone – and, based on his record, I doubt he will go public – it probably won’t be with me. I’ve still got an official request in through my source. But I’m not holding my breath over it.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll check with a source of mine about trying to get you that interview.”

  “You have a source who might be able to do that?” I said in amazement.

  I didn’t mean it quite to come out like that, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “I have a source,” she said.

  I wondered if maybe she was talking about Jonathan Larsen himself. I’d heard all the stories about how Lorraine might have slept with someone important at the Tribune – maybe even Larsen – to get promoted to managing editor so fast. I’d dismissed them as just office gossip until now. But maybe they were true? And maybe she could use her personal influence on Larsen – or someone else – to get me an interview with Walsh. Hell, I didn’t care; I just wanted that damn interview.

  “Sure, let me know.”

  “I’ll get back to you on it.”

  Lorraine nibbled on one of her French fries, seemingly lost in thought.

  “Have you gone through everything online and in the Tribune library on this?” she asked. “Everything that’s ever been written about Maura Walsh? Her father? Corruption scandals? Anything you can think of that could give some kind of a clue what was happening here. Why this seemingly model cop – the daughter of the deputy police commissioner and a member of a revered NYPD family – would suddenly go bad. And whether that – or any of the rest of the material you’ve uncovered – somehow played a role in her murder?”

  “Of course I’ve done that, Lorraine.”

  “Then do it again.”

  “C’mon, that seems like a waste of my time…”

  “Go back and look at everything that’s out there on any – or all – of these topics.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and find something this time.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds like a real longshot.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  On the elevator ride upstairs to the newsroom after we left the cafeteria, I asked Lorraine the question I’d wondered about for a long time.

  “Do you carry a gun?”

  “Why?”

  “Some people think you do.”

  There was no metal detector at the Tribune. Lorraine could be packing heat every day she went to work here, and none of us would ever know.

  “What do you think?” Lorraine asked me now after I finally posed the gun question to her.

  “I’m not sure.”


  “Do you want to frisk me?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve covered the police beat for quite a while, right? You must know how they frisk a person for a gun.”

  “Oh, I actually did a feature on it once. They taught me how to do it. How to look for a weapon on a suspect. So yes, I know how to frisk a person for a gun just like a police officer does it.”

  “Then pat me down right now and tell me if I’m carrying one.”

  I laughed, but she was serious. I finally ran my hands up and down her body looking for the bulge of a weapon. I didn’t find anything.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Well, at least I answered that question.”

  The elevator doors opened. As they did, I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned around. Lorraine was standing there with a small pistol in her hand.

  “Where’d it come from?” I asked when I regained my composure.

  “Ankle holster,” she said.

  “I didn’t check down that far.”

  “I thought you said you’d learned how to frisk someone.”

  “I did.”

  “I figured you’d find it.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t make a very good cop.”

  Forty-Nine

  The most important trait for a newspaper reporter has to be persistence. Intelligence, deductive ability, good instincts and even luck, they’re all important. But none of it compares to persistence.

  I learned this lesson from Peter Ventura when I first came to the Tribune. A number of years earlier, he exposed a massive kickback scandal involving members of the City Council. It led to the impeachment and eventual indictment of six Councilmen; a revision of the Council’s ethical standards and guidelines; and a slew of journalistic awards for Ventura. It was the story that cemented his reputation as one of the legendary reporters in New York City.

  The key to breaking the story was the testimony of a City Council aide who knew all the details of the scandal. It was an exclusive interview Ventura did with this aide that set everything in motion and led to everything else that happened.