The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  “But what about you? You didn’t join the NYPD. Despite all your claims the last time we talked about how much you loved your time on the force and missed being a police officer. No, you opened this landscaping business. Which must have taken money to do. But where did you get the money?”

  “I told you – I’m not talking to you about this. You’re right about Walsh and Palumbo. He did get him on the NYPD. That was the quid pro quo. But that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “You’ve told me this much, why not give me the rest?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Who gave you the money for this company to cover up stuff about Patrick Walsh’s death? Was it Walsh? Did he first offer you a job with the NYPD like he did for Palumbo? But you didn’t care about that, did you? You wanted something more than a job with the NYPD. You wanted money. And you used the money to make this business here for yourself. Isn’t that right?”

  “You’ll get nothing from me about that.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll go ahead and write that article for the Tribune if you don’t come clean with me?”

  “I’m more afraid of what would happen to me if I did.”

  “Why are you so afraid of Walsh?”

  “It’s not Walsh I’m afraid of.”

  And that’s when I knew.

  I knew there was only one person in all this who could invoke that kind of fear in a man like Greg Stovall.

  Dominic Bennato.

  Sixty

  I’d been seeing police cars in my sleep for a while now because of the Maura Walsh story. I saw them when I was wide awake too. And I was getting increasingly paranoid about whether the police might be watching me. Especially after that encounter of mine with the two rogue cops, Shockley and Janko.

  That’s why, after I left Greg Stovall and saw a police car on the street behind me, I wondered if it might be Chief Palumbo. Okay, it was his father that had helped cover up facts about the Walsh boy’s shooting, but maybe the son, Dale Palumbo, was looking out for his legacy or whatever. I was getting pretty nervous about this damn police car business.

  But then I remembered I was in Elmira, a hundred miles away from Saginaw Lake where Dale Palumbo was the chief. No one in Elmira was following me. And, sure enough, very soon the police car turned off and began going in another direction away from me.

  The same thing happened when I got closer to home in the city. There was an NYPD car on the West Side Highway as I came down it. Could this be Shockley and Janko again? Or else some of the other corrupt cops from the 22nd or wherever? But, when I checked again in my rearview mirror, that police car was gone too.

  I made it home without any more sightings and quickly ran upstairs to my apartment and locked the door.

  Okay, it was probably just my paranoia. But all the stuff with Bennato and the dirty cops and the rest was freaking me out. And it didn’t help when I saw how afraid Greg Stovall seemed to be of Bennato. Even locked away here in my apartment, I couldn’t stop this rising panic I felt at the moment. I didn’t feel safe anymore. Crazy, right? Or maybe not.

  Which was why I really got nervous when I heard a knock on my door.

  I wasn’t expecting anyone.

  So who the hell was out there?

  “Who’s there?” I said through the closed door.

  “Jessie, open up.”

  I recognized the voice.

  It was Sam Rawlings.

  Who I now knew worked for Dominic Bennato.

  “Go away,” I said.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “No.”

  “Please, it’s important.”

  “Go away, or I’ll call the police!!”

  “I am the police,” Rawlings said.

  “You got it all wrong, Jessie,” Rawlings said when I finally relented and did let him inside. “I am a police officer. I’m working undercover.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “Take another look at that picture you showed me. The one from outside the Police Academy.”

  I walked over to my desk, found the picture and brought it back to the living room where Rawlings was sitting.

  I studied it again. No question about it, that was Rawlings graduating at the same time as Maura Walsh. They knew each other back then. And now they were sharing in illegal payoffs, all connected to a mob boss like Bennato. I told that to Sam again.

  “Look at the instructor,” Sam said.

  I hadn’t really thought about that. There were several recruits and an instructor. I had picked out Samuel Rawlings and Maura Walsh. But I hadn’t noticed anyone else. I stared at the picture of the instructor now. The man who had been teaching the two of them while they were at the Police Academy. And I recognized him too.

  “Russell Garrison,” I said.

  “We all knew each other back then,” Rawlings said. “That’s why I was working with Garrison. I’ve been undercover for a while now. Ever since we – Garrison and I – came up with the phony story about me being booted from the force for taking payoffs. That was my cover. We needed that to make people like Bennato believe I was okay to work with. I’m telling you this because I think you need to know the truth. I’m not the bad guy, I’m one of the good guys. But you can’t print anything about this, or else people’s lives will be jeopardized, including mine. I need you to agree to that before I tell you anything more, Jessie.”

  I nodded numbly.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And it’s not what you think about Maura Walsh either.”

  “You were going to arrest her sooner or later for corruption, weren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “What were you going to do – give her another award?”

  “We weren’t after her.”

  “But…”

  “Maura was working with us too, Jessie.”

  “Maura Walsh was undercover?”

  “Yes.”

  “For six months?”

  “Yes, taking payoffs and doing other illegal acts. It was part of the cover. We had to convince people of that, even if she was the deputy commissioner’s daughter. So we set up phony purchases for her of a fancy sports car and other expensive things so everyone would be convinced she really was on the take. Just like they had to do with me. It was harder with Maura Walsh because of who she was and her family background. We had to go to great lengths to make her look dirty because of that. That’s the only way it could work.”

  I still didn’t understand it.

  “Why her?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to put another officer undercover?”

  “We had no choice but to use her. She was the one who came to us first with the incriminating information involving corruption in the department. She said she’d only work with us under the condition that she was directly involved in the case. She volunteered for the assignment, Jessie. She insisted on doing it.”

  “It must have been a big assignment for her to want to get involved and devote six months of her life to an undercover investigation.”

  “It is.”

  “How big?”

  “We’re talking about corruption at the highest levels of the department.”

  The highest levels of the department.

  “Is her father involved in this?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How deeply?”

  “Deputy Commissioner Walsh is the target of the investigation, Jessie.”

  Sixty-One

  The corruption in the police department had been going on for a number of years, Sam said.

  Little things at first. Special favoritism being shown to some business and real estate projects. Money winding up where it shouldn’t be. A tendency to look the other way and ignore violations of some laws and city codes for certain individuals. No one paid much attention to it for a long time.

  It was Maura who first came to Internal Affairs and said she had obtained information about a pattern of systematic corruption within the police departmen
t in connection with its dealings with a prominent New York City mobster.

  The mobster was Dominic Bennato, who in addition to his sanitation company owned many other businesses around town.

  “These businesses were paying off police officers for protection from the law to do anything they wanted. No arrests, no raids, not even any tickets or summonses. Some of the businesses were legit on the surface like The Hangout was. But many of them were escort services and X-rated clubs and gambling or drug dealing operations. Even the supposedly reputable operations like The Hangout were involved in activities like money laundering. A lot of cash went into that restaurant and then into Bennato’s pocket. Whatever he paid for the police protection was minimal compared to the huge profits he was making from all his illegal operations. Without any interference from the police, Bennato had a free hand to do whatever he wanted in New York City.”

  A special elite unit was set up within the Internal Affairs Division to investigate the scandal, working under top-level secrecy because no one knew for sure at that point how far up the chain of command the corruption spread. It was eventually determined that Bennato’s influence seemed to come right from the top – the deputy commissioner’s office.

  “And it was definitely Maura herself who came to you with this investigation and volunteered to go undercover against her own father?” I asked.

  “Yes. At first, the Internal Affairs people rejected the idea of Maura’s participation because of who she was. But she said she was a police officer first, and Walsh’s daughter next. If he was guilty of a crime, she said, then he had to pay the price just like everyone else. She said it was her father who had taught her that a long time ago. Her enthusiasm and intensity and dedication finally won everyone over.

  “The big problem we had was to convince the dirty cops – Renfro and all the others – that Maura was really one of them. I mean, they all knew she was the deputy police commissioner’s daughter – and about his reputation for integrity – so everyone would be very careful not to do anything illegal when she was around.

  “That’s when we decided to create an obvious rift between Maura and her father. She deliberately picked a fight with him in the middle of the 22nd Precinct station house so that everyone could see it. She called him up, said she needed to see him there and then told him something that she said she knew would make him angry. It worked. Things were never the same between them after that.

  “I know it was probably hard on her, but she never complained. She knew it was essential for her role in the undercover operation to work. The other cops had to truly believe that she and her father were on different sides. And, as it turned out, they were.

  “Even then though some of the other cops on the take didn’t trust her at first. But she kept telling everyone how angry she was at her father and how she wanted to get back at him somehow. She started taking payoffs from store owners on her own, without any help from anyone else. Finally the other dirty cops cut her in on their deal. Maura was very convincing. She played the part of a disgruntled cop like Meryl Streep.

  “The rest you know about. When Renfro’s partner died, we put Maura in there to gather evidence. No one knew what she was really doing. Just me and Russell Garrison in Internal Affairs. I got a job with the restaurant so I could work on Bennato from the inside.”

  “How about Billy Renfro?” I asked. “Did he know what Maura was doing?”

  I told him about how strange Renfro had acted in the pizza parlor that night and how I was convinced he felt guilty for some reason about his partner’s death.

  “He did blame himself for it,” Sam said. “We confronted him after the murder and told him the truth about Maura. He said he’d begun to suspect that she might be working undercover. He said he’d confided his fears to some other cops who were also involved with the bribe taking and payoffs. On the night that she died, Renfro was worried. He was afraid the other dirty cops might do something to her to keep her mouth shut. He couldn’t tell Maura that though without giving himself away. And he figured that they wouldn’t hurt her. Just try to scare her a little bit. But when she wound up dead, he blamed himself for letting his partner get killed. Especially when he found out that she had been lying there for as much as a full hour bleeding to death. He could have saved her. But he waited too long to start looking for her.”

  I took a deep breath as I tried to assimilate everything he was telling me.

  “Do you think Maura Walsh was killed because of the undercover work she was doing against other cops?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Is Dominic Bennato a possible suspect in her death?”

  “Yes.”

  Then I asked him the unthinkable question.

  “What about Maura’s father? Is Walsh a suspect in the death of his own daughter?”

  “Everyone’s a suspect,” he said.

  Sixty-Two

  “Maura Walsh was working undercover?” Isaacs said.

  “For six months. Pretending to be a corrupt police officer. But really working with Internal Affairs to expose corruption in the 22nd Precinct and other places in the department too. Including her own father, the deputy commissioner.”

  We were in Isaacs’ office with the door closed. Me, him, Danny and Lorraine. I told them about everything Sam had told me. About everything I’d found out in Saginaw Lake. And about everything else I knew.

  “Do the police think she was killed because someone found out she was working undercover?” Danny asked.

  “That’s certainly a strong possibility, they say.”

  “By her own father? My God, that’s hard to believe.”

  “Or Dominic Bennato.”

  “That makes more sense.”

  “Or maybe Bennato and Walsh both. I think they were working together. My scenario – and it’s just a scenario at this point, but I think it’s a reasonable one – is that Walsh covered up things about the death of his seven-year-old son in Saginaw Lake. He desperately didn’t want anyone to find out that the boy had been beaten by him numerous times before that. Bennato found out about this somehow. Presumably by paying off Stovall, the deputy on the case for the Saginaw Lake Police Force, and financing his landscaping business. In return, Stovall gave Bennato the authentic police report and other information about what happened to Patrick Walsh. Bennato then used that to blackmail Walsh senior. To protect himself, Walsh gave Bennato free rein for all his illegal activities. There’s no indication Walsh actually took money from Bennato, but he did look the other way when the cops at the 22nd and other places were making secret deals with him. Otherwise, Bennato threatened to reveal the details about what happened to the Walsh boy. The beatings from the father that had been covered up by the phony medical report. And maybe even more stuff that had been covered up about the circumstances of the boy’s death. And that’s what Maura Walsh was about to expose.”

  I looked around the room. Danny seemed excited by the story, Norman nervous about it and Lorraine… well, I couldn’t figure out what she thought about it. She was always a big mystery.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Lorraine said now. “Why would this undercover cop Rawlings tell you all this? Why would he reveal it to a newspaper reporter? Doesn’t that violate the code or whatever those undercover people live by?”

  I wanted to say Rawlings did it because of me. He wanted to protect me from going off in the wrong direction on this story. He wanted to atone for the lies he’d told me in the past. He wanted to tell me everything now in an effort to re-establish our personal relationship, whatever that might be.

  But I’d found out from him in my apartment the night before it was for a more practical reason.

  “The Internal Affairs People – Garrison, Rawlings and the others involved – want to go public with this information. They want me to write a story. They want the Tribune to let the world know about it all. I can’t reveal the undercover part about Sam Rawlings or Maura Walsh. Not yet. But they will give me info
rmation to write a sourced story linking Bennato to all sorts of crimes – including blackmail, extortion and possibly even murder. And that high members of the NYPD are believed to have participated in the cover-up of Bennato’s crimes.

  “Until now, there has been a tight security lid over this whole corruption operation. I’m not even sure Aguirre knows. And they sure didn’t tell Florio at the 22nd, which was the center of the corruption. But now they’re ready to move in on Bennato and the others. Except they don’t have a hundred percent airtight case. Everyone knows how crazy and reckless and unhinged Bennato can be. They feel if he finds out the Tribune is going with a story exposing it all, it might push him over the edge to do something really stupid. Then they’ll have him.”

  It was Norman Isaacs who first brought up the obvious. Norman was always the pragmatist.

  “That could be very dangerous for you, Jessie. Bennato might go to any lengths to stop you from writing about this. And we can’t print the story without running it past him first. We have to get a comment from him about all these allegations. And then he might do anything to retaliate. And I’m not just talking about legal retaliation. Your life could be in danger.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Did you tell Rawlings you had any misgivings about making yourself a target like that for Bennato?”

  “He said it was my decision. They’d understand if I decided against it.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Lorraine said.

  “I told him I would.”

  Even Danny seemed a bit rattled by the potential consequence of me doing this story.

  “We need to come up with a way to protect you,” he said. “You really need to be careful about this.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” I said. “Believe me, I don’t want to die on this story. I didn’t die in Central Park and I sure don’t plan to get knocked off by Dominic Bennato.”