Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  “No, I didn’t go to Europe. We moved. We had to move out of that building.”

  “Yeah.”

  Hersing started to explain, but DeBenedetto abruptly cut him off.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Can we arrange a meeting with them people you mentioned?” Hersing was referring to the morals squad.

  DeBenedetto said he was still trying.

  “They’re knocking me nuts,” Hersing complained.

  “Well, we ain’t been bothering you.”

  “No, no, no. I know that. But I’m saying them other guys.”

  “Well, I’m trying to work something with them.”

  “You know what’s happening, John. Tracy’s going to move into that—Chic is moving into our old building.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” the inspector said. “If they are, they’re gonna get their balls knocked off.”

  “Well, they’re, I think they’re the ones behind motivating it.”

  “Nah, you’re wrong. You’re wrong. When, if you ever come around here and I see ya, I’ll explain it to you.”

  They arranged to meet on the following Tuesday, March 2, but at the last moment Hersing again called to cancel. They set up the meeting instead for Thursday at lunchtime in the Parkway Room.

  Thursday, March 4, 1982, dawned cloudy and cold. Thompson and Lash met Hersing at his apartment. The agents succeeded this time in persuading their undercover source to wear the tape recorder. They set the small Nagra into the elastic holder and again strapped it to the small of Hersing’s back. They gave him $500 in marked bills. It was time to start paying off again.

  By noon, the clouds had cleared. Lash drove across town to the Parkway Room ahead of the others. He would be observing the meeting from another table. Thompson followed Hersing’s Thunderbird, a new car, white with a red top. The agent parked on Spring Garden Street to keep watch outside in case DeBenedetto decided to leave the restaurant with Hersing. The FBI had even placed a tape recorder in Hersing’s car, in the event that one of his payoff sessions wound up there.

  When Lash arrived he was escorted to a table by Gene Console, a short, friendly man with thick hair and a soft, handsome face. A big color photo portrait of Console, framed, hung prominently up over a mirror on the east wall of the restaurant. It pictured the restaurant manager in a tasseled leather jacket staring off wistfully, and looked a bit like the kind of picture one sees on the album covers of popular country singers. There were ceiling fans overhead, slowly turning. Temperatures were still in the thirties, but the noontime sun streaming through the restaurant’s high greenhouse windows on the south wall bathed the dining room in warmth. Lash knew that DeBenedetto liked to sit at the round table in the front corner of the place, behind the thick pea-green pillar. So he was pleased when Console gave him a table nearby.

  Hersing came in a few minutes later, wearing his short tan leather jacket and double-knit trousers. Console met him at the entrance to the dining room. Lash could overhear Hersing explain that he was there to meet the inspector, so Console sat him down at the round corner table. Hersing ordered a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. Console walked over to the bar and rang DeBenedetto at central division headquarters down the street.

  A few moments later the inspector and his lieutenant strode in. DeBenedetto looked crisp and official in his white uniform shirt and tie. The portly Smith was dressed casually. Lash could see right away that there was nothing at all friendly in the way they greeted Don Hersing today.

  “Howya doin’, John?” Hersing said, smiling.

  “Oh, somebody told me you left town,” said Smith, pulling out a chair.

  “I haven’t seen you for so long.” Then the lieutenant let the inspector handle things.

  “Where have you been for four months?” asked DeBenedetto.

  “Where have I been? All over.” Hersing looked across at the two men with a hurt, quizzical expression.

  “Yeah, but you ain’t seen us for four months.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, we got, we got a little message for you. I want you to get something straight.” DeBenedetto accused Hersing of mentioning his name in three city bars.

  Hersing was confused. “Where, John?”

  And the inspector listed two places.

  Hersing denied it in a hurt, pleading way. He spoke in a whining, nasal voice. “I didn’t even know you then, John.”

  “Let me tell you something,” DeBenedetto said. He wasn’t even listening to Hersing. “I don’t want to do business with you no more. This money don’t mean anything to me. Understand what I mean? So you operate the way you want to operate, but I don’t want to do business with you anymore. Okay? Because if you think you’re gonna walk around this fucking city, come around every four months and we have to chase you all the fuck around…”

  “John, things has been bad, man.” Now Hersing’s tone was obsequious.

  “Well, call us up and tell us ‘things has been bad,’” the inspector said, mocking Hersing’s tone. “But not you, you want to play a cute game, you wiseass. Now, I try to put you in touch with a certain guy, Delvecchio”—John Delvecchio headed the morals squad—“and you’ve dumped him two times.”

  Hersing was truly confused. Delvecchio had never arranged a meeting with him. (Delvecchio, in fact, never did meet with Hersing, and although a federal grand jury would later name him as an unindicted coconspirator, he was never charged with a crime.)

  Hersing whined, he pleaded, he swore to DeBenedetto that he had never stood up Delvecchio. “I swear to God. Honest to God I didn’t, John.”

  “Let me tell you what we’re going to do with you. We’re not going to do any more business with you. See that club, that club is going on our list as regular clubs. We’re going to start hitting you in the afternoon, we’re gonna start breaking your fucking balls, because you broke my balls for four months.”

  “John, I’ll make it up.”

  “You ain’t gonna make nothing up,” DeBenedetto snapped. He leaned toward Hersing across the table, and spoke in a low, threatening tone.

  “We’re done with you. You’re done. You want to get on our after-hours club list, it’s okay with me. But that’s as far as we’re gonna go. We ain’t gonna do no business with you otherwise because I ain’t gonna chase you all over the fucking United States…. You know why you’re around to see me now? Because you need me. You need me, don’t you? You want me to help you out, don’t you? Well, I ain’t gonna help you out—you’re going, you’re going down the tubes. I’m gonna tell you another thing. You moved out of that one place, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now where are you?”

  “Twelve forty-one.”

  “Just had a complaint,” Smith chimed in. “You don’t know about the complaint from Roman High School, huh?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know about the kid getting the clap in there and going home and telling his mother? You don’t know about that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I’m tellin’ ya,” DeBenedetto said. “If you would be in contact with us, we would know what’s going on.”

  Despite his overbearing manner, DeBenedetto seemed, suddenly, to be backtracking from his initial outburst. Now he was convincing Hersing how valuable they were to him. He evidently cared about the money more than he said, thought Hersing. The inspector went on. He explained that they had tried to let Hersing know what was going on, but couldn’t find him. He said they weren’t about to leave recorded messages on his answering machine. “Now, if you think we’re about to talk into a machine, you’re wrong,” DeBenedetto sneered. Hersing’s mind rested suddenly on the gentle hum at the small of his back—Hmmm.

  “And I’ll tell you. We don’t know whether we—frankly, we don’t want to do business with you and Delvecchio doesn’t want to do business with you. ’Cause you’ve got a big mouth. You just get drunk and talk.”

  Hersing protested. He
said he never drank anything harder than beer. He swore that he had never mentioned their names.

  “Listen,” DeBenedetto said. “Let me tell you something. Nobody we do business with mentions our names…. Frankly, Don, I’ll tell you. You came recommended to me by a guy that I like. Otherwise you would have never gotten near me. See? Now this guy vouches for you and Carlini vouches for you. And they never dealt business with you, see? Now I told them about you, and they don’t even like you. ’Cause, I don’t know. That talk shit.”

  Again, Hersing protested that he had never mentioned DeBenedetto’s name. Smith explained that it wasn’t necessary to say his name; if he identified the inspector by rank, people knew who he was talking about. Hersing said that he had only been in one of the bars DeBenedetto had mentioned, and that had been before DeBenedetto took command of the central division.

  “What the fuck?” the inspector said. “They don’t put dates on these things! But you’re tellin’ people you got us. And you don’t got us. Because we ain’t seen you for four months. And you didn’t call us up. You didn’t say, ‘Hey, fellas, things are rough. I’m getting a lot of pinches.’ We know that. We know you were taking pinches. We know that.”

  Again DeBenedetto accused Hersing of setting and breaking appointments with Delvecchio. Hersing swore he hadn’t. “John, I swear on my mother,” Hersing said, God apparently not having been sufficient.

  “Now he knows that man for over twenty years,” Smith interjected.

  “Now who’s he supposed to believe?”

  “I know the fucking guy from my neighborhood,” DeBenedetto said.

  But Hersing insisted that he had never heard from the morals squad. He hadn’t. He was genuinely puzzled by the inspector’s accusations. DeBenedetto continued abusing Hersing. They went back over the story about the high school kid that supposedly contracted venereal disease in Hersing’s place. They said the district attorney wanted Hersing “off the face of the earth.”

  “And you were never aware of the complaint, right?” Smith said.

  “How the fuck can you operate a business like that?”

  “Yeah, but if somebody don’t tell me, how do I know?”

  “Well, how will they tell you if you stay away?” Smith answered.

  This went on and on. Lash couldn’t overhear the conversation, but he could tell Hersing was taking his lumps. He overheard Hersing pleading, “I swear to God…” The officers were hunched over the table, leaning toward Hersing. Lash could tell that their undercover man was doing his best to hang on.

  DeBenedetto told Hersing they were “putting him on the back burner.” Finally, they let up a bit. They started to talk business again. Despite the bluster, they clearly weren’t serious about refusing money from Hersing. They encouraged Hersing to stay in touch with them. Then they could tip him off about things. They wanted to know if Hersing was making money now, after all the hits and the move.

  “Are youse operational now at 1241?” DeBenedetto asked.

  “Yeah. We’re coming back up on our feet now. I mean, if you give me a little bit I’ll make it up, John. I got something with me.”

  “What have you got with you?”

  “Five.”

  “Five hundred?” the inspector said, sarcastic. He looked over at Smith comically, and the two officers laughed.

  “John, if you, if you give me—”

  “What kind of—are you Jewish?”

  “No, no, John.”

  “You think I’m a fucking Jew. You think he’s a fucking Jew.”

  “John, John, no. John, give me a couple of weeks and I guarantee I’ll make every bit of it up.”

  “Oh, guess what? Hold that five hundred and add it to whatever you’ve got in a couple of weeks. Okay? Then come around when you want to talk business.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “And in the meantime, we have no alliance.”

  “How much, how much in arrears do you know you are?” Smith asked.

  “This is one, right?”

  “This’ll be three payments.”

  “What?” Smith asked.

  Hersing could see that wouldn’t do.

  “Four. This’ll be the fourth.”

  Then DeBenedetto said, “You hold that five hundred and add, and add something substantial to it.”

  “How about if I add fifteen [hundred] to it and make it two [thousand]?”

  “I’m gonna talk to Delvecchio,” the inspector said. “If I went there, even assuming you could get Delvecchio, how much do you think you’re gonna have to pay him?”

  “I have no ideas, John, whatever you say…. If I can get him off my back, then I can operate. But we’re running on low key. They’re sending three and four times a day somebody into the fucking place.”

  DeBenedetto said there was no use in doing business with Hersing if the morals squad was going to keep locking his girls up.

  “I’m gonna talk to Delvecchio tomorrow. Let me put you on the back burner for a while. You hold that five hundred, we’ll tell you how much it is.”

  He told Hersing to call him the next day at 11 a.m., after he met with the head of the morals squad. Then the two officers stood up without further ceremony and began to walk off.

  “Thanks, John Smitty, have a good day,” Hersing called after them.

  “I will,” said Smith.

  But DeBenedetto and Smith didn’t leave. Instead they walked over to the bar. Hersing sat for a few moments alone. On the restaurant’s sound system, Jimmy Buffett sang his hungover lament, “Margaritaville.” Hersing called for his check and finished his coffee, which he hadn’t touched, and crushed out his cigarette. When the waitress brought his check, Lash watched as Hersing stood up and put on his jacket, took a bill out of his wallet, placed it on the table, and left. Hersing nodded and said good-bye again to DeBenedetto and Smith as he passed them at the bar on his way out.

  Lash stayed at his table for a while longer. In a few minutes, a well-dressed man with dark hair came in and greeted DeBenedetto and Smith. They returned to the table. The man in the fine suit sat in the same chair that Hersing had been in, and the inspector and the lieutenant sat back in their chairs. It seemed to Lash as if the same scene was being enacted again with a different person. Then Lash left. He would see the man with dark hair again.

  When Hersing left the restaurant he walked back up the street to his Thunderbird. He got in and took a couple of deep breaths, turned on the ignition, and put on his seat belt. The weatherman on the radio announced that the temperature was thirty-two degrees, and predicted a warmer day tomorrow. Soft music began to play.

  Just before he reached back to the machine in the elastic holder and turned off the tape, Hersing muttered to himself with disgust.

  He said, “Filthy cops.”

  It had gone better than Thompson and Lash had dared expect. Halting payoffs for a few months had, so to speak, drawn the beast from his lair. Now they had DeBenedetto on tape spelling things out clearly. The inspector of the central police division bullied Hersing like a mob enforcer, exhibiting what a prosecutor would later term “amazing venality.” Thompson and Lash knew that this revealing glimpse of DeBenedetto would enable any jury to see past his rank and reputation.

  They also noticed that after the March 4 meeting, the one they came to call the “browbeating session,” their informant’s interest in the case revived; DeBenedetto and Smith had insulted Hersing. He felt pushed around and squeezed, the way he had felt the year before when George Woods had upped the ante on him. Hersing mostly blamed Smith. The inspector’s accusations about missing meetings with John Delvecchio especially bugged him. He figured the lieutenant was feeding DeBenedetto false stories about him, hoping to poison Hersing’s dealings with the boss because he feared the inspector would find out he had been in on Georgie Woods’s Dial-a-Bust system. Hersing had felt stupid and powerless sitting there just taking it that day. Didn’t these guys know who Donald Hersing was?

  For the next th
ree weeks, Hersing kept calling DeBenedetto to see if he had arranged a meeting with the morals squad, but the inspector kept putting him off. He called his friend Schwartz, but affable Abe seemed to have grown completely cool.

  Finally, Hersing got a message. He was to meet with Smith back at the Parkway Room on Wednesday, March 24. Thompson and Lash again wanted their informant to wear the body recorder, but, again, Hersing was afraid. He was sure he would be searched. A few weeks before, in one of his calls to DeBenedetto, the inspector had said something about having Hersing “checked out” before they could start doing business again. And then, when he talked with Lieutenant Smith on the phone to set up the meeting, he had asked how much money he should bring with him. Smith had told him to bring nothing, just himself.

  So now, at this first meeting since the browbeating session, Hersing was jumpy. The agents were especially reluctant to let him go without the recorder. They felt that they were at a crucial point in the case. Today Hersing would find out exactly how much it would take to get back into the inspector’s favor. They suspected that Smith was going to spell out the amount at this meeting. But they weren’t going to force their informant to wear a tape. They argued with him. Agents would be inside and outside the restaurant observing, they said. Nobody had searched him yet. But Hersing was adamant. He went to the meeting without the body wire.

  He arrived at the Parkway Room first, and Console showed him to the usual table. After a few minutes, Smith walked in with Larry Molloy. But instead of coming to the table, Smith ignored Hersing and walked to the bar. Molloy came up to the table and asked Hersing to accompany him to the men’s room. As agents at a nearby table watched, Hersing followed Molloy into the men’s room.

  According to Hersing, once inside the lavatory Molloy told him to drop his pants. Hersing asked why, and Molloy, who was apologetic, said he had to search him. Hersing took off his trousers and his underpants. Molloy frisked him, even reaching up in his armpits. Then they came back out to see Smith. On their way out, Hersing recalls, Molloy offered him some advice. “He said, ‘Look, if you are behind four payments, why don’t you give the boss an extra payment, which would make it five payments, and get back in his good graces?’”