The Con Man's Daughter

Chapter 19

Friday, April 10

9:00 A.M.

City cops brought their own coffee into the FBI building, even though they knew the rich kids had everything. Eddie Dunne found Matty Boland at the dingy lunch wagon wedged under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, directly behind NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza. They were both due at the FBI's New York headquarters for a hastily called meeting of the joint task force investigating Russian organized crime in the United States.

"Why the hell are we here?" Eddie asked. "Why aren't we out knocking on doors?"

"Buyer's remorse," Boland said. "It's the whole thing with Paulie Caruso, Eddie. Guys like the Priest make them nervous."

The sudden appearance of the severed head of Eddie's old partner had injected doubt into the task force's plans to use him as the foundation of their assault on the Russian mafiya in New York. He couldn't blame them for being careful; the feds didn't need another embarrassment. But shouldn't his daughter's life outweigh their anxiety?

Eddie bought a container of black coffee and a buttered bagel at the wagon. Today, they'd run a hard-nosed Q &A, "give him a scare," as Paulie the Priest used to say. Then, he hoped, it would be back to the business of finding his daughter. The caffeine jolt would help him stay sharp through the barrage of fedspeak he was sure to hear.

"Maybe you should give some serious thought to calling a lawyer," Boland said. "They're going to screw you around up there. I don't have to tell you the horror stories; you know them as well as I do."

"I need these people to help me, Matty. I'm willing to listen to what they have to say."

"I know what they're going to say. They're going to put this case on hold until they can figure out exactly how you and the Priest are involved. The feds are great for holding off and hoping the problem goes away. And remember…" Boland put his hand to his ear in the universal sign for a phone call.

"They're already tapping my phone," Eddie said.

"Then check your house for bugs. They're going to protect their own asses. That's priority one with the high-level feds. By the time they jump back in this case, the Russians will have sold the Lincoln Tunnel to the Iranians. We'll be swimming to Jersey."

"I'll swim to Jersey. Just find Kate."

Eddie had parked his Olds in the underground public garage at Madison Street and the Avenue of the Finest. The garage was located directly underneath NYPD headquarters. Uniformed cops stood at the entrance, checking for car bombs. Eddie wound up parking three levels below the building. It marked the closest he'd been to headquarters since the day a civilian clerk had flipped his detective shield into a cardboard box containing the badges of the recently quit, fired, retired, or dead. The guy just tossed it on the anonymous pile with dozens of numbered metal pieces engraved with the seal of the city of New York. Clink, it's over. Finality bestowed by some overweight desk jockey treating each shield as if it were a meaningless chunk of tin. The lazy bastard couldn't have cared less that each one of those shields had spent the last few decades pinned to some cop's breast pocket and was therefore witness to the unspeakable. Each could tell a million stories. He should have genuflected in their presence.

"The guy who called this meeting is a pretentious bastard," Boland said. "Last month, we were at the Ninth Precinct with the two uniformed cops who locked up that diplomat's kid. We needed to get downtown quick for a press conference, so we grab the subway. We get to the platform and this guy hears the bing-bong-you know, the signal that they're closing the subway doors. He tells everyone that the bing-bong is a descending major third-like an E to a C-like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth. The cops looked at him like he was a Martian or a stone fag. I was embarrassed to be with the guy."

It was a five-minute walk across Foley Square from One Police Plaza to 26 Federal Plaza. On weekdays, the square was populated by jurors, bored civil servants, tourists looking for Little Italy or Chinatown, and film crews using the steps of the Federal Courthouse for background. Sometimes, when they were shooting a movie scene, you'd have to walk around police barriers. It was still only a five-minute walk. Boland was stalling.

"I can't believe you remembered 'a descending major third,' " Eddie said.

"My mother was a music teacher. But my point is, I wouldn't say that in front of cops."

"You have something you want to say to me, Matty?"

"Yeah, I was just going to tell you. Internal Affairs is sending a courier with your file and the Caruso file. I offered to bring them, save them the trip-that way, you'd get a peek. But no dice."

"You'd probably get a hernia lugging those files."

"I just want to warn you that IAB will be there dredging up the past. I know you're out a long time and all. But at this stage of my career, I don't need anyone thinking I'm part of some rat squad ambush."

"Don't worry about it," Eddie said. "I have a high pain threshold. I don't care what the hell they dredge up, as long as they keep looking."

On the corner of Worth Street, familiar faces gathered in the early stages of a small demonstration. The same core group had manned every antigovemment rally for the past twenty years. Yellow signs stood ready, stacked against a pole. The slogans demanded freedom for the manipulative and articulate killer of a Philadelphia cop.

"I gotta ask," Boland said. "How come you refused to testify against the Priest? You could have saved your own ass."

"It was a bullshit case; they were trying to nail him for other things."

"I heard he was a very dirty cop."

"It depends on what you mean by 'dirty.' The Priest was a dinosaur. He never saw anything wrong with accepting a free meal or a free cup of coffee."

"Free hotel rooms, free cars, free trips to Puerto Rico," Boland added.

"Probably a lot more than that in his early days. He slowed down after the Knapp Commission, but he was a stubborn bastard. He should have seen the handwriting on the wall and retired."

"They got you guys for consorting with known criminals," Boland said.

"At his niece's graduation party. He'd been consorting with those people all his life. He couldn't've avoided them if he'd wanted to."

"Story I heard is that half the Gambino family was there. That's what bothers me, Eddie. You had to have known that someone would be taking pictures. The feds or the rat squad, somebody. I can't believe you just walked into that."

"It was during my Johnnie Walker Black period. All I cared about was the next glass in my hand."

The view from the small conference room on the twenty-eighth floor of 26 Federal Plaza was spectacular. The confluence of the Hudson and East rivers at the tip of the narrow island gave a clear perspective on the amount of water surrounding and bisecting the boroughs. But like most natives, Eddie Dunne was more interested in the brick and mortar than the coastline. He looked for roofs he'd made love on, roofs he'd caught homicides on. He had to amuse himself somehow; thus far, they'd excluded him from the meeting.

Eddie had finished his coffee and bagel and read all he wanted of the New York Post. He started looking around the room, trying to figure out where they'd hidden the camera and mike. The FBI tech men were much better than in the days when they wired a mike into a TV set, then sat it dead center in the middle of the room. The only thing in the center of this room was an odd-shaped chunk of polished brown granite in the center of a small table. On it was a brass plaque that read Alfred p. murrah federal

BUILDING, APRIL 19, I995.

No goddamn reason for making me wait this long, he thought. Arrogant bastards couldn't find a junkie in Harlem without guys like me. Eddie walked over to a large mirror and placed his fingernail against it. There was no gap between his fingernail and the image of it in the mirror. It was a two-way mirror. If it had been a real mirror, there would have been a space between his nail and its image.

After ninety minutes, he heard the sound of heels clicking on the tile floor. Special Agent Stacey Powers, a young woman with a Southern accent, led him two turns down the hallway, then into a conference room that faced uptown. She pointed out a seat at the end of a long, polished table, next to a grim-faced Matty Boland. Yellow pads and pencils were stacked in the center of the table. Powers introduced seven nonsmiling males, agents or attorneys, all crisp and buttoned-down. Then she went straight to the first question: When was the last time he'd seen Paul Caruso?

"Fourteen years ago at a party in Queens," Eddie said. "I never saw him again after that."

"Any correspondence between you since he moved to Sicily?"

"None."

"Do you know if Detective Caruso ever returned home to the United States again after that?"

"If he did, he didn't call me," Eddie said. "Ask his brother."

"We spoke to Mr. Caruso," Powers said.

Agent Powers gave Eddie a quick, annoyed glance, then said there was no record of him ever returning, not even this time. Friends and neighbors thought he was traveling in Europe again. Local police considered Paul Caruso an international playboy, jetting off to Amsterdam or the French Riviera on a whim. No one had any idea how his skull had arrived in New York, or where the rest of his body might be hiding.

Agent Powers said, "According to your department's records, you had a fistfight with Detective Paul Caruso at a graduation party in June of 1984, in the backyard of Angelo Caruso's house."

"It wasn't a real fight."

"He needed extensive dental work following the encounter."

"Paulie liked to do Robert De Niro imitations," Eddie said. "He was doing De Niro playing Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. I was supposed to be Sugar Ray Robinson. He'd had a little too much to drink and stepped into a punch."

"I understand that was the last time he spoke to you."

"That's true."

"Tell us about Marvin Rosenfeld," a new questioner said from behind them.

All heads turned to a man sitting in one of the four leather chairs that surrounded a glass coffee table. French cuffs, blue shirt with a white collar. He'd come in after the introductions, carrying a teacup, complete with saucer.

"Marvin Rosenfeld started out as a tax attorney," Eddie said, addressing his answer across the table to Agent Powers. "He had an office on Remsen Street in the seventies. Then he started working as a financial adviser for a scumbag Russian crime boss named Evesi Volshin."

"Rosenfeld lived in Manhattan Beach," French Cuffs said.

"And he died there," Eddie added.

Eddie figured French Cuffs was the assistant special agent in charge. The one who claimed to know the musical roots of the subway bing-bong. He had no yellow pad of his own. Eddie figured the conversation was being recorded. Agent Powers took notes for effect.

"Rosenfeld was murdered at home in March of 1984," French Cuffs said. "Tell me about that homicide and the Marine Park shooting that followed it."

"Nineteen eighty-four was a long time ago. Agent Powers has the files in front of her."

"Humor me," French Cuffs said. 'Tell me about that day."

Eddie told him that he and Detective Paul Caruso were working off the detective chart, investigating a rash of burglaries in upscale Manhattan Beach. They spotted a souped-up Dodge Charger parked in the driveway of the expensive home of local attorney Marvin Rosenfeld. They figured Rosenfeld wasn't the muscle-car type. Detective Caruso drove around the block once more. On the second pass, they saw two men they knew to be Brooklyn thugs tossing black plastic trash bags into the Charger. It didn't look like trash removal or anything legitimate. It looked purely wrong. Caruso parked half a block away. A few minutes later, the Charger backed out of the driveway. They followed it a short distance east on the Belt Parkway to a deserted employee parking area in Marine Park. The Charger pulled behind a park storage building, where the two men had apparently hidden a second vehicle. When they began transferring the bags to the second vehicle, the two detectives moved in. They came up on them quickly, guns drawn, loudly identifying themselves: "Police! Freeze!" The two thugs began firing. The detectives returned fire, killing both men. Eddie pointed out that both he and the Priest won the Medal of Honor for this incident, the highest decoration awarded by the NYPD.

"You just happened to be there," French Cuffs said.

"It's called police work."

"You didn't call for backup?" he asked.

"No radio. Not all detective cars had radios in those days. We always signed out the cars that didn't."

"Why was that?"

"If you had a radio, they always called you back into the house for annoying errands: Pick up lunch, coffee, booze, drive the boss to a meeting. Things like that."

"The guys who did the robbery, Santo Vestri and Ray Nunez, who were they?"

"Two half-assed wanna-be gangsters," Eddie said. "Consignment guys, mostly. They'd get rid of hijacked loads for a percentage: TVs, fur coats, drugstore supplies, anything."

"Two small-time punks who died in a police shoot-out," French Cuffs said. "Who the hell cared, right?"

"Not even their mothers," Eddie said, turning to look at him. "These guys murdered both Marvin Rosenfeld and his wife, Svetlana, while their little girl sat right there. They shot the parents to death right in front of her."

"But you didn't know this at the time of your encounter in Marine Park."

"If we had, we wouldn't have gone so easy on them."

"Were you outraged enough to follow up on the shooting, Mr. Dunne? What happened to the child?"

"The wife's parents moved back to Russia, took the little girl. She drowned a year or two later. Fell into an icy lake."

"My report says hypothermia," Agent Powers said.

'The record indicates you recovered a lot of money from the trunk of that Dodge Charger."

"Front page of the Daily News said four point two million," Eddie said.

"Four point two million," French Cuffs said. "How did a small-time lawyer like Rosenfeld come to have so much cash?"

"I'm sure that's also in that file Agent Powers is holding."

"I read it," French Cuffs said. "It says that in the early 1980s, Marvin Rosenfeld was a money launderer who worked for the man you mentioned. Evesi Volshin was the major Russian crime boss in Brighton Beach up until that week. The four point two million was Volshin's money, believed to be from the lucrative gasoline-tax scam, waiting to be laundered. The money was coming in so fast, they had a hard time getting it all out. Hundreds of millions, if you believe the rumors."

"I'm sure all the rumors are in the FBI report," Eddie said.

"The report also mentions that Anatoly Lukin, your former employer, was the real mastermind of the gas-tax scam. Or was that only a rumor?"

"Evesi Volshin was an idiot; I'm sure someone else was the brains. Lukin would be my guess, too."

"Volshin himself was murdered a few days after Rosenfeld," French Cuffs said. "Anatoly Lukin then took over the Russian mob. Isn't that correct?"

"And your next question," Eddie said, "is about my relationship with Anatoly Lukin."

"No sense in me asking, then, is there?"

Eddie said, "First, let me tell you that Evesi Volshin was a vicious bastard who preyed on his own people. Russian people in Brooklyn started celebrating in the street the minute they heard he was dead. He was shot and beaten to death in a crowded restaurant. No witnesses. A hundred people have taken credit for his murder."

"So you agree that Anatoly Lukin took over his operation on that day?"

"Common knowledge," Eddie said. "But what you're leading up to is the fact that shortly after those murders, Anatoly Lukin hired me. And that makes you think I had something to do with the murders."

"It doesn't matter what I think," French Cuffs said. "It's an investigative dead end. You're the only witness left alive."

"Mr. Dunne," Agent Powers said. "Last Tuesday, you told Detective Boland about several black binders that Anatoly Lukin kept in his office. You said they contained dummy corporations. Where did they come from?"

"From Marvin Rosenfeld. The guy was an expert in dummy corporations before it was fashionable. He made them up in advance. Dozens of phony corporations at a time. He kept them in black binders and sold them to any interested party."

"How did the binders move from Rosenfeld's possession into Lukin's?" she asked. "The Brooklyn DA never took those binders into evidence on the day of the murders."

Eddie stood and nodded to the silent group around the table. For all he knew, they'd had their tongues clipped in Quantico.

"Mr. Dunne," Agent Powers said. "The binders are missing. Apparently, someone stole them from Lukin's apartment shortly after he was shoved under the train."

"I don't have them."

"You disappeared for almost an hour after Lukin's death," French Cuffs said.

Eddie glared across the table at Matty Boland. He'd chased Lukin's killer to a construction site and come back with the coat. But that didn't prove anything to them. Witnesses identified the coat as the killer's, but the feds always saw Machiavellian plots when city cops were involved.

Eddie stood up and walked to the door.

Agent Powers said, "We have a duty to protect the reputation of the United States government, Mr. Dunne. This doesn't mean we'll stop looking for your daughter. We want you to understand that."

"If I were you, I wouldn't do anything foolish," French Cuffs said.

"Actually," Eddie said, "this is the smartest thing I've done in a long time."