American Gangster

23. Red Tape

The next morning, Jimmy Zee showed up at the squadroom, bright and early — around eleven... bright and early for Jimmy Zee.

He had a wild-eyed, incoherent story to tell, which Richie Roberts was not much enjoying, figuring a touch for a C-note would be the darkness at the end of this tunnel. Jimmy was seated in a desk chair and Richie sat on the edge of another desk nearby, with Abruzzo, Jones and Spearman encircling the snitch, prompting him, trying to get him to cough up something that made an ounce of fucking sense.

“There’s no Short Term Lot Three at Newark, Jimmy,” Abruzzo was saying. “They’re lettered A, B, C, D — like the alphabet?”

“I don’t care about the fuckin’ alphabet,” Jimmy insisted firmly. “I’m just tellin’ you what I heard—”

“Then maybe you heard...” And Abruzzo leaned in and got in Jimmy’s face. “...wrong!”

Jimmy’s head bobbed back, as if Abruzzo’s breath was bad, which may well have been the case, but Jimmy’s flinch was more to avoid a possible blow.

Spearman, tired of asking Jimmy questions, tried Jones instead: “Maybe he means the time? Three o’clock maybe?”

Jones shrugged, and zeroed in on Jimmy again. “Look, Jim, this isn’t a Jersey plate. Or a New York one, either... not with just two letters. It’s three and three, not two and three, get it?”

Jimmy, not getting it, shook his head. “I’m just tellin’ you what Huey said. You guys say keep you ears open, so I keep my ears open, and I tell you what I hear, and then you fuckin’ ride me...”

“If it’s not a plate,” Jones said, ignoring this outburst, “then what the fuck is it?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Jimmy blurted. “I ain’t the detective!”

Abruzzo was shaking his head, looking like he wanted to hit somebody. Looking like he wanted to hit Jimmy, who Richie had to agree was as frustrating a snitch as he’d ever come across.

“If you’re fuckin’ lying,” Abruzzo said menacingly. “If you’re fuckin’ yanking our chain...”

“It’s what Huey said. On the phone. To Frank. I’m sure.”

“KA 760,” Spearman said skeptically.

“Yes! Yes! Fucking yes!”

Jimmy gazed up helplessly at the cops surrounding him. The cops gazed helplessly at each other.

All except Richie, who slid off the desk and onto his feet, smiling. “None of you assholes ever been in the service?” he asked.

The three cops and the one snitch gaped at Richie.

“It’s an Air Force tail number.”

By early afternoon Richie and his entire staff of detectives — fifteen strong plus their big boss Toback standing next to the task force leader — were grouped along the edge of the tarmac at Newark Airport, watching a military plane with the tail number ka 760 taxi toward them.

Soon the big silver bird had rolled to its stop, and the cabin door slid up, passengers emerging, including military officers, embassy personnel and families, all looking as haggard as they did relieved to be trading Vietnam for their homeland. Richie, Toback and the squad watched with some concern as official passengers, met by a host of assistants, filed past — to Richie, everybody on that plane was a suspect, and seeing VIPs get special treatment did not thrill him.

Finally a seasoned-looking captain approached the assembly of law enforcement officers, and Richie stepped forward to meet him.

“Captain, I’m Richard Roberts, director of the Essex County Narcotics Bureau. We have reason to believe this aircraft has been used to smuggle contraband.”

“Contraband.”

“Heroin, sir.”

“ ‘Reason to believe’ doesn’t cut it, Director Roberts.”

“No, sir...” Richie held up the folded papers. “... but this warrant does.”

Minutes later, the squad was turning an airport hangar into a kind of big-scale chop shop, taking the military plane apart inside and out. Within the cabin, seats were removed and inspected, carpeting yanked up, panels unscrewed, even the lavatories dismantled. Outside, engines and landing gear were disassembled, tires knifed open and searched; luggage was throughly gone through; and a nuzzle was plunged into a toilet to pump out the contents into barrels where Richie’s detectives did a dirty job that somebody had to do, fishing through human waste with rubber-gloved hands.

Richie, off to one side, watched with a growing sense of panic, even despair, as his detectives and mechanics and customs agents began to peel the metal skin off the plane. In the meantime, coffins bearing fighting men who were getting out of Vietnam the hard way were being off-loaded.

By the time the search was finished, the carcass of the plane barely resembled the flying machine it had been a few hours ago — no panel had not been removed, no cavity had gone unprobed.

Toback ambled up beside him. “Rich, we’ve checked everything.”

“Not quite,” he said.

Richie was gazing at the military caskets getting loaded onto a trunk with armed soldiers standing respectful guard. The captain was watching the process gravely.

Toback’s jaw dropped; then he said, “You can’t be serious?”

Richie eyed his boss. “Why, dope smugglers are going to stand on ceremony? They’re gonna have a sense of right and wrong?”

“Well, keep me out of it.”

Slowly Richie approached the coffins and walked up to the one next in line for lifting up onto the truck.

To the captain, Richie said, “Need to have a look inside, sir.”

The captain frowned.

“Open it,” Richie said.

Richie had been stared at before, by criminals including rapists and murderers and mob bosses, and by cops as honest as Toback and as crooked as Trupo, but never had colder, more contemptuous eyes settled on him than the captain’s.

Richie didn’t give a shit. He said, “You saw the warrant. You know it permits me to search the plane and its cargo.”

“These men. They’re cargo?”

“I mean no disrespect. But I do have permission.”

Still the captain just stood and stared at Richie.

“Okay,” Richie said, and he knelt to open the coffin himself...

... and every soldier’s rifle came immediately into firing position.

Richie the target.

The captain’s smile wasn’t really a smile. “You don’t have my permission.”

Richie looked up and all sorts of cold eyes stared at him, some belonging to the soldiers, the others to the rifles pointed at him, those black circular eyes that could be the last ever to regard a man.

Safeties clicked off.

Fingers poised to fire.

All these soldiers needed was their captain’s order to blow away this disrespectful civilian son of a bitch.

Richie glanced at the captain. “Thing is,” he said, “I don’t need your permission.”

Having all these rifles pointed at him was no fun; but Richie did not believe this captain would kill a law enforcement officer in his line of duty, and end his own career in a court-martial.

When Richie undid them, the coffin latches popped like gun shots, and yet he managed not to jump. He lifted the lid on the long black body bag within. Sickened by what he needed to do, Richie pulled at the zipper, and the body bag parted to reveal the sad remains of a young soldier.

“That’s enough!”

Richie glanced behind him and saw a very annoyed middle-aged man in a suit and tie striding toward him. The guy looked decidedly official.

Then Toback was kneeling beside Richie, whispering, “First Assistant U.S. Attorney, Richie. Do as he says.”

At the Lucas family home in Teaneck, Eva was a guest. She and Frank rarely stayed at the house but — in the aftermath of the shooting, and while Frank was overseas on business — she had been installed here with Momma Lucas and several of the brothers and cousins and their families. This afternoon, however, no one was home but Eva and Momma.

Eva found Momma’s presence comforting, and the house itself was lovely; today was typical of life in the upscale housing development, an idyllic world of suburban domesticity, from chirping birds and laughing kiddies to the hum of lawnmowers and the music of wind chimes.

The two women sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and talking and laughing, as Mrs. Lucas showed Eva family photographs of Frank as a boy. Eva was struck by the warmth of the family members, obvious in the snapshots, but also by the just as apparent abject poverty.

Eva had grown up in Puerto Rico and knew all about living poor; but even she was impressed by the squalor the Lucas clan had endured.

A tap at the kitchen doors onto the backyard startled both women. Framed there, holding up his badge, was a detective named Trupo — Eva had seen him before, several times, though she had never exchanged words with the man, and knew Frank despised this particular police officer, with whom he was forced to do business.

Other men, plainclothes officers like Trupo she assumed, were standing, chatting, in the backyard nearby. Trupo himself was handsome in a cruel way, with Apache cheekbones and a Mexican mustache and a thigh-length black-leather topcoat that probably cost as much as a small car. The German shepherd, in his fenced-in run that led into its doghouse, was barking, but nobody was paying the animal any attention.

Trupo smiled at her and waved hello.

Eva traded glances with Momma, and then went over to the door and, without opening it, asked, “Yes?”

He motioned. “Meet me around front.”

Then the detective disappeared, his men trailing after.

Momma, still seated at the kitchen table, looked worried, and had a right to be. Eva said she’d deal with this and, when the front doorbell rang, was already on her way.

Trupo was on the front stoop with a cocky grin and a search warrant. Behind him were three more of his kind.

“This is for you,” he said, and handed her the document and brushed past her into the residence.

The other three detectives trooped in, one of them nodding at her, another giving her a wolfish grin that gave her spine a chill.

“Listen,” Eva began, but none of them listened.

Instead, the trio of detectives fanned out on the main floor, while Trupo headed upstairs, like he owned the place. Eva went quickly back to the kitchen, and sat with Mrs. Lucas, and was showing her the search warrant when one of the detectives came in, helped himself to a cup of coffee, and ransacked the kitchen, while keeping an eye on the two women.

The sound of more ransacking, upstairs, was painful to hear, and Momma gripped one of Eva’s hands in both of hers. After a very long half hour, Trupo came into the kitchen, pocketing what Eva knew to be a safe deposit key, and said to Eva, “Could use a little help.”

She just looked at him.

He shrugged and took her by the arm, yanking her off the chair and practically dragging her up the stairs. The second floor was like the aftermath of a tornado. Clothes and other belongings had been thrown onto the floor from closets, and as she passed bedrooms she could see dresser drawers similarly emptied, covers off beds, mattresses gutted.

In the bedroom that was Eva’s and Frank’s, on the rare occasions they stayed over, Trupo gestured to the torn-apart surroundings and said, “We’ve done our best here, little lady, but we can use some help.”

“What is this about, Detective?”

“It’s about your husband’s illustrious career being over. The feds are going to come in and clear everything out. Every damn cent, every damn car and toy and diamond ring. But not before I get my share. Where’s the money, Mrs. Lucas?”

Eva pointed to a dresser whose drawers were on the floor along with their former contents. “There was some change and a few bills over there, but they’re gone now. You must’ve already got it.”

“Not the piddling shit, Mrs. Lucas. The money — the getaway stash that Frank and every other cheap gangster keeps at his house! For when the inevitable happens, and this is the inevitable, Mrs. Lucas.”

Eva locked eyes with the detective. “Listen carefully, Detective.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you leave now, right now, there’s a chance Frank might not kill you.”

She’d barely got that out when Trupo backhanded her.

The detective had one of his men haul Eva back down to the kitchen, where Mrs. Lucas applied a cool washcloth to Eva’s cheek, which was already swelling up. They could hear the search continue and escalate above them: glass breaking, panels being ripped from walls, the walls themselves splintering and crunching apart from blows by sledgehammers.

Eva had tears in her eyes, but it wasn’t the pain from Trupo’s slap. She was gazing at Frank’s sweet loving mother, saying, “I am so sorry...”

Periodically, the dog in the backyard would start to bark again. The invasion of the house had been going on for over an hour now, so the dog would start in, lose steam, then some particularly loud noise in the house would spur him on again.

As they stood at the sink with Momma applying the washcloth, Eva could see Detective Trupo striding across the backyard, toward the German shepherd and its elaborate doghouse. Bumpy, as Frank called the animal, was going wild at the approach of the big man in the flapping black coat.

Trupo ignored the fenced-in animal and pushed at the back of the doghouse, which seemed to give a little, as if it were levered...

Eva watched through the window in horror as Trupo went over casually and removed a handgun from under his black topcoat and fired through the fence at the big dog, shooting it in the head.

The animal fell dead against the fence of its run as Trupo overturned the doghouse and revealed a dugout, insulated area underneath where stacks and stacks of banded cash had been salted away.

Eva, at the window, was comforting Momma, appalled by the execution of the poor dumb animal. Eva was heartsick, too, but as much as she liked the late Bumpy, mostly she was feeling the loss of the money that Trupo and his men were soon stuffing into black duffel bags.

In an office attached to the hangar at the Newark Airport, Richie and Toback sat in chairs opposite a desk behind which the assistant United States attorney sat. Several other official-looking gents in suits and ties were milling about, and Toback respectively identified them, in a whisper, as a deputy assistant U.S. attorney, an executive assistant U.S. attorney, and the chief counsel to the U.S. attorney.

Right now the man in charge, who had stopped Richie’s efforts to search the coffins and bodybags, was hanging up after a lengthy phone conversation — most of the talking had been on the other end of the line.

The assistant U.S. attorney sighed heavily, and folded his hands. He gazed at Richie with hard eyes that blinked only occasionally, and his voice was resonant and commanding, which must have served him well in court.

“That was a military transport plane,” the attorney said. “If there was heroin on board, then someone in the military would have to be involved. Which means that even as the military is busy fighting a war that has only claimed fifty thousand American lives, it was also busy smuggling narcotics.”

Richie was up Shit Creek, and no paddle was in sight. The attorney was making Richie’s case sound about as viable as Alice in Wonderland; and Toback’s frozen grimace was no comfort.

The attorney glanced at the phone, indicating the conversation he’d just had. “That is how General Easton interprets these events. That someone sitting in this office right now believes the United States Army is in the drug-trafficking business... and is trying to prove that questionable theory by desecrating the remains of valiant young men who’ve given their lives in the defense of their country.”

Richie sat forward. “All I know is, there are drugs on that plane.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Richie shut the fuck up.

He shut the fuck up even though this man and his associates, who were dismissing him as a fool and even a traitor, were law enforcement professionals who had never spent a second on the street. Yet these men were obviously confident that they knew more than the street cop who’d clawed his way to being director of the Essex Country Narcotics Bureau. These men were, after all, in the unfortunately bureaucratic structure of the world Richie functioned in, his superior officers.

“Is it any wonder then,” the attorney was saying, “that because of your actions, the entire federal narcotics program is now in serious jeopardy of being dismantled? Dismantled as utterly and enthusiastically as that fucking transport plane you and your people just demolished out there...? Because, Director Roberts, that’s what you’ve accomplished this afternoon, single-handedly. And that is all you’ve accomplished.”

Richie, finally finding an opening, said, “I have good information that the target of my squad’s investigation was smuggling dope into this country on that plane.”

The attorney thought about that, giving it all of half a second. “And that target is?”

Toback winced.

Richie said, “Frank Lucas.”

The attorney looked up and over at his federal colleagues. Their blank expressions and shrugs spoke volumes.

Then the attorney turned a fish-eyed gaze on Richie and said, “Really. And just who the hell is Frank Lucas?”

The attorney got no help from the various assistants around him.

“Who does he work for?” the attorney demanded. “What family?”

“He’s not Italian,” Richie said.

“Well, what is he?”

“Black.”

A long silence followed, and you could have heard a pin drop — a grenade pin.

Finally the attorney said, “Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Do I look like I’m easily amused, Director Roberts? Because coming from an individual like yourself, this close to the end of his career in law enforcement? Making jokes would seem ill-advised.”

“No joke, sir. Our investigation indicates... no, establishes... that Frank Lucas is above the Mafia in the dope-trade hierarchy. We believe he is buying direct from the source in Southeast Asia, cutting out all the middlemen, and that he has been using U.S. military planes and personnel to smuggle pure No. 4 heroin into the United States.”

While Richie spoke, the faces of the officials before him started out confused and then turned skeptical and finally openly derisive.

Toback sat forward. “Gentlemen, Director Roberts has plenty of experience in—”

“Plenty of experience,” the attorney cut in. “Does he now? And how many arrests have you made so far, Director Roberts, in your so-called investigation?”

“I was promised when I took on this job,” Richie said, “that it would be about real arrests. We aren’t focused on pushers and—”

“Would that be no arrests, Director Roberts?”

“We’re well on the way, building cases against most of Lucas’s organization. Not him, as yet. Like all American gangsters from Capone on, Frank Lucas is well-insulated.”

“You’re comparing him to Al Capone now. I see. And he has an organization...”

“That’s right.”

The attorney’s eyes were tight, and his voice was edged with scorn: “You’re saying a single fucking nigger has accomplished what the entire American Mafia hasn’t managed in one hundred fucking years.”

Richie stared at the man. Then he shook his head. “Yeah, you’d know, right? Just sitting here. Ever been on the street? Sir?”

“Get this fucking kike out of my sight,” the attorney said, with a sneer and a disgusted wave.

Richie was out of his chair and smacked the bastard, twice, the second one taking the guy right out of his desk chair and onto the floor before the others could pull Richie back.

The attorney’s remarks had been out of line enough that no charges were brought against Richie; but as he and Toback walked across the hangar, Richie was already thinking about his next move.

But Toback was saying, “Rich, it’s over. You’re shut down.”

“Right,” Richie said.

Then he exited the hangar and his squad members fell in behind him as they headed toward their cars.

Behind the wheel, with Spearman in the driver’s seat, Richie said, “We couldn’t intercept the heroin here, well, fine. Somebody’s got to pick it up.”

“Some Country Boy or other,” Spearman agreed.

“So we tail their asses, every one of them.”

Richie wasn’t worried about being fired. What with the federal government and their endless red tape, hell, days would go by before the team was officially disbanded.

And all he needed was the next twenty-four hours.