Cops and Robbers

Vigano

Vigano slept for most of the trip. He was lucky that way, he could sleep on planes, and for that reason he tried to do as much of his traveling as possible late at night. Otherwise, too much time was wasted going from place to place.

He was riding in a Lear jet, a private company plane owned and operated by a corporation called K-L Inc. K-L’s function was to own and care for and run the fleet of six planes that were available around the country to Vigano and some of his associates. The company also leased hangar space in Miami and Las Vegas and two other places, and in addition owned some real estate in the Caribbean. It had been financed by a private stock offering a few years ago, most of which had been bought by various union pension funds. Its assets were the planes and the island real estate, but its expenses were very high and it had never shown a profit, and so had never paid taxes or dividends.

The interior of the plane was comfortable, but not lush, in a kind of motel-lobby style. There was seating for eight, large soft chairs similar to first-class accommodations on a scheduled airliner, except that the front pairs of seats faced backwards and there was an unusual amount of leg room. Aft of the seats was a partition, followed by a dining area; a long oval table that would also seat eight, around three sides, leaving one of the long sides open for passage. A lavatory and galley came next, and farthest back was a bedroom containing two single beds. That was where Vigano traveled, sleeping on one of the beds while his two bodyguards sat up front, joking with the hostess, a girl who used to be a dancer until she’d had to have an operation on her hip. She was a beautiful girl, and her former bosses had done right by her.

The hostess came back finally and knocked on the bedroom door, calling, “Mr. Vigano?”

He woke up right away. His eyes opened, but he didn’t move. He was lying on his right side, and he looked around, shifting only his eyes, until he’d oriented himself. He’d left one small light on, over the door, and it showed him the other bed, the curving plastic wall of the plane, the two oval windows looking out on nothing but blackness.

On the plane. Going to see Bandell about the stock market robbery. Right.

Vigano sat up. “All right,” he called.

“We’ll be landing in five minutes.” She said that through the door, not opening it.

Of course they’d be landing in five minutes, otherwise she wouldn’t be waking him. “Thank you,” he said, and reached for his trousers on the other bed.

He’d stripped to his underwear for the flight, and now he quickly dressed, then opened his attaché case and out of the small separate compartment in it took his toothbrush and toothpaste. Carrying them in one hand and his tie in the other, he left the bedroom for the lavatory.

The hostess was in the galley, doing this and that. She smiled at him and said, “Coffee, Mr. Vigano?”

“Definitely.”

He didn’t take long in the lavatory, and then he carried his attaché case up front to the regular seats to have his coffee and watch the landing. His bodyguards were sitting facing one another on the right, so he took the forward-facing window seat on the left. The bodyguards were named Andy and Mike, and Vigano never called them bodyguards. He didn’t even think the word; they were just the young guys he traveled with. They both carried their own attaché cases, and they were presentable in a tough kind of way, and he simply traveled with them because that’s what he did.

Vigano sipped at his coffee and looked out the window at the lights of the city. You could always tell a resort town, it ran much heavier to neon. A place like Cleveland, now, you could hardly see any neon from the air at all.

Andy, grinning, said, “Mr. Vigano, it’s a waste of time to come here in the summer. We ought to come for the winter.”

Vigano smiled back. “Maybe I’ll work something out,” he said. He liked these two boys.

It was a smooth landing. They taxied away from the normal passenger terminals and over to the private area. When they rolled to a stop a black limousine drove out to meet them. Vigano and the two young men he traveled with picked up their attaché cases, thanked the hostess, congratulated the pilot on his landing, and stepped out into incredible heat. “Christ,” Andy said. “What’s it like in the daytime?”

“Worse,” Vigano said. The heat lay on his skin like a wool blanket. It made New Jersey seem cool.

They crossed quickly to the limousine, and slid inside, where the air was a cool, dry seventy degrees. The chauffeur shut the door after them, slid behind the wheel, and drove them smoothly to the hotel. It was nearly four in the morning, and the streets were deserted; even a resort city goes to sleep sooner or later.

They had another blast of heat between the car and side entrance of the hotel. They were also put on film, though it didn’t matter, by a team of federal agents concealed in a bakery truck parked on a side road just off the hotel property. It was infra-red film and the faces were blurred, but they already knew who it was they were filming, so there wasn’t any problem about identification. This strip of film would eventually join the strip that had been taken earlier tonight outside Vigano’s home in New Jersey, and the two strips would establish the fact that on this date Anthony Vigano had gone to a meeting with Joseph Bandell. The fact would never mean anything to anybody, but it would have been established and placed on film and filed away, at a cost to the government of forty-two thousand dollars.

Vigano and his bodyguards rode up in the elevator to the twelfth floor, and walked down the corridor to Bandell’s suite, at the end. They went in and Bandell was there with his advisers. “Hello, Tony,” he said.

“Hello, Joe.”

They spent a few minutes in civilities, taking drink orders and asking after one another’s wives and making the couple of introductions necessary; one of Bandell’s assistants was a new man freshly in from Los Angeles, named Stello. There were handshakes and general chitchat.

Bandell was stocky and short and gray-haired, a man in his sixties, wearing a dark suit and a conservative tie. The three men with him were in their thirties or forties, tanned, all dressed casually in the style of a resort town. Everybody deferred to Bandell, who sat alone on a sofa with his back to a picture window. Vigano was the only one present who called him Joe instead of Mr. Bandell, but he too deferred to the older man, in smaller ways.

After three or four minutes, Bandell said, “Well, it’s nice to see you again. I’m glad you phoned. I’m glad you could take the time to come visit.”

He meant the chitchat was done, and he wanted to know the purpose of the trip. Vigano hadn’t attempted to explain anything on the phone, had only suggested he make the trip. (The phone conversation was also in a government file now, at a cost of twenty-three hundred dollars.) Now, in guaranteed privacy, Vigano set aside the drink he’d been given and explained the story of the two possible cops and the twelve-million-dollar stock-market heist.

Bandell interrupted once, saying, “It’s usable paper?”

“They took exactly what I said, Joe. Bearer bonds, in amounts between twenty and a hundred grand.”

Bandell nodded. “All right.”

Vigano went on, explaining the payoff terms he’d agreed to. When he was finished, Bandell pursed his lips and looked across the room and said, “I don’t know. Two million dollars is heavy cash.”

Vigano said, “It’ll be back in the bank within two hours.” Because that was the point of this meeting; he couldn’t draw two million cash on his own say-so, he needed Bandell’s approval.

Bandell said, “Why take it out at all? Use a bag full of newspapers.”

“They aren’t that dumb,” Vigano told him. “The caper they pulled shows how cute they are.”

“Then use a dressed roll,” Bandell said. “Take out a hundred thousand or so.”

Vigano shook his head. “It won’t work, Joe. They’re very cute and very cautious. They’ll have to see the two million before they relax. They’ll reach in and see what’s in the bottom of the basket.”

Bandell said, “How about wallpaper?”

“They already talked about that,” Vigano said. “They’re ready for it.”

Stello, the new man, said, “If they’re that good, how do you know they won’t figure out a way to keep the money?”

“We’ve got the manpower,” Vigano said. “We can smother them.”

Another of Bandell’s assistants said, “Why not leave them alive? If they did this first job so good they can do more.”

“We don’t have anything on them,” Vigano pointed out. “We don’t know who they are, we don’t have any handle on them, and they don’t want to do any more. They were only interested in the one job. They’re amateurs, they said so from the beginning and they acted like it.”

“Smart amateurs,” suggested Stello.

“Granted,” Vigano said. “But still amateurs. Which means they could still make a mistake and get picked up by the law, and that leads right directly from them to me.”

Bandell said, “Are they cops or aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Vigano said. “We tried to find them in the force, we asked around with our tame cops, nobody knows anything. I myself personally looked at mug shots on twenty-six thousand New York City cops, and I didn’t come up with them, but that doesn’t mean anything because the guy came to me in a wig and moustache and eyeglasses, and who knows what he looks like with his normal face?”

Bandell’s other assistant said, “Why didn’t you take the disguise off him when you had him?”

“That was before he pulled the job,” Vigano pointed out. “If I broke his security ahead of time, he never would have gone through with it.”

Bandell said, “What do you think, Tony? You yourself, personally. Are they cops or not cops?”

“I just don’t know,” Vigano told him. “The guy who came to me said he was on the force. They pulled the job in uniform and used a police car for their getaway. But I’ll tell you, I don’t know for sure what the hell they are.”

Stello said, “If they’re cops, maybe it’s not such a good idea to have them hit.”

“If they’re cops especially I want them hit,” Vigano said. “One of them visited me in my own home, remember.”

Bandell said, “If you do it, you do it quietly.”

“Quietly,” Vigano agreed. “But to relax them so I can do it, I need to be able to show them cash.”

Bandell considered, pursing his lips again and staring at a spot in midair. Then he said, “What’s your setup for the changeover?”

Vigano clicked his fingers at Andy, who immediately got to his feet, opened his attaché case, and brought out a map of Manhattan. He opened the map and stood there being a human easel, holding the map so everybody could see it, while Vigano pointed at it to explain the situation.

“I told you they’re cute,” Vigano said, and went over to stand next to the map. “Their idea is,” he said, “that we’ll switch picnic baskets in Central Park next Tuesday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Do you know where the snapper is in that?”

Bandell didn’t want to guess; he was strictly business. “Tell us,” he said.

Vigano said, “Every Tuesday afternoon, Central Park in New York is closed to automobiles.” Gesturing at the map, he said, “There’s nothing allowed in there but bicycles.”

Bandell nodded. “How do you counter?”

“We can’t use cars, but neither can they.” Vigano started touching the map with his finger, explaining it all. “We’ll put a car at every exit from the park. All the way around, here and here and here. Inside, we’ll have our own men on bicycles, all over the place. They’ll be in touch with one another by walkie-talkie, back and forth.” He turned away from the map, held his hand out in front of himself, palm up, and slowly closed his fingers into a fist. “We’ll have the whole park bottled up,” he said.

Stello said, “You’ll have a thousand witnesses.”

“We can smother them,” Vigano said. “When we have them at the spot where we make the switch, we can just surround them with our own people. There won’t be anybody to see a thing, and we carry them the hell out of there afterwards, and nobody going by on bicycles is going to know a thing about it.”

Bandell was frowning at the map. “You have this clear in your mind, Tony? You’re sure of yourself?”

“You know me, Joe,” Vigano said. “I’m a careful man. I wouldn’t get involved in this if I wasn’t sure of myself.”

“And it’s twelve million. In bearer bonds.”

“Just under.” Vigano looked around at them all and said, “It’s a good big pie to slice up.”

Bandell nodded slowly. He said, “You want to take the cash out of our accounts in New York, put it together to make two million, show it to them, and then put the cash right back again.”

“Right.”

“What’s the chance of losing the two million to somebody else?”

Vigano gestured at his young men. “Andy and Mike will be with it all the way. And the other soldiers in the operation don’t have to know what’s in the basket at all.”

Bandell shifted position on the sofa, half-turning so he could look out the picture window behind him. The seconds went by, and he continued to show the room only the back of his head. Vigano gestured to Mike, who quietly folded the map again and put it away. Still Bandell looked out at the city.

Finally he turned back. He gave Vigano a level look and said, “It’s your responsibility.”

Vigano smiled. “Done,” he said.