Hammerhead Ranch Motel

3

The Diaz Boys didn’t exactly outlive everybody. There was this one other guy.

Harvey Fiddlebottom kept telling himself he had to get out of the cocaine business.

Since the salad days of the 1980s, Fiddlebottom had branched out into the comparatively harmless fields of wire fraud, election tampering and stolen car parts. But his voracious greed-streak kept bringing him back. Fiddlebottom had mixed luck in the trafficking business. His deals regularly went awry. On the other hand, he always came out alive.

He sat by the pool at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel and read a newspaper article about another shipment of cocaine intercepted on I-75. To Fiddlebottom, it was a hundred-thousand-dollar loss. Goddamn the Diaz Boys! He had let them talk him into it again. He threw the paper down in disgust.

“I’ve got to get out of the cocaine business!”

Harvey Fiddlebottom’s name belied his brutality. He hadn’t always been a tough guy, but his name made it inevitable. It had that certain musical texture that invited daily butt-kickings from his classmates. By senior year they had created a monster. Violent threats, school hall beatings, weapons charges. After his expulsion, Fiddlebottom decided he needed a fresh start, a bigger gun and a new name. It had to be a special name. Something to command respect, strike fear. One word, like Cher. He grabbed an old city map of Pensacola and read down the street index until he found something he could live with. He filed the necessary papers with the county clerk. The former Harvey Fiddlebottom walked out of the courthouse, puffed up his chest and strolled back into life a new man. The new man swore he’d kill anyone who called him by his old name. From now on, he would only answer to Zargoza.

Zargoza got into the drug business in the mid-1980s. The Diaz Boys needed a mole for a piece of disposable real estate. Tommy Diaz had gone to Tampa High School with Zargoza and remembered his brutal tendencies from senior year. Banging taunting kids’ heads into walls. Now that was style.

They knocked on the door of his second-floor apartment on grimy Hillsborough Avenue. Zargoza opened up shirtless, wearing blue boxer shorts with smiling sharks, hair uncombed, eyes not ready for the light of day, gun in hand.

“Hey, Fiddlebottom, we got a proposition for you,” said Tommy Diaz.

Zargoza raised his pistol and the Diaz Boys pulled theirs. Point-blank, standing against the rusted turquoise balcony railing, afternoon traffic going by.

“Nobody calls me by that name anymore! From now on, it’s Zargoza!”

“Zargoza what?” asked Tommy.

“It’s like Cher,” said Zargoza.

“Zargoza Bono?”

“No, you fucking idiot! Just Zargoza.”

But the gun and the cursing were a language the Diaz Boys understood and respected, and they told him he was the right man for the job.

“We’ll call you Carmen Miranda if it makes you happy,” said Tommy. He handed Zargoza a thick brown envelope and Zargoza peeked inside.

For eighteen months, Zargoza managed the rundown Hammerhead Ranch Motel on the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg. After three successful shipments of cocaine, the Diaz Boys moved on to new property and gave Zargoza the motel deed as a tip.

Hammerhead Ranch was falling apart, but that was its charm. The entrance was the gate of an Old West corral-two upright posts connected at the top by a wooden plank with the name of the motel and the cattle brand “HR” burned in a circle. In the middle of the plank was the stuffed head of a hammerhead shark with a rope lasso around its neck. The motel was a single-story L-shaped ranch house. The building stayed white, but the color of the trim changed every other year. Pink, blue, yellow, orange, seafoam green. It was originally the Golden Palm Inn, built in 1961, then the Coconut Grove, the Whispering Palms Lodge, the Econo-Palm Motor Court and Herb’s Triple-X Honeymoon Hideaway (“in the palms”). Then the owners got back from a trip through Texas on Route 66. They’d driven by Amarillo and seen the ten half-buried cars at the landmark Cadillac Ranch, and the rest is roadside Florida kitsch history. The owners contacted charter fishermen and taxidermy shops and in three months had purchased ten stuffed hammerhead sharks, which they planted in a row behind the swimming pool.

The owners thought it would increase business, but it only increased the number of people who stopped, posed for snapshots and drove off.

As the nineties dawned, Zargoza saw the beginning of the end of cocaine. The Diaz Boys did not. Zargoza diversified, and in five years he had parlayed his drug proceeds into enough savvy criminal enterprises that he pulled even in wealth and stature to the Diaz Boys. As the nineties waned, the only reason Zargoza would buy into a coke run anymore was uncontrollable avarice and the sporadic favor he owed the Diaz Boys in return for having used their muscle to limber up stubborn clients. And, though nobody would admit it, they liked to hang out together, mainly to bust each other’s balls for old times’ sake. Surviving fraternity brothers, the Last of the Mohicans. Sometimes they drank at the motel bar and sometimes they drag-raced after midnight around the bay.

Zargoza had a small chop shop in Ybor City and a hand in a nursing home Medicare scam, but most recently he concentrated on the boiler room telephone bunco operation he had set up at Hammerhead Ranch. He gutted and connected the last four rooms of the motel into a giant office and furnished it with military surplus desks, telephones, copiers and postal meters. Zargoza’s callers worked sucker lists that cost up to fifteen bucks a name. The room hummed with the overlapping patter of con men.

“This is your lucky day, Mrs. Castiglioni! You’re our grand prize winner. Now just give us your credit card number so we can verify eligibility and pay our modest processing fee…”

“No, you won’t wait to ask your husband when he comes home, and we won’t wait either, Mrs. Shoemaker, because this offer is only good for the next five minutes! You’re not a loser, you’re a winner! And your husband will be so proud of you. Now, I want you to start reading that credit card number when I count to three. One…two…”

“You’re king of the world, Mr. Boudreau! This is your big day! Do you believe in God, Mr. Boudreau?…Good, because God wants you to get out that credit card…”

The con men made regular runs to the coffee machine but didn’t pour any coffee. Zargoza may have been against the drug business, but not drugs, and he provided his phone operators with an unlimited supply of complimentary cocaine. It was an expensive experiment, but Zargoza immediately saw profits spike due to increasingly predatory salesmanship.

“Feeding them coke was the smartest thing I ever did,” Zargoza told Tommy Diaz as he gave a tour of the operation. “Look at ’em intimidating those old bastards. Check out that satanic sparkle in their eyes. You don’t get that from Folgers.”

Zargoza stopped at the coffee stand and dipped a flat wooden stirring stick in a pile of white powder. He stuck it under his nose and snorted.

His arms flew out, and he fell against the wall, shattering a full-length motel mirror. He pawed at his stinging nose like a dog that just stuck his snout in a fire-ant hole.

“Jesus! Who put the fucking nondairy creamer in the cocaine jar?”

“Sorry, Z,” said one of the phone men. “The coke’s in that other jar today.”

“Let’s get some labels on this stuff. God knows what’s in Coffee-mate!”

“Sure thing, Z.”

Zargoza turned to Tommy. “You got to get out of cocaine, man. It’s passé. It’s just not chic anymore. Brings too much heat. Now, wire fraud-that’s where it’s at.

“We send out fake insurance invoices and credit card bills. We scare old people into buying home security systems that we get at Radio Shack for a fifth the price-say stuff like ‘Did you know Mrs. Crabtree on the next street was anally raped by winos?’ We mark up water-filtration systems eight hundred bucks, tell the old bags they need it or they’ll grow kidney stones like avocados.

“For a while we took out second mortgages on houses we didn’t own. Amazingly easy. Get a fake driver’s license, find a nice home and start calling mortgage brokers. The business is so competitive they almost make you take the money at gunpoint. They Xerox your license and hand you the cashier’s check. They don’t even take you to the house to make sure you have the keys. So you cash out the check and you got a month’s head start until the homeowner gets a new payment book in the mail and calls the mortgage company and says, ‘What the hell’s this?’”

Tommy Diaz nodded approvingly.

“The key is not to get too greedy in any one scheme,” continued Zargoza. “I’ve survived through diversification-getting out of every scam just a little bit early, before the authorities catch on. Since it’s not violent crime, the complaints have to reach a critical mass in some government office before it comes off the back burner. By spreading out the scams, you spread out the complaints… I tell ya, this new generation coming up”-he made a dismissive wave of his arm-“they reject many lucrative areas of crime simply because they’re not glamorous enough.”

They walked by a table where a man sat hunched over cartons of eggs working with a counterfeit USDA ink stamp.

“I still got the chop shop in Ybor City, to anchor the portfolio, but otherwise I’m only expanding in the white-collar sector,” Zargoza told Tommy. He reached into a file and handed Tommy Diaz a document from the secretary of state’s office.

“Amalgamated Eclectic Inc., a Florida corporation,” said Tommy, reading the fine official certificate. “Impressive.”

“Wait till you hear about my latest venture. Sweepstakes. Look at this great mailer! Big letters: ‘YOU’VE WON MILLIONS!!!’ Gets ’em every time. I was receiving the offers so often myself that I figured they had to be making money.”

“Who’s this in the little picture on the mailer?” asked Tommy Diaz.

“Some has-been personality. I figured I needed a celebrity endorsement. All the stars these old people remember-they’re nobodies today. You can get ’em to endorse anything real cheap.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought this all out,” said Tommy.

“You know the best part? You meet a much better class of people in this line of work. In the drug business everyone’s a backstabbing scumbag looking to rip you off or turn you in. But in telephone fraud, your victims are all sweet, polite, law-abiding citizens who would never think of taking advantage of you. Why can’t everyone be like that?”

The two stared out the back window in quiet contentment and watched a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the sides pull up to the motel office.