Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

THE METROPOLITAN DETENTION Center was a surprisingly small building with a brown brick exterior. The MDC was built in the 1970s and it was anonymous, with no signs announcing its name or purpose. Only its narrow and widely spaced windows with wire meshing suggested from the outside that it might be a prison.

Internally it was an extraordinary building. Its official purpose as a prison was to act as a short-term and secure facility for three hundred men and as many as fifty women who were federal prisoners and who, because a judge had determined that they posed a risk of danger or a threat of flight, were denied bail. Anyone who was in MDC was not guilty; men and women were held there, often for months, because they had been indicted on serious federal crimes and not released on any form of bail while waiting for their trials.

MDC was attached by an intricate series of tunnels, suspended walkways and other outwardly invisible avenues to the three closely adjacent federal courthouses and to the adjoining building, the office of the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, so that the prisoners could easily and secretly be moved to the courthouses for appearances before judges or trials. As soon as a person was convicted, he or she was bundled out of the MDC and sent to one of the more than seventy regular prisons around the country that kept the thousands of people convicted of federal felonies.

There were traditional conference rooms in the MDC where lawyers could meet with their inmate clients. They were not comfortable rooms but they were well-known to the lawyers who used them. But there were a few other, entirely unknown rooms, even more medieval than the rest of the prison. They were known as the “rubber hose rooms” and only a few of the federal marshals who ruled MDC knew where they were. They were only the size of large closets.

And they were nothing like the more conventional conference rooms in the adjoining, far more comfortable U.S. Attorney’s office where Tony Garafalo had one day earlier met with the two government lawyers and the six or seven bemused federal agents. Instead, in this secret room, Tony Garafalo stood against one of the walls, his hands and feet shackled to the wall.

He waited in the almost total darkness for two minutes. Nothing like this, not even several weeks in solitary confinement at the Supermax prison in Colorado, had ever happened to him. And, in these two minutes, probably for the first time in his life, he felt fear.

Tony heard the three iron locks to the door slide in quick intervals from left to right. Gina Carbone entered the cell. He knew that only because for the briefest moment her tall shape formed a black silhouette against the empty dim hallway. She slid the iron door closed.

Gina turned on the small halogen flashlight she carried. She trained the beam, which was as bright as the sun, into his eyes.

Tony said, “Hey, babe, didn’t know you were into S and M.”

“Once a wiseass always a wiseass.”

“You talk too much.”

“Think so? I never said a word to you about my company business,” she answered. “Somehow you got into my cell phone and computer. Where did they teach you to get to be a computer genius? Not at Supermax, right?”

“You gonna unlock me from this shit? It is unconstitutional. Right there in the Eighth Amendment. No cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Now you’re Alan Dershowitz?”

“At least stop shining that friggin’ light in my face.”

“Don’t worry. You’re still as good looking as ever.”

She kept the intense, single focus beam on his face. “You didn’t get away with it, you know?”

“I did, and you know it, babe, and you know why.”

“I have great forensics people. You’re too stupid to know that. They’re issuing a report to the world that the tape the little Indian put out was a forgery. He spliced it all together. It was phony-like you. You know those Indians? And those Indians, unlike a cheap bum like you, are geniuses when it comes to tech stuff.”

“You’re dreaming this all up, babe.”

“And the Indian reporter never laid eyes on Gabriel Hauser in his life. The guy on the bench was one of my people, a great actor and look-alike of a guy, the Angel of Life, Mr. Gandhi had only seen on TV.”

Garafalo laughed.

Gina Carbone laughed, too, the sardonic laugh, the mocking chuckle she had learned from her Gambino family uncle. It was, Tony realized, the chuckle he’d learned when an order was given from a family consigliere to do bad things to someone. This was the first time in his life he felt, and knew he felt, real fear.

“Babe,” he said, “we’ve fucked in a lot of different places. How about here? Nobody’s looking.”

“And those agents you talked to yesterday. Never happened. You know the drill. You never left your cell. Not yesterday, not today.”

“You know, Gina, you were always a crazy broad. I’m going to keep on talking. Maybe I’ll write a book. Make a million bucks.”

“With your heart condition? I don’t think so.”

Tony closed his eyes. But the membranes that were his eyelids could not stop the glare. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t tell me all those good doctors at Supermax didn’t have all those long talks with you about how your heart valves were shot to hell? How they told you they would have you flown to that prison hospital in Texas for surgery to replace the valves? I just had all their reports e-mailed to me. I felt real bad for you. I never knew anything was wrong.”

“Gina, you’re full of shit. That fucking Usain Bolt guy wishes he had my heart.”

“That’s what you kept on telling the doctors. You said, and it’s in their notes, that you had the heart of Usain Bolt.”

“You should know that. I could pump you for two hours easy without breaking a sweat.”

“I got the notes, Tony. They’re the only notes, all copies are deleted.” She paused and turned off the intense flashlight. “You won’t be the first fifty-four-year-old inmate to die in the federal prison system of a heart attack. You were always a stubborn Wop who thought he knew everything.”

Two hours later, in the solitary confinement cell where John Gotti and other celebrity prisoners were held while awaiting trial, Tony Garafalo was dead of a heart attack. There was nothing the two new prison doctors could do to save him.