The Mayor of Lexington Avenue

Forty

Jack’s “opportunity” finally arrived two months later.

He had inherited an aggressive young lawyer named Todd Hamilton, who had been with the office for two years before Jack took over. Hamilton had all the makings of a potential superstar in the business. He was smart, articulate, handsome-and had one gigantic pair of cojones. Although he’d grown tired of prosecuting the usual small-town felonies, instead of packing his bags and heading for the big city, he’d stayed put and dug deep to find the corrupt underbelly of Cobb County. He was already in the thick of a major investigation when Jack was appointed.

As Miami, Fort Lauderdale and the Palm Beaches grew and grew and grew, real estate developers began to run out of the necessary dirt to churn their profits. They couldn’t go south or east: It was hard to build condominiums and single-family homes in the Atlantic Ocean. They couldn’t go north: Everything up to Fort Pierce and Vero was pretty much built out. So they did what Horace Greeley had suggested to a much different crowd about a hundred years before-go west! Even west created some problems, however, because of a rather large freak of nature called the Everglades. But just north of the Everglades was Lake Okeechobee, and it wasn’t long before the land around the lake started popping up on radar screens as prime property for future development. Developers began to gobble up acreage at bargain-basement prices. Few people noticed. Unfortunately for the buyers, Todd Hamilton was one of the people who did.

There are always a few minor start-up problems when converting a basically rural area into a sub-sub-sub-suburb of the metropolis-minor irritants such as land-use, zoning and environmental regulations that must be removed. Politicians need to be paid off at the state and local level, and environmental regulators need to be taken care of. Zoning officials and city and county code enforcement officers have to get their cut as well, although theirs is usually quite a bit smaller because of their position in the food chain. The big dogs eat first.

While everybody was feeding at the public trough, Todd Hamilton was taking notes and following the money trail. By the time he approached Jack about convening a grand jury to start handing out indictments, Hamilton could trace money flowing from four separate companies that had purchased land in Cobb County to the personal bank accounts of state senators and representatives, state environmental commission employees, and assorted other parasites-to the tune of millions of dollars. He could also show where zoning restrictions had been removed and permits had been granted in protected wetland areas and estuaries without any valid basis.

Jack was ecstatic when Todd presented his evidence to him, but not for the obvious reasons. Jack had known all along that the biggest impediment to bringing Wesley Brume and Clay Evans to justice was getting an indictment from a grand jury. In Florida, a state attorney can prosecute most crimes by information, which basically means that the state attorney has the discretion to determine whether there is probable cause to charge someone with a crime. The only time a state attorney is required to get an indictment, a finding of probable cause from a grand jury, is when the potential punishment is death. Since Jack intended to charge both Evans and Brume with first-degree murder, he would have to have a grand jury convened to get an indictment-and there was the rub. The chief judge of the circuit court would have to convene the grand jury, and the chief judge of Cobb County-the only circuit judge in Cobb County-was Bill Sampson, Jack’s predecessor as state attorney. Bill Sampson would never convene a grand jury to consider the indictment of Clay Evans, a sitting federal judge, and Wesley Brume, a chief of police.

While grand juries must be the source of indictments in first-degree murder cases, they can be convened for any type of felony and often are asked to issue indictments for high-profile crimes like the corruption case Todd Hamilton was investigating. A grand jury indictment in such a case shields the state attorney from charges of unfairness or playing politics or things of that nature. Bill Sampson would have no problem convening a grand jury to investigate corruption. Once the grand jury was in place, however, Jack could ask them to issue an indictment in any case he wanted. This was the “opportunity” he had told Pat he was waiting for.

Still, he waited until the grand jury had been in session for a month before he told Todd Hamilton that they were going to take a break from his case for a few days to present another case.

The proverbial shit was about to hit the fan.