The Plan

Chapter 62.

THE BLAST KNOCKED OUT SOME OF THE WINDOWS IN THE Bach house. Cole and Ryan had watched from the garage door. One graphic detail would haunt both of them for th e r est of their lives. High above the colony of houses, th e b lack and green hood of the taxi shimmered in the sun, twisting and turning, caught in a terminal updraft. It kite d o ut over the harbor.

"Son of a bitch," Cole said in awe as debris started to rain down in the yard.

Ryan and Cole turned and saw Lucinda standing behind them, her hand to her mouth.

"Let's get moving. We gotta get out of here," Ryan said, coming to his senses first.

They moved back inside the house on rubbery legs, gathered up their things, and stuffed the tapes and film back into the bag. Within a few minutes, they were walking down the long driveway. A small fire had started in the trees and people were beginning to come out of their houses and stare in disbelief at the site of the explosion.

The three of them walked out of the development and finally hitched a ride in the back of a citrus truck.

They rode in silence back to Tel Aviv. All of them were thinking about Kaz.

The corner room at the Carlton seemed littered with Kaz's meager possessions. Lucinda started collecting everything while Cole tried to get Naomi Zur on the phone. It was hard to believe the big, rumpled ex-fed in the Hawaiian shirt was gone. He had saved Ryan's life and Cole's. He had provided them with field savvy none of the rest of them possessed. They felt sad and vulnerable.

Cole finally got one of the Reuters staffers to give him Naomi's home number. She had just stepped out of the shower when she took the call and was dripping water on her floor.

"You need what?" she said to Cole.

"I need to listen to some tapes, transfer some film, and have you get me out of Israel, all as fast as possible."

"Here's how you accomplish that, Cole… First you go to a TV station and pay somebody to transfer the stuff, then you. go to Ben Gurion Airport and you buy a ticket."

"Naomi, my partner was just killed. I may have the biggest story of my career. I'll cut you in, but you have to help me and then smuggle three of us outta here on a private bird."

"Why can't you go commercial?"

"Because, every time we. travel commercial, some goombah hitter is standing outside the gate with an Uzi." "Where are you?"

"We'll come to you. Pick a place."

"There's an entrance for Reuters in the underground garage. Park in one of the yellow spaces, go to the elevator farthest away from the parking stalls. There's a keypad there, punch in the numbers three-six, then PYD. That'll get you in. I'll meet you on the fourteenth floor in twenty-five minutes."

"You're a doll."

"This better be the best damn story since Watergate," she said and hung up.

When she finally heard it, even Naomi, who had covered some of the biggest stories of the decade, knew that, if true, it was huge.

The four of them were sitting in the Reuters conference room and she was looking at Ryan and Lucinda, who she thought looked way too pretty to be players in this drama. She listened to the entire backstory. This time, Cole told her everything, including the fact that Haze Richards was a mob-controlled candidate… The canvas bag had been emptied and the tapes and film were on the conference table between them.

"I can transfer the film to videotape but, shit, Cole, I haven't seen that size audiotape in five years. Engineering could transfer it, but it's gonna take a couple of hours. They're gonna have to send it out."

"No fucking way this tape leaves my sight."

She looked at the reels again. "We turned our seventh-floor library into a stockroom for outdated equipment… Maybe some of the old tape equipment is down there."

"Let's go."

As they headed down the hall to the elevator, Naomi found herself walking next to Lucinda. She looked at the strikingly beautiful girl and wondered what she was made of. "Are you our cheerleader?"

"You should always try to eat a good breakfast. It'll keep you from getting bitchy," Lucinda said, deadpan.

Naomi smiled, thinking that they would get along fine. The four of them got in the elevator and headed down to the seventh floor.

The library was a clutter of old machines, desks, and out-of-date supplies. They finally found a Wollensak tape recorder with no cord. The reels were too small, but the tape size was perfect.

"I can straight-wire it," Ryan said, examining it. "We just gotta pray the tubes are all right."

They got back in the elevator and rode up to fourteen, where Ryan grabbed a desk lamp out of an office and, with his pocketknife, cut the cord off. He used the blade to take the back off the tape machine. He found the female electrical feed, stripped the lamp cord, and attached it to the Wollensak. He wrapped the new connection with Scotch tape and set it down on the conference table.

While he had been doing all of this, Cole had been taking the audiotape off the plastic reel and rewinding it on the smaller reels from the Wollensak. He wound it till it was to the lip and then left the rest of the tape on the conference table, strung out in rows. Ryan plugged in the small reel-to-reel recorder and let out a sigh of relief as the red power light went on.

Cole fed the end of the tape into the little Wollensak. "Okay, Ryan, hit Play and pull it through."

They turned on the tape recorder and, miraculously, the little unit worked. The speakers were more or less blown, giving the recorded phone taps a fuzzy quality, but it was possible to hear everything that was being said. The tape ran past the head, and as Ryan pulled, it spooled out onto the floor. Each tape was vocally slated by the agent monitoring it.

"January sixteen, 1966," a long-ago voice said. "Agent Peter Lawson. This is a wiretap on M. Lansky's Fontainebleau Hotel suite. Day shift, nine A. M.," There was a hiss. Then the same voice came back on. "Day shift, ten A. M. No contacts."

Cole explained that the voice slates every hour were for the log and that he remembered his old research said Meyer often checked into the Fontainebleau under an assumed name to do business.

Then another hiss and suddenly the sound of a phone ringing. Then Meyer's voice came on the phone. The mob financier sounded tired and angry. "Yeah," he sighed into the phone.

"Meyer, it's Augustus. Just checking in. How's Buddy?"

"Buddy is Meyer's son who's in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis," Cole volunteered.

"How's Buddy? Shit, gimme a break with this, will ya?

Fucking guy… fucking moanin' all the time. I got my hands full." And then he screamed, "Hey, Teddy, turn down that radio, will ya?" And then he was back. "Whatta you need, Augie?"

"This line clean?"

"Yeah. I got a guy comes in every morning and sweeps the place."

Cole picked up Ryan's questioning look. "This kind of bug doesn't put out a power charge unless somebody's speaking on the phone. It's voice-activated, so it was missed by debugging equipment. Voice-activated bugs are common now, but back in the seventies, the mob didn't know this shit existed."

The conversation continued… "Meyer, we're having some trouble in Philly with Castanga an' all them fucks up there. Every time I wanna move product, he's got his hand in my pocket and I'm thinkin', this here ain't in the spirit of the agreement, so to speak."

"Look, Augie, I ain't a ref. You should talk to Mo-Mo. He's got good ties with Castanga."

"Fuckin' Giancana. I think Mo is behind this whole thing."

"Okay, okay. Lemme look into it, but if I get this straightened out, you cut me in for a couple a' points." "You was already in, Meyer. You know I wouldn't l eave you in the cold. You're my rabbi in this deal." "Shit," the old mobster said for no apparent reason. "Anyway, I'll call back in a day or so… okay?" "Yeah, sure… a day." And the line went dead, wit h n o good-bye.

Most of the calls were like that. They were just wise guys in dispute with other wise guys or deals that were being set up where Meyer was some kind of traffic cop, sorting out differences. Each tape took about an hour to play, and by the time they were through the second one, they were beginning to lose hope. It was easy to see how these tapes had helped the Israeli Supreme Court deny Meyer's "right of return," but so far, they contained nothing that would tie Meyer, C. Wallace Litman, and Joseph Alo together.

They shut off the machine as a Reuters staff assistant brought in some sandwiches and cold beer that Naomi had ordered.

Cole was beginning to think they had come all this way and had lost Kaz's life for nothing. He still had three cans of sixteen-millimeter film in front of him.

"Why don't you let me have engineering transfer the film to videotape," Naomi said, picking up his black mood. He had been so sure the tapes would confirm their theory. Now they seemed valueless. They still had an hour or more of tape to listen to, so he shoved the film cans across to her and she gave them to the staffer.

"Take these down to Engineering and get them transferred to VHS immediately. And don't let them out of your sight." As soon as the assistant was gone, they started the tape again.

They were listening to conversations from the early seventies. The tape started with a conversation picked up in a private dining room above a strip club in Miami called the Boom-Boom Bazoom Room. The club belonged to the Costa family.

Apparently, there was some dispute over Colombian cocaine distribution in Miami. Miami had always been an open city, but as the drug trade grew, tempers frayed, and when the lead started flying, it got dicey. Meyer was trying to hammer out a truce between the Costas and the Delaricos. The only thing the two families could seem to agree on was that they hated the Colombians more than each other.

"We got a deal all set up with Mendoza," Frankie Costa said in a high, nasal voice. "We supply everything, from the farm to the arm, and these guys in Dade are trying to cut in on our distribution. We got the whole drugstore. Got everything from Early Girl to Mother's Helper. And now, at the last minute, Delarico is trying to make a side deal with my Spanish guys to supply their fucking Peruvian Marching Powder at a premium and it's gonna flood the market. We'll have White Lady comin' out our asses."

Cole widened his eyes. "What's this ravioli talking about?"

"Early Girl is marijuana. Mother's Helper is Valium. Some guys take it along with uppers to level out. Peruvian Marching Powder is Peruvian coke," Ryan explained.

Cole nodded. His body was suddenly very tired as he looked at the tape running through the old Wollensak. Hope diminished as each spent reel leaked magnetic tape onto the floor. Cole began to accept that it was probably all going nowhere.

Then it happened, in a conversation between Meyer Lansky and somebody he called Wally. The monitoring agent was named Lee Stein and the verbal slate said Meyer was at a pay phone across the street from his apartment. The date was January 15, 1971. Stein said the fells had cut into the line from a phone pole a block away. Meyer made his calls from this pay phone, thinking it was absolutely safe and he spoke freely, secure in the belief pay phones couldn't be tapped.

"Did you get the package, Wally?" Meyer's voice came on the line, pinched and flat.

"Sure did, Meyer, just like you said. But we're gonna hold it in the paint company offshore till I need it."

Cole knew that Mary Carver Paints was a shell company and money laundry in the Bahamas that Meyer had set up for the Alo family. Then he recognized C. Wallace Lit-man's voice on the tape. Cole sat up straight. "That's Litman," he whispered. "We could do a voice print, but that's him. This could be it. We could have it."

"Okay, good," Meyer continued. "I think you should level off on the newspapers and radio. We got four chains but I'm much more interested in television."

"I agree, Meyer. I got my eye on United Broadcasting. They're a group of independent stations, but I think they can be bought for the right price. We could expand and create a TV network. We can leverage the buy and I'd r ecommend that, because we're going to need a lot more cash downriver to acquire additional stations and fund programming."

"How much?"

"I'm not sure. Figure media properties right now are trading at multiples of seven, maybe eight. And it's only going to go up. I'd like to dump the radio stuff to help fund the UBC buy. Maybe Paul Arquette could help us in Washington. He could help push the license transfers through the FCC."

"You wanna talk to him, okay. I don't talk to him 'cause Joe Alo wants us to stay away. Don't want no stink on his candidate."

"I'll talk to him. I'm in Washington next week. How's Teddy?" Wallace said, turning the conversation to Meyer's wife, for whom he had a genuine affection.

"She's fine, Wally. And Mrs. Litman?"

Cole's heart was pounding.

"She's fine. You two are gonna have to meet sometime."

"We can't meet. Joseph wants you in the clear. If he puts his man in the White House, you're the one gonna do it. You and your TV network." There was a long moment of silence, then Meyer added, "Once we own the Man, we're gonna put all these fucks in the Justice Department out of business."

"You take care of yourself, Meyer. I hope you're feeling better."

"I feel like shit, but I'm going home to Israel. I applied for citizenship. I'm gonna go home and die in the Promised Land."

Cole reached out and turned off the tape. He looked at the others in the room. They were all holding their breath.

"Son of a bitch," Naomi finally said. "You were right." And then she leaned across the table and kissed him.