The Good Guys Read online

  “No Skinny Al,” O’Brien repeated, writing it firmly in his notebook. He looked up. “Any other Skinnys? Besides this Mike?”

  Ike shot him a challenging look. “That s’posed to be funny?”

  O’Brien had at least a dozen completely unprofessional responses to that very question he had been using since he was a teenager, ranging from a goofy expression to classic punch lines like, “Not as funny as your face.” The shame was that he couldn’t use any of them while on the job. But before he could respond, a young woman poked her head in the door. “Ike, can I use the—” She stopped. “Oops, sorry. Didn’t know you had company.” By the time O’Brien turned around, she was gone.

  Russo answered for him. “Ike, were you here Monday night?”

  He considered it. “I’m always here.” He beamed. “Hey, FBI, take a look around. Well, excuuuuussse me,” he said, doing a truly awful Steve Martin impersonation. “But name me one place any red-blooded American guy would rather be than right here.”

  “Okay. Then you tell me, who made the call?”

  He sighed. “Beats me. I’m telling you, your guess is as good as mine. I spent a lot of time out on the floor and this door’s open . . .”

  Russo nodded agreement. “Sure. Yeah. So let me ask you this one, Ike. Who are your partners in this place?”

  The bank, mostly, he said, laughing. Then he named several other men; the only one whose name was familiar to either O’Brien or Russo was a well-known Manhattan real estate developer. Two of them were Wall Street guys, Ike explained, who used the place to impress investors. Another one was the executive VP of an ad agency, and the last partner was “the faggot son of this rich guy who bought in trying to convince everybody that he’s straight.”

  “Oh, Ikey,” O’Brien said doubtfully, “come on. A cash cow like this place? T&A, maybe a little hooking on the side, watered-down overpriced booze. Smack, snow, weed, whatever the fuck else. Just who the fuck do you think you’re kidding? You really expect us to believe nobody has hooks in here?”

  Ike rolled his cigar stub around his mouth as he glared at O’Brien. Turning to Russo, he said, “Too bad Ed Sullivan’s off the TV. ’Cause your partner’s got some funny act.” Then to O’Brien he repeated coldly, “I said I run a clean place here.”

  O’Brien stood up, knowing he was on the verge of becoming the cliché. “Well, I guess we’re gonna have to find out about that now, aren’t we?”

  Russo also stood. “If we have any more questions, Ike, we’ll be back. And, just one more thing. Your liquor license? Is that in your name? Your real name?”

  As they walked out, Ike was standing behind his desk, glaring at them, muttering to himself. O’Brien paused at the door. “And you know what else?” he said defiantly. “I don’t believe your name really is Ike.” He paused for emphasis, then snarled, “Is it?” Then he practically spit out, “Sid!” He marched out.

  They had just about reached the velvet curtain when Ike shouted after them, “Hey, FBI!” They turned around. He was standing in the doorway, frowning. “Come on back.” When they were again settled in the room, he laid it out for them. “You hear this from me, I’m a fucking dead man, you know that, right?”

  “Okay,” Russo agreed, “it’s a deal.”

  He looked at O’Brien. “How ’bout Bob Hope there?”

  O’Brien nodded. “Whattya got?”

  “It’s mostly like I said, I run a clean place here.” He paused. “You know, considering.”

  “Considering,” O’Brien agreed.

  “No drugs in here, period. The customers or my girls, I’m real strict about that. That other thing, there’s nothing official going on, you know what I mean? But you’re a smart guy, you know the facts of life, you gonna operate in the city you gotta have a name.”

  Russo held her breath. “Of course.”

  Once again Ike rolled his cigar stub around his mouth, closed his eyes, and wiped his forehead with his hand. “I didn’t have much choice.” He inhaled deeply and explained, “Two-Gun Tony comes around pretty much every week. If not him, one of his people. I give him whatever I give him, usually between four and five Gs. I’ve never had one problem.” He paused, waiting.

  Neither O’Brien nor Russo made a sound. Within seconds Ike leaped into the silence. “He was around Monday night with a few of his people. They come in the office, I go out on the floor. If somebody made a phone call, it was one of them.” He finally took the cold stub out of his mouth and squashed it into an Off Limitsashtray. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Russo told him, “I think that’s it.” She looked at O’Brien. “You?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  As they stood up, Russo promised, “We got your back.”

  Ike chuckled ruefully. “I sure hope so.”

  Once again they had just about reached the velvet curtain when Ike shouted for their attention. “Hey!” And once again they stopped and turned. “It’s Arthur,” he said, and stepped back inside.

  They ended up in a booth against the back wall at Odeon, making lists and diagrams on a paper tablecloth, drawing lines between names, constructing timelines, reviewing O’Brien’s notes, trying to find the pattern they just knew had to be there. They had added one really important piece of information earlier that night: The phone call from Cosentino had caused Gradinsky to pack a bag and get out quick. They now had pretty solid evidence that their original theory was right: Columbia University Slavic Languages Professor Peter Gradinsky was the connection between Two-Gun Tony Cosentino’s Bath Street crew and the Russian mob, at least Vaseline and Barney Ruble. Natalie Speakman put him with the Russians, Ike/Arthur tied him to Cosentino. The obvious assumption had to be that he was working as an interpreter for the Italians. It certainly couldn’t be the other way around, O’Brien pointed out over the Death by Chocolate, since Gradinsky didn’t speak Italian and it didn’t seem likely the Russians would need a Russian translator.

  The fact that Cosentino was putting pressure on San Filippo to find the professor before Thursday night was a pretty good indication the two groups were planning to meet later in the week. Natalie had even given them some vague idea of where these meetings generally took place. The big questions were why: Why were they meeting and why was the professor on the run?

  That’s pretty much what Connor was still trying to figure out as he sat in Slattery’s office the next morning with his eyes closed. Why and why?

  But he snapped back to attention the moment he heard Bobby Blue Eyes’ voice on the recorder respond to some question, “I don’t know, open a gas station maybe.”

  He glanced at Russo, who was looking at him, and saw the beginning of a smile forming on her lips. Either she was thinking about her Russian gas jockey or she was beginning to see the pattern too. “Open a gas station” is not the punch line of too many jokes.

  All the friendly banter and the laughter in the office subsided as they listened to Bobby laying out his plan to hijack a fuel delivery truck. Organized crime at work. Slattery informed them, “This is all yesterday. The hijacking was supposed to take place last night. We’re trying to track it down, we’re talking to all the companies, but so far we haven’t got anything.” When Bobby finished describing the job, Slattery shut off the tape recorder. “That’s pretty much it.”

  “Boy oh boy,” one of the other agents joked about Benny Rags as he left Slattery’s office, “I’ve heard of the Wailing Wall, but that was the first time I ever actually heard it.”

  When the other agents were gone, Slattery closed his door. O’Brien and Russo had remained on the couch. He sat down across the coffee table from them. And smiled knowingly. “I know something you two don’t,” he said.

  O’Brien took a guess. “You found Judge Crater?”

  “Better,” Slattery promised, “much better.”

  “Who’s Judge Crater?” Russo asked, looking from O’Brien to Slattery. Her whole body sagged. “Please. Don’t tell me somebody else is missi
ng now?”

  Connor explained, “He’s this New York legend. Joseph Force Crater. He was a state supreme court justice who walked out of his office one afternoon in 1930 and nobody ever saw him again.”

  “That’s the legend,” Slattery agreed, “but the fact is that ole Judge Crater ended up in a herring barrel tossed into the East River. A mobster, Red something, killed him for beating up the guy’s sister, who was a hooker.”

  “That for real?” O’Brien asked, impressed.

  Slattery nodded. “Scout’s honor. They worked it in this office for fun about forty years ago. There’s a file around here somewhere. But I got something a lot better than that for you.” He stood up and returned to the security of his own desk. When you work on an investigation, you never know which single piece of the puzzle is going to make all the difference. So, like Connor O’Brien, you collect everything and you just keep hoping you get lucky. “Remember when they went to put the tap on Gradinsky’s phone, they found out somebody was already listening to him?”

  “Cosentino?” O’Brien figured.

  Slattery slowly and knowingly shook his head from side to side. “That’s what I figured too. Or at least somebody from the family. But I was wrong.” One of the least-known departments in the Federal Bureau of Investigation is ERF, Engineering Research Facilities. Through the years it’s had several different names and been moved around a lot in the organizational structure, but it’s always done an extraordinary job providing technical services to agents in the field. These are the guys who plant the microphones and the surveillance cameras and all the other devices the bureau uses in its investigations. “I’ll tell you what, I didn’t even know they could do this, but they traced it backwards. They found out where it was . . . um . . .” Slattery had never been particularly adept at technical descriptions, gravitating toward “whatchamacallits” and “whoozits” rather than the correct terminology. He waved his hands through the air. “Whatever it is they do, that’s what they did.”

  It was not a particularly difficult feat of engineering, but it was very clever. The technicians traced the wire back to its point of origin, put a wire on that wire, and called the telephone company service number to find out that number. This was long before the availability of Google or any of the other search engines that allow you to type in a phone number to find out to whom it belongs and where it’s located. Law enforcement has long relied on the extremely limited-circulation reverse phone book, a phone book arranged numerically, to track a phone number. Slattery picked up a sheet of paper and asked, “Ever hear of the G&C Corporation?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Russo said.

  “The fucking Russians,” O’Brien said, disbelieving. “They were on to Gradinsky the whole time.”

  Russo was trying to sort out the details in her mind. “How did they find him? I don’t get it.”

  “Who knows?” Slattery replied. “There’s a million ways. These people have money, they have resources, and apparently they’ve got a lot to protect. When someone they can’t identify starts showing up at important meetings, they’re going to be curious. They got a lot at stake. You figure they’ll do whatever’s necessary to find out who he is. You ask me, I think there’s a pretty good chance that’s the Skinny Al connection.”

  O’Brien just couldn’t believe it. “We were right there, at G&C. It’s a gas station in Brighton Beach. We were there.”

  Slattery picked up a copy of their report. “I know, I read about it.” He paused and licked his lips and said very quietly, “There’s something else I want you people to hear.” He walked around his desk and handed them copies of a six-page document. “The techies went a little further for us. They tapped the tappers.” He chuckled. “Don’t ask me how. I still think it’s a miracle when I flip a switch and a light goes on, but those guys put a reverse wire on the Russians’ phone. This is a translation of a conversation that took place last night. Hot off the old Xerox.”

  When the bureau chooses to focus its resources on a specific investigation or individual, extraordinary progress can be made very quickly. Even with all its well-publicized flaws, the FBI remains the finest crime-fighting agency in the world. Apparently the bureau had had a freelance Russian translator provide a translation. Actually the document consisted of transcriptions of three separate telephone conversations. The first and third conversations were in English, the middle conversation in Russian.

  “This first call was made from the office of a parking lot in the Bronx,” Slattery continued. “It’s a place for truckers to leave their rigs for a few days till they get a load. We’ve got it under surveillance now.” He locked a large plastic reel onto the recorder and turned it on. A male caller identified himself as “Sean from the parking lot.” The recipient of the call was an unidentified male. It was obvious from his thick accent that he was an Eastern European, presumably Russian. Sean said he was afraid he had some bad news. “The truck didn’t show up,” he explained. Instead, he said, a “real nice-dressed guy” had appeared at the front gate and told him the truck was being held, and if the owners wanted it back, they had to call a phone number—Sean slowly repeated the number for emphasis—at noon the following day.

  “That’s the Freemont,” Russo said when she heard the number.

  “Hats,” O’Brien added. “You heard the guy say he was well dressed. It’s got to be him.”

  Sean reported that the man had given him two hundred dollars to pass along the message and wondered if there was any assistance he could offer. The Russian asked fewer questions than either O’Brien or Russo might have anticipated, leading them to conclude that he had a pretty good idea who had hijacked his truck. He didn’t even seem to be particularly upset or angry. When asked for a description of the man, Sean was somewhat vague, explaining that it was pretty dark and there was a gate between them. But the few things he mentioned accurately described Bobby San Filippo. The Russian ended the conversation dispassionately, reminding Sean that a driver would be there later that evening to pick up the second truck.

  “This next one’s all in Russian,” Slattery told them as he snapped on the second reel. “It was placed from the G&C office to a rental apartment in Brighton Beach currently occupied by a man named”—he searched the document for a name and found it—“Vasily Kuz . . . Kuznetzov.”

  “Vaseline,” Russo said to O’Brien. Then to Slattery, “We know him. That’s one of the people Gradinsky was meeting with.”

  This conversation was quite brief. According to the transcription, the as-yet-unidentified caller asked Kuznetzov if he was awake. “Yes,” he said, “very much.” Calmly the caller explained that “a big truck has been taken (hijacked).” He then told Kuznetzov to “go to the apartment and get the (UNI),” meaning unintelligible. He was then to “bring her to the company.”

  Kuznetzov asked if this had to be done immediately. “Yes, right now,” he was told. Kuznetzov could then be heard telling someone that he “must leave to do some work.” In response an unidentified female in the background shouted something in Russian, which was indicated on the transcription as unintelligible.

  Slattery took a deep breath as he took the second tape off the reel and put on the third tape. “This next one’s pretty rough,” he warned. “We know who this call’s to. We got it from both places.” It is not uncommon for someone to use a tapped phone to call someone who is also speaking on a tapped phone. In this instance the call was made to the social club, which itself was bugged. “This is from the Russian phone.” Slattery hit the play button. “Bobby?” the Russian said.

  Bobby’s voice: “What?”

  “So listen, we got your fucking message.”

  “Jesus,” Russo said. She looked at Slattery, who nodded.

  “Look at that, Bobby grabbed their truck,” O’Brien said. “Unbeliev—”

  He was cut off by a long, seemingly inhuman scream, preserved crisply and forever by the most sophisticated recording equipment then available. According to FBI lore,
there is a repository of tapes designated “sensitive,” which are never to be made available to the general public. Supposedly this collection includes a recording made by the serial killer on whom Thomas Harris’ memorable Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter was based, describing in detail each of his actions while skinning a living human being; a tape made by an individual who hides patiently outside his former home while waiting for his ex-wife to get there, then records when the woman arrives and is beaten to death; and several recordings made by people in the process of committing suicide. This Russian tape would surely end up in this repository.

  The scream lasted less than five seconds. When Slattery turned off the tape recorder, the silence in the room lasted much longer than that. “Jesus,” Russo said again, this time almost a whisper.

  “We haven’t identified the victim yet,” Slattery said professionally, avoiding eye contact. He removed the tape. “The tape we got from the social club goes on several seconds longer.”

  “That’s all right,” O’Brien said, “I think we get the idea.”

  “Go ahead and play it,” Russo said, then looked at O’Brien sternly. “I want to hear it.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Using the tape recorder’s time counter, Slattery fast-forwarded the fourth tape to a point several seconds from the end. Still long enough to feel the victim’s agony. On this tape the scream seemed quite distant, muffled, but no less horrific. Then they heard the Russian hanging up, which was followed by several seconds of room tone, and finally someone asking, “What the fuck was that?” And then gently replacing the receiver.

  This tape, made by the listeners in the Country Club, continued for several additional minutes. After the phone call had been completed, the voice asked again, “What the fuck was that?”

  Bobby responded weakly, “That motherfucking Russian.”

  “The gas truck guy? I figured,” the second man said, anxiety growing in his voice. “But I mean, what was that screaming? What the fuck was that all about? Bobby, tell me that wasn’t Ronnie.”