The Good Guys Read online

  “Who the hell is that?” asked FBI Special Agent Connor O’Brien, nodding toward the state-of-the-art TEK speakers. Every word spoken in the club was being recorded.

  “Which one,” wondered his new partner, Laura Russo, “Abbott or Costello?”

  “The first one, the linguistics genius.”

  She checked her notes. “That is one Mr. Edward Peter LaRocca, a.k.a. Little Eddie, Eddie Black, Crazy Eddie.” She looked up at O’Brien. “The original Crazy Eddie.”

  “What’s he got, a cold?” O’Brien asked as he walked into the tiny kitchen. “That doesn’t sound like him. Hey, you want something to drink?”

  Russo stood up and stretched. From habit more than necessity her eyes stayed riveted on the front of the social club. “They leave any of my mineral water in there?”

  “They” being Team II of the agents working the stakeout of the Freemont Avenue Social Club. Twenty-four-hour surveillance operations like this one required two or sometimes three teams rotating around the clock. As many as six people shared the one-bedroom apartment, which made it hard for anyone to keep their own food or drinks in the refrigerator. Maybe the question asked most often in the apartment was, “Who left the butter out?”

  Believe me, there are very few assignments you can get in the FBI as boring as sitting on a wire. In this particular case, using information provided by an undercover agent who had successfully infiltrated the crew run by Henry Franzone—apparently stolen goods were being sold inside the social club—the bureau had obtained a warrant to bug the place. Among the stolen items the undercover agent had “personally witnessed being sold” were Banlon shirts. As much as anything else, though, this was an intelligence-gathering operation—although a lot of agents who have worked organized crime would tell you that what they heard could not properly be called intelligence.

  Usually these assignments consisted of long hours spent listening to bullshit conversations, hoping to find a single nugget of useful information buried in a mine of boredom. Early in my career as an FBI agent, long before I went undercover inside the Mafia as a small-time jewel thief named Donnie Brasco, I spent what seemed like an eternity listening to old wiretaps, reading reports, and watching surveillance tapes to try to get to know how these people thought and spoke and moved. Combined with the education I received growing up on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, this was the beginning of my education into the world of organized crime. I understand that some people might think it’s exciting to be eavesdropping on real live gangsters who don’t know they’re being tapped or taped. It isn’t. It wears real thin real quick.

  Being an FBI agent is not the thrill-a-minute job portrayed by TV and movie producers. It’s an always interesting, occasionally exciting job in a mammoth bureaucracy. The fact is that most agents spend most of their time collecting information. Everything from conducting interviews for government security clearances to picking up and analyzing bomb fragments in Africa. It’s a career of watching and listening and tailing and interviewing, endlessly interviewing, gathering a mountain of information and trying to transform it into a molehill of evidence.

  Being on-site in an observation or listening post is among the most tedious of all assignments. It consists of little more than endless hours spent watching and waiting for something to happen. Sometimes the most exciting thing that happens during an eight-hour shift is a pizza delivery. In organized crime investigations much of the time the people you’re watching know they’re being watched. They may not know exactly where you are, but they know they’re being watched. And we know they know we’re watching. In the old days agents used to be assigned to specific individuals for years at a time and the agent and the subject would actually get to know each other. On occasion they would even speak to each other. Everybody knew the rules and respected them.

  The listening posts, observation posts, whatever you want to call them, are not what you would describe as immaculate. Probably “unbelievably filthy” would be more accurate. The way it used to be was that you had a small area with four to six men living there around the clock. Nobody was responsible for keeping it clean, so that’s who took care of it. Early in my career I was working the Hijack Truck Squad and we were watching warehouses in New Jersey and Brooklyn. I guess I was a little more concerned about cleanliness than the other agents: I would take the garbage out once a month whether it needed to be taken out or not. One time, I remember, my partner pointed at a plate of melted butter on the table and said with disgust, “That butter’s been sitting out since April.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked. “What year?” That’s how bad it used to get sometimes.

  Things did get a little better when they started adding female agents to the teams. Some of these women were tough—they insisted that their partners pick up after themselves. This particular apartment was known as the Country Club. That was a joke. This apartment was as much like a country club as Sinatra was a heavy-metal singer.

  It was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. The building had to be at least eighty years old. New wiring had been installed to support the high-tech equipment the agents needed, but there had been no reason to upgrade the plumbing or the heating. The good news was that the plumbing and the heating banged and rattled and hissed only when they worked, which at best was erratically.

  The Country Club exuded all the charm and style that the General Accounting Office could provide. It had one couch, an uneasy chair, and a kitchen set—a table with four wooden chairs that had been confiscated in a drug raid. A television and a transistor radio that had been provided by an agent assigned there for more than a year were known as the entertainment center. The tiny kitchen contained a refrigerator that dated from Eisenhower and a well-used microwave. Even the bravest of the agents wouldn’t dare look at whatever life was going on behind the refrigerator.

  But for Agents O’Brien and Russo this was home and office, eight to twelve hours a day, five and on occasion six days a week. On this particular afternoon they were a little more attentive than usual because two days earlier the body of a made member of the Genovese crime family had been found in the trunk of a stolen Ford coupe under the Williamsburg Bridge. What was unusual was that before he was killed, he’d been burned with cigarettes on his face, inside both ears, and on his prick and balls. Additionally both arms and one leg had been crushed almost flat by some extremely heavy object. This guy had been tortured, which was not the way the mob usually conducted business. The best guess was that the somebody who did him wanted to get some information from him pretty badly. The questions of the day were, who was that somebody and what type of information were they looking for? Was it family business? This seemed more like the way the ethnic groups, people like the Westies, a group of Irish crazies who controlled Hell’s Kitchen, or the Colombians or even the newcomers, the Russians, who were trying to build a nasty reputation, did things.

  There was a pretty good chance that this killing would be the primary topic of conversation in every social club in New York. Just like when there’s a big fire, that’s all firemen talk about in the firehouses; when there’s a mob killing, that’s what they talk about in the social clubs. So Little Eddie got Russo’s attention when he started whining about the latest job—finding an unknown individual without being provided sufficient background information. “Just listen to him,” she said, shaking her head with wonder. “I never heard anybody complain so much.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” O’Brien said loudly from the kitchen. “That’s what they’re experts at, complaining. When they don’t have anything to complain about, they complain about not having anything to complain about.” He popped open a bottle of mineral water and asked, “You want some ice with your water?”

  “No thanks.”

  O’Brien noticed that when Russo shook her head, her tied-back light brown ponytail rolled sensually from side to side. They’d been working together in the Country Club for almost five weeks. The first few weeks were strictly
professional, but the last couple of weeks he’d found himself stealing the occasional glance at her. He wasn’t afraid to admit to himself that he found her attractive, sort of Lesley Ann Warren with the confidence of Katharine Hepburn, but he would never admit this to anyone else, and there was exactly no chance that he would ever act on that attraction. He’d heard too many stories about careers going down the chute for getting sexually involved with a female agent. This was right about the time that sexual harassment was becoming a serious occupational hazard. They had even started giving a warning lecture about it at the academy. He didn’t need the reminder. Connor O’Brien prided himself on being much too smart to fall into that particular trap. Returning to the window with Russo’s mineral water, he asked, “Who’s he talking about?”

  “Some Russian. A Professor G. You got anything about him?”

  “A Russian, huh? That’s pretty interesting.” He began leafing through his notebook. Success or failure in just about any endeavor, he’d learned from his father, a very successful investment banker, was a matter of hard work and organization. It wasn’t enough just gathering information, you had to be able to access it. You had to be able to find it when you needed it. So in addition to all the official forms he filled out for the bureau, he carried a small notebook and kept his own loose-leaf binder, cross-indexed by given name and nickname, by dates, by known or suspected involvement with groups of specific crimes. If he had previously come across any Professor G, he would be able to find out when, how, and who. He scrolled rapidly through the Gs with his index finger. While he found a “Doctor G,” there was no “Professor G.” “No. Nothing.”

  “How about anything in that book about the Russian mob guys?”

  He glanced through the Rs, then shook his head. “You want to call it in?” When agents working a stakeout overheard anything timely, particularly interesting, or very unusual on a wire, standard procedure required them to immediately notify a supervisor. That way, for example, if someone was about to get whacked, they could do something to stop it. But nobody liked to report anything short of that because the inevitable result was that a whole lot of reports would have to be written. CYA, cover your ass, was the foundation of just about every successful bureau career. This was one of those close calls. A man was missing and a body got found. Maybe pieces of the same puzzle. It was probably nothing, but there existed that slight, tantalizing possibility that it was something.

  The bureau had been struggling for more than three years to find a link between the five New York families and the growing Russian mob. It was well known that they’d had an occasional date, but no one had been able to prove that they had gotten married. So the combination of a missing Russian and an Italian body was at least interesting. “Let’s just see where it goes,” O’Brien decided.

  Russo got up and stretched, clasping her hands behind her neck and thrusting out her elbows. Russo wasn’t naïve: She knew she was an attractive woman and, more important, she knew how to use it for her own benefit. Within the regulations, of course, always within the regs. This was the first time Russo had worked with O’Brien, but the two of them had slid easily into a comfortable team. Both of them knew the rules and had learned how to get the job done without actually breaking them.

  Organized crime was a new assignment for Russo, who had spent most of her seven-year career working undercover, first in HMO fraud investigations, then in counterintelligence. She’d requested an organized crime assignment primarily because it was an area in which few female agents had ever worked. It wasn’t so much bureau policy as logic. The mob was so strictly a man’s world that there wasn’t much room in it for women. Russo was smart, though, and ambitious, so she figured out that punching the organized crime ticket would set her apart from most other female agents. As an additional bonus organized crime assignments generally meant staying put in the same city for a substantial period of time. So eight weeks earlier she’d arrived in New York City for the first time since her St. Louis high school senior class trip. This time she intended to stay for more than five days.

  O’Brien and Russo made a good team. Just as in every other business, there were two types of agents in the FBI: those people who did the grunt work and made cases and those people who went along to get along. The workers tended to get the glory, but they also got the blame when things got screwed up. The bureau was not known to stick out its reputation to protect agents. The agents who put in their time, stayed out of trouble, and did their paperwork got their scheduled promotions. Both O’Brien and Russo were workers.

  As O’Brien settled into the uneasy chair, a ripped leather recliner some previous resident of the Country Club had rescued from the sidewalk, he heard people inside the Freemont greeting Bobby San Filippo. “Hey, Russo,” he shouted to Laura, who had gone into the kitchen, “your boyfriend’s back.”

  Bobby Blue Eyes had become a continuing joke between them. The first time Russo had looked at surveillance photographs of San Filippo, with his perfectly styled hair, tailored clothes, Calvin Klein sunglasses, and large diamond pinkie ring, she’d said facetiously, “Hold me back, boys, my Prince Charming has just arrived.”

  In the background they heard the radio suddenly get louder, and a voice they could barely hear and was therefore impossible to identify asked, “. . . obby, who’s this . . . ed to find?”

  O’Brien sighed. “That bastard. He turned the radio up again. I hate that sappy music. Couldn’t they at least play some rock music once in a while? If I hear that fucking Sinatra one more—”

  “Hey!” Russo snapped. “Watch it there, buddy. I’m warning you right now, don’t screw with Frank. I wouldn’t want to have to take you down.” Like every Italian off the Hill in St. Louis, she’d grown up listening to Sinatra coming out of every open window on the block. Except in her own room late at night, when she’d put her ear against the radio and listen to the Beatles. In fact, although she would never dare admit it to a living Italian soul, if she personally never had to listen to him singing “It Was a Very Good Year” ever again, she would light a candle to the Madonna. Maybe she’d even pop into a church one Sunday morning. But none of that mattered when O’Brien attacked the Chairman. It was her responsibility to her entire family, to all the Italians in the world, to defend Frank from the Irish O’Brien’s heathen remarks.

  There was almost always a radio or television playing loudly inside the social clubs, more to prevent conversations being overheard than for entertainment. Years earlier it had been very difficult to plant a bug inside a social club, but as the bureau’s ELSUR—electronic surveillance—capabilities improved with the development of smaller and more sophisticated listening devices, and the engineers in the Technical Section of the crime lab got more creative, bugs had become as plentiful as . . . as bugs. Most mobsters just assumed that the clubs and their cars were bugged, and when they needed to have a serious conversation, they either took a walk outside or turned up the volume on the TV or radio to cover their voices.

  When I was working undercover as Donnie Brasco, I never liked wearing a wire. Most of the time I just wouldn’t do it. I hated the fucking things. One time another undercover I know, who was wearing a wire, was hanging out in an apartment with several members of his crew. These guys were stone-cold killers. Somehow there was a bug in the agent’s bug, and suddenly every word spoken in the apartment was being broadcast through the television set. These guys went crazy trying to figure out what was going on. And not one of them ever suspected the most obvious reason—there was a microphone in the room!

  I’ve seen mikes and even cameras planted in an incredible variety of places. The bureau has put them inside car dashboards, inside lightbulbs, in a sprinkler system. One time for a sting operation they hung a painting of a gorgeous nude woman on the wall—and installed the camera in the center of one of her nipples. There wasn’t ever a guy who walked into that room and didn’t look directly at her breasts, allowing the FBI surveillance team to get a clear picture of every
single person.

  The bug inside the Freemont Avenue Social Club had been installed in the very last place anybody would suspect: inside the radio. It had required the work of an engineering genius to figure out how to blunt the sound from the radio speaker. The actual scientific principle was explained to me once, but I didn’t completely understand it. It had something to do with mirroring sounds, causing the sound waves to be canceled, supposedly allowing quality audiotapes to be made.

  Russo leaned against the wall, sipping her mineral water. “So? What do you think about this Russian? Want to make a guess why they’re looking for him?”

  He shook his head. “You got me. I mean, c’mon, who knows why these guys do anything? The only thing you can know for sure is that whatever it’s about, it’s got something to do with money. Guaranteed. Chances are this guy owes somebody and doesn’t want to pay it back or doesn’t have it. Maybe he’s a gambler, maybe he borrowed. But if the mob is looking for him, it’s about money.”

  One of the first lessons young agents learn is to never suppose. In this kind of work people often surprise you. Profession isn’t personality. I’ve seen kindergarten teachers who were degenerate gamblers, cancer researchers addicted to hard drugs, cops who sold intelligence to organized crime. O’Brien was smart enough to temper curiosity with caution. At least most of the time.

  Russo smiled shyly. “Wanna find out?”

  Connor O’Brien chuckled. The only time she let herself be a woman, he thought, was when she wanted help from a man. And he appreciated that. “You’re some piece of work,” he said.

  “C’mon, O’Brien, it’s right there in front of us. What can happen? Then at least we’d have some idea of exactly what’s going down.”

  He hesitated, then said, “You know what the three worst words in the English language are?”