Hauser nodded, like that rang a bell. He still hadn’t answered my question.
Shauna said, “The joint venture shouldn’t be a problem. I did one last year for Ralph Reynolds. We’ll just have to be careful with any local business preferences.”
I didn’t follow very much of what Shauna was saying, but it was clear that Jack Hauser did, and he seemed to like what he was hearing.
“Okay. Well, you’re hired, obviously,” he said.
I didn’t understand what was so “obvious” about that, but I wasn’t going to complain.
“So, what do you charge?” he asked, preparing himself for the bad news.
“Three hundred an hour,” I said. If it was low enough for the state, why not Jack Hauser, too?
He didn’t seem to see it that way. He winced like I’d stuck him with a hot needle. “Any chance we can work on that?” He held out his hands. “I mean, okay, fine, I’ll hire you, but—any way to knock that number down?”
We settled on two-fifty, which was still a decent chunk of change. He showed me the complaint the city filed, left me a retainer, and gave me some basic information on the case. Before the end of the day, I had signed an appearance to enter the case as counsel for Hauser Construction, which Marie took to court to file.
Maybe, I thought, hanging a shingle in private practice wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. Shauna, dutifully impressed, offered to take me out to dinner of my choosing. “Doubling your clientele in ten days is cause for celebration,” she said. Actually, zero times two was still zero, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to pick the restaurant, where I ordered two racks of barbecue ribs with extra vinegar and sweet-potato fries.
I had three glasses of their homemade brew—a red ale—and then Shauna and I had the wonderful idea of staying out a bit longer. We found a tavern down the street, I switched to vodka, and sometime around midnight, I found myself staggering out of a cab. I was bloated and dizzy and thinking about Talia, but otherwise I felt great.
Great, that is, until I saw the car parked in the driveway of my townhouse.
They got out of the sedan in tandem, all four of them, moving in sync, smoothing out their coats, heads darting side to side—all they were lacking were the trademark sunglasses, as it was midnight.
“Jason Kolarich?” One of the four men, from the driver’s-side rear door, approached me. He didn’t need to bother with the credentials. I’d made them before I had two feet out of the cab. “Special Agent Lee Tucker, FBI.”
“How nice for you.” I kept walking to my door, trying to mentally steel myself through my intoxication.
“We’ll need a minute of your time, sir.”
“Not now. I promised my hamster a bath.”
“It’ll have to be now,” said the man behind him. I recognized the voice, and as he approached, his soft Irish features came into focus. It was Christopher Moody, lead prosecutor on
U.S. v. Hector Almundo.
These were serious customers, all four of them, most of all the humorless Moody, but I swore I saw the seeds of a smile cross his face.
25
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAD DESCENDED ON MY
living room. Four agents, all of them straight-faced with faux solemnity, when underneath it all this was what they loved most about the job. A standard deployment, two to the right, two to the left, as I sat on the couch, staring at a laptop computer resting on an ottoman in the center of the room.
When Chris Moody hit “play” on the computer, dialing up the disk drive, the volume popped too loudly, and he quickly adjusted it. The first voice I heard was easy enough to recognize. It was Charlie Cimino, coming in loud and clear in a conversation that had been intercepted by the FBI:
“Okay, what’s next . . . oh, the bus contract. Board of Education. That’s the one for Lenny Swift. Okay, here’s the problem with that one. The kid—the new guy, Hector’s lawyer—he says there’s no way to say this is a sole-source and just give it to Lenny’s company. No way to claim there’s something unique about buses. So what he says is, the only way to get around the requirement of competitive bids is to break the contract into pieces, so each piece is small enough to stay below the ten-thousand-dollar threshold.”
“Very creative,” Chris Moody commented as the tape continued.
I didn’t answer. My internal thermometer was rising, but I wanted to see Moody’s entire hand before I said anything.
“How do you do that?
” came a second voice over the recording.
“How do you take a hundred-thousand-dollar contract and break it down to increments of ten thousand?”
“That voice is Greg Connolly,” said Chris Moody. “The man you met today,” he added, letting me understand how deeply the feds had sunk their fingers.
Cimino’s voice again:
“Break it up by school, the kid says. Give each school a separate bus contract, instead of going through the Board of Ed.”
I shook my head. Cimino was trying to reassure Connolly by invoking my name—the lawyer had said it was okay. The thing was, I hadn’t.
“Yeah, we could do it by school. That would work.”
It was a third voice, and it was unmistakable. It was Patrick Lemke.
“It would be, like, a dozen contracts, all under ten thousand.”
“Then we’ll do it that way, by school,” said Cimino. “And Lenny gets all of them.”
“He’s talking about Leonard Swift,” said Chris Moody. “Swift Transportation. The same Leonard Swift who’s donated more than thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow in the last twelve months.”
“I didn’t give Cimino that advice,” I said. “I never said anything about breaking the contract up to circumvent the law.” I was at the boiling point, and without a clear head—I knew better than to be talking to the feds without a sober brain, or a lawyer. My mouth had gone painfully dry, and the buzz I had been enjoying was now an annoying migraine that prevented me from fully focusing on the problem at hand.
Chris Moody, who was now leaning casually against the bookcase, looked at me with amusement. The other agents sat stone-faced on the couch.
Moody nodded to the agent who was now manning the laptop. One click and we were listening to the second installment of my nightmare.
“Next is this thing with Marymount. The prison contract.”
Cimino’s voice started the second tape as well.
“Yeah, the, uh, what’s it—sanitation?”
said Greg Connolly.
“Janitor work?”
“Right, right. Bobby Higgins’s company,”
said Cimino.
“Yeah, and what was the deal there? Someone outbid him?”
“Two companies were lower
,
”
said Patrick Lemke.
“Right, but the kid, Kola—what’s it, Kolarich, right?”
Cimino asked.
“Jason Kolarich,”
said Lemke.
“Yeah, Kolarich
.
”
Cimino coughed loudly, a prolonged, phlegmy gag.
“Yeah, the kid did a number on ’em. DQ’d both of ’em.”
Bullshit again. I didn’t disqualify either of those bidders. I wrote a memo doing just the opposite, for God’s sake. It was all I could do to sit silently, fists clenched, struggling to keep my legs still.
“This Kolarich is the one—this was Hector’s lawyer?”
Connolly asked.
“Right, right. Sent the G packin’,”
said Cimino.
“Why?”
“No, I’m just saying,”
said Connolly.
“This is a pretty smart kid, right? He did a good job on this thing for Higgins. I mean, he could be useful, is all I’m saying.”
“Remains to be seen. Smart enough, yeah, sure. I mean, he pulled Hector’s head out of his ass, and we know how hard that can be.”
Everyone on the tape got a good chuckle out of that. Moody nodded to one of the agents, who turned off the tape. He could have turned off the tape a few sentences earlier, but he wanted me to hear Charlie Cimino diss Hector, as if, being Hector’s former counsel, I would be offended. Under the circumstances, it didn’t even hit the top ten list of things bothering me.
Chris Moody, for his part, was absolutely enjoying this entire affair. He must have been bouncing around all day, awaiting this visit, thinking of all the smart one-liners he’d throw my way.
“My word against Cimino’s,” I said. “And I’ve got paper to back it up.”
“Paper? You mean
this
paper?” Moody nodded to one of the agents, who handed me a document. It was a memorandum about the school bus contract that bore my name and looked a heck of a lot like the one I wrote. But a few paragraphs had been inserted at the end, with this conclusion:
Thus, provided that the Board of Education contract were reduced to smaller contracts of ten thousand dollars in value or less, the competitive bidding law would not apply, and the contract could be awarded to whatever company the PCB desired.
“I didn’t write that memo,” I said, realizing I should probably keep my mouth shut.
“I see,” said Moody with mock sympathy. “You probably didn’t write this one, either.”
On Moody’s cue, an agent handed me a second document, this one a legal memorandum bearing my name on the prison sanitation contract—once again different in its conclusion:
Neither of the two lowest bidders on the Marymount Penitentiary sanitation contract should be considered “responsible” bidders. Accordingly, the contract should be awarded to the next lowest bidder, Higgins Sanitation.
It was like Cimino had said on the tape.
DQ’d both of ’em.
But I hadn’t, of course.
“These have been doctored,” I said.
“You’ve been framed?” Moody asked, the question dripping with sarcasm. “Railroaded?”
I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of baiting me. I didn’t know if “frame-up” was the right phrase here. More likely, Cimino was just using me as legal cover to justify what he wanted to do.
But to the federal government listening in, it sure looked like I was playing right along with Charlie.
“Oh, we’re not done, Jason.” Moody nodded to the agent manning the computer. “Play the next one,” he said.
26
CHRIS MOODY KEPT HIS EYES ON ME AS THE FBI AGENT
played the next intercepted conversation.
“You’ve done good work so far. I’ve seen your work product. The memo on the DOC sanitation project—the two bidders who underbid Higgins Sanitation.”
I did a slow burn. It was the voice of Greg Connolly, speaking to me in his office earlier today.
“Those bidders were well qualified
,
”
I said in response.
“Course they were,”
Connolly said.
“Course they were. That’s why I’m saying, good job
.
”
It was pretty clear how this was lining up now. From Moody’s perspective, I was admitting to Greg Connolly that I knew those bidders were well qualified, and yet there was a memo with my name on it saying the exact opposite. I was admitting, that is, to deliberately giving a false legal opinion to further a crime—directing state business to an undeserving company that had given campaign contributions to Governor Snow.
And the recording wasn’t finished, either.
“Charlie talked to you about the buses, too
,
”
Connolly went on.
“I saw that analysis you did
.
”
“There’s no way that’s a sole-source
,
”
I said.
“Providing a bus? A hundred companies could do it
.
”
“So, again, good job on that. You’ll do very well here, Jason, if you want to.
”
The tape shut off. That was all they had, but it was more than enough, if they chose to believe that I had authored those memos in the form they now appeared. And they were definitely choosing to believe that.
“I didn’t write either of those memos,” I repeated. “Someone took those memos and changed them. Connolly may have been talking about the doctored memo when he was telling me ‘good job,’ but I didn’t know that. I thought he approved the memo that
I
wrote.”
Moody raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you’d believe, if you were me, Counselor?” He strolled around my living room. “It sounds to me like you impressed the chairman with your creative ways to get the favored companies their contracts, and it also sounds to me like you admitted that your legal conclusions were bogus. And that, Mr. Kolarich, sure sounds like fraud and conspiracy to me.”
“And why would I do that?” I added. “Even if I were inclined to do that, what would I get out of it?”
“Why would you do that . . . why would you do that . . .” Moody looked around the room at the other agents, like everyone was in on the joke except for me.