DeSantis seized on that. “Obviously, we’d be very grateful, if Governor Snow—”
“If, Mitch. ‘If’ is the operative word here. You realize he’s running in a contested primary. And then the general election.” Cimino shook his head. “These are expensive things, these elections. Did you know that candidates for governor are budgeting twenty million for the race?”
DeSantis sat back, as if flabbergasted at what was occurring. “No, I didn’t know—”
“So Friends of Snow is looking for friends, right, Mitch? You follow me.”
DeSantis pushed his thick glasses back up his nose. “I don’t know that I do.”
“Sure you do. Mitch, I know you got your contract under the Trotter administration. But now you’re working for the Snow administration. So we want to know if you’re willing to help.”
DeSantis’s face colored, as had the faces of several others, sitting in his spot, after hearing our pitch, over the last few weeks. “And if I don’t, I lose my contract?”
“Did you hear me say that?” Cimino delivered the line with a cool glare, no trace of a smile. “You didn’t hear me say that. Did you, Mitch?”
The man deflated. Cimino removed a piece of paper from his pocket and slid it over. The number on it was “25,000.” DeSantis looked at Cimino, who raised his eyebrows. It was clear that certain things would remain unspoken. He took the paper back and said, “And obviously, with Willie Bryant running against Governor Snow in the primary, and Lang Trotter’s son, Edgar, running in the Republican primary, there would be the question of whether you intend to support anyone else. We’ll be sure to keep tabs on any contributions being made to other campaigns, as well. Jason, you check the semiannual reports, right?”
“Like clockwork,” I said. This was part of the routine, too, every time. Governor Snow had a serious challenger in the primary, the current secretary of state, a guy named Willie Bryant. And the Republicans were another concern, obviously; the smart money seemed to be on Langdon Trotter’s kid, Edgar. Charlie was not only shaking down companies for contributions; he was threatening them if they contributed to anyone else.
“Look, Mr. Cimino,” DeSantis said.
“Charlie. It’s Charlie.”
“Charlie.” DeSantis sighed. “Look, Charlie, I have a small company—”
“Mitch, I want to thank you for lunch,” Cimino said, which was probably news to DeSantis, who hadn’t realized he was buying. “I suppose”—he looked at me—“I suppose the decision on the contract could be delayed for a week or so. That would give both of us time to think about our next step. One,” he repeated, “week.”
It was a script we’d worked out. We would start with an idle threat of terminating a contract, and nine times out of ten, that was all it took—a check to Friends of Snow was cut within the next twenty-four hours. On the two occasions, thus far, that anyone had pushed back, I had followed up by meeting with the contractor and showing him a “preliminary” report demonstrating a basis for terminating the contract—basically showing him that we weren’t kidding when we said we were going to shit-can them. At Charlie’s insistence, I never left a copy of that report with the contractor; I always kept it with me. Charlie was extremely careful about leaving bread crumbs.
But he wasn’t being careful with me. I had gained his trust; it was I who had come up with the idea to extort existing state contractors, and I who helped him orchestrate the entire pitch we made. All of this was done under the guise of shielding our scheme from unwanted scrutiny, and Cimino thought of me as the most risk-averse person he’d ever met, which in turn further cemented my credibility with him. I’d even gone so far as to insist that we not move on one particular contractor who seemed more than a little nervous about the whole thing; I told Cimino that the guy just didn’t feel right, and he decided to trust my gut, albeit with a patronizing laugh. It didn’t matter; the point was that he put me down as having as much to lose as he did, which put me squarely beyond the realm of suspicion.
It became clear, quickly after our scheme began, that we’d need to rely on some sort of technology to communicate with each other. Charlie had always avoided emails, cell phones—anything that could be captured by the feds. He’d always preferred face-to-face conversations. But we were working too quickly to pull that off anymore. So we settled on text messages. And we came up with a plan. Charlie had a master list of all companies that had contracts with one of the governor’s agencies in excess of a hundred thousand a year. Charlie figured a hundred thousand was a good break-off, sufficiently large that a company would be willing to make a campaign contribution, and/or throw Charlie or me some side business, in order to keep it.
Charlie put that list in order, from bigger contracts to smaller, and assigned a number to each one. When he had a company in mind to target, he would send me a text message that contained that number somewhere within the body of the message. A text saying
It must be 25 degrees outside
meant the next target was contractor number 25.
Did you see that article in the paper on page 11?
meant contractor number 11 was next up. That gave me the contractor’s name and the contract itself. I would study it to look for ways that we could break the contract and dump the company. And after our meetings like the one we just had with Mitch DeSantis, I would be responsible for any follow-up. If the contractor balked in any way or if they reached out to me at all, I would text Charlie back, again using the coded number to indicate the company.
All of that was acceptable, from Charlie’s perspective. He wasn’t thrilled about the text messages but the messages themselves were indecipherable without a translator. The only person who could translate them, besides him, was me. And he trusted me.
The two of us were making out okay on these deals, as well. Cimino picked and chose among our targets—the ones with the larger contracts and, therefore, more to lose if we pulled the plug on them—and made sure consulting contracts went to his sham companies. Some legal work was sent my way, as well. My plate was beginning to swell at the office. Even Shauna was impressed, though still skeptical. The feds and I had to figure out how to handle the issue of the legal business. On the one hand, it was ill-gotten legal work, the product of extortion. On the other hand, I
was
performing legitimate legal work for these clients, however they arrived at my doorstep, and I couldn’t be expected to do it for nothing. So the arrangement that I made with the U.S. attorney’s office was that I would receive the hourly fee for private attorneys who are referred cases from the federal defender. Every private lawyer who was a member of the federal bar was eligible to be referred such a case and was required to handle it for a paltry hourly fee as part of our duty to provide legal services to the indigent; in my case, it wasn’t the indigent but the extorted.
Lee Tucker could hardly complain. He met with me daily and marveled at our proficiency—and the case he was building against Charlie Cimino. As the evidence came in, the government had been documenting it with fancy color charts detailing each meeting with a state contractor; the date of the corresponding contribution to Governor Snow’s campaign fund; any other perks, such as consulting work to one of Charlie’s side companies or legal work to me; and the cell-phone communications about these things.
Every instance of extortion was a crime, and the feds were very good at taking a single act and multiplying it into about twelve crimes, throwing in counts for conspiracy and wire fraud, that kind of thing. The key to federal jurisdiction was the use of interstate communication. That meant phone calls, faxes, emails. That, of course, is why I came up with the elaborate text-messaging scheme between Charlie and me. Each of the text messages was a separate use of the wires in interstate commerce for the purpose of executing the criminal scheme.
I’d expected, at some point, for Charlie to delegate this work to me and not involve himself in the day-to-day affairs of the extortion. But he hadn’t. He loved it, the raw power of holding the fates of these contractors in his hands, the thrill of the shakedown itself. The guy was a bully at heart. What he was doing was the adult version of stealing milk money from the weaker kids.
“I don’t care,” he said into his earpiece as we rode in his Porsche from the DeSantis meeting. “Just get them sold. I’m just carrying these fuckin’ things. They’re killing me. Sell them or I’ll find someone who will.”
He clicked off his phone and murmured to himself. “What a market. What a goddamn market.”
It was not the greatest time to be a real estate developer, I gathered.
“Fifty thousand square feet of commercial space I got,” he went on. “Tenants, I don’t.”
That was the life of a developer. Buy the land, build on it, and hope the buyers will come. But the market had crashed. Charlie was property rich but, for all I knew, cash poor.
His cell phone buzzed, and he looked at the phone for the caller ID. “Greg Connolly,” he said with disdain. “That jerk-off can wait.” He looked over at me for a reaction but did not receive one. “Greg’s feeling lonely these days.”
Lonely, that is, because our new plan didn’t include the PCB much at all. The “Charlie and Jason Show” didn’t require Greg Connolly.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“Hard to say. It’s a problem if he runs to Carl.”
The mention of the governor’s name gave me a jolt. Cimino was saying that the governor knew what was going on. There would be no point in Greg Connolly running to his childhood friend, Governor Snow, unless the governor had some idea about the scheme.
It was what we figured, the feds and I, but it was the first time Cimino had invoked the governor’s name in this way. I hadn’t brought it up. It would seem too forced. Sooner or later, the topic was going to come up, and now was that time. I’m sure Chris Moody would be scrutinizing today’s recording from my F-Bird with particular care.
“And how plugged in is the governor to all of this?” I asked, going for it, because that had been the request from the federal government. If the topic came up, pursue it.
Cimino made a face but then changed topics. “That reminds me. He’s having a funder tonight. You should go.”
“To a fundraiser.”
“You should meet him, kid. Fuck. Fuck!” he said, looking at his buzzing cell phone. “Connolly again. This guy calls me twice in five minutes. Anyway, yeah, you should go tonight. You got a tux? Or get one. I’ll leave your name at the door. After all you’ve done for him,” he said, looking over at me, “they oughta let you in for free.”
41
BETWEEN MY CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE WITH CHARLIE
Cimino and the new clients and cases I had as bonus prizes, January and February had been quite busy for me. That was good. I needed busy. Because I tended to keep my head on straighter when my thoughts were occupied. I didn’t pass an hour of the day without thinking of my wife and daughter, but it wasn’t dominating me as much. Part of that was the mere passage of time, I realized, but the constant demands of litigation were a welcome distraction.
The bad part was that I hadn’t had much time to do what I’d originally set out to do when I joined up with the Procurement and Construction Board: find Ernesto Ramirez’s killer. There was a very good chance that the person responsible for his death was my partner in our criminal scheme. But even if I knew that, I didn’t have any proof. I couldn’t very well ask him. It would make for an awkward conversation, and there weren’t a lot of workable segues, either.
Hey, speaking of murder, Charlie, by chance did you have a guy named Ernesto Ramirez whacked?
I didn’t have much to go on, other than my gut. Ernesto’s wife, Essie, didn’t know anything. Ernesto’s scribbling on the back of my business card wasn’t any kind of proof. The only thing I had to go on was that lawsuit that Wozniak’s company had filed when they lost that beverage contract. It could lead to something, but I didn’t have the resources to follow up. I didn’t want to use Joel Lightner; I didn’t want to get him anywhere near this thing. Christopher Moody was just looking for ways to fuck my friends, and I’d been lucky to get Shauna out of it with a nice letter from the U.S. attorney’s office, acknowledging that Shauna Tasker was not suspected of having any role in this thing whatsoever and was not a target of the investigation. I wouldn’t get another one of those.
So I couldn’t use Lightner, and I didn’t have a whole lot of spare money to hire an investigator, anyway. Once the money from some of this legal work started coming, maybe. But not at the moment.
But then I caught a break. Charlie had sent me a text message that included a number, which I then matched with the list he’d written up of major state contractors. My job would be to pull the contract and look for ways to terminate it, should the contractor refuse to pay the ransom. As my eyes wandered over the list, I noticed that virtually all of the biggest state contractors had already been paid a visit from Charlie and me.
But one very significant one had not. And even more important, Charlie hadn’t even assigned it a number. That company would not be receiving one of our visits.
The company was Starlight Catering, the very same company that had won the beverage contract after Adalbert Wozniak’s company had been disqualified.
Life’s full of coincidences.