Manhattan Lockdown (32 page)

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Clark? That's your name, isn't it?”

Horace Clark nodded. “Same name that I had when I introduced myself to you three minutes ago.”

“Haven't you guys learned how to use tape recorders and video equipment and all that stuff? I don't see anything like that.”

“We don't record interviews,” Clark answered.

“Even the Podunk PD records interviews these days. Andy of Mayberry would be doing it. Fuck, even cops wear cameras when they're out on the street.”

“It's federal policy not to have recording devices during interviews. You must surely know that, Mr. Garafalo, you've had experience with this process before.”

“So you still rely on the miracle of 302s?” Tony asked.

Form 302 was the government form, in use since the era of J. Edgar Hoover, on which FBI and other government agents wrote in sometimes vivid narratives the results of conversations they had with witnesses, defendants, and others. Tony used the words
the miracle of 302s
because, even though he had once sat for hours with FBI and other agents without ever saying a word, there were at least five agents who testified against him at trial who used their 302 reports to recount his incriminating statements.

During his trial, Tony had whispered to his lawyer, the legendary Vincent Sorrentino, “This is all made-up shit. I never said a word to those fuckers.” In return, Sorrentino, cupping his right hand over Tony's left ear, had quietly said, “That's why we call them form
302F
, with
F
as in fiction.” Sorrentino had added, “Don't worry, I'll rip up their asses and their 302s on cross.” And Sorrentino had.

“Doesn't matter to me,” Tony told Horace Clark. “It'll give you guys all day tomorrow to pick up some overtime when you write your 302s.” Tony Garafalo through the years had built up a way of fostering camaraderie with law enforcement agents, many of whom were born and raised in the same kinds of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island in which he had been raised. Tony was a man of many roles—if he'd become an actor, he could play convincingly a suave gangster, a compassionate priest, a lawyer or the leader of one of those evil empires in the action movies with
computer animation that had become so popular in the years since his prison term ended.

All of the agents, men with Italian, Irish, and Polish names, either smiled or laughed when they heard him say “the miracle of 302s.” The two assistants didn't laugh or even smile.

Gently adjusting the thin frames of his glasses, Horace Clark asked, “Mr. Garafalo, do you know the name Gina Carbone?”

“The name?” Tony smiled at the serious Horace Clark. “I know the person, too.”

“Do you know the Gina Carbone who is the current commissioner of the New York City Police Department?”

“Sure I do.”

“How long have you known Commissioner Carbone?”

“My math isn't great. I'm fifty-four. I was ten or so when she was born. Our families lived on the same street. I even remember going to her baptism.” Tony glanced at the Asian Assistant, whose only words so far had been to introduce herself as “Assistant U.S. Attorney Yvette Yang,” a name that had tempted Tony to think of her as
Yo Yo
. “You know what a baptism is, don't you?”

She ignored him. In front of her at the table was a yellow legal pad at the top of which, as Tony could see, the only words were “Interview Notes with Anthony Garafalo” and the date.

“Did there come a point in time when you and Commissioner Carbone became friends?”

“That's a really complicated word, Mr. Clark. She was my friend when she was baptized. Our families were, as I told you, close. I saw her almost every day for years. I do remember that when I was eighteen or so I played a lot of heavy-duty American Legion baseball. I told the coach to get a uniform for her and make her the first girl bat boy. She really, really wanted that. She kept on asking me to help get her that job. So the team made a little uniform for her that
was just like ours and she became the first bat girl, not just for our team but in all of the other American Legion teams we played from all around the country.” Tony paused and smiled. “The coach, you know, would have made my eighty-five-year-old grandmother the first bat grandmother if I asked. I was so good I was being seriously scouted by the Pirates, the Red Sox, and the fucking San Diego Padres at the time. Gina, by the way, was a great bat girl from day one. She got to loose foul balls and picked up dropped bats faster than any bat boy I ever saw.”

“So you were friends then, too? She was about ten when you were twenty or so,” Clark said.

“Well,” Tony said, “there's that problem with the word
friend
. She wanted to be on the team. If I hadn't been at her baptism, if I didn't know her and her family, if she had just been a little girl from the neighborhood begging the star of the team, which was yours truly, to be the first bat girl, I'd have ignored her.” Tony glanced around the room. “In my world
friends
help
friends
. Does that happen in your world, Ms. Yo?”

“My name is Ms. Yang, Mr. Garafalo.”

“Hey, sorry. You can't imagine the things I've been called. The name Garafalo confuses a lot of people. Ask these other guys around the table, especially the good-looking Polish guy over there, what people have done with their names. You gotta get used to it, you gotta have a sense of humor about it.”

“Thanks for the insight, Mr. Garafalo,” Horace Clark said.

“No problem.”

“Let me ask you this, sir,” Clark said, “what happened to your baseball prospects? I'm just curious.”

“I decided there was another line of work I was going to like better.”

“And what was that?”

“Gangster.”

Three of the agents laughed aloud. Yang glanced disapprovingly at them, the censorious expression of a grade-school teacher. Their laughter slowly, defiantly subsided.

“Why,” Clark asked, “did you make that choice?”

“Who knows? But my baseball training came in real handy. I always had a bat nearby. Hitting a head is a lot easier to hit than a speedy baseball. So before I went to jail I had two names, Tony the Horse, Tony the Batter.”

“What,” Horace Clark asked, “did “The Horse” mean?”

Garafalo glanced at the Asian girl. “I've got a dick the size of a Louisville Slugger.”

Yvette Yang, unblinking, stared at the yellow legal pad.

“Ask the commissioner,” Garafalo said. “She's known that for a long, long time. She knew it when she sat here seven years ago when our
friendship
was so hot again, but I didn't know until that minute that she was part of the hit squad that wound up with me spending years at the Supermax in Colorado. At the trial they ended up playing tapes of me talking to Gina Carbone, my
friend
, who used to wear a wire when we drove around or went to restaurants together.”

Again adjusting the right joint of his slender glasses—in what Garafalo now understood was a nervous tic—Clark asked, “Are we to understand that from time to time you and the commissioner are in an intimate relationship?”

“Good guess.”

“When was the last time you and Commissioner Carbone were
friends
?”

“We've been good
friends
for two years.”

“How,” Yvette Yang asked, “did the most recent
friendship
begin?” “Our families still live close to each other. Italians on Staten Island like to have barbecues in the summer. I was out of Supermax
for two, three weeks. The barbecue was at her parents' house. They have a nice patio. I just walked over with my family, like we'd been doing since I was a kid. Gina was there. She was already the police chief. She had a security detail. I guess she was really surprised to see me because she and her people began to leave.”

“What happened next?”

“I called out ‘Gina.' She stopped. She looked great. She let me walk over to her. I said, ‘Gina, no hard feelings, please. It was your job, you did what you had to do.'”

Yvette Yang asked, “Did you mean that?”

“Not one fucking word. I wanted to kill her. She had even had the tapes going when we were in bed. They, by the way, were useless, hundreds of hours of them. All you could hear was an hour or so of me banging her and her screaming,
More, more, yes, yes!”
He paused. “My lawyer, Vinnie Sorrentino, wanted to play one of those tapes for the jury. Vinnie's a great guy, a great lawyer. When the judge asked what the point was of letting a jury listen to an hour of pornography, Vinnie said,
Prosecutorial misconduct
. Even the judge, an old woman, laughed, but she said no. Ms. Yang, do you scream or moan?”

Serious-faced, Clark asked, “Did you, at this barbecue, say anything else to the commissioner?”

“‘I was only doing my job, too.' That's what I told her. ‘No hard feelings,' I said.”

“What happened next?” Clark asked.

“I had gotten a job as a salesman at the Mercedes Benz place on Queens Boulevard. I knew I was a good salesman. Back in my ball-playing days some writer for the
Daily News
said watching me play was like watching a top-of-the-line Mercedes racing on a highspeed track. I still have a copy of the article.”

“That,” Yvette Yang said, “is a very rapid period of time for
someone just released from Supermax, the highest security prison in the United States, to find work at a prestigious auto dealership. Is the owner of the dealership part of organized crime or connected to it?”

“That's none of your fucking business.”

“Let's return to Commissioner Carbone,” Clark said. “Tell us the next event.”

“At the barbecue I said to Gina, ‘Wow, now you're the chief, the
capo di tutti capi
.' And I told her what dealership I was working for, just casually. And then she left with her security detail, but not before kissing my eighty year-old mother and father. Just like
friends
do.”

“And next?”

“Next, just a few days later, I'm at my desk at the dealership, and it's a slow day, and my desk phone, with caller ID, rings. The little screen that tells you whose calling says
Pay Phone
. That's really unusual, I think. There must have been six pay phones left in all of New York. But I'm a salesman and, hey, you never know.

“And so I take the call and it's Gina. She obviously didn't want to use her phone at the PD or her cell phone. A pay phone call is untraceable. Right away I think
Fuck, this is great. Bingo
.

“And Gina bullshits for a little while. How's the job going? How are your kids? Bullshit like that. And then Gina, who was never shy, asked if I can get together with her at that coffee shop near LaGuardia off the Grand Central Parkway. It's just a silver-sided coffee shop, no name on it, just a red neon sign on it that says
Diner
. The kind of place where limo and cab drivers stop off for coffee and hamburgers at all hours of the day and night. Transients, people tired from long flights, taxi and limo drivers on breaks.”

“What did you say?” Horace Clark asked.

“I joked. I said to her, ‘You gonna be wearing a wire this time, Gina?'”

“And?”

“She said, ‘Come on, Tony, those days are long over. I'll let you take me into the bathroom first and I'll strip completely so you can check for wires.'”

Tony had noticed that Yvette Yang's eyes blinked very infrequently. She said, “You do realize, Mr. Garafalo, don't you, that Mr. Clark and I are law enforcement agents of the federal government. As are all the other officers in this room. Lying to us is, in and of itself, a federal offense punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.”

“Not a problem, Ms. Yang. I'm not lying. Ask Gina. Ask Commissioner Carbone.” Tony Garafalo knew that the other agents, all men, all trying not to smile, were having the time of their lives as they listened to him.

Smooth as a dark marble, Clark asked, “Did the meeting at the diner take place?”

“The next day. Middle of the afternoon. She came in a little Toyota one of her brothers owned. She wore an oversize Mets baseball cap. She was already famous, she didn't want to be recognized. If she had security with her, I didn't see them. There were a few guys at the counter who were already there when I got there a few minutes before her. They didn't necessarily look like limo or cab drivers taking a break.” Tony glanced up at the male agents at the far end of the table. “No, I didn't take her to the bathroom to check out whether she was wearing a wire.”

“What did you discuss?”

“Discuss? We weren't there to talk about a nuclear treaty with Iran. After half an hour or so she wrote down on a napkin what her address was—it's an apartment on East 79
^th
Street and East End Avenue near one of the downtown entrance ramps to the FDR so that she has an easy time getting downtown to One Police Plaza, and she said she wanted to cook for me that night.”

“What did you say?” Clark asked.

“Maybe she's not your type, Mr. Clark, but Gina was, and is, a real good-looking woman. Besides, not once in my life have I ever said no to a woman who asked me to dinner in her house. That's always a
bingo
.”

One of the agents at the far end of the table suddenly said, “Tony, you must need a bottle of water by now, right?”

“Sure, thanks.”

The agent walked to Tony and put a bottle of water in front of him. “Thanks, guy,” Tony said.

Clark, who didn't appear to approve that one of his agents had offered water to Tony, asked, “And next?”

“I went over. We ate. And I fucked her. Or she fucked me. Or we fucked each other. I guess it depends on how you look at it.”