Authors: Joseph Badal
“You need to know something before we go any further in this matter,” Gino said. “There are four people with me. My son-in-law, David Hood, and his father, Peter. I trust both of them.” Gino paused. He had to tell Cataldo about O’Neil and Ramsey. But how to do so without losing Cataldo’s support.
But Cataldo broke into Gino’s thoughts and said, “You gonna tell me about the two cops?”
Gino coughed in surprise. “I was about to, but how’d you know?”
Cataldo shrugged. “You don’t think my men can recognize heat. I hear the woman’s a real knockout, but she walks like she wore a gun belt her whole life.” Cataldo laughed and imitated the walk all beat cops seem to acquire from wearing a heavy leather utility belt laden with weapon and equipment.
Gino laughed along with Cataldo. He raised a hand as though he held a wineglass. “
Salute
. My compliments, Don Cataldo.”
“Shall we take that tour now?”
Gino nodded. He followed Cataldo through the house to a set of French doors that led out to an English garden. Hedges and flowerbeds covered an area of nearly two acres. The garden of
Casa Sogna
was a tribute to taste, beauty, and someone’s attention to minute detail. Under any other circumstance Gino would have enjoyed the gardens. But he couldn’t get his mind off the envelope in his jacket. He forced himself to pay attention while Cataldo described this plant or that shrub.
Then one of Cataldo’s men approached at a fast walk. He carried a wireless telephone. “Mr. Cataldo, you got a call.”
Cataldo took the phone. “My apologies, Don Bartolucci,” he said with a shrug, and walked twenty yards away.
Gino took advantage of the moment and sat on a stone bench. He removed the envelope from his jacket and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper. On it was the name of a bank and what appeared to be an account number at the top. Below that were two columns, one with dates and the other with dollar-denominated amounts. At the bottom of the page was a single sentence:
On the dates shown above, the corresponding dollar amounts were deposited in the account number shown.
Joey Cataldo had handed over a record of every payment the Zefferelli Family had made for drug shipments from Afghanistan a decade earlier. If the account noted on the paper belonged to Rolf Bishop, Gino knew he would be able to prove Rolf Bishop had betrayed his country, had violated his oath as a military officer, had broken U.S. and international laws, and had motive for murder. That evidence would be dramatically more compelling than the video of Montrose Toney, an ex-con, spilling the beans about Bishop while under torture. He replaced the list in the envelope and slipped it back into his pocket.
He thought about what Bishop had done to his daughter and grandchildren and thought once again that he could kill the man based on the information he already had. But he understood men like Bishop. Death was an easy way out. For men like Bishop, there were more painful things than death. Gino would kill the man’s reputation before he took his life.
Cataldo returned. “Nice spot for deep thoughts, wouldn’t you say, Don Bartolucci?”
“None better, Don Cataldo, none better. It’s a perfect place to think about friends and enemies . . . how to thank and reward one’s friends, and how to punish one’s enemies.”
Cataldo looked intently into Gino’s eyes. Finally, he smiled. “I count myself fortunate I’m a friend and not an enemy of Don Bartolucci.”
“Don Cataldo, you are much more than a friend. You are a creditor.” He patted his chest. “This envelope puts me in your debt for the rest of my life.”
“
Grazie
, Don Bartolucci,
mille grazie.
”
Gino looked at his watch. He suddenly felt weary and mildly nauseous. “I see we have a little time before dinner. Would you mind if I returned to my room to wash up?”
“I think that’s a good idea. I need to do the same. Let me call Cyril so he can drive you to the guesthouse.”
“No, no, the walk will do me good.”
“Whatever you say. I’ll see you and your friends in the dining room in thirty minutes.”
Gino was anxious to put Cataldo’s list into David’s hands. He knew his son-in-law had international bank clients. Perhaps one of those clients might be able to fill in the one piece of information that wasn’t on the sheet of paper Cataldo had given him: the name of the owner of the bank account. Gino ignored the rapid beat of his heart and his shortness of breath and forced himself to continue to the guesthouse. By the time he arrived there he gasped for air, his body awash in sweat. A sudden pain struck his chest. He realized he was in real trouble when he felt pain shoot down his left arm from the shoulder. He staggered through the front door and bumped into Peter.
One look at Gino’s face was enough for Peter. He put his arms around his old friend and helped him to a sofa. He quickly removed Gino’s shoes and loosened his belt and tie. After he elevated Gino’s legs on pillows, Peter ran to the telephone and pressed a button labeled Main House. Cyril answered.
“We need an ambulance here,” Peter said. “Now! Gino’s having a heart attack.”
Within twenty minutes, an ambulance and a team of paramedics arrived. The paramedics did everything they could do to stabilize Gino and then loaded him into the ambulance. David rode along. Gino was conscious but weak. He reached out for David’s hand and squeezed it. David bent toward Gino, who hoarsely whispered, “Jacket. Find my jacket?”
“Don’t worry about your jacket.”
At that moment the ambulance jerked to a stop at the hospital, its rear doors were flung open, and Gino was taken away. David found Gino’s jacket stuffed under the gurney. He snatched it up and ran to follow the paramedics.
Reporter Beth Crombie stood outside St. Joseph’s Hospital’s emergency room. She held a microphone and looked into a television camera. She told her cameraman to stop the film when an ambulance sped behind her. Then she rotated her hand and signaled her cameraman to start the camera again.
“And so, Officer Patrick Elliott will survive,” she resumed. “The man who shot him, believed by authorities to be a Russian mob member, died on the sidewalk in front of Sovereignty State Bank from two shots fired by Officer Elliott. Once again, we see that crime doesn’t pay. This is Beth Crombie. Action News.”
At a signal from her cameraman, she lowered the microphone and said, “Let’s go inside, Freddie. See if we can find a member of the cop’s family we can interview.”
A name scrawled in grease pencil on an acetate board in the emergency room caught Crombie’s eye: “Bartolucci, Gino.” She had recently won an award for her investigative reports on organized crime. She knew the names of many of the East Coast
Mafiosi
. Past and present. But New York was packed with Italians. This could be just a coincidence. She decided to play a hunch.
She stopped a nurse and asked about Gino Bartolucci. The harried nurse gave Crombie an impatient look and waved in the direction of a curtained-off examination area. With the arrogance of an Action News television star, Crombie parted the curtains and stood behind an orderly who bent over an elderly man on a gurney. Despite the patient’s pallor and the oxygen mask that covered the lower part of his face, Beth knew immediately it was the Gino Bartolucci who’d once headed up the Philadelphia mob.
“What’s the matter with him?” she asked.
The orderly said, “Heart attack.” Then he looked over his shoulder at her and asked, “Who the hell are you?”
Before the orderly could throw her out, several people in white smocks rushed into the room. Crombie wheeled around, left the exam room, and rushed over to her cameraman.
“Get that damn thing on; we got ourselves another story.”
“Where?”
“Just follow me. This one’s for the network,” she said.
When she saw Freddie was all set, she said, “This is Beth Crombie with an exclusive story from KBIW in New York City. You may recall a little over a year ago, this reporter did a special investigative series on organized crime. One of the segments in that series covered the voluntary retirement several years earlier of one of the East Coast’s most successful—and notorious—Mafia figures, Gino Bartolucci. Bartolucci allegedly used a grocery market he owned as a cover for his illegitimate activities. He was also alleged to own or control numerous other legitimate businesses—all acquired with the ill-gotten gains of criminal activity. But those allegations were never proved. While I covered the story of a brave police officer shot in a bank robbery this afternoon, this reporter discovered that Gino Bartolucci had been admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital. Mr. Bartolucci apparently suffered a heart attack. Doctors are with him at this moment. We do not have a condition report. We do not know why the former Mafia chief is in New York. We will update this story when more information becomes available. This is Beth Crombie, Action News.”
CHAPTER 40
Manny Segal walked into an alley and found the file exactly where Talon said it would be. He carried the file to a cafe on 47
th
street, bought a cup of tea, and sat in a back booth. As usual, Talon had been thorough. The file had background information about his target; the man’s family members, friends, and business associates; addresses, and the man’s possible locations. He was not pleased to read that the target was originally from Philadelphia and now lived in Bethesda. How the hell am I going to find this guy in twenty-four hours?
Segal was intrigued by the target’s connection to a mobster. Maybe I should have demanded a bigger price for this job, he thought.
He considered his options and thought about his first step. He’d go to Philadelphia. His gut told him Hood would go to Bartolucci for support. About to leave the café, his cellphone rang.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“It’s Talon. It looks like I overpaid you.”
“How so?”
“I think I know where the . . . assignment might be. I just saw on the news that our man’s father-in-law just had a heart attack and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital on Long Island. You want to bet that he’s in New York with his father-in-law?”
While the doctors worked on Gino, David paced the emergency room floor. He’d dropped Gino’s jacket on a plastic chair in the treatment room and suddenly remembered how insistent Gino had been about him finding it. He picked up the jacket and checked the pockets. In an inside pocket he found an envelope with a single sheet of paper inside. On the paper, under the name of a Swiss Bank he knew quite well, were columns of dates and amounts. The dates on the paper were from 2003 and 2004, the same period of time he’d served in Afghanistan. David did a quick calculation in his head and guessed the dollar amount to be a staggering twenty-two to twenty-three million dollars.
Gino had already told him about Cataldo’s information about drug smuggling from Afghanistan. But they had yet to prove Bishop was involved in such a scheme. All they had was information provided by a gangster. Perhaps the paper David now held in his hand would make that connection. Could it be his Rosetta Stone, the key to the mystery that had turned his life upside down? He looked at his watch. Zurich was eight hours ahead. It was barely 7 a.m. there. After he put the document and envelope into his jacket pocket, David went in search of someone who could give him a status report on his father-in-law.
APRIL 27
CHAPTER 41
David couldn’t get any specific information on Gino’s condition until after midnight, when the cardiologist who’d performed an angioplasty told him Gino would recover, but needed to stay in the hospital for observation for at least forty-eight hours. He said Gino could not have visitors until the morning, when he would be moved from intensive care to a private room.
From a courtesy phone, David called the Cataldo estate and told Cyril of events at the hospital. He asked to have a car and driver sent to take him back to the estate.
“Don Bartolucci’s driver, Paulie Rizzo, just arrived here from Philadelphia. He should be outside the emergency room entrance in a dark gray Infiniti QX80.”
“Thank you, Cyril.”
Paulie Rizzo was parked in one of the slots reserved for “Ambulances Only.”
David walked over to the vehicle. “You think you could drive me back to the Cataldo estate?”
“How’s Don Bartolucci?” Rizzo asked.
“They fixed a clogged blood vessel. He’s fine. But they won’t let anyone see him until later.”
Rizzo stared at David as though he wondered if he’d been told the truth. Finally, he asked, “You’re sure the Don’s fine?”
“I don’t know if he’s fine, but the doctor told me the operation went well.” He watched worry drain from Rizzo’s face. Rizzo crossed himself and his lips moved ever so slightly.
“Okay, get in the car,” Rizzo said.
David sat in the front seat. He was wired from stress and worry. In an effort to burn off some of his tension, he tried to make conversation with Rizzo.
“I saw you parked in an ambulance slot. You have any problems with hospital security?”
“No, not really,” Rizzo answered. “A couple times the hospital rent-a-cop came by and eyeballed me. The third time, he told me I wasn’t allowed to park there.”
When it became obvious Rizzo wouldn’t volunteer any more information, David asked, “So what did you tell him?”
Rizzo looked over at David and, with a straight face, said, “I showed him Detective O’Neil’s police shield.”
David gaped at Rizzo. “Why would O’Neil give you his shield?”
Rizzo grinned. “He didn’t
give
me his shield.”
Manny “Paladin” Segal parked outside St. Joseph’s Hospital and waited to see if David Hood would show up. After an hour, he saw Hood leave the hospital and get into the front seat of an Infiniti SUV. He trailed the luxury SUV from the hospital to an estate on Long Island and cruised by a gate the vehicle entered. Segal tapped the steering wheel of his rental car to the beat of Ravel’s
Bolero
playing on the radio. He thought this would be the easiest money he’d ever earned.