Authors: Anthony Bruno
Special Agent Dominick Polifrone of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had a lot on his mind as he parked the Shark, his long black Lincoln Continental coupe. Backing into a space on the busy north Jersey road, watching for cars coming up from behind, he was thinking about his family. Today was the first day of school for his kids, and his wife, Ellen, was overjoyed. The boys, Drew and Matt, had moped around all weekend, complaining that the summer had been too short, driving their mother nuts. His daughter, Keri, couldn’t wait to get back and start eighth grade. She was thirteen, and she and her girlfriends were boy-crazy all of a sudden. Dominick wasn’t sure if he was ready to have boyfriends hanging around the house. Keri wasn’t even in high school, for God’s sake. But right now he had to stop worrying about all that because he wasn’t Dominick Polifrone now.
Agent Polifrone got out of the car, locked the door, and flipped up the collar of his black leather jacket against the rain as he glanced across the city avenue at the ordinary-looking storefront on the first floor of the three-story brick building, the place that had no name and was known simply
as “the store.” When he stepped into “the store,” he would be “Michael Dominick Provenzano,” “Dom” to those who knew him, a “connected” guy currently in the market for guns. Unlike Dominick Polifrone, Michael Dominick Provenzano didn’t give a shit about wives, report cards, and Little League games. Provenzano’s main interest was in making deals and making money. That was the mind-set that Special Agent Dominick Polifrone had to put himself in as he waited for a break in the traffic so he could cross the street.
Tires hissed on the wet pavement as he started across. He looked through the plate glass window of the greasy spoon luncheonette next door to “the store” to see if he recognized any faces. Thank God he’d already had lunch. You took your life in your hands eating in that place. Even the coffee was treacherous. But sometimes having coffee there was a necessary risk. It was where the clientele from “the store” went when they wanted a little privacy to discuss a deal.
The narrow driveway next to the store was jammed with big cars—Caddys and Lincolns. The end of the drive was blocked by an idling police cruiser with its front end hanging out into the street. The trunk was open. A cop in uniform had a cardboard box on his shoulder, which he was carrying in through the side door. Dominick followed him up the steps. The cop glanced at him around the edge of the box and avoided eye contact, but once they got inside the doorway and no one challenged Dom’s presence there, the cop smiled and nodded.
“Need any umbrellas?” the cop asked, lowering the box off his shoulder. It was full of brand-new umbrellas, the tags still on them. Dominick had no doubt that they’d just “fallen off the truck.”
Dominick stroked the ends of his bandito mustache as if he were thinking about it. “Nah. Can’t move stuff like that.”
The cop shrugged and dropped the box. He kicked it into a corner and looked around for another taker.
Dominick scanned the room. It was nothing to look at. The floor
was littered with cigarette butts, the walls hadn’t seen paint in twenty years, and there was hardly a place to sit, but “the store” was a virtual K mart of criminal activity.
A dozen men or so huddled in twos and threes under clouds of cigarette smoke, buying and selling stolen property, making connections, planning hijackings and burglaries, bragging and bullshitting. Dominick noticed a short, wiry guy in a maroon silk shirt and a burgundy leather sports jacket scribbling in a notepad as he nodded and smiled and talked to a heavyset guy in his forties whose hairline nearly touched his eyebrows. They didn’t know Dominick, but Dominick knew who they were. The hairy guy had a methamphetamine factory somewhere out in Pennsylvania. The little guy was a loan shark associated with one of the New York Mafia families. It looked like the hairy guy was taking out a loan, perhaps to expand his speed business. Dominick made a mental note, so he could pass it on.
At a wobbly kitchen table with mismatched chairs, a scruffy-looking character with a ragged red beard dealt out cards to three meticulously groomed older gentlemen who all wore sheer nylon socks and lots of gold jewelry.
A fat man with three chins and a wart on the side of his nose was coming down the back staircase, peering over his belly and stepping carefully as if he were crossing a stream on slippery stones. He looked happy. No wonder. A pair of prostitutes had their own boutique up on the third floor.
A smudged glass counter near the front door held a small electric fan, a few cheap Korean cameras, and a set of aluminum pots and pans. The merchandise was just there for show. It was covered with dust and hadn’t been touched in the seventeen months Dominick had been coming here. Except that there used to be two fans. Dominick recalled the first hot day of the summer when a little old Italian lady came in wanting to buy a fan. Everything stopped when the regulars finally noticed her. They stared at her as if she were from the moon. Someone grabbed one of the fans
and gave it to her for nothing, then told her to get the hell out. The poor old lady was still good for a laugh now and then. She had become something of a legend at “the store”—the first and only honest person ever to walk into this place.
Over by the pay phone on the wall, Lenny DePrima, one of the regular fixtures here, was talking to the crooked cop with the umbrellas. Dominick had to talk to DePrima. But before he could make it across the room, someone grabbed his sleeve.
“Hey, Dom.”
Walter Kipner peered over his tinted aviator glasses and grinned up at Dominick. Thick ropes of gold chain mingled with his gray chest hairs. His silver gray mane was perfect.
“Hey, what’s up, Walt?” Kipner always had something going.
“C’mere. I wanna show you something.” Kipner led Dominick over to a secluded corner. He had a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag in his hand. He opened the bag and let Dominick take a peek. It was full of five-dollar bills, bundles of them bound with rubber bands.
Kipner pulled a loose bill out and handed it to Dominick. “Made in England. The best. You can’t tell the difference, can you?”
Dominick rubbed the counterfeit bill between his fingers. “Yeah, not bad.” Frigging Kipner. He was into everything.
“If you take half a mil, you can have ’em for twenty cents on the dollar.” Kipner was slathering like the wolf who ate Grandma.
Dominick pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I dunno, Walt. Fives. Who the fuck wants fives? Twenties, sure. But fives? Gimme a break. You gotta walk around with a fucking suitcase with these things.”
Kipner looked deeply hurt. “Whattaya talkin’ about, Dom? Fives are perfect. Who the fuck bothers to check out a five? You tell me. Big bills they check. But they don’t check little stuff. Never. That’s why they’re perfect.”
Lenny DePrima was still over by the phone, but the cop was gone. Dominick really had to talk to him.
Kipner lowered his voice. “You take a mil and I’ll give ’em to you for
fifteen cents
. Just for you, Dom.”
Dominick kept his eye on DePrima. He had to get rid of Kipner and his phony fives so he could talk to him, but he’d write this up later in his daily report. Kipner was a real piece of work. In the last year he’d tried to sell Dominick everything—silencers, rocket launchers, plastic explosives. This was the first time with counterfeit money, though. If this guy only knew what a pass he was getting. It had been decided from the beginning that they weren’t going to bust any bad guys Dominick found out about and risk blowing his cover. For the past seventeen months he’d had just one target and that was all he was supposed to focus on. His assignment was to get close to Richard Kuklinski—that’s all. But now, almost a year and a half later, he was no closer to Kuklinski than he had been when he started this undercover. That’s why he and Lenny DePrima had to have a little talk. DePrima had to start doing more.
Dominick suspected that Lenny DePrima was jerking him around now. Between the New Jersey State Police and the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, they had more than enough on DePrima to make his life miserable. He was a known fence with a lengthy criminal record, and they could easily put him away for receiving stolen property. They could also prosecute him for a number of auto thefts, burglaries, and hijackings he’d sponsored. This was how people in DePrima’s business ordered their wares. If there was something you knew you could sell, you hired somebody else to steal it for you. Cars, jewelry, fur coats, TV sets, sewing machines, watches, canned goods, whatever. Dominick remembered when a hijacked truckload of Maine lobsters had appeared a couple of days before New Year’s. DePrima figured he could unload lobsters easy for the holiday, so he’d put in an order.
But DePrima wasn’t getting a free ride from the state for nothing
Dominick had several informants who said they knew Richard Kuklinski and were working to get him an introduction, but DePrima was the one who claimed to be Kuklinski’s old buddy. When they first started leaning on DePrima, he had promised to introduce Dominick to Kuklinski and vouch for him, no problem. But in seventeen months Kuklinski hadn’t come into “the store” once, and whenever Dominick asked why, DePrima just shrugged and said Big Rich must be spooked or something. The state wanted to pack it in with Dominick and his informants and try something else. But Dominick had a feeling DePrima wasn’t giving this his best effort, and he was getting tired of the bullshit. He wanted that introduction, and he wanted it soon. DePrima had to start doing more.
Normally Dominick might have been more patient. He knew from experience that these things took time, that in deep cover it often took years to establish yourself. But this wasn’t a normal assignment. This one was different. It was a joint effort, state and federal, combining the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, and the New Jersey State Police. A cooperative effort like this was almost unheard of in law enforcement, but Richard Kuklinski was a very unusual kind of criminal. He was deadly, crafty, and efficient, a mass murderer who set no pattern and left no traces. Everybody had had high hopes when Dominick started out on this undercover assignment, but now he was hearing rumblings from the state side. People were getting impatient and beginning to have doubts about Dominick’s ability to succeed.
Maybe if he hadn’t come into this operation with such a fanfare, they wouldn’t be so disappointed with his slow progress. Ed Denning and Alan Grieco, his old buddies from the Bergen County Homicide Unit, where Dominick had worked before he became a fed, had recommended him for the job. He could imagine the buildup they must have given him. Captain Denning, poker-faced, squinting behind the perpetual veil of cigar smoke, stating the
facts as if they were carved in stone, and there must be something wrong with
you
that you didn’t already know this:
Dominick Polifrone is the best, period
. And Alan Grieco, he looked so honest and sincere he could sell snow to an Eskimo.
Dominick could just hear the two of them: “Oh, Dominick’s the guy you need for this job.” “Dominick put John Gotti’s little brother Vinny away—the one nobody ever hears about because Dominick put him away for a long, long time.” “Dominick? He’s got balls like a frigging elephant. One time he went undercover on location in New York where Frank Sinatra was making a movie and he busted some guy on the crew who was dealing coke.” “Dominick’s got a scrapbook full of wiseguys he’s put away over the years that would make Dick Tracy jealous.”
It was all true, of course, but Dominick knew how Grieco and Denning operated. They must have made him out to be Superman. And Grieco was his best friend. Three times a week he and Dominick went jogging together. No one could ever live up to whatever those two had said about him.
Of course, when you consider who they were giving their sales pitch to, the hype job wasn’t so surprising. Pat Kane of the state police had been dogging Kuklinski since 1980 and all by himself for most of that time. Catching Kuklinski had practically become his mission in life. So when a pharmacist in Bergen County was reported missing and the last person this man was supposed to have been with was Richard Kuklinski, Pat Kane made a beeline for the Bergen County Homicide Unit and asked that they not pursue this suspected homicide but leave it to the state police instead.
It never sits well with the locals when other agencies try to horn in on their territory, but when Captain Denning and Lieutenant Grieco heard about all the killings that were linked to Kuklinski, they decided not to argue with Detective Kane over jurisdiction. Wishing out loud, Kane said what they really needed to flush Kuklinski out was a good undercover man, and a single lightbulb
went on over Denning’s and Grieco’s heads: Dominick Polifrone. If they got Dominick involved, they could cooperate with the state police and still keep it in the family, so to speak. Even though Dominick was a fed now, he was still one of them. They told Detective Kane that Dominick Polifrone was without a doubt the one man for this job, and when Kane objected that Dominick was a federal agent and probably couldn’t get involved in a homicide investigation like this, Denning puffed on his cigar and said one word: “Guns.” Selling guns was part of Kuklinski’s extensive criminal portfolio. As long as there were guns involved, an ATF agent could be brought in.
Pat Kane bought their pitch and called Dominick that very afternoon. It wasn’t long before Dominick was on the job as “Michael Dominick Provenzano.”
But that had been seventeen months ago, and even though certain people from the state might not be saying it out loud, Dominick could feel that they were getting antsy. Frankly so was he. In the past year and a half he’d heard a lot of stories about Kuklinski and the things he was supposed to have done, stories from both sides of the law. At “the store” they referred to him as “the one-man army” and “the devil himself.” If half of what Dominick had heard was true, these names were well deserved.