Chasers (7 page)

10

He sat with his back to the wall, thick long hair brushing up against the gray cinder blocks that surrounded the four sides of the dark basement. The man was young, no older than twenty-five, and was dressed in a style well-schooled Brits call smart casual. He glanced down at a yellow legal pad resting in the center of a dark-oak table and shook his head in mock disappointment. He looked up and glared at the trembling man sitting across from him, stripped down to his shorts and a sweat-soaked T-shirt, blond hair, scraggly beard, and double chin coated with the gleam of fear.

“You know me?” the young man asked, his voice strong and calm. “Who I am and who I work for is what I mean?”

“Yes,” the trembling man muttered, his lower lip quivering at a NASCAR pace.

“And yet you still went ahead and did what you did,” the young man said, flashing eyes as cold as winter rain. “Which can only lead me to conclude that you don’t give a bear’s shit about who I am or who it is I work for. You’re a player, and a player picks any field he wants. That’s the photo snap I get.”

“No, no, that’s not it at all, Carlos,” the trembling man said, sweat flowing off his head and neck like a small waterfall. “I needed to move the six kilos fast, didn’t want to give a tip-off to the narcs that always seem to be on my ass.”

“They’re on your ass for sound reason, Walter,” Carlos said with disdain. “They know that if they catch you they break you. Simple as the alphabet. And when they break you they know you’ll toss out names at them faster than if you were reading them from a fuckin’ phone book. It’s prison you’re afraid of, little man. But ratting out those who play on the same streets you do? It don’t carry the weight. And selling shit that ain’t yours to sell, you give a fuck about even less.”

“I’m trying to explain it all to you—please, just hear me out on this,” Walter pleaded. “First off, I didn’t know the shit came from your crew. I bought it fair and on the square from Johnny the Clerk, hard runner with El Lupe and the Purple Gang in the East Bronx. Worked a good deal and made back six bangs more than what I paid, and I did it in less time than it takes to watch an extra-inning ball game. Then, once I knew I was in cloud clear, I was gonna come find you and hand over fifty percent of the haul. Plus any adds on top. My hand to my mother’s grave, I’m talkin’ truth here.”

“I’d bet better than even money you never even laid eyes on your mother or any woman claiming such,” Carlos said. He pushed his chair aside, walked around the table, and stood behind Walter, who was trembling so hard now that his bare feet shook on the cement floor. “And I don’t give a fuck about the where and the how my drugs ended up in your greasy little hands. But I care, and I care a great deal, that you moved my brand out on my streets. I let shit like that stand without a Western Union going back the other direction, soon enough my name is ground down to what yours is now. A flat nothing with a target large enough for the blind to see splattered on my back. Even someone as shit-sure stupid as you can see the bind that puts me in.”

Carlos McEntire was a seven-figure drug dealer, running hundreds of kilos a month from the hills of Bogotá to the streets of New York each and every month. He had set up shop in a candy store on East 233rd Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx while he was still in his freshman year at a local Catholic high school. He worked four-hour shifts behind the counter and used his time there as a base to sell marijuana packets to the older students who flocked in after class to buy cold sodas, small bags of chips, and enough weed to get them through the week. Every Saturday, he split the cash profits with an elderly Irish couple who didn’t care how the money supplementing their monthly income came through the door. Within six months, Carlos had taken over the candy store and partnered with a narcotics detective with a habit of his own who was working out of the local precinct. The cop offered both protection and connections and, in return, had asked for a 15 percent cut and all the free coke he could jam up his nostrils.

Carlos had diversified his inventory to include pills and small vials of weak coke cut and danced on so many times it ranked just above Johnson’s baby powder for a full-tilt buzz. He would spray a few hits of Raid ant and roach killer over the dope to give it an extra boost. “Raid is, like, the fuckin’ Gatorade of dope,” he once told a rival dealer. “It gives it that energy kick to get you over the top of the hill. Until you hit the big time and land your ass in prime-time heaven, you got no choice but to swear by that shit. Anything that’s strong enough to kill bugs has got to be more than good enough to milk the flakes we’re moving on these losers.”

The increase in Carlos’s street activity brought him to the attention of two equally young and hungry drug runners, Hector and Freddie Gonzalez. For a few brief months, the trio circled around one another like circus cats in a cage, watching and waiting, deciding when and where to make the first move. But in a unique show of restraint that is seldom witnessed in the drug world the three on-the-rise dealers decided to unite their small forces and move as one against the stronger and better equipped coke lords of the city. Across a two-year period, starting in the summer of 1982, the three hoods and their ruthless G-Men, numbering no more than twenty-four strong at the outset, lashed out against rival gangs with a viciousness not seen on New York streets since the Gallo-Profaci wars of the early 1960s.

“Every day on the job, I knew I could count on finding another body tossed in a garbage dump or left burnt as a slab of bacon on a rooftop,” Sonny Rottillo, a detective working the narcotics beat during those twenty-four brutal months, recalled. “And they never hid the fact it was them that did the killing. They
wanted
us all to know, especially the other gangs. We just could never get enough on them to tag them with the hits. Sooner turned to soon, and the other gangs got tired of having their wives start their cars or looking both ways when they walked out of one of their social clubs. They didn’t have the same stomach for the fight that the brothers and McEntire did. And in that crowd the one with the biggest hunger for blood always walks away with the title.”

The Gonzalez brothers did the five-borough walk and talked with the other gangs in town, brokering deals that would eventually stem some of the bloodshed, cutting partnerships with the five Italian crime families and the smaller South American crews that were in play. Carlos worked at building up the sale and distribution end of the multi-tiered business, ensuring that a cut of any cocaine or heroin that moved into New York City ended up in the offshore bank accounts of the G-Men. In return, the upstarts offered blanket coverage to all participating members of the organization, turning loose their murder machine on any late arrivals that failed to grasp the rules of the agreement. If a new crew or dealer emerged on the scene, the offer was put out to send a share of the profits down toward the G-Men or risk a penalty fee. The initial cost was the life of a player who was close to the dealer. If that move was either ignored or not acted upon with the required speed, the G-Men took it to the next level. “They were the first New York City gang to reach out and touch someone’s family,” Timmy “Goat” Reynolds, one of the NYPD’s legendary narcotics undercover cops, later said. “Before them, dealers only looked to take out one another. Their families could sleep safe and sound at night. These guys came in and changed all the rules. They did a top-to-bottom wipeout—wife, mother, father, kids, pets. You fucked with them and they left behind a trail of blood Mississippi River thick. That left dealers and their crews with two clear-as-a-sunny-day choices: you either do business the G-Men way or you get the fuck out of Dodge. You could be a hundred a day and on-the-nod deep into drugs, that’s the kind of message that blasts its way through any smoke and haze you toss in its path.”

“I’ll give you all my money from any deal I make here on,” Walter said, trembling as if he were in the middle of an ice storm. “From this second, I work only for you, fuck anybody else. I’ll bring it in heavy, too—you know you can count on that plain as shit on the street. I’ll be your number-one mover, work my ass off night and day. You’ll see, Carlos, believe it when you hear it. You’ll see.”

“How can I believe you on that?” Carlos asked, taking several steps away from Walter and putting a light to a thin brown cigar. “An air-sucker like you would lie in front of the fuckin’ Pope if you figured it would help out your angle. So words out of your mouth are like tits on a bull to my ears. Don’t mean shit.”

“I put it on my honor to you as a man,” Walter said. “No way for me to make it any cleaner than that.”

“There’s a way,” Carlos said, giving a slow nod, his thin lips pursed in a tight smile. “One that would show me you had the courage and the balls to back up all your words, make me toe-tap my way out of here knowing I had just traded for a stand-up and true team member.”

“Tell me what it is and I’ll do it without wasting a blink,” Walter said, finally starting to see the emergence of a sliver of light at the end of his barren tunnel.

“You sure now?” Carlos asked. “You can still back away from your Custer stand, take the fast ride upstate with the ice pick in your neck. Not too late for that. All nice, clean, and easy. This other road that’s open to you—not as quick, not as painless, not as final. You have to live with what happens, you make it your choice to travel down there. Am I coming across clear?”

“Whatever it is,” Walter said with nervous conviction. “I won’t take a step back. I’m from the barrio, my brother. We born with the hard brand burnt into us.”

Carlos nodded and tossed his half-smoked cigar against a corner wall, a hard set of eyes glaring down at the sweat-stained dealer, who was breathing loud enough for it to echo in the empty room. “All right, then,” he said, his voice, tone, and manner as relaxed as if he were in the middle of a Sunday-afternoon golf outing. “You leave me something behind, something that means the whole planet to you but would show how serious you are about working for me alive as opposed to not working for me dead. You willing to do that, to take it that far down the road, then we might have ourselves a solid deal.”

“Anything, Carlos, I swear it,” Walter said. “You just name it and whatever it is, if I got it, it belongs to you. All you need do is tell me what it is you want.”

Carlos stared at Walter for a long and silent stretch of time. He then took a deep breath, smiled, and rested his hands against the cool cement of the wall at his back. “Your legs, Walter,” Carlos finally said in a low voice. “You leave behind both your legs. You work for me, you’ll do it from a wheelchair. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to keep them. I’ll have them left for you in your apartment. You’ll see them again once you’re out of the hospital.”

Tears streamed down Walter’s scarred face and he choked back a mouthful of vomit. His heart was beating so loud that it made him dizzy, his mind filled with a vision of pain and bloodshed. He didn’t turn to watch Carlos leave, unable to either speak or move his head, trembling hard enough to rattle the wooden slats of his chair.

“Welcome to my crew,” he heard Carlos say.

11

Boomer waited as the woman walked toward him, the lights from the Whitestone Bridge overhead helping to guide her way. The ground was wet, the middle-of-the-night dew settling in and turning the brown dirt at his feet into soft mud. “I was starting to think you might not show,” he said as she stood across from him, hands shoved inside the pockets of an expensive black coat, the shine on her boots strong enough to reflect the glare of the passing headlights from above.

“I’m always late,” she said, her voice coated with a rich Eastern European accent. “A family habit, I’m afraid.”

“Late or not, I’m glad you’re here,” Boomer said. He handed her a container of deli coffee, the lid jammed down tight. “I took a guess as to how you like it.”

“Which is how?” she asked.

“I had a nun when I was in grammar school used to say she took her coffee black and bitter, just like her life,” Boomer said. “That’s how I take it, figured you for the same.”

“Good call,” she said. She lifted the lid of the container and took a long sip of the hot coffee. She was in her mid-twenties, dark hair flowing long and straight down the sides of her face and shoulders.

“Do you know why I wanted to meet with you?” Boomer said.

“Our friend said you had something important to ask,” she said. “He thought it would be best if it was done face-to-face. And I agree with that thinking. It’s always best to be able to look in the eye of either a friend or an enemy.”

“He tell you anything about me?” Boomer asked.

“He didn’t need to,” she said. “I’ve always done my own homework. So I know you’re a cop, or were. And who I am should be no secret to you.”

Natalie Robinov was Russian organized-crime royalty.

She was the only daughter of the feared and respected Viktor Robinov, known to both cops and criminals as the Red Wolf, a thug and killer who ruled the Russian underworld from the Cold War through the odd dance of détente by murdering upwards of fifteen hundred men and women who sought to block the growth of his empire. Viktor was the Charles “Lucky” Luciano of the Russian mob, moving it out of its simple nineteenth-century mind-set, in which tribal gangs were happy and content to rule over the small villages within their domain and share the profits only among themselves, and into a national crime syndicate where the nation was sliced up like a thick oven-fresh pie and all factions gathered to share in the wages of fear.

Such a bold move did not come free of bloodshed, and it took several decades and many mutilated bodies before Russia was finally able to waltz into the twentieth century armed and organized, its reach now of global proportions, its power vast, the numbers beyond the scope and abilities of any other criminal enterprise or law-enforcement entity. “In time—and we’re not talking a long time here, either—the Russian mob will dominate and rule the world of crime,” FBI field director Ralph Vecchio once said to a gathering of federal agents at a Washington, D.C., government-sponsored conference. “At the height of their power, there were no more than five thousand members of Italian organized crime in the United States and as many as eight thousand in Italy. The same numbers, more or less, hold true today for the South Americans and rank a few thousand or so higher for the Chinese Triads. The Russians? They are a criminal nation all their own. At last count, there were three and a half million sworn members of the Russian mob, with anywhere between thirty and forty percent of them holding degrees in chemistry and physics. That makes them both deadly and dangerous. And, in the minds of many at our end of the line, be they federal or local, damn near unbeatable.”

Viktor Robinov chose his daughter, Natalie, to lead the Russians in their quest to conquer and rule the criminal world. She had trained by his side since her youngest years, and had been educated in both the best schools mob money can afford and the day-to-day lessons of running a vast and expanding criminal enterprise. She was fluent in four languages and had martial-arts and weapons expertise, as well as a business degree from Oxford. She was tall, angular, and beautiful, and she understood that in her work such beauty could be as vicious a weapon as a loaded gun or a jagged knife. Viktor was sixty-seven and succumbing to lung cancer when he last spoke to his daughter, anointing her the most powerful member of the Russian underworld.

“You’re ready now,” he said to her, his once full-bodied voice reduced to a mere rasp. “It is my time to die and your time to rule.”

“I don’t want to be without you, Papa,” Natalie said, not allowing herself the luxury of tears. She knew how little her father approved of any sign of weakness.

“And you won’t ever be,” Viktor said, reaching for her hand. “As I ruled with you by my side, so, too, shall you rule with me by yours. I will never leave you. My presence will be felt in every action, every decision, in your every thought. Know this, my sweet girl, and never forget it.”

“I won’t,” Natalie said with a slow shake of her head. “I swear it to you.”

“You will be tested, very early on,” Viktor said to her. “Not everyone is pleased that my only child, and a woman at that, has been chosen to run the operation. They will look to kill, rid you from the scene before you even have a chance to enjoy a taste of the vast power you will have at your disposal.”

“Who do you think it will be?” Natalie asked.

“The who, in this case, doesn’t matter,” Viktor said, his eyes the color of a wolf’s winter coat. “They are
all
thinking you are too weak, ill suited to command them. So you must act within the first hours of taking the reins, even before my body is buried. Send a signal to all that you are even more vicious than the Red Wolf they so feared. It is the only way you can assume control and keep it. You must do it fast, make sure it’s bloody, and, most of all, make sure it’s visible for all to know and see.”

“How many?” she asked.

“As many as it takes to get the message delivered,” Viktor said. “No soldiers, only those with high ranks and powerful posts. Include in this initial group the one who is your most trusted adviser and who all suspect has your heart.”

Natalie stiffened a bit, just enough for Viktor to notice. “Do you suspect it as well?” she asked. “That Vlad has my heart?”

“I have learned never to suspect,” Viktor said. “Only to believe. And, yes, I believe your heart belongs to that young gangster.”

“And yet you would have me kill a man you believe I’m in love with,” she said. “A man I may wish to wed and have by my side.”

“You can never love, Natalie,” Viktor said, wiping at his mouth with a cloth napkin. “In your position you can only taste love, be near it perhaps, embrace it on occasion, but never give yourself to it. Love is as big an enemy to you as trust. They can only bring you to ruin. You must never surrender to either one.”

“But you have loved me,” Natalie said. “And, before me, you loved Mama. Or am I wrong?”

“You speak the truth, I loved you both,” Viktor said, his words hard and as cold as the Russian air. “But even with that I made sure to have ears to your words and eyes to your movements. And, despite such caution, I was caught off guard by your mother’s betrayal, so much so that initially I doubted the evidence I knew to be valid. I questioned the truth that stood before me.”

Natalie leaned in closer to her father. “What are you telling me?” she asked.

“That if you are indeed to follow in my footsteps you must be prepared to have an even harder heart than I could ever have,” Viktor said. “Anyone can order a kill or do it himself, be it the death of a stranger, an enemy, or a friend. But not anyone can put to death a person to whom he has professed an unending love, someone with whom he has exposed his true self. Someone for whom he would risk all that he has worked to gain.”

“It was you that had Mama murdered?” Natalie said, barely able to get the words past her lips.

“Even worse than that, my Natalie,” Viktor said, taking in a series of deep and painful breaths. “Your mother met her death by my own hands. It was done in this very room and on this very bed. And I shed not one tear. Not back then and not now, even with my own death so close at hand.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked, glancing for a brief moment at a framed photo of her mother on a night table, dressed in a black dress, a white string of pearls hanging loose around her neck. “And why now?”

“So that you are fully aware of the type of man I had to be in order to retain my position of power,” Viktor said. “And the kind of woman you need to be in order to maintain yours. And now is not just the only time I have left to alert you to this painful fact but the best time as well.”

“I don’t understand you, Papa,” Natalie said. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“My lesson is a simple one, my little Natalie,” Viktor said, gripping both her hands in his, thick purple veins coursing up his arms. “I need to know before I breathe my last that I have prepared you to run this organization in the manner required. I need to see the proof that I have indeed chosen the right person to succeed me.”

“And how am I to prove it?” Natalie said, wondering now if her father was merely lost inside the fuzzy haze of the various drugs his doctors were giving him to help him cope with the pain.

“End my life,” he said, his voice at full strength for this brief moment. “Do not allow your mother’s killer to breathe for one more pain-free second. Make me pay for what I did to her and for what I took from you.”

“Isn’t living with it pain enough for you?” Natalie asked.

“If you do indeed believe that, then my choice is already doomed,” Viktor said. “There is no pain in taking a life, only relief that you were the one spared. No matter whose life it was that was brought to an end.”

Natalie stared at her father and gazed into the harshness of his eyes. She leaned down and kissed him gently on both cheeks. She then reached across the bed, grabbed a pillow, and held it above her father’s face. She watched as he smiled up at her and gave her a silent nod. She eased the pillow down on his face and held it there, holding it tighter and with strength the moment she felt her father jostle and squirm. She kept it there until the life was drained from the wilted body of the most feared man in the Russian underworld.

“Your father never made mention of having a kid,” Boomer said to Natalie. “Then again, our meetings were never weighed much on the social end.”

“You knew my father?” Natalie asked, not bothering to hide her surprise.

“We butted heads once or twice,” Boomer said. “Other times, when it served both our interests, we buttered each other’s bread. He was a tough bastard, but old school all the way. He knew the rules and, while he may have bent them here and there, he usually stayed within the foul lines.”

“And you’re wondering if the same is true of me as well?” Natalie said.

“Only when it comes to a restaurant takeout,” Boomer said. “I want to make sure I aim my guns at the right targets.”

“You lost someone in that shooting,” Natalie said, both hands gripped around the now empty coffee container.

“My niece,” Boomer said, his eyes suddenly sliding from hers.

“I’m sorry for that,” she said, drawing in on Boomer’s sense of loss and despair. “But none of my guns were involved. It’s your choice whether you believe that or not.”

Boomer stared at Natalie, looking into a pair of eyes the color of night, and nodded, surprised at the warmth she conveyed. “Viktor never lied to me,” he said. “I’m going to take the points and spread that trait to his daughter.”

“Do you need anything else from me?” she asked, her unlined face shimmering under the lights of the bridge.

“If I do, I’ll reach out,” Boomer said.

“And if you do I’m sure we’ll meet in a spot equally as romantic,” she said, gazing out at the river water lapping against a shoreline littered with old tires, blocks of cement, and rusty old train rails.

“I’ll make a point of it,” Boomer said.

Natalie turned back to him and smiled.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” he said. “I lost my dad when I was young, too. It’s not something you shake off easy, doesn’t matter what end of the fence you play on.”