The Informant

15

SHE RECOGNIZED SPECIAL Agent Holman's voice on the phone instantly. It was before dawn, and she had been waiting for most of the night for his call. But what he said was unexpected. "Frank Tosca is dead."

"So he found the meeting," she said.

"I thought the theory was that he was the one who asked for it."

"Not Tosca," she said. "The other one. The Butcher's Boy. He certainly wasn't invited, but he found out where it was and went there to kill Tosca."

"It's a little early to be sure of that," Holman said. "I remember that was your interpretation of the break-in and killings at Tosca's house. But anytime one of these guys is on the edge of getting really powerful, his enemies get anxious. There were sure to be others who thought they should be the head of the Balacontano family, a few with the name Balacontano. There's also the fact that calling a meeting of the old men is an inherently dangerous thing to do. They're touchy, and a couple are borderline psychotic."

"You're right, of course," she said. "How was Tosca killed?"

"He was found by the raiding party in his cabin, lying on the floor with his throat cut."

It was exactly as she would have expected—the kind of silent attack a solitary killer with all the skills would choose. "I'll wait until the preliminary investigation is over before I say anything more. What's going on out there now?"

"We're moving into the mop-up stages, I think. There are more than two hundred of them in custody right now. We're trying to process them in small groups by airlifting some of them to the Phoenix Police Department. We're also bringing in buses. I expect before the night is over, we'll be farming them out to local lockups all over the area. It's the biggest thing since Apalachin—much bigger, if you just count the number of men we picked up."

"I wish I were there."

"So do I. We could use your help keeping the names straight and how they relate to each other."

"Well, I'd better let you get back to that."

"As soon as we've got more on the Tosca thing, or anything else, I'll get back to you."

"Thanks."

"The thanks go to you. I'm not forgetting that you were the one who figured this out and turned it over to us."

"We're on the same side. It may not seem that way sometimes, but we are."

"I'll talk to you later."

She sat in her dimly lighted office staring at the telephone. She shouldn't have blurted it out that way. She hated working with people who immediately accepted the first interpretation that came to mind and then stuck to it because it was theirs. And now she had probably given Holman the impression she was one of those people. She was sure the Butcher's Boy had done it, but she shouldn't have said it until she'd given the FBI a chance to work their way to the same conclusion.

He had told her that was what he wanted to do, and as far as she knew, he had never failed to accomplish his goal when all it entailed was killing someone. He had managed to get past two hundred men, all of whom had, at some point, made their bones. He had gotten past them and killed Frank Tosca. The big question in her mind now was, Had he also gotten out?

If he had been scooped up in the sweep, he would be photographed and fingerprinted like everyone else. But if he was then placed in a holding cell with a big group of Mafiosi, one of them would recognize him, and they would immediately gang up and kill him. That was what they did best. But if Elizabeth Waring arrived and took him out of that danger, wouldn't he be grateful? Wouldn't he be happy to be her informant? Getting as many of the men who knew him as possible into prison would be his best way of making himself safe. And he had already begun to tell her things. He didn't have any reluctance about that. As he'd said, he hadn't taken an oath of omertà. He wasn't in the Mafia.

She had to take steps to exert control of his fate before he was lost to her forever. First, she would have to be in Phoenix. She would have to get permission from Hunsecker, but her chances of receiving it were nil.

The situation was infuriating. She was the head of a section. If, in the course of any other organized crime case, she'd needed to send a Justice Department investigator to identify and divert a prisoner in the hope of turning him into an informant, she could have done it without permission from anybody. But this man, the professional hit man who had just killed the most potent and dangerous mob boss since Carl Bala himself, evidently wasn't acceptable to the department.

And even if, as probably would happen, the deputy assistant was forced by the avalanche of publicity on his superiors to take an interest, it would be a distant, tepid interest in what the FBI was up to. And the one person who must not be directly involved was Elizabeth Waring. Not only did she have a distinctly supervisory post that precluded her going out into the field, but she was tainted. She had spoken with the killer alone before the three murders at Tosca's house. If Hunsecker knew that she had spoken with the killer a second time, she would be fired.

Elizabeth was in an impossible position, and she had no method for handling it. She had been through twenty years of bureaucratic civil wars, and she had never needed more than one strategy—look at every detail and tell the truth about it. In her first big case she had relinquished forever the chance to endear herself to the upper echelon of the hierarchy by dissenting from their view of the chaos that got Carlo Balacontano convicted of murder. And by being the lone dissenter, she had denied herself the chance to be popular with her equals. When she had been asked for an opinion, she had told the truth. Each time someone who had embraced an opposing view questioned her assessment, she would supply the evidence—as much of it as was necessary to overwhelm him and make him move on to score his points on some other issue.

The strategy of telling the truth would not work this time. She had broken rules, argued with her boss, deceived him, and done things he had forbidden. The truth would destroy her. She had crossed a line and didn't see a way back. She had already begun to console herself the way lunatics and fanatics did—by telling herself that some day everyone would see she was right. She thought about her husband, Jim. He would have told her to concentrate her efforts on persuading the rest of her section. "Bring the team along," he would have said. "If you get too far out there ahead of everybody, the main thing you are is alone."

She woke up her computer and surfed the websites of the various packagers, searching for the best flight from Reagan International in Washington to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. She was about to select a flight when she remembered the rest of the ritual—her itinerary would be sent to her computer and printed. The computer would tell anyone who wanted to look exactly what she'd done and when.

She looked at her watch. It was five-thirty already. The sun was rising on the other side of the building, and the facades across the street were bathed in a red-orange glow. She picked up the telephone on her desk and started to dial, then hung up. She had no proof that her phone calls weren't being recorded. Maybe they weren't, but the numbers anyone dialed would appear on the bill. She used her cell phone and called Delta Airlines. She got a ticket for the flight at ten A.M. Then she wrote a memo to her second-tier people, saying she was taking a personal day or two. She thought about the kids. Amanda and Jim were exceptionally mature and self-reliant, and they had each other. But she would have to do some thinking before she went through with this.

When she got home, she spent a few minutes examining the physical evidence of how her two children had operated without her last night. The dishes in the dishwasher were clean and indicated they'd cooked something that required a pot. The storage container indicated they'd finished the homemade pasta sauce, and the package in the garbage identified the pasta as penne. She was shocked to see the trimmed bottoms of asparagus and a few wilted leaves of Romaine lettuce. They were growing up.

Before she woke them for breakfast, she wrote a note explaining where she was going and approximately why, with a reminder that they were never to answer any questions about her, regardless of who asked. She said she was going to try to contact a suspect, separate him from other prisoners in a jail, and persuade him to cooperate. Then she went upstairs, woke them, and told them she had to leave for a couple of days. Neither seemed especially interested, and certainly not impressed.

She took some cash out of her hiding place in her closet, which was a tall pair of hiking boots she never wore, and left them half of it. She also left them both cars, but didn't tell them that the reason was that if anyone drove past in the daytime, one would be there, and late at night she wanted them to notice that neither was missing.

When she had kissed them good-bye and watched them get into the Volvo to head off for school, she showered, dressed, packed, and called a cab. When she got to the airport, she met a couple of colleagues from the Justice Department. They were both flying to some case in Florida, and they all checked in and declared their weapons, then were taken on a detour around the metal detectors before they parted company.

In two hours Elizabeth was on a plane watching the baggage carts go forward past her window as the tractor pushed the plane away from the gate. The plane taxied out to its spot, bumped along the runway into the wind, and lifted. It was still tilted sharply upward and leaving identifiable buildings and streets below when her night of staring at a computer screen exacted its price. She fell asleep.

She woke six hours later as the plane went into its final descent over Phoenix. The strange, hot Arizona winds always gave planes landing there sudden rises and drops, and then, as the plane touched down, batted it from the side to force the pilot to set it down fast and hard. She was shocked and embarrassed. She would no more have slept on a plane than in any other public place.

She endured a few minutes of feeling awful and half asleep, took out her hairbrush and makeup, and did her best to repair her appearance. She was almost at the rear of the airplane so she had a long wait to get into the aisle and leave. She used the time to recover from taking her night's sleep in an airplane seat. After she got out and visited the ladies' room, where she finished her makeup and hair in front of big, well-lighted mirrors, she walked toward the baggage claim while she called Special Agent Holman's cell phone number.

"Holman."

"Hi. This is Elizabeth Waring. I'm in Phoenix. I realized I didn't have anything more important than this to do. I'm on my way to the baggage claim. If you'll tell me where you are, I'll join you and see what I can do to help."

"I'm sending a man for you. His name is Agent Krause. What airline?"

"Delta."

"Give him about a half hour."

"Thank you. I'll watch for him."

Agent Krause was there in twenty minutes, and he wasn't difficult to spot. He was probably thirty, about six foot one, and looked a lot like a former running back for a small college. He wore a good gray suit and carried a sheet of paper that said WARING.

She stepped up to him and held out her hand. "Waring."

"Krause," he said. "The car's at the curb." He took her bag and led her there. It was the usual Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor. Krause drove the way they all did, with a slightly aggressive certainty that came from the driver training they got. She had always been a little bit nervous and distrustful of her husband Jim's way of pushing the speed, but nothing had ever happened, so she was resolved to ignore it now.

"You know why I'm here, right?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Is there any way I can go straight to where the prisoners are and look at them all at once?"

"Not at once. They're in about a dozen different places—precinct jails, mostly. We've got seven regional offices in Arizona, and we've been bringing in agents from all of them to help out with this."

"Have the prisoners been booked and photographed?"

"Yes. We're collecting the booking files for you right now in a conference room at the FBI building on Indianola Avenue in town."

"That should be fine."

When they arrived at the FBI field office, she recognized it from other trips to Phoenix. It was a low redbrick building that dominated the street corner, with high windows on two sides that seemed designed to save on artificial lighting. He set her up in the conference room. The room was what they all were, a long room with windows on one side and a long table surrounded by chairs that looked comfortable but weren't. She realized she had been in this room once before, about ten years ago. It had been for a briefing on information the Phoenix office had obtained in wiretaps of the phone of old Vito Sangiovese while he was exiled to Arizona.

She sat down beside the pile of files and attacked them, going through them as quickly as she could, just opening each one, glancing at the snapshot, closing the file, and setting it on top of the pile to her right so she could go to the next one.

Krause said, "What are you looking for?"

"A particular face, a man who might be using any name or no name. I think he was there. If he got picked up, I want to talk to him."

She had seen thousands of arrest files in the twenty years since she had gone to work for the Justice Department. The men in today's collection of files were unusually well dressed and neatly shaven, but otherwise they looked like booking photographs always did—one profile, one facing the camera, with height lines behind the irritated subject and a black square in front with his name. In this group there were men as old as eighty, and men who at nineteen or twenty could barely be called men. They were a year or so older than her own son, Jim. She had seen many of these faces before—most in surveillance photographs, a few in person.

She read the name in front of her, below the face of a middle-aged man. "This says he's Dominic Ippolito. He's actually Salvatore Gappa, and he lives in Detroit. He even lied about his age. This says he's fifty-one, but he's at least sixty."

"Another one?" said Krause. "We've already found about twenty who had false ID. Credit cards and everything."

She gave him the Gappa file and went to the next. She kept moving through the files quickly, scanning the pictures. She had a sense of the men who had attended the meeting. The heads of the twenty-six families that ran cities had come, as well as a few heads of crews that ran particularly important businesses. Each had brought two or three young soldiers as bodyguards and one or two consiglieres or underbosses. That group of thirty or so old men and their hundred and fifty retainers made up the central group, the people essential for a national consensus on anything. The other fifty or so were probably petitioners who had grievances, or disputants with issues they wanted the old men to decide, or heads of crews who wanted permission to do various things. In a system where the penalty for overstepping was always death, a meeting must be a great opportunity to avoid problems.

As Elizabeth went through the files, she kept searching for the face of the one man who had not been invited to the conference, but whom she believed had come anyway. She stared once at each photo of a face, unable to avoid seeing each name too, but pushing herself to get through them and find him.

If he had been there, his picture should be with the others. He was a man, not a ghost. Fifty years ago at Apalachin, at least a few important capos had evaded the police by running through the fields of nearby farms. But that had been a different kind of operation. A New York State trooper had simply noticed that there seemed to be a lot of big fancy cars parked at a local farmhouse. This time there had been a few hours' advance notice, so the might and sophistication of a modern military-style federal operation had been applied. There had been helicopters with infrared imaging, advanced night-vision scopes. How could he have gotten away? Something occurred to her and she turned to Krause.

"Holman said they'd found Frank Tosca's body in one of the cabins."

"That's right. He was killed with a knife. His throat was cut."

"What's been found since then? Were there any other bodies?"

"Yes. There's a file on it over here."

She felt the breath go out of her. Why hadn't she thought of it before? Being able to get in and kill Tosca didn't mean he could get out afterward. He wasn't in these files because they'd killed him.

Krause got up and walked to the corner of the long table, brought back a file, and handed it to her.

She opened it, almost certain whose face she would see. She looked down. It was a young man of Italian descent, twenty years younger than the man she had expected, and his name was Agnetti. "Any others?"

"Not yet. It's a big crime scene. There's the ranch, all the cabins and facilities, miles of trails, and so on. And all around is just empty mountains and desert."

"Okay." She returned to the photographs, looking for his. If he had been swept up with the others, there might still be time. All of them would have been handcuffed during the first few hours. There may not have been a moment when a group of them could strangle him or stomp him to death in a cell.

As she looked at file after file, she quietly became more and more frantic. The time she had spent looking at the ones who were not him seemed wasted. She flipped through files at an increasing rate, even when part of her mind was telling her that the odds against his being in one of the last few files were enormous.

She reached the last file, and his picture was not there. She looked up and said, "That's it, right? There aren't any men detained but not photographed, or stopped and released as innocent bystanders or something?"

"No, ma'am. I believe the thinking was that La Cosa Nostra wouldn't have let anyone like that get near their little retreat. Everybody there was considered to be invited. And there isn't much chance that anybody got away unnoticed."

"That's my next question. Why do you say that?"

"Because before the order came to move in, the roads had all been blocked with patrol cars waiting for the word for nearly an hour. We didn't want anybody driving in and saying they'd seen a whole bunch of cops. The raid was a complete surprise. When the helicopters landed, the meeting in the main building was still in session. Nobody was running away."

"Who killed Frank Tosca?"

"I don't know, but I'm guessing it was somebody working for whoever ends up as boss of the Balacontano family. Probably with the approval of the council of old men, or at least some of them."

"Who killed this other man, the young one?" She opened the file. "The diagram of the scene puts him up on the mountain, at the crest above the ranch. He was strangled with a rope or a cord."

"Maybe he was a Balacontano soldier who came to the ranch with Frank Tosca."

"The most logical reason to be up on the mountain is to stand guard, to protect the meeting from intruders. And strangling a young, healthy man is a lot of work. If it was an execution, why not do it the way they've always done it, a bullet at the base of the skull?"

"I don't know."

"I think it wasn't an execution. I think it was the killer taking out a guard in the most silent way."

"Why?" asked Krause.

"So he could get into the complex where Frank Tosca was, kill him—also silently, with a knife—and then walk out the same way, past a dead guard."

He looked skeptical. "You think the FBI screwed this up, don't you?"

"Absolutely not."

"But you think we let the one who killed Frank Tosca slip away. We apprehended over two hundred men, including the heads of twenty-six families, and about a hundred of their best people, none of whom got away. Doesn't it make more sense to think one of the two hundred made members of the Mafia we caught within a hundred yards of the body did it, and not someone we can't prove was even there?"

"Do we have a time of death for Tosca yet?"

"He was dead no more than an hour before we got there."

"So it doesn't tell us much about who did it."

"No, but it makes an outsider who did it and slipped away before we moved into the area a lot less likely. We already had cars blocking the road by then."

"If he was there, he didn't come or go by road. Do we have a murder weapon for either victim?"

"No. We have a few knives, but nothing that has any trace of blood on it, and most of them are too small to be the one. Nothing on the strangling cord, which could have been any kind of rope, strip of leather, or even rolled fabric."

"So what's been found doesn't prove anything at all."

"Agreed."

"I'm beginning to think I can't prove my theory with what we have," she said. "But if this were my raid, I would have forensics people examining the clothing of each of the men who have been detained and searching the grounds for clothing that's been thrown away. It's highly unlikely that somebody could cut Tosca's throat and not get some droplets of blood on his own clothes or shoes. Since nobody heard a struggle or shouting or anything, the attacker probably took him by surprise, and that usually means from behind. It's hard to cut a man's throat without getting a hand or arm around his head to tilt it back. By the time the throat is fully cut, the carotid artery is shooting blood out a couple of feet, and it gets messier after that."

"You're right," Krause said. "They're treating the whole ranch as the crime scene, so they'll be searching it foot by foot."





Elizabeth Waring corrected the misinformation in the files and wrote in relevant details. There were a large number of obfuscations and lies in the answers the detainees had given to direct questions. Danny "the Monkey" Strachello listed his occupation as "casino operator" even though he had been barred from entering a casino in all the states that had them. Paul Mascone from New Jersey had planted some nonsense about being in the insurance business, which was only true if extortion was a form of insurance.

But there were also genuine bits of information. Anthony Barino, the head of the family in Tampa, had listed a holding company that owned four restaurants as his employer. Jerry Sorrenti from New York had a monopoly on refuse collection in part of the city, and he listed his occupation as "garbage man." If this meeting could be shown in court to be what it was—a meeting of the men who ran the Mafia—these businesses could be broken up or confiscated under the RICO statute.

She used a computer in the outer office to examine the list of men who were on parole and were not allowed to be within speaking distance of other convicted felons. There were a dozen who weren't even supposed to leave their home states without the permission of a judge. There were fifty-six who had been taken into custody with concealed firearms, and over a hundred firearms had been found that hadn't been tied to anyone in particular. Nineteen men had been carrying cocaine and thirteen had medications with false or suspicious prescriptions on the labels.

The count she liked best so far was the telephones. Thirty-seven men had been carrying cell phones that were stolen or were clones of phones registered to other people. That apparently was their current way of keeping their calls from being monitored. But it also reminded her of something she had learned in her first days at the Justice Department. Gangsters were all thieves at heart. A capo who made millions of dollars a year on rake-offs and tributes still couldn't resist a stolen television set that ran on a cable diverted from a neighbor's yard. A case of scotch was a hundred times better if it was boosted from the back of a truck.

By now all of them must have had a chance to make a telephone call so the flights coming into Phoenix for the next twenty-four hours would be delivering the largest influx of legal talent that Arizona had ever seen. But there was still time to find more vulnerabilities in these detainees and more opportunities to ask questions.

There were men in the meeting who had so many policemen, prosecutors, and judges on their payrolls that they would have had to commit massacres in public to get arrested in their home cities, and something more than that to get anything but a suspended sentence. Immunity had made some of them careless, so many of them were going to be in serious trouble for things they habitually did at home—carrying guns and drugs, and spending time with people just like them.

She spent several more hours working with the U.S. attorney's people in the office preparing charges to be filed against the heads of the twenty-six families and then oversaw the work of the staff in filling out the papers for some of the lower-ranking men.

Holman came in looking for her late in the afternoon, and when he saw her, he grinned and called, "Waring!" He rushed up to her and extended his arms to give her a hug, but then restrained himself and lowered his hand to shake hers. "Thank you so much for coming to help us out."

"It's my pleasure," she said. "We hardly ever have too much of a good thing—so many suspects that we can hardly push the paper fast enough."

"That's the truth. I heard you've been at this all day without stopping."

"We all have. But as a result, we're getting down to the simple stuff now—the ones who didn't have the sense to throw away their guns and drugs. Nothing subtle or arguable."

"Thank you very much for doing this. I've been tied up for most of the day processing the crime scene in the Tosca murder and the one up the hill. If we could just tie the bodies to one or two of these guys—"

"I'm afraid that's not going to happen," she said. "The killer is long gone. He got out before the FBI arrived."

"How did he do that?"

"How? Probably he came on foot, avoiding the roads, and killed one of the guards along the crest so he'd be able to leave the same way."

"And where would that put him now?"

"Believe me, if I find out, you'll be the first one I call."