Young Darius was given a bag of money one day. Take this to the laundry, he was told. If there’s one dollar missing, we’ll find out in two minutes. You’ll be dead in three.
He took the money to the laundry—actually, it was a laundromat—and that’s where he met the man who kept a little office in the back of the place. It was one of several cash-based businesses the man owned all over the city. Laundromats, car washes, restaurants. Anyplace that handled a lot of bills, and even loose change. The man would take money from guys like Darius Cole and he’d mix it up with the cash from the businesses and like some kind of magic trick he’d somehow make it all come out clean.
The man at the laundromat told Darius Cole that this was a trick invented in Chicago, by Al Capone, back in the Prohibition days. Later, Cole learned about Meyer Lansky, the criminal mastermind and financial genius who was a hell of a lot smarter than Capone. Lansky financed the National Crime Syndicate, held points in every casino from Vegas to London, and transferred every dollar he made to his own personal bank in Switzerland. He never spent one day in prison.
Cole didn’t want to be just another kid working a corner. He wanted to be the black Meyer Lansky. No more drug addicts. No more gunfights on the streets. If you clean the money, you get clean yourself. You wear a suit like a legitimate businessman. Fuck that, you are a legitimate businessman.
By the time he was twenty, Cole had a minority share in a dozen restaurants. In barbershops. In car washes. Even a few laundromats. Any business that handled cash, with minimal recordkeeping, Cole wanted a piece of it. He’d mix in drug money with the cash proceeds and deposit it all as legitimate income.
The entire time, he kept a low profile. No flash. He paid federal agents to keep him out of the files. FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, even Interpol. Cole stayed invisible.
He bought more businesses all over the country. Better restaurants, nightclubs. If the bartender would take a hundred-dollar bill from you without blinking, Cole wanted to meet the owner.
He got so good at it, he started handling other people’s money. Not from rival gangs, of course. Some lines don’t get crossed. But there were plenty of other criminal enterprises with money that needed cleaning. He didn’t get nervous about taking that money from white men in suits and giving most of it back to them. In fact, he would use the opportunity to learn everything he could about their operations, every last detail, until he could take over from the inside, like a Greek soldier from a Trojan horse, eliminating anyone who dared stand in his way.
By the time he was thirty, Cole had grown smarter and even more powerful. He expanded overseas, first in the Cayman Islands, then in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Belarus—any country with soft banking laws. He always kept the money moving, more and more of it, faster and faster, in amounts small enough to avoid suspicion, but times a hundred, then a thousand, using accounts in other people’s names. People he could trust. People who knew the penalty for betraying him. The money would be round-tripped from one “smurf” account to another, Kraków to Rio to Jakarta, before coming back to Chicago.
When the time was right, he moved back into the drug business, but he did it the smart way, on the wholesale end. There was already a direct pipeline from the Mexican cartels to Chicago—Cole took this over and made life easier for the Mexicans by giving them one single contact to work with. Then he supplied the product to high-level dealers who would move it throughout the entire Midwest. So instead of having a thousand customers, he had twenty or thirty, all men he could trust. This was how he managed the risk and maximized the revenue. Then he channeled that money into more and more legitimate businesses.
He hired the best accountants. He hired the best attorneys. And he paid off the dirtiest cops. He grew his business into an empire.
Most cops know how to follow criminals. Only a select few of them are good at following money. Cole stayed ahead of them for years until they finally brought him down on a federal RICO case. He’d been here in Terre Haute ever since.
It was a story Mason never thought he’d hear. Not from Darius Cole himself. He never thought he’d make a second trip to the Secure Housing Unit. Or that the third trip would be permanent.
The same two men came to get him that day. Mason ignored the stares and followed them out of the cellblock. As he walked between them, he had time to think it over. It must have been a hell of a first conversation or there wouldn’t be a second. But what did Cole really want from him? If he wanted Mason’s ticket punched, that would have happened already. Out in the yard or in the cafeteria. You wouldn’t walk the man right to your cell.
When he got there, Cole was sitting at his desk with his back to him. He turned and gave Mason a quick nod. He was wearing the same rimless reading glasses that made him look like a prison librarian.