—
His Omar character was in real life a man named Vonn Dubose, the descendant of one of the original gangsters who did indeed begin their mischief in the rear room of a catfish restaurant near Forrest City, Arkansas. His maternal grandfather owned the restaurant, and years later died in a police ambush. His father hanged himself in prison, or at least the official report said they found him hanging. Numerous and various uncles and cousins met similar fates, and the gang had pretty much thinned out until Vonn discovered the allure of cocaine trafficking in south Florida. A few good years there provided the means to resolidify his little syndicate. He was now approaching the age of seventy, lived somewhere along the coast, and did not maintain a legitimate address, bank account, driver’s license, Social Security number, or passport. Once Vonn struck gold with the casino, he whittled his gang down to just a handful of cousins so there would be fewer hands in the till. He operated with complete anonymity and hid behind a wall of offshore companies, all of which were overseen by a certain law firm in Biloxi. By all accounts, and there were not many, he was quite wealthy but lived modestly.
“Have you ever met him?” Lacy asked.
Myers scoffed at the question. “Don’t be silly. No one meets this guy, okay? He lives in the shadows, sort of like me, I guess. You can’t find three people in the Pensacola area who’ll admit to knowing Vonn Dubose. I lived there for forty years and never heard of him until a few years ago. He comes and goes.”
“But he has no passport,” Hugo said.
“Valid passport. If they ever nail him, they’ll find half a dozen fake ones.”
In 1936, the Bureau of Indian Affairs granted a charter to the Tappacola Nation, a small tribe of about four hundred scattered along the Panhandle, with most living in small homes in the swampy outback of Brunswick County. The tribe maintained a headquarters of sorts there, on a three-hundred-acre reservation ceded by the federal government eighty years earlier. By 1990, the mighty Seminole Nation of south Florida was discovering the bright lights of the casino trade, as were tribes across the country. Coincidentally, Vonn and his gang began buying cheap land adjacent to the Tappacola reservation. At some point in the early 1990s—no one would ever know for sure because the conversations had long since been buried—Dubose approached the Tappacola with a deal too good to be true.
“Treasure Key,” Hugo mumbled.
“You got it. The only casino in north Florida, conveniently located just ten miles south of Interstate 10 and ten miles north of the beaches. Full-service casino, open twenty-four/seven, Disney-style amusement fun for the entire family, largest water park in the state, condos for sale, lease, or time-share, take your pick. A veritable mecca for those who want to gamble and those who want to play in the sun, and it’s perfectly situated within two hundred miles of five million people. Don’t know the numbers, because the Indians who run the casinos report to no one, but it’s believed Treasure Key is easily in the half-billion-dollar-a-year range.”
“We were there last summer,” Hugo admitted, as if he’d done something wrong. “One of those last-minute weekend junkets for a buck-fifty. It wasn’t bad.”
“Bad? It’s fabulous. That’s why the place is packed and the Tappacola are printing money.”
“And sharing it with Vonn and his boys?” Hugo asked.
“Among others, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Lacy said, “That’s in Brunswick County, which is in the Twenty-Fourth Judicial District. There are two circuit judges in the Twenty-Fourth, one male, one female. Am I getting warm?”
Myers smiled and tapped a closed file in the center of the table. “This is the complaint. I’ll give it to you later. The judge is the Honorable Claudia McDover, on the bench now for seventeen years. We’ll talk about her later. For now, please allow me to give you the backstory. It’s crucial.”
Back to the Tappacola. The tribe was violently split over the issue of casino gambling. The opponents were led by an agitator named Son Razko, who was a Christian and opposed gambling on moral grounds. He organized his followers and they seemed to be in the majority. The proponents of the casino promised riches for all—new homes, lifetime pensions, better schools, free college tuition, health care, the list went on and on. Vonn Dubose was secretly funding the drive to approve the casino, but, as usual, his fingerprints could never be found. In 1993, the issue was put to a vote. Excluding those under eighteen, there were about three hundred eligible voters. All but fourteen made it to the polls, which were being watched by federal marshals, just in case things turned violent. Son Razko and his traditionalists won with 54 percent of the vote. A nasty lawsuit alleged voter fraud and intimidation, but the circuit court judge threw it out. The casino was dead.