Blood of My Brother (19 page)

At one thirty Shaw and Kendall got into Shaw’s unmarked car and headed to the FBI’s field office in downtown Miami.

“Anything new?” Shaw asked, once they were underway.

“Markey’s in. He called me a few minutes ago. He asked me to send someone to talk to Dixie at Dixie’s Do’s.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He’s being thorough.”

“Like Princess Di kept a diary.”

Kendall laughed, and then said, “He’s a tough guy. I worked with him a couple of years ago on a drug sting. He doesn’t like to be disagreed with, and if you cross him he’ll make your life miserable. A word to the wise.”

“You know me, Jack,” said Shaw. “I never buck the system.”

Shaw and Kendall were greeted by Jack Voynik, who introduced himself as one of Markey’s assistants before leading them into a second-floor conference room. Around the rectangular conference table were six chairs, and on the table in front of each chair was a yellow legal pad, a pencil, and a manila folder.

“There’s a briefing memo in the folders,” said Voynik. “Chris is downstairs meeting with Officer Ramirez of your department. He’ll be up in a few minutes. The memo will bring you up to speed. I’ll be back with Chris.”

“Briefing memo?” said Shaw after Voynik had shut the door behind him.

“This is how Markey operates,” said Kendall. “You’ll never see a witness statement or an official report unless he thinks you have to. We might as well read.”

Shaw opened his manila folder, read the memo, and learned the following: two members of a DEA/FBI task force had been killed—shot in the heart and beheaded—in Tijuana in early 2003 at an isolated airfield in a sting that went bad. The two Mexican members of the team were not killed, and their stories were not convincing. One of them was found dead in the trunk of his car six months later; the other disappeared at around the same time, and was presumed dead. Both Mexican agents had been interrogated repeatedly by the FBI, with nothing to show for it. The Mexican government was AWOL. Pronouncements of
aggressive investigation and imminent arrests from Lazaro Santaria, the attorney general, were painfully transparent public relations bullshit.

Another DEA/FBI task force was put together, headed by Chris Markey. After a year of hard work with little to show for it, Markey’s team received a tip from a Houston informant identifying Isabel Perez as a courier of drug cash with significant ties to Herman Santaria, Lazaro’s multimillionaire brother. Apparently someone in the informant’s family had been killed—beheaded—on orders from Santaria, a few months earlier.

This was last summer. Markey’s people watched as Isabel, her home base Bryce Powers’s condo in West Palm Beach, picked up cash at various locations around the country, each in the vicinity of a Powers property, and deposited it in a local bank. In August, she and Powers spent a weekend together at a luxury resort in the Colorado Rockies. Phone taps yielded nothing. Markey had obtained a search warrant, and was about to execute it, when Bryce and his wife were killed. A team of agents went through Powers’s financial records and quickly found wire transfers to overseas banks totaling forty million dollars between 1996 and 1999. These matched up with the deposits Isabel had been making, less a 10 percent broker’s fee to Powers.

Powers’s records also revealed that Herman Santaria was a co-managing partner in the four properties developed by Powers in Texas in the seventies; that H.S. & Company was formed as a corporation in Texas in 1972 by a Houston law firm; and that its sole shareholder, and recipient of over one million dollars in phony maintenance fees per year, was the same Herman Santaria. An hour before he and Kate were murdered, Powers called Isabel and, with an FBI agent listening in, told her that he was worried about getting killed,
and that the “stuff ” he had given her was her only protection against the same fate. If she was arrested, she could hand over “de Leon and both Santarias” on a silver platter.

Agents went quickly to the condo at Royal Palm Plantation, but Isabel had fled. A week later, she brazenly turns up in Jersey, and a few days later Dan Del Colliano is dead and Isabel is nowhere to be found. Last week, a civilian named Bill Davis was killed in Newark after it was reported in a New Jersey newspaper that he had seen two young Mexican men in Del Colliano’s apartment and identified them to the FBI. The killers—of Bryce and Kate Powers, Del Colliano, and Davis—were believed to be brothers named Edgardo and Jose Feria, Mexicans believed to be in the employ of Herman Santaria. Grainy, eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of them were also in the manila folder.

Shaw finished reading, stared intently at the photographs for a few seconds, then looked over at Kendall, sitting across the table. Kendall had finished as well.

“I’ll settle for nailing these two scumbags,” said Shaw, placing the pictures on the table.

“I’m with you,” Kendall replied. “Does he really think he can bring down the attorney general of Mexico?”

At that moment, the door swung open and Markey walked in, followed by Voynik, Ted Stevens, and Phil Gatti. Introductions were made, and Markey, sitting at the head of the table, began.

“Have you read the memo?” he asked.

Shaw and Kendall nodded.

“Our immediate targets are the people who killed our agents in Guadalajara last year. We’re pretty sure it’s the Felix cartel, but they’re deep in the hills of the Sierra Madre in Jalisco, and the Mexican government won’t act. We now have what we feel is great leverage: We think we can prove that
Herman Santaria, Lazaro Santaria, and Rafael de Leon, the chief domestic advisor to the president of Mexico, are not only protecting drug cartels, but dealing drugs themselves. If we nail them, one of the first things we’ll do is get authority to launch a small army on the Felix stronghold in the mountains.

“There are two paths to the Santarias and de Leon. One is via Isabel Perez. Certainly she can give us Herman Santaria, but we think whatever it is Bryce Powers gave her—it’s probably documents of some kind—will directly involve Lazaro and Rafael de Leon and, because he’s so close to the guy, possibly the president of Mexico. We’re pretty sure Isabel’s in hiding here in Miami, in Little Havana. We don’t want to go in there overtly because those people don’t talk to police. They’d probably tip her off, and she’d flee. That’s why we’ve asked for the Miami PD’s help. I’ve talked to Officer Ramirez. He’s Cuban, he’s smart, and he’s got balls. I’d like a cover put together, a good one, and I’d like him in there as soon as possible, tomorrow or Sunday at the latest. Can you do that Lieutenant Shaw?”

“I can do it,” Shaw answered, “but I’ll need help with documents, people to back up his story, that kind of thing. We can have him coming down from Jersey—there’s a big Cuban community in one of those towns near the city.”

“Whatever you need,” said Markey. “Get together with Voynik. If we get Miss Perez, we’ve struck gold. Through her, we can bring down the whole fucking banana republic government down there.”

“And the other path?” said Jack Kendall.

“The other path,” Markey replied, “is through our New Jersey lawyer friend, Jay Cassio.”

“Who’s he?” Kendall asked.

“He’s a friend of Del Colliano. He was representing Kate
Powers in the divorce. He got Bill Davis’s name in the paper, which got the guy killed.”

“He couldn’t have known the guy would be killed,” said Shaw.

“Cassio was seen in the building on the night Davis was murdered.”

“You don’t think he helped kill the guy, do you, Chris?” said Kendall.

“No, I don’t. But he’s a wise guy. He skipped town right after Davis was killed. When we searched his house, we found two bloody towels. We think one of the Feria boys clipped him. Then I talked to one of the Powers daughters—he was banging her, by the way—and she told me her mother wrote Cassio a bunch of letters accusing her husband of all kinds of bad things. I subpoenaed Cassio’s divorce file, and there were no letters in it. I could arrest him for obstruction of justice right now.”

“Why don’t you?” Shaw asked.

“I’ve got something better in mind,” said Markey. “He’s in Miami Beach. I’m going over to talk to him tonight. But I’m not going to arrest him. I’m planting an article in the
Miami Herald
tomorrow, with his picture—‘Witness to New Jersey Murder Located in Miami.’ We’ll put a tail on him starting early in the morning.”

“To draw out the Feria brothers?” Kendall asked.

“Yes.”

“What if Cassio won’t go along with it?” Shaw asked.

“He won’t know about it,” Markey answered, closing his folder.

After the team meeting, Gary Shaw, Jack Kendall, and Officer Ramirez had an hour’s sit-down with Agent Voynik to talk about what was required in order to put Ramirez safely undercover in Little Havana. They established an identity and a simple history for Ramirez, and agreed to meet again at nine p.m. to pound the story into the young policeman’s head and set up communication procedures between him and Shaw. In the interim, Voynik would have his people produce the necessary false papers to back up Ramirez’s new identity.

Shaw drove Kendall back to the homicide bureau, and then headed out to Hialeah to try to catch the last race or two. As he drove, Naomi Teller called on his cell phone to tell him that the jury had come back with a guilty verdict in the
State v. Taylor
trial. He made a mental note to call Liz Siegal in the morning to congratulate her. She had already said that she would seek the death penalty, and Shaw had no doubt that Lambert would impose it. Of course it would be fifteen years before William Taylor was executed, fifteen years in which Taylor would have three meals a day, watch a lot of television, and probably have some young punk around to suck him off whenever he felt like it. There was something
wrong with that picture, but Shaw was way beyond trying to rearrange it. He was just happy that Taylor had been convicted.

He got to the track twenty minutes before the ninth race went off. There would be a tenth race, too, at five fifteen. Both were trifectas, which accounted for the crowd of addicts milling around the betting concourse and the grand-stand, where he liked to sit, near the finish line. The infield and the grounds around the track were green and handsome under a clear, blue sky. He picked up a Racing Form—there were plenty laying around at this time of the day—and sat in a section of seats shaded by the tier of stands above to read it. As he studied the past performances of the eleven horses in the ninth race—a ten thousand dollar claiming race, loaded with the working stiffs of the sport of kings—his meeting that afternoon with Chris Markey, et al, replayed in his mind, sticking each time, like a broken record, at the part where Agent Markey made Shaw, by his silence, a member of a conspiracy to set up Jay Cassio to be executed.

Shaw was not a true gambler. The most he bet was ten dollars, and he never doubled his bets to catch up. If he lost, he lost. What attracted him was the circus maximus atmosphere of the track, the great heart and athleticism of the jockeys and horses, and the satisfaction of successfully handicapping a race. In the twenty minutes before the ninth race, he decided on his bets for it and the tenth: a trifecta in each, the favorite in the ninth, and a fifty-to-one shot in the tenth, across the board. After the ninth race, which the favorite won, he collected his winnings, placed his bets on the tenth, and went to an open-air bar to drink a beer.

The horses for the tenth race were approaching the starting gate, and Shaw decided to watch it on the closed-circuit television at the bar. The jockey on his horse, a Hialeah veteran
named Victor Huerta, had already won three races that day, which had been the deciding factor in making the bet. The guy was hot. When the horse, a chestnut gelding named Sonny’s Dream, was led into his stall, he stiffened and balked, and the jockey was almost thrown, striking his shoulder hard against a metal cross brace before righting himself. “Christ,” Shaw said to himself, “that must have hurt.”

Sonny’s Dream broke strong, and Shaw was happy to see Huerta rein him in forcefully, his shoulder apparently okay. The horse’s problem in its last three races had been early speed, with not enough left at the end. Huerta stayed in the middle of the pack until he reached the far turn, where he made a great move, overtaking the two leaders in the middle of the stretch. Sonny’s Dream tired at the end, and was beaten by a nose by the favorite, but he would pay around fifty dollars to place, a nice win for Shaw, who had the horse five times.

Outside the track, on the way to his car, Shaw stopped at a pay phone and called El Pulpo. Angelo was not there, but Maria told him that he was expected soon. Shaw told her that he would stop by.

Jay and Dunn made it back to their hotel from West Palm at four. Dunn went to his room for a nap, and Jay again went to the beach. This time he swam for thirty minutes, out past the breakers, then parallel to the beach, back and forth in hundred yard reaches. Afterward, exhausted, he fell asleep for an hour on his towel. Back at his room, he showered and put on khaki slacks and a faded denim shirt. He thought briefly of calling his office, but rejected the idea. Cheryl would be gone by now—it was seven p.m.—and, although he had only been away for five days, practicing law seemed like something he had done in another lifetime. He had no desire to hear, and respond to, the usual messages left by clients, adversaries, and judges’ chambers, and wondered if he ever would again. He had not shaved since he arrived in Florida, and it felt good not to. He was meeting Dunn in the lobby at seven thirty for the drive to El Pulpo, and decided to have a drink in the adjacent lounge while waiting for him.