Deadly Assets (27 page)

Payne knew that the “dark money” of well-heeled donors—individuals to teamster unions—was funneled through third-party political action committees in order to mask its source. And, for reasons that baffled him, was fully allowed by Pennsylvania law.

Payne nodded. “Which is legal, of course, but despicable. Which is why corruption in this state is off the chart.”

“Pay to play . . .” O'Hara said, nodding, then added, “Five-Eff ring a bell?”

Payne sighed.

“Tell me you're yanking my chain.”

“Good ol' Frank, as you refer to him on days you're not in a foul mood, tried to foist Wonder Woman on me at
Philly News Now
—which, incidentally, is how I came to research the Missouri capital—and I put my foot down. So he bumped her down the ladder to be a weekend anchor on
Action News!
”

The image on the TV screen transitioned to the station anchor desk, where the same buxom reporter, now with her thick brunette hair down to her shoulders and wearing an expensive outfit, sat with a TV monitor behind her showing the image of her in ball cap confronting the restaurant manager. At the bottom of the screen was a text box with
ACTION NEWS ANCHOR RAYCHELL MEADOW
.

O'Hara jerked a thumb at the screen.

“This is all for show,” he said, “for inflating Raychell's ratings to hopefully get the station out of last place and get her to the next step of her career. Little Pete's is clean. I had it quietly checked. Clean enough, anyway. The city inspectors found a few things. But every restaurant fails some part of the inspection. There're eight violations each year for the average Philly eat-in restaurant. My bet is some wise-guy city inspector got told to go fuck himself after he thought he could shake down Pete's by threatening a bad inspection—one violation was ‘mouse droppings'—and then made sure she got her hands on it.”

O'Hara made a face and shook his head.

“So there's your investigative mouse-shit journalism,” he said.

Payne raised his eyebrows.

“Okay,” Payne said, “but I'm not making the connection. I need more dots.”

“Who did POTUS just propose to make his next AG of the United States of America?”

“Jesus H. Christ . . . !” Payne blurted.

“No, not even He is forgiving enough to work for this POTUS,” O'Hara quipped.

Payne finished: “. . . The previous attorney general of Missouri! You simply said the AG.”

O'Hara smirked.

“I said you'd have to work for it.”

“And now Daniel Patrick O'Connor is here . . . and headed for Washington.”

“Final clue: as soon as Five-Eff gets O'Connor's wife a job there.”

O'Hara looked up at the buxom brunette
Action News!
anchor.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Payne said again, this time his tone disgusted. He looked back across the bar. “Raychell Meadow is O'Connor's wife?”

O'Hara made a false smile, then drained his drink.

“On the face of it,” Payne said, “it stinks that a high-ranking political operative in a powerful state is married to a talking head of a TV news team in the fourth-largest media market. Even if that station's dead last in ratings. It's a whole other stink that they're both owned by Five-Eff.”

Payne drained his Macallan and waved to the bartender for two refills.

“Of course,” Payne said, dripping sarcasm, “I would never expect that either would violate any ethics by discussing confidential work—or worse—over the dinner table.”

“You mean such as going easy on covering certain politicians, and harder on others?” O'Hara said. “Or getting court-sealed documents on the opposition leaked to the station? Why, now that just would not be proper.”

Payne looked at him.

“Like that health inspection on Little Pete's. You got a copy ‘leaked' to you, too, didn't you?”

“Matty, I get all kinds of possible scoops secretly fed to me. Hell, I've gotten tips from you and others in the department. But, like with Little Pete's, I verify them independently and then only report them if there is no legal or moral obstacle. But the vast majority of ‘scoops'—with the notable exception of that from present company—are tainted. They're trying to play me, just as they're using Raychell. The difference is, as our Texas Ranger friend likes to say, ‘This ain't my first rodeo.'”

After a moment Payne added, “How do you reconcile that in your mind, Mick? I mean, knowing you're ultimately working for Five-Eff?”

O'Hara watched as the bartender placed two fresh Macallan single malts before them. He then picked up his and held it toward Payne in a sort of toast.

“Matty, I thought you knew: My heart is made of gold, my intentions pure. I'm simply not for sale. I devoutly believe I'm the lone noble knight on his white steed fighting the good fight.”

Payne met his eyes and nodded slowly.

“One who embraces,” O'Hara added, gesturing with his drink, “what Sun Tzu wrote in
The Art of War
: ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.'”

Payne, putting his drink back on the bar, saw that the bartender had left on the bar, next to a stack of cocktail napkins and short plastic straws, the TV remote control. He reached for it, then thumbed keys to change the channel to
Philly News Now
. Then he slipped the remote in the pocket inside his dinner jacket.

“There,” he said, smiling broadly. “That's better.”

He saw, almost immediately, Daniel Patrick O'Connor's head jerk as he looked toward the TV. O'Connor made a face, then began motioning for the bartender's attention.

—

As Payne and Harris approached the yellow crime scene tape, Raychell Meadow came clomping up in her high heels toward them.

“Sergeant Payne!” she called out, holding on to the brim of her
Action News!
ball cap. “It's good to see you again! Can I have a moment of your time?”

Again? We've never met,
Payne thought.

She held out the microphone, sticking its black foam tip to just beneath his chin. Her video cameraman came in close with his lens, framing Payne with the smoldering stage in the background.

“What is your comment,” Raychell Meadow said, “on being declared Public Enemy Number One by Reverend Josiah Cross, who now appears to have been shot after publicly demanding your resignation from the police department?”

Payne looked her in the eyes, made a thin smile, then turned to Tony.

“Detective Harris, feel free to speak with the lady. Or not . . .”

Payne then smoothly ducked under the yellow police line tape and began marching purposefully toward the red door of the ministry, where some of his small crowd of undercover officers stood. He saw, on the smoldering stage, the lectern with his burned poster.

“Sergeant Payne!” Raychell Meadow called.

Payne, without turning or breaking stride, held his right hand up to shoulder height, fingers spread wide.

Harris thought:
Is he about to fold everything but his middle finger . . . on camera?

Payne waved once, then put his arm back down to his side.

Raychell Meadow looked at Harris.

“Detective?” she said. “What do you—”

“No comment.”

And then he ducked under the yellow tape and moved with purpose to catch up with Payne.

[ ONE ]

Queens Club Resort

George Town, Grand Cayman Islands

Saturday, December 15, 6:35
P.M.

“I'm going to kill him!” H. Rapp Badde Jr. shouted right after snapping closed his Go To Hell flip phone and then almost throwing it out into the shimmering Caribbean Sea.

The sun hung low in the western sky, an enormous sphere slowly sinking toward the horizon. Its rays, bathing everything in golden hues, cast long shadows across the five-star resort.

Guests of Queens Club, most carrying drinks, were gathering up and down the sugar-white sand beach to await what promised to be yet another glorious tropical sunset.

Kicking at the beach sand in frustration, Badde shouted, “Goddammit!”

His voice caused heads to turn—just in time to witness him make a fist with his free hand and punch the thick trunk of a tall palm tree.

“Damn it, that hurt!” Badde blurted, frantically waving the hand.

A young mother, holding the hands of children as they walked nearby, said, “Come on, kids, hurry this way!”

She tugged them toward the beach as the children stared wide-eyed over their shoulders at the madman who had hit a tree after yelling into his phone.

Badde, a half hour earlier, watching large yachts moving off in the distance, had already been imagining himself counting his soon-to-be new wealth on his own luxury vessel.

Now I can forget that—I'm on a sinking
Titanic
.

It's about to all go to hell . . .

—

They had all gathered near the resort's seaside tiki bar in one of the twenty private cabanas. Each cabana had a frame fashioned of rough-hewn palm tree trunk, a roof of fronds, and walls of heavy white cotton duck fabric that undulated with the breeze.

Above the doorway, which had its two panels of white cotton duck tied back, was a hand-carved sign with brightly painted letters that read
JOLLY MON CABANA.
Inside, the cabana held six chaise lounges topped with thick royal blue cushions, a low bamboo table, and four armchairs arranged around a table topped with a soaring birds-of-paradise floral centerpiece. Broad fan blades made of woven palms hung from the raised ceiling and undulated, adding to the cool ocean breeze.

Janelle Harper sat at the table across from Rapp Badde. Each had a tall, icy glass filled with locally crafted Governor's Reserve dark rum, tonic water, and a lime wedge.

Sitting between them was Miguel Santos, a beefy Hispanic in his late twenties who had his big hand wrapped around a dripping wet bottle of Red Stripe beer that he had just pulled from a cooler of ice.

“Mike” Santos, the chief executive officer of OneWorld Private Equity Partners, had a chubby face with dark eyes and thick wavy black hair, combed back and reaching his collar. He wore a tight-fitting black T-shirt with faded blue jeans and, despite it being a tropical island, black pointed-toe Western boots, which now had a dusting of white sand.

“I'm glad you two could get away on such short notice,” Santos said. “In addition to executing the contracts here, this gives me a chance to share with you both a detailed tour of what we hope to do with the casinos.”

“We're quite happy we could make it,” Jan said politely. “And thank you for sending the jet.”

“The view here is a helluva lot better than back home,” Badde said, flashing his toothy politician's smile. “Do you have any idea how miserable the snow and cold have been in Philly?”

Santos chuckled.

“Yeah, Rapp, it's already damn cold in Dallas, too,” he said, and turned to Harper. “Which is partly why my partner is unhappy he couldn't make the trip. And Bobby was looking forward to meeting you, Jan. He speaks highly of your skill in reviewing the contracts.”

Janelle Harper had graduated from Temple University's Beasley School of Law two years earlier.

“That's very kind,” Jan said. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Santos said, and smiled warmly at her.

Badde's eyes darted between the two as he tried to discern if there was something he was missing in their exchange.

Badde had met Santos, along with his partner, a lawyer by the name of Robert Garza, a month earlier in their offices in Uptown Dallas. OneWorld Private Equity Partners occupied the penthouse, on the twenty-fourth floor of its building. The partners had explained that they had arranged the financing for the entire complex, which was owned by the same clients who owned luxury resorts worldwide, including Queens Club, for which they had also arranged the financing.

Badde remembered them saying that China Global Investments owned Yellowrose, one of the foreign conglomerate's four significant companies in the hospitality market.

“We packaged Yellowrose, then sold it to them, and continue to help them expand it,” Garza had told him.

Robert “Bobby” Garza, thirty years old, was a tall, light-brown-skinned man with a neatly trimmed goatee and a smoothly shaven scalp. In contrast to Santos's jeans and boots, he wore crisp slacks and a white dress shirt. He was a
Tejano
—a Texan of
criollo
Spanish descent—his family having lived near San Antonio when the area was still Mexican territory and called
Tejas
.

Santos's family, meanwhile, was from Colombia, and had cattle ranches there, as well as in Argentina and Brazil. His father had sent him to boarding school in San Antonio at age thirteen—where he and Garza first met—then he went on to graduate from the Ranch Management program—“with an MBA in Cow Shit,” he said—at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

“Rapp said you started out as a cattle rancher,” Jan Harper said to Santos. “How did you wind up . . . well, here?”

“Jan, where one finds cattle, one also finds cow pies—”

He paused when she shook her head at the unfamiliar term.

“That's cow shit, honey,” Badde put in, then in an attempt to illustrate, held his hands up about a foot apart. “When they go, it's pretty wet, and it makes a big brown—”

“I get the picture, Rapp,” she interrupted.

“My apology, Jan,” Santos went on. “I shouldn't have started with that. It's just that I felt comfortable enough in your company to use my usual explanation.”

She smiled. “No apology necessary, Mr. Santos.”

“Please. As I said, it's ‘Mike.'”

He smiled warmly again.

“Mike,” she said, and also smiled warmly.

Badde looked somewhat suspiciously between them again.

He thought:
I made a point to call her “honey”—for his benefit as much as hers—and she about chewed off my head with that reply.

Santos went on: “What I meant to say was that I grew up working on the ranch, and didn't want to spend the rest of my lifetime around the odor that seems to permeate everything.”

She nodded and smiled.

“But,” he continued, “a bigger reason was that after graduating TCU, I still was a Colombian national with a just-about-expired student visa. If I wanted to stay in the States—legally stay in the States, since many simply overstay their visas after they expire and risk deportation—I needed a Plan B. I had my MBA, and crews running the ranch, and decided venture capital looked appealing. When Bobby was in law school, he was learning the ins and outs of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service's visas.”

“The HB ones we talked about, right?” Badde said.

Santos, being careful not to directly correct him, said, “Right. The specialty occupation H-1Bs are for architects, doctors, engineers, fashion models. They're good for three years, with a three-year renewal. H-2Bs are the seasonal jobs, like for migrant farm workers. And he was introduced to the EB-5 green card program that fast-tracks you to permanent resident status. He told me about it, and we decided to start OneWorld Private Equity Partners. One of the first things OneWorld did, as a test case you might say, was to get me my citizenship through the EB-5.”

“You mind me asking what you did to qualify for the program?” Badde said.

“Not at all. I thought we'd touched on that in Dallas,” Santos said. “I created the ranch on the Texas border. I had the two already, then bought three smaller ranches and combined them all to create Rio Grande Organic Farms. We grow citrus—grapefruit, oranges, lemons, limes—and run an average of two thousand head of cattle.”

“How did that qualify for the EB-5?” Badde said, then chuckled. “Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't count the cows, right?”

Santos smiled.

“You're right. But any foreign national investing at least a million dollars in a U.S. business that creates and maintains at least ten jobs for existing Americans, plus ones for himself and his family members, gets a green card for himself, his wife, and his kids under twenty-one. Which is what we did.”

“You're married, Mike? And have children?” Jan said.

Santos looked at her and shook his head.

“Still looking for the special someone,” he said.

“Mike, have you ever heard that marriage is like a deck of playing cards?” Badde said.

“Rappe . . . ?” Jan said, her tone warning.

“No, can't say that I have heard that,” Santos said.

Badde grinned.

“Yeah,” he said, “in the beginning of a marriage you just need two hearts and a diamond . . .”

“Ha,” Santos said.

“. . . But in the end you want a club and a spade.”

Jan shook her head.

Santos chuckled.

“Duly noted,” he said.

He turned to Jan, then added, “With Rio Grande Organic Farms, I added more than fifty full-time positions. Not counting the seasonal jobs, which require the 2B visas for those who aren't citizens.”

He paused and looked at Badde.

“Did you know demand for 1B visas runs in the six figures, but only sixty-five thousand are issued? Meanwhile, the U.S. never issues all ten thousand EB-5s that are available each year. Which we are going to change.”

Santos then gestured, holding his arms wide.

“Anyway, so here I am,” he said. “And here we are.”

“Interesting,” Jan Harper said, sipped her rum, then added, “And there are some five hundred banks here, is that right?”

Santos nodded.

“Correct. Which is why OneWorld does all its business here. As you probably know, the Caymans are called the Switzerland of the Caribbean. For a couple main reasons. One, it has those five hundred–plus banks you mentioned. And, two, it has the confidential Relationships Preservation Law—in which Section Five imposes criminal penalties—fines and imprisonment—if someone attempts to share confidential information. That of course includes where funds come from and where they go, but everything else, too, including the names of the officers of a company.”

“Remarkable,” Jan said. “And it's certainly kept everyone who's investing with Diamond Development happy.”

Santos nodded again.

“That is why all our investment vehicles for Diamond Development are FINS—Focused Investment Niche Strategies. They're highly diversified, include many EB-5s, and, being Cayman-based, the lid on them is kept tight.”

“Rapp,” Jan said, turning to Badde, who was draining his glass of rum with his straw, “that's what I was talking about with Yuri. Reassuring him of the confidentiality and stability of the investment . . .”

The Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative's first project had been to replace an abandoned factory on the banks of the Delaware with the new Lucky Stars Casino & Entertainment facility. Diamond Development—forty-nine percent was owned by Yuri Tikhonov through shell companies; minority-owned companies, including Urban Ventures LLC, which Badde had a small piece of, held the rest—was constructing a new indoor sports and live music coliseum that could fit sixty thousand fans under a retractable roof.

Jan went on: “. . . especially since PEGI cuts through the red tape to get the EB-5 applicants approved. That's critical. A typical investor could expect a seven to ten percent return on investment. A foreign national wanting U.S. citizenship will settle for around two percent—if they're assured the project has Fed approval.”

“Exactly,” Santos said. “It's equally critical for those borrowing the money, because they're paying less interest.” He grinned. “Which of course allows for higher profits.”

Badde nodded.

“And that's damn cheap ROI,” Santos added.

“ROI?” Badde said.

“Return on investment. Rapp, your hotel project is going to get a mighty sweet ROI.”

Badde grinned, then flashed his full toothy smile.

Then he felt his Go To Hell flip phone vibrate. He looked at the caller ID. It read gibberish:
#01-0K0-30X-V34-X%K.

He ignored it.

[ TWO ]

Strawberry Mansion, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 6:55
P.M.

“How long do we gotta stay down here?” Tyrone Hooks said, trying hard not to shiver as yet more cold water dripped on him from the roof of the tunnel.

Hooks could just barely make out in the dark tunnel the form of Reverend Josiah Cross sitting on an empty plastic milk crate. Both Hooks and Cross were wrapped in thick woolen blankets.

“Shhhh,” Cross said, glancing up at Hooks, who was standing. “Keep your voice down until we get to where it's all clear.”

“I don't know how much more of this cold I can take,” Hooks said.

“Cold I can deal with,” Cross said, then chuckled. “But that stinking smell of yours got old a long time ago.”

“Said I was sorry. Never been shot at before.”

—

Tyrone Hooks was no stranger to the sound of gunfire—for as long as he could remember, he had heard shots in his neighborhood on a regular basis, sometimes every night on weekends—and at the rally there had been no doubt in his mind that he was hearing shots fired in the crowd.