Justifiable Homicide: A Political Thriller (Robert Paige Thrillers Book 1) (41 page)

Jules put the two ideas together and sued high tech companies. He would track their stock prices. Whenever he saw a rapid rise or rapid decline, he would threaten to file a class action lawsuit for insider trading. He didn’t bother to look for actual proof of insider trading. There almost never was any, because rapid fluctuations in stock price were part of the normal market process for start-up companies in the high tech industry. The mere fact that the stock price fluctuated was enough to give him the excuse he needed to shake them down.

After threatening to sue, or perhaps shortly after filing suit, he would call their attorney and offer to settle out of court for a few hundred thousand dollars. They would usually pay him what he asked, just to get rid of him, since the alternative could be disastrous for the company. Banks would hesitate to grant loans or refinance existing loans. The stock price would drop. The cost of litigating a class action lawsuit, combined with the bad press, could bankrupt a fledgling company, and both Jules and the opposing counsel knew it.

He never thought of himself as a parasite. In law school, they taught him there was no such thing as a bad lawsuit. If it didn’t have merit, some judge or jury would determine that fact and would find the defendant not guilty. Justice would be done. The defendant would have his day in court.

Jules and his family didn’t attend synagogue except on the high holy days. He preferred spending Saturdays with his family. He followed a regular pattern. More often than not, he would spend Saturday morning taking his family for a ride on the family boat, a 40-foot cabin cruiser. Not exactly a yacht, but it’s all he could afford on a judge’s salary, which was supplemented by the income generated from the investment portfolio he accumulated while working for his father’s law firm.

Santos and Tomás knew he was a predictable guy. They learned his schedule. They knew he would be visiting his boat between 8 and 9 o’clock on Saturday morning. They were looking forward to meeting him.

The definition of a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into. Jules’s boat was no exception. Boats cost several thousand dollars a foot and his boat was 40 feet long. The docking fees, insurance and maintenance added up to several thousand dollars a year. It burned 40 gallons of gasoline an hour when cruising. He cruised a few hours practically every Saturday.

Sometimes he took the family around the canals in Fort Lauderdale, which some people call the Venice of America. Once a month or so, he took them to Biscayne Bay for lunch. A couple times a year he took them to the Bahamas, which was only five hours away. Today he wouldn’t be taking them anywhere, if Tomás and Santos had their way. They would be saving him a few hundred dollars in gas.

Tomás and Santos arrived at the marina around 7:30. They brought along some fishing gear and pretended to fish on the dock about 50 feet from where Jules’s boat was docked, but they didn’t have any worms on their hooks or any lures on their lines. They didn’t want any fish to interrupt their plans.

They wore gloves, which seemed a little unusual, but nobody paid much attention to them. Their caps and sun glasses looked a lot like the caps and sun glasses on sale at the marina kiosk. They blended in, except for the fact that they looked Hispanic. There weren’t many Hispanic club members, although that was changing.

Jules and his family arrived at 8:15 and headed straight for their boat. Tomás and Santos noticed their approach and prepared to activate their plan. They waited until they were all on board. Jules carried an ice cooler and a bag of what appeared to be food. His wife, Leah, carried a black knapsack. Becky, his eight year-old daughter, and Evan, his eleven year-old son, had dark blue backpacks.

After stowing their stuff either below deck or on the main deck, they took their positions. Becky and Evan put on their life jackets and walked to the bow of the boat. They liked to sit at the front when it pulled away from the dock. Leah remained below deck, unpacking the contents of her knapsack. Jules started the three engines and fumbled around with some dials on the panel. Then he walked to the front of the boat to unhook the ropes that secured it to the dock.

As he walked to the stern to unfasten the ropes that secured the back of the boat to the dock, Tomás and Santos jumped into action. They boarded from the back, blocking Jules as he walked toward the ropes. Tomás pulled out the .22 cal. Ruger Mark 3 and pointed it at Jules’ midsection. Evan and Becky saw them come on board but couldn’t see the gun because Jules’s body and the boat were blocking their line of vision.

Jules was startled to see them. He had no idea why they boarded the boat. Maybe a robbery. Maybe a hijacking.

Tomás jammed the pistol into his stomach. “Get below deck. Now!”

Without a word, Jules turned and headed for the stairs to the lower deck. Tomás and Santos followed. When Jules’s right foot made contact with the floor of the lower deck, Tomás pointed the gun at the back of his head and fired twice. Jules fell forward, hitting the deck with his face.

Leah heard the noise and turned around to see two men, both holding guns, and her husband, face down with blood oozing from the back of his head. She was too terrified to scream. She just stood there, frozen.

Tomás turned toward her. “Shut up and we won’t hurt you.”

Santos took out his Sig Sauer P250 and pumped all 18 rounds into the floor. He had it fitted with a suppressor, and it was below deck, so no one in the dock area could hear the shots as they ripped through the floor of the boat. The 9mm rounds made nice holes, but it would take some time before the boat sank.

They turned around, went up the stairs and exited from the rear of the boat. Before setting foot on the dock they unfastened the remaining ropes. When their feet hit the dock, they turned around. Each placed a foot on the back of the boat and shoved it out of the dock space, causing it to go adrift. His wife would be powerless to prevent the boat from sinking, but they wouldn’t drown. They all had on their life jackets. But it would make the forensic team’s job more difficult.

“An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.”

Henry Clay

“For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.”

Thomas Jefferson

Assassinating a judge is a big deal and that’s exactly how the media and police treated it. The FBI got called in, and the headquarters in Washington pulled out all the stops to provide resources. No one thought to challenge the FBI’s authority, although the killing did not involve interstate commerce and although there was nothing in the Constitution that authorized the federal government to have a police force or conduct any police functions. Everyone just assumed the FBI was operating with Constitutional authority.

Conspiracy theories ran wild, since the hit took place within a few miles and a few days of the assassinations of three members of Congress, a senior official of the Federal Reserve Bank and a real estate magnate and his attorney. These hits were professional, unlike the usual gun related killings, which involved either drug gangs or domestic disputes.

The gun grabbers were calling for the confiscation of guns and the repeal of the Second Amendment. Thousands of people responded by going to gun shops and buying tens of thousands of weapons before they were outlawed.

The problem the police and FBI faced was that they didn’t know who did it or why they did it. An examination of the remains of the hollow points and the shell casings might eventually determine that the same weapon was used to kill Daniel Frumpton and Jerry Goldstein, but that would take a while. Tying the three of them together would be more difficult, and would be speculative unless more clues were forthcoming.

The Sons of Liberty were about to give them more clues … but not yet.

Keith Ross didn’t fit the mold of the usual Miami-Dade County politician. It was generally conceded that you had to be either Jewish or Cuban to win any elective office. If you weren’t in either of those categories, you at least had to have a Hispanic sounding name. He didn’t have any of that. Although his mother was half Jewish, his father was Episcopalian, and so was he.

In spite of those defects in his family tree, he managed to become the city manager of Aventura, which was a hop, skip and a jump from the Broward County line. Perhaps the fact that only 21 percent of the Aventura population was Hispanic helped.

He was somewhat concerned about the welfare of his constituents, and whenever anyone complained about something he tried to pacify them and fix the problem. But he was even more concerned about keeping his job. He liked the prestige, the power and visibility that came with running a small suburb, and the extra income opportunities.

One of those income opportunities was the ability to tap real estate developers who needed approval to build in Aventura. A secondary source of income came from approving zoning board variances.

Not all of the income was in the form of cash. Sometimes he received a room full of furniture or a vacation package. He had had so many cruises to the Caribbean that he started refusing free cruise offers two years ago.

He didn’t know that the job had health risks … like concentrated doses of lead shot into the brain.

Saturday afternoon. Santos and Tomás were having a good day. After taking care of Jules Rapaport, they got some breakfast, took a break, and listened to the radio for news reports of their morning activity. All the news stations were carrying the assassination of Judge Rapaport and they all said pretty much the same thing. The judge was shot and killed. Nobody knew why. There was speculation that it might have been a disgruntled defendant from one of the cases he tried. The boat sank. The wife and kids were able to get off the boat safely.

Jules had a $2 million insurance policy on his life but his family wouldn’t be collecting anything. He was 12 days late in his premium payment, which was 2 days beyond the 10-day grace period. The insurance company refused to pay. The family spent $30,000 to sue the insurance company but lost. Justice was done. They had their day in court.

The descriptions of the assailants were conflicting. People at the scene gave different descriptions of the two men seen leaving the boat. Either they wore black tee shirts or white tee shirts. Their caps were either black or blue. Their physical descriptions differed. One of the guys who left the boat was of average size and build. The other was either muscular or fat, depending on who was being interviewed. Santos chuckled when he heard the conflicting descriptions of him. So did Tomás, who accused Santos of being fat. One witness said he thought he saw three men leave the boat.

The police and the courts know how poor eye witness testimony can be. They placed the most trust in his wife’s description, since she saw them up close and had some contact with them for the longest period of time. She said they appeared to be Hispanic. One of them was large. She remembered their tee shirts and caps were dark.

Santos and Tomás had one more job to do before they could go home. Keith Ross was scheduled to make an appearance and give a short speech at a public employee picnic to be held at one of the parks in Aventura. They knew where the park was, but they didn’t know when he would arrive or when he would give the speech.

It was certain that there would be police present. Police were assigned to the park even when there weren’t any official activities scheduled. The police presence that afternoon might be heavier than usual, since a group of about 100 public employees had reserved space. Tomás and Santos decided that whacking him at the park would be a bad idea. However, they needed to be at the park so they could know when he arrived and when he left.

They brought along a bag of sandwiches and soft drinks and decided to camp out at one of the picnic tables about 100 feet from where the public employee picnic would take place. They would just wait, observe and read a book to pass the time. Santos started reading Erne Lewis’s
An Act of Self-Defense
. Tomás was halfway through Barry Eisler’s
Requiem for an Assassin
. He also took along a copy of Meira Pentermann’s
Nine-Tenths
, in case he finished the Eisler book before Keith Ross was ready to leave.

The plan was to follow Ross to his car after he finished his speech, then follow him out of the park and shoot him somewhere between the park and his next destination, wherever it was convenient.

They had changed out of their black tee shirts and dark blue caps and into brightly colored shirts with buttons. Santos wore a white cap. Tomás wore a green, orange and white Miami Dolphins cap. Both wore sun glasses. They looked like they could have been on vacation.

Ross arrived shortly before 12:30 in his own car. No chauffeur. He wasn’t high enough on the food chain for that. Besides, he wanted to appear to be a man of the people. Men of the people don’t have chauffeurs.

He made the rounds, shaking hands and engaging in small talk with a few of the people. Then he started his speech. Blah, blah, blah. He recited the kinds of things that public employees picnicking with their families wanted to hear. They were doing a good job in tough times. They were appreciated. It was a nice, sunny day in Florida. He kept it short. He knew they really weren’t interested in what he had to say. They just wanted to eat their hot dogs and hamburgers and get back to what they were doing before he interrupted them. He was just as anxious to leave as they were to see him leave.

After the speech, he shook a few more hands, chatted a bit and started moving toward his car. Santos and Tomás closed their books, picked up their bags of sandwiches and soft drinks, and started walking toward their stolen car, which was parked about 30 feet from Ross’s car.

Santos got behind the wheel. Tomás got in on the passenger side. They waited for Ross to pull out. Then they pulled out and followed him, keeping a reasonable distance behind him.