Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (58 page)

He saw two police officers rushing toward his door, and he started crying. They told him to stay still—they’d have the door pried open in no time. He looked up at them through tears. “I was carjacked!”

T
he Diaz Boys didn’t exactly outlive everybody. There was this one other guy.

Harvey Fiddlebottom kept telling himself he had to get out of the cocaine business.

Since the salad days of the 1980s, Fiddlebottom had branched out into the comparatively harmless fields of wire fraud, election tampering and stolen car parts. But his voracious greed-streak kept bringing him back. Fiddlebottom had mixed luck in the trafficking business. His deals regularly went awry. On the other hand, he always came out alive.

He sat by the pool at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel and read a newspaper article about another shipment of cocaine intercepted on I-75. To Fiddlebottom, it was a hundred-thousand-dollar loss. Goddamn the Diaz Boys! He had let them talk him into it again. He threw the paper down in disgust.

“I’ve got to get out of the cocaine business!”

Harvey Fiddlebottom’s name belied his brutality. He hadn’t always been a tough guy, but his name made it inevitable. It had that certain musical tex
ture that invited daily butt-kickings from his classmates. By senior year they had created a monster. Violent threats, school hall beatings, weapons charges. After his expulsion, Fiddlebottom decided he needed a fresh start, a bigger gun and a new name. It had to be a special name. Something to command respect, strike fear. One word, like Cher. He grabbed an old city map of Pensacola and read down the street index until he found something he could live with. He filed the necessary papers with the county clerk. The former Harvey Fiddlebottom walked out of the courthouse, puffed up his chest and strolled back into life a new man. The new man swore he’d kill anyone who called him by his old name. From now on, he would only answer to
Zargoza
.

Zargoza got into the drug business in the mid-1980s. The Diaz Boys needed a mole for a piece of disposable real estate. Tommy Diaz had gone to Tampa High School with Zargoza and remembered his brutal tendencies from senior year. Banging taunting kids’ heads into walls. Now that was style.

They knocked on the door of his second-floor apartment on grimy Hillsborough Avenue. Zargoza opened up shirtless, wearing blue boxer shorts with smiling sharks, hair uncombed, eyes not ready for the light of day, gun in hand.

“Hey, Fiddlebottom, we got a proposition for you,” said Tommy Diaz.

Zargoza raised his pistol and the Diaz Boys pulled theirs. Point-blank, standing against the rusted turquoise balcony railing, afternoon traffic going by.

“Nobody calls me by that name anymore! From now on, it’s Zargoza!”

“Zargoza what?” asked Tommy.

“It’s like Cher,” said Zargoza.

“Zargoza Bono?”

“No, you fucking idiot! Just Zargoza.”

But the gun and the cursing were a language the Diaz Boys understood and respected, and they told him he was the right man for the job.

“We’ll call you Carmen Miranda if it makes you happy,” said Tommy. He handed Zargoza a thick brown envelope and Zargoza peeked inside.

For eighteen months, Zargoza managed the rundown Hammerhead Ranch Motel on the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg. After three successful shipments of cocaine, the Diaz Boys moved on to new property and gave Zargoza the motel deed as a tip.

Hammerhead Ranch was falling apart, but that was its charm. The entrance was the gate of an Old West corral—two upright posts connected at the top by a wooden plank with the name of the motel and the cattle brand “HR” burned in a circle. In the middle of the plank was the stuffed head of a hammerhead shark with a rope lasso around its neck. The motel was a single-story L-shaped ranch house. The building stayed white, but the color of the trim changed every other year. Pink, blue, yellow, orange, seafoam green. It was originally the Golden Palm Inn, built in 1961, then the Coconut Grove, the Whispering Palms Lodge, the Econo-Palm Motor Court and Herb’s Triple-X Honeymoon Hideaway (“in the
palms”). Then the owners got back from a trip through Texas on Route 66. They’d driven by Amarillo and seen the ten half-buried cars at the landmark Cadillac Ranch, and the rest is roadside Florida kitsch history. The owners contacted charter fishermen and taxidermy shops and in three months had purchased ten stuffed hammerhead sharks, which they planted in a row behind the swimming pool.

The owners thought it would increase business, but it only increased the number of people who stopped, posed for snapshots and drove off.

As the nineties dawned, Zargoza saw the beginning of the end of cocaine. The Diaz Boys did not. Zargoza diversified, and in five years he had parlayed his drug proceeds into enough savvy criminal enterprises that he pulled even in wealth and stature to the Diaz Boys. As the nineties waned, the only reason Zargoza would buy into a coke run anymore was uncontrollable avarice and the sporadic favor he owed the Diaz Boys in return for having used their muscle to limber up stubborn clients. And, though nobody would admit it, they liked to hang out together, mainly to bust each other’s balls for old times’ sake. Surviving fraternity brothers, the Last of the Mohicans. Sometimes they drank at the motel bar and sometimes they drag-raced after midnight around the bay.

Zargoza had a small chop shop in Ybor City and a hand in a nursing home Medicare scam, but most recently he concentrated on the boiler room telephone bunco operation he had set up at Hammerhead Ranch. He gutted and connected the last four rooms
of the motel into a giant office and furnished it with military surplus desks, telephones, copiers and postal meters. Zargoza’s callers worked sucker lists that cost up to fifteen bucks a name. The room hummed with the overlapping patter of con men.

“This is your lucky day, Mrs. Castiglioni! You’re our grand prize winner. Now just give us your credit card number so we can verify eligibility and pay our modest processing fee….”

“No, you won’t wait to ask your husband when he comes home, and we won’t wait either, Mrs. Shoemaker, because this offer is only good for the next five minutes! You’re not a loser, you’re a winner! And your husband will be so proud of you. Now, I want you to start reading that credit card number when I count to three. One…two…”

“You’re king of the world, Mr. Boudreau! This is your big day! Do you believe in God, Mr. Boudreau?…Good, because God wants you to get out that credit card….”

The con men made regular runs to the coffee machine but didn’t pour any coffee. Zargoza may have been against the drug business, but not
drugs
, and he provided his phone operators with an unlimited supply of complimentary cocaine. It was an expensive experiment, but Zargoza immediately saw profits spike due to increasingly predatory salesmanship.

“Feeding them coke was the smartest thing I ever did,” Zargoza told Tommy Diaz as he gave a tour of the operation. “Look at ’em intimidating those old bastards. Check out that satanic sparkle in their eyes. You don’t get that from Folgers.”

Zargoza stopped at the coffee stand and dipped a flat wooden stirring stick in a pile of white powder. He stuck it under his nose and snorted.

His arms flew out, and he fell against the wall, shattering a full-length motel mirror. He pawed at his stinging nose like a dog that just stuck his snout in a fire-ant hole.

“Jesus! Who put the fucking nondairy creamer in the cocaine jar?”

“Sorry, Z,” said one of the phone men. “The coke’s in that other jar today.”

“Let’s get some labels on this stuff. God knows what’s in Coffee-mate!”

“Sure thing, Z.”

Zargoza turned to Tommy. “You got to get out of cocaine, man. It’s passé. It’s just not chic anymore. Brings too much heat. Now, wire fraud—that’s where it’s at.

“We send out fake insurance invoices and credit card bills. We scare old people into buying home security systems that we get at Radio Shack for a fifth the price—say stuff like ‘Did you know Mrs. Crabtree on the next street was anally raped by winos?’ We mark up water-filtration systems eight hundred bucks, tell the old bags they need it or they’ll grow kidney stones like avocados.

“For a while we took out second mortgages on houses we didn’t own. Amazingly easy. Get a fake driver’s license, find a nice home and start calling mortgage brokers. The business is so competitive they almost make you take the money at gunpoint. They Xerox your license and hand you the cashier’s
check. They don’t even take you to the house to make sure you have the keys. So you cash out the check and you got a month’s head start until the homeowner gets a new payment book in the mail and calls the mortgage company and says, ‘What the hell’s this?’”

Tommy Diaz nodded approvingly.

“The key is not to get too greedy in any one scheme,” continued Zargoza. “I’ve survived through diversification—getting out of every scam just a little bit early, before the authorities catch on. Since it’s not violent crime, the complaints have to reach a critical mass in some government office before it comes off the back burner. By spreading out the scams, you spread out the complaints…. I tell ya, this new generation coming up”—he made a dismissive wave of his arm—“they reject many lucrative areas of crime simply because they’re not glamorous enough.”

They walked by a table where a man sat hunched over cartons of eggs working with a counterfeit USDA ink stamp.

“I still got the chop shop in Ybor City, to anchor the portfolio, but otherwise I’m only expanding in the white-collar sector,” Zargoza told Tommy. He reached into a file and handed Tommy Diaz a document from the secretary of state’s office.

“Amalgamated Eclectic Inc., a Florida corporation,” said Tommy, reading the fine official certificate. “Impressive.”

“Wait till you hear about my latest venture. Sweepstakes. Look at this great mailer! Big letters: ‘YOU’VE WON MILLIONS!!!’ Gets ’em every
time. I was receiving the offers so often myself that I figured they had to be making money.”

“Who’s this in the little picture on the mailer?” asked Tommy Diaz.

“Some has-been personality. I figured I needed a celebrity endorsement. All the stars these old people remember—they’re nobodies today. You can get ’em to endorse anything real cheap.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought this all out,” said Tommy.

“You know the best part? You meet a much better class of people in this line of work. In the drug business everyone’s a backstabbing scumbag looking to rip you off or turn you in. But in telephone fraud, your victims are all sweet, polite, law-abiding citizens who would never think of taking advantage of you. Why can’t everyone be like that?”

The two stared out the back window in quiet contentment and watched a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the sides pull up to the motel office.

H
ammerhead Ranch had a wonderful, sweaty Florida seediness to it. The bargain pricing drew an interesting cast, who slinked around the pool and the bar. The sidewalk outside the rooms had orange-brown rust stains from the sprinklers. Rooms one to eleven ran parallel to the beach along the long part of the motel’s L layout. Zargoza’s four-room boiler operation occupied rooms twelve to fifteen—the short part of the L that ran toward the water. Every room had a story to tell.

Room one: It was 1971. A forty-year-old man stood on a bright afternoon in the Fra Mauro highlands. His name was Edgar Mitchell. He held what looked like a long-handled gardening tool and he slowly scooped up a few little gray rocks and some dirt. Then Mr. Mitchell got in a rocket ship and flew to the third planet in our solar system, called Earth. The United States government looked at the moon rocks for a while and gave a few of them to a man named President Nixon. Mr. Nixon gave some of the rocks to people who ran other countries, to try to get
them to like him. He gave one rock the size of a Cocoa Puff to a man at the top of the government of Honduras. The Honduran head of state was ousted in a violent coup and the rock fell into the hands of a rebel leader named Ché Gazpacho, who put it in a special case on his credenza. Gazpacho was killed a week later when the military regained control during the chaos following a hotly contested soccer match in the capital of Tegucigalpa. The moon rock was grabbed by one of the lieutenants storming the rebels in the presidential palace, who was forced to give it to the general who entered the room behind him, who in turn was forced to give it to his long-legged mistress, who was using sex as a weapon and had unrealistic expectations of a singing career. The mistress gave the rock to an incompetent theatrical agent in the Dominican Republic named Shecky, who was later discovered in a filing cabinet in sixty feet of water. The rock turned up six months later in the lint and Wrigley gum wrappers at the bottom of a hooker’s purse at the Hemingway Marina in Cuba, and she used it to get smuggled aboard a sailboat piloted by an American with a press visa who curses the day he put the rock up for collateral during a scag relapse in a leather bar on South Beach. The rock found its way to a pawnshop in Dania, where it sold for fifty dollars in food stamps. It changed hands three more times in a tight circle of people in the porn industry before ending up in the possession of a man who was trying to arrange a black market telephone auction from room one of Hammerhead Ranch.

Room two: Twenty-seven blue cardboard crates of legal-size files covered both beds. Lunch hour. Three unindicted co-conspirators in business suits anxiously fed documents into a ninety-nine-dollar shredder just out of the box from Office Depot.

Room three: A Balkan war criminal tried to unload three hundred loggerhead turtle eggs to an aphrodisiac salesman from Terra Ceia.

Room four: Twenty-one undocumented Haitians huddled silently as their cruise director, Captain Bradley Xeno, brushed his teeth in the mirror and hummed “Tequila.”

Room five: Six federal agents sat around the edges of the beds eating Chinese-to-go and guarding an underboss in the witness protection program.

Room six: A delicensed surgeon stacked twenty thousand in cash in his briefcase and prepared to saw off the right leg of a man afflicted with the rare condition apotemnophilia, the sexual desire to have limbs removed.

Room seven: A Japanese businessman filled a hollow surfboard with a five-year supply of shark cartilage extract in gel caps.

Room eight: An unemployed auto mechanic named Leo barricaded himself and refused to come out, although he had done nothing wrong and nobody was looking for him.

Room nine: Three Cubans swallowed condoms filled with large American currency folded into tiny squares and triangles.

Room ten: Two men tried unsuccessfully for the
third day to sell a highjacked truckload of thirty thousand Motorola beepers.

Room eleven: Three Anglos in taste-proof floral shirts randomly tested seven kilos of cocaine packed in Sharps medical waste dispensers. Three Latinos in matching yellow guayaberas stood across from them, cramming bundles of hundred-dollar bills into the side of a Naugahyde golf bag.

Rooms twelve to fifteen: Zargoza went over the day’s wire fraud receipts as a dozen con artists worked the phones. There was a loud thud against the wall coming from room eleven, then a series of smaller thumps and some yelling. A door slammed.

“What the hell?” said Zargoza.

On the other side of the wall in room eleven, bricks of coke and hundred-dollar bills were strewn across the floor and both beds. A Mexican standoff. Two of the men in floral shirts stood in one corner of the room, MAC-10s drawn. The third crouched on the floor with a pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun. The three Latinos aimed back with Rugers.

The door of eleven crashed open and four men in black ninja outfits ran into the room pointing subcompact machine guns at both the Anglos and the Latinos. They wore night-vision goggles. It was the afternoon.

“I can’t see anything! Are the lights on?” said one ninja, slapping the top of his goggles. He reached in a Velcro compartment on his right thigh, pulled out an underwater flare, cracked it and threw it on the floor, setting the carpet on fire.

“I still can’t see anything. What’s happening?”

The head ninja glanced sideways at his colleague and back at the men he was covering with his machine gun. He whispered out the corner of his mouth: “Lens caps.”

“What?”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” the leader said. He turned and ripped the night goggles off the ninja’s head and stomped out the carpet fire.

Then he aimed his weapon again at the floral shirts and guayaberas. “Okay, back to live action! Everybody drop your guns! You’re all under arrest! We’re U.S. special agents from the U.S. Special Agency.”

“No, you drop ’em—
you’re
under arrest!” said one of the floral shirts, showing a badge. “Florida Bureau of Investigation! This is a double-reverse, flea-flicker sting operation!”

A guayabera said, “No, both of
you
drop ’em! You’re all subpoenaed! We’re from the special prosecutor’s office!”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” said the ninja leader. “We’re all cops?!”

A fist pounded from the other side of the wall. It was Zargoza. “Hey, what’s all the racket in there! Knock it off!” he yelled, and he went back to weighing out cocaine on a triple-beam scale.

“You shut up!” a floral shirt yelled back through the wall and hit it with the butt of his shotgun. “I’ll kick your ass!”

“I’m the owner!” yelled Zargoza. “Settle down or I’ll call the police!”

The head ninja told them to cool it. This farce didn’t need a fourth jurisdiction of cops.

“Sorry. We apologize,” the leader yelled through the wall.

“That’s better,” shouted Zargoza, spooning cocaine. “We try to run a civilized place here.”

The three teams of cops filed out of the room and took up a row of stools at the bar by the motel pool. They ordered strawberry daiquiris and watched a TV weather report on a new hurricane moving steadily across the Atlantic after slamming the Cape Verde Islands.

“Doesn’t anyone sell cocaine these days?” asked an agent in a floral shirt. “I mean, besides undercover cops?”

“It’s out of style,” said a ninja with night-vision goggles propped on top of his head like sunglasses. He licked whipped cream off the end of a flamingo swizzle stick. “I don’t think you can buy it in Florida anymore.”

T
he Hammerhead Ranch Motel was a sandspur between the toes of everyone who lived next door in the spanking-new high-rises of Beverly Shores.

Condominiums, someday, will be the stuff of Florida nostalgia, but not yet.

Before it incorporated, Beverly Shores was the classic beach town. A row of one-story mom-and-pop motels built in the early sixties. All nondescript and modest except for the few dollars that went into
corny neon signs. Alligators in top hats and dancing swordfish. Several of the motels carved out niches with foreign visitors. There were signs with maple leafs and Union Jacks, and one had an insane Bavarian with crossed eyes, playing a glockenspiel.

Hammerhead Ranch was the only one left. The others were all gone, demolished one by one to clear the path for the advancing column of condos that would become the City of Beverly Shores.

One of the condominiums had a twin, curved design like a W; one was stair-stepped. There was traditional Mediterranean, a towering spaceship and another that looked like the Watergate. One was a rhombus.

Half had the word “Arms” in the name. Total, nine hundred fifty units, average cost, six hundred thousand. Population: spite.

The residents were exceedingly fortunate and comfortable, which brought them to the inescapable conclusion that they needed to be pissed at someone. They were mad at people who drove down the public street in front of their condos, and swimmers who swam in their public ocean and beachcombers who combed their public beach. The phenomenon was so pronounced across Florida that such residents had a nickname: “Condo Commandos.” The particular residents of Beverly Shores took it to a new level.

A nine-year-old overthrew a Frisbee behind one of the buildings, and it sailed a few yards across the city limits of Beverly Shores. A woman manicuring a shrub picked up the plastic disk, cut it in half with
pruning shears and threw the two unaerodynamic pieces wobbling back at the boy.

The residents put aside a few hours each day to complain about being screwed by welfare mothers.

Every fall the storm season washed the beach at Beverly Shores out to sea, and every spring the Army Corps of Engineers sent in barges to dredge sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pump it back to shore. It cost millions of dollars and, coupled with their federally subsidized flood insurance, made the residents of Beverly Shores the biggest welfare recipients in the state. All the government required in return, to legitimize spending tax dollars on beach restoration, was public access to the already public beach.

It was an outrage.

The residents planted small trees to obscure the beach parking signs at the tiny access areas. When people continued showing up, they stole the signs at night and blamed outside agitators. They presented a united front of frosty stares at anyone who parked in the small public lot between their buildings; the mayor yelled at them if the parking job was out of alignment, and he yelled if it was not. The residents drove golf carts everywhere, with loud horns.

They were the luckiest people on the island, and they filled days of endless leisure in paradise by being petty, quarrelsome, obsessive and vindictive. They woke up difficult, had a whiny lunch and went to bed not backing down for shit.

When nobody from the outside world was doing them wrong, they turned on each other, and the
courthouse brimmed with lawsuits and unfounded criminal complaints. Florida Cable News regularly rifled the legal briefs for a dependable stream of feature stories. There was the condo association that wouldn’t let the disabled vet hang an American flag on his balcony for Memorial Day. And the child in the wheelchair sued for running over a sprinkler head. And the arrest of two women on the beach for breaking the beverage prohibition by drinking coffee during a morning stroll. Florida Cable News cameras were live in the courtroom for the weighing of Muffins, the not-so-miniature poodle who had eaten herself right up to the condo’s fifteen-pound pet weight limit. But Muffins became nervous under the camera lights, and her shaking produced a range of readings from fourteen pounds fourteen ounces to fifteen pounds two ounces. Muffins then relieved herself in the scale, triggering motions from both lawyers on whether the bonus should be included in the weighing. The judge ordered a continuance and stomped off the bench in a huff. The stories were so frequent that Florida Cable News had an on-screen logo—“Beverly Shores 33786.”

Almost all the incidents at Beverly Shores were minor. There were exceptions. One resident was watering the flower bed outside his ground-floor unit, and the resident upstairs, his archenemy and nemesis Malcolm Kefauver, the mayor of Beverly Shores, came up and needled him about the shade of blue of his wife’s hair until Malcolm got a face full of hose water. The soaked Mayor Kefauver ran back in his condo looking for a weapon and grabbed the first
thing he found. The man with the garden hose saw the mayor return, and he took off running.

It was an impressive shot. At a range of thirty feet, the fleeing condo owner was nailed in the derrière with a lawn dart. He went down to his knees like a rhino hit with a tranquilizer gun, then fell face first in the Bermuda grass. They both filed civil and criminal complaints, which brought out the TV people again.

And so went the golden twilight years at Beverly Shores.