Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

Another anti-gambling spot, this one paid for by a different group, included soft-focus photographs of kids shooting baskets in driveways and playing baseball and soccer in the sunshine. The soothing radio voice of the Boston Red Sox delivered the message: “Sports. They should be about fun-not money.” Funny. I didn’t remember him complaining when the Sox’s payroll ballooned to a hundred and eighty million dollars.

In the third spot, Kenny Rogers touted the virtues of privately operated sports betting. As he spoke, the jaunty melody from his best-known stinker-the one with the lyric “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” -played softly in the background. Kenny delivered the tag line in his down-home drawl-“Stop big government’s takeover of sports gambling. Support free enterprise.”

By quarter of twelve, the serious midday drinkers had gathered at the bar, their arms curled around their boilermakers as if they were afraid somebody might confiscate them. When they started grumbling about my channel surfing, I tossed one of them the remote, carried my fourth cup of coffee to a table in back, and made a call.

“Campaign Finance Division, Bud Henry speaking.”

“Hi, Bud. It’s Mulligan.”

“I had a feeling I’d be hearing from you this morning.”

“So you must know what I’m calling about,” I said.

“The super PACs that are running all those gambling ads.”

“Yeah. What do you know about them?”

“Officially, nothing at all.”

“What about unofficially?”

“It’s looks like we’ve got four big-money players in the game.”

“Can you run them down for me?”

“The NCAA and the pro sports leagues are behind Stop Sports Gambling Now,” he said, “but I think you already knew that. The scuttlebutt is that at least one Atlantic City casino, maybe more, is funding Americans for the Preservation of Free Enterprise, the super PAC advocating privatized sports gambling. And don’t ask me which casino, ’cause I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And Don’t Gamble with Our Kids’ Futures, the super PAC running the ad with the soft-focus photos of little kids? I think their money’s coming out of Vegas.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“Last Thursday,” he said, “I got a call from an attorney claiming to represent them.”

“A local lawyer?”

“He was calling from Nevada. Had some questions about the fine points of Rhode Island campaign finance law. After we hung up, I did a little checking. Turns out his firm also represents a trade association that lobbies on behalf of Las Vegas casinos.”

“Interesting.”

“But odd, don’t you think?” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“That the Atlantic City Casinos are for sports gambling in Rhode Island and the Las Vegas casinos are against it.”

“Not really,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“The Vegas casinos want to protect their monopoly on legal sports betting,” I said. “The Atlantic City casinos want to muscle in on it.”

“Aren’t they pretty much owned by the same people?”

“Not all of them,” I said. “You said there were four players. What’s the last one?”

“Have you driven down I-95 today?”

“Not yet.”

“The AFL-CIO put up a bunch of new billboards overnight.”

“What’s on them?”

“Photos of a working man in a hard hat and a student hovering over a textbook. The message in big red letters urges everybody to ‘Save Our Pensions and Support Our Schools’ by supporting the governor’s plan for state-operated sports gambling.”

State Senator Mark Reynolds had a dandy idea. He wanted to anoint Mr. Potato Head the official mascot of the state of Rhode Island. By happy coincidence, the national headquarters of Hasbro, the toy’s maker, happened to be located in Reynolds’s district.

The senator was silent on what the duties of the state’s mascot might entail. Do a funky dance on the sidelines during legislative debates? Douse visitors with buckets of confetti at Green Airport? Mock Mr. Met? Stand on the state line and blow raspberries at Massachusetts?

I decided to play it straight and was writing it up when the opening riff of Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man,” my ringtone for McCracken, started playing in my pocket.

“Got something for me?” I asked.

“My guy at the airport’s been keeping an eye on incoming flights from Atlantic City,” he said, “and last night something interesting came up.”

“Oh?”

“Mario Zerilli met the last evening flight. I just e-mailed you a couple of frame grabs from one of the security cameras.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said.

I opened the e-mail on my desktop computer and clicked on the attachments. One grainy photo caught a short, stocky man in a business suit standing behind the trunk of Mario’s car. He was clutching a black briefcase in one hand and holding the handle of a small rolling suitcase in the other. In the second photo, which showed his face more clearly, he was sliding into the passenger seat. He had thin lips, slits for eyes, a hawk’s beak, and luxurious salt-and-pepper hair arranged in a pompadour.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“I asked my Jersey P.I. pal, but he wasn’t sure.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“There’s more,” McCracken said.

“Oh?”

“After my guy at the airport came up with this, he went back over the video of incoming flights from South Jersey for the last couple of weeks. Turns out the same man arrived on an afternoon flight a week ago and got into a cab.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I ended the call, forwarded the photos to Judy Abbruzzi at The Atlantic City Press, and dialed her number.

“I wondered when I was going to hear from you,” she said. “I thought maybe you were blowing me off.”

“Check your e-mail,” I said, “and call me right back.”

So that’s what she did.

“Recognize him?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“So?”

“First tell me what the hell’s going on.”

I took a moment to think it over and decided to give her most of it-the super PACs competing to influence Rhode Island gambling legislation, the bundles of cash in Lucan Alfano’s briefcase, his attempts to bribe state legislators, and the unsolved murder of Phil Templeton.

“Do you know the names of the legislators Alfano tried to bribe?” she asked.

“Some of them.”

“Give.”

“I don’t feel comfortable sharing that.”

“Why?”

“I got it off the record.”

She paused, taking her time deciding if I’d given her enough for her to reciprocate.

“The guy in the photo is Romeo Alfano,” she finally said. “He’s Lucan’s younger brother.”

“They were in business together?”

“In the payday loan company, yeah.”

“And as fixers?”

“So the Jersey state cops are telling us.”

“The murder-for-hire business, too?”

“Maybe, but they can’t say for sure.”

“What else have you got?” I asked.

“The three super PACs you mentioned are active down here, too. All three have made big media buys.”

“Anybody bribing state legislators down there?”

“All the time,” she said.

“Well, sure. But on Christie’s sports gambling proposal?”

“I don’t have anything solid on that.”

We promised again to stay in touch and signed off.

At noon I skipped lunch, walked a couple of blocks to the Omni, and asked the desk clerk if Romeo Alfano was registered. He wasn’t.

“What about Michael O’Toole?” I asked. That, I remembered, was the name his late brother had registered under.