Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Are you a counselor, sir?” she asked after rather a long pause. Her voice was cracked from disuse, but she spoke with the exaggerated clarity of the New York native who has been at pains to disguise the accent.

“I’m with the D.A.,” said Karp.

“Oh. I have such an interesting case here,” she said, waving a thick and filthy manila folder. “Maybe you would be so kind as to give me your legal opinion. I believe a great injustice has been done, a very great, a very great, great injustice, and they’re getting away with it.” She lowered her voice and glanced theatrically over both shoulders. “With murder.”

“Would you care for a knish?” Karp asked, hoping by this gesture to forestall what he knew could be an unpleasant encounter. The courthouse area was, naturally enough, well supplied with those of the mad whose nuttiness came out in legal colors, and this person was clearly one of them.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t take your lunch,” she fluttered.

“Please.” He stood and extended the brick to her in its square of waxed paper, meanwhile slapping his (actually quite flat) stomach with his other hand. “I don’t need it,” he said heartily. “It’d only go to waste.”

“Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much,” she said, and accepted it and took a first small bite, closing her eyes as if she were tasting a spoonful of molossal at Le Pavillon.

Karp took this opportunity to make his escape, feeling somewhat ratty about it, but not too ratty, and not really regretting his lost knish.

Back in the office, he called the ADA in charge of the car-theft-ring prosecution, a luminary of the Felony Bureau named Weingarten, and asked him to stop by if he had no other commitments. Officially, Karp should have called Weingarten’s bureau chief, Tim Sullivan, and taken it through channels, or, failing that, he should have had O’Malley call the Felony office secretary to set up an appointment, but he chose not to. Sullivan would bitch to Keegan, of course, and Keegan would answer that the chief assistant could call anyone in the office he damn pleased, and then yell at Karp to for chrissake go through the chain of command, and Karp would forget to do so the next time, and thus each of the hundreds of attorneys in the office would learn that they could at any moment expect such a call and have to answer instantly for any of the cases under their control, which, of course, was the point of Karp doing it in so outrageously unbureaucratic a fashion.

Weingarten said the only thing he could say, which was that he had no other commitments and would be right up, and then he spent a frantic five minutes juggling his many commitments, and arrived at Karp’s door breathless, a long-faced young man with pale eyes and thinning blondish hair. Karp pointed him to a seat and held up the case file.

“ People v . Ragosi , nice job,” Karp said.

A smile pulled tentatively at Weingarten’s mouth and the ginger mustache that sat upon it. “Uh, thanks.”

“Yeah, how long did it take you to build the case, a year?”

“Fourteen months, including the grand jury.”

“Yeah, this Ragosi seems to be the kingpin, all right. And you got him the usual way, by turning each layer of his organization. The cops went undercover, posed as car thieves, got the evidence on the chop shops, the chop shops gave you the parts brokers, and one particular parts broker, what was his name? I got it right here. .” He thumbed through the thick file.

“Ortiz, Luis Ortiz,” said Weingarten.

“Yeah, here it is. I see Luis was a very bad boy. You started him out on fifty-seven separate B-felony counts, criminal possession of stolen property, first-degree-wow, this was a multimillion-dollar operation-plus forgery of a VIN, forty counts, plus odds and ends: falsifying business records, illegal possession of a VIN, and then you let him plead down to, let’s see here, three counts of CPSP four, an E felony, plus some misdemeanor trash, and the payoff was he gave you Mr. Ragosi, who is the mastermind behind the ring. Is that right?”

Weingarten said, “Yeah, we thought that was a good deal for us. The cops and the feds have been after Ragosi for years, but he was always too sharp.”

“Yeah, I see where Ortiz testifies to the grand jury the guy always used cutouts for cash transfers, would never meet face to face with his suppliers. And I don’t see any evidence from the phone taps and mail covers, so I presume you got zip. A careful guy, Ragosi. So it was real fortunate that Mr. Ragosi decides one fine day to personally hand a manila envelope with forty grand in it to your pal Ortiz, and even more fortunate that Ortiz decides to keep that envelope, and sure enough, it’s got Mr. Ragosi’s prints on it. And on that evidence the cops get a warrant and raid Mr. Ragosi’s place of business, and what do they find? All sorts of incriminating paperwork from our boy Ortiz. None from all the other limbs of his vast criminal enterprise, only from Ortiz. What do you make of that, Weingarten?”

“What can I say? The guy got sloppy for once, and we got lucky. It happens.”

“Yeah, it does. It also happens that defendants under the hammer of a big jolt perjure themselves, and it also happens that cops anxious to close out a big one encourage that perjury and plant evidence. Ragosi may be a criminal mastermind, like you say, but I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that in this case he was framed.”

Weingarten felt sweat bead up on his hairline and resisted the urge to wipe at it. “Wait a minute, you don’t seriously think I-”

“Suborned perjury? No, I don’t. I think the cops arranged it, and you bought it. Be more careful next time. Do you realize that you have no real independent corroboration of Ragosi’s personal involvement in a criminal enterprise?”

“But we have half a dozen of his employees-”

“The same as Ortiz. They’re ratting the boss out to save their asses. No, as far as I can see from this, you have a legitimate case against Ragosi for a number of counts of falsifying business records, period.”

The young prosecutor gaped. “But that’s. . nothing !”

“It’s not much,” agreed Karp, “but it’s all I’m going to let you go ahead with on Ragosi. The shame of it is that this is a really good operation. Ortiz and the other chop kings are bad guys and you got them. You broke up a major car-theft ring. If the big guy beat you, hey, you might get him the next time. There’s no shame in getting whipped. The shame would be in this office bringing a case that stinks of perjury and manufactured evidence. If you’re still set on Ragosi, my advice to you is go back to his operation and look harder.”

“But we did !” cried Weingarten in a strangled tone. “We looked everywhere, his wife, his banks, his daughter, his fucking cousins, we bugged his house, his office. . Jesus Christ, every skank, drugged-out car thief on the East Coast knows Ragosi is the man, and we didn’t find a fucking mark on him, and if it wasn’t for Ortiz. .” He stopped, flushed, and hissed, “Ah, shit!”

“I rest my case,” said Karp.

When Weingarten had slunk off, Karp made a note to talk to Keegan and Sullivan about canning the Ragosi trial, and also to let the police chain of command know in the nicest possible way that he wasn’t having any of that particular brand of horseshit this month. Then he picked up the phone and called his wife.

“Where are you?” Karp asked when she answered. Marlene’s car phone was still enough of a novelty that Karp always asked, even though he had been talking to cops in their cars for years without querying their 10–20 unless necessary. It was different when it was your wife.

“I’m on Woodhaven in Queens,” said Marlene.