David Ellis - Breach of Trust

Lee Tucker could hardly complain. He met with me daily and marveled at our proficiency-and the case he was building against Charlie Cimino. As the evidence came in, the government had been documenting it with fancy color charts detailing each meeting with a state contractor; the date of the corresponding contribution to Governor Snow’s campaign fund; any other perks, such as consulting work to one of Charlie’s side companies or legal work to me; and the cell-phone communications about these things.

Every instance of extortion was a crime, and the feds were very good at taking a single act and multiplying it into about twelve crimes, throwing in counts for conspiracy and wire fraud, that kind of thing. The key to federal jurisdiction was the use of interstate communication. That meant phone calls, faxes, emails. That, of course, is why I came up with the elaborate text-messaging scheme between Charlie and me. Each of the text messages was a separate use of the wires in interstate commerce for the purpose of executing the criminal scheme.

I’d expected, at some point, for Charlie to delegate this work to me and not involve himself in the day-to-day affairs of the extortion. But he hadn’t. He loved it, the raw power of holding the fates of these contractors in his hands, the thrill of the shakedown itself. The guy was a bully at heart. What he was doing was the adult version of stealing milk money from the weaker kids.

“I don’t care,” he said into his earpiece as we rode in his Porsche from the DeSantis meeting. “Just get them sold. I’m just carrying these fuckin’ things. They’re killing me. Sell them or I’ll find someone who will.”

He clicked off his phone and murmured to himself. “What a market. What a goddamn market.”

It was not the greatest time to be a real estate developer, I gathered.

“Fifty thousand square feet of commercial space I got,” he went on. “Tenants, I don’t.”

That was the life of a developer. Buy the land, build on it, and hope the buyers will come. But the market had crashed. Charlie was property rich but, for all I knew, cash poor.

His cell phone buzzed, and he looked at the phone for the caller ID. “Greg Connolly,” he said with disdain. “That jerk-off can wait.” He looked over at me for a reaction but did not receive one. “Greg’s feeling lonely these days.”

Lonely, that is, because our new plan didn’t include the PCB much at all. The “Charlie and Jason Show” didn’t require Greg Connolly.

“Is that a problem?” I asked.

“Hard to say. It’s a problem if he runs to Carl.”

The mention of the governor’s name gave me a jolt. Cimino was saying that the governor knew what was going on. There would be no point in Greg Connolly running to his childhood friend, Governor Snow, unless the governor had some idea about the scheme.

It was what we figured, the feds and I, but it was the first time Cimino had invoked the governor’s name in this way. I hadn’t brought it up. It would seem too forced. Sooner or later, the topic was going to come up, and now was that time. I’m sure Chris Moody would be scrutinizing today’s recording from my F-Bird with particular care.

“And how plugged in is the governor to all of this?” I asked, going for it, because that had been the request from the federal government. If the topic came up, pursue it.

Cimino made a face but then changed topics. “That reminds me. He’s having a funder tonight. You should go.”

“To a fundraiser.”

“You should meet him, kid. Fuck. Fuck!” he said, looking at his buzzing cell phone. “Connolly again. This guy calls me twice in five minutes. Anyway, yeah, you should go tonight. You got a tux? Or get one. I’ll leave your name at the door. After all you’ve done for him,” he said, looking over at me, “they oughta let you in for free.”

Between my criminal enterprise with Charlie Cimino and the new clients and cases I had as bonus prizes, January and February had been quite busy for me. That was good. I needed busy. Because I tended to keep my head on straighter when my thoughts were occupied. I didn’t pass an hour of the day without thinking of my wife and daughter, but it wasn’t dominating me as much. Part of that was the mere passage of time, I realized, but the constant demands of litigation were a welcome distraction.

The bad part was that I hadn’t had much time to do what I’d originally set out to do when I joined up with the Procurement and Construction Board: find Ernesto Ramirez’s killer. There was a very good chance that the person responsible for his death was my partner in our criminal scheme. But even if I knew that, I didn’t have any proof. I couldn’t very well ask him. It would make for an awkward conversation, and there weren’t a lot of workable segues, either. Hey, speaking of murder, Charlie, by chance did you have a guy named Ernesto Ramirez whacked?

I didn’t have much to go on, other than my gut. Ernesto’s wife, Essie, didn’t know anything. Ernesto’s scribbling on the back of my business card wasn’t any kind of proof. The only thing I had to go on was that lawsuit that Wozniak’s company had filed when they lost that beverage contract. It could lead to something, but I didn’t have the resources to follow up. I didn’t want to use Joel Lightner; I didn’t want to get him anywhere near this thing. Christopher Moody was just looking for ways to fuck my friends, and I’d been lucky to get Shauna out of it with a nice letter from the U.S. attorney’s office, acknowledging that Shauna Tasker was not suspected of having any role in this thing whatsoever and was not a target of the investigation. I wouldn’t get another one of those.

So I couldn’t use Lightner, and I didn’t have a whole lot of spare money to hire an investigator, anyway. Once the money from some of this legal work started coming, maybe. But not at the moment.

But then I caught a break. Charlie had sent me a text message that included a number, which I then matched with the list he’d written up of major state contractors. My job would be to pull the contract and look for ways to terminate it, should the contractor refuse to pay the ransom. As my eyes wandered over the list, I noticed that virtually all of the biggest state contractors had already been paid a visit from Charlie and me.

But one very significant one had not. And even more important, Charlie hadn’t even assigned it a number. That company would not be receiving one of our visits.

The company was Starlight Catering, the very same company that had won the beverage contract after Adalbert Wozniak’s company had been disqualified.

Life’s full of coincidences.

And now I had an opening.

I went to my office at the state building and pulled the contracts currently held by Starlight Catering. Then I returned to my law offices and got a motion on file in one of my new cases. At five o’clock, I went down to Suite 410 and used the key I’d been given to walk in.

Special Agent Lee Tucker, who had documents spread out all over the office he was using, seemed pleased to learn of my invitation to the fundraiser. From his perspective, it suggested potential. It could open new doors for me. But he didn’t ask me to wear a wire and I didn’t volunteer.

“Hey,” I said. “I have a question.”

“Wow. Usually you’re the guy with all the answers.” Tucker and I got along okay. We’d had a rocky start, but I was eligible for a gold star after these last two months. The government had solid evidence of twenty-three separate shakedowns by Charlie Cimino and me. That kind of success seemed to smooth over any differences. Plus it was part of Tucker’s job to manage me, and he’d come to realize that I didn’t respond to threats.