Stephen Cannell - The Plan

"Okay, good," Meyer continued. "I think you should level off on the newspapers and radio. We got four chains but I'm much more interested in television."

"I agree, Meyer. I got my eye on United Broadcasting. They're a group of independent stations, but I think they can be bought for the right price. We could expand and create a TV network. We can leverage the buy and I'd r ecommend that, because we're going to need a lot more cash downriver to acquire additional stations and fund programming."

"How much?"

"I'm not sure. Figure media properties right now are trading at multiples of seven, maybe eight. And it's only going to go up. I'd like to dump the radio stuff to help fund the UBC buy. Maybe Paul Arquette could help us in Washington. He could help push the license transfers through the FCC."

"You wanna talk to him, okay. I don't talk to him 'cause Joe Alo wants us to stay away. Don't want no stink on his candidate."

"I'll talk to him. I'm in Washington next week. How's Teddy?" Wallace said, turning the conversation to Meyer's wife, for whom he had a genuine affection.

"She's fine, Wally. And Mrs. Litman?"

Cole's heart was pounding.

"She's fine. You two are gonna have to meet sometime."

"We can't meet. Joseph wants you in the clear. If he puts his man in the White House, you're the one gonna do it. You and your TV network." There was a long moment of silence, then Meyer added, "Once we own the Man, we're gonna put all these fucks in the Justice Department out of business."

"You take care of yourself, Meyer. I hope you're feeling better."

"I feel like shit, but I'm going home to Israel. I applied for citizenship. I'm gonna go home and die in the Promised Land."

Cole reached out and turned off the tape. He looked at the others in the room. They were all holding their breath.

"Son of a bitch," Naomi finally said. "You were right." And then she leaned across the table and kissed him.

The ride to Ben Gurion airport was a paranoid trip through the shadows of their imaginations. Every car, every taxi, seemed to hold vicious assassins. They were led onto the field and boarded the private jet. Their hearts were pounding.

Even though Kaz wasn't with them, his spirit permeated the small ten-seat Hawker jet. His bag of possessions occupied an empty seat in the passenger cabin.

The jet belonged to Reuters, and it had taken Naomi four phone calls to get permission to use it. She had pleaded and flirted and lied, and finally, the Middle Eastern bureau chief had signed off on it.

As soon as the sixteen-millimeter film was transferred, they had grabbed the two VHS cassettes and left for the airport in a Reuters sedan without stopping to play them.

They were soon out over the Mediterranean, headed for a refueling stop at the Azores before crossing the North Atlantic. Cole shoved the tape into the VCR in the plush cabin. They watched the silent film of Meyer meeting men in dark suits on Miami street corners in the sixties. Each shot was identified by location and date by a film slate, written on an eight-by-ten-inch handheld blackboard. Th e t elephoto lens zoomed in to catch the conversations. Sometimes, it was possible to see lips moving.

"We gotta get a lip reader to translate this stuff," Cole said. Naomi nodded.

The film didn't seem ominous unless you knew who the players were. Cole recognized a few notorious figures. There was a shot of Meyer and Joe Colombo coming out of a Miami nightclub; shots of Meyer and Sam Giancana. They watched the ever-changing parade of Mafia princes and then, toward the end of the second tape, Cole jabbed the Pause button. The shot showed Meyer getting out of a taxicab with Joseph Alo. Lucinda saw her father as he was twenty-six years ago, and then, as they ran the tape farther, Mickey Alo got out of the cab. The camera zoomed in; Joseph could be seen talking. After a minute, the shot turned off and the monitoring federal agent held a slate in front of the lens that said: "July 5, 1970, Fontainebleau parking lot." That was the only film in which Mickey Alo appeared. But C. Wallace Litman made a surprise appearance in a shot taken in Las Vegas. An elevator camera in the Frontier Hotel photographed him talking briefly to Joseph Alo. They finished viewing the tapes, turned off the TV, and moved to the four seats that faced one another in the back of the cabin.

"Strategy session," Cole said. "We got Meyer and C. Wallace Litman planning to use UBC to put a guy in the White House, saying Joe Alo is the quarterback. We got Meyer and Joseph Alo on film. And we got Joseph and Litman together in the Frontier elevator. We don't have anything to tie Haze Richards to Mickey Alo."

"I overheard a telephone conversation between A. J. and Mickey talking about Bahamian funding for the Richards campaign," Ryan said.

They sat in silence for a moment. They weren't sure it was enough.

"If the federal government had Meyer Lansky on tape talking about gaining the presidency by using a TV network, why wouldn't they have done anything about it back then?" Lucinda asked.

"Bunch a' reasons," Cole said. "In '71, network TV wasn't the huge political factor it is today. In '60, we had just begun to find out how powerful TV was when Nixon lost the presidency to Kennedy over a television debate. Second. . these mob guys are always plotting ways to get back at the Justice Department. Most of it is just hot air. And third. . you gotta remember these were illegal wiretaps. The government couldn't use them even if they wanted to. They might have wondered back then what he was talking about. The plan had a twenty-year timetable. That's too long for any fed I ever met. Kaz was the exception. They're looking for quick busts. As time passed and nothing happened, this stuff disappeared into a file and nobody gave a shit anymore; it was forgotten."

Ryan nodded. "Let's say we've got enough proof here. How do we use it? If we put it in the wrong hands, it could get buried or discredited. We've already seen how dangerous Mickey is and how far he's willing to go to get this done."

"We need to give that a lot of thought," Cole said, studiously. But he already knew what he wanted to do. "We don't have many options and I don't want to turn loose control of the story till it's in the right hands."

Naomi knew exactly what Cole meant. They'd have to choose the outlet carefully. What they had was only the tip of the iceberg, but it was enough to attract official interest. Once the Justice Department started going through Litman's financial records, with special attention to Mary Carver Paints, she knew, it would all come out. But in the wrong hands, it could be distorted, the story altered. If they didn't spring it quickly, Litman and Mickey would have time to destroy the records before the Justice Department could move in.

"We've only got two weeks," Cole continued. "In two weeks, Haze Richards is most likely going to be elected President and then it'll be too late. That means that in the next fourteen days we have to communicate this to the entire electorate and we have to pick somebody the public will believe."

After half an hour's discussion, they chose Tom Brokaw at NBC because Cole used to play tennis with him and trusted him. He would contact Brokaw once they landed.

Events changed everything.

While the Hawker jet was still over the Atlantic, Mickey Alo pieced together what had happened in Israel.

The Tel Aviv police had recovered Kaz's nine-millimeter automatic, which had been blown through the roof of the taxi and landed not two hundred feet from the site of the collision. The I. D. F.'s Special Investigations Section in Tel Aviv had been able to lift prints from the weapon and matched them to Solomon Kazorowski. The wire services reported that a gardener working next door to the Bach house had seen the taxi, presumably driven by Kazorowski, hit a blue sedan containing three unknown men. He had also seen two men and a woman hurrying down the Bachs' driveway. The gardener had given a fairly accurate set of descriptions. Mickey had called Silvio from a pay phone. Silvio said that they had better meet.