William Lashner - Hostile witness

When I was in junior high I was picked to perform a genetics experiment with different forms of fruit flies called drosophilae. In the back of the classroom I mated the red-eyed variety with the white-eyed variety and then determined the characteristics of the offspring. Drosophilae were perfect for the experiment because their lives were so short and their reproductive cycle so swift that in a very few days I could follow their genetic adventures through a number of generations. For the length of my experiment they were like pets, and when I was supposed to etherize the final batch of offspring to get a precise count of the red-eyed and white-eyed descendants, a procedure that would inevitably kill a majority, I decided instead to release them. "Go, my friends," I said as I opened the small vials in which they had been bred. "Be free." And I watched as successive rows of my classmates waved distractedly at the air. I thought about my friends the drosophilae in those moments when I felt overwhelmed by the evocations of despair swirling around me and envied them their short, sentienceless lives. To fly, to suck at fruit, to mate and reproduce, all with absolutely no consciousness of their inevitable fate.

So what I did that night after Beth left me was what I did most every night. I stopped off at a storefront grill and ordered a cheese steak with ketchup and onions to go and took it home and ate it in front of the television with half a six-pack beside me. Whatever the night, there was always one show almost worth watching and I was able to stretch a whole night of mindlessness around that one show, running from Jeopardy! through prime time through the late news and the talk shows and finally the late late movie on UHF, until I'd fallen asleep on the couch, drugged by all I had seen. That Friday night was like every other night of what my life had become, and for the few blessed moments that I was caught like a science fiction hero in the power of that electron beam I lost whatever sentience I held and became as connected to the now of my life as the simple but noble drosophila.

THOUGH I HAD NEVER met Jimmy Moore, I knew his name. I knew thousands of names, actors and criminals, sports heroes and politicians, authors, rock stars, the silly little guy who sells suits on South Street. It is the names who rule the world, the Tina Browns, the Jerry Browns, the Jim Browns. They are the aristocracy of America and whatever their rank, and there is a ranking, from the national to the local to the almost obscure, it is the names who attend the best parties, screw the prettiest people, drink the finest champagne, laugh loudest and longest. Jimmy Moore was a local name, a businessman turned politician, a city councilman with a populist, anti-drug agenda that bridged the lower and middle classes. He was a name with aspirations and a loyal following. A name who would be mayor.

I spent the better part of Monday in the offices of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase listening to Jimmy Moore on the telephone. He wasn't on the telephone with me, of course, as I was not a name and thus not worth talking to. Instead he was on the phone with Michael Ruffing, a restaurateur whose flashy enterprises in the city had made him a local name among the city's well-cultured and whose phone at his nightclub, Bissonette's, named after his partner Zack Bissonette, the currently comatose former second baseman, happened to have been tapped by the FBI. I sat alone at the foot of a long marble table in a huge conference room. Fine antique prints of Old Philadelphia lined the walls: Independence Hall, Carpenters Hall, Christ Church, the Second Bank of the United States. The carpet was thick and blue. A tray of soft drinks lay on a credenza behind me and I didn't have to pay six bits to open one, they were just there, for me. I can't help but admit that sitting in that room like an invited guest, sitting there like a colleague, gave me a thrill. I was in the very heart of success, someone else's success maybe, but still the closest I had ever come to the real thing. And there was a dark joy in my heart the whole of my time there because I knew that if all went right this could be my success, too. So I couldn't help smiling every now and then as I sat in that conference room with earphones on and a yellow pad before me, listening to a score of cassettes holding Jimmy Moore's taped conversations with Michael Ruffing.

Moore: Your plan for the riverfront is brilliant. Prescient. But I see problems in council.

Ruffing: Uh, like, what kinds of…

Moore: Jesus, Mikey, you got problems.

Ruffing: I don't need no more problems.

Moore: Every damn councilman gets a take out of the water going a certain way. That's why it still looks like the Bronx down there. What you need is a champion. What you need is a Joe Frazier.

Ruffing: Okay. I see that. That's who I need then, what I'm looking for.

Moore: Take Fontelli. Part of the waterfront's in his district, so he thinks the whole damn river's his pisspot.

Ruffing: I don't want Fontelli, you know. I've heard things.

Moore: They're all true. What have you heard?

Ruffing: He's, you know. What I heard. Connected.

Moore: Of course he is, Mikey. You know who he's married to.

Ruffing: I don't want them.

Moore: Of course not. Of course not. In for an inch and they're screwing your sister. Now I like your place, you know that. I'm in there almost every week, you know that.

Ruffing: And you don't stint on the Dom, either.

[laughter]

Moore: Fuck no, you're either class or you're shit. Now I could help with this. We could help each other, Mikey.

Ruffing: Okay, yeah.

Moore: But the kind of influence you're talking about here, well, you know.

Ruffing: Of course. That's, uh, assumed.

Moore: But I'll be your Joe Frazier.

Ruffing: What exactly are we talking about here?

Moore: I'll send my man Concannon over to discuss arrangements.

Ruffing: Give me an idea.

Moore: He'll call you. You'll deal with him on everything.

Ruffing: Sure, then.

Moore: This is going to work out for everybody, Mikey. For everybody. Trust me. This project's going to take off like a rocket ship.

It was these tapes and certain subsequent events that were the basis for the government's case against Moore and Concannon. Ruffing's waterfront development plan was budgeted at $140 million, and Moore wanted a full 1 percent to propose and ensure passage of the enabling legislation in City Council. The government's theory was that Moore and Concannon were shaking down Ruffing for the million point four and that when Ruffing stopped paying after the first half mil they turned violent, first beating the hell out of Bissonette, the club's minority owner who had convinced Ruffing to stop the payments, and then burning down the club. Moore and Concannon had been indicted for violations of the Hobbs Act, RICO, the federal conspiracy laws, and there was plenty of evidence to back it all up. Ruffing would testify at the trial to an arrangement that had gone very bad, and there were reams of records, which I had not yet been able to examine, that purported to follow the trail of money from Ruffing to Concannon to Moore's political action committee, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, or CUP, as well as physical evidence relating to the assault. But most significant of all were Moore's own words, captured with startling clarity on the ferric oxide of the tapes.

Moore: I don't understand the problem.

Ruffing: We're going a different way is all.

Moore: But we had a deal. A deal, Mikey.

Ruffing: I'm not happy about it but I don't got no fucking choice. Bissonette found out about us.

Moore: And I should care about that. He hit two-twenty lifetime, Mikey, two-twenty. We can walk all over him.