Zachary Lazar - Evening's Empire - The Story of My Father's Murder

Warren said, “McCollum wanted something for nothing, and I gave him nothing for something.” They almost came to blows. McCollum would say later that he got fucked to death on that deal. He spent $250,000 of his own money to buy Consolidated and it ended up costing him everything. Two accounting firms looked over the books and gave him the okay. Then he found out it was under a federal probe, that it had half a million dollars in undisclosed debts. He ended up on trial in federal court for fraud. His name dragged through the mud for nothing at all. Eight weeks later plus legal expenses, he was acquitted. Even then, he would go to the ASU football games and people who had been his friends would pretend he wasn’t there.

They joined the Toastmasters Club, Ed and Ron Fineberg, but they eventually stopped going to the meetings and just went out for drinks. Newton’s on Van Buren every Tuesday night. One night Ron got a call that Ed had been picked up on a DUI. He went down to find him, but there was no Ed Lazar on the blotter. He had given a different name. He said he was Eduardo Español Fuck You.

In early November 1974, Adamson got a call from a friend of his named Mark Rossi, *who rented a liquor store from Carl Verive’s friend Old Man Kaiser. Mark Rossi knew everybody. The liquor store was near Papa Joe Tocco’s bar, the Barrel, on East Washington Street, and Joe and Albert Tocco headed the Phoenix branch of the Chicago Outfit. Rossi said he’d heard from another one of the Outfit guys, Freddy Pedote, yesterday. He said that Freddy Pedote wanted Adamson to give him a call.

They were putting him in the loop, Adamson realized, which is what he’d wanted ever since he met Verive, but he saw now that there was more to it. He saw that he had no choice now but to go as far as they told him to go. They were putting him in the loop because of what he’d heard at Applegate’s.

“Come over and we’ll talk,” Pedote said when Adamson called. “The Sun King Apartments, over on Thomas. Fifty-nine hundred East Thomas.”

. . .

The Outfit guys usually lived in run-down little houses, or they took a room at the Arizona Manor, but Fred Pedote was living in Scottsdale in one of those beige-stucco apartment complexes with Spanish tile on the roofs, a swimming pool surrounded by umbrella tables. Adamson parked in the lot with its aluminum overhang to screen out the sun. He walked into the courtyard planted with orange trees and bougainvillea, following a trail of gray concrete disks toward Pedote’s door. Pedote answered in a red golf shirt, a stout man in his midfifties, the hallway behind him a dark nebulous space from where Adamson stood in the sun. He could see that Pedote was short but big, muscle under the fat. He had brown, greased hair and a mottled complexion and strange, milky blue eyes. He smelled like Old Spice. They went inside and sat down in the dark living room and Adamson had a vodka cranberry and Pedote had a Löwenbräu beer.

“Mark Rossi said you could help me get a setup,” Pedote said.

Adamson stared down at the carpet, adjusting his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what that means.”

“Mark said you knew how to make a silencer for a twenty-two pistol. We call that a setup. Okay?”

“I don’t know why Mark told you that. I don’t have that on hand.”

“I was told you could get me one.”

“I could probably make you one. I’ve seen it done with a plastic bottle, that’s one way. But you’d be better off with a forty-five, not a twenty-two.”

“I want the peashooter.”

“Why?”

“That’s the way we do it. It’s quiet.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“You do that.”

“I said I would.”

Pedote clicked on the television with the remote. He leaned back on the sofa, his legs spread apart. “Mark Rossi says you breed greyhounds,” he said.

“I have a few dogs. No pups right now.”

“I like the track once in a while.”

“It’s one of my sidelines. Just keep my hand in.”

They watched TV for a few minutes without talking. It was the afternoon and the only things on were soap operas and game shows and Pedote settled on a game show. Eventually Adamson realized that Pedote was waiting for him to leave.

A few days later, he and his wife, Mary, were over at the Rossis’ trailer in a suburb called Chandler. They were having drinks with Mark and his wife, when Mark said he wanted to show Adamson something out in the yard.

“They don’t want the gun,” he said. “They want to bomb the car. They want to make it big, send a message.”

Adamson moved his feet in the gravel. There was a row of blue agave cactuses, their spines torn off at the ends like broken swords. “That’s fine,” he said.

Rossi nodded. He was tall and wide, like a strong man from an old circus, with a workman’s battered hands. “You want to do it now?”

Adamson shrugged. “Fine. Sure.”

“I’ve got some things in the camper. Some dynamite.”

“How much dynamite do you have?”

“I’ve got six sticks of dynamite. I’ve got primer cord. Caps.”

“You have magnets?”

“No.”

“We’ll need to go get magnets.”

They told the girls they were doing an errand. Adamson stood on the porch, his back turned, while Rossi spoke through the bare aluminum screen door. They drove over to the GEMCO on McClintock and Baseline and bought some magnets and some tape. When they got back to Rossi’s, Adamson just waited for him in the driveway, pretending to look over Mary’s car, seeing that the tires all had pressure. Mark came back out, breathing heavily with a canvas duffel bag, frowning, and they went into Mark’s camper. It was dark and hot inside, all metal and oil and dust. Mark unzipped the bag and Adamson pulled out the sticks of dynamite and set them out on the top of a strongbox. He laced them together with the primer cord, working it around and around, until he could draw the six sticks together into a loose cylinder. It was not easy and he made sure he used plenty of cord. He was just taping the ends together when Mary opened up the door of the camper and asked him what they were doing.

“Mary, go back in the trailer,” he said.

She wore glasses with wide brown frames and a flannel shirt. “I see you two are up to no good.”

“Go back in the trailer, all right?”

“We were going to order some pizzas. Unless you or Mark wants to go pick up a bucket of chicken.”

“Pizza sounds fine. Get one. One’s plenty.”

“What do you want on your pizza, Mark?”

Mark was staring down into the flat of his upturned hand.

They put the bomb in a briefcase and he and Rossi drove up to the Sun King Apartments in Mary’s car. The briefcase had belonged to Mary’s father, a family heirloom, a brown leather contraption that opened from the top. Adamson waited in the car beneath the metal overhang while Rossi went in to make sure that Pedote was alone. Rossi’s solid figure came back down the pathway of concrete disks, out of the tropical foliage, and he gave Adamson a curt, irritated wave.

Pedote was in the kitchen in a powder blue shirt over a sleeveless undershirt. He stood with his hands locked in front of his waist. On the counter was a large, iced vodka and orange juice. There was a skillet on the stove with the last shreds of some scrambled eggs stuck to its surface.

“That was quick service,” Pedote said. “You want to show me how the thing works?”

Adamson let his head fall a little to one side, affronted by the tone. He was going to assert himself — tinted glasses, silver-and-turquoise jewelry — and Freddy Pedote was going to have to take it or leave it.