Investigators Page 11

  Lieutenant Foster was truly ambivalent about his son having recently taken—just as soon as he was eligible—the examination for promotion to detective. If he passed it and was promoted, Lieutenant Foster knew that he would really be proud of his son—despite his genuine belief that his son hadn’t been on the job long enough to be a good beat patrolman, much less a detective.

  “I’m sure,” Staff Inspector Weisbach began, “that everyone was as thrilled as I was to learn that this morning Commissioner Czernich, by classified communication, charged the Ethical Affairs Unit with investigating certain allegations of misbehavior in the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit, and further directed Inspector Wohl to make available to EAU whatever Special Operations resources are needed, which includes the services of everybody in this room.”

  “Shit,” Detective Harris said, but smiled.

  “Thank you, Detective Harris,” Weisbach said, “for so succinctly summing up the feelings of so many of us.”

  There were general chuckles.

  “But we’re cops, gentlemen, all of us. And we do what we’re ordered to do, so let’s get on with it,” Weisbach said. “My first order—I don’t give many orders, so pay attention when I do—is that this is one job that nobody talks about. Not to your wives, not at the FOP bar, not to your buddies. Not to anyone. If there’s something dirty going on in Narcotics Five Squad, and they even suspect we’re looking close at them, they’ll just shut down whatever they’re doing and wait until the storm blows over. Which obviously means our job would be much harder. Everybody got that clear in their minds?”

  He looked at Matt Payne so long that Matt nodded. And then he kept looking. Finally, Matt understood what was expected of him. He stood up and said, “Yes, sir.”

  Weisbach looked at everybody but Sergeants Washington and Sandow in turn, and waited until each of them stood up and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “For all practical purposes, Sergeants Washington and Sandow will not be taking a very active role in this,” Weisbach said. “Sergeant Sandow for the obvious reasons, he’ll be handling the paperwork, and Sergeant Washington because he really is a legend in his own time, and the first time he started asking questions, looking around Five Squad, they would wonder why. To only a slightly lesser degree—he is not nearly as visible as Sergeant Washington—this also applies to Detective Harris.

  “This does not mean,” Weisbach went on, to be interrupted by a chorus of chuckles, and then went on, “that Sergeant Washington and Harris will not be involved in this—quite the opposite—just that they won’t be out ringing doorbells. The flow of reports will be through Washington to me, and I expect Washington to bring Harris in on everything. Okay?”

  There was a chorus of “Yes, sirs,” and Washington nodded his understanding.

  “Is there anybody here who doesn’t know how and where the interest in Five Squad began?” Weisbach asked. “I mean the accusations made to Sergeant Washington by Officer Kellog’s wife at the time of the murder? Hands, please.”

  No hands went up.

  “I’m not surprised. My wife says cops gossip more than women,” Weisbach went on. “Okay, let me bring everybody up-to-date on what’s happened since. If you’ve heard this before, bear with me.

  “When these allegations first came up, I spoke with Captain Pekach. He was surprised to hear them. He felt, I suppose still feels, that if anything was going on in Narcotics, he would have heard about it, or at least had suspicions. Now, since Captain Pekach is both not naive, and an experienced police supervisor, what that means is—let’s go on the presumption that there are dirty cops in the Five Squad—that they’re smart and doing what they’re doing skillfully enough to keep a smart supervisor like Captain Pekach from even suspecting that something’s going on.”

  He looked at Detective Jesus Martinez.

  “Jesus, when you worked Narcotics, did you hear anything about the Five Squad? Suspect anything?”

  Martinez shook his head, “no.”

  “Charley?” Weisbach asked, looking at Detective McFadden.

  “No, sir,” McFadden said. “Five Squad were the hotshots. They hung together. They didn’t even talk to the peasants.”

  Weisbach nodded.

  “More proof that they know how to keep their mouths shut,” Weisbach said. “I asked Captain Pekach to let his imagination run free, and come up with how Five Squad could illegally profit from the performance, or nonper formance, of their official duties.

  “Captain Pekach said he doesn’t think Five Squad is taking payments from drug dealers or others to ignore their criminal activities. He made the point that the statistics—the number of ‘good’ arrests resulting in court convictions made by Five Squad—are extraordinary.

  “That, he said—and I think he’s right—left one possibility: if there is something dirty going on, it’s taking place during raids and arrests. I looked into this idea, and found out that the number of times Five Squad conducted raids and arrests without support from other police units, the districts, Highway Patrol, and ACT teams is unusual.

  “In other words, with no one present during a raid or arrest but fellow members of the Narcotics Five Squad, it’s possible that Five Squad is illegally diverting to their own use part of the cash and other valuables that would be subject to seizure before it was entered upon a property receipt.”

  “Yeah,” Detective McFadden thought out loud.

  “McFadden?” Weisbach asked.

  “They run a bust. The bad guy has, say, ten thousand in cash. They turn in say, eight or nine thousand. What’s the bad guy going to do? ‘Hey, I got ripped off of a thousand’? Who’s going to believe him?”

  “I think it will probably turn out to be something like that,” Weisbach said.

  “Or controlled substances,” Jesus Martinez said. “They bust the guy, he’s got fifty bags of crap. They turn in forty. Same story.”

  “If Martinez is right about that—and I’m afraid he might be—that would mean that Five Squad is putting drugs back onto the street,” Weisbach said.

  “Are we talking out of school here?” McFadden asked.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I done a little of that myself,” McFadden said, “Took a couple of bags here and there to feed my snitches.”

  “You never sold any, Charley,” Jesus said.

  “What I’m saying is that’s how it could have started,” McFadden said. “You need to make a car payment or something, you got five, ten bags you took away from some scumbag to feed your snitches. Fuck your snitches, sell the shit, make your car payment.”

  Staff Inspector Weisbach had spoken to Captain Pekach about Detectives Martinez and McFadden, who had worked for him when he’d been a lieutenant in Narcotics.

  They both had been assigned to Narcotics right out of the Academy, solely because Narcotics needed a steady stream of undercover officers whose faces were not known on the street. Until they were “burned”—that is, became known—rookie cops were very valuable in making buys, and thus causing arrests. Many rookies were psychologically unable to work undercover, and many other rookies, because of inexperience or just plain bad luck, were quickly burned. Once burned, rookie cops working undercover Narcotics then resumed a rookie’s normal police career. Most of them wound up in districts, walking a beat, until such time as their superiors felt they could be trusted working district wagons.

  McFadden and Martinez had been the exception to the general rule. They liked what they were doing, and had been extraordinarily good at it. They had come to be known as “Mutt and Jeff,” after the comic book characters, because of their sizes. They made a large number of good arrests, and they had been on the job over a year before they had been burned.

  And the way they were burned had set them aside from their peers, too.

  The commanding officer of Highway Patrol, Captain “Dutch” Moffitt, a very colorful and popular officer, had been shot to death when, off-duty and in civilian clothing, he had tried to stop an arm
ed robbery of a diner on Roosevelt Boulevard.

  The identity of the shooter, a drug addict, was known, and the entire Philadelphia Police Department was looking for him. Mutt and Jeff had run him down on their own time, at the Bridge Street elevated train station. McFadden had literally run the shooter down, chasing him down the elevated train tracks at considerable risk to his own life, until a train had come along, and the shooter had fallen under its wheels.

  The two had received their commendations from Mayor Carlucci himself, which had caused their photographs to be plastered all over the front pages of all the newspapers in Philadelphia except the Ledger, and thus effectively burning them from further duty as undercover narcs.

  It wouldn’t have been fair, under those circumstances, to send the two of them out to a district to turn off fire hydrants in the summer, transport prisoners, and do the other things that other rookies with an out-of-the-Academy undercover narcotics assignment usually did after they were burned.

  Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had arranged for their assignment to Highway Patrol, considered the elite of the uniformed force. Normally, police officers couldn’t even apply for transfer to Highway unless they had at least five very good years on the job elsewhere.

  They’d taken the examination for detective as soon as they were eligible. Martinez had placed two spots below Matt Payne, and McFadden two spots above the cutoff point at the bottom on the rankings.

  They had to be considered outstanding young police officers, Staff Inspector Weisbach thought. And while there was no question in his mind that they were both straight arrows, there was something very disturbing to him in their matter-of-fact acceptance that it was perfectly acceptable—if admittedly illegal—police procedure to take drugs from evidence with the intention of using them to pay informers. That the end, so to speak, justified the means.

  He was not morally outraged—he had been a policeman too long for that—but it bothered him.

  “You think something like that happened, McFadden?” he asked.

  “I don’t think anybody, any dirty cop, starts out by saying, ‘Fuck it, today I start being dirty.’ They have to have some reason, something that makes it all right. Tell themselves, for example, ‘Just this one time, when I make this car payment, that’ll be the end of it. I’ll never do it again.’ ”

  “If you’re right, and I think you may be, that doesn’t explain how the whole Five Squad went bad,” Weisbach said.

  “Are we sure they’re all dirty?” Martinez asked.

  “If they’re not all actually involved,” Washington said, “I find it difficult to accept that anyone on Five Squad is not fully aware of what the others are doing.”

  “Cops don’t snitch on other cops?” McFadden replied.

  Washington nodded.

  “Not unless their option is, their own innocence aside, going down with the others,” Tony Harris said. “Maybe the way to get into this is to find the one guy—if there is one—who is not dirty.”

  “How do we find him, Tony?” Weisbach asked.

  “Easy. He’s the one who doesn’t have money he shouldn’t have,” Harris said.

  “Well, that’s where we’re going to begin. With money,” Weisbach said. “We’re going to see if anybody on the Five Squad has been spending—or saving—more money than seems reasonable on what the department is paying him. Frankly, I would be surprised if we can quickly, or easily, come up with something. If, on the first go-around, we can find anything suspicious at all.”

  “I don’t understand, Inspector,” Matt Payne said.

  “I think one of the things we all have to keep in mind, Payne, is that although Internal Affairs hasn’t been given this job specifically, that doesn’t mean they’re incompetent, or stupid. They’re always looking for signs of unusual affluence, and I would suspect they look closest at cops in jobs where taking bribes, or doing something else illegal, would be more likely. I’m sure they routinely check Narcotics people, is what I’m saying. And they didn’t find anything suspicious, or else they would have started their own investigation. Chief Coughlin tells me Internal Affairs was not conducting any kind of a specific investigation of anybody in Narcotics before we got this job.

  “What I think that could mean is—presuming some members of Five Squad are dirty—that they are also too smart to go out and buy a new Buick in their own name, or a condo at the shore, or put money in their own bank account. You still with me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, we—and by ‘we’ I mean McFadden and Jesus and Tiny—are going to go through the motions of looking for unexplained amounts of money. I expect a thorough job. I would be delighted if they don’t find unexplainable money and prove me wrong. Call that the first go-around. And while they’re doing that, Payne, you’re going to come up with a database of names of people in whose names Buicks and condos, et cetera, could be bought. Still with me?”

  “No, sir. Sorry.”

  “Relatives. Friends. A brother-in-law. You want to buy a condo at the shore and you don’t want to attract Internal Affairs attention, so you give your brother-in-law or your uncle Charley the money, and he buys the condo at the shore. Or you put the money in his bank account. Got it?”

  “Where do I start?”

  “Start with personnel records. Sergeant Sandow can set that up for you. At night, Elliot. I don’t want it to get out that somebody from Special Operations or Ethical Affairs is checking personnel records.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sergeant Sandow said.

  “That’ll give us some names to start with,” Weisbach went on. “I don’t want to start ringing doorbells until we have to. We can’t afford to have somebody say, ‘Hey, Charley, there was a cop here asking questions about you.’ ”

  “Yes, sir,” Payne said.

  “Your first job, though, Payne, is the tapes. We need them transcribed, the sooner the better. Sandow will see that everybody gets a copy. Then I want everybody, individually, to try to make sense of them. Then we’ll get together and brainstorm them. I want a brainstorm session every day or so. We all have to know what everybody else is doing, and maybe somebody will be able to make sense out of something the other guy doesn’t understand.”

  He looked around the room.

  “Any questions?”

  No one had any questions.

  SEVEN

  When, accompanied by a discreet ping, one of the buttons on his telephone lit up, a look of mingled annoyance and resignation flickered on and off the face of Brewster Cortland Payne II.

  The telephone would not have, as he thought of it, pinged, had not Mrs. Irene Craig, his silver-haired, stylish, fiftyish secretary, been quite sure he would want to take the call. Irene had been his secretary—and confidante and friend—from the moment he had joined his father’s law firm fresh from law school. She had been the first employee of B. C. Payne, Lawyer, when he had started out on his own, and their law offices had been two small and dark rooms in a run-down building on South Tenth Street.

  The law offices of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester now occupied all of the eleventh floor and most of the twelfth floor of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street, east of Broad, and as befitted the executive secretary to the managing partner of what had arguably become Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, Mrs. Craig’s annual compensation exceeded that of seventy percent of the lawyers in Philadelphia.

  She had other duties, of course, but she—quite correctly—regarded her primary function as the management of her employer’s time, which included putting only those telephone calls through to him that she believed he not only would want to, but should, deal with himself.

  A half hour before, she had been asked to bring him a pot of coffee and then to see that he wasn’t disturbed. Under that circumstance, Mr. Payne knew Mrs. Craig would normally put through only a call from the president of the United States offering to nominate him for the position of chief justice of the United States Supreme C
ourt, or from his wife. Everybody else would be asked if he could return their call.

  He picked up the telephone.

  “Brewster Payne,” he said.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Mrs. Craig said, “but Armando C. Giacomo, Esquire, is on the line, begging for a brief moment of your time.”

  “The Colonel’s not here?”

  “I tried that. Manny wants to speak with you.”

  The Colonel was J. Dunlop Mawson, Esq., the other founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, who had served as a lieutenant colonel, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Army, and loved the sound of that rank.

  It was arguable whether the Colonel or Manny Giacomo was the most successful criminal lawyer in Philadelphia. Giacomo & Giacomo—the second Giacomo was his son, Armando C. Giacomo III—was a thirty-plus-attorney law firm with its own building on South 9th Street that did little else but criminal law.

  The elder Giacomo—a slight, lithe, dapper, fifty-year-old who wore what little was left of his hair plastered to the sides of his tanned skull—was very good, and consequently, very expensive. Like Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, he had a well-earned reputation for defending, most often successfully and invariably with great skill, people charged with violation of the whole gamut of criminal offenses. His clients in criminal proceedings were seldom ordinary criminals, however, for the very good reason that ordinary criminals seldom had any money.

  The difference between them was that from the beginning it had been understood between the Colonel and Brewster Payne that their firm would not represent the mob—as often called the Mafia—under any circumstances, and Giacomo often did.