Investigators Page 9

  He justified the expense to himself by rationalizing that he had just been promoted to Inspector, and didn’t have a wife and children to support, and he tried hard not to think about the hole he had had to drill in the trunk lid.

  “William One,” a female voice responded to his call.

  “Until further notice, at Chief Wohl’s home,” Wohl said. “You have the number.”

  “You and everybody else,” the female voice responded, with a chuckle.

  The reference was not only to the mayor’s limousine (radio call sign “Mary One”) but also to the four other identical—except for color—new Plymouth sedans parked along Jeanes Street, the occupants of which were also required to make their whereabouts known around-the-clock to either Police Radio or Special Operations Radio and had done so.

  Two of the cars were assigned to Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein and Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, who were widely acknowledged to be the most influential of the eight chief inspectors of the Philadelphia Police Department. The other two were assigned to Staff Inspector Mike Weisbach and Captain Michael Sabara.

  Staff inspectors—the rank between captain and inspector—and captains are not normally provided with new automobiles. There is a sort of hand-me-down system in vehicle assignment. Deputy commissioners and chief inspectors get new unmarked vehicles every six months to a year. Their “used” vehicles are passed down to inspectors, who in turn pass their used cars down the line to staff inspectors and captains, who in turn pass their cars down to lieutenants and detectives. At this point, the cars have reached the end of their useful lives, and are disposed of.

  Mayor Carlucci, who was a political power far beyond Philadelphia, had managed to obtain substantial grants of money from the federal government for the ACT Program.

  ACT was the acronym for Anti-Crime Teams. It was a test, more or less, to see what effect saturating a high-crime area with extra police, the latest technology, and special assistance from the district attorney in the form of having assistant district attorneys with nothing to do but push ACT-arrested criminals through the criminal justice system would have, short and long term, on crime statistics.

  Mayor Carlucci was believed to be—and believed himself to be—the best-qualified mayor of all the mayors of major American cities to determine how the federal government’s money could be most effectively spent to provide “new and innovative means of law enforcement.”

  On Jerry Carlucci’s part, this belief was based on the fact that before he ran for public office, he had held every rank—except policewoman—in the Philadelphia Police Department from patrolman to commissioner of police. The federal officials charged with dispensing the taxpayers’ largesse in the ACT Program, moreover, became aware that both of Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators and a substantial majority of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation shared the mayor’s opinion, and not only because most of them owed their jobs to him.

  As soon as the money started flowing, Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich—at Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion—announced the formation of the Special Operations Division. The new unit to test new and innovative crime fighting ideas took under its wing the existing Highway Patrol, which had evolved from a highway-patrolling—often on motorcycles—police unit into an elite unit, two police officers per radio patrol car, with citywide authority, and a number of other police officers were transferred to it as ACT personnel.

  Staff Inspector Peter Wohl had been appointed commanding officer of Special Operations. There was some grumbling about this, both within police ranks and in the press, especially in the Philadelphia Ledger, which usually found something wrong with whatever the police department did.

  The charges made in this case said Wohl’s appointment was another example of cronyism within the department. The Ledger’s readers were told that Peter Wohl was the son of retired Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl, who was generally acknowledged to be Mayor Carlucci’s best friend.

  On the other hand, there was approval of Peter’s Wohl’s appointment by many members of the police department, especially from those who knew him and were regarded as straight arrows. They pointed out that he had been the youngest-ever sergeant in Highway Patrol, the youngest-ever captain, and the youngest-ever staff inspector. In the latter capacity, from which he had been promoted to command of Special Operations, he had conducted the investigation that had sent—following a lengthy and well-publicized trial—Judge Moses Finderman off to pass an extended period behind bars.

  Mayor Carlucci had been as deaf to the grumbling about the appointment of Peter Wohl to command Special Operations as he was to the grumbling within the department and howls of indignation from the federal government about how he elected to spend the ACT grants.

  Since mobility of forces was essential to the idea of quickly saturating high-crime areas with police, one of the first expenditures of the federal funds available made by Commissioner Czernich—at Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion—was to purchase for Special Operations a fleet of new cars, some unmarked and all equipped with the very latest and most expensive shortwave radio equipment.

  Commissioner Czernich also went along with Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion that a large part of the federal grant be expended to make “emergency” repairs to Special Operations’ new headquarters, which had begun life in 1892 as the Frankford Grammar School and had been abandoned three years before by the Board of Education as uninhabitable and beyond repair.

  In cases that drew a good deal of attention from the press, Peter Wohl’s Special Operations Division had quickly proved its worth, and was thus also to prove Wohl to be the extraordinary cop that Mayor Carlucci and his friends knew him to be.

  The commissioner, at Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion—it was said that the commissioner rarely did anything more innovative than blowing his nose without a friendly suggestion from the mayor—gave to the newly formed Special Operations Division the responsibility for running to earth a gentleman referred to by the press as the “North west Serial Rapist.”

  This gentleman had been shot to death by Wohl’s administrative assistant after trying to run over the law officer with his van. At the time, he had neatly trussed up in the back of his van another naked young woman whom he had been regaling with specific details of what he planned to do to her just as soon as they reached some quiet spot in the country.

  A massive Special Operations operation had run to earth another gentleman—a bank employee without any previous brushes with the law—who believed that God had told him to blow up the Vice President of the United States and was found at the time of his arrest to be in possession of the Vice President’s Philadelphia visit itinerary as well as several hundred pounds of the latest high explosive, together with state-of-the-art detonating devices.

  A Special Operations/ACT Task Force had, in a precisely timed operation, simultaneously arrested a dozen armed and dangerous individuals scattered all over Philadelphia on warrants charging them with murder in connection with the robbery of a South Philadelphia furniture store. With one exception, the arrests had been made without the firing of a shot. In the one exception, the individual had tried to gun down a Special Operations officer, who, although wounded, had saved the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the cost of a lengthy trial with a well-placed fatal pistol shot.

  More recently, Special Operations investigators had uncovered an operation smuggling heroin through Philadelphia’s International Airport. The operation had escaped the attention of the Narcotics Unit, and also—a police officer had been involved—that of the Internal Affairs Division, which had the responsibility for uncovering dishonest cops.

  On the heels of that, Special Operations investigators had uncovered a call girl ring operating in Center City Philadelphia with the blessing of both the Mafia and the district commander—what are called “precincts” in most large cities are called “districts” in Philadelphia—and a lieutenant of the Vice Squad, who were being paid a percentage of the profits.


  Commissioner Czernich’s response to that—at, of course, Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion—was to form another organization, to work very closely with, and be supported by, Special Operations. It was called the Ethical Affairs Unit (EAU). Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach, whose reputation—smart as a whip, straight as an arrow—was much like Peter Wohl’s, was named to head EAU and charged with making sure that never again was the Philadelphia Police Department—and thus Mayor Jerry Carlucci—going to be embarrassed by a senior police official getting caught selling his badge.

  Mike Weisbach had barely had time to find a desk in the Schoolhouse and turn in his battered unmarked Ford for one of Special Operations’ brand-new Plymouths when another case caught Mayor Jerry Carlucci’s personal attention.

  Officer Jerome H. Kellog, who worked as a plainclothes officer in the Narcotics Unit, had been found brutally murdered in his own kitchen. Among the initial suspects in the homicide had been Officer Kellog’s estranged wife, Helene, and Mrs. Kellog’s close friend, Mr. Wallace J. Milham, into whose apartment she had moved when she left Officer Kellog’s bed and board. Mr. Milham fell under suspicion not only because of possible motive, but also because it was known that Mr. Milham habitually carried on his person a pistol of the type and caliber that had killed Mr. Kellog.

  Mr. Milham was a detective in the homicide division of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  Shortly after her husband’s death, Officer Kellog’s widow had appeared at the apartment of Sergeant Jason Washington of Special Operations. Mrs. Kellog told him that she had come to him because he was the only cop besides Wally Milham of whose honesty she was sure. She then went on to say that if they really wanted to catch whoever had shot her late husband, they need look no further than the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit, all of whom, she stated flatly, were dirty.

  Jerry, she suggested, had been killed because he knew too much, or was about to blow the whistle on the others, or, probably, both.

  Sergeant Washington had of course considered it possible that Mrs. Kellog was making these accusations to divert attention from herself and Detective Milham, but he didn’t think so. He believed himself to be—and in fact was—an usually skilled judge of humankind, especially in the areas of veracity and obfuscation.

  Washington reported to Inspector Wohl his encounter with Mrs. Kellog and his belief that she, at least, believed what she was saying. Wohl, knowing that Mayor Carlucci would want to know immediately of even a hint that a police officer had been murdered by other policemen, had passed what he knew on to the mayor.

  At that point, the murder of Officer Kellog had been solved by a longtime ordinary uniformed beat patrolman, Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., of the 39th District. Bailey, who had been keeping a more or less routine eye on one James Howard Leslie, whom he knew to be a burglar, had found in Leslie’s burned trash pile a wedding photograph of Officer and Mrs. Jerome H. Kellog.

  Correctly suspecting that Mr. Leslie had not been a close enough friend of Officer Kellog to have been given a wedding photograph, Officer Bailey investigated further, and sought assistance from other police officers. Soon after that, Mr. Leslie explained to Sergeant Washington why he had felt it necessary to shoot Officer Kellog.

  That cleared Officer Kellog’s widow and Detective Milham of any suspicion in the matter, of course. But it did not address the Widow Kellog’s allegations that the entire Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit was dirty, and at least in her opinion, capable of murdering one of their own to ensure his silence.

  Three months before, investigation of such allegations would have been routinely handled by the Internal Affairs Division, which was charged with uncovering police corruption. But three months before, Internal Affairs hadn’t dropped the ball on that dirty cop passing heroin through the airport, or on the dirty Center City captain and Vice Squad lieutenant taking money from a call girl madam.

  Three months before, Mayor Carlucci hadn’t felt it necessary to suggest the formation of the Ethical Affairs Unit.

  Inspector Peter Wohl, as he walked up to the front door of his childhood home, knew that while there would be lots of beer and whiskey and wine, and lots of tasty Jewish, Italian, German, and southern barbecue food served in the basement recreation room of his father’s house this afternoon, as well as lots of laughs, and almost certainly a long trip down memory lane, that was not the reason Jerry Carlucci had suggested that everybody get together.

  When the mayor decided the time had come, what they were going to do in good ol’ Augie Wohl’s recreation room this afternoon was decide how they were going to clean up the Narcotics Unit, and how to do it right, so that nobody dirty would get to walk because some goddamned defense lawyer caught them with an i they hadn’t dotted, or a t they’d forgotten to cross.

  He went in without knocking, and walked to the kitchen to kiss his mother.

  There were six wives in the kitchen, dealing with the food: Chief Lowenstein’s comfortably plump wife, Sarah; Angeline “Angie” Carlucci, the slight, almost delicate woman who was said to be the only human being of whom Mayor Carlucci lived in fear; Mike Weisbach’s Natalie, a younger version of Sarah Lowenstein; Mike Sabara’s Helen, a striking woman with luxuriant red hair; Jack Fellows’s Beverly, a tall, slim woman who was an operating-room nurse at Temple Hospital; and Peter’s mother.

  Peter wondered tangentially how Martha Peebles—once she became Mrs. Captain David Pekach—was going to fit in with her fellow officer’s wives. She would try, of course—she was absolutely bananas about her “Pre cious”—but her experience with feeding people was limited to telling her butler how many people would be coming to dinner, when, and what she would like to have them fed.

  For that matter, he absolutely could not imagine Amy Payne in a kitchen, stirring spaghetti sauce, either.

  Mrs. Carlucci and Mrs. Lowenstein insisted on their right, as women who had known him since he wore diapers, to kiss him.

  “Your father and everybody’s downstairs,” his mother said.

  “Really?” Peter replied, as if that was surprising.

  “He’s always been a smarty-pants,” his mother said.

  “Yes, he has,” Sarah Lowenstein agreed. “But his time is coming.”

  “How’s that?” Peter asked.

  “There’s a young lady out there—you just haven’t bumped into each other yet—who will change you.”

  “And any change would be an improvement, right?”

  “You took the words out of my mouth.”

  Peter smiled at her and went down the narrow steps into the basement.

  He made his manners first with Mayor Carlucci, a tall, large-boned, heavyset fifty-three-year-old with dark intelligent eyes and a full head of brown hair brushed close to his scalp.

  “Mr. Mayor,” he said.

  “I like your suit, Peter,” Carlucci said, and tried to crush Peter’s hand with his.

  He failed.

  “You’re stronger than you look,” the mayor said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Smarter, too,” Peter’s father said, draping an arm around his shoulders.

  Peter shook hands with the others, then made himself a drink.

  The trip down memory lane started. Peter didn’t pay much attention. He had heard all the stories at least twice before. He sensed that both Mikes, Weisbach and Sabara, were slightly ill at ease.

  Sabara’s uncomfortable, probably, Peter thought, because he’s here and Dave Pekach isn’t. And Weisbach is legitimately worried about how much of this Five Squad investigation is going to be placed on his shoulders.

  The conference vis-à-vis the investigation of allegations of corruption within the Narcotics Unit began when everyone declined another piece of cake, whereupon Mrs. Wohl announced that she would put another pot of coffee on and leave them alone.

  “Peter, you help carry the heavy things upstairs,” she ordered.

  In three minutes, the Ping-Pong table pressed into service as a buffet table and all the f
olding tables were cleared and put away.

  “I always like a second cup of coffee to settle my stomach,” Mayor Carlucci announced.

  Lieutenant Fellows quickly served him one.

  “Don’t mind me,” the mayor said. “If anyone wants something harder than coffee, help yourselves.”

  Chiefs Coughlin and Lowenstein went to the refrigerator and helped themselves to bottles of Neuweiler’s ale. The others poured coffee. The pot ran dry.

  Lieutenant Fellows went upstairs to see how the fresh pot was coming.

  “I talked to Jason Washington about this,” the mayor began. “Maybe I should have asked Augie to have him here for this. Anyway, Washington told me he believes Officer Kellog’s widow believes what she told him about the whole Five Squad being dirty. No disrespect to Captain Pekach intended—he’s a fine officer—but despite what he says about if there was something dirty going in Narcotics he would have known about it, I don’t think we can ignore what the widow said. Now, what else have we got?”

  “The threatening telephone call,” Peter Wohl said. “I believe that Mrs. Milham—”

  “Mrs. Milham?” Mayor Carlucci interrupted.

  “She and Wally Milham went to Maryland and got married, Mr. Mayor,” Peter said. “I thought you knew.”

  “Now that you mention it . . . go ahead, Peter.”

  “I believe there was such a call,” Peter said. “And so does Wally Milham.”

  “He would have to believe it, wouldn’t you say, Peter? I mean, after all, he was slipping the salami to her before her husband was murdered.”

  “Wally Milham is a good cop, Mr. Mayor,” Peter said.

  The mayor looked at him for a long moment without expression.

  “Tell me about the tapes,” the mayor said finally.

  “They’re in the process of being transcribed,” Peter said.

  “Still? Christ, you’ve had them for a week.”

  “The tapes were damaged by fire, Mr. Mayor,” Peter said. “They’re very hard to transcribe.”