Death Dance (31 page)

As the head of Asset Forfeiture walked out of Battaglia's
suite, he was smoking one of the DA's cigars and blowing smoke rings in
my face. "My first Cohiba, Alex. Amazing what a million bucks can do
for my career. He told me to send you in."

Battaglia didn't move the cigar stub from the center of his
mouth. "I hope you're not about to spoil my afternoon. It's been a
banner day up until now."

"Then I'll start with the good news. There's a DNA hit on the
Riverside Park rapist."

"What'd the
Post
call it? Canine Cop
Caper?"

"That's the one. The suspect has been identified and DCPI is
going to put out a release with a sketch tonight. He's homeless, so it
may take a few days to come up with him, but they're Optimistic."

"Let me know the minute they get anything."

"Of course. Paul, I think you need to know that this case has
raised an issue about using the DNA linkage database. McFarland's going
to hold my feet to the fire while I try to set a decent precedent for
us," I said, taking the risk that I was better off warning Battaglia
that there was the potential for trouble, even if I didn't give him the
whole blueprint yet. "I'm going to ask the guys in Appeals for some
help."

"So what's the bad news?"

"The drug-facilitated-rape case with the physician and the two
Canadian women? I filed the indictment today," I said, as I steadied
myself for the district attorney's response to my report. "But
Sen-gor's already fled the country. He flew home to Turkey."

Battaglia dropped his feet from the desk and actually took the
cigar out of his mouth.

"How'd you let the guy get away? I can't believe you did that.
It looks awful for us."

"I asked for substantial bail, Paul. Moffett bought into the
fact that he was a doctor with roots in the community and let him out."

"Roots, my ass. Any chance of getting him back?"

"The treaty allows extradition for murder and rape, but the
State Department liaison just told me there's never once been a return
of a Turkish national. They'll send back Americans or other Europeans,
but they won't give up one of their own. Sengor was on the phone from
Ankara telling me he didn't even commit a crime."

"You don't think it'll get press, do you?" Battaglia seemed as
anxious to keep it out of the headlines now as the defendant did.

"More ink than you'll want, I'm afraid. The commissioner's
going to take the case to Interpol, boss. He's going to ask them to
issue a red notice on this." The international notice system would rely
on my indictment to try to arrest Selim Sengor with a view to
encouraging the Turks to let us extradite.

"Damn it."

"It gets worse. Mercer just seized a video collection from the
perp's apartment. We're probably talking multiple
victims—maybe dozens, here and abroad. Seems he drugged and
raped them, recording the entire encounter with a camera hidden in his
bookcase."

Battaglia spun his chair around away from me, pretending to
fiddle with documents on the table behind his desk. He liked the
success of my unit's innovative prosecution tactics, but he hated
discussing the details of bizarre sexual habits. "Now what
the—what the hell is that all about?"

"Paraphilia."

"Para what?

"Dr. Sengor's a paraphiliac, if I had to guess from the box of
tapes Mercer just picked up. As Mike likes to say, it's Latin for 'sick
puppy.' It's one of the categories of sexual dysfunction in the
DSM
,"
I said, referring to forensic psychiatry's bible, the
Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. "The guy acts
out his deviant fantasies with unwilling victims. What gets him aroused
is doing things he wouldn't be able to do to a conscious partner, like
maybe anal intercourse or—well, we'll know as soon as we
watch the videotapes."

"But why put it on film?" Battaglia asked, still with his back
to me.

"To create a masturbatory scenario, a way to reenact the
events to stimulate himself when the night is over. To keep a trophy of
the event." Great. I'm talking dirty to the most powerful prosecutor in
the country and he's pretending to be shuffling folders on his desk,
looking for an irrelevant piece of paper that doesn't even exist.
"These guys lead double lives, Paul. Sengor's a licensed professional
in a well-respected field, but he's obviously got a fantasy about
necrophilia."

"So how come he says he didn't do anything wrong?" Battaglia
said, holding up a file from the bottom of a tall Stack of yellowed
papers and staring at a page of statistical information that was at
least two years old. Anything to avoid eye contact with me in the
middle of this discussion.

"Rapists who drug their victims don't see themselves as
criminals. The women are with them by choice, the pills aren't
administered by force—even though the victims aren't aware
they're drinking the substance—their clothes aren't torn off
them, and they're rarely injured. It's delusional on Sengor's part, but
that's the nature of this kind of assault."

"Anything else on this?"

"Not for now."

He wheeled his chair around to face me. "Meanwhile, what's the
progress on the case at the Met? The press iskilling us on this. There
are front-page stories every day."

Like most high-profile crimes, Natalya Galinova's murder
spawned a related series of features. There was a retelling of the
dramatic death onstage at the Old Met of the great baritone, Leonard
Warren, in 1960, as someone in the packed audience screamed out to the
paralyzed cast and crew, "For God's sake, bring down the
curtain!";interviews with suburban teachers and parents who worried
about sending their children on Lincoln Center tours because the killer
was still atlarge in the neighborhood; and countless profiles
ofGalinova quoting the great, world-famous men who had partnered her of
the other primas with whom she had shared a stage.

There was even a sidebar by Mickey Diamond, who had covered
the first murder at the Met. Running out of fresh leads to keep the
current frenzy on the front pages, Diamond revealed that the only time
the
Post
had ever rejected one of his tasteless
headlines was in that earlier case, when he submitted his story with a
title captioned
Fiddler Off the Roof
.

"Lieutenant Peterson's got everybody working double shifts,
Paul, You know how methodical he is."

"I've got a black-tie dinner at the Pierre Hotel Saturday
night for some committee my wife's on—I can't remember which
disease. Odds are that somebody or other from the Lincoln Center board
will be there. You've got to give me something to say about the
progress of the investigation."

"You'll have whatever I know by then."

Prominent people tried to treat the DA as their private
attorney. Church leaders called to press for leniency when parishioners
were caught up in white-collar crimes, parents of elite prep school
students urged the hush-up of teachers arrested in Internet pedophile
stings, and well-to-do investment bankers promised treatment programs
for offspring netted in campus drug sweeps. Battaglia had developed an
enviable immunity to all the pressure, and settled for being in the
know about every detail of a case before muscle was applied by
outsiders.

"Alex," Battaglia said as I started to get up to leave, "those
television monitors that were in Joe Berk's apartment. The commissioner
told me about them, even though you saw fit to leave me in the dark.
You ever find out what they were filming?"

"We didn't have any way to run with that, Paul. Especially
once they disappeared. I just don't know what he could have been
watching."

"Have you talked to the tech guys about it?"

"Yes, of course. They're on standby to give us a hand. But
first we have to know exactly where the cameras were
concealed—I mean, in what building—and what Berk
was looking at. We never got there."

"I'm just wondering whether he could be
a—a—" He stopped himself midsentence, not even
wanting to say the word.

"A paraphiliac?"

I thought about the interiors Mike and I had seen on the
screens in the brief moments before Mona Berk had interrupted us.
"Possible. Voyeurism's a form of paraphilia. Peeping, watching someone
disrobe or engage in a sexual act. Depends where he had those cameras
positioned. We thought it looked like dressing rooms or bath-rooms,
maybe in some of the Berk theaters."

"So why didn't you follow up?"

"It didn't seem to have anything to do with Galinova's murder,
Paul. The cops went over her dressing room with every piece of
equipment they had. There were no cameras concealed there, at the Met."

"Let me know if you come up with any dirt on old Joe,"
Battaglia said, smiling as he chewed on the wet tip of his cigar. "I'd
love to have it in my arsenal."

I could see where he was going now. He wasn't suggesting that
Berk was involved in Talya's death. In Battaglia's world of power and
privilege, it would be a useful chit to know that Berk had a personal
point of vulnerability, something he might someday trade for
information of value in another case.

"Sure, Paul. When I was in here on Monday, you mentioned that
you had a lot of background on Berk. That you thought he'd been
involved in some kind of illegal tax schemes."

Again he removed the cigar from his mouth. "Yeah."

"He told Mike and me there's a messy lawsuit going on. His
niece wouldn't let us get into the details at all. Do you know anything
about it? Maybe it would give us a broader family picture if I
under—stood it, now that we've also got this incident with
the girl who fell from the swing."

"You talk to her yet?"

"She's in what the doctors call a controlled coma. One that
they've medically induced. They don't want her to wake up till they've
got the pain management under control. Then they'll assess the brain
damage."

What Battaglia didn't like discussing about sex, he more than
made up for when the subject was financial fraud.

"Don't run off, Alex. He's quite a character. You have any
idea what Joe Berk is worth today?"

"Not a clue."

"He makes the rest of the Fortune 500 look like amateurs. I'd
say he and his brother built themselves an empire worth twenty-five
billion dollars. Real estate, theatrical properties, airplane leasing,
almost as many hotels as Hyatt and Hilton combined. It's a phenomenal
operation."

"Why did you start an investigation of the Berk Organization,
boss?"

"Somebody snitched—brought me in some good
information."

"About Joe?"

"Joe and his brother, Izzy, they were inseparable. Izzy was
the real brains of the family, plus he didn't have Joe's big mouth.
They shared one common trait."

"What's that?"

"They hated the taxman. I'm not talking about shipping your
purchases to an out-of-state address or minor scams like that. Izzy
Berkowitz might be the shrewdest guy who ever took on the feds, back
when the two of them started making money, more than forty years ago.
He was doing leveraged buyouts in the 1940s, before anyone ever heard
of them. Izzy had more money hidden offshore than Captain Kidd."

"Legally?"

"That's the issue. What do you know about 1740 Trusts?"

Ask me anything about the variety of deviant acts that
comprised section 130 of the Penal Law and I could cite chapter and
verse as well as draw diagrams, but this was as foreign to me as
Swahili.

"Never heard of them. 1740—the year?"

"No, 1740 of the IRS trust and estate provisions. In the
1960s, Congress passed a set of laws that basically ended the tax
benefits of foreign trusts for residents of the U.S. To get around the
legislation, Izzy dreamed up a scheme that he got going down in the
Bahamas. As long as he could prove to Uncle Sam that a foreign citizen
actually set up the trust and kept a legal presence in the islands, he
wasn't subject to U.S. taxes. Izzy found some friendly local, put him
in business, and used the millions generated in cash from that general
partnership to lend it to the other Berk Organization trusts and
companies."

"That works with the IRS? The feds bought into it?"

"They did originally, but not anymore. By then the Berks were
grandfathered in by the government when the law changed a decade ago. I
went into it to try to break the damn thing up but ran into a stone
wall," Battaglia said, plugging the cigar back into the corner of his
mouth. "As long as the income is loaned to other Berk ventures or
reinvested—get it? As long as Joe doesn't distribute the
money to himself or his heirs—he sits pretty on top of his
billions. No taxes, no obligation to even tell the IRS what's in the
trusts."

"Quite an arrangement."

"I guess Joe's got the same idea as Izzy had. The Berk family
plan is to die broke."

"Broke? You've lost me. None of them is broke."

"On the estate tax return, Alex. Izzy's heirs claimed he was
only worth twenty thousand at the time of his death. That's what got me
into the matter to begin with. The feds grabbed it from
me—they always take the easy ones—but they made a
really bad deal. They let Joe call his own terms."

"Why?"

"If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't have lost
jurisdiction of the case. Joe paid ten million to settle the tax
claims, and the IRS agreed never again to tax any of the Berks' oldest
offshore trusts. Never."

"Sweet deal. That's why there's no way of knowing how much
money is actually at stake here."

"And that's why Izzy valued the family's privacy so much. He
hated Joe's flapping mouth."

"It can't make Joe very happy that now there's a lawsuit
within the family. It's bound to make some of this stuff public," I
said.

"Why do you think I'm watching the suit so carefully?"
Battaglia hated to lose. If he could find a way back into an
investigation that so obviously intrigued him, he'd be looking for the
first crack in the door through which to insert his toe. "The two
youngest kids—Izzy's daughter and Joe's son. They're the ones
suing."