Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (13 page)

“That is a good question, isn’t it?” Gillis answers. “I was told I did.”

And yet on the flight with Jack Ross, Gillis says, he didn’t see any cliffs or canyons, did not observe a craggy landscape that could in no way be divided into neat, rectangular, five-acre parcels.

.  .  .

On June 16, 1972, Warren writes to his attorney, Philip Goldstein, to explain that subdividing the land into five-acre parcels had not been his responsibility, but rather the Japanese company CMS’s. He writes: “The Arizona Real Estate Department is completely aware of the fact that we sold 40 acre parcels only. I visited the Real Estate Department and spoke with Mr. Talley and Mr. Kieffer. They both told me to advise CMS not to sell five acre parcels without receiving subdivision approval. That day I telephoned CMS and so advised them. They continued to sell five acre parcels after my warning.”

On September 28, 1972, Harry Sperber of CMS, Japan, gives a deposition about how he learned of the subdivision status of Chino Grande, Arizona: “I asked him [James Kieffer, chief investigator, Arizona department of real estate] if this was true, if this was an illegal subdivision. And he then went on to explain that it was, that they didn’t have a record of the plat, and they had complaints from a few of our clients. And I asked him what he thought, you know, could be done.”

Sperber then recalls a lunch they had that day, which began with Warren greeting the CMS representatives at the bar with the words, “Are you guys going to sue me?”

Sperber’s boss, Robert Kaplan, had answered, “Look, we ain’t here to sue anybody. We just want to straighten this problem out.”

“Well, if you sue me, I’ll deny anything you say,” Warren had responded. Then they had lunch.

On December 6, 1974, Jack Ross’s lawyer, Jack McCormick, describes to Ross in a letter a conversation he’s just had with a former CMS executive named Dale Hunt. Dale Hunt, McCormick writes, said that CMS was “fully aware” that Chino Grande was not a qualified subdivision when they began selling lots in Japan. According to Hunt, CMS was also “in some difficulty” with American military authorities over other land deals. Hunt acknowledged that CMS had had “an opportunity to inspect the property to any extent they deemed necessary” and that “their inspection was, nonetheless, inadequate.”

On March 27, 1972, Robert Gunnison of Consolidated Acceptance Corporation gives a deposition about why Chino Grande could never be granted subdivision approval: “Five-acre parcels would require health department approval at both the county and the state level. The county would turn us down because most of the terrain is rock and there would be no percolation for septic tank use…. The state would turn us down because of the slope and angles of the lots… because of the rock and steep slopes, cliffs, road construction would be impossible in most of the area.”

About a year later, on June 8, 1973, Warren is asked in a deposition how he could have gone to Japan and described such land as gentle, rolling meadows. He responds, “Apparently it was not as represented to me and as I represented it to CMS.”

“How did the discrepancy come about?”

“I don’t know.”

On September 28, 1972, Robert Kaplan of CMS gives a deposition about Ned Warren’s sales pitch the previous year in Japan. “As a matter of fact, he even brought a letter from Senator Goldwater when I saw him the next time.” Kaplan recalls that the letter was “a great help in our selling program.” He adds, of Warren, “It looked like we were really dealing with a reputable guy.”

On September 9, 1976, he recounts his first trip to Chino Grande and says that the land looked “like goat’s country. Would go up two, three hundred feet, then it would come down sheer.

“We always hoped there was something we could do, that we could straighten up the land, that we could carve it up. I’m telling you, when I saw that land, there was no way.”

On October 19, 1976, Barry Goldwater issues a press statement saying he has been “unable to determine who among his friends asked him to write a laudatory letter that was used to promote a Ned Warren Sr. land-sales operation among U.S. servicemen in the Far East.” The letter, as far as Goldwater knew at the time, referred to a Consolidated Mortgage subdivision called Chino Valley, near Prescott. It did not refer to the land near Seligman known as Chino Grande.

The FBI file on Chino Grande is three inches thick—I have another inch of depositions and court exhibits. A patch of desert was viewed from Jack Ross’s airplane by CMS’s Harry Gillis. After that, all that can be done is to triangulate the various evasions. I think it’s almost certain that my father never saw the land at Chino Grande—“goat’s country,” “cliffs.” It was a side deal in a larger deal, it happened quickly, he was in Arizona when Warren made his trip to Japan. My father’s own statements are vague, minimal. It’s as if for a few months in 1971 he was just lazy, or careless, but of course laziness and carelessness are not characteristics that anyone speaks of when describing my father.

What ends up being called greed doesn’t look like greed, it looks like giving things a go, seizing the main chance.

9

L
onzo McCracken was the senior detective in the Intelligence Division of the Phoenix police, the division that handled organized crime. He had a lined face, a straight, nearly lipless mouth, and guarded, close-set eyes. His work gave him ulcers, or aggravated them. He wrote memos for his personal record—obsessive, crammed with detail, each fact locked in his mind to twelve or fifteen others.

To be concerned is enough to rip your guts out. The alternative, disregard it and go on—, become a part of it by your silence. At times the sins of omission are greater than the sins of commission. This would be brought home with devistating [
sic
] clarity if you were to sit in my office and watch an older man and his wife crying because their life savings from the sale of their home, their farm, was gone, all that was left represented in a stack of worthless documents. To ignore the problem any longer, I feel would be dereliction of duty.

About three months after James Cornwall became president of the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company—in January 1971—McCracken and his partner, Bill Bouley, drove to an office on East Camelback Road, not far from the offices of Consolidated Mortgage Corporation, to speak to an informant named Tony Serra. Tony Serra was the lot salesman at ALCO who had helped Warren manufacture land contracts to sell through Diamond Valley, the company Warren later sold off to Lee Ackerman. Serra had also been a sales manager for James Cornwall at Great Southwest. More recently, he had started his own business, Western World Development, to sell Great Southwest land and paper in the manner Warren had taught him.

The office of Western World looked more like the back room of a store: a few plastic chairs against a bare wall, a calendar from an auto parts wholesaler, a carpet remnant on the linoleum floor, a card table with three newspapers from the previous month. The girl behind the desk wore a crochet dress and had long, straight hair and hoop earrings. She did not end her phone conversation, even when McCracken took off his jacket, revealing his holstered gun. She parted her lips a little, half looking, half concentrating on the voice on the line.

“No one’s in yet,” she said, her hand covering the receiver. “You could try back in half an hour.”

“It’s ten o’clock,” McCracken said. “Our appointment was for nine-thirty.”

“Then they must be late. They’re usually here by ten.”

Bouley stood with his feet apart, hands in a bridge before his waist. McCracken nodded his head, looking at the floor.

“Tell Mr. Serra we’ll be waiting for him at the coffee shop across the street,” he said. “The Pullman Pie, it’s called.”

.  .  .

They sat in a booth near the window and had coffee.

“Serra’s not really anybody,” McCracken said. “He knows a few of the Ivanhoe crowd. Talks a lot.”

“He’s from Cleveland?” asked Bouley.

“St. Louis. He was in the insurance racket there. I don’t know what else he got up to.”

A car pulled into the parking lot—a deliberately Hollywood entrance, complete with squealing tires and a sudden, juddering stop at an angle to the parking lines. The car was a white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. McCracken thought, this is how people get killed, by sitting in a coffee shop that turns out to be the imagined set of somebody else’s action movie. He watched the driver step out, a stocky white-haired man in a tan leisure suit. The man stood up straight and jammed a pistol into his waistband. He made sure the gesture was as visible as possible. Then another man got out of the backseat, Tony Serra.

McCracken took a sip of his coffee. When he looked up again, he saw the driver open the restaurant’s glass door with a jangle of bells, Serra behind him, already scanning the tables. He wore a charcoal suit and a shiny green tie with scarlet stripes. When he saw McCracken, his face looked absent. Then he recognized him. He put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and turned his head back toward the door, indicating that he should leave.

He apologized, standing at their booth. He explained that the girl at the desk had forgotten to mention that McCracken and Bouley were detectives—all she’d said was that two men with guns had come by.

“It’s all right,” McCracken said, barely looking at Serra. “I guess her talent is more for answering phones.”

Serra sat down and ordered a coffee. McCracken took out his notebook and pen and on the next blank page wrote a dateline with Serra’s source ID. The waitress brought over the coffee pot and poured into Serra’s cup, then refilled McCracken’s and Bouley’s. McCracken looked at his watch and wrote down the time. They talked for about half an hour.

“Cornwall,” Serra said toward the end. “He’s the one you want to look at first.”

“The southerner,” said McCracken.

“He seems like a southerner. Actually he’s from some cracker town in Oregon. Dig around, you’ll find his signature on twenty, thirty loans—loans to pay off loans. More than a million dollars, maybe more like five.”

McCracken flipped back a few pages in his notebook to an earlier part of their conversation. He had written the words NED WARREN and then a scribble of details. Everyone in the land business, Serra had told him, knew that Ned Warren was behind more than a dozen companies in one way or another. He said that the Mafia’s biggest interest in Arizona at that point was not gambling, not prostitution, not loan-sharking, but the land business. That’s why they’d sent him there from St. Louis ten years ago, Serra said, to find a way into the land business.

Serra saw from across the table the notation about Warren in McCracken’s book. “You’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere with this,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because—you know how this town is. Warren, those people, they’ve got everyone tied in.”

“Who’s everyone?”

“Everyone. The real estate commissioner, Talley. All his investigators. They’ve got the county prosecutor, the attorney general. They’ve probably got Barry Goldwater.”

McCracken paid for the three coffees. Some parts of the story seemed more or less credible, but it was all coming from Tony Serra—the expensive new suit, the fantasist with the breath mints and cologne. At first, McCracken didn’t take it very seriously.