Fahrenheit 1600 (Victor Kozol) (6 page)

Chapter 11

Reflecting

The next morning Sam is once again back in his
corner office with his picture perfect view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Manhattan skyline. But the beautiful day outside is far from his mind. He is
thinking about how far he has come in three years. He had risen from a lawyer
at the bottom of the ladder in a large firm, to being his own boss of a tony
law practice catering to a mob family. Once onboard, Sam could never look back.
With all of the perks and easy living, has come tremendous responsibilities. To
say that the criminal side of his work is a matter of life and death is not an
overstatement.

The organization Sam is fronting for relies on his
judgement, connections, and sometimes high wire acts to survive. The family
needs the authorities as far from their enterprises as can be managed at all
times. Sam has to throw up as many legal delays and roadblocks as possible. On
the civil law side, he is buying and selling properties, laundering and
investing millions of dollars in places as close as New York and as far away as
Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

Among his many duties he defends against lawsuits
and negotiates leases and deals for the many legitimate businesses they
operate. The one thing that is different from regular law practices is the code
of silence. Lawyers are supposed to conduct their affairs in confidence, mob
lawyers have to take this discretion to a much higher level. Many of the names
and companies are actually fictitious; they are smokescreens to hide the real
players. Compared to ordinary business law, this is a lot trickier

Sam is well paid, but knows he is earning every penny.
Plus, with all of this information in the confines of his head, he is now every
bit as deeply involved as the rest of the family. In fact, by necessity he is
now a “made man.”

Sam was far younger than the others around him and
his original idea of working in the gray areas of the law are long since gone.
He is a racketeer as defined by the government. It is like the old saw, “in for
a penny, in for a pound.” All of this secrecy and time commitment has made a
huge dent in Sam’s ability to have a permanent relationship with a woman. He
has had many dates and short term romances with some fine and attractive women
in New York, but the complexity of trying to fit someone permanently into his
life always leads to an ultimate breakup.

As for his family back in Jersey, Sam gets to see
them on holidays and special occasions. But even here, there is always a
certain distance Sam feels as he can let no one, no matter how closely related,
know his real career. It would be just too dangerous for them and him. So, Sam
is conflicted. He has all of the material things he could ever want, but he is
not progressing towards a possible family life, nor can he ever hope to change
careers at this point. Sam knows it is the ultimate trade-off that every
underworld figure has to make; he is no different.

Across town in his office sits Carlo Dellveccio, the
mob boss for his family for the past fifteen years. We have all heard of the
good old days, well Carlo feels this was certainly true for the five crime
families that controlled New York. While there was the occasional bloodletting
when new leaders or renegade soldiers of the various families attempted to
expand their reach into another family’s area, these transgressions were always
dealt with and harmony again prevailed in New York. But now a new threat, that
wasn’t going to go away in a couple of weeks or even months, was rearing its
ugly head.

The law was always a menace to the mob, but when you
dealt with local authorities, you were up against one detective or at most a
precinct Captain who was out to prove a point. However, when critical witnesses
failed to show up for trials, there was little the local authorities could do.
Sometimes it was necessary to pay off a couple of over vigilant cops or a
meddling detective, but these were all manageable problems. The local
authorities eventually lost interest as more pressing criminal matters were
always at hand. Come the 1980s and new problems arrived.

This all went back to the early 1960s when Robert
Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961 and began to investigate mob influence
in legitimate businesses and unions. After his brother President John F.
Kennedy was killed in 1963, Robert was out of the Attorney General’s office and
the pressure was off. Whether Robert and John Kennedy’s assassinations had
anything to do with the mob has never been proven, but it certainly did bode
well for the families to have those two off of their backs forever. The other
federal authority who could have been a threat to the crime families was J.
Edgar Hoover’s FBI. But, Hoover had a long history of not wanting to get
involved prosecuting organized crime in America. The reasons for this are not
clear, but the results were good for the families across the nation.

Fast forward to the eighties and we have new
problems. There is a law passed by Congress called RICO, an anti-racketeering
statute that targeted the mob families. For the first time federal charges
could now be brought for collusion to act together to commit crimes that were
now punishable by federal instead of local statutes. Several Federal
prosecutors in the States like Rudolph Giuliani in New York began to bring
charges and get grand juries to indict, and later, in trials get convictions
for mob members and their leaders. All of a sudden prominent family members had
the light of the news media shone upon them, followed by aggressive
prosecutions.

Carlo was one of the Dons who, while not himself
indicted, had seen plenty of his peers make the ‘perp’ walk. When you add this
to the development of much better forensic science especially DNA testing, it
was getting easier for the authorities to get the evidence they needed for
convictions. Thus the interest and need for the new ‘firestop’ project to be implemented.

Carlo had to at least slow down the advances made by
the authorities on his turf. All of this for Carlo, this was a costly
distraction to family business. He now has a couple of his Lieutenants under indictment
and is being forced to pay for a costly legal defense. His lawyer, Sam, was
more and more involved with these cases and Carlo had to spend countless hours
in conference with him to guide the defense.

Worse, people who his soldiers dealt with, who paid
ransom to the mob, were less fearful and more aggressive in their willingness
to hold out. No, these were not the best of times for Carlo, but you have to
play the hand that is dealt to you, and Carlo will soldier on.

Chapter 12

A Call to Action

It is Monday morning following the organization’s
meeting and Sam has two new priorities to attend to. First, he contacts a
criminal lawyer he has used in the past, one Saul Lassik. After a discussion of
the Bruno Albino case particulars, Sam assigns the case to Saul. The two
lawyers will stay in close contact, but for discretionary reasons, Sam will
remain in the shadows on this one. Saul will be the Attorney of Record and do
all of the courtroom work on the trial.

The second challenge is a bit more complex. For Sam
it is completely out of his area of expertise. He now calls Mitch Gruber the
‘go to guy’ for finding out about how anything works in the business world.
Mitch is asked to find out, how hard would it be to purchase and install a
crematory in the New York metro area?

After two weeks, Mitch is sitting in Sam’s office
with a binder that includes full color literature on the latest retorts (the
name for a cremation oven) available for cremation.

Mitch says to Sam, “So, you want to have a primer on
cremation. It is really a quite interesting and dark enough subject that most
people aren’t going to want to know these details.

“First people have cremated the dead for as long as
we have recorded history. The Hindus in India did and still do open fire
cremations letting the ashes float down the Ganges River. They simply gather
much kindling wood put the body on top and let it burn through the night.
Besides not being good for tourism, it is quite toxic to the atmosphere. Fast
forward to the eighteen hundreds and an Italian uses the technology already
existent in gas commercial ovens like the kind used for baking. With a properly
sized fire chamber, we can now accommodate a human body.

“The first modern crematory is born. This gives us a
closed furnace usually fired by natural gas that is hotter, quicker, and much
cleaner than open fire burnings. Fast forward another hundred years and the
cremation manufacturers are now operating under even tighter pollution
regulations and they respond with technology. Using computers and superchargers
to blow high volumes of air onto the fire, temperatures are thereby increased
substantially. The new retorts can get up to sixteen hundred to two thousand degrees
Fahrenheit; this is the temperature that is needed to incinerate a body
cleanly.

“With the EPA constantly decreasing the amount of
pollutants allowed into the air, the companies respond by adding a second fire
chamber above the main one housing the body. The purpose of this is to re-burn
the gasses from the first chamber in order to further purify the toxic residue
in the escaping vapors. The final result is that you will see no black smoke or
smell anything standing next to the air exhaust stack of a crematory. It is for
all observable purposes just hot air coming out.

“The residue from the approximate two hour burn
cycle are called cremains by the industry and ashes by everyone else. However
they are really not ashes, they are bone fragments from the larger bones still
left after the cremation. These two pounds or so of bone fragments are fed into
a grinder called a processor and the outcome is a fine gravel. This uniform
sized substance is then usually poured into an urn for further disposition.

“The final thing is that once this is done there can
be no DNA or any other kind of known testing to determine who was in fact
cremated. You couldn’t even tell if it was man or woman, white or black.

The amount of ashes might give you some idea of the
size of the person, but that would be very imprecise except that you may know
it was an adult. If the remains are scattered or dumped in the sea there would
soon be no trace of the ashes at all. And even if you recovered the ashes
(cremains), they would be of no use for identification.

“This is a $50,000 – $75,000 piece of equipment and
is a ten ton unit about the size of a car. It would fit into a one car space in
a garage or any similar sized space. It is delivered on a truck in one piece,
rolled into place and after the gas and three phase electricity connections are
hooked up it is ready to go the same day.”

All of this corresponded to what Victor had told Sam
in Atlantic City during their meeting.

“This is the easy part,” Mitch continues. “No one
has their own private crematory. They are used to serve the public through
funeral homes, cemeteries, and other service providers. Next, you need permits
from the EPA and local authorities since it is an industrial furnace. In the
New York metro area this could be a slow and arduous process as this would be
one of the hardest areas in the country to quality with all of the additional
local regulations. And this creates the third problem for you, how do you keep
it secret. Once you apply for the permits everyone will know the name and
address of the person/s who filed for the permits. Then, there are the
constraints of the law for operating the retort. You need a signed cremation
permit in every state for each body you run through the machine. This is why
you can’t just go to a legitimate crematory with a body for cremation. Where
would the paperwork be? How long could a doctor and a funeral director keep
forging these documents without getting caught? What professional would want to
risk prosecution for aiding and abetting such a scheme?”

After spending the rest of the morning trying to
twist and reformulate the subject to fit the organization’s needs, Sam is
pretty dejected. Sam feels, maybe this is why nobody has done this to his
knowledge before, but there must be a way.

A couple of days after paying Mitch his $2,000 for
the report, Sam is back in his office thinking about cremations. How do you
justify the thing, if you don’t have a funeral home or a cemetery? What
professional would risk his career being involved in such a scheme of illegal
cremations? It then occurs to Sam, what if you do have a funeral home in
somebody else’s name and it sits 100 miles from New York? An area much more
secluded than Brooklyn, but less than three hours’ drive away? What if that
area was Northeast Pennsylvania and the operator might be desperate enough to
engage in illegal activities? Sam knows he somehow has to get to Victor Kozol
in Duryea, Pa.

But, how to approach someone about something illegal
when to the best of your knowledge, this person is not involved in any illegal
activities? How do you turn an honest guy? There has always been one answer to
this problem,
money.
You offer more money than the person is making or
has any hope of earning legitimately.

“It is even better to approach someone who is
willing to gamble because he is already up against the wall financially. This
formula has worked for the over one hundred years that the crime syndicates
have operated in America. From federal judges, to shoe shine boys, the lure of
easy money has allowed the underworld to operate freely in the legitimate
world. Sam, for just a moment, reflects—this is exactly how I became involved.
He will need to find out everything there is to know about Victor before he
even attempts to contact him.

This takes Sam back to his Rolodex where a quick
call to Serge Vlassic gets you a computer search on the personal information of
anyone in America. It ain’t cheap, but the info will have details you can’t get
on Google. Things like bank and credit card balances and payment records, FICA
scores, outstanding loans, divorce decrees, convictions, you name it, if it
exists Serge will find it.