Friends at Homeland Security (5 page)

Chapter Seven

D
etective First Grade Mary Margaret MacLeese and Detective Second Grade Martin Redworth are good at police work—knocking on doors, interviewing citizens and suspects, analyzing information to sort out the nuggets of truth from the mountains of baloney, and for getting people to unburden their souls by confessing. Working together for eleven years, they have developed a pattern of doing police work together that produces results. They both have commendations and decorations; they have both been injured in the line of duty; and neither of them retains the least vestige of illusion about the potential for evil in their fellow humans.

For six working days, they conduct interviews at New York’s Global Investment Bank with the full endorsement of its president, Lincoln Vestor. The interviews are producing—if nothing else—a buzz of rumor among the staff. President Vestor follows the rumors with growing interest, beginning to realize that where there is smoke, there has to be some fire. He had heretofore avoided even the slightest idea that anything improper was going on in the bank’s own investment unit—the fiefdom of Howard Marcus and Reggie Whitehead. But now he is being forced to admit that he has been avoiding the warning signs because the bank’s bottom line has never been healthier.

There are three executive assistants in the investments section. Interviews with two of them by Detectives MacLeese and Redworth have been unproductive of anything but a growing conviction that those two know something more than they are telling. Despite a day spent tag-teaming each of them, no solid leads develop. Today it is the turn of the newest addition to the investment unit’s secretarial staff. Redworth is well aware of her past—a boyfriend with at least some ties to the Soriano crime family, and a more affluent lifestyle than her salary from the bank would permit.

“Hello, Ms. Martignetti,” Redworth says in his calm, courteous manner. “Have a seat and relax. You seem pretty nervous. Take it easy. This is just routine. We have a few questions, and then you’ll be on your way.”

“Thank you, Detective. I am nervous. Would it be okay if you call me Oriana? It would be less formal, and I would be more at ease with your questions.”

“Sure, and I’m Martin. Tell me a little about yourself. Like, where did you grow up, go to school, and how you got into banking? You have a pretty important position here in the bank; how did you get the job in investments?”

Oriana Martignetti is twenty-one years old, fresh out of CUNY with a bachelor’s in finance, and has very little experience. Diego Clemente is her first serious boyfriend, and she is attracted to him because of his bad-boy flare. Redworth and MacLeese get all of that out of her in the first twenty minutes of their interview.

“What are your duties in the investment section, Oriana?” asks MacLeese.

“Well, if you really want to know the truth, I am just a glorified gopher. I get papers and reports ready for Mr. Whitehead. I make coffee, and I make sure he gets to his meetings on time. Sometimes I travel with him to Europe, and a few times I even went to Moscow with him to keep his arrangements and documents—that sort of thing—in order. It’s pretty fun, but I kind of think it is a dead-end job. My education is better than that.”

“I guess you have to start somewhere,” Redworth observes. “Yeah, but it’s slow-going.”

“You’d know ‘slow’ if you were a cop. It takes forever to get promoted or even to get noticed,” MacLeese says.

“I guess I ought to be happy that I even have a job. More than half of my fellow business students who graduated with me last spring are still looking for a job.”

“You must be something of a go-getter then. How’d you come to get this job? We had a look at your employment records. You were placed in the investment section right out of the starting gate, right?”

“I was lucky.”

“I don’t really believe in luck, Oriana. In this tough world, you have to have an edge. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you are a classical Italian beauty. Maybe that helped. Or maybe you know somebody who knows somebody. What do you think?” asks Redworth.

“Don’t tell anybody else, Detectives, but I guess I did sort of have an in.”

“That sounds interesting. Tell us about it,” MacLeese says. “Promise you won’t spread it around. The other girls would freeze me out if they knew that I have a sort of godfather.”

“Ooh, that sounds interesting. C’mon, out with it,” MacLeese leads the attractive girl to divulge her secrets.

“All right. This is the thing. My boyfriend—did I tell you about Diego?”

“I think you did. Go on.”

“Well, he has some pretty interesting friends and an uncle who is big in the olive oil import business, I think it is. He’s a nice man and a very good dresser. I tell you when he talks, people listen. I was almost scared of him at first, but he treats me like a favorite niece—a favorite Italian niece—which really counts for something.”

“What’s your ‘uncle’s’ name, Oriana? He sounds like someone who’s going to help you get up the ladder. You can never have too much of an in, you know,” Redworth says.

“It’s Vitaly Soriano. Diego says he’s really well-connected. I think he’s even friends of Mr. Whitehead. I don’t know about Mr. Marcus, but Diego talks about his uncle and Mr. Whitehead belonging to the same Rotary club and going sailing together in the Caribbean—that kind of thing. Diego and me went on one of those trips. It was really fun.”

“I’ll bet it was. Now, Oriana, I really have to ask, do you talk to Diego or to Mr. Soriano about bank business? You know, just chit-chat sort of stuff?”

For all her naiveté and inexperience, and despite her very obvious physical charms, Oriana is not an airhead. Her antennae go up with that question.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, look, Oriana,” MacLeese says, “I think you are perfectly aware of who Vitaly Soriano is. Isn’t that right?”

“Maybe.”

Redworth says, “Look, Oriana, you’re a bright girl. You know that he’s a big shot in one of the New York families. You are not dumb enough to be entirely taken in by that ‘nice old uncle’ stuff, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But Diego is a decent guy, and doesn’t have a record or anything. Maybe he’s kind of wild.”

“I’m sorry, Oriana, but we’re not buying the idea that you just happened to get this job. You are paid half again more than any of the other secretaries, did you know that?” MacLeese asks her, more pointedly now.

“I guess so. I guess that’s right. What of it?”

“The ‘what-of-it’ is: what do you do for that extra money? How come you don’t have to work all that hard, and you get to go on a bunch of nice trips? I think you’re too smart to be sleeping with the boss. And I think you get more than a little extra money on the side from the Soriano family. Isn’t that the long and short of it? And, for that, you pay back the nice uncle with a running account of what goes on in the investment unit. Isn’t that right, too?”

Now, MacLeese’s gloves are off, and Oriana realizes that she is in trouble.

“How do you know that?”

“We’re detectives. It’s what we do, Oriana,” Redworth tells her.

“Am I in trouble?”

“Could be. But if you help us, maybe we can help you. Do you get what I’m trying to say to you? You’re basically a good Catholic girl who might be getting in over your head. We want to help you, but you have to do something for us in return. Understand?” Redworth presses.

There is a pause while Oriana goes through the gamut of emotions and hurried decision making.

“I’m scared of the Sorianos. If they think I told you stuff about what I do for them, I could really get hurt. I just can’t talk to you about that. I don’t want to answer any more questions.”

“Sorry, Oriana, but we know too much about you just to let it go. Talk to us. Give us everything, and we’ll protect you. You can trust us,” says MacLeese.

“If it gets that far, we could even get you into witness protection,” Redworth tells her.

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“We don’t know, do you?”

Another pregnant pause.

“If I get a lawyer, Diego and Uncle Vitaly will know. They seem to know everything. I do know stuff, but I have to be certain that I’ll be protected; and I want immunity. I don’t say anything more until I get written immunity. Okay?”

Detectives MacLeese and Redworth make two calls as soon as they finish Oriana Martignetti’s interview. Oriana is taken to 1PP for her protection until the phone calls were completed.

MacLeese calls the chief of Ds.

“Chief, we have a break in the Decklin Marcus case.”

“Let’s hear it, Detective.”

“We talked to a relatively low-level staffer at Global Investment Bank this morning. It happens that she is an Italian girl whose boyfriend is the nephew of Vitaly Soriano. The boyfriend is a low-level soldier in the Soriano family. The Sorianos have their fingers in Global’s investments, especially in Europe. We think they probably hooked one of the major execs who got into debt, used a loan shark, couldn’t pay, and traded his banking soul to pay off his debt. The girl has agreed to talk, but only if she gets immunity—written immunity—from a federal judge. I need your help.”

“I’ve heard this refrain before, Detective. It’s a familiar one—probably heard you sing it before. I’ll get through to Judge Davenport at the Second Circuit. He’s understanding and quick. What’s the witness’s name?”

MacLeese tells him, and the wheels are set in motion. Redworth calls McGee at his office.

“We caught a break. Actually two breaks. We have what appears to be a well-informed witness, an employee at Global Investment Bank. The other good thing is that we will have a letter granting immunity by two. Mary Margaret and I want to grill the girl’s direct boss, and we think it would be a good idea for you to sit in. His name is Reggie Whitehead, and he is close to Howard Marcus and Angus McTavish.”

“And you want to get him drained before you go for the vic’s father, that about it?”

“In a nutshell.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Is Caitlin up to speed on Whitehead’s finances?” Redworth asks.

“We have a whole team dedicated just to Whitehead and Marcus. They will know everything there is to know by two o’clock today at the latest. We’ll be ready. When and where do you want to meet?” I ask him.

“Tomorrow at ten—1PP, room 853.”

“Got it.”

MacLeese and Redworth walk down to the visitors’ rooms on the third floor of the central police building. It is comforting to them to have to be searched no less than three times by experts. The security force rivals that of the sitting president.

They spend the next three hours getting the whole sordid story from Oriana. They record her confession that implicates the Sorianos and Reggie Whitehead in what looks to be a slam-dunk felony case. Then they head back to the bank.

Whitehead has heard the rumors and is visibly nervous—sweating and tugging at his collar. Caitlin and I purposely let him sit in the investment division conference room alone with nothing to do or read for an hour.

“Do you want some water? Coffee? Anything?” I ask when we enter the room.

“No.”

If he thinks it is out of place for us two private eyes working in league with the cops to be offering him something from his own office kitchen, he does not show it.

“Well, then,” I say, “we’ll get started.”

I take ten minutes to get all of the public data about himself from Whitehead, lulling him into a light torpor. Then I get to the heart of the conversation.

“Mr. Whitehead, do you know a woman named Oriana Martignetti?”

Whitehead’s stony facial expression develops a crack—ever so tiny.

“Hmm … I think so,” he reluctantly says, becoming instantly suspicious because he can tell where this was headed.

“Come now, Mr. Whitehead, you traveled to Europe, to Moscow, and took her to parties on your yacht. Isn’t that true?”

“How did you know…?” he blurts, now fully aware that he is caught in a viselike trap.

I smile.

He frowns and sweats.

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“I don’t know—do you? You know the old drill—you have the right to an attorney and all the rest of it. You can plead the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States not to incriminate yourself. In fact, you don’t even have to listen to me, but I strongly advise you to do so. Financial chicanery may be unethical and hurt your career, or it may rise to the level of grand larceny and a prison sentence. The legal implications are beyond my legal training. However, that said, let me tell you this before you make your decision. Oriana Martignetti was the first to spill her guts to the NYPD detectives. She copped to her part in the entire crooked enterprise and even now is filling the DA in on details related to the murder of one Decklin Marcus. While we will only be too happy to see you go down for fraud, embezzlement and that sort of thing, what we came for is to get to the bottom of a murder. You are looking like the prime suspect in that crime. To be technical, the charge will be conspiracy to commit first degree murder for the purpose of stealing from your company, to silence a witness, and for the purpose of money laundering on a grand scale. You will go to prison for the rest of your life. I presume that the federal government will find a way to make RICO charges stick as well.”

“You are probably overstating your evidence, Mr. McGee. But, hypothetically, what kind of a break could one in a position like you describe expect to gain from cooperating with the authorities?”

“That depends on how quickly you provide evidence—that is, if you beat the other likely suspects to the draw and how valuable your information is. Both the NYPD detectives and us private investigators take a dim view of murder. Decklin Marcus—so far as we can tell—was a decent young man with a great deal of promise who did not deserve to die. So, let me tell you this: if my partner and I leave this room without a serious promise and bring the NYPD into the room, your chances of getting a positive plea deal will become infinitesimally small.”

Two things drive Reggie Whitehead at that moment. The first is that he is terrified of the American mafia and of another even worse threat. The second is the grim specter of the imposition of RICO statutes to his other potential sentences. He is no lawyer, but he has helped multiple clients evade the penalties under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970. He would end up forfeiting everything he owns, go away for life, and make his wife—the only decent part of his miserable life—destitute. More than anything else, that drives his decision.