Salvation Boulevard (10 page)

“That's great, what you're doing here,” I said to her.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For taking this case with Manny. He may not say so, but he really thinks the world of you and your work, but I'll say so, and I'm grateful that he has you on this one.”

The police gathered in the dark. It was a joint operation. City and state police. The plan was to be in place before dawn. Due to a flat tire on the bomb-disposal vehicle and the late arrival of one of the news crews, they got started a little late. But still, they arrived at the mosque on Geronimo Street just before dawn. They deployed silently—or as silently as people with cars, guns, radios, batons, cameras, ropes, rappelling gear, and a battering ram can.

The snipers got up on the rooftops on the three sides that had any sorts of entrances or exits. The main contingent got into hidden positions on Julia, one block south of Geronimo, to await the signal. A second, somewhat smaller group went around the back to Wolvern Row. They had the battering ram, and the plan was that they would burst in while the people inside were preoccupied with the main troop out front.

As they were moving into position, about ten minutes later than planned, a big, fat, red sun came up over the flat lands to the east. It was the sort of sun that said, Here comes a bright and beautiful day. Come and watch me in my glory.

Just then a voice screamed out in Arabic.

The police took it to be a warning—an alert. Rather than wait to be attacked or for the defenders inside to barricade themselves and ready their arms, the cops sprang into action. The team at the rear,
on Wolvern, got its battering ram and smashed in the back door. The drivers of the fifteen cars assigned to the front put their pedals to the metal and rushed into position, slewing and squealing as they braked. Officers with their flak jackets on and their weapons drawn leapt out and took cover behind their vehicles.

Still, the shouting from the mosque continued.

A captain with a bullhorn yelled back, “Come out. Come out with your hands up! Throw down your weapons, and come out with your hands up!”

The voice in the mosque shouted back. It sounded like defiance.

Meantime, there was noise from the back. A shot. It sounded like a shot. Then more shots. So the police in front began firing too.

Still the yelling continued.

The crying voice from the mosque, as later confirmed by the news tapes, had started by saying,
Allah u Akbar, Allah u Akbar. Ash-hadu al-la Ilaha ill Allah, Ash-hadu al-la Ilaha ill Allah,
then continued,
Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan Rasulullaah, Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan Rasulullaah.

That translates as, “God is great. God is great. I bear witness that there is no God but Allah. I bear witness that there is no God but Allah,” then “I bear witness that Mohammed is Allah's messenger,” also repeated twice, as were the rest of the phrases. “Hasten to the prayer. Hasten to real success. God is great.” Then there is a final phrase, recited once: “None is worthy of worship but Allah.”

It was the
adhan,
the call to prayer, that's issued five times a day. It is supposed to be shouted from a tower by the
muadhdhin,
written “muezzin” in English. If it had been a person doing it, perhaps he would have stopped. But this mosque, as many do, used a recorded voice, so it went on and on, through the assault, through the captain yelling with the bullhorn, through the firing.

There were fifteen people inside. Five were injured. A twelve-year-old boy was rushed to intensive care. The imam was killed. Two police officers were hurt. One was grazed by a bullet. One broke an ankle leaping out of his car.

Two guns were found in the mosque, both legal and registered to the caretaker. Various publications were found, mostly in Arabic, some of which were described by the police as Islamo-Fascist texts, though nobody on our local force can read or understand Arabic. Otherwise, they might have recognized the muezzin's cry of the most familiar phrase in that language, one of the most familiar in the world,
Allah u Akbar,
God is great.

They also found a copy of
The Anarchist Cookbook,
an American publication from 1970 and
The Anarchist Handbook,
published in 1985. Both have instructions on how to make homemade bombs and homemade weapons. One of the arrestees claimed the police had planted them.

The governor, the mayor, the chief of police, the chief of detectives, the superintendent of the state police, and the head of their counterterrorist division all had to be at the press conference. When that happens, there's always a fight about the location. The standard solution is to hold it outdoors in Municipal Square, as close to dead center as it's possible to be, between the State House and City Hall.

The Capital City Islamic Center, they told us, was a radical mosque. It catered to the Sunni sect. The details of the investigation that had led to the raid had to remain secret as revealing methods and techniques might jeopardize other ongoing and future investigations and make us less safe.

They also announced that Ahmad Nazami had been a member.

The imam, who could have testified that Ahmad had been much more the wiseass college kid who asked embarrassing questions about the faith than a fanatical follower of Islam, was dead.

 

“How can you defend that man?” my daughter asked me at dinner. We make it a point for the family to eat together. That makes families work.

“I'm not really defending. I'm investigating,” I said. “I get the facts, good or bad, and then I hand them over to Manny Goldfarb. Manny's a defense lawyer, it's true. He brings the facts into court, and then a judge and a jury decide who's guilty and who's not.”

“But don't people who are guilty get off sometimes?”

“Yes.”

“Don't we have all kinds of strange rules created by activist judges and the ACLU that keep lots of bad people out of jail and make it almost impossible for the police to do their jobs?”

“Some people say so,” I said. “Where'd you hear all this?”

“It was in school today. They had a special session. It was to tell us not to be frightened or upset.”

“About what?”

“About them finding the terrorist cells, right here, with their bomb-making equipment and explosives.”

“They didn't exactly find terrorist cells.”

“Yes, they did. They showed us. In school. The tapes on the news. I saw it. There was a big raid. The Islamo-Fascist terrorists,” she said, obviously reciting back what she'd been told in school, “fought back, and the police had to shoot their way in. One of them even shot a cop! And they arrested a whole bunch of them. But we don't know that we got them all. Even the ones we did get, who knows if they'll get punished or even locked up. If the ACLU has their way, they'll all get get-out-of-jail-free cards and be back on the streets doing it again.”

“I think you should slow down,” I said.

“That's exactly right,” Gwen said. “I saw it on the TV too.”

“They raided a mosque. That's a Muslim church,” I said.

“I know that, Dad. Obviously, I know that.”

“Yes, we all know that,” my wife said.

“What I'm trying to say is that we don't know if this is the way the police say it is or another Waco.”

I could see that I had drawn a blank. Angie was too young to remember Waco.

Before I could explain, Gwen asked, “Why would the police lie? This isn't Nicaragua.” In her early twenties, she'd spent a year with a Cathedral of the Third Millennium mission in Puerto Cabazas, helping the poor and seeking converts. There had been a lot of violence and corruption around them. She'd sailed through, never flinching,
certain that Jesus, like a force field, and her blue passport, like a shield, would protect her. “This is America. They have no reason to lie.”

 

The snap answer—of course they lie, and for all sorts of reasons—sat behind my teeth, ready to be spit out like a bitter stone.

I looked from Angie to Gwen and back again, Gwen so certain and Angie so accepting, and wondered if I should say it. Welcome to the real world.

Back when I was on the job, we'd get frustrated over some perp who we were certain was dirty. Morally certain. Unable to put our hands on the dirt, we'd find some dirt to put on the man.

If someone had asked, what if it's the wrong guy, though no one ever did ask, we would have said, one out of thousand, maybe, but isn't it worth it if it means nine hundred ninety-nine bad guys were put away. Besides, the types of people we went after, if we got them for something they didn't do, they'd done something else, so it didn't matter. Justice was served. Case closed. They were wrong; we were right.

That's part of why I'm Manny Goldfarb's favorite investigator. I can tell when the cops are stretching, massaging the evidence, spinning their testimony, inventing informants, even planting evidence. I can figure out how they're doing it because there's no new way. We all do it the same old way.

Also, I still have friends.

Also, I know where many of the bodies are buried. After all, I was in narcotics.

I can only thank Jesus. I know Jesus was watching out for me because He came for me just in time. In order to get right with the Lord and live right, I knew I had to get out of narcotics.

It happened during the first year of the bounties.

As part of the War on Drugs, the federal government was giving a lot of grants to local police forces. The city had to come up with matching funds, twenty-five percent to the federal seventy-five percent. The city didn't want to raise taxes or take the money from somewhere else. They decided to go into the confiscation business,
seizing the assets of drug dealers. It was sort of a free perpetual money machine. Every dollar it created was turned into four by the feds. The mayor, the council, the taxpayers—everybody loved it.

To get more money, they needed more busts.

To get more busts, they decided to imitate another federal program, one that paid informants ten percent of whatever was confiscated.

Confiscation falls outside the normal rules of criminal law. It loosened things up a lot and also created new types of informants. They didn't have to have the kind of knowledge that would justify a warrant and that could later be questioned by an ACLU-type defense attorney and lead to a search being thrown out by an activist judge. In other words, they didn't have to be criminals, creeps, and coconspirators.

The informant could be a neighbor who noticed too many people coming and going. A car dealer who sold a BMW for cash. A bank clerk who noticed suspicious transactions. If they fingered someone and it led to a drug arrest, the city could seize both money and property, and the informant got ten percent of the value. Even if the criminal charges didn't stand up, the seizures usually remained.

In order to get a warrant, there has to be due cause. One of the simplest ways to establish due cause is to find someone to say, “I saw,” “I heard,” or “I have knowledge of” something criminal. It's very easy to make up a fake informant.

The first time a fake informant and our bounty program came together was, I think, fortuitous.

Xavier Garcia, who owned a body shop on Division Street between Sixty-fourth and Santiago Boulevard, was dealing on the side. There wasn't enough information for a warrant, so we made up an informant. The bust went down, and we found an ounce of cocaine. The city attorney was aggressive and went after everything that Garcia had: the shop, the plot it was on, the equipment, his personal cars, and his home. The value of the seizures was $328,000. That meant that $32,800 was due to the person whose information had led to the bust.

Except no such person existed. The check was ready, but we couldn't say that we'd made it up, sworn falsely, and committed perjury.
We could have claimed that the informant had died or gone to Mexico or disappeared. But everyone agreed it was a shame to let that money go to waste.

So, we recruited one of our regular informants to come in and sign for it and tossed him a few hundred dollars.

None of that bothered me. Though it should have. But whoring around and my second wife whoring around and her doing speed and me drinking and no one being responsible enough about our daughter and getting very casual about violence, all of that bothered me. Frightened me, and I was spilling my guts to Alan Stephens one lunch hour in a bar, my mind sloshing around in beer and bourbon, at noon, and he said come with me and made me get in a car and he drove and drove, out past the city limits, to where a great modern cathedral sat on a ridge dominating the whole horizon and there was a big rainstorm coming down from the mountains, you could see it moving like a dense black wall, bolts of lightning coming off its face hither and yon, and he drove up to the Cathedral and dragged me out of the car, every breath that came out of me spewing fumes that would burn if you held up a match in front of my mouth, and he dragged me down that long, long aisle to where Pastor Paul Plowright was preaching in front of a choir that was singing and where the lights were shining and at that very moment he was calling people to come down, to give it up for Jesus, to be saved, and my legs carried me forward as if my body knew already what my mind was yet to learn and I went right up to him, the smell of me preceding my arrival, so he knew full well that he was dealing with a reprobate and drunk, reeling through the afternoon, and he smiled at me, kindness in his eyes, no condemnation, no criticism, not even revulsion, a greeting on his lips, and he put his hands upon me and Jesus came through him and I fell backward. And I was saved.

A few days later, I put in a transfer to get out of narcotics. I was not there when the money was distributed. It was clear that Jesus was looking out for me, that He had sent Alan to come and get me, and He got me just in time.