The Perfect Kill (24 page)

“Arrested?”

“Some bullshit charge. Please come up and talk to his son. He'll explain everything.”

Before I got off the phone, I made Marc tell me the father's name.
“Vito Rizzuto,” he said. Other than I knew it was Italian, it meant nothing to me. I wrote it down to Google later.

I drew in a deep breath as I read about the notorious Canadian Mafia boss named Vito Rizzuto. A capo in the Bonanno family who more or less monopolized North American heroin smuggling, he was one of the most powerful gangsters in the world. The Canadian press dubbed him the “Teflon Don.” He was memorialized in the film
Donnie Brasco
, where in a true-to-life scene his character jumps out of a broom closet, a pistol blazing, cutting down three Bonanno family rivals. A classic
regolamento di conti
. A settling of scores.

Rizzuto had just been indicted in New York for those murders and racketeering, and the United States was now asking Canada to extradite him to stand trial. Rizzuto's arrest in Montreal on January 20, 2004, was the first step in the process of extradition.

Now I was definitely interested. I didn't care so much about the mob as I did about Rizzuto's connections to the Lebanese heroin trade, which were supposedly tight. Taking into consideration the rumors that Hajj Radwan might have been dealing in the stuff to support himself, I wondered if there wasn't something to be done with it. I'd come right out and ask the Rizzutos about him.

Marc was curbside at Montreal's airport, behind the wheel of a new black Porsche Cayenne. With his angular face, slicked-back hair, and Hugo Boss suit, he easily could have passed as a made man.

“You want something to eat?” Marc asked as I climbed in. “Or maybe go to the hotel and take a rest?” He didn't wait for an answer: “Let's go grab a drink.” Marc accelerated fast, nearly clipping a bus pulling away from the curb.

Marc caught me looking at the patchy snow along the skirt of the highway: “Welcome to Montreal, dude. More on the way tonight, a big dump.” You couldn't tell it from the sky. It was patchy too, thin blades of sun slicing through it.

When Marc pulled up in front of his club, the lights were off, but a
tall, slouchy blonde with high cheekbones and a short tube dress stepped out of the doorway. Her accent was Russian. We got out, and she took the Cayenne's keys from Marc.

As Marc pushed through the front door, I asked him where he'd found the Russian. He didn't answer. I followed him up a flight of stairs, two steps at a time, and then through two doorways with bead curtains. We came to a room with a proper door. He closed it behind us, turning on the lights. It was a private dining room, a dozen erotic Japanese gouache drawings lining the walls.

A second girl, as beautiful as the first, came in with two glasses of white wine on a tray. It wasn't even noon, but I took one. Marc motioned for her to put his glass on the table. He told me he needed to step out to make a call.

Fifteen minutes later, Marc was back with a slender man in a tan cashmere overcoat and turtleneck. I stood up to shake hands. “Delighted to meet you,” he said. “I'm Leo Rizzuto.”

Marc pulled up a chair next to mine so Leo could sit next to me. Marc called into the darkness of the hallway: “Please bring us a bottle of red. A decent Bordeaux.”

“Do you smoke?” Leo asked, holding open a slim gold cigarette case. When I said no, he put it away without taking a cigarette.

“My father had so wanted to meet you,” Leo said. “It's too bad you were busy.”

Marc had told me on the drive in from the airport that Leo was a lawyer with a good, legitimate practice. Now meeting Leo, I believed him. He seemed uncomfortable speaking with an ex–CIA agent on behalf of his Mafia father. But as Marc's father told me, the Rizzutos were a tight family, which meant Leo had no choice in the matter.

Marc walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain, flushing the room with light. As he'd promised, it was snowing—small, dry flakes. It must have turned cold very fast, I thought.

Marc turned to me. “I have something to do. I'll leave you two alone.”
He closed the door behind him as he left. I noticed that Leo hadn't touched his wine.

“I don't want my father extradited to the United States,” Leo said. “He could spend the rest of his life in jail.”

“I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not sure how I can help.”

I considered asking him if his father really was in on killing the three men in Queens. But it would have been an unwelcome, not to mention pointless, question—the facts had been established long ago. A better question would have been whether it was the murder of his three rivals that had propelled Vito to the head of the Bonanno family. But I wasn't going to ask that one either.

Leo went on: “My father knows a lot of people . . . a lot of things about them that aren't well-known . . . about heads of state in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. He knows who's selling what to whom, who's on whose payroll. He has people everywhere. He knows people and can get things done you can't imagine.”

I now finally understood what Vito Rizzuto wanted from me: a channel to American intelligence, the CIA. He'd probably tried but failed to reach a deal through the Department of Justice, and now he was looking for a back door. I couldn't come up with another explanation.

“Was your father well connected in Lebanon?”

“I believe he was. But he'd have to give you the details.”

I had to laugh to myself when I pictured my returning to Washington and calling up the CIA to let them know that, after all these years of missteps and failure, I had finally found the perfect assassin to take care of Hajj Radwan. All I'd need is their help springing him out of a Canadian jail and the clutches of the Department of Justice. The telephone would have melted in my hand before I could get halfway through my pitch.

That night Leo and Marc took me to an Italian restaurant for drinks. They drifted off to talk to friends, leaving me to talk to a squat man
united with a Roman nose. He never took off his fedora as he told me how tough things were in the wholesale fish business.

After round three of grappa, he asked me if he could trust me. When I said yes, he told me that, the night before, his car had been firebombed and burned to the rims. It was over a contract dispute.

“They'll pay,” he said. “Don't you worry about that.”

I changed the subject: “I have to go to Lebanon next month. [It was a lie.] Ever been there?”

“No.”

“No Lebanese business contacts?”

“No.”

I looked out the window at the snow; it was now a driving blizzard.

Somewhere between the Italian restaurant and a nightclub, Leo disappeared. As Marc drove me back to my hotel, breaking through a wall of falling snow, I thought about Leo's offer, or at least the one I thought he'd made. It intrigued me; I could only guess what sort of people the Rizzutos keep on their speed dials, no doubt among them the heroin dealers in Hajj Radwan's backyard, the Bekaa Valley.

But I didn't think anything was really lost. The American Mafia may have a long history of settling disputes in blood, but they're loath to do it for outsiders, especially governments. Maybe in Italy, but not on this side of the Atlantic. (At this point, some fool's going to raise his hand to ask if the CIA didn't try to recruit the Mafia during the Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro. It did, but it never got off another fool's drawing board.)

None of this is meant to imply that the Mafia doesn't know what it's doing when it comes to murder. They know who their enemies are, who deserves it, and who doesn't. They know to strike early, before the victim gets the same idea. The three Bonanno captains Vito murdered in the Queens social club would have done the same to him had they known about his ambitions. Murder is a two-way street.

In December 2009, Vito's son—not Leo, but rather his heir apparent—would be assassinated in a Montreal suburb. Nearly a year later Vito's father, the Rizzuto patriarch, would meet the same fate when a single sniper's bullet punched through the double-paned patio doors of his house, killing him instantly. As for Vito, he was jailed for five years at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He was paroled early, but died of cancer on December 23, 2013. I imagine this was the end to the Rizzutos' reign, the complete destruction of its
tabula patronatus
.

Speed, secrecy, and surprise are your best allies. When they are applied in proper doses, the target will not have time to even cower. As for the survivors, they'll live in grim dread that their turn is next.

M
adrid, December 20, 1973: Franco's new prime minister was a creature of habit. For as long as anyone could remember, at nine sharp every morning Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco would emerge from his apartment building, climb into a waiting car, and take a short ride to San Francisco de Borja church to attend daily mass. His schedule and route never varied; his neighbors joked that they could set their watches by it. In fact, it would be Carrero Blanco's habitual observances that would contribute to his undoing.

By the early seventies, the Basque separatist movement ETA decided
it was high time to knock a tooth out of the mouth of the doddering Franco regime, hoping to nudge it down the road to the realization that it wasn't worth holding on to the Basques. Among ETA's calculations: Franco's health was bad; there was no real dauphin; the left wing of the Catholic Church had broken from the ultraconservatives, a serious blow to Franco; many Spaniards born after the civil war (1936–1939) didn't think Spain needed a strongman to hold the country together. In short, with the consensus frayed, one high-profile murder would be a game changer.

ETA also decided it needed a spectacular display of violence to put itself on the map, to give it the voice that Franco had denied it all these years. As one ETA assassin put it in a long, taped confession to Blanco's “execution”: “Spaniards have an enormous incapacity to understand the Euskadi [the Basque nation] is a country.”

ETA apparently didn't share George Bernard Shaw's opinion that assassination is the extreme form of censorship. For them, it was a means to uncensor themselves.

In those days, Spain was an overconfident police state, and all that ETA had to do to find Carrero Blanco's apartment was look it up in the telephone book: Calle de los Hermanos Bécquer, 6. ETA members located it on a subway map. In the following days, they watched his apartment, which soon confirmed a tip about the prime minister's daily trip to San Francisco de Borja.

The church was open to the public, which allowed the assassins to study its layout and workings at their leisure. The very first day, they caught Carrero Blanco leaving mass. The next day, they got there early enough to see him arrive and attend mass. Only one bodyguard accompanied Carrero Blanco inside the church.

Every day an ETA assassin waited at the church for Carrero Blanco to arrive. At one point one of them tested the reaction of Carrero Blanco's bodyguard by kneeling on the prie-dieu next to him. Although he was only a foot or so from Carrero Blanco, the bodyguard did nothing.
It was then that ETA understood just how vulnerable Carrero Blanco was. At first, they had considered kidnapping him, but when he was appointed prime minister he was assigned too many bodyguards to make it feasible.

In the meantime, the assassins did their best to go about life as inconspicuously as possible. But it wasn't all that easy in Madrid, a city that ran on the rhythm of a dull estuary. Young men without jobs, who spent their days and nights sitting in parks and cafés, weren't exactly invisible. On top of it, there was no way to hide their Basque accents.

Since none of the assassins had lived in Madrid long enough to become completely familiar with the city, everything was hard, from finding an apartment to renting a car. They didn't have a good network of friends and contacts to rely on. Nor did they have a safe way to communicate other than with face-to-face meetings. The one thing they did have going for them was Spanish lassitude—and the fortune that Spain's secret police weren't particularly efficient.

The Basque assassins twice accidentally fired off rounds in their apartments. It was sheer luck that neighbors didn't call the police. And in what can only be described as a rash act, they stole a machine gun from a sleeping sentry at Spain's military headquarters. What did ETA have to do to get noticed? Apparently nothing, and with each day, ETA's confidence in its ability to assassinate Carrero Blanco grew. In spite of the mistakes, its members still retained the element of surprise.

—

O
n the morning of December 20, Carrero Blanco emerged from his apartment building at five after nine. His bodyguard and driver were waiting by his new Dodge 3700 GT, as was the rest of his security detail.

No one has ever come forward to say they'd noticed anything out of place that morning. To be sure, no one noticed a chalk mark on Calle de Claudio Coello, a street behind Francisco de Borja. The unsteady
vertical line on the wall looked like a child's thoughtless scrawl. But in the high-end-murder business it's called a “timing line”—a mark to help clock the speed of a moving car.

Another thing no one noticed that morning was the ETA assassins who'd been posing as sculptors. Two months before, they'd rented a basement studio on Calle de Claudio Coello. This time of the morning they'd normally be making a racket, chipping away at their blocks of marble and carrying out heavy bags of something. Marble chips, the neighbors assumed. No one, of course, had a clue they'd been tunneling under the street. But not a peep out of them now.

No, to all appearances it was a typical morning, the usual people on their way to work, the same early shoppers. The only thing unusual was that the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had been in Madrid on a visit and had stopped by the American embassy, which was only a couple blocks from San Francisco de Borja.

Carrero Blanco stepped out of the church at about half past nine, the driver holding open the Dodge's rear door for him. Carrero Blanco took his usual seat. His bodyguards looked up and down the street, searching for anything out of place. The two chase cars of his security detail were double-parked behind Carrero Blanco's Dodge, idling. Everyone started off at once.

The convoy took its usual route south on Calle de Serrano, a one-way street, and then a left on Calle de Juan Bravo, another one-way street. It made an immediate left on Calle de Claudio Coello. It would have been a straight shot down Calle de Claudio Coello. But mid-block there was a double-parked car. No one was in it. But so what? This was Madrid, and Blanco's driver thought nothing about it. He slowed down to maneuver around it.

Carrero Blanco's Dodge had barely passed the double-parked car when the street heaved and exploded in flying debris and concrete. Where the Dodge had been, there now was only an enormous crater, quickly filling with water and sewage.

Carrero Blanco's dazed detail had no idea what had happened to him or his Dodge. It was as if he'd been plucked from the earth by an unworldly force. They wouldn't know where he was until people came running out of San Francisco de Borja to tell them that the car had landed on a second-floor terrace on the other side of the five-story church. Carrero Blanco immediately survived the blast, but he died afterward in the hospital. His driver and bodyguard also died.

Franco would be dead less than two years later. But Spain went after ETA and Carrero Blanco's assassins the best it could. In 1978 one of them was himself assassinated in France by a car bomb. A few others were hauled in, or drifted off to other occupations. One became a successful filmmaker. ETA never got its own country. Whether or not Carrero Blanco's assassination hastened the end of Spanish fascism is a matter of interpretation.

Beirut, July 11, 1987: The Victorians would have called it Eastern licentiousness, but the way I looked at it at the time was that the Lebanese are a people who know how to throw a rollicking birthday party. It was my thirty-fifth birthday, and one I'll never forget.

A new friend of mine, whom I'll call Colette, put it together. She was a smart, sweet girl and, as the Italians say,
un bel pezzo di figa
. She picked an outdoor restaurant just downhill from a mountain village called Faraya.

Right away, I liked the feng shui of the place, how the restaurant was carved into the limestone hillside, its terrace thrown open to a spectacular set of seashell-pink Roman ruins and, beyond the ruins, the inevitable Mediterranean framed by a spotless blue-lacquered sky.

I thought it would be only four of us, but more people kept showing
up, about a dozen in the end. The more the merrier, I thought. These days I was doing my best to pass myself off as a foreign roué come to Lebanon to party. Which was only partially true.

The more pressing truth was that I was now as paranoid as Chuck. I could feel Hajj Radwan's hot breath hard on the back of my neck. There was nothing specific other than the slow accumulation of evidence that he had free run of the Christian enclave. The French assassinations and a lot of recent really good chatter were proof enough for me.

But it wouldn't be until the Hariri investigation that I fully understood just how right I was. As I wrote before, Hajj Radwan's brother-in-law—the on-the-ground coordinator for Hariri's assassination—had set himself up on the Christian side of Beirut posing as an Armenian jeweler. If he could embed himself in the Christian enclave so easily, it must have been all the easier for Hajj Radwan's less prominent operatives. Hell, for all I knew, my downstairs neighbors worked for him.

It all meant that a Carrero Blanco–like assassination would have been a cup of tea for Hajj Radwan. Which left me the choice of either hiding in our fortress, counting the days until it was time to leave Beirut, or going out among the Lebanese and pretending to be something I wasn't. If I could have, I would have posed as a priest or something, but it never would have worked. So, I was left with the womanizing act.

The party started with about fifty plates of Lebanese mezze—hummus, tabbouleh, fresh vegetables—and an enormous bottle of homemade arak. It's the Lebanese version of Greek ouzo. It disappeared faster than I thought possible.

I wished the hard drinking hadn't started so early; these people were interesting. Mostly Greek Orthodox, they were in their twenties and hip. Their politics were open-minded and ecumenical; of all the Lebanese Christians, they were the closest to the Muslims. It also wasn't far from my mind that one of the assassins of the Maronite president-elect in September 1982 was Greek Orthodox. It was a long shot, but I was hoping one of my fellow partyers might know a way into Hajj Radwan's world.

All too soon things started to get watery, the conversation descending into giggling and professions of eternal love between America and Lebanon. Mercifully, someone stood up on a chair to recite a poem—in Greek. At the end of it, even though I understood nothing, I downed my arak with the best of them. The next bard jumped up on the table and stomped his foot in cadence with his delivery. We emptied our glasses again, only this time smashing them on the floor. All of the dishes on the table soon met the same fate; the owner stood in the door, smiling at us.

I suspected lunch was over when my fellow revelers got up, staggered to their cars, and came back with their assault rifles. Each couplet now was punctuated by the rat-tat-tat of firing into the air. I watched as the tracer rounds arced over the Roman ruins toward the sea. We were on borrowed light by the time we finally left.

—

T
hat night I couldn't sleep, thinking how I'd been caught up in the lunacy of this country, falling for its charms like so many other expat saps. Or maybe harder than most did. I was always after that anonymous moment when some fact or tidbit of information would clear up some burning question or explain the byways of political violence that govern these people.

Not long after my birthday party, I took over a source who had some good inroads into Fatah. He soon got into trouble though, obligating me to put him up in one of my apartments to wait for things to cool down. One night over a whiskey, he asked me if he could trust me. It's a question I always have a pat answer for: Yes, absolutely.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, he said that Fatah had been behind the 1982 assassination of the Lebanese president-elect. There's too much detail to get into here, but the upshot was that it had been Yasser Arafat who'd personally given the orders. Arafat decided the president-elect was a dire threat to the Palestinians and that he had no choice other than to murder him. But it didn't mean that Arafat could afford to
claim it or, for that matter, even use his own people. It's the reason he enlisted a breakaway faction of the predominantly Greek Orthodox Syrian Social Nationalist Party to do the job. If my source hadn't been able to provide chapter and verse, I would have dismissed his story out of hand.

The story became even more interesting when the source told me one of Hajj Radwan's gunmen might have been connected to the president's assassination. When I asked him whether Hajj Radwan was in on it, he said he didn't think so. When I asked him if there was a way to check, he shot back that he wouldn't ask.

The deeper I waded into Lebanon's swamp, the murkier it seemed to get. There were layers upon layers of hidden relations I couldn't make sense of, entire worlds closed to me. At times it seemed as if there were a caste of assassins who hired out their services. Hajj Radwan first murdered for the Palestinians and later for the Iranians and the Syrians. The fact that it wasn't always about politics added to the complexity. Hajj Radwan spent seven years trying to free his brother-in-law from his Kuwaiti prison. But there was no way for me to tie it all up in a pink bow. I did have my little consolations, though. If ETA could bumble around Madrid and not tip its hand, so could I.

There was one girl from my birthday party who'd caught my attention. She had a voice that could drive the birds from the sky, but a sixth sense told me she was a good connector. I called her to ask her out for drinks.