CHAPTER THREE

It was one of those fall mornings that remind you winter is coming. But Nora didn’t feel it as she walked through chilly Hoboken. Her mom would walk Sophie to school today. Nora was in trial mode, her head already in the courtroom. When she grabbed a bagel with cream cheese at Seventh Street, she was planning the day in court. When she shuffled with the crowd down the stairs to the PATH train for the short ride to Manhattan, she was thinking about her key witness.

She didn’t even notice the tabloid headlines shouting from newsstands. The Daily News went with its nickname for the murdered former governor whose record of sexual harassment was exposed shortly before his death: LUV GUV SLAY TRIAL. The Post focused on the accused: KILLER KYRA IN THE DOCK. Sure, Nora knew the murder trial of Kyra Burke, the dead governor’s estranged wife, was starting soon, but that was a local case handled by the Manhattan District Attorney. She was a fed—an Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York—prosecuting a mobster, and she didn’t much care about the “Luv Guv” or “Killer Kyra”. The feeling was mutual, in a way; the media didn’t care much about mob cases anymore, didn’t seem to care that there were still sophisticated and dangerous criminals out there, didn’t seem to care that the elusive Dominic “The Nose” D’Amico was finally going to jail.

But Nora wasn’t worrying about the press this morning. When the commuters flowed out through the Oculus, the gigantic ribbed white bird of a transportation hub emerging from the wreckage of the original World Trade Center site, she was worrying about Frenchie. Would Frenchie hold up? Would he freak out? Would the jury believe him? When Frenchie pointed at The Nose in that cavernous courtroom today, would that finally get D’Amico off the streets and into prison?

She marched along Park Row past City Hall and instinctively lowered her head as she prepared to pass the forty-story white granite David N. Dinkins Municipal Building. For some reason, it was always into the wind here, which was why, on trial days, she broke a personal rule and used some hairspray to hold her bob together. Juries didn’t trust prosecutors with crazy hair.

But she wasn’t thinking about the wind or her hair right now. Nora’s mind was across “the bridge” which connected her building to a more dignified piece of stone, the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, named for the legendary civil rights attorney.

United States v. Dominic D’Amico, aka “The Nose,” was being tried in courtroom 318 of the Marshall Courthouse. That was unusual, because most federal criminal hearings these days were held in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse—the so-called “new courthouse”—finished in 1996 and wedged into a tiny piece of land behind the state courthouse, over which it towered, and across narrow Pearl Street from the MCC jail. Most federal trial judges now sat in the new courthouse, leaving the Marshall building, with its feeling of an old Ivy League eating club—all rich carpet, dark paneling, and whispering—to the federal appeals court. But there were no bridges to the new courthouse, so it was inconvenient and nerve-racking to move dangerous defendants and incarcerated witnesses on the street for court proceedings.

Room 318 was a grand old courtroom with ample space for spectators and press, but its best feature was that, behind the judge’s bench, it was secretly connected to the bridges to the MCC and the US Attorney’s office. Witnesses could be brought in and moved without being seen. And Nora needed her key witness not to be seen until the moment he stepped up to take the oath.

There was no banter with Benny Dugan this morning. He had already been to the US Marshals Witness Security holding facility to see their star witness, the one who was going to bury Dominic D’Amico, if he didn’t melt down first.

“You should check in with Frenchie before he hits the stand,” Dugan said.

“Hanging on?” Nora asked.

“Barely. Feels like he could come apart any minute.”

Daniel Albert Joseph, aka “Frenchie,” was a career thief who looked like the actor Denis Leary. A handsome man with thick wheat-colored hair, he had the same gravel in his voice as the actor, but with a hint of la langue française of his childhood. He was normally charming and confident, traits that had been essential to his living to the age of forty-eight.

Frenchie first met The Nose when he needed to unload a highly recognizable bronze sculpture he’d stolen from the Bolton Gallery in Manhattan. The Bolton had been around since 1857 and occupied a grand townhouse at Seventy-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue; it specialized in American and Western paintings and sculpture. Frenchie wanted their Remington bronze. So late one night, he stole it, working alone and climbing the elevator shaft as his way in and around alarms. With the heavy sculpture in a canvas bag on his shoulder, he pushed a door open and vanished. He couldn’t unload something like that on an ordinary fence, so, through fellow criminals, he managed to meet The Nose, who was a recently made member of the Gambino Crime Family, the most powerful of New York’s five Mafia Families.

Their first meeting was in the parking lot of a diner near Kennedy Airport, where they made a deal for the Remington. D’Amico took to Frenchie immediately, explaining that he sold high-end stuff like that to people who would never display the art. “They just wanna touch themselves while they look at it,” he explained. But that was none of Frenchie’s business; what mattered was that D’Amico said he liked Frenchie’s style and asked him to bring him more stolen valuables.

Frenchie and The Nose rose together, each becoming more sophisticated and successful in their criminal worlds. Frenchie would scout art and check with D’Amico to see if he had a buyer. From time to time, D’Amico suggested a focus for Frenchie. The Valnaghi was their best work. D’Amico asked Frenchie to case it, and the thief came back wide-eyed, for two contradictory reasons. The Madison Avenue gallery’s walls were covered with amazing paintings. That was the good news. The bad news, he told The Nose, was there was no way to get to those walls because the large gallery floor was honeycombed with sensors and the entire open space, which extended upward for three floors, was equipped with a heat sensor that would detect even small changes in air temperature. Frenchie didn’t say it couldn’t be done, only that it would be really hard. D’Amico responded by offering him 40 percent of whatever he made reselling the pieces.

Several weeks later, Frenchie used a diamond blade to cut the glass in a roof skylight at the gallery. Wearing a head-to-toe wetsuit to contain his body heat, he lowered himself on a cable into the main display space, swinging from wall to wall—above the motion sensors. He skipped stuff he knew was overpriced junk and cut twenty-seven Old Master paintings and drawings from their frames, including two panels from the early 1400s by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico, gently rolling and storing each piece in a large portfolio tube slung over his back, before retreating up through the skylight. It was an impressive job clearly done by somebody who knew a lot about both burglary and art. D’Amico paid him $800,000 for his end. Frenchie knew that was well below 40 percent of the sales price, but he said nothing. D’Amico by this point had become a capo in the Gambino Family, supervising his own crew of made members and answering directly to the Family boss. He was not one to entertain complaints about accounting.

To Frenchie’s dismay though, D’Amico wasn’t interested in Persian rugs, despite Frenchie’s insistence that they were an underappreciated SWAG—a term purportedly derived from the police report category of “Stolen Wares and Goods.” D’Amico responded that rugs were stupid because more than one person was needed on every job, given the weight of the things. “Helpers,” he explained, “bring risk. Stay the fuck away from that kind of risk. You are the best there is, alone. Keep it that way.”

But Frenchie couldn’t stop thinking about rugs, especially after he burned through the money from the Valnaghi job. Before he’d met The Nose, Frenchie had orchestrated an audacious rug heist at the Regency Manhattan art storage warehouse and was itching to do it again. With coconspirators, he built a custom crate for himself and shipped it—and himself—to the warehouse. A corrupt employee ensured the huge, heavy wooden box was placed inside a special vault that held Persian rugs, each worth tens of thousands of dollars. That evening, Frenchie emerged from the box. He removed the heavy material that gave the box its shipping weight and replaced the weights with dozens of carefully selected carpets. It was a long process, but he had all night and he had snacks and water he brought with him. Before dawn, he climbed back into the box with his pile of rugs, sealed the box from the inside, and waited. First thing in the morning, the corrupt employee “discovered” the misaddressed crate and immediately shipped it—and Frenchie and the Persians—out of the warehouse.

The Regency Manhattan rug job had been so lucrative—and so goddam fun—he had to do it again. He had promised to avoid rugs and to work only for D’Amico, but what The Nose didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

So he returned to the Regency and, with the help of four others, used a jackhammer to open a burglar-sized hole in the wall from an adjoining roof. The hole easily accommodated the twenty Persian carpets he stole that night. That was the good part. The bad part was that D’Amico was right: helpers were risky. One of the other four got jammed up on something unrelated and fingered Frenchie and his helpers.

Frenchie was sent to Rikers Island—New York City’s main jail complex, on an island in the East River—for five months before trial. He had never cooperated with law enforcement but, as he sat in the bleak jail, now forty-five and looking at a seriously long stretch in New York state prison, he was receptive when two detectives from the NYPD robbery squad came to see him. Their pitch was simple: wear a wire for us against other thieves and fences, and we’ll spare you many years upstate. He signed up and spent the next eighteen months working for law enforcement, making cases against his former colleagues. Everyone except The Nose. He didn’t tell the cops about D’Amico. And what? Wear a wire against a capo? That was too dangerous. Instead he gave up rug guys, guys he had sold small stuff to, little people. The cops ate it up.

Frenchie was so good at dealing with people that his undercover tapes usually produced guilty pleas. But not always. Two corrupt rug merchants went to trial in state court, and Frenchie dreaded revealing himself at a public trial. Under stress, Frenchie secretly returned to the two things that relaxed him—heroin and stealing. He began visiting Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, two high-end department stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, to steal crystal, silver, and anything else he could resell for drugs. But he cleaned himself up before testifying through an in-patient treatment program and the rug dealers were convicted. Frenchie was going to get a reduced sentence, which, at his request, he was going to serve in a state prison away from New York City, where he was less likely to be recognized.

Except he had been recognized and he was no longer safe in prison, which is how Nora and Benny met him.

Frenchie was in solitary confinement near Buffalo, about as far from New York City as one could get without leaving the state. His lawyer called Carmen Garcia, the chief of the Violent and Organized Crime unit at One St. Andrew’s. He told Carmen his client wanted to get into the federal witness protection program—known as WITSEC—and had information about “a significant organized crime figure.” Carmen explained that she didn’t do deals over the phone, how getting into WITSEC would be complicated for a state prisoner, and she would never buy without a test drive anyway. She sent Nora and Benny to Buffalo, where Frenchie told them everything he knew about The Nose.

Now Frenchie was in “the program” and about to hit the stand. He was still in custody and would be until he finished his state jail term, but he was doing that time in a special witness protection prison run by the federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Marshals Service.

Nora and Benny stood as the WITSEC marshals brought Frenchie into the small room just behind courtroom 318. He was in a prison jumpsuit, the way Nora wanted it. The defendant D’Amico was out on bail and appeared every day in a tailored suit; she wanted the jury to see that Frenchie was being held accountable and now it was D’Amico’s turn.

Frenchie seemed jumpy, nervous. “Hey, you ready to do this?” Nora asked.

“Yeah, yeah, ready as I’ll ever be,” Frenchie answered in a low voice.

Benny hit it directly, his own voice a rumble. “What, you scared of this piece of shit?”

Frenchie exhaled a short laugh. “Nah. Not for me. But I still worry about my kid.”

His adult son, Albert, had declined the offer of relocation with a new identity, something the marshals routinely provided to willing family members of a witness. But Frenchie’s son was not willing. They weren’t close enough for him to abandon his whole life because a father who had been distant most of his childhood was now doing something really dangerous.

“You heard from him?” Benny asked. “There a problem?”

“No, no, I never hear from Albert. Still, everybody in my old world knows I have a son, and they might hurt him just to hurt me. Only good thing I ever did was have that kid and then stay away so he grew up normal. I didn’t fuck him up. But now I may have fucked him.”

“They know he’s a civilian, Frenchie,” Benny said. “They ain’t gonna mess with him. They know if they ever did, we would fuck with them ’til the end of time.”

“I appreciate that, Benny, I really do.” Looking at Nora, he added, “I appreciate both of you, but this has me feeling like I’m making a mistake.”

Nora paused, a feeling of panic rising in her throat. Before she could speak, Benny jumped on it. “Don’t be a putz. We made you promises, we kept our promises. Now you gotta keep yours and testify. You told us in motherfucking freezing Buffalo that you were an honorable man. I believed it then, I believe it now. So fucking act like it.”

The room went silent. Frenchie studied the table, while Nora and Benny stared at him. After several long beats, Frenchie looked up, jutted his chin out, and broke the silence. “You’re right. Fuck it, let’s do this.”

“Good man,” Nora said, standing. “Marshals will bring you out in just a couple minutes. Be yourself out there. Tell the truth and get on with your life.”