Whoever APR Holdings was, they had their hands full with Nathan Vogel. It was hard to beat a client willing to fight to the death, literally. The man had nothing to lose that was important to him beyond that piece of land and not leaving his home. But APR likely had the cash to play the long game. I wouldn’t take a bet on which party was more stubborn.
“Are you at home?”
I phoned Cai from the car on the painfully slow drive through city traffic back toward the Loop, worried about her emotional state and her ability to put caution before ambition.
“You’d be proud of me. I’m being a good girl, but I hate it already. I feel like a slacker on the verge of sliding toward sweats and bedroom slippers and dirty hair as my daytime attire. Please conduct an intervention if I go there.” She sighed. “And Richard has been in depositions all day, so we haven’t been able to talk. I actually lied to the office and told them I had a migraine so my phone wouldn’t ring thirty times an hour like it normally does. I didn’t want to fumble through a bullshit explanation of why I was off-site.”
Cai was racing ahead, projecting both a long-term stint with work-from-home and what she assumed would be a decline into frumpery. I couldn’t predict the length of her isolation, but my friend would not be ditching her mascara or buying her first pair of sweatpants.
“Richard will understand,” I said. “He wants his star attorney to stay safe. The two of you just need to figure out a communication strategy.”
“I can manage for a while, but I can’t do this for long without my work suffering. And my sanity.”
And that discomfort would lead her to take risks. “You staying safe is the most important thing. Let’s concentrate on that. We’ll figure this out. Take it one day at a time.”
I could hear the anxiety in her voice and imagined her already bouncing off the walls, even though it had only been a few hours.
“I met with Mr. Vogel,” I said. “He’s quite a character. This real estate group can’t be happy to have a stubborn old man to deal with. What do you know about them?”
“Not much. They’ve stayed in the background, using the attorney exclusively as their contact point. So far, I haven’t even met him. We’ve handled everything via email. I don’t get the impression he’s a heavy hitter, but that’s probably just because I’ve never heard of him. He certainly isn’t big in the real estate mogul world, that much I know. We all know that breed. They thrive on attention.”
“Did any names come up from inside APR in your dealings with the attorney?” Brynn still hadn’t called with an update, so that meant she was struggling to get information.
She paused for a minute. “No, now that you ask, I don’t recall any names of principals. That’s odd. It’s a small case for me, so I guess I overlooked that.”
“Have you heard anything more from Zipsdefender?” I asked, checking off the other threat—if it was a separate threat, that is.
“All quiet.”
“Good. Stay on top of it, but let’s hope it stays that way. I’ll call you tonight.”
I was back in the office thirty minutes later. Motioning to Brynn, I dropped my bag next to my desk and went to my wall. Adding Post-its for Vogel and APR and the attorney Bruni, I surveyed the landscape of the story.
“I’m still having trouble with that company you asked about,” Brynn said as she joined me. “Private ownership. And I’ve yet to find a name other than this attorney who’s listed as the managing agent.”
“Let me guess, his name is Stephan Bruni,” I said.
“Yes, it is. I guess you’re ahead of me. How does this company, APR Holdings, fit into the mix on these murders?”
“What I know so far is that they had a case before Judge Atkinson that I need to know more about. I’ll go into the why later,” I said. “For now, APR is trying to develop some property, a decent-size project. Speculation is that the plan is for a housing development or a big retail project. I want to know what the project is. It would be easier if we knew who was behind the company versus just this front man, but we may find that out as we dig. Let’s start with the scale of the project. Let’s see if we can figure out the total landmass based on how many purchases they’ve made. That will help us narrow it down. We may also discover some names as we work through the purchases.”
“I’ll get my laptop,” Brynn said.
I picked up mine and moved over to the corner table so Brynn and I could work. Then I printed out a parcel map of the area and grabbed more Post-its and highlighters. We plugged away on our computers, marking off parcels on the map as we discovered a sale. It was tedious work, but slowly the typography began to flesh out.
Rubbing my eyes from the strain, I plugged another parcel number into the database. When the screen filled, I blinked, looking a second time at the name in front of me.
Seller—Felix Panici.
“Do you recall seeing any parcels where the seller was Felix Panici? I know I didn’t ask you to look for sellers’ names, but I think I have found a new angle.” Thoughts swirled in my head as I considered the possible implications of this new information.
“That name sounds familiar, but I’ll have to go back through to be sure.”
“Do it. And watch for Rae Panici, Edmund Rastello, Nestor Morales, Bradford Reynolds, and Orlando Gaetano on either side of property transactions.” I scribbled the names on a piece of paper for her, and we got back to work. There was no need for conversation. Our fingers flew over the keys, and our eyes tired from the concentration, stopping only to take a drink or to note a new find on paper.
An hour and a half later, we had discovered four parcels sold by Panici, six by Rastello, one by Morales, and two by Gaetano out of nearly sixty lots within our target area, all sold within the last four months. Noticeably absent was Bradford Reynolds’s name. This had to have been planned, as if the men knew the buyer before the deals or knew that something big was coming and intended to profit from it. What wasn’t clear yet was how long ago these men had purchased those properties and how they had known a project was in the works.
We hadn’t gone through parcel by parcel tracking ownership, so it wasn’t completely clear how many properties were not within APR control, nor did I know if I had all the names of the parties involved, but based on what we could clearly identify as APR owned or sympathetic to the scheme, a substantial portion was under their control.
My first thought was Farnsworth had clued them in to the development plan; the next was someone in the group knew whoever owned APR Holdings.
“What do you think is going on? Why did so many guys who know each other all own property in the same area?” Brynn asked.
“I think the most likely scenario is that these were planned, coordinated flips. The guys who knew the big picture bought what they could early. A way to prime the pump. Get in while pricing was low, I imagine, since this isn’t a neighborhood on the upswing.”
“Wouldn’t all that sale activity have tipped someone off? Investors watch that. Neighbors talk.”
“It depends on how slowly the purchases happened.” I thought for a minute. “Another possibility is that the guys on the inside, and by that I mean APR, needed a guaranteed amount of land to take the project from idea to next level. Like when a housing development needs a certain number of pre-construction contracts in place to get their next level of financing. Maybe by having these owners in their back pockets, so to speak, that juiced up something else, like financing. That would explain why the sales from these guys are all recent.”
“And this is all tied to Atkinson somehow?” Brynn asked.
“Whatever the plan is, right now there’s a wrench in that plan. This guy Vogel. Atkinson was presiding judge in the lawsuit as APR is trying to force Vogel out.”
“Where does Reynolds fit in this? We didn’t find any property in his name.”
I looked at her, contemplating the question.
“As we started to dig into this, I thought maybe that five-hundred-K debt might have been a loan to finance a purchase or two. The more people, the better as a way to spread the risk, but since there is nothing on the books in his name, I still don’t have an answer.”
I pulled over the plot map so we could see the scale.
“That’s a decent chunk of land,” Brynn said. “Is it a bigger area than what we found when we did that casino story?”
“Comparable, I’d say, but this location doesn’t have expressway access, so whatever they’re hoping to build is more intimate. And a tougher build, given the concentration of property and the different zoning involved. I’m leaning toward a residential project or a combo residential and commercial.”
“What’s next? You want me back on The Chicken Shack story? I’m talking to two employees on Morales’s inspection beat in an hour.”
“Stay on that. We just connected Gaetano and Morales to whatever this real estate deal is, so this is one complicated story, not two. I’m going to dig into the attorney who's been hitting up Vogel while you stay on the restaurant stuff. Let’s touch base later.”
Brynn went back to her desk, and I ran a search on Stephan Bruni. He was another solo practitioner, in the Panici vein, who dabbled in whatever legal areas struck his fancy. He also seemed an odd choice for a complex real estate development problem. The solo guys didn’t have a staff of researchers and paralegals to do the background work. And often not the city government connections to get to the right people quickly. At best, he had a staff of one or two, and would call in a freelancer if something outside his wheelhouse came up. I knew the breed and knew they generally got blown away by a well-staffed corporate team. So either this attorney was just the front man for the official records and had now been brought on to run out the clock on Vogel, or he was a true insider.
I picked up my phone. “Peter, it’s Andrea again. I need another favor. You know all the development guys around town. Have you ever heard of a real estate development company called APR Holdings?”
“Never heard of them. What are they working on?”
“I don’t know yet, but I think it’s housing or mixed-use. There’s almost nothing publicly available about them, so I thought I’d try you.”
“Maybe it’s newly formed. A lot of guys split off from another group to do their own thing, or small rehabbers get deluded into thinking it’s easy and form a startup for one project.”
“That could be. How about an attorney named Stephan Bruni?”
“Again, I got nothing.”
“Thanks anyway. Now I really need to send you over a really good bottle of scotch.”
“I’d settle for dinner.”
I laughed it off. No, a date was not going to be the price of information.
I needed to know who was behind APR. Borkowski was too cheap to authorize a Westlaw subscription, arguing that I could use old-fashioned shoe leather. Screw that when databases were faster. I set up an account. We could fight about the expense later when I submitted the bill.
A search on APR Holdings didn’t give me much more than I already had. Formed three years ago. Six employees. An address that sounded like a mailing service. No bankruptcies. Bruni was still the only contact given. Results for Bruni directly showed an eight-year legal career, always as an independent. A baby attorney as far as these things went.
However, the value of the Westlaw system was not its company structure information but its case law history, so I could dig through Bruni’s legal résumé case by case.
Improper permitting of a garage, a dispute over property lines between neighbors, some kid’s vandalism charge. How did this guy get hooked up with APR? Was he someone’s nephew?
And then I saw it. Four separate cases involving TCS, Inc. The Chicken Shack’s corporate name. He was Gaetano’s attorney, but hadn’t been for the bribery case.