Other than at the occasional family function, Brian did not see much of his Uncle Jim as he was growing up. He had gone on to do what was expected of him, graduate high school and college and get a ‘white collar’ job. Out of the ten cousins on his father’s side, seven went to college. They had a surgeon, a nurse, and a CPA among them. He had chosen a rewarding career in the financial services industry. One of his cousins (one who did not go to college) was also in financial services more or less. His cousin, Mike, had followed his father (Brian’s Uncle Jim) into the debt resolution side of the industry. His cousin had inherited Jim’s fine physique and looked for all the world like Sylvester Stallone, only taller.
The whole damn nightmare, Brian found himself in, started one day as he was heading out for lunch and saw his cousin Mike coming up the street. After the ritual hand shake and hug, “How you doing?” kind of thing, Mike leaned in and told him that his Uncle Jim was waiting around the corner in the car and would like to see him. Brian was going to make a joke about being ‘sent for’, but he really wasn’t that close to Mike and he wasn’t sure how he would take it. So he followed him around the corner and saw his Uncle Jim sitting in the passenger seat of his Cadillac. Mike opened the rear door for Brian and then got behind the wheel. Uncle Jim turned around and shook hands (no room for a hug), told Brian he was looking good and got straight to the point.
“Listen, kid (all his nieces and nephews were ‘kid’, Brian always had the feeling that Jim never really had all their names straight), I need to talk to you about some family things, it’s important. I thought we might take a walk around the park.”
They made polite chit chat on the short drive up to Central Park. Now, of course, Brian’s antennae were up. He couldn’t think of what this might be about. Maybe the brothers had fallen out over something and Jim wanted him to be a peace emissary. Mike let them out at the Plaza and Jim told him to be back there in half an hour.
They crossed the street, entered the park and began their stroll at a leisurely pace.
“Kid, your dad has gotten himself in some trouble and I need your help in order to help him out. Also, and I will explain it, but this is not something you can go to him with. I know that you are real close with him but if you go to him he will not let you help and I need your help, to help him. Trust me, this is not something he can handle himself.”
At this point, as Brian’s mother use to say, the color drained from his face. Jim motioned to an empty park bench.
“Kid, listen, I think this is something we can take care of but it is a serious thing and I wouldn’t ask for your help unless I really needed you.”
“Jesus Christ, Uncle Jim, what is it?”
“Look, kid, you know how your father is about the old country and all that political stuff?”
His dad was pretty passionate about the situation in the North of Ireland. Brian knew that his dad attended fund raisers for NORAID and Friends of Sinn Féin. Once at Mass, a visiting priest (not an Irishman) referred to the situation in the North of Ireland as neither saintly nor scholarly and his mother had to tackle his father to prevent him from walking out. Brian could not remember ever seeing his father that mad in public.
“Well, kid, your father has been helping those guys out when he works the lanes.”
If you have ever been to a modern port, you will see the trucks with their containers lining up in lanes to get weighed and to pass their paper work to guys working the booths. This was one of the jobs his dad sometimes had. It was considered one of the best jobs as you got to sit down all day. The other sought after job was riding the scout car. Containers that came off ships were stacked in a park before they were loaded onto the trucks. Each container had an identifier like a bar code. The scout car guys would ride around the park identifying containers. His dad got to do this sometimes as well.
Uncle Jim didn’t have to spell it out. His dad was apparently helping Irish Republicans falsify the weights on shipping containers in order not to draw attention to their real content.
“Okay,” Brian said, “So what’s the problem? If that’s the case, can’t you just tell him to stop?”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that. Listen, certain people get paid when the lanes are used for business. In this case, they have not been getting paid. When they find out, and they will, they will have to make a statement. They won’t want to go head on with the Irish, so my guess is that they will wait and arrange an accident for your father, probably when he is driving the scout car. Accidents still happen all the time on the docks. I found out because one of the other guys working the lanes figured it out. This guy owes money and he traded the information for some extra time on what he owes. He noticed drivers heading for your dad’s lane even when it had the longest lines. He checked around and found out the containers were headed for Dublin. He put two and two together and he laid it out for me. I don’t know what your dad and his pals are thinking, but if this guy can figure it out, it won’t be long before the people who are supposed to be being paid figure it out. In fact, I figure we only have a few weeks at best.”
“I still don’t understand why you don’t tell my dad, why are you telling me?”
“I know your dad and I know what he would say and how he would try to handle it. Your dad would say, ‘fuck them’ and assume that he wouldn’t be touched because of his friends. He wouldn’t believe that an accident would be arranged for him. But I swear to you, that that is exactly what will happen and his friends will choose to believe it was an accident and then go to another port or start paying the people they should have been paying. I am telling you because I think there is another way to handle this. The guy that should be getting the payments is the guy that will want to make the statement when he finds out. If he were out of the picture, before he finds out, then I would have time to reason with your dad and his friends and get them to start paying the new guy or take their business elsewhere.”
“I don’t really understand this and I absolutely don’t understand what this has to do with me.”
“The guy that is our problem is Joey Tarantino. He’s the guy that should have been paid, he’s the guy who is going to arrange the accident for your dad when he finds out. He’s a ‘made’ guy and not someone I can just take out of the picture. Bottom line is we need to arrange something for him, before he finds out about your dad and his friends, and I need your help with the arrangements. Listen, kid, I know this is a lot, but I know you love your father and I need to know if I can count on you.”
“Listen, Uncle Jim, this is a lot. You are telling me that some guy is going to try and kill my father and that you are going to take him out, but you need my help. Of course, I will help my dad but I need to know what the hell you are asking me to do.”
“Okay, that’s good. Meet me tomorrow after work for a drink at Tommy Makem’s. I will lay it out. It’s nothing physical, no rough stuff, it’s something you can absolutely help with.”
Brian went back to work but he didn’t stay long. He felt sick and couldn’t concentrate. Back in the day, they didn’t have cubicles; they just had desks in rows in an open plan, no privacy, nowhere to hide. He could reach forward and touch the back of the guy in front of him and the guy behind him could do the same thing. The space on either side was just enough to wheel a file cart up and down. If you looked sick or worried, someone would notice and inquire either out of genuine concern, boredom, or concern for their own health (if you’re sick kid, you need to get the hell out of here and not be spreading that shit all over the office). When polite inquiries were made, (what’s a matter you look like shit) he told them he had eaten a hot dog from a cart at lunch time. The response from his co-workers tells you a lot about their personalities. From Charlie, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap, kid.” (English major, Hunter College), from Pete, “You want to see if we can go find the guy, at least get your money back,” (Vendetta major, CCNY) and finally from Sal, his boss, “Yeah, go home and feel better.” When the others were out of ear shot, Sal continued, “We all have our troubles, from time to time, kid, but we gotta learn to keep that stuff outside and not let it in here, they pay us to do business here, okay?” (Psychology major, School of Hard Knocks). He knew, right away, that the hot dog story was bullshit. Now Brian felt sick and embarrassed. It was a stupid story. Sal knew him well enough to know that if he wanted a hot dog he would have gone to Nathan’s which was only three blocks away. God, he had to think straight and make good decisions. If he couldn’t come up with a convincing story about being sick at lunch time, how was he going to react if the cops questioned him about the kind of business he thought his Uncle Jim was going to suggest?
He phoned Noreen, his wife and told her he was on the way home. On the bus trip out, he tried to calm down and reason it out. His first impulse was to go see his dad and talk it over but Jim had made it clear that if his dad found out, his reaction would be defiance and that could get him killed. Knowing his dad, that was probably a correct assessment of what his reaction would be. So, if he didn’t tell him that meant, he just needed to decide whether to help his Uncle Jim or not. If his dad was in real danger, of course he should help; he should at least listen to what Jim had to say. But accessory to murder, God Almighty! If someone was coming to harm his family, he would not hesitate to defend them. Wasn’t this the same thing? It’s not like they could just go to the police, nobody had committed a crime, except his father, who could get twenty years. He decided that there was no harm in hearing Jim out, he did not have to commit to anything, just hear him out. He definitely would not tell his wife anything about this. She just wouldn’t understand. He thought about talking it over with friends of his but again, he couldn’t decide how to talk about it without potentially making them an accomplice to a crime.
He thought about the scene in the Godfather when Michael Corleone is at the hospital and he asks the nurse for help, “Some men are coming to kill my father, please help me,” but this was not the movies. It was real life and totally fucked up. His brother was in his final year of a Master’s program at Fordham, he had his hands full and Brian certainly didn’t want him mixed up in this.
After his brother was born, there were complications and his mom was told she could not have any more kids. She and his dad were very disappointed but she set about being the best mother anyone could ever have asked for. She died of cancer four years ago and a day did not go by that Brian didn’t miss her. She was kind and gentle and funny. She had great wisdom and was much sought after by family members for life advice. He could sure use some sound advice now. His dad used to call her the brains of the outfit. Brian wondered if his dad would be doing what he was doing if she were still alive.
He thought about his wife again. Their passports were up to date, and if things went wrong they could always make a run for the old country. He was glad they didn’t have a house or kids or anything like that. He was worried, he was confused, he was planning an escape. He was going along with this and he hadn’t even heard the plan.
Brian never thought his dad would be in so deep with those people. He knew that his grandfather, Dan Flanagan, and his brother, Billy, had been in the IRA and that they had fought for Ireland’s freedom before coming to America. His grandfather died when he was ten, so they never really spoke much about the past. Billy Flanagan died long before Brian was born. Brian was told that he had died in an accident on the docks. Years later, he learned that he had been killed by some guys when he went to help out a perfect stranger. Brian grew up listening to the Clancy Brothers and any gathering of family or friends (mostly Irish) that had music usually included a few Irish Republican tunes.
When he was a young teenager, they made a summer trip to Ireland. They visited all the relations, both his mom’s and dad’s. They were staying with his mom’s sister who lived just outside a fairly large town in North Tipperary. It was late evening, but still bright, and Brian remembered going into the kitchen to get a glass of water. His aunt was sitting by the window drinking a cup of tea. He had reached for a glass when he heard a cracking noise in the distance. It was like a car backfiring. He was a bit startled, where his aunt and uncle lived was a really quiet place. He was used to going to sleep to the sound of traffic on Seventh Avenue, so he was really conscious of how quiet their home was in the evening. He looked at his aunt and asked her what the noise was. She replied as if she had not heard anything, then they heard another crack followed by a volley of cracks.
“That noise, Auntie Kate, what the heck is that?”
“Oh that, uhm, that’s just the lads out practicing, that’s all. Listen, we don’t talk about that, we never mention it, alright?”
He assured her that it was alright with him. The next day before he had a chance to speak with them, his parents set off to visit yet another cousin. After breakfast, he was alone with his uncle in the kitchen.
“About last night, Brian.”
“I know, Auntie Kate told me not to speak about it.”
“That’s right, lad, we don’t speak about it.”
“But isn’t that illegal? I am sure people could hear that for miles around. Isn’t there a Garda (police) station just a mile up the road in town?”
“Yes, that’s all true. But sure, no one here would arrest those lads. Not everyone agrees with their tactics mind, but everyone here is for a united Ireland and everyone believes that the Catholics of the North have the right to defend themselves. Bombs in pubs are another thing altogether and people will debate the right and the wrong of it but no one here will be calling the Guards on those lads. They are our neighbors and we all have to live together here. And sure, if someone called the Guards it is very unlikely that they would come at all. I am sure your dad has taught you some of our history, lad, and there is one thing that all Irishmen despise above all, and that’s an informer and rightly so. Whether you are for them or not, no one here would ever call the Guards. So as your auntie mentioned, we don’t talk about any noises we might hear on an evening.”
Brian found out some years later from a cousin that at the start of the troubles in the North, some of the lads had joined the FCA (Irish National Guard). At the time, the FCA were allowed to take their rifles home with them. The lads had a list of names of FCA members who lived in the area. In the evening, they would call around to the houses and ‘borrow’ the rifles for a few hours. Everyone, as they would say in Ireland, “turned a blind eye.” As things got worse in the North, the authorities had to make some effort to crack down on ‘illegal’ activity, so they no longer let the FCA bring their weapons home with them. At that point, the IRA no longer needed to train volunteers on old vintage WWII 303 rifles, they were fully equipped with AR 15 assault rifles. People said that the money for them, if not the guns themselves, had come in from the States. When he heard this at the time, he would not in a million years have thought his own father would have a hand in it.
Brian had met all different kinds of Republicans when he spent his year in Dublin and although he knew his dad sympathized with the overall objective of a united Ireland, he could not see him getting really close to any of the groups involved. The Official IRA seemed to be against the armed struggle, though not opposed to violence as such. They seemed to be looking for mass political action along the lines of workers of the world unite. The few he met really seemed to believe that East Germany was a worker’s paradise and that it had been built to defend the people. These guys seemed like out-and-out Communists. The Provisionals were for the armed struggle but the political wing folks in Sinn Fein, at least the ones he met, were all for a thirty-two county socialist Republic. Their great hero was Che Guevara and they spoke a lot about Ireland being the victim of colonial oppression. They had what they called solidarity with other liberation movements such as the African National Congress in South Africa. They were very quick to point out to anyone who would listen that Nelson Mandela had never renounced the armed wing of his party and that they would not renounce theirs.
At that time, there was even another faction, the Irish National Liberation Army, and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Brian only met one IRSP guy and it seemed like they were more radically left wing than the Provos but also in favor of the armed struggle, so they could not agree with the Officials. After a few drinks one night, he also confided in Brian that a lot of Irish politics had more to do with personalities and of who was in charge than it had to do with ideology and that all the ideology went out the window when a Loyalist mob came rampaging down the street while the RUC (police force in Northern Ireland) looked on in support.
Brian supposed that was it for the men of his father’s generation. His father could disagree with their politics (vehemently when anyone mentioned Socialism), but he was not going to sit by as the Catholics in the North were burned out of their homes and people protesting for civil rights in their own country were beaten and shot down by the police and British soldiers. While he himself had sympathy for the their cause, it never occurred to him to do anything about it other than give polite encouragement to those who took the time to explain the situation to him and to buy the occasional copy of An Phoblacht (the Republican newspaper). He did meet a few Protestants from Northern Ireland at Trinity College and although they were pretty reluctant to discuss politics with a Catholic Irish American, they stated a simple view that all they wanted was majority rule and that they couldn’t see what was wrong with that. They did not, needless to say, accept that majority rule should mean the majority of the people of the island of Ireland, not just the majority of the corner where they held the majority. Not surprising, all things considered. He deliberately did not travel to Belfast (Northern Ireland) when he was in Ireland. He felt that his first duty was to his family and that he needed to graduate from college and help to move his family on. He was angry at all the trouble his dad had brought on them but he would be lying if he didn’t say that a part of him deep down was proud of his dad, the crazy bastard.
As arranged, Brian met Uncle Jim in a quiet corner of Tommy Makem’s pub. The pub was quiet during the week and a mad house on the weekends. A lot of the illegal Irish workers gathered there at the weekend to drink their pay checks as generations of Irish immigrants had done before them. Jim arrived around 6:30 that evening and ordered a beer. Brian was drinking ginger ale, he wanted to be completely focused on the details.
Jim got straight down to business.
“Okay, so here’s the thing. The guy we were talking about has a number of business interests and he fancies himself as a business man. He is very focused on his legitimate interests. You are a banker, I am pretty sure you bank one of his companies. I’m thinking you could set up a meeting to talk to him about banking matters. I just need him to show up somewhere at a given place and time. A business meeting with a banker he will do alone, other kinds of meetings he will usually have a driver.”
“Uncle Jim, even supposing we do bank one of his firms, I am not on the sales side of things. I generally don’t go out and meet clients unless they are in trouble. Also, they would have an account officer assigned to them. I couldn’t just show up.”
“I thought of that and maybe there is a way around it. You heard of this RICO thing right?”
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations was a new weapon that prosecutors were using to convict mob bosses in so-called criminal conspiracies. If a business was considered a part of the criminal conspiracy, then the assets could be seized by the government and sold off to pay fines. This meant that any banks that had loans outstanding to these firms were shit out of luck. Just a couple of years back, US attorney Rudolph Giuliani had used the RICO law to indict the heads of all five Mafia families in New York.
“Let’s say that you had in your possession, an ownership chart that indicated that a certain business was tied to certain individuals who were well known organized crime figures. If the bank found out about this, they would not want to provide loans to that company anymore and if they stopped providing loans other banks might get suspicious and not want to do business with that firm anymore. This would be bad for the firm and bad for our guy. He has spent a lot of time and effort convincing people that he can handle the legitimate side of things and that they should invest money with him. It would look real bad if he couldn’t handle a thing like this. Now, you approach the business, you tell them that they might be at risk over this RICO thing and that you can help make sure that other people at the bank don’t figure it out. You want to help them out like a consultant but you need to meet the decision maker in order to arrange the deal. I think this is the kind of meeting our guy would want to attend.”
He handed over a piece of paper with a very professionally drawn out ownership chart. C&J Textiles was owned 20% by Charles Morgenstern and 80% by a trust whose beneficiary was Joseph Tarantino.
“How did you get a hold of this,” Brian asked.
“Someone I know at the accounting firm.”
Back in the day, before 9/11 and all the big money laundering scandals, banks really didn’t pay much attention to the ownership details. They were more concerned with meeting the people who ran the business and made the day to day decisions. If the ownership structure said Charles Morgenstern and ABC trust, and Mr. Morgenstern said that the trust represented silent investors, that was usually where the enquiries stopped. If Mr. Morgenstern’s background check came out okay, no further due diligence was required. However, after the RICO thing started, if a bank came across this kind of information they would quietly find a way to exit the banking relationship as soon as possible.
“So he comes to the meeting, I show him this and I tell him that I will keep it to myself, but that he should probably put in a few more trusts and that the beneficiaries should not be anyone directly connected with him or his business, and I’m doing this because…?”
“Let’s say, in return, several more businesses that currently bank with another bank decide that they want to bank with you, but only if you are their account officer. So you help him out and he returns the favor. He will absolutely understand this kind of reasoning.”
His Uncle Jim had obviously given this a lot of thought. He had rehearsed this in his mind like a play and he was explaining it like a director would explain an actor’s motivation. Brian was a young ambitious banker, he had come across some information that he might use to help his career and he chose to take advantage of it. He was a neighborhood kid and he didn’t have any particular moral dilemma. He understood that most of the big corporations, they did business with were equally if not more crooked than Mr. Tarantino.
“Isn’t he going to ask me about myself, where I’m from, before he even starts talking, won’t he make the connection between us?”
“What if he does, at that point it won’t really matter.”
“So, I get him to the meeting, explain all this and just leave?”
“That’s it.”
“What about the police, how do I handle that?”
“What about them? The meeting will be after hours, Morgenstern would never have a meeting with Tarantino during office hours, the place will be locked up and he will ask you to come in by the alley entrance. It’s highly unlikely that anyone will see you come or go.” Jim, the director, had also considered set design; nervous banker exits stage left. “If the cops do find out you were there, you tell them all about the meeting and you tell them you were scared. You would lose your job if the bank found out about it. That is a risk. I don’t think it’s much of a one and it’s one worth taking considering what we are trying to prevent.”
Brian didn’t know why but he did feel reassured by this. He wanted to trust the director that when he got on stage he wouldn’t make a fool of himself.
“What about after? I’m assuming this guy has friends and family who are going to make enquiries. Are they going to want to speak with the people who spoke to him before it happened? Are they going to suspect that he was lured to the meeting? What about Morgenstern?”
“Well, kid, now we get to the part where you are just going to have to trust me. Don’t you think I have considered this? You can’t know any of what you might call the operational details.”
Brian felt bad expressing doubt but he needed to tell Jim that he was concerned that this would come back to him and that he might be putting his wife at risk.
“Kid, I can’t guarantee it but I really can’t see that happening. Joey’s father died in prison years back and his only brother died of a heart attack three or four years ago. He doesn’t really have anyone else and what friends he has really don’t care for him all that much. He is where he is because his old man was stand up and his brother by all accounts was a good guy. If things don’t go well, God forbid, send your wife back to the old country to visit her folks and join her there if you need to. God knows you should be safe enough in Tipperary.”
So, with the unpleasant vision of spending the rest of his days knee deep in cow dung on his wife’s family farm, he returned to practical matters.
“How and when should I approach Morgenstern?”
“We need to move right away. Morgenstern eats lunch every day at that Jewish deli on 34th Street, he eats in a booth near the back by himself. Fat bald guy with thick glasses. Go up and introduce yourself. Tell him it concerns ‘Alberta Trust’, you will get his attention.”
On the way home, Brian thought about ways out. How to get out of this thing before it went too far, before it was out of control. There had to be a way but everything he thought of smacked of betrayal. Betray his father, betray his uncle, betray somebody or something. Betrayal was a big theme for his family. His grandfather passed away when he was ten years old, but he remembered him saying, “Never trust a politician, they will always betray you in the end.” He never heard his grandfather speak about his experience fighting for Ireland, but his dad told him that his grandfather and his brother had been with the IRA and had seen action and that like many veterans (including his uncles who had fought in WWII), they simply didn’t want to talk about it. His father explained to him that his grandfather had fought to kick the British out of Ireland and to establish an All-Ireland Republic. He had come on some sort of mission to New York with his brother (maybe to arrange guns or something, he never would talk about it, not even to his dad and they were close as could be) and in the meantime, a treaty was signed with the British and ‘the politicians’ got to work and betrayed the Republic. They gave up the six Northern counties and accepted dominion status with an oath of allegiance to the crown instead of the Republic that everyone had been fighting and dying for. The politicians frightened the people and persuaded them that dominion status was the best deal they could get and if they didn’t accept, the British would respond with immediate and terrible war (as if what they had been doing wasn’t immediate and terrible enough). Brian’s grandfather was a ‘die-hard’ Republican but he did respect one of the leaders of the other (pro-treaty) side. Michael Collins had been the chief of intelligence for the IRA and had been instrumental in getting arms to the men in the field like his grandfather. Collins argued that the treaty with the British did not give Ireland the freedom they wanted, but the freedom to achieve it. Collins was well-respected and many people believed him, including some of their own cousins in Ireland, and then Collins was killed in an ambush. Some say members of his own security detail may have been involved. More betrayal. As far as his grandfather was concerned, that was the last straw. He would never set foot in Ireland again.