MARTY BARLOW WAS investigating eight buildings where he thought corruption was flourishing. I visited the same eight places and saw what appeared to be questionable and illegal activities going on in them. All eight companies were owned by a company called Big M Realty Corp. Obviously, I needed to track down information about Big M Realty.
But I had had no better luck at that than the people in the building with the broken elevator or any of the other tenants had had. There was no phone or email listing, no website, no information of any kind about Big M Realty. Their business operation seemed one directional: You send in your checks, and we don’t want to hear any more from you. Very effective way to do business, if you could pull that off.
But someone had to be running Big M Realty Corp.
They existed somewhere. I just had no idea how to find them.
I knew someone who might.
His name was Todd Schacter and he was a computer expert. Actually, Schacter was a computer hacking expert. Janet had once represented him in court and gotten him acquitted of charges of breaking into companies’ computer files for personal information about their top officers. I’d used him, too, a year ago when I was looking for my daughter, Lucy. What he did wasn’t exactly legal. Let’s face it, what Schacter did wasn’t legal at all. But it wasn’t like he was stealing money or anything from these people. Only information. I was willing to bend the rules to get what I needed.
I told him about Big M Realty Corp. and all the dead ends I’d run into.
“I can think of two ways right off to get what you’re looking for,” he said. “It should be easy.”
“What are they?”
“First, there has to be a link to whatever financial institution Big M Realty uses. These tenants sent checks to them, you say. The cancelled checks they get back from their bank will have the bank that cashed them for Big M. Then all I have to do is get the details about Big M out of that bank’s files.”
“How can you get into the bank’s files?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Schacter was right. I didn’t.
“What’s the other way?” I asked.
“A phone number. They must use some kind of phone. No business could operate without using a phone.”
“But I couldn’t find any indication of a phone number anywhere.”
“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places,” he said.
Sure enough, the next morning he gave me a phone number that he said belonged to Big M Realty.
All right, that was easy.
Except it wasn’t.
When I called the number, I got a voice message that said: “You have reached Moreland Enterprises. This is an automated message. If you have a question, leave it here along with your contact information. Don’t waste our time with frivolous queries. If we feel it is necessary, we will contact you.” This was followed by a beep to leave a message. I hung up. I didn’t want to waste their time. Besides, I preferred they didn’t know I was calling them yet.
But at least I now knew they existed under the name of Moreland Enterprises.
When I googled Moreland Enterprises, I found out more. For one thing, it was spelled “More-Land.” Clever. The company had been in the news a few years ago when the district attorney announced an investigation of their real estate practices. Not Terri Hartwell. The district attorney before her. There was no indication that investigation ever went anywhere though.
Even more interesting was the owner of More-Land Enterprises—Victor Morelli. Which is where the “More” in “More-Land” must have come from. Victor Morelli, I knew quite a bit about. He’d been one of the top mob bosses in New York City in recent years. Supposedly, he had his hand in a lot of illegal operations, but he’d never been convicted of anything. He seemed to be a Teflon Don—no one in law enforcement could touch him—in the same way John Gotti had once been.
That sure explained some of the things I’d seen at the buildings where I’d gone. The gambling operations, pizza extortion rackets, sex businesses, etcetera. Was Wincott—and maybe Terri Hartwell, too—working with a mob boss like Victor Morelli? Had Marty found that out? Was that why Marty was killed?
Well, I couldn’t get any answers from Big M Realty Corp./ More-Land Enterprises because they apparently wouldn’t talk to anyone.
Or from Thomas Wincott, who was mad at me.
Or from Victor Morelli.
And Marty Barlow was dead, so he couldn’t talk to me anymore.
But there was one person who might be able to tell me something. One person I still hadn’t talked to yet. A person who had been a part of this story right from the beginning, even though I wasn’t exactly sure how.
Terri Hartwell.
“Good luck with that,” Dani Blaine said to me when I told her what I was trying to do.
I’d gone to Dani because she’d been a guest on Terri Hartwell’s radio show a few times when Hartwell was on the air, talking about New York City crime stories we’d covered on Channel 10. It was a high-profile way to promote our station and newscasters on a popular radio show. I figured I’d find out from Dani the best way to approach Terri Hartwell and then subtly segue from that into the status of Dani’s relationship with co-anchor Brett Wolff.
“She’s got this annoying guy named Chad Enright who works for her and won’t let anyone talk or see Terri without going through him,” Dani said. “He’s a total pain in the ass. Thinks he’s a big shot, thinks he’s really important, brags about how no one gets to Terri Hartwell without his approval. Jeez. Like I said, a pain in the ass. Watch out for him.”
She gave me Enright’s contact information.
“How’s everything going between you and Brett these days?” I asked her then.
“What do you mean how is it going?”
“I mean are you two … uh, well, pursuing a relationship outside the office?”
“In other words, you want to know if we’re still screwing?”
“Okay, are you and Brett still screwing?”
“Yes and no.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Brett and I are still together as a couple. But we’ve decided to step back from an intense personal relationship for now until he resolves some issues in his life, like the situation with his wife. Brett and I talked about this all, and we’re fine. This seemed like the mature, logical way to deal with this.”
She was right. It was the mature, logical approach. Unfortunately, it also was doomed to failure. I’d been through this kind of thing before in my own personal life and I knew it would all explode and get ugly again at some point in the future unless he actually divorced his wife.
But I couldn’t worry about that now.
“Exactly how big a pain in the ass is this Enright guy?” I asked her before she left my office.
“The worst.”
“I’ve met some pretty big pain in the asses in my life.”
“Not like this one.”