FBI Agent Marcus Brady had lost some weight and gained some gravitas in the eight months since I had last seen him. He’d saved my life and I had given his career a boost. Thanks to his efforts, and my engineering, he had been instrumental in wrapping up a multiple murder case that covered three jurisdictions. The powers that be had rewarded him with a transfer out of forensic accounting.
“So there I was,” he said, smiling coldly.
There’s an old trader’s joke—What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a trader’s story? A fairy tale begins “Once upon a time” and a trader’s story starts “So there I was.”
“There you were,” I answered.
We were sitting in his office at the Federal Building downtown—a windowless walk-in closet holding a desk, two chairs, and some filing cabinets. It was worse than my old cell, which was bigger and at least had a window. Of course, Brady didn’t have to share the space with a roommate with gang tats.
“And I’m scrolling through surveillance tapes of the entrance to the Merchants and Traders Club . . .”
“Our tax dollars at work,” I said.
“And, Whoa! Who do I see? An old friend . . .”
“Acquaintance.”
“. . . arriving for a meeting with one Tulio Castillo, the main subject of a major interagency investigation. And I think, there must be some very good reason that a guy with almost two and a half years to go on his parole would risk being seen with a bad guy like that.”
“You’d think.”
“So I figured I’ll ask. It can’t hurt.”
The FBI seemed to know my schedule. The two agents had been waiting outside the Ansonia when I got back from dropping the Kid at school. They had been polite but firm, offering me a choice. I could come downtown with them with the handcuffs on or off.
“Mr. Castillo invited me to come down and talk with him. Same way you did. Only he did it classier. Do I tell him what you and I talk about?”
“Suppose I put a wire on you and send you back?”
“Not a chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have a strong aversion to being dead.”
Brady chuckled. “I understand.”
“Thank you.”
“Shall we start over?”
“Old friends?”
“Reluctant allies?”
It was my turn to laugh. “Done. Who goes first?”
“You do.”
There was never any question on that. “Okay, I’ve been hired by a wealthy New England family to recover some money.”
“Who’s this?”
“Just let me finish.”
“Come on. I know you’re not working for the Kennedys. Are these people connected?”
“You’re way off base.”
“If Castillo is teamed up with the Patriarca people, I need to know about it.”
“Who?”
“The New England mob.”
“Stop. Stop. Let me tell it.” How was it that everyone I talked to knew who I was working for—except for the FBI?
“Get to the point.”
“Castillo invited me to his club. Politely. He sent a card. We had a long chat, and he wants to hire me, too—to find the same money, which he says belongs to his client.”
“Client!” Brady snorted.
“Do I get to tell this or do I get to go home?”
“Start from the top.”
Everett Payne. Newport. The Von Becker family. Paddy. Douglas Randolph. The clerk, Rose-Marie.
“She says there is no stash, right? Wouldn’t she know?”
“Not necessarily. What I’m beginning to see about Von Becker is that he was brilliant at keeping everyone in the dark. No one got to see the whole picture, only their little part in it. Maybe the other clerk knows something—but he’s not talking. At least not to me.”
“How did Castillo find you?”
“I don’t know, but it feels like everyone knows what I’m supposed to be doing.”
I filled him in on the whole conversation with Castillo. The bearer bonds. The lawyer, Biondi. The Swiss bank.
“So you’re working for him?”
“No. I told him that if I come up with something that looks like it belongs to him, I’ll let him know. That’s it. He’s run out of ideas, though he gave me one lead. If anything comes of it, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re in trouble. Way out of your depth.”
“I promised him nothing. Zip.”
“Did he say who this client is?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Well, I can guarantee they know who you are. And you don’t want that. That is not a good thing. It is a bad thing.”
“I’ve got nothing to do with any of that. I plan on staying squeaky clean and out of prison.”
“There’s scarier things than going back to jail. Let me tell you a little story. You need to know who you’re dealing with. Then I’m going to bring some other agents in here. They’ll want to hear your story—in triplicate—so get comfortable. And if you don’t believe what I tell you, ask these guys. They’ve seen it all.”
Brady’s story was an eye-opener. When the U.S. and the Colombian government finally broke up the two big cocaine cartels, back in the late 1990s, they left a power gap at the top that still hadn’t been filled. But they hadn’t stopped the flow of drugs—there was just too much money involved. The remaining players—mostly the Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans—had rushed in to take over the distribution. And when the Taliban shut down the poppy growers in Afghanistan in 2000, the Central American gangs had seen a new growth opportunity—heroin. With considerably shorter distribution routes to the world’s largest market, they were able to provide a product much closer to pure in a much shorter period of time. They captured market share. The profits they were raking in made the old Medellín and Cali cartels look like kids’ lemonade stands in comparison.
But without centralization of the power structure, there was no way to maintain agreed-upon areas of influence. The drug war became a free-for-all. The violence ratcheted up. It wasn’t just the Mexican border gangs that were out of control, killing one another, policemen, politicians, and innocent bystanders in a crazy bloodbath. Honduras had the highest per capita murder rate in the world. Guatemala was not much better. There no longer needed to be a reason to murder someone—terror was now the objective.
“Castillo is an aristocrat. His family has been at the top of the food chain in Colombia since they arrived three or four hundred years ago. That makes him think he has some control over what these people do. He doesn’t. They are very scary people and they now know your name. If you’re not scared, you’re an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot.” Everyone was calling me an idiot.
“Good. Stay here.”
He went out and returned a moment later with three members of the team—two from the DEA and Brady’s senior agent. I started again from the beginning.