CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Tampa, Florida

Monday 8:30 a.m.

March 5, 2001

THE U.S. V. AIELO case was begging for my attention. My clerks had read the briefs and prepared a three-page order for my review. I read it through quickly. I was about to sign the order transferring the case to Philadelphia for trial, when the short statement of relevant facts at the beginning caught my attention.

Mr. Aielo reinvented himself in Miami. He opened a club in 1992 that was destroyed by fire, providing the insurance money to start his more trendy and lucrative clubs believed to be money-laundering operations.

Something about the statement tickled my brain.

I chased it around in my head for a while, but couldn’t catch it. I re-read the passage several times and finally put it aside, knowing that I’d remember if I thought about something else, and let the thought peek around the corner like a kitten.

Only in this case, it was a lion.

About thirty minutes later, it fairly pounced on my thinking with claws fully extended and a deafening roar.

I checked the computer once again. In just a few minutes, I found the death certificate I was looking for.

Death records for Miami going back fifty years had recently been updated in the Dade County database, but not integrated into the search service database.

Which explained why I didn’t find it when I had looked the first time.

I pulled out the tattered article George had given me from the Tribune the Sunday after Gasparilla and read it one more time. The article related the story of a former IRS agent who had made a living in much the same way as Dad did, by pursuing white-collar criminals. The agent compiled the more legal methods of changing your life and wrote a book about it. The article reflected the agent’s advice about how to hide your assets and disappear.

The most difficult aspects of changing one’s identity were not the initial strategies, such as acquiring foreign passports under assumed names. Instead, the hardest thing to do, the agent said, was to cut all ties to your old self. Most people can’t manage it and eventually return to their old lives in some fashion.

The article talked about well known, admitted former Mafia criminals who became government informants, but have abandoned the federal Witness Protection Program. The fear of Mafia retribution has disappeared and was probably overstated anyway, the agent claimed.

But the big problem is that once one creates a certain lifestyle, it’s nearly impossible to abandon all of the past.

Friends, family and co-workers are our firmly tethered human anchors. They drag us back when we float too far away.

Some secrets never leave us alone. Eastern mystics say that no karmic debt ever remains unpaid. Scientists claim the human body replaces itself once every seven years. The problem is, the new body is exactly like the old one. It’s got the same scars, the same colors and a few more aches and pains.

We think the past is past, but it’s the foundation for all that comes after. The past seeps into our very sinews and remains in our cells, just like the genes we’re born with.

It doesn’t mean that humans can’t change. But it does mean we don’t change much at the fundamental level.

Those cells just keep reproducing themselves, over and over and over.

Americans attempt to reinvent themselves all the time, without hiding their assets and disappearing. How ironic that the Fitzgerald House case had found its way to my docket, obscuring my first clue to Otter’s identity.

After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s myth of reinvention when James Gatz became Jay Gatsby, was the very reason for Fitzgerald House’s existence as a charitable organization.

Like many clues, this one was right in front of me all the time, and I didn’t see it.

Without Gatsby, Fitzgerald House would have had no historical significance. Without Fitzgerald House, Martin’s becoming Otter might never have been discovered.

Yet, James Gatz did no more than get a fresh start by attempting to leave his past in the past. I thought of everyone I knew who has done the same thing.

Jim Harper has become a good husband and father. Suzanne Harper has become a wife and soon-to-be mother.

Mariam Richardson became a well-respected matron and wife of the Chief Judge.

Sandra Kelley, an abandoned and adopted child, was now a wealthy socialite.

Even George and I changed our lives from a staid banker and Detroit attorney to a Tampa restaurateur and judge.

To David Martin and Gilbert Kelley, young men who were looking for fun and fortune gambling in Nassau and wound up on the wrong side of the Mafia-owned casinos, re-inventing the obscure David Martin must have seemed the logical answer.

The readily accessible money from Kelley’s bank was an overwhelming temptation to solve their problems. They met the young, unchaperoned Margaret, another American, and added her to their youthful exuberance.

In 1956, when the bank examiners arrived, Martin and Kelley must have panicked to learn that their actions had serious potential consequences.

The suicide plot they concocted had the added benefits of stopping the investigation and forcing the bonding company to pay off their debt to the bank. They must have also found a source of living money for Martin “after death.”

Exactly how they managed that, I couldn’t guess.

Maybe that was when they got hooked up with the offshore banks. The entire scheme would only have worked if Martin had no ties to anyone.

Either Kelley didn’t know that Martin and Margaret had married, or he didn’t care. Or maybe they just saw no way out.

It was the kind of youthful solution that didn’t plan for all the consequences. Like maybe there was a child on the way.

I had no way of knowing how long Martin had managed to stay away from Kelley. But, at some point, whatever money they had managed to get Martin for his fresh start must have run out.

Martin/Otter seemed to have an insatiable appetite for spending that could only have been a problem from the very beginning.

So Martin resurfaced as Armstrong Otter, and Kelley had been helping to feed Otter’s voracious demands for cash from the vaults of the Tampa Bay Bank, via offshore banking deposits.

When did Ron Wheaton find out that Margaret’s one true love was not dead? That he was, instead, alive and well and living just over the bay in Pass-a-Grille?

It was likely a long while ago. The Wheatons didn’t socialize with the Kelleys and their set, but it was unlikely that Martin/Otter would have been able to stay away from Margaret. Or maybe he saw Margaret by accident.

In any event, Ron definitely knew about Otter and planned to protect Margaret in death as he always had in life.

There were just a few loose ends yet for me to tie up, and I would have it all resolved.

I picked up the phone and called the CJ’s chambers, dialing the number for his secretary instead of himself. I confirmed that CJ was in his office, grabbed my purse, and walked the short block between my building and his. It took me only about ten minutes from the time I’d made the call.

When I arrived, unannounced, CJ consented to see me. He wasn’t in a position to antagonize me today, since I still hadn’t completed my testimony in his ethics hearing. I tried to keep the envy from putting an unnecessary edge in my tone as I sat in his palatial chambers, admiring the rich mahogany and beautiful upholstery.

He offered me coffee. I declined. I didn’t want to get too comfortable—with him or in these surroundings.

I said, “I came to ask you some questions about Armstrong Otter.”

CJ looked down at his desk, then back up at me, with resignation. “I was afraid that was why you’re here.”

I came right out with it. “Why was Otter asking you for money outside Minaret Friday before the Knight Parade?”

He jerked back, startled. “How do you know about that?”

“I was the one who walked past the two of you. Didn’t you recognize me?”

Shaking his head, he said, “I didn’t want to recognize you. I was hoping you were a misplaced tourist.”

“But, I wasn’t. Tell me what you were arguing about.”

For a few seconds, CJ looked like he would refuse. Or, at least, come up with an excuse not to answer the question.

He spent some time rearranging the pens on his desk, fidgeting in his chair. He looked past me to the Picasso on his wall that his wife had given him when he was elected Chief Judge. Then, he sighed with resignation, and told me what I’d come to find out.

CJ said, “Otter had been in trouble for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. I swear, I didn’t. I didn’t even know that he was involved in a criminal case until after I’d tried to get you to dismiss Fitzgerald House.”

CJ sounded insistent, because he was. He needed me to believe he hadn’t known that Otter was being prosecuted for a massive fraud that could have put Otter in prison for much longer than the rest of his life.

The curious thing was that I believed CJ hadn’t known. Because I hadn’t known.

Just because we’re judges, doesn’t mean we’re any better informed than most other citizens on a lot of issues. There’s no way I could know all the cases pending on my docket. There were just too many of them to keep track, except on the computers.

I nodded my understanding and CJ continued, “Well, in the past, Otter resolved complaints against him by offering restitution of some kind, counting on people like me and Mariam to keep quiet because of shame and pride. Or, if that didn’t work, he’d deny the validity of the complaint and threaten to counter-sue. He told me later that the complaints that got the U.S. Attorney’s attention were started by that restaurant guy in Michigan. Otter said the guy had bought millions of dollars worth of gems, intending to re-sell them for billions. When the guy wasn’t able to make the profit he wanted, he collected a bunch of other claims and filed a criminal complaint.”

Otter’s version of the facts wasn’t too far from the allegations made by the U.S. Attorney. It was easy to believe that Otter probably would have been convicted. There didn’t seem to be much of a defense building there.

I asked, “How does that relate to Otter trying to get money from you?”

“He was shaking down everyone he knew. He thought if he could get enough money together to pay off the restaurant guy, he could get the criminal complaint dismissed and then avoid going to jail.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, with some sarcasm. “At least, it would have been better than getting himself killed to stay out of prison.”

CJ gave me a grimace. “I’m sure Otter didn’t plan on his arm-twisting scheme getting him killed. He’d had good luck with it in the past.”

Yes, I thought, he certainly had. For years, he’d been collecting money from every available source.

I was sure now that Otter had killed Ron Wheaton because he’d found out that Ron had life insurance and other assets worth over $7 million.

That was probably why he’d contacted Margaret again after all the years he had been living in the Bay area, too. He could have found her at any time. His buddy, Gil Kelley, certainly would have told Otter where to find Margaret.

And Otter’s desire to stay out of prison explained, to a certain extent, Gil Kelley’s continued embezzlement from Tampa Bay Bank.

Otter was probably using their past crimes to support his ongoing ones.

I didn’t doubt that Kelley also had a gambling problem. That’s one addiction that can easily take over your life. Gambling, plus Otter’s voracious and insatiable appetite for luxurious living, gave Kelley a powerful motive for murder, too.

Otter had been bleeding Kelley for decades. And who knows? If they were both involved in Mafia money laundering, they might have wanted to stop. The Mafia has a low tolerance for quitters. The sky was literally the limit to their need for money.

But as I sat there working it through, I knew Gilbert Kelley wasn’t Otter’s only source of cash. Otter never would have thought Kelley could give him enough to satisfy all of the creditors listed in the U.S. v. Otter criminal indictment.

“One last thing, CJ,” I said. “Did you give Otter any money?”

His defeat was now complete. He shrunk before my very eyes. The man who had seen fit to lecture me on appropriate judicial conduct had let himself down. He couldn’t meet his own high standards, to say nothing of the lower standards set by the law for the behavior of judges. Paying a blackmailer was more than the appearance of impropriety.

There was no way his behavior, and the reason for it, wouldn’t become public.

The voice was barely recognizable to me when he said, “What else could I do? Mariam couldn’t be humiliated again.”

So, I added two more names to the list of possible suspects in Otter’s death, although I continued to believe whoever had killed him hadn’t intended to do so.

Lack of intent could keep the killer off death row, anyway.

I had to make one phone call and then I could do the final interview.