There was silence then, for as long as it took to draw the first deep, exhausted breaths, to wipe away the sweat that had dripped for ninety minutes, for someone to move soundlessly across the carpeted floor, open the door a crack and watch as Rizzo escorted Ense and Barg down the corridor to the elevator, got into the elevator with them, disappeared behind the closing doors. A sign was given. Klaus Peter raced for the telephone, dialed, began a babble of rapid, frantic German.
Coffey dashed for the door, sprinted down the corridor, up two flights of stairs to his room on the fifth floor, perched tensely on the edge of the bed, reached for the phone. He halted, his hand in midair. He had to calm himself, had to order the impressions, ideas, hunches that filled his mind, that overflowed so he could barely contain them. He knew then that his intuition had been right that night when Rizzo and Crespino conversed so intently in the freezing rain, had been more right than he could have imagined. He no longer had to worry about the warnings of Hogan and the others. He had stumbled onto something so big he was not sure he could truly grasp it all. But what he knew without question was that he had found gold.
Sitting there, staring at the phone, staring at the scribbled notes he had made, he tried to make some sense of it all, tried to make himself understand at least enough of it so that when he made that call across the ocean, he would be able to report with some accuracy.
He read over the notes. There were all those names. There was Rizzo, of course, and the two Germans, Alfred Barg and Winfried Ense. Coffey had not yet gotten a look at them, had no idea what they looked like, could not describe them. There was somebody named Ricky whose last name might be Jacobs, though of that he was not completely certain since the name Jacobs had been mentioned only once, very near the beginning of that conversation. There was Ricky’s son, Jerry, whom Rizzo thought was a son of a bitch, and a woman named Evelyn, who was probably Ricky’s wife. It was more than likely that all of them were from California and that Ricky had been and might still be in prison. There was Billy Benjamin, the Philadelphia forger and dealer in stolen and counterfeit securities and money. There was Heshy Lebensfeld, though whether he had played any part in all of this except to give Ense a worthless check for $450, Coffey had no idea. There were those unnamed people in New York, and probably elsewhere in the United States, whom Rizzo said he represented and whose money he was in Munich to collect. Coffey was sure that among those unnamed people was Marty de Lorenzo. There was a Frenchman named Maurice, who was stupid and who made mistakes but was a man to be trusted. There was somebody named Tony, who had been in London and who, everyone agreed, was a nice guy. There was an Italian named Dr. Amato who was in Milan. There was a Dr. Ledl, who was not really a doctor but a butcher; who was probably German, since that was the language he spoke; who had contacts in the Vatican and who was in prison somewhere for some unnamed crime. There was Jacques Suesans from Amsterdam. There were the nuns of the Bush and something or somebody called Rosario. There were people in the Vatican who were working with Ledl and others, who wanted counterfeit securities, though whether they were clerics or laymen was uncertain. Whatever they were, that they were in the Vatican was almost unbelievable. And there were certainly a lot of others whose names had not been mentioned.
How much money was involved? There was no way Coffey could calculate that, but it certainly ran way up in the millions. There had been references several times to $900,000, and that was only one deal. There had been talk of $100,000 here and another $100,000 there, and several hundred thousand someplace else. There was no way of putting a figure on the counterfeits that had been discussed. There had been at least three stolen United States Treasury certificates that Ricky had given Ense, who had cashed one of them in Brussels. There was a lot of stolen stock, most particularly shares of Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles. There were counterfeit securities that were supposed to have gone, may actually have gone, might still be going, to the Vatican. There was merchandise—it was impossible to say whether from the Vatican package or another—that had been recovered in Rome. There seemed to be so many stock deals—stocks that were stolen or counterfeit, deals already consummated or in the process—that it was impossible to keep track of them. And from the references to hundreds, fifties, twenties and tens, it seemed likely there was also something in the works about counterfeit money.
There was the money owed to Rizzo and his people in New York that he had come to Munich to collect from Barg and Ense—$200,000 due Rizzo and another $150,000 due Ricky. There was apparently money owing on the sale of the treasury certificate, and perhaps Ricky and Jerry had cheated Rizzo of his share. There was at least $25,000 that had been turned over to Jerry during a trip to Munich, probably part payment from Barg, and Jerry had not paid Rizzo his portion. There was an unspecified amount due on an Italian deal, which might or might not relate to the Vatican. There was obviously a lot more money that was owed, or soon would be, on a number of other securities deals, all of which seemed to originate with Rizzo. An agreement was being drawn between Rizzo, Barg and Ense to provide a means for the Germans to pay what they owed and to set up a bank account for Rizzo into which payments would be made regularly.
And, without doubt, there were things that would come to light only after a close and intense scrutiny of the transcript of that conversation, though there were probably things in it that would remain cloudy and indecipherable until the investigation had gone a lot further.
Coffey took a deep breath, picked up the phone, asked for the overseas operator and put in a call to Inspector Vitrano. It was evening in New York by then, but Coffey knew that nobody in the district attorney’s office kept regular hours. Vitrano would certainly be at his desk and this could not wait.
“Inspector Vitrano,” he said when the connection was finally made, “this is Joe Coffey, calling from Munich. Are you sitting down?”
“Why?”
“Well, hold on to your hat. You’re not going to believe this.” The story began to pour out of Coffey as he tried to get it all in at one breath.
“Wait,” Vitrano shouted before Coffey had spoken a dozen words. “You just sit there. I want to get Ron Goldstock in here to listen to this, and I want to put the whole thing on tape. Get it organized in your mind and then call me back in half an hour. We’ll have everything set by then.”
An hour later, Coffey went through it slowly, trying to omit nothing, trying to give not just the facts but the feel of those moments, trying, too, to add his impressions and intuitions, and his knowledge of people and things when he had that. Vitrano and Goldstock listened intently. The recapitulation was, complete enough so that when Coffey finished they had a few questions to ask. “Good work, Joe,” Vitrano said.
“Where do we go with it now?” Coffey asked.
“You sit on Rizzo until he leaves,” Vitrano said. “Ron and I will get to the Strike Force. There’s no way they’re not going to want to come in on this with us now.”
Within moments after Coffey hung up, Goldstock was on the telephone to Dan Hollman, head of the Strike Force in New York. Did Hollman remember that conversation they’d had a few weeks before, when they had given Hollman a tip and he’d turned them down, saying he wasn’t interested?
Hollman remembered. He still felt the same way about it.
Well, Goldstock said, something new had just come up, something so hot, so unbelievable, so vast that the district attorney’s office could not possibly handle it alone. In fact, it went far beyond Hogan’s jurisdiction, maybe even beyond the jurisdiction of the Organized Crime Strike Force.
Hollman began to show a little interest. What was Goldstock talking about?
Goldstock would not tell him over the phone. If Hollman came to Leonard Street first thing in the morning, he’d find out.
The next morning, Hollman and his assistant, William Aronwald, appeared. Goldstock and Vitrano led them into a conference room. Vitrano started the tape of Coffey’s report. Hollman and Aronwald leaned forward, listening, straining, began to look at each other and at Goldstock and Vitrano.
Coffey was later told: “We didn’t even get halfway through that tape before one of them reached over and turned the machine off. They were practically jumping through the hoops. They said, ‘We’ll buy it. We’re in.’ They reached for the checkbooks and they said, ‘What do you need? How much do you want? You need cars? You got them. You need money? Just tell us how much and it’s yours. You need men? We’ll assign them. Whatever you need, you’ve got it. We’re in this together now. We work together from now on, share everything.’”
If Coffey had been shocked and fascinated by the references to the Vatican, for the moment he was almost alone. The federal agency seemed uninterested. Two other things had sold the Strike Force so quickly that morning, had made Hollman, Aronwald and the Justice Department so eager to join forces with the district attorney’s office that they were willing to pay any price, go to any lengths. One was the mention of Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles. The rapidly escalating trade in stolen and counterfeit securities had become a major preoccupation of the department and the FBI. While no one was certain just how vast it was, a Congressional subcommittee estimated that there were more than $50 billion worth of such securities loose around the world and that figure was growing all the time. What was certain was that it had become a potential peril to the economic well-being of corporations and of nations, that it had become a major element in the empire of organized crime and that efforts to stop it had, at best, achieved only minor success. Of some concern had been the stock of Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles. A large block of those securities had disappeared from the United States mail somewhere between Los Angeles and New York in the fall of 1970, and had turned up later in Panama and then in various parts of Europe. Wherever the stock had turned up, there were indications that it had been a cornerstone in huge swindles, though just who had been doing the swindling and how successful they had been was not known. Though a few of those shares had been recovered along the way, most were still missing. So, it appeared to Hollman and Aronwald that a key might well lie in that conversation in the Palace Hotel in Munich.
The other attraction for the feds was the mention of one name—Ricky Jacobs. For a considerable time, he had been at the center of that ever-widening investigation into the hot securities racket.
Born in Philadelphia in 1917, or 1918, or 1919—the date depended on whom he was giving it to at the time—Manuel Richard Jacobs, a short, fat man with an open, winning expression and an ingenuous manner that seemed to inspire confidence and trust, was one of the most accomplished American swindlers and confidence men of the time. He had early developed a passion for gambling and even as a teen-ager was running card games, usually crooked ones, in his native city, and supplementing his income through robberies and burglaries. By the time he was thirty, he realized that the climate in Philadelphia did not completely suit him and that he ought to seek his fortune somewhere else, preferably far away, especially since the Philadelphia police were very anxious then to ask him some embarrassing questions about several burglaries. He packed his belongings and with his first wife, Evelyn (who divorced him a few years later, at which time he promptly married another woman named Evelyn), and their small son, Jerry Marc, headed for the sunshine of Southern California. No sooner had fie settled down, though, than the Santa Monica police took him in to ask him about a string of burglaries there, and while his answers did not fully satisfy them, the charges were eventually dismissed.
It did not take long for Jacobs to become a ubiquitous figure in the Los Angeles “sporting” world. His name began to appear regularly on the police blotters for gambling and bookmaking. At the same time, he was making a lot of important friends, in both the underworld and the upperworld, and was being invited into some of the better homes in Beverly Hills and into some of the best clubs.
The name Ricky Jacobs first brushed the edges of public awareness in 1965, when the scandal at the Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills erupted. Jacobs, along with several close friends, including John Roselli (one of the leaders of the Los Angeles syndicate, and the man who had been recruited together with Chicago’s Sam Giancana by the federal government to develop a plan to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro), had taken fellow members of the Friar’s Club—Hollywood celebrities, sports figures and prominent businessmen—for more than half a million dollars by rigging supposedly friendly card games. They had concealed mirrors in the ceiling, had positioned spotters to peer through peepholes strategically bored over card tables and flash signals electronically to Jacobs, Roselli and others.
Even after those disclosures, even after Jacobs was convicted three years later on federal conspiracy charges growing out of that scandal and sentenced to four years in prison, even after the revelations that he had bought supposedly secret federal-grand-jury transcripts, there were still plenty of people in Los Angeles who refused to believe that Ricky Jacobs could really have done anything reprehensible. He was, they said, so disarming, so mild-mannered, such a gentleman that it all had to be some kind of mistake. Jacobs managed for some time to keep the prison gates from closing behind him through a series of other complicated legal maneuvers that kept putting his surrender to serve his term off into the future. Meanwhile, there were more than a few prominent people who continued to open their homes to him and continued to sit in on card games he arranged at other houses in Beverly Hills, which he rented for just that purpose. These people refused to believe that the games could be crooked no matter how much they lost, refused to believe that they had as much chance of winning in a Jacobs-run poker game as a swimmer has of surviving in a tank filled with hungry sharks.
By then, though, Jacobs was much more than just a crooked gambler with a winning manner. He had emerged as one of the major American dealers, first on the West Coast and soon around the country and across the world, of stolen and counterfeit securities. He had learned all the angles and he knew everyone. Through his friend John Roselli, he had met, become close to and was working with the leaders of the syndicate, Miami’s Dominic Mantell, Detroit’s Joe Zerilli and a lot of others, and he had developed a series of contacts and outlets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. There were rumors that he was on friendly terms with several high officials in the American government. When there were securities to be dealt, Ricky Jacobs had become the man to see.
Even with prison hanging over him after his conviction in 1968, Jacobs continued to ply these waters as though he had nothing to fear from the law. And even after he finally went to a minimum-security prison in California early in July 1971, his dealing did not end. His wife, Evelyn, carried messages and orders to and from him on her weekly visits, and somehow he managed to persuade the prison authorities on several occasions to give him furloughs because of family problems (a sick brother in Philadelphia, for instance, to whose side he had to rush). And there was, too, his son, Jerry Marc, who served as his proxy when it was impossible for him to deal personally and directly.
By early 1972, the Justice Department and the FBI were sure that Ricky Jacobs was the man behind several million dollars’ worth of stolen and counterfeit blue-chip American corporate and government securities that had been turning up all over the United States and around the world. The trouble was, they could not prove it, could not find the evidence, had only suspicions. So, when his name came up so often in that conversation in Munich between Rizzo, Barg and Ense—came up in conjunction with both stolen treasury bills and Coca-Cola Bottling Company stock—it looked as though that evidence might at last be found.