By calling the banks from the courthouse and telling their officers we had a court order to remove the contents of certain safe-deposit boxes and an escort of two marshals, Vince Halloran, Zane Neidlinger, and I were able to collect 138 diaries bound in black, blue, and brown leather. The diaries went back to 1886, the year William Farragut I started the family tradition. Some years were so busy they needed more than one diary. They filled the entire trunk of Vince's Mercedes.
I pulled out the ones covering the years I was most interested in: 1906, to see if there was any mention of the incident involving my grandfather, and the five years preceding Warren Dillon's murder of Mayor DiMarco and the five years after, up until Dillon's parole and alleged suicide. I also took the diary for the last year of William Farragut IV's miserable life.
The remainder was locked into an antique four-ton Wells Fargo safe in the basement of Vince Halloran's house in Pacific Heights, where Zane Neidlinger would spend the weekend getting an eyeful and a bellyful.
Slipping Colleen past the media had been surprisingly easy for Martha, Arnie, Henry, and Phillip. When I returned home that evening, their shouts of congratulations rattled the windows, hitting a 9.1 on the We-Kicked-Their-Ass scale.
That evening, Colleen and I took my Corvette to Santa Cruz, escorted the entire way by Arnie and Henry in the Firenze Plumbing van.
Colleen had bribed Virginia Riley, her retired schoolteacher friend, to let us have her Victorian mansion in Capitola by buying her a plane ticket to Seattle so she could see her sons and her grandchildren. We spent the next two days, Saturday and Sunday, eating, falling in love, fucking, reading the Farragut diaries, falling in love, fucking, watching the news, fucking, planning our lives, falling in love, and fucking.
When I told Colleen about Calvin's plot, about his bribing Rivera to testify against her, the withholding of the Candira information, and the Sausalito hotel tapes, she sagged into a chair, speechless for almost an hour. Her dismay at my withholding the information from her vanished quickly. She was too happy to hate me.
We drank a toast to the news-at-eleven shot of Calvin and Bearden being taken from the courthouse in handcuffs, followed by a clip of two burly cops dragging a screaming Tommy Rivera up the steps of the city jail.
William II's 1906 diary provided a great deal of insight into the murder of my great-granduncle Byron "Bunky" Fallon. According to numerous entries, Byron had waged a lengthy battle to bring down political boss Adam Rolf and his puppet mayor, Eugene Schmitz. But Byron allegedly fell off a launch in San Francisco Bay en route to deliver the arrest warrants on April 17, 1906 – the day before the great San Francisco Earthquake struck. It was to be the greatest corruption trial in American history, a plot that was hatched in Theodore Roosevelt's office at the White House. But the earthquake, and Byron's death, gave Rolf and Schmitz a chance at rehabilitation by painting themselves as the 'heros' of the earthquake and fires, the latter which burned for three days. Fires that burned because Mayor Schmitz let the Army run around with dynamite, blasting wood frame buildings and spreading the conflagration.
When Byron drowned, his son Hunter – my granduncle – and his partner, Francis Fagen – my namesake grandfather – took over the investigation sought to prove that Adam Rolf was behind Byron's death. They never proved it. But when Rolf and Schmitz were toppled from power during the corruption trials that took place during the rebuilding of the city, the Farraguts moved into the vacuum by bribing city officials for one construction project after another. Since that time, their power had been second to none.
Farragut's own handwritten missives revealed a soul as twisted as any of his numerous progeny. One of his favorite pastimes was buying runaway teenage girls from a flock of kidnappers/procurers, keeping them in a Sausalito brothel and forcing them into sexual servitude when the urge overcame him. My forebears tried in vain to put him away for that as well, and failed.
As for my own war with William IV, it's too bad he died, because I might have gotten him thirty or forty thousand years in prison for the bribes, extortion, kickbacks, tax evasion, money laundering, and strong-arming that started when he was still in college.
Among the recipients of the felonious Farragut largess were more than a few cops, including my favorite Inspector John Naftulin—two judges, a San Francisco assistant DA, Assistant Coroner Michael Wentworth, a former state attorney general, several California state senators, a U.S. senator, two congressmen, and, of course, the delightful supervisor for life, Miss Helen Smidge. No wonder Farragut worked so many hours; he had a lot of mouths to feed.
Willy IV and Smidge had also orchestrated the murder of Charles Simcic, after Simcic tried to extort money from Farragut in exchange for a promise to keep Farragut's affair with Lynne McBain a secret, as well as the murder of Flynn Pooley, who dared to tell San Franciscans that the sky as well as the earth would fall if they built high-rises along the Market Street corridor.
Writing in the diaries, Farragut was lavish with detail, exorbitant in his praise for his own genius. I had to give him credit for the latter. Keeping it all a secret had been his family's twisted masterpiece.
The one thing I'd hoped to prove was that he and Smidge had been directly involved in the murder of Mayor DiMarco, but that turned out not to be the case. The key word being directly.
There were pages and pages, chronicling the long and frightening involvement of Farragut and Smidge with Warren Dillon.
It had taken considerable maneuvering by both Smidge and Farragut to get Dillon accepted into the police force, for several of his fellow officers knew of Dillon's high school propensity for getting drunk and bashing blacks and gays with baseball bats and five-irons.
"He was perfect," William IV stated in one entry, "and Helen recognized it when he was still in high school. Handsome, wellspoken, a sports hero, a poster boy for those old-fashioned yahoo values we can still market by the carload, regardless of what lurks beneath. We coached him endlessly, got him into the department, made him a spokesman for traditional mores, and only a few of us knew the unstable, hate-mongering psychopath that he really was."
From the moment that DiMarco was elected, they encouraged—and financed—Warren Dillon's campaign of hatred against him.
When Dillon was fired from the department for receiving bribes from several of Farragut's cronies to cover up everything from money laundering to hate crimes, Smidge, Sherenian, and Farragut negotiated his resignation, avoiding an embarrassing dismissal.
"We really worked on him after that," Farragut wrote, "we told him it was the mayor's fault, that the old queer hated him, that DiMarco alone could give him his pension and his shield back but was out to destroy him and his family."
An entry dated the day after the murder read, "I guess poor Warren just snapped. Today he crawled through a window at City Hall and put five shots in His Honor. My heart is broken, the champagne is chilling."
Another entry detailed the fix in his trial, the travesty of justice that allowed Dillon to serve only four years.
"We owned everything and everybody," Farragut stated. "We either bought them or convinced them that poor Warren was a victim, not a criminal. Just another Bible-quoting, tie-wearing, hardworking white heterosexual gone temporarily over the edge from junk food, job stress, and too much TV. It was our finest moment. Half the investigating team, the judge, and incompetent prosecutor:it was our tune they danced to. That's the secret to the family's hundred years of success: you deify the dishonest and then pander to the gullible. Progress is our biggest enemy."
He concluded with, "Even the jury was shocked when they heard the sentence that Dillon got. Had they known, every one of them would have voted for first-degree murder instead of manslaughter."
After parole, they went at Dillon relentlessly, telling him a "liberal hit squad" of "queers and Communists" had a contract on his life, until finally he committed suicide.
Neither Smidge nor Farragut had held the smoking gun, they had been too clever. All they were guilty of, as far as involvement in the murder, was a well-orchestrated campaign of feeding the hope and hatred to a pinstripe suit with a white-hooded mind.
But the trial was different. Farragut's notes on the corruption and co-opting of the trial were everything I'd hoped for. When the sections were published, everyone would know that I been fired unjustly, that I was not a lunatic, that justice had been raped on that horrible day in San Francisco.
I went to bed that night and slept the sleep of vindication—Colleen and I were both too tired to do it again.