“Maybe not in Rome, but it does in Miami Beach,” Virgil said. “Let’s get on home.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
After the shooting in Florida City, and a series of conversations with Romano and Bianchi, Weaver had set up a surveillance net in South Florida, focusing on known associates of Douglas Sansone.
One of them, James (Jimmy) Parisi, had been identified as a killer, suspected of five murders in New York and New Jersey, carried out with semiautomatic .22 rifles; but he was good, and had never been indicted for any of them. The feds thought he might have been on the boat when the Coast Guardsmen were murdered, not because they had hard information, but simply because of his proclivities.
Six more men were identified as working for Sansone in South Florida, and rumor had it that they had a connection with Mexican heroin importers, but that the Mexicans had begun shifting their support to Hispanic dealers in New Jersey, overlapping Sansone’s territory. Sansone, the rumors went, had looked for an alternate source of heroin, and had found one. Heroin was again flowing into Staten Island needles.
* * *
In mid-November, a week after Bob’s funeral in Louisiana—where Rae had told Lucas in no uncertain terms that she was on this case now, so Lucas could just shut up about it, and so Lucas did and started thinking—Lucas had traveled to Washington to meet with Weaver, who’d come up from Florida, and two contacts high in the FBI, Deputy Director Louis Mallard and an influential senior agent named Jane Chase.
Weaver was impressed: as they walked together down the hallway to the first of the meetings, he’d said in a hushed tone, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you were friends with these people. Mallard is like the Archangel Gabriel, right up there next to God.”
“He’s no kind of angel, I can promise you that,” Lucas said.
They met in Mallard’s office, a cluttered double cubicle with piles of books and paper on every flat surface. As they talked, Chase wandered around the office, peering at the piles, occasionally muttering, “No way,” or “Gimme a break,” until Mallard told her to shut up and sit down.
“What do we know about this Sansone guy? Know for sure?” Mallard asked Weaver.
Weaver said, “For sure? He owns a chain of donut shops.”
“Donut shops?”
“Mama Ferrari’s Donuts. Ten shops. The OC unit did some checks on his income taxes, and they tell me he’s the most successful donut seller in New Jersey,” Weaver said. “People come in the door at the donut shops and pay with small bills. Mama Ferrari discourages credit cards—if you pay in cash, you get an extra donut, supposed to offset credit card fees. That means they have large amounts of small greasy bills . . .”
“A laundry,” Chase said.
“That’s what OC says,” Weaver said. “On the other hand, they sent one of their Jersey people out to buy a box of donuts, to see if the shops were legit, and word came back that they’re damn good donuts.”
“How sure are you that Sansone’s group is behind the Coast Guard shootings?” Chase asked.
“Eighty-six percent,” Weaver said. “We started watching those guys down in Miami, best we could without a full surveillance team, and they’re not doing much. They seem to be . . . waiting. For something. They can’t go after the dope with the Coast Guard sitting out there, checking every boat.”
* * *
With three dead Coast Guardsmen, a dead marshal, and a badly wounded FBI agent who might never fully recover from his wounds, neither Mallard nor Chase had needed much persuading. They’d approved a working group, to be run by the New York AIC out of Manhattan and Weaver out of South Florida, with the objective of identifying and then taking down the entire Sansone operation.
Walking out of the meeting, Weaver said, “I thought I was fucked. Now, I’m sorta a semi–big shot. I mean, I called Louis, Louis, instead of ‘sir.’”
“You called him ‘sir’ about twenty times,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but I also called him Louis.”
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “You can write it down in your diary.”
Working with Chase and the Manhattan agent in charge, Weaver had put together a working group of carefully chosen surveillance specialists who were told the assignment required the deepest secrecy: they were to be ghosts.
Sansone was not to know that he’d come under any special scrutiny. Stalking them with extreme care through November and December, the group identified more Sansone operators in the Newark area and on Staten Island, with associates as far north as Boston and Bangor, Maine. The South Florida group was believed to be coordinating narcotics purchases for distribution in the Northeast.
By the third week of November, Lucas had returned to Minnesota and a day later drove to Virgil Flowers’s girlfriend’s farm, where Virgil lived, to recruit him for the working group. Frankie, Virgil’s girlfriend, had sat in on the talk, sleeping twins on her lap.
“I’m not complaining, Lucas, but every time I see you, you’re pulling poor Virgil in over his head,” Frankie said. She was a striking woman, as blond as Virgil, short, busty, wickedly intelligent. She and Lucas tended to knock sparks off each other; Lucas liked her a lot.
“You should look a little closer. Virgil doesn’t tend to get pulled unless he wants to go,” Lucas said.
“What are we talking about this time?” Frankie asked.
“Can I talk?” Virgil asked.
Frankie turned her head to him and said, “No. Think of me as your agent.”
“Virgil would technically be part of an interagency federal task force working out of Fort Lauderdale,” Lucas said. “Nobody would know about him except me and Rae and one other marshal and a couple of FBI agents.”
“Man, I’m not a diver,” Virgil interjected. “I only took lessons because I couldn’t afford to fish all day. Since I was off the boat in the afternoons, I got certified. In a week. In a swimming pool, mostly, with two open water dives. I dove a few more times, rental equipment, but I’m not competent. I’m a tourist.”
“We can fix that,” Lucas said. “You’re almost as athletic and smart as I am . . .”
“That’s what everybody says,” Virgil agreed.
“. . . Best of all, you’ve got that hair and that natural, built-in stoner look,” Lucas continued. “By the time we send you down there, in a month or two, you’ll be the best diver in the United States. Thirty, maybe forty days of training.”
“Seriously, no way that could happen, that I’d get that good.”