I look at Reed and he nods encouragingly.
“Okay. Of course. Whatever you want.”
But where to begin?
In my article, I start by setting the stage for the reader. I describe the ill-fated Charpentier family, and the tragic house fire that claimed four of six of them in one horrible night. I describe how Charles’ insurance company refused to honor his property claim because of “suspected arson and insurance fraud.” And how he fought to clear his name, and secure the funds owed to him, for the better part of the next year, because he wanted desperately to build a new house, and a new life, for his sole surviving teenager, Eleanor.
I explain in my article that, in the end, a defeated and beleaguered Charles Charpentier marshalled every last dime in his bank account and used it to send his bereft daughter to an art school in Paris. And that, when he knew she was safe and sound on another continent, painting family portraits while overlooking the Seine, he put a gun in his mouth and ended his life on the one-year anniversary of the fire.
But, obviously, Eleanor doesn’t need to hear about any of those tragedies, seeing as how she lived them, plus many more, once she met Terrence Rivers—a strapping, smooth-talking thirty-year-old American—who happened to be vacationing in Paris.
I turn my article facedown on the table, deciding to ditch the format of the article, and, instead, walk Eleanor through my investigation, step by step.
I say, “After you told me about your family and your father during our prior visit, I couldn’t help wondering what investigations might have been conducted at the time, either by the police or the insurance company. I called my favorite professor from UCLA, a woman named Gilda Schiff, and she was excited to help me. Right away, we discovered police records regarding the fire were nonexistent. So, we focused on trying to track down the insurance company’s investigation. At my professor’s recommendation, I hired a local investigator in New York to help identify the insurance company, and, pretty quickly, she was able to find an archive of old property records that provided the answer.”
“Mom,” Reed says. “What Georgina isn’t telling you is that she hired that private investigator with her own money. I didn’t even know she was doing any of this research.”
“I didn’t want to tell Reed, or anyone, in case I came up empty handed,” I say. But the full truth is that I didn’t want to say anything to Reed, or anyone else, in case I stumbled upon evidence that suggested, or possibly even confirmed, that Charles Charpentier had set that fire. I continue, “To be clear, though, I only paid for the investigator in the beginning. When my little pot of money ran out, she continued working on the case pro bono for me, simply because she’d become as obsessed with the case by then as me.”
“I didn’t realize that,” Reed says. “Give me your investigator’s address later. I’ll send her a big, fat check to thank her.”
I smile at Reed. “Thank you. She’ll be grateful for that. She worked really, really hard on this case.” I address Eleanor. “I should mention it was only because of Reed’s generosity with me that I could afford to pay that investigator, at all. Thanks to him, I didn’t have any expenses this summer.”
I pause, thinking Eleanor might say something, but when she only stares at me, wide-eyed and visibly overwhelmed, I realize this isn’t going to be a back-and-forth conversation. Plainly, Eleanor is too shell-shocked to do anything but sit and listen to an unending monologue. And so, that’s what I give her. The full story, in one long, continuous ramble, summarized as follows:
The private investigator I hired, Carla, quickly figured out the Charpentier home had been insured by a long-defunct company called Shamrock Insurance, which went out of business within a year of the fire, when its owner, Henry Flannery, a renowned New York City mobster, was arrested for money laundering, racketeering, and other criminal enterprises.
After finding out the shocking news about Shamrock being owned by a mobster, I called Leonard with some general questions about money laundering and racketeering, and he told me criminals always run their “dirty money” through legitimate businesses, in order to “clean” it. Or, in other words, to make the money look, on the books, like it didn’t come from a criminal enterprise. Leonard explained, “It sounds like Shamrock Insurance was one of the legitimate businesses Henry Flannery used to clean his dirty money.”
At that point, I devoured every article I could find on Henry Flannery, and noticed that many of them mentioned his bitter feud with another New York mobster named Giuseppe Benvenuto, who’d famously owned a bustling restaurant in Lower Manhattan called “Sofia’s”... until it burned to the ground in a raging fire a mere six days before the Charpentier fire.
Bam! For some reason, that fact hit me like a ton of bricks. Just that fast, the investigative reporter inside me knew I’d hit on something big. A restaurant in Manhattan, owned by one mobster, burned down in a fire, and less than a week later, a home insured by that mobster’s rival also burned down in a fire? Rationally, I knew it was a stretch to link the two fires. But my gut told me there was almost certainly a connection.
Not knowing what else to do, I read a biography about Henry Flannery, written, with the help of a professional co-writer, by a high-ranking member of Henry’s crime organization—a “lieutenant” who’d flipped on Henry during Henry’s trial, and then disappeared into the witness protection program. And what I discovered while reading that lieutenant’s biography broke the entire cold case wide open.
According to this “lieutenant” dude, Henry ordered Giuseppe’s restaurant torched to the ground for some unknown offense. And so, in retaliation, Giuseppe decided to “take down” Shamrock by forcing it to pay out on a whole bunch of property claims, all at once. Specifically, claims that would be filed by Shamrock’s handful of few “legitimate clients,” whom the lieutenant described in his book as “suckers from rich suburbs, who’d bought cheap insurance from Shamrock, not realizing they were doing business with the mob.”
Well, that was it for me. After reading that description, I knew in my gut poor Charles Charpentier had been one of those “suckers.” I knew, in my gut, he hadn’t set the fire that claimed his family. Giuseppe Benvenuto had. But, obviously, a gut feeling wasn’t going to be enough. I knew I needed to find unquestionable facts.
When I tried to track down the professional co-writer of the Henry Flannery biography, I learned he’d died a decade ago. But, lucky for me, his adult daughter—a professor at Cornell—was more than happy to chat with me on the phone and relay to me all the detailed stories her beloved, and very talkative, father had told her about the legendary mobster, Henry Flannery.
According to the co-writer’s daughter, ninety-five percent of Shamrock’s clients were dummy profiles with bank accounts controlled by Henry or one of his family members. Only five percent of Shamrock’s client roster was comprised of real people—poor saps Henry counted on, without their knowledge, to prove his company’s legitimacy, if needed. Over the years, on the rare occasion when one of Shamrock’s few real clients filed an actual property claim, the company always denied it on whatever grounds. And then, as necessary, bribed someone at the Insurance Commission to rule in Shamrock’s favor on the claim, if the client persisted.