“Okay,” I said.
“And Don’t Gamble with Our Kids’ Futures, the super PAC running the ad with the soft-focus photos of little kids? I think their money’s coming out of Vegas.”
“How’d you find that out?”
“Last Thursday,” he said, “I got a call from an attorney claiming to represent them.”
“A local lawyer?”
“He was calling from Nevada. Had some questions about the fine points of Rhode Island campaign finance law. After we hung up, I did a little checking. Turns out his firm also represents a trade association that lobbies on behalf of Las Vegas casinos.”
“Interesting.”
“But odd, don’t you think?” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“That the Atlantic City Casinos are for sports gambling in Rhode Island and the Las Vegas casinos are against it.”
“Not really,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“The Vegas casinos want to protect their monopoly on legal sports betting,” I said. “The Atlantic City casinos want to muscle in on it.”
“Aren’t they pretty much owned by the same people?”
“Not all of them,” I said. “You said there were four players. What’s the last one?”
“Have you driven down I-95 today?”
“Not yet.”
“The AFL-CIO put up a bunch of new billboards overnight.”
“What’s on them?”
“Photos of a working man in a hard hat and a student hovering over a textbook. The message in big red letters urges everybody to ‘Save Our Pensions and Support Our Schools’ by supporting the governor’s plan for state-operated sports gambling.”
28
State Senator Mark Reynolds had a dandy idea. He wanted to anoint Mr. Potato Head the official mascot of the state of Rhode Island. By happy coincidence, the national headquarters of Hasbro, the toy’s maker, happened to be located in Reynolds’s district.
The senator was silent on what the duties of the state’s mascot might entail. Do a funky dance on the sidelines during legislative debates? Douse visitors with buckets of confetti at Green Airport? Mock Mr. Met? Stand on the state line and blow raspberries at Massachusetts?
I decided to play it straight and was writing it up when the opening riff of Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man,” my ringtone for McCracken, started playing in my pocket.
“Got something for me?” I asked.
“My guy at the airport’s been keeping an eye on incoming flights from Atlantic City,” he said, “and last night something interesting came up.”
“Oh?”
“Mario Zerilli met the last evening flight. I just e-mailed you a couple of frame grabs from one of the security cameras.”
“Hold on a sec,” I said.
I opened the e-mail on my desktop computer and clicked on the attachments. One grainy photo caught a short, stocky man in a business suit standing behind the trunk of Mario’s car. He was clutching a black briefcase in one hand and holding the handle of a small rolling suitcase in the other. In the second photo, which showed his face more clearly, he was sliding into the passenger seat. He had thin lips, slits for eyes, a hawk’s beak, and luxurious salt-and-pepper hair arranged in a pompadour.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“I asked my Jersey P.I. pal, but he wasn’t sure.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“There’s more,” McCracken said.
“Oh?”
“After my guy at the airport came up with this, he went back over the video of incoming flights from South Jersey for the last couple of weeks. Turns out the same man arrived on an afternoon flight a week ago and got into a cab.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I ended the call, forwarded the photos to Judy Abbruzzi at The Atlantic City Press, and dialed her number.
“I wondered when I was going to hear from you,” she said. “I thought maybe you were blowing me off.”
“Check your e-mail,” I said, “and call me right back.”
So that’s what she did.
“Recognize him?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“So?”
“First tell me what the hell’s going on.”
I took a moment to think it over and decided to give her most of it-the super PACs competing to influence Rhode Island gambling legislation, the bundles of cash in Lucan Alfano’s briefcase, his attempts to bribe state legislators, and the unsolved murder of Phil Templeton.
“Do you know the names of the legislators Alfano tried to bribe?” she asked.
“Some of them.”
“Give.”
“I don’t feel comfortable sharing that.”
“Why?”
“I got it off the record.”
She paused, taking her time deciding if I’d given her enough for her to reciprocate.
“The guy in the photo is Romeo Alfano,” she finally said. “He’s Lucan’s younger brother.”
“They were in business together?”
“In the payday loan company, yeah.”
“And as fixers?”
“So the Jersey state cops are telling us.”
“The murder-for-hire business, too?”
“Maybe, but they can’t say for sure.”
“What else have you got?” I asked.
“The three super PACs you mentioned are active down here, too. All three have made big media buys.”
“Anybody bribing state legislators down there?”
“All the time,” she said.
“Well, sure. But on Christie’s sports gambling proposal?”
“I don’t have anything solid on that.”
We promised again to stay in touch and signed off.
At noon I skipped lunch, walked a couple of blocks to the Omni, and asked the desk clerk if Romeo Alfano was registered. He wasn’t.
“What about Michael O’Toole?” I asked. That, I remembered, was the name his late brother had registered under.
“Hold on a moment, sir… Yes, he is a guest. Would you like me to ring his room for you?”
“No thanks, but could you give me his room number?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but that would be a violation of company policy.”
I nodded, took two twenty-dollar bills out of my pocket, and dropped them on the counter.
“Suite 914,” he whispered.
I considered going it alone, thought better of it, and rang McCracken. Fifteen minutes later, we rode the elevator to the ninth floor and knocked on the door to 914. I sensed someone peering at me through the peephole. Then the door swung open.
“Good afternoon, Mario,” I said.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“A word with your boss.”
“Get lost, assholes.”
He pushed against the door. McCracken pushed back and shoved Mario deeper into the room.
Romeo Alfano was seated on a beige sectional sofa, a black briefcase by his side. A carafe of white wine and a room-service luncheon of mixed seafood were tastefully arranged on the coffee table in front of him. I elbowed Mario out of the way and headed for him.
The kid didn’t like that. He grabbed my shoulder with his left hand, spun me, and reached for his waistband with his right. That was a mistake.
McCracken popped him in the nose with a stiff left jab, grabbed his left wrist, yanked his arm behind his back, and bulled him against the wall. Mario’s head bounced against a framed Rhode Island Tourist Bureau photo of Newport Harbor, cracking the glass. The P.I. calmly lifted Mario’s T-shirt and slid the silver revolver from his waistband.
“Piece of junk, Mario,” the P.I. said. “Damned thing could have blown up in your hand.”
He opened the cylinder, shook out the shells, wiped his prints away with his shirttail, and tossed the gun on the carpet. Mario raised the hem of his T-shirt and used it to stanch the blood flowing from his honker.
Alfano looked up at us and smiled. Then he calmly picked up his wineglass and took a sip.
“If this is a robbery,” he said, “you two bozos are fuckin’ with the wrong people.”