“How’s Marlene, Butch?” she asked.
“Recovering,” said Karp.
“Good. No impairment, then?”
“No.”
“That’s great. I’d really like to do a piece on the raid. Any chance of setting that up?”
“Ask her,” said Karp, continuing his well-known tradition of restricting all his conversation with the press to phrases of two words or less, a habit that had earned him among journalists the nickname “No Komment Karp.”
Eng made a gesture, and the camera light behind her shoulder went on, blinding Karp as she brought her microphone up to attack position.
“You know, Sal Bollano’s lawyer is claiming it was a setup. The story is he and his bodyguards were lured to the shelter so he could be assassinated in so-called self-defense. They claim Marlene was in on it. What about that, Butch?”
“No comment,” said Karp.
Eng rolled her eyes and turned to Roland. “Do you have anything on that, Roland? Is the D.A. going to look at this as an attempted murder?”
Roland flashed his perfect set of caps. “Well, Gloria, it’s far too early for any speculation on that score. The police investigation is still ongoing.”
“But Marlene Ciampi remains in police custody, is that right?”
“As far as I am aware,” Roland lied.
“And what about the Catalano murder?”
“That investigation is still ongoing.”
“You don’t intend to charge Joe Pigetti with that homicide?”
“As I said, Gloria-”
“Is it true that a witness to that murder presented himself to the district attorney’s office and you turned him away?”
The smile vanished from Roland’s eyes, and involuntarily they flicked over to meet Karp’s. Gloria Eng’s smile broadened, because she now had tape of the Homicide Bureau chief looking shifty in response to her questioning. Roland cleared his throat. “Gloria, we, ah, get any number of people coming in and claiming to be witnesses to crimes. There’s an assessment procedure that we go through, and I would venture to say. .”
A venture aborted, for Roland was saved from having to concoct a load of nonsense by a stir at the front of the room. The man himself walked across the little stage and took up position at the podium behind the Justice Department seal and a bouquet of microphones. The room settled, the lights flared, the cameras hummed. Thomas Colombo looked at what he had wrought and apparently found it good, for the small man seemed to inflate under the focused attention of the onlookers.
“As many of you are aware,” he said without preamble, “for the past three months a federal grand jury has been hearing evidence concerning the influence of organized crime on various businesses in this city. I am pleased to inform you that the grand jury has issued twenty-four indictments under the so-called RICO law, that is, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute. This statute is our major weapon against the ability of organized crime to infiltrate and corrupt legitimate enterprise and to launder its ill-gotten revenues. Among the criminal organizations of this city, it is the crime family run by Salvatore G. Bollano that has been most famous for the extent and subtlety of its infiltration. It has sent its grimy tentacles into commercial laundries, food importing, meat cutting, trucking, restaurants, construction, and waste hauling. To cover up these infiltrations, it has bribed and corrupted public officials at all levels, including those in the criminal justice system itself. It has threatened, beaten, kidnapped, and murdered, without mercy, without the smallest shred of human decency. For over thirty years it has operated with impunity, garnering astronomical profits, and hanging like a bloated parasite on the economic life of New York. The head of this organization, Salvatore G. Bollano, and his henchmen have considered themselves immune from the law and from the legitimate anger of the people. I’m here to tell you that as of today, that immunity is at an end.”
“He’s in rare form,” said Roland. “I like grimy tentacles.”
“Bloated parasite isn’t bad either,” said Karp. “But twenty-four RICO indictments seems kind of slim for how long he’s been hacking at this.”
“All you need is one good one,” said Roland. “Ah, here’s the charts and the pointer. I always like the way he snaps his little car aerial out. Do you think it has sexual connotations, these guys and the pointers?”
Colombo had gestured to one of his minions, who had thrown back the cover from a stack of large charts on an easel, and Colombo was indeed probing it with a gleaming extensible steel pointer. First he poked a chart depicting the organization of the Bollano family, then one showing the various businesses it controlled, then a chart summarizing various pieces of paper evidence, phone taps, and grand jury testimony, tying reputed members of the Bollanos to this or that restaurant, laundry, or trucker. It went on, and grew tedious. It seemed that a large number of people with Italian surnames (many bearing colorful sobriquets pronounced by the U.S. attorney with obvious relish) had indeed been very naughty. They had bribed platoons of petty officials and had made threatening calls to good citizens and hadn’t paid their taxes and had lied like bandits under oath. Not much juice here yet. The TV people began looking at their watches. Colombo appeared to sense this and moved toward his punch line, snapping his pointer in with a sharp click and turning back to face his audience.
“How did Salvatore Bollano assemble this vast empire of crime?” he demanded rhetorically. “By violence, by murder, and the credible threat of violence and murder. Now murder, as you know, is not a federal crime. But ordering murder to prevent testimony to a federal grand jury is a federal crime. Three weeks ago Edward Catalano was scheduled to appear before a federal grand jury. As noted in the chart I just showed you, Mr. Catalano, street name Eddie Cat, was one of Salvatore G. Bollano’s closest associates. He knew where the bodies were buried, and I mean that literally, and he was going to tell what he knew. He never got the chance because he wound up with five bullets in his head on the night before his scheduled appearance. Recently, however, a witness has emerged, a witness who will lay the murder of Eddie Cat at the doorstep of none other than Salvatore G. Bollano. This witness is a Chinese illegal alien named Willie Lie. .” This stirred up a murmer of nervous laughter, and Colombo waited, unsmiling, for it to die away, before continuing.
“Mr. Lie has testified before the federal grand jury, and on the basis of that testimony we issued indictments and have arrested Mr. Joseph Pigetti on charges of conspiracy, interference with a federal prosecution, witness intimidation, and kidnapping in connection with the abduction and murder of Edward Catalano. That concludes my presentation, and I am open for questions at this time.”
“Oh, shit, it’s going to be a feeding frenzy,” said Roland as a forest of hands shot up from the ranks of the press.
No one asked about the various indictments, the ostensible purpose of the press conference. What they wanted to know about was the murder and the mysterious witness. Where was this witness? In protective custody. Why wasn’t Pigetti being charged with murder? Colombo was happy to explain that murder was not a federal crime. Murder was, of course, a crime under state law, and the witness, Mr. Lie, had approached the district attorney’s office with his information, but the district attorney had refused to act on it. Pandemonium, shouts, urgent wavings. Colombo picked one and got the obvious: why did the district attorney not act?
“I have no idea,” said Colombo, his expression indicating that he had a very good idea. “In general, federal investigations enjoy excellent cooperation with local law enforcement, using both state and federal statutes against defendants of this type. After all, we’re all on the same side. There are exceptions, of course, in cases where organized crime has compromised local law enforcement organizations.”