I had some paperwork with me relating to the baiclass="underline" the receipt for five million dollars, the bail forfeiture warning, and other printed matter that I looked over. I also had the arrest warrant now, and the charge sheet, which I now read. Most important, I had a copy of the indictment, which ran to about eighty pages. I wanted to read it at my leisure, but for now, I perused it, discovering that, indeed, all the evidence against Frank Bellarosa was in the form of five witness statements. There was no physical evidence putting him at the scene of the crime, and all the witnesses had Hispanic names.
I had never asked Bellarosa about the actual murder, and I only vaguely remembered the press accounts of it. But from what I could glean from the witness statements, Juan Carranza, driving his own car, a Corvette, left the Garden State Parkway at about noon on January fourteenth, at the Red Bank exit. With him was his girlfriend, Ramona Velarde. A car in front of the Corvette came to a stop on the single-lane exit ramp, and Carranza was forced to stop also. Two men then exited the car behind Carranza, walked right up to his car, and one of them fired a single bullet through his side window, striking Carranza in the face. The assassin then tried the driver's door, and finding it unlocked, he opened it and fired the remaining four bullets from the revolver into Carranza's head. The girlfriend was untouched. The assassin then threw the revolver on the girlfriend's lap, and he and his companion got into the front car that had blocked the exit ramp, abandoning their car behind Carranza's. The witnesses to this assassination were Ramona Velarde and four men who were in a car behind the car from which the assassins exited. Each of the four male witnesses stated frankly that they were Juan Carranza's bodyguards. I noted that none of them said they fired at the men who had bumped off their boss. In fact, they stated that they put Ramona Velarde in their car and jumped the curb onto the grass, driving around the assassins' abandoned car and the Corvette, but they made no attempt to pursue the assassins. The subtext here was that they recognized that their boss had been hit by the Italian mob, and they didn't want to be dead heroes. The New Jersey State Police determined that this rubout had federal drug and racketeering implications and contacted the FBI. Through an anonymous tip, Ramona Velarde was picked up, and she subsequently identified the four bodyguards, who were all picked up or surrendered within a few weeks. All of them agreed to become federal witnesses.
The issue of identification seemed to me a little vague. Ramona Velarde was only a few feet from the assassin, but I don't see how she could have seen his face if he was standing beside a low-slung Corvette. All she could have seen was the hand and the gun. Similarly, the assassin and his partner would have exited their car with their backs to the four bodyguards, who had let that car come between them and their boss. However, all four men stated that the assassin and his partner glanced back at them a few times as the two men stepped up to Carranza's Corvette. All four of the men said they recognized the face of Frank Bellarosa. Ramona Velarde picked Bellarosa's photo out of mug shots. Well, as I read this interesting account of gangland murder, it did certainly sound like a mob hit, Italian style. I mean, it was classical Mafia: the boxed-in automobile, the girlfriend left untouched, even the bodyguards left alone so that the hit didn't become a massacre, which would draw all sorts of unwanted negative press. And the abandoned car was stolen, of course, and also Italian style, the murder weapon was left behind and was clean as a whistle. The amateurs liked to use the same gun over and over again until somebody got caught with it, and ballistics showed it had about a dozen murders on it. The Italians bought clean guns, used them once, and dumped them immediately at the scene before strolling off.
I thought about this testimony I was reading in Bellarosa's Cadillac. It was quite possible that the murder had taken place exactly this way, and the witnesses were telling the truth, except for the identification of Frank Bellarosa. I'm no detective, but it doesn't take many brains to realize that a man such as Bellarosa, even if he wanted to commit a murder personally, wouldn't do it in broad daylight where half the population of the New York metropolitan area could identify his face. But apparently someone in the FBI office or the U.S. Attorney's office saw this murder as an opportunity to cause problems in the underworld. Therefore why not assign it to the number-one Mafia boss? And I thought, if Bellarosa was right that the murder was done by the Drug Enforcement Agency, then the DEA would most probably choose a modus operandi of the underworld, e.g. an Uzi submachine-gun attack to imitate Colombians, a knife or machete attack to imitate the Jamaicans, a bomb assassination as the Koreans had used a few times, or the cleanest, safest, and most easily imitated attack – a Mafia rubout.
I realized that what I was doing was formulating a defence in my mind, but beyond that I was trying to convince myself that I was defending an innocent man. Trying to be objective, trying to be that universal juror, I evaluated what I knew of the case so far and found that there was a reasonable doubt as to Frank Bellarosa's guilt.
I glanced at Bellarosa as I flipped through the indictment. He noticed and said to me, "They named the guys who testified against me. Right?" "Yes. Four men and one woman."
"Oh, yeah. Carranza's girlfriend. I remember that from the papers." He asked, "She said she saw me?"
"Yes." He nodded but said nothing.
I said to him, "They're all under the federal witness protection programme."
"That's good. Nobody can hurt them." He smiled.
I said to him, "They won't made good witnesses for a jury. They're not upright citizens."
He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.
Lenny stopped in front of a coffee shop on Broadway. Vinnie took coffee orders, then went inside to fetch four containers.
We drove through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, then came back into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel.
The car phone in the rear rang, and Bellarosa motioned for me to answer it, so I did. "Hello?"
A familiar voice, a man, asked, "Is Mr Bellarosa there?"
John Sutter is a fast learner, so I replied, "No, he's at Mass. Who is this?"
Bellarosa chuckled.
The man answered my question with one of his own, "Is this John Sutter?"
"This is Mr Sutter's valet."
"I don't like your sense of humour, Mr Sutter."
"Most people don't, Mr Ferragamo. What can I do for you?" I looked at Bellarosa. "I would like your permission to speak to your client." Bellarosa already had his hand out for the phone, so I gave it to him. "Hello, Al… Yeah… Yeah, well, he's kind of new to this. You know?" He listened for a while, then said, "You ain't playing the game, either, goombah. You got no right to complain about this." He listened again, a bored expression on his face. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what? Look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Am I complaining? You hear me shooting my mouth off?"
I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation, of course, but I couldn't believe the end I was hearing. These guys were talking as if they'd just had a disagreement over a game of boccie ball or something. Bellarosa said, "You think I'm gonna use dirty money for bail? Check it out, Al. You find it's dirty, it's yours, and I'll come back to jail… Yeah. Save yourself some time. Don't get technical." He glanced at me, then said into the phone, "He's an okay guy. Get off his case. He's a real citizen. An important citizen. You don't fuck with him, Al. You fuck with him, you got serious problems.
Capisce?"
Me? Was he talking about me?