Kane & Abel (1979) (77 page)

‘You’ve been indicted on seventeen charges of bribery and corruption of officials in fourteen different states. I’ve made provisional arrangements with the Justice Department for you to be arrested here at the apartment tomorrow morning, and they will make no objection to the granting of bail.’

‘Very cosy,’ said Abel. ‘And what if they can prove the charges?’

‘Oh, I think they’ll be able to prove some of them,’ said H. Trafford Jilks matter-of-factly. ‘But as long as Henry Osborne can’t be found, they’re going to find it very difficult to nail you on most of them. But I’m afraid the real damage has already been done, Mr Rosnovski, whether you’re convicted or not.’

‘I can see that only too well,’ said Abel, glancing at a picture of himself on the front page of the
Daily News.
‘I want you to find out, Mr Jilks, who the hell bought that file from Henry Osborne. Put as many people to work on it as you need. I don’t care about the cost. But you find out, and find out quickly, because if it turns out to be William Kane, I’m going to finish him off once and for all.’

‘Don’t get yourself into any more trouble, Mr Rosnovski,’ said H. Trafford Jilks firmly. ‘You’re knee deep in enough shit as it is.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Abel. ‘When I finish Kane, it’ll be legal and above-board.’

‘Now listen carefully, Mr Rosnovski. Forget about William Kane for the time being, and start worrying about your impending trial, unless you don’t care about spending the next ten years in jail. There’s not much more we can do tonight. I’ve already got several men looking for Osborne, and I’ll be issuing a short press statement denying the charges and saying we have a full explanation that will exonerate you completely.’

‘Do we?’ George asked hopefully.

‘No,’ said Jilks, ‘but it will give me some time to work on our defence. When Mr Rosnovski has had a chance to check through the list of officials he’s supposed to have bribed, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s never had direct contact with anyone on that list. It’s possible that Osborne always acted as an intermediary without ever putting Mr Rosnovski fully in the picture. So my job will be to prove that Osborne exceeded his authority as a director of the Baron Group. Mind you, Mr Rosnovski, if you have ever met any of the people on the list, for God’s sake tell me, because you can be sure the Justice Department will put every one of them on the witness stand. But for now, go to bed and try to get some sleep. You must be exhausted. I’ll see you first thing in the morning.’

Abel was arrested in his daughter’s apartment at 8.30 the following morning, and driven by a US marshal to the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York. The brightly coloured St Valentine’s Day decorations in the store windows heightened his sense of loneliness. Jilks had hoped that his arrangements had been so discreet the press would not have found out about them, but when Abel reached the courthouse he was once again surrounded by photographers and reporters. He ran the gauntlet into the courtroom with George in front of him and Jilks behind. They sat silently in the corridor waiting for their case to be called.

Although they waited for several hours, when they were finally called the indictment hearing lasted only a few minutes, and felt strangely anticlimactic. The clerk read out the seventeen charges, and H. Trafford Jilks answered ‘Not Guilty’ to every one of them on behalf of his client. He then requested bail. The Government, as agreed, made no objection. Jilks asked Judge Prescott for at least three months to prepare his defence. The judge set a trial date of May 17.

Abel was free again; free to face the press and more of their barbed questions and flashing bulbs. The chauffeur had the car waiting for him at the bottom of the courtroom steps, with the back door open and the engine running. He had to do some very skilful manoeuvring to escape the reporters who were still pursuing their story. When the car came to a halt on East Fifty-Seventh Street, Abel turned to George and put his arm around his shoulder.

‘Now listen, George, you’re going to have to run the group while I get my defence sorted out. Let’s hope you don’t have to go on running it after that,’ he said, attempting a laugh.

‘Of course I won’t have to, Abel. Mr Jilks will get you off, you’ll see. Keep smiling,’ he said, and left the other two men as they entered the apartment building.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without George,’ Abel told Jilks as they settled down in Florentyna’s living room. ‘We came over on the boat together forty years ago, and we’ve been through a hell of a lot since then. Now it looks as if there’s a whole lot more ahead of us to worry about, so let’s get on with it, Mr Jilks. Have you caught up with Osborne yet?’

‘No, but I have six men working on it, and I understand the Justice Department has at least another six, so we can be fairly certain one of us will find him. Not that we want the other side to get to him first.’

‘What about the man Osborne sold the file to?’ asked Abel.

‘I have some people I trust in Chicago detailed to run that down.’

‘Good,’ said Abel. ‘Now the time has come to go over that file of names you left with me last night.’

Jilks began by reading the indictment, and then went over the charges one by one. Abel made notes.

After nearly three weeks of back-to-back meetings, Jilks was finally convinced there was nothing more Abel could tell him. During those three weeks there had been no leads on the whereabouts of Henry Osborne, for either Jilks’s men or the Justice Department. Nor was there any information on who Henry had sold his information to, and Jilks was beginning to wonder if Abel had guessed right. Not that they could find any direct connection to William Kane.

As the trial date drew nearer, Abel started to face the possibility that he might actually have to go to jail. He was fifty-four, and fearful of the prospect of spending the last years of his life the same way he had spent the first few. As H. Trafford Jilks pointed out, if the Government was able to prove its case, there was enough evidence in Osborne’s file to send Abel to prison for a very long time. Abel doubted that any new business could make much progress without the kind of handouts and small bribes to various people documented with such sickening accuracy in Jilks’s file. He thought bitterly about the smooth, impassive face of the young William Kane, sitting in his Boston office on a pile of inherited money whose doubtful origins were safely buried under generations of respectability.

In the midst of Abel’s unhappiness came a ray of light. Florentyna wrote a touching letter enclosing some photographs of her son, and saying that she still loved and respected her father and believed in his innocence.

Three days before the trial was due to open, the Justice Department tracked Henry Osborne down in New Orleans. They would never have found him if he hadn’t turned up in a local hospital with two broken legs, after welching on several gambling debts. They don’t like that sort of thing in New Orleans. After the hospital had put plaster casts on Osborne’s legs, the Justice Department assisted him onto an Eastern Airlines flight to New York.

Henry Osborne was charged the next day with conspiracy to defraud, and denied bail. H. Trafford Jilks asked the court’s permission to be allowed to question him. The judge granted his request, but Jilks gained little satisfaction from the hour-long exchange. It was clear that Osborne had already made a deal with the Government, agreeing to testify against Abel in return for facing lesser charges.

‘No doubt Mr Osborne will find the charges against him are surprisingly lenient,’ the lawyer commented drily.

‘So that’s his game,’ said Abel. ‘I take the rap while he escapes. Now we’ll never find out who he sold that goddamn file to.’

‘No, that was the one thing he was willing to talk about. He assured me that it wasn’t William Kane. He said he would never have sold the file to Kane, however much he offered. A man from Chicago called Harry Smith paid Osborne $25,000 for the file. Would you believe it, Harry Smith turns out to be an alias; there are dozens of Harry Smiths in the Chicago area and not one of them fits the description.’

‘Find him,’ said Abel. And find him before the trial opens.’

‘We’re working around the clock on that,’ said Jilks. ‘If he’s still in Chicago, we’ll track him down. Osborne said that this so-called Harry Smith told him he only wanted the information for private purposes, and had no intention of revealing its contents to anyone in authority.’

‘Then why did he want the file in the first place?’

‘The inference was blackmail. That’s why Osborne disappeared: he wanted to avoid you. If you think about it, Mr Rosnovski, he could be telling the truth. After all, the contents of the file are extremely damaging to him, and he must have been as alarmed as you when he heard it was in the hands of the Justice Department. No wonder he tried to lie low, and then agreed to testify against you once they’d caught up with him.’

‘Do you know,’ said Abel, ‘the only reason I ever employed Osborne was because he hated William Kane as much as I did, and now Kane has turned that to his advantage.’

‘There’s no proof that Mr Kane was involved in any way,’ said Jilks.

‘I don’t need proof.’

The trial was delayed at the request of the prosecution, who said they needed more time to question Henry Osborne, who was now their principal witness. Trafford Jilks objected strongly, and informed the court that the health of his client, who was no longer a young man, was failing under the strain of the false accusations against him. The plea did not move Judge Prescott, who agreed to the prosecution’s request and postponed the trial for a further four weeks.

For Abel, those twenty-eight days could be measured in hours, and two days before the trial was due to open, he resigned himself to being found guilty and facing a long jail sentence. Then Jilks’s investigator in Chicago found the man called Harry Smith. He turned out to be a local private detective who had used an alias under strict instructions from his client, a firm of lawyers in New York. It cost Jilks a thousand dollars and another twenty-four hours before ‘Harry Smith’ revealed that the firm concerned had been Cohen, Cohen and Yablons.

‘Thaddeus Cohen is Kane’s personal lawyer. They go back to Harvard days,’ said Abel. ‘And way back, when I bought the hotel group from Kane’s bank, some of the paperwork was done by a man named Thomas Cohen. For some reason the bank used two lawyers for the transaction.’

‘What do you want me to do about this?’ George asked Abel.

‘Nothing,’ interrupted Trafford Jilks. ‘We don’t need any more trouble before the trial. Do you understand, Mr Rosnovski?’