THE FOURTH WATCH (43 page)

29

Seattle, 1986

SAL MOLTINALDO ALMOST FELL
off his chair when the Colonel told him his
plan.

It had taken him more than a decade to build
the business in Los Angeles! He went as far as to remind the
Colonel that he was not one of his employees - that he couldn't
just be ordered around.

The Colonel had laughed at that. "If I were to
withdraw your protection in Los Angeles, how many hours would you
live?"

Sal thought that there was merit in that
argument. And he had to admit that even if the long-term plans that
the Colonel had outlined were a little scary, they were also
exciting, and potentially very profitable. Solidify their position
in the northwest and use Seattle as a springboard to strike at the
big East-Coast markets. So, after threatening and whining and
demanding all nature of promises, he went to Seattle, and went
about the work of taking control of the drug trade there. He
brought his core Los Angeles people with him, and although the
Colonel had hand picked Sal's L.A successor, he allowed Sal to keep
a nice piece of the Southern California action.

*****

SAL RECOGNIZED RIGHT
away that the reason the drug trade in Seattle
was fractured was because it wasn't anyone's priority. Many groups
had their hands in the pie, but in all cases it was a sideline to
their primary business. The Italians were there, of course, but
gambling, prostitution, big ticket larceny and loan sharking were
the primary sources of their income. The Asian gangs did the same
thing as the Italians in Chinatown, but also terrorized their own
people with a centralized protection racket that put the squeeze on
every business in the community. The dope business, in both
organizations, was secondary and therefore, poorly administered and
not well controlled. Sal knew he could count on the Colonel for
some protection against both of those parties, although not to the
same level that he had in the South. So he had to add a layer of
protection for himself and his people, and that was expensive. And
he quickly realized that his real challenge was going to come from
a different group. It was called RAT (Railroad Authority
Transients) a loosely amalgamated criminal organization made up of
rail bums that dealt in robbery, the fencing of hot merchandise,
sexual slavery and narcotics.

Sal got himself situated.

He bought a family restaurant near the water on
Aiki Avenue SW and rented a suite of offices in a high rise on 9th
Avenue North, south of Lake Union. For himself he rented a six
thousand square foot penthouse apartment on Seneca Street. Six
bedrooms, four baths, formal dining and living rooms, game room,
library, office, enormous chef's kitchen. Everything hardwood and
marble, stainless and gold, with plush Berber carpeting where
appropriate. It was the penthouse suite in a building that soared
twenty stories above the city, was all glass in front, faced the
ocean and looked out across Puget Sound at Bainbridge
Island.

The Restaurant was called “Ship Shape” and was,
in fact, an old clipper ship, modified for its new purpose, with
its keel buried in the sand and its masts trimmed. The entrance was
amid ship, up a ramp and through double doors. It was quaint,
pleasant, done in a rustic sea-side motif, not plush but
comfortable and clean, with a big menu, moderately priced. A family
joint. The back room became Sal's headquarters.

The offices on 9th Avenue were a front that
gave him local respectability. He set up an investment and
financial planning business called Positive Planning and Brokerage,
Inc. He hired the best people he could find, luring them away from
big firms throughout the northwest with big salaries and benefit
packages. Within a year it was a growing concern, attracting real
clients being handled by professional brokers. Sal himself wouldn't
know a T-bill from a mutual fund, but that was okay. Both the
brokerage and the restaurant were just fronts.

Sal handed out cash to every politician he
could find. He wined and dined them lavishly, throwing regular
parties and dinners at his Seneca Street home. He had private boxes
for the Mariners and the Super Sonics, and passed out the tickets
liberally. His men found every corrupt cop in the city and lined
their pockets. Pretty soon he could pick up the phone and solve
problems from the top down or the bottom up.

His lieutenants quickly put his product on the
street, taking over small dealers and welcoming them into the
organization, or ruthlessly murdering those that put up a fight.
The message was heard loud and clear on the street. RAT struck back
mercilessly, killing any dealer they could reach who left their
organization for Sal's. As he suspected, he had little trouble with
the Italians and Asians. The drug business was secondary to them
and not worth getting into a war about. But RAT was proving to be a
significant problem. They were faceless and moved mysteriously in
and out of the city on the rails. They were vicious and fearless,
striking back at every slight, and immune to the Colonel's
influence. Time marched by without the slightest let up from
RAT.

*****

SAL HAD TO
figure something out. One Wednesday night, in the Fall of his
third year in Seattle, he called his lieutenants together in the
back of the restaurant.

Carlos was of the opinion that RAT was a
headless operation, ruled by some committee that moved between
Portland and Seattle.

"Bullshit," Sal told him.

"It's true," Carlos said. “We debriefed every
dealer that we brought over. They get their stuff from guys on the
waterfront. Never the same place, not very often the same guys. We
got a couple of the supplier types too, and they say that the stuff
comes in on the rails, and they never know who is going to contact
them with how and where to pick up the product.

"How do they know that the people that contact
them aren't cops or setting them up?" Asked Ramon, who had recently
joined them to run security for the new dealers.

"Codes, passwords, that kind of shit." Carlos
said.

"So that just means the upper guys are
insulated from the guys most likely to get busted," Ramon said,
“just like us."

"That's right," Sal said. "You think if we lost
a few dealers or drop guys they could I.D. me? Not a chance! If I
thought there was, I'd dump you guys in the Sound."

They all sat quiet, thinking about
that.

''Nope,” Sal finally told them. "There's a top
guy. There might be a committee or whatever, just like you guys are
a committee. I meet with you, you all meet with your little cells,
those guys distribute and the dealers put the product out there on
the street. Insulation, that's all it is."

"I don't know," Carlos whined, "I can't find
him."

"That's because you don't think they're out
there. Carlos, you are forever busting my balls. I say something,"
Sal held his right hand up, "and you always want to take the other
side" and he held up his left. "Sometimes that's okay because it
makes me think of other possibilities, but for the most part, you
just like to break my nuts. I'm telling you that there is a guy in
charge and I want to know who the fuck he is, where he is, where
his family is and what his fucking shoe size is, because that's how
we are going to get to them."

"Well it ain't gonna be easy" Carlos protested.
"They could never get to you."

"For your sake I hope not. Still I want to get
to him. Juan," Sal said, shifting his attention to the always
silent giant who ran the groups enforcement operation and provided
security to Sal and his inner circle, “find the fucker, and
soon."

Juan just nodded.

*****

JUAN KNEW THAT
he had to collect data. Torturing information out of people
was a messy and often ineffective business. You could never tell if
it was reliable. A guy with his balls in a vice will tell you
anything you want to hear. If he did have important news to impart,
you might not know it - being mixed in as it always was with all
the screaming and lying. No, you had to narrow your search first.
Before you started cutting a guy's ears off, you had to make sure
there was a high probability that he had the information you were
looking for.

Computers were the new thing. Juan was
fascinated at the way you could input and sort information. A few
years ago, when it started to get big, he got the bug, and he read
and learned everything he could about them. He took a course at a
community college in LA and learned about the latest technology.
Recently he had paid $12,000 for a computer system that was
compatible with this new ARAPANET, a collection of 60,000 sources
of information, mostly declassified, government databases used by
large businesses engaged in global commerce with the United States.
Juan's system allowed him access to these databases. He became
captivated watching global transportation and soon became adept at
manipulating data and tracking traffic. Air freight, container
shipping, trucking, rail transport, it was all right there, if you
were willing to spend the time. And not only was it mesmerizing -
it was applicable to business! Juan became an expert.

The day after their meeting with Sal, Juan
powered up his system and began looking at rail schedules in and
out of the Port of Seattle. They knew that RAT operated between
Portland and Seattle. There were about twenty regularly scheduled
trains into Seattle from Portland everyday. There were more than
forty going the other way. Juan drummed his fingers on the table
and thought. First off, he eliminated trains that were
predominantly commuter or passenger based. These trains often had
cargo cars on them, but he doubted the bums would use them to move
product. You had too many extra pairs of eyes when passengers were
involved. That took out more than half the routes. Next he looked
at patterns of train numbers. What trains, he wanted to know, were
regulars? Meaning, which of the same trains came and went
frequently. Juan knew that transport trains were loaded, then
routed by cargo. In other words, the cars were connected based on
the most efficient way to drop loads along a route, and pickup
loaded cars for return. Some engines took their cars along a route
and dropped and picked up cars and ended up at a different home
base, never to return, or to return. infrequently. Standard runs
would be determined by engines that left Portland and ran through
Seattle to God knew where, but returned to do it all over again.
Manufactures usage determined the frequency of the returns based
upon carloads used.

Juan worked at it for hours, moving data
around, narrowing, adding and eliminating trains from his list,
looking for a steady, dependable supply of regular cars that would
be so common in the stream of commerce that they would be ignored
by rail security. When he was done he sat back and looked at the
list on his screen. There were four cargo trains that made at least
two stops a week in both Portland and Seattle, all leaving from the
same yard in both ports. He grunted and jotted down the
numbers.

They needed spies.

Juan went to Carlos with his information and
after some obligatory complaining, Carlos had to admit that he
liked Juan's idea. They would plant a few of their own 'bums' in
the Portland and Seattle rail yards and watch and wait.

30

HENRY FLYNN HAD
been in the trash business for more than forty years. He
liked to think of himself as a bit of a pioneer in the world of
refuse. He'd cut his teeth back in the days of garbage, working a
pig farm truck that rumbled through the old neighborhoods picking,
up the festering remains of a thousand meals a week. It was a
sloppy, fetid mess, mixed with eggshells and coffee grinds, apple
cores and orange rinds, a perfect concoction with which to slop the
farmer's hogs. Henry would tell you that after a ten-hour day, in
the hot summer sun on a pig truck, you couldn't get the stink off
of you in a lye bath.

He'd held down the now mostly defunct position
of dump attendant for years, until they were banned in
Massachusetts. Back in those days he'd burned garbage mixed with
trash in tall towers, broadcasting sour soot for miles on the wind.
Later, during the land fill era, he'd buried mountains of filth in
huge pits, pushing endless miles of mixed sludge with a bulldozer
through mud and snow until hole after hole was snug with junk, and
plastic bags, and disposable diapers that would rot for a thousand
years.

Yeah, Old Henry, he'd done it all.

And now it was dumpsters and recycling bins -
waste management they called it, what a load of crap - no pun
intended.

So here he was working his first day with a new
outfit, and he was pissed off. Not at the job, it was a good one.
Ride around and empty containers into the truck. Good pay, not much
getting your hands dirty. The front of the truck had two arms that
folded hydraulically out in front of it. You maneuvered the arms
into slots on either side of the dumpster, and then, using levers,
you lifted it up over the top of the truck and dumped the load into
the back. Nice and clean. Put the box back in place and you're good
to go. He even had a uniform to wear!

But, today, as an added feature, he
had this little prick sitting next to him.
His boss,
supposedly “showing him
the ropes,” but really just busting his ass and telling him what to
do. Non-stop bullshit at the speed of sound is what Henry was
getting from the kid, who kept saying that dumping trash was just
like golf. Henry didn't know jack-shit about golf He was 58 years
old and had been hauling garbage since he'd dropped out of high
school at 16! Now he had to listen to this little asshole teaching
him how to do it. It was almost more than he could
stand.