Two Jakes (44 page)

CHAPTER
4 – BULLETPROOF

Everett
Harvey put his coffee in the cup holder. It was mid-afternoon and his was the
only car parked in the Dunkin’ Donuts lot in a strip center on Bay Street. He
pulled down the visor and opened the mirror. There were white crumbs in his
moustache. Harvey took a napkin and brushed them off. He looked down and swiped
his tie and pants legs. He ignored his jacket, which could camouflage anything.
Harvey looked around the front seat and did a hasty cleanup. But he knew he
would miss some. Nancy would notice and pitch a fit. But nobody can go into a
Dunkin’ for just coffee, for Christ sake!

Harvey
was a triple dipper. Having done 20 and out in the N.Y.P.D., he was nearing the
end of a concurrent 25-year stint in the Army Reserve, with a cushy staff
sergeant billet right on Staten Island in Fort Wadsworth. An overachiever –
working on a Masters in Education at the College of Staten Island – Harvey was
cognizant of the blessings of multiple pensions and thus also covered the
police beat for the
Richmond Register
.

The
transition from cop to reporter was jarring at first – he had been programmed
to hate the media – but now loved the job. He reported to an editor, Bob
Pearsall, who had balls, and his own background cut him plenty of slack with
the local cops. They assumed, rightly, that Harvey wasn’t out to screw them. As
a result, he crossed more crime scene tapes than any other reporter. A penchant
for colorful checkered sports coats made him easy to spot; most cops now knew
him by sight. He was patient with the rookies who gave him a hard time,
politely asking them to check with a superior. If that didn’t work, he put his
240 pounds in their face and told them he was arresting kids their age when
they spilled out of their fathers’ condoms.

Harvey
was already vested in the paper’s pension plan and planned to call it quits
soon. He felt bad about leaving Pearsall in the lurch – the man knew a good
crime story – but with three pensions (the triple dip) and a teacher wife
nearing retirement (another dip at the entitlement trough), not to mention
Social Security (a quintuple dip?) warmer climes beckoned. In fact, he was
reading a brochure about the new Gary Player golf community in the Smoky
Mountains when his police scanner crackled. Then three squad cars, sirens
blazing, shot past.

Five
minutes later, Harvey pulled up to an obvious crime scene, bracketed with
police cars, ambulances and anxious neighbors. He felt sick. It had nothing to
do with the sinkers he’d downed. He knew the house.

A grim-faced
cop lifted the yellow tape for him.

“It
sucks, Ev. Big time. I’m sorry.”

Harvey
heard his name being called. He looked up to the front door, where District
Attorney Daniel O’Connor was waving him up. Harvey bent under the tape and
headed up the walk with a growing sense of foreboding. What was the D.A. doing
here? O’Connor was pale as a ghost. This was bad.

***

Robert
Pearsall was tired. The
Richmond Register
was a “p.m.” paper. It hit the
newsstands just before noon and was on stoops or in doorways all across the
borough by the time most people got home from work in “the city,” as Staten
Islanders universally referred to Manhattan. That meant his day usually started
before dawn.

The
newsroom was quiet, a sea of empty cubicles. More than half the editorial staff
had been let go over the previous three years, as the Internet decimated the
paper’s traditional advertising base. Circulation, which had peaked at 70,000,
was now around 40,000, and that didn’t tell the whole story. The 70,000 figure
was reached when the Island had a population of 200,000. Since most papers were
then home delivered, that meant that just about every Islander not in diapers
read the
Register
. Today the population was half a million, the majority
new arrivals with no affection for their “hometown newspaper.” There was talk
of the
Register
going weekly. The paper’s new $25 million headquarters
and state-of-the-art printing plant, built with cheap money four years earlier,
was already obsolete and a financial drain. Pearsall often longed for the
crowded and decrepit newsroom he started in, with its steel-desk ambiance and
bustle.

Pearsall
put his feet up. His shoes were black, and clashed with the off-the-rack brown
suit he was wearing. At least, he noted, his socks matched his maroon tie and
suspenders. His daughter, a typically clothes-conscious teen-ager, tried to get
him to wear a belt. With his thin face and balding pate, the suspenders made
him look like a banker in a 1940’s Capra movie, she said. While delighted in
her movie taste, he stood firm on the suspenders. When you have a pot belly,
narrow hips and no ass, trousers tend to slip south unless anchored around the
shoulders. He hoped she wouldn’t notice the damn shoes!

Pearsall
had worked at the paper all his professional life, starting on the night staff
as a reporter writing a blizzard of “meeting” notices churned out by Staten
Island’s legions of religious, veteran, political, social, cultural and
metastasizing not-for-profit groups. All of them got three sprightly-written
paragraphs, buried inside. Pearsall and his colleagues rarely went to any
meetings; most of the stories were phoned in by participants, usually a
designated “press” person who drew the short straw. The information was recited
verbatim, and there wasn’t much room for creativity on the part of the
“reporter” taking it all down. How many ways can you say that 35 Rotarians at
the Mandalay Restaurant listened to a speech by the Commander of the local
Coast Guard base? But Pearsall did his best, even surviving the prankster who
reported that the Association of Gynecologists had elected Dr. Seymour Vulva as
its president. He was more careful after that.

But
during the same nighttime hours when Rotarians were getting soused at local
bars, other people were occasionally getting themselves murdered, raped or
trapped in fires. Those stories weren’t phoned in. Since the paper’s “crack”
police reporter at the time, an often drunk ex-flatfoot named Padraic O’Malley,
checked his ambition at his favorite pub by 6 p.m., a night staff reporter
might catch a juicy story.

Unlike
the other night reporters, Pearsall never ignored one of these stories, and
soon his editors noted that he rarely made factual or stylistic mistakes, or
needed much rewriting. He quickly moved up the editorial ladder, avoiding, for
the most part, the petty squabbles rampant at a small-town monopoly newspaper.
He was a natural for the city editor’s job, all he ever coveted, never aspiring
to the executive editor’s position, which would have meant getting involved in
office and local politics. Moreover, while he was fairly facile with computers
and appreciated what they could do in a newsroom, he had no desire to lead the
paper into the New Age and was happy when management brought in a young technocrat
from a Silicon Valley daily as executive editor.

The
“techie” was Beldon Popp, who had never been a “line” editor, selected for the
job because he’d been a computer teacher at one time. But he turned out to be a
decent manager and deserved credit for revamping the
Register’s
award-winning computer system and saving what circulation was left. More
importantly to Pearsall, Popp rarely interfered in the day-to-day operations of
the newsroom.

Robert
Pearsall was part of a dying breed – the crusading newspaperman. Not that he’d
fallen off a turnip truck. He knew a certain amount of corruption was
inevitable in a small, insular community where the “old boy” network was
ingrained. Indeed, he was prepared to look the other way when favors and
accommodations between and among local elected officials and judges made life
easier for Staten Islanders who were otherwise at the mercy of the larger
city’s unfeeling bureaucracy. Islanders looked after their own – and Pearsall
was first and foremost an Islander.

But
Pearsall always had his eye out for real corruption and hypocrisy, which, while
never in short supply on Staten Island, had become bolder as the
Register’s
influence waned. Older residents who remembered a less-crowded and less-corrupt
small-town Staten Island were fleeing to New Jersey and the Sun Belt, and the
borough’s burgeoning immigrant population could care less about local news
coverage. The politicians and crooks were having a field day, safe in the
knowledge that the “Manhattan media” typically ignored Staten Island unless a
plane crashed on it.

Pearsall
knew his days were numbered. He had come close to putting in his papers two
years earlier, after the tragic, though not unexpected, death of his wife.
Veronica Pearsall lost a two-year battle with breast cancer and he was left
with a teen-age daughter to raise.

Then
came the nursing home scandal. Most of the nursing home and assisted living
facilities in the borough were locally owned and operated and, for the most
part, did a fairly good job. But one group of homes, run by an Arkansas-based
corporation called Paradise on Earth Inc., wasn’t living up to its name.
Indeed, its mortality rate was beginning to ring alarm bells even in the
live-and-let-die world of Staten Island political and medical circles.

Pearsall
had his reporters look into Paradise’s operations. One of them went undercover
as an employee. Within two months, he discovered gross abuse of helpless
patients, including rape, Medicare fraud, instances of euthanasia among
patients without relatives and black market sale of drugs. The hygiene in the
clinics would have been a disgrace in the Third World and on its own would have
counted for the high death rate. But patients were also being given outdated or
diluted prescriptions.

Pearsall
ran a series, but suspected that Paradise’s corruption was systemic. He
dispatched two reporters to investigate the company’s facilities in other
states. Armed with the early stories, they convinced frightened administrators
in other Paradise operations to open up. The subsequent revelations that, in
addition to its other atrocities, the company traded in body parts, soon hit
the national media. Congress stepped in. The
Register’s
series, led by
thundering editorials written by Pearsall himself, won a spate of awards,
including a Pulitzer Prize
,
the first in the paper’s 109-year history.
There was even a slight, and temporary, surge in circulation.

The
paper’s downward spiral soon resumed, but Bob Pearsall wanted one more feather
in his cap before retiring. He thought he might get one if his latest
suspicions panned out. He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a beat-up,
coffee-stained Hagstrom map of Staten Island. There were newer, flashier
Chamber of Commerce maps in the drawer that were in many ways superior, and
certainly more current, but he liked the feel of the Hagstrom and the way its
streets looked. Besides, the older map had been used so often it had a “crease”
memory. It took him only seconds to refold it. When he tried to close the new
maps it looked like he was having a seizure. Often as not the map cover wound
up on the inside.

He
lay the map flat on his desk and stared at it. He had used a red magic marker
to circle two areas: the former oil-tank farm in Bloomfield on Staten Island’s
west shore and the mothballed Naval Home Port in Stapleton on the east shore.
Unlike the newer maps, the old Hagstrom didn’t indicate the Home Port property
in Stapleton, so Pearsall wrote the name in with a ballpoint.

Someone
was quietly buying up land all the way down to the water line surrounding both
tracts. The name that kept popping up was Dr. Nathan Bimm, a millionaire former
plastic surgeon turned real estate developer.

Pearsall
despised Bimm. He had built a fabulously lucrative chain of “nip-and-tuck”
clinics on Staten Island but sold his practice suddenly just before a Federal
Medicare Fraud task force discovered tens of millions of dollars in
overbilling. Pearsall suspected, but could never prove, that Bimm had a silent
partner in the clinics – the Lacuna crime family – which warned him of the
impending investigation. In any event, Bimm escaped prosecution and through
political contributions and sweetheart real estate deals was now considered to
be the right-hand man of Borough President Mario Blovardi – or vice versa,
Pearsall thought cynically.

In
most cases it was obvious Bimm was merely arranging the recent land purchases
for a third party. But who? The Lacunas? What could they get out of it? Both
tracts, which each ran to several hundred acres, were presumably spoken for. In
Bloomfield, NASCAR had purchased the oil-farm property and was planning a race
track and stadium, a project Pearsall opposed but suspected would never get off
the drawing boards anyway. And the Home Port land had recently been sold by the
city to a Hong Kong-based firm for development as a mixed-use community of
residential high-rises and shopping.

But
the editor’s distrust of Bimm, who he blamed for much of the recent
construction blight on Staten Island, prompted him to assign his two best
reporters to dig deeper. So far they had drawn a blank on both the who and the
why. It was early innings, he knew, and they were hampered by the fact they
really didn’t know what to look for and had been reduced to grasping at straws.

The
latest straw being a historical coincidence about the two properties that one
of the reporters, Chris Tighe, dug up on the Internet. Pearsall had actually
been snippy with the kid on the phone for wasting time on something that had no
relevance.