Two Jakes (53 page)

“So, what’s going on there now? I read someplace it was supposed
to be a movie studio.”

“It would have been perfect,” Doyle said. “The big Navy Yard buildings
would have made great studios and soundstages. Plus a lot of movies are shot on
Staten Island anyway, so it would have been convenient.”

“What happened?”

“Political bullshit. Big contributor to the Mayor’s campaign had
an investment in the Silvertop Studio complex on the waterfront in Brooklyn
across from Manhattan. He didn’t want any competition so they scotched the
Stapleton deal. Now I hear the whole thing is going to be developed by some
Chinese investors as a mixed-use project. Some retail, some residential.”

“Any connection between Bloomfield and the Home Port?”

“You mean other than Bimm?”

“I mean would one affect the other.”

“They are on opposite sides of the borough. Apples and oranges.”

“Anyone really angry about it?”

“Not really. A lot of people will have their views of the harbor
ruined, and a few seagulls will be pissed off, but it means jobs and may even
revitalize the Stapleton and Rosebank areas, which could use it. Even Mr.
Pearsall thought it might be a plus. The only thing that bothered him was Bimm
buying up all that real estate near it.”

“Would
your partner, Chris, know anything you don’t?”

“I
doubt it.”

“Do
you keep in touch?”

“Through
the Internet, occasionally. He’s in New Zealand.”

“I
know.”

“You’re
going to call him anyway, aren’t you?”

“It’s
the call that you don’t make that you later find out you should have.”

“Well,
don’t forget the time difference. He’s 13 hours ahead.”

***

As
Scarne headed back to New York, he called Chris Tighe. If Sandy Doyle was right
about time zones, it would be about 9 AM in New Zealand.

“I’m
just heading out,” Tighe said when he answered. “Surf’s up.”

Tighe
obviously had his priorities right.

“Listen,
Chris, can I call you Chris?”

“Sure.”

“Well,
Chris, I’ll make this quick. I’m doing a follow up on a story that you and
Sandy Doyle were working on together at the
Richmond Register
, the
proposal for the NASCAR track. I just spoke to her.”

“How
is Sandy?”

“She
fine. Expecting twins.”

“Yes,
I know. We Tweet. You at the
Register
?”

Scarne
didn’t want to go through the whole private eye rigmarole. Tighe might be more
comfortable opening up to another journalist.

“Yeah,”
he lied. “Just started. They gave me some old stories to revisit. NASCAR, the
Home Port, you know the drill.”

“Sure.
Been there, done that. We all have to pay our dues. How’s the weather back
there?”

Scarne
knew that people living in places with gorgeous weather always get off on
hearing about lousy weather elsewhere. It wasn’t a bad day in New Jersey, but
Scarne wanted to make Tighe feel good so he said, “Sucks.”

“Figures.
Did they replace Bob Pearsall yet?”

“No.
Mr. Popp said his shoes are hard to fill.”

That
did they trick.

“He’s
right about that. So, what can I do for you?”

“Well,
I think I got everything from Sandy, but is there anything you found out that
maybe you didn’t mention to her?”

Scarne
could hear a woman’s voice in the background urging Tighe to get a move on.

“You
mean other than finding Amelia Earhart’s body under Nathan Bimm?”

The
kid had a sense of humor.

“Old
news,” Scarne retorted, laughing. “But how about anything that would have
gotten someone’s balls in a twist.”

“Not
really. The track project was, and I guess still is, controversial. But I mean
a kid can’t open up a lemonade stand on Staten Island without some yahoo sounding
off about it. My guess was that it’s never going to be approved. Bob wasn’t so
much against the track as he was suspicious of anything Bimm had his hands in,
which is why we looked at the Home Port, too. But I have to tell you nothing we
came across looked illegal. Doesn’t mean that something wasn’t kosher, but what
the hell in New York isn’t when big money is involved? If you spoke to Sandy,
you know we had nada.”

Well,
that’s that, Scarne thought, as the background female voice became more
insistent.

“Uh,
I really have to go, Mr. Scarne. Sorry I couldn’t be more help, but I think we
were on a wild goose chase. I guess Bimm is an acquired taste, but I really
have nothing against him. He was polite to me when I talked to him.”

“Sandy
told me the interview with him fell through.”

“It
did. But I called him separately about something I found on the Web.”

“What
was it?”

“Nothing
important.”

“Humor
me.”

“Well,
I came across some old news clips from the 1920’s about plans to build rail
tunnels from Staten Island to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The entrances would have
been located on or near the property for the Home Port or the NASCAR track.
Some work was even started on the Brooklyn tunnel before they ran out of money
or something. I thought it might make a humorous story, add some history and
color to both projects. I asked Bimm whether he knew about it.”

“What
did he say?”

“Said
it was news to him.”

“Did
you write it up?”

Tighe
laughed.

“I
ran it by Mr. Pearsall,” Tighe said, laughing at the memory. “He pitched a fit,
which was unlike him. Said the Internet was a bottomless pit of cockamamie
story ideas, and mine was one of them. He was right; it was a stupid idea. I
never even mentioned it to Sandy.”

C
HAPTER
15 – MOO SHU POKER

“Moo
Shu” Silman was at the bar in the Richmond Hotel, reflecting, as usual, at how
far he had fallen. The lounge at the Richmond Hotel is definitely not the “in”
place to be on Thursday – or any – night. Small, dimly lit and usually vacant
but for the occasional salesman too lethargic or discouraged to seek out Staten
Island’s better nightspots, it stopped just short of being seedy. That
distinction went to the lobby.

But
not much could be expected from the hotel, one of the few independently owned
hotels in the city of New York, if being mob-owned fit that description. A
barely break-even operation, it survived on small government and corporate
contracts (military recruits awaiting destination orders; pilots and attendants
from a Bulgarian airline; tour operators who lied about the borough’s
“proximity” to Manhattan), as well as ill-informed salesmen and, incredibly,
given Silman’s checkered history, sequestered juries.

Without
asking, the barmaid refilled his glass of tomato juice. She looked past him and
said, “Oh, Christ.”

Dr.
Nathan Bimm waddled in and sat next to him.

“You
should lay off the menstrual fluid,” Bimm said pointing to Silman’s glass.
“Isn’t that right, honey?” The barmaid gave him a tired look. She was used to
Bimm’s vulgarisms. “Muddle me an Old Fashioned, Maker’s Mark, extra cherries.”
He didn’t put any money on the bar, ran no tab and never paid for a drink,
which annoyed the hell out of Silman, who managed the hotel.

“Chang
cut me off the booze,” Silman said.

“The
only thing he cut off was your balls. Serves you right for going to a Chink
doctor. Is the room set up?”

“You
ask me that every week,” Silman said, as Bimm reached for a bowl of trail mix,
which he quickly emptied, and signaled for another. “And every week I tell you
the room is the same as always. And the result will be the same. So can I skip
the game and just give you my $300 now? I’ve got work to do.”

“Who
are you kidding? This place is as busy as my colon and I can’t remember the
last time I shit. What business you do, I send your way. I need bodies upstairs.”

The
two men made small talk for half an hour, during which time Bimm inhaled three
Old Fashioneds and three bowls of trail mix. Silman knew plenty of doctors who
didn’t take care of themselves. Some even smoked. But he’d never met a doctor
with more bad health habits than Bimm. Come to think of it, he’d never met an
obese plastic surgeon. Bimm had his reasons for selling his clinics, Silman
knew, but his girth probably prevented him from getting near an operating table
anyway.

Silman’s
real first name was Alfred. A onetime lavishly paid mob lawyer, he had been
disbarred and served two years in Sing Sing for trying to poison a jury.
Literally. The lead lawyer for several mobsters accused of over-billing the
city for $10 million worth of windows in the third phase of a Bronx high-rise
housing project, Silman had been genuinely outraged when the judge refused to
allow him to introduce evidence that the minority contractors who monopolized
such construction jobs during a previous administration had over-billed the
city by $30 million for the project’s earlier phases.

“At
least my clients put the windows in,” he had argued in the judge’s chambers,
pointing out that the earlier contractors hadn’t even done that, with the
result that blocks of buildings had turned into the world’s largest birdhouses.
When his arguments fell on deaf ears – it didn’t help that the judge was a
former black activist, Silman admitted – he hit upon a scheme to derail the
trial entirely, on the theory that justice delayed might be justice denied.
Witnesses often disappeared, judges could be bribed, elderly Mafioso could more
reasonably act senile. Unfortunately, the scheme was more brilliant in
conception than in execution.

It
being a mob trial, the jurors were sequestered from the start in a Holiday Inn
in Queens. They were allowed to order dinner out twice a week, alternating
among three nearby restaurants: Italian, Mexican and Chinese. For reasons of
national pride, the Italian restaurant was left out of the plot, which involved
planting pliable (meaning threatened) undocumented kitchen workers in the other
two establishments.

It
was easy enough for Silman to find out from a court officer on what days jurors
used a particular restaurant. On the day when it became apparent that, despite
his best legal efforts, the guilty-as-sin defendants were going down the tubes,
he passed a note – in a specially altered fortune cookie – to the designated
kitchen worker in the Chinese restaurant. Following careful instructions, the
worker had mixed up a batch of E-coli impregnated chicken, pork, beef and
shrimp and put it in a blender. The resultant noxious stew was hidden among
cartons in a storage room, where it continued to “ferment.” Since it was a
Chinese restaurant, nobody noticed. When the time came, the worker, armed with
an eyedropper, managed to taint an entire order of takeout, including a carton
of Moo Shu Pork, which was the origin of the nickname with which Silman was now
permanently saddled. He counted himself lucky that it wasn’t “Taco” Silman.

The
timing was impeccable. On the morning of closing arguments, one after another
the jurors began to complain of nausea, fever, blurred vision and, most
disturbingly in a courthouse short of workable toilets, projectile diarrhea.
Two Federal marshals who were guarding the jurors also became ill, as did
several members of their families who ate leftovers. Within an hour the
courthouse resembled – and smelled like – the emergency room at Baghdad
General. It was days before the trial could resume, and then, with three jurors
and two alternates still in the hospital, a mistrial was declared.

Food
poisoning was immediately suspected but the trail so obviously led back to the
Chinese food no one considered foul play. The unfortunate restaurant was drummed
out of business by the Health Department. (“The place didn’t even have a Zagat
rating,” railed the frustrated trial judge. “What else could the cheapskate
city expect?”)

Silman
and his clients were home free – until the INS unexpectedly raided the Mexican
restaurant and started deportation proceedings against the illegal immigrant
who was the E-coli alternate. Anxious to stay in America, where his mother,
father, wife and eight children lived, he called the FBI and proposed a deal.
In return for a “get-out-of-jail-free, no deportation” card – and witness
protection for his entire clan – the worker rolled on Silman. The lawyer took
the fall but kept his mouth shut, which earned him respect from his employers.

The
subsequent death of the worker in the Chinese restaurant compromised the case
against Silman. Nothing nefarious was involved; the worker had neglected to
wash his hands after handling the container of rotting E-coli soup and ate an
egg roll so tainted that his immune system collapsed. With a major witness
gone, Silman pled down to a felony charge of attempted assault and some
misdemeanor health violations still on the books from the days of Typhoid Mary.
After being paroled, Silman was too hot to handle in his home borough, so his
mob contacts sent him to Bimm, a silent partner, along with the Lacuna crime
family, in the hotel. It was the Lacunas, Silman subsequently discovered, who
had financed the expansion of Bimm’s clinic empire.

“The
hotel is perfect for you,” Bimm had told him. “Skim some from the lounge, but
not too much. Lacuna can be touchy. Join the Rotary, the Chamber and all that
bullshit and keep your eyes open. You’ll be back on top soon. Nobody out here
gives a shit about your past. They’re too busy scamming. And if you get the urge
to poison another jury, they’ll deliver one right to you.”

***

“C’mon,
let’s head up there,” Bimm said now, as he struggled his 320 pounds out of his
seat. Nattily dressed, in his signature white linen suit made in Hong Kong,
with a pink Charles Terwhitt shirt and powder blue silk tie, he dwarfed the
slightly-built Silman, who wore a beat-up sports jacket and didn’t feel
particularly dapper after a day spent handling guest complaints and plumbing
problems. Moo Shu also felt a cold coming on and wasn’t looking forward to his
90-minute drive back to the Bronx in the chilling rain. He often day-dreamed of
running into the Mexican snitch in the witness protection program – somewhere
in sunny Arizona no doubt – and shoving a chili pepper up his wetback ass.

As
they passed the reception desk, Silman nodded at the assistant manager he’d
inherited from the previous management. He fired the woman before he found out
she was related to the politically active pastor of the largest
African-American congregation in the borough. Forced to take her back, she now
treated him will ill-concealed disdain. She picked up the house phone.

“Laurel
and Hardy are on the way up. Make sure the room is ready.” She listened for a
second and then, exasperated, said, “Moo Shu and Bimm the Blimp, dummy. Laurel
and Hardy were silent film … oh, forget it.”

***

Bimm
always sat with his back to the huge plasma TV on the far wall of the suite. By
necessity most of the other players sat across or at angles to the big man, and
could see the TV, which dominated the room and played a constant stream of
porno videos. And not just any porno movies. Bimm had scoured the Internet for
the most graphic professional hard-core videos available, and supplemented them
with the raunchiest amateur downloads from Youporn.com and other sites. He
loved porn and had a large collection in his home, but that’s not why he
featured it at the poker game. The action on the flat screen was a distraction
to the other players, and covered up his cheating.

The
game featured a variety of poker variations, including the ubiquitous Texas
Hold ‘Em. Most were played high-low, which meant that a player could win with
either a high or low hand (the lowest being Ace-2-3-4-6, of different suits).
Thus, pots were usually split two ways. Bluffing was an art form, since even
the weakest low hand might actually wind up high, as a hidden straight or a
flush. Mediocre players – Bimm, an expert card player, stacked the game with
them – hardly ever folded. To win consistently, a player needed to concentrate.
Hence, the porno movies. Deciding when to play, what cards to draw, what to bet
and whether to declare your hand high or low wasn’t easy when some sexual stud
was delivering his money shot on the chin of his naked partner on a plasma
screen on the far wall. And none of the players would ask to turn the movie
off, and risk being labeled wimps, or worse.

Only
one other player could fit on the side of the oval table with Bimm, because of
his girth and the fact that he kept the space between them empty of chairs. In
that spot was a small chest in which he kept playing cards, chips and a ledger
listing the amounts various players owed him. The top of the chest was crammed
with the detritus of his disgusting lifestyle: a nasal inhaler that threatened
to disappear up either of his huge nostrils when he jammed its tip in; an ugly
green horseshoe-shaped ashtray in which resided a particularly pungent cigar;
various mints, antacid tablets, peanuts and jellybeans in respective bowls; an
ever-present half-eaten sandwich dripping with both mustard and mayonnaise; a
box of Russell Stover chocolates – and Diet Cokes.

Bimm
was always seated when the first player other than Silman arrived. It was Tony
Porcini, a cousin of mobster Salvatore Lacuna. He ran a small property
appraisal firm secretly owned by Bimm for the express purpose of providing
above- or below-market appraisals on properties Bimm either wanted to dump or
buy. He was Bimm’s regular poker shill, and was expected to play a staid,
unspectacular game, occasionally losing a small pot to one of the other players
to add verisimilitude to the proceedings. Bimm, who made sure he lost a few
dollars in those pots, would then gripe loudly, so that the others would
remember his loss. But Porcini’s main job was to catch unsuspecting players in
a crossfire when he and Bimm had unbeatable hands high and low. That only
happened a few times a night, but with unlimited raises the poor suckers could
be stripped of hundreds of dollars on one pot.

Most
times, the victims would fold disgustedly and switch their attention to the
fellatio on the screen. Between the sexual distractions, the plethora of drinks
and food (which everyone had to chip in for), the cheating and his own uncanny
card memory skills, Bimm cleared, on average, $2,000 every week. He was
wealthy, but $100,000 a year, undeclared, was not chump change.

Better
yet, some of the players were soon deep in debt to Bimm, including the head of
the local school board, a political reporter for the local paper and the
president of the Chamber of Commerce. While gambling debts in private games did
not have the power to ruin a man as they did, say, in Victorian England, being
labeled a deadbeat in the closed society of Staten Island would be humiliating.

“So
what’s new at the Chamber,” Bimm said, directing a smirk at a small, nervous
man who was raking in half of a small pot. “How’s the contract negotiation
going? They gonna fire your ass, or what?”

“Haven’t
heard anything,” Press Stephens replied. “The exec committee is studying my
performance review from the mentoring committee.”

“Mentoring
committee, performance review, what kind of bullshit is that? What’s wrong with
those jerks? Your membership is growing; the Chamber is showing a profit for
the first time in years. They should kiss your ass in Macy’s window.”