Death's Witness (32 page)

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Sorrentino had been called to the MCC in this way many times before. Earlier in the day a man had contacted him from the prison three hours after his arrest, saying he had been charged with money laundering and fraud and that Sorrentino had been recommended to him by his business associates. Sorrentino took the names and telephone numbers of those business associates and asked the man to call him in two hours, since it was impossible for anyone from the outside to place a call to any inmate in MCC or any other federal prison. In those two hours, Sorrentino called around and learned that the man was “important,” a “real player,” and that money for legal fees was not a big problem at all. When the man called back, Sorrentino said he would be at the MCC in about an hour but that it might well take another hour to pass through security before he could reach a lawyer-client conference room.

This wasn’t the way Sorrentino usually met new clients, but he knew that sometimes this could be the most explosive and lucrative way to meet one. Ordinarily over the last decade he had first encountered clients when they were under investigation, which often continued for months. If the clients were ultimately indicted they weren’t arrested, because Sorrentino had built enough rap-port with the prosecutors’ offices through the years to enable him to arrange to produce his clients for arraignment. They would walk through the front door of the courthouse with him and, after a short bail hearing, leave the same way, as though they had had a business appointment.

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This was not that kind of arrangement: the man he was about to meet had been arrested before even knowing that he was under investigation, abruptly and unexpectedly seized at an airport as he was about to leave for Europe. He had come into the system in a harsh way, almost literally through a trapdoor under his world, and this sudden, wrenching way of starting could, in Sorrentino’s experience, lead to intense pressures, interesting results.

Lawyers had to wait in line at the MCC like every other civilian. Sorrentino was no exception. As he finally reached the metal
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detectors, he emptied the contents of his pockets into plastic trays, placed his briefcase on a conveyor belt, and walked carefully through the door frame of an airport-style security scanner. A uniformed guard—a man who had the slow, insolent gestures of a customs officer on a Caribbean island—asked him to unbutton his suit jacket, spread his legs, and hold his arms out. The guard passed an electronic wand around the outline of Sorrentino’s body, and when finished, said gruffly, “Take your things.”

Feigning politeness, Sorrentino thanked him. It was the same subversive tone of voice he had used when, many years earlier, he was compelled to say “sir” to officers in the Army.

Almost forty-five minutes passed before Sorrentino was finally brought through many locked gates to the fifth floor to meet his new client. Arrested only eight hours earlier, the man was already in the kind of uniform all prisoners inside this grim, chilling building wore: a green jumpsuit. He didn’t smell well and anxiety had him in a sweat whose staleness permeated the prison uniform.

Sorrentino and Bill Irwin sat on wooden chairs at a metal table in a soundproof room. The door had a large window in it. Bill Irwin knew who Sorrentino was, since he had heard his name and seen him on television many times. He knew who his clients were. Sorrentino was the only lawyer Irwin had called because Irwin instinctively felt that Sorrentino could lead him out of the troubled land in which he now found himself. Sorrentino had never heard Irwin’s name before that first call earlier in the day.

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They were allotted only forty-five minutes for this first meeting, and Irwin—a plump, balding man with soft hands who resembled one of the Midwestern Republicans in the Bush Administration—

knew what he wanted to say and had a salesman’s instinct for fitting it into the time available.

He was a Washington lobbyist, he said quickly. He had known Danny Fonseca for years. He knew, in fact, just about everybody in Congress. He could arrange to have $300,000 wired into Sorrentino’s account by early the next day, as an advance on legal fees. There was “no way” he was going to spend time in prison:
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the eight hours here had already been enough. He had absolute confidence, he said, that Sorrentino could “walk him out.”

“I’m a lawyer, Bill, not the Pope,” Sorrentino said after listening for ten minutes to this driven, self-obsessed man. Like many people Sorrentino had encountered through the years who were faced for the first time with the freezing reality bath of a criminal prosecution, Irwin wasn’t being realistic. Part of Sorrentino’s work was to infuse people like Irwin with reality, and he used his familiar speech: “If there are going to be any deals, you’ve got to give me something to work with. The assistant who’s handling this told me you’re facing charges of money laundering, drug trafficking, fraud, and suborning of perjury. That’s big. You’ve got to give me something big in return.”

Irwin was very bright. Without any more prodding, he told Sorrentino that from time to time he had done work for a Latin American businessman named Madrigal—a name Sorrentino immediately, vividly remembered—and that Madrigal’s people in the United States had recruited FBI agents to work for Madrigal in strategic areas around the country: Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, New York.

Sorrentino spoke slowly, “Do you know who they are?”

“Sure I do.”

“How do you know?”

“I gave them money.”

“Can you prove that?”

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“I wore tiny video and audio equipment that Madrigal’s people equipped me with. Nothing exotic. They bought it all at Radio Shack.”

“Why did they do that?”

“For insurance, for loyalty, for control.”

“Where are the tapes?”

“I can get them.”

“Can I?”

“Sure: you’re my lawyer, aren’t you?”

“If you want me.”

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“I want you if you tell me you can get me out of here.”

“I can’t guarantee anything, Bill, to any client, but this is radioactive stuff.”

“I know you can do it.”

Sorrentino pushed aside on the metal table the notepad on which he had been writing intermittently. He said, “We don’t have much time before the goons buzz you out of here for the day and back up to the eighth floor.” That was the floor on which the most dangerous, or most well-known, prisoners were held, essentially in solitary confinement. “Let me ask you this: who is the agent in New York?”

“John McGlynn.”

Sorrentino didn’t skip a beat. “For how long?”

“Three, four years.”

“Do you have tapes of him?”

“Of course.”

“How much did he get?”

“Large amounts. Probably two and a half million a year.”

“Anyone else in New York?”

“Not people whose names I know. He had a team; he used part of the money to fund other people.”

“How did he get directions about what to do?”

“Not from me. My job was to deliver money. The instructions came from other people. One was a small Latin American guy named Mr. Perez.”

“What did Madrigal want McGlynn to do?”

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“Be his eyes and ears and give him control and information.

Carry out orders.”

“What kinds of orders?”

“Oh, simple stuff. Killing Tom Perini, that kind of thing.”

The buzzer sounded. A guard knocked on the window in the door. Sorrentino said, “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Do you get more time?”

“No. I’ll come back as often as I need to. I need to spend the rest of the afternoon arranging a bail hearing so that I can try to get you out of here.”

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“Try?”

“We’ll get it done.”

“Promise you’ll come back tomorrow.”

“I promise.”

They shook hands as the guard opened the door. Irwin, the confident salesman, suddenly looked altered, frightened, as it finally dawned on him that he was being led away deeper into the prison. The doors would be locked behind him, he realized. For the first time in his life he wouldn’t have his own key.

* * *

Vincent Sorrentino sent a car for her. She ran from the elevator through her lobby, passed a suddenly aroused and boisterous group of reporters on the sidewalk, and plunged into the backseat. The car accelerated the short distance to Fifth Avenue and turned decisively south before any other car had any chance to follow. Twenty-five minutes later, after the swift trip all the way downtown to the memorable point at which Fifth Avenue ends at the monument in Washington Square Park, its winter trees etched against the nineteenth-century streetlamps, the car turned west then south, and brought her to Provence, a French restaurant on a quiet West Village street.

He was waiting for her at the zinc bar. It was luxuriant, the sense she had as the warm martini worked its way through her system. Luxuriant, too, the music: Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Porter, and around them, other couples—men and women, men and men—enjoying each other’s company, drinking, listening, all of them engulfed in the quiet, intimate surroundings of a beautiful bar and restaurant on a cold night.

They sat at a dark table. There was candlelight. They had a bottle of wine. Julie ate duck breast in a fragrant sauce. Sorrentino had steak frites. He never once mentioned his afternoon encounter with Bill Irwin. She told him she had spent most of her day reading the middle chapters of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
. Sorrentino wasn’t sure who Johnson was—scientist, politician, doc-275

tor?—or when he had lived, or who Boswell was, for Sorrentino had spent his life fascinated by the daily world around him. But he listened intently to Julie as she spoke.

The bathrooms in Provence were down a long flight of stairs leading to the basement. She said, “Follow me down to the bathroom a minute after I leave.” Her eyes were so alluring in the candlelight that he thought the unimaginable as to what that invitation meant, and he got an erection as he saw her leave: so shapely, so graceful.

The stairway to the basement was lined with photographs of Paris, a city he’d visited only once; in descending order there were pictures of bistros, restaurants, open bridges. No one was at the foot of the stairs, redolent of red wine. He knocked tentatively on the door marked “Femmes.” The door opened, he stepped in, and she locked it behind him. It was large, elegant, there was a table with a vase of flowers. She had her dress off, only a blouse on, and he was far more aroused than he had been when he watched her leave the table. He entered her as she leaned back against the wall, kissing him. It was, he thought, the most perfect, most exhilarating ten minutes of his life. He couldn’t believe he had found this miraculous woman. She loved her own daring. She absorbed all the comforting intimacy this man could provide.

* * *

On Wednesday nights for more than six months Neil Steinman and John McGlynn played one-on-one basketball in the gym of
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Monsignor Thomas Haynes Junior High School in Yonkers, three blocks from the colossal, depressing race track. The gym had bright yellow walls and the permanent smell of sneakers, sweat, and the ammonia used to clean the floors and bathrooms. They had never let anyone play in their one-on-one games and, by now, none of the other Wednesday night regulars even bothered to ask.

The basketball court was the only place where they felt they could talk about their business, and they always did that while moving, dribbling, shooting, blocking. McGlynn, taller and more powerful than Steinman, was usually outplayed by Steinman,
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who had sharp elbows, skinny legs, and dense, wiry hair (“Jew hair,” as McGlynn thought of it) all over his body, especially on his back. McGlynn could see Steinman’s back, chest, and arms, just as Steinman could see McGlynn’s sleek, hairless chest, back, and arms, because neither of them wore shirts when they played.

Their distrust of each other was now that deep.

“How can you be fucking sure those are all the tapes Kiyo had?” Steinman asked as he jumped and rose over McGlynn’s head for a field shot. It missed.

Recovering the ball, McGlynn said, “There was nothing in her office. I went through her apartment. I don’t make mistakes.”

“That’s comforting.”

For four hours before they arrived at the gym they had driven slowly around Westchester County in Steinman’s Buick Skylark.

They played the tapes McGlynn had taken from Kiyo Michine’s apartment. On them she had recorded, as if they were a detailed written journal, all that she had learned about McGlynn, Steinman, drug-running, weapons sales, Hutchinson, Madrigal, money. Listening to the words on the tapes had completely unnerved—unmanned—Steinman. That quiet spectacle had only deepened McGlynn’s contempt.

On the old court, amid the sound of scuffing sneakers, that contempt was reinforced by the acrid odor rising to McGlynn’s nostrils from Steinman’s sweat and hair.

“How did the little cunt get that far?” Steinman asked.

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“She worked for you, buddy. You were the guy at the station.

The train pulled out before you fuckin’ bothered to notice. Me, I’m just a lowly ticket agent. You were the stationmaster.”

There was a tone in McGlynn’s voice that Steinman, over time, had come to fear. His first instinct was to say to McGlynn,

“You fucking got me into this,” but he let it go.

McGlynn had been trained tough—something bred in him in his boyhood in the Bronx, engraved even more deeply during a four-year tour of duty as an MP in the Army, and polished by five years as a New York City cop before he finally graduated from
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college, enrolled in law school at night, and landed a job as an FBI agent in 1985. He had appeared at first to Steinman to be a routine FBI agent, reasonably bright, deferential, obedient. In time, as Steinman saw, the training in toughness had ended in lunacy, and Steinman knew that the tapes McGlynn had taken from Kiyo’s apartment and the two handguns he always kept nearby were in the beaten-up, plastic gym bag just feet from where they bounced, shot, and tossed the smelly basketball.

“She had to have given this stuff to somebody else,” Steinman said.

“Who knows? She was a lightweight. She liked secrets. She was careful. Maybe she thought this was just a school exercise, and she’d graduate to something else. She didn’t know who she was fuckin’ with.”

Steinman shot. The ball dropped through the net without causing any perceptible movement. He said: “She was too far along.

She had to have given something to somebody, Julie Perini, Hutchinson…”

“She had a boyfriend.”

“She did?”

“There were rubbers in her apartment bathroom.”

“Do you know who?”

“He didn’t leave a business card. Her address book with names was on her when she tripped and fell down in front of the train.”

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“Why don’t you get the police to give you that?”

“They already did. I have it.”

“Where is it?”

“In my bag.”

“Let me see it.”

“Not until I decide,” McGlynn said. “I want to look at it some more. Your name’s in it.”

Steinman had stopped dribbling and shooting. He had a white towel draped around his neck, and he felt sick; he wanted to leave this court, this world. “Of course it is,” he said. “She worked for
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me. She had to be able to reach me.”

“Tom Perini’s name, with his home number and his cell number.”

“There had to be names of lots of lawyers. She dealt with lawyers all the time.”

“No. This was her personal book. She kept business numbers, names, and addresses in her computer at the office. You and Perini are the only two lawyers she had in her personal book.”

“So what?”

“I want to think about that.”

* * *

Even Sorrentino, who had repeatedly witnessed the changes prison made in the faces, bodies, and movements of men he had represented, was taken aback by Bill Irwin’s expression, stance, and demeanor after only two days at MCC. When Sorrentino was escorted into the lawyer’s conference room by a massive black guard who wore an earring in his left ear, Irwin’s eyes moved rapidly, focused but erratic, as though waiting for a slap or a reprimand. Sorrentino thought he detected a tremor in Irwin’s neck and head. He was a lawyer, not a doctor, and he decided not to ask Irwin how he felt or how he had been treated. Irwin, too, knew he had only a few minutes with his lawyer and he asked, “Did you get the money?”

“I did.” A quarter of a million dollars had been wired into Sorrentino’s bank account. “I’ve arranged a bail hearing for tomorrow.”

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“Will you get me out?”

“The United States Attorney’s Office is going to oppose releasing you. In most cases they agree to let out people who fit your profile in exchange for bail, pledging property, the surrender of your passport, wearing an ankle bracelet.”

“What’s the problem with me?”

“The prosecutor I’m dealing with tells me they’ve decided you’re a flight risk, a danger to the community.”

“Danger? I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”

“I’m sure you haven’t. But saying you’re dangerous is their
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way of making you worry you might not get out of here, and making you think about ways to help them.”

“I got that point as soon as they arrested me. I want to help them. Christ, I’m in a fucking cell with an open toilet and a Colombian.”

“Has anything happened, Bill?”

“He’s a fucking Colombian.”

“Look, Bill, the law actually favors releasing people before trial.”

“Then why not me?”

“The guy I’m dealing with didn’t say anything specific.”

“Who are you dealing with?”

“A young assistant named Lazarus. I never met with him before. I did tell him, of course, that you wanted me to talk about a deal.”

“What did he say?”

“The usual. Come to us and make a proffer, tell us what your client has to offer us.”

“And did you tell him?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“First, there is no way that I’m going to negotiate with a twenty-eight-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney when you tell me that you’ve got a national network of federal agents on the payroll of Mr. Madrigal. Second, Bill, I can’t begin to negotiate unless
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I really know I’ve got something to support it. My credibility and yours would go down the toilet without the tapes, and you haven’t told me yet how I’m going to get them.”

For the first time in this encounter, Bill Irwin looked relaxed, for he was a man who liked to put events and people in motion.

“I’ve already arranged that. I have a lady friend in Boca Raton, Tara Weinstein. She has the tapes in a package in a safe deposit box. She doesn’t know what’s in the package. I had to wait in a line for three hours yesterday before I could call her. I asked her to get the package and wait for a call from you.”