The Gold Coast (64 page)

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Authors: Nelson DeMille

BOOK: The Gold Coast
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He puffed on his stogie. “I gotta tell ya, I had the worse breakfast of my life in there. That’s what I call cruel and unusual punishment.”
That got a good laugh, and as it became obvious that Mr. Bellarosa was not going to make any newsworthy statements, the emphasis shifted to the entertainment value of the story. Frank was good entertainment. Someone asked him, “How much did that suit cost you, Frank?”
“Peanuts. I go to a little guy on Mott Street. I don’t pay uptown prices. You could use a good tailor yourself, Ralph.”
So the don held court for a few minutes as we made our way down the forty-six steps toward the street, surrounded by about fifty members of the press, including cameramen and photographers. Worse, a crowd of several hundred onlookers had materialized. It doesn’t take much to draw a crowd in New York.
I was not being completely ignored, of course, and reporters who couldn’t get the don’s attention were settling for me, but I was just reciting my mantra, which was, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”
We were near the bottom of the steps, but the crowd around us was so thick now, I couldn’t see any way to get to the street where Lenny was supposed to meet us with the car.
A reporter asked me, “How much does five million dollars weigh?”
It seemed silly to say “No comment’’ to a silly question, so I replied, “It was heavy enough for me to think that it was excessive bail.”
Well, you should never encourage these people, and by answering one question, I opened myself up for a lot of attention. I was really getting grilled now, and I glanced at Bellarosa, who gave me a look of caution through his cigar smoke.
“Mr. Sutter,’’ asked a newspaper reporter, “you said in court that you were delayed by four cars on your way here. How did they delay you?”
“No comment.”
“Did they cut you off?”
“No comment.”
“Do you really think those cars were driven by people from Alphonse Ferragamo’s office?”
“No comment.”
And so it went. I seemed to have a permanent microphone under my nose now, recording my “no comment’’ for posterity. I spotted the Cadillac parked illegally in the square about fifty yards away, with Lenny behind the wheel. Then I noticed Vinnie approaching the courthouse with two patrolmen in tow.
Meanwhile, the press were really getting on my nerves. I glanced again at my client and saw that he was still smiling, still puffing away, and still at ease despite being surrounded by aggressive A-type personalities. But though he was at ease, Bellarosa did not have the reputation of being a publicity hound. He could handle it, but he did not seek it out as did some of his predecessors, certain of whom were—partly as a result of their fondness for talking too much to the press—dead.
A particularly persistent and pesky female reporter, whom I recognized from one of the TV networks, was bugging me about the alibi. She asked me, “Are you
certain
it was Frank Bellarosa you saw?”
“No comment.”
“You mean you’re not
sure
it was Frank Bellarosa.”
“No comment.”
“But you
said
it was Frank Bellarosa.”
And on and on she went, as if we were married or something. “Mr. Sutter,’’ she said very snottily, “Mr. Ferragamo has five witnesses who put Frank Bellarosa at the scene of the murder. Are you saying they’re all liars? Or are
you
the liar?”
It must have been the heat, and I guess my own state of mind, or maybe that woman’s tone of voice finally got to me. Anyway, I snapped back, “Ferragamo’s witnesses are liars, and he
knows
they are liars. This whole thing is a frame-up, a personal vendetta against my client, and an attempt to start trouble between—’’ I got my mouth under control, then glanced at Bellarosa, who touched his index finger to his lips.
“Trouble between who? Rival mobs?”
Someone else, a Mafia groupie or something, asked, “Trouble with his own mob? Trouble with his underboss? With Sally Da-da?”
Mafia politics were not my strong point, but obviously the initiated knew all sorts of underworld gossip and they thought I did, too.
“Trouble with who?’’ asked someone else. “With the Colombian drug kings? With Juan Carranza’s friends?”
“Is it true that the Mafia is trying to push out the Colombians?”
“Mr. Sutter, did you say in court that Alphonse Ferragamo ordered people to run you off the road?”
I thought someone already asked that question.
“Mr. Sutter, are you saying that the U.S. Attorney is framing your client?”
Mr. Sutter, blah, blah, blah. I had this image of the television set over the bar at The Creek. I wonder if people really do look heavier on TV. I hope not. I could hear my pals now. “Look at him.’’ “He’s getting fat.’’ “He’s sweating like a pig.’’ “His tie is crooked.’’ “How much is he getting paid for that?’’ “His father must be rolling over in his grave.’’ My father is actually alive and well in Europe.
Finally, the two cops, with Vinnie encouraging them on, got through to us. Frank bid the press fond adieu, waved, smiled, and followed Vinnie and the two cops through the throng with me bringing up the rear. We got out to the street, and Lenny inched the car closer through the onlookers. I was annoyed that the government could set the stage for a media circus, then not provide crowd control. Actually, I never realized how many annoying things the government did.
Vinnie got to the Cadillac and opened the rear door. Bellarosa ducked inside, and one of the cops said, “Take it easy, Frank.”
Bellarosa said to the two cops, “Thanks, boys. I owe you one.”
Meanwhile, I can’t even get a cop to interpret complex and contradictory parking signs for me. But that was yesterday. Today, the cop near the open car door touched his cap as I slid in beside the don. What a screwy country.
Vinnie had jumped into the passenger’s seat up front, and Lenny pulled away, moving slowly until he was clear of the crowd, then he gassed it.
We headed downtown, then Lenny swung west toward the World Trade Center, then downtown again to Wall Street. Obviously, he was trying to lose anyone who might be following.
We passed my office building, the J. P. Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street, and though I was still supposed to work there, I felt a sudden nostalgia for the old place.
We drove around for a while, no one saying much, except that Vinnie and Lenny were congratulating the don ad nauseam about his great escape, as though he had something to do with it. I really detest flunkies.
Bellarosa said very little in return, but at one point he leaned over to me. “You did real good, Counselor. Right up until the end there.”
I didn’t reply.
He continued, “You got to be careful what you say to the press. They twist things around.”
I nodded.
He went on, “The press ain’t lookin’ for facts. They think they are, but they want a good story. Sometimes a good story has no facts. Sometimes it’s funny. They think this stuff is all funny. This stuff with the Mafia and all. The big Cadillacs, the cigars, the fancy suits. Somehow they think this is all funny.
Capisce?
That’s okay. That’s better than them thinking it’s not funny. So you keep it funny. You give them funny stuff. You’re a funny guy. So lighten up. Make it all sound funny, like it’s a big joke. Understand?”
“Capisco.”
“Yeah. You did fine with that lady judge. Alphonse fucked himself up. He talks too much. Every time he opens his mouth, somebody wants to put their fist in it. He’s pissed off now, but he’s gonna be a lot more pissed off when the press starts asking him about the car bullshit this morning and the frame-up thing. You didn’t have to say all that shit. You know?”
“Frank, if you don’t like the way—”
He patted my knee. “Hey, you did okay. Just a few points I gotta make so you know. Okay? Hey, I walked. Right?”
“Right.”
We kept driving around lower Manhattan. Frank ordered Lenny to pull over at a newsstand, and Vinnie got out and bought the
Post
for Frank, the
Wall Street Journal
for me, and some medical journals for himself, mostly gynecology and proctology. Lenny shared the journals with Vinnie at stoplights. I like to see people try to improve their minds.
I had some paperwork with me relating to the bail: the receipt for five million dollars, the bail forfeiture warning, and other printed matter that I looked over. I also had the arrest warrant now, and the charge sheet, which I now read. Most important, I had a copy of the indictment, which ran to about eighty pages. I wanted to read it at my leisure, but for now, I perused it, discovering that, indeed, all the evidence against Frank Bellarosa was in the form of five witness statements. There was no physical evidence putting him at the scene of the crime, and all the witnesses had Hispanic names.
I had never asked Bellarosa about the actual murder, and I only vaguely remembered the press accounts of it. But from what I could glean from the witness statements, Juan Carranza, driving his own car, a Corvette, left the Garden State Parkway at about noon on January fourteenth, at the Red Bank exit. With him was his girlfriend, Ramona Velarde. A car in front of the Corvette came to a stop on the single-lane exit ramp, and Carranza was forced to stop also. Two men then exited the car behind Carranza, walked right up to his car, and one of them fired a single bullet through his side window, striking Carranza in the face. The assassin then tried the driver’s door, and finding it unlocked, he opened it and fired the remaining four bullets from the revolver into Carranza’s head. The girlfriend was untouched. The assassin then threw the revolver on the girlfriend’s lap, and he and his companion got into the front car that had blocked the exit ramp, abandoning their car behind Carranza’s.
The witnesses to this assassination were Ramona Velarde and four men who were in a car behind the car from which the assassins exited. Each of the four male witnesses stated frankly that they were Juan Carranza’s bodyguards. I noted that none of them said they fired at the men who had bumped off their boss. In fact, they stated that they put Ramona Velarde in their car and jumped the curb onto the grass, driving around the assassins’ abandoned car and the Corvette, but they made no attempt to pursue the assassins. The subtext here was that they recognized that their boss had been hit by the Italian mob, and they didn’t want to be dead heroes. The New Jersey State Police determined that this rubout had federal drug and racketeering implications and contacted the FBI. Through an anonymous tip, Ramona Velarde was picked up, and she subsequently identified the four bodyguards, who were all picked up or surrendered within a few weeks. All of them agreed to become federal witnesses.
The issue of identification seemed to me a little vague. Ramona Velarde was only a few feet from the assassin, but I don’t see how she could have seen his face if he was standing beside a low-slung Corvette. All she could have seen was the hand and the gun. Similarly, the assassin and his partner would have exited their car with their backs to the four bodyguards, who had let that car come between them and their boss. However, all four men stated that the assassin and his partner glanced back at them a few times as the two men stepped up to Carranza’s Corvette. All four of the men said they recognized the face of Frank Bellarosa. Ramona Velarde picked Bellarosa’s photo out of mug shots.
Well, as I read this interesting account of gangland murder, it did certainly sound like a mob hit, Italian style. I mean, it was classical Mafia: the boxed-in automobile, the girlfriend left untouched, even the bodyguards left alone so that the hit didn’t become a massacre, which would draw all sorts of unwanted negative press. And the abandoned car was stolen, of course, and also Italian style, the murder weapon was left behind and was clean as a whistle. The amateurs liked to use the same gun over and over again until somebody got caught with it, and ballistics showed it had about a dozen murders on it. The Italians bought clean guns, used them once, and dumped them immediately at the scene before strolling off.
I thought about this testimony I was reading in Bellarosa’s Cadillac. It was quite possible that the murder had taken place exactly this way, and the witnesses were telling the truth, except for the identification of Frank Bellarosa. I’m no detective, but it doesn’t take many brains to realize that a man such as Bellarosa, even if he wanted to personally commit a murder, wouldn’t do it in broad daylight where half the population of the New York metropolitan area could identify his face.
But apparently someone in the FBI office or the U.S. Attorney’s office saw this murder as an opportunity to cause problems in the underworld. Therefore why not assign it to the number-one Mafia boss? And I thought, if Bellarosa was right that the murder was done by the Drug Enforcement Agency, then the DEA would most probably choose a modus operandi of the underworld, e.g., an Uzi submachine-gun attack to imitate Colombians, a knife or machete attack to imitate the Jamaicans, a bomb assassination as the Koreans had used a few times, or the cleanest, safest, and most easily imitated attack—a Mafia rubout.
I realized that what I was doing was formulating a defense in my mind, but beyond that I was trying to convince myself that I was defending an innocent man. Trying to be objective, trying to be that universal juror, I evaluated what I knew of the case so far and found that there was a reasonable doubt as to Frank Bellarosa’s guilt.

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