-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Arizona Project Michael Wendland©1977 ISBN 0-8362-0728-9 Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc. 6700 Squibb Rd. Misson Kansas 66202 276 pps. - first edition - out-of-print New revised edition - available amazon.com Paperback, 304pp. ISBN: 0945165021 Blue Sky Press, Incorporated June 1988 --[13]-- 13 Office Politics and Some Loose Ends John Winters walked into the morning staff meeting the Monday after the Warren interview to find a gregarious Bob Greene almost boasting about the land fraud godfather's first official meeting with reporters. It was a dynamite interview, Greene was telling the troops, one that everyone should read. "Warren came in and bought a state and despite a trail of murder and unbelievable heartache, he's still walking the streets. The memo spells it all out. Read it." Winters was puzzled. "What's he talking about?" he asked Rawlinson. "Warren-he and Alex got a seven-hour interview with Warren the other night." It hit Winters like a kick in the groin. "That son of a bitch. That was a real chicken-shit thing he did to me." Winters turned and walked out of the office. Rawlinson then realized what Winters was so angry about. Since October 4, the quiet, bearded reporter from the Republic had worked on scarcely anything else but Ned Warren, Sr. For three months, Winters had pored over literally thousands of pages of records, researched every one of the more than thirty land companies Warren had been involved in, and talked to dozens of Warren associates. He had spent days debriefing Dick Frost, perhaps the most difficult, nonstop talker any reporter could ever come across. More than to anyone on the team, Warren belonged to John Winters. The six-inch-thick files on Warren had been prepared almost exclusively by him. Yet Greene did not even choose to tell him that the interview was going down. Winters could understand Drehsler's presence. Alex knew Warren from previous stories, and Warren was comfortable talking to him. And Winters had no quarrel with Greene's being there either. Warren was a key interview, one which Greene, as team leader, would understandably want to be a part of. But, if out of nothing more than courtesy, Winters should have been asked to go along. Until joining the team, John Winters had never worked land fraud. He had never wanted to, either. His specialty at the Republic was the mob. It was Winters to whom Don Bolles had turned over his organized crime files when the slain reporter had left the investigative beat. Winters had explained that to Greene in October, offering to make those files and his local expertise available to the team. Instead, Greene had assigned him to work Ned Warren, Sr., and land fraud, a task Winters had thrown himself into with enthusiasm, because, he confided to Koziol after getting over the initial rush of anger, "I really believe in what we're doing with this project." Winters was not the only reporter upset by Greene's often arbitrary ways. Dick Lyneis, the Riverside Press reporter from California, sarcastically referred to the team effort as "The Greene Project." Lyneis was a member of the board of directors for IRE. As such, he was instrumental in the formation of the project in the first place. Even before the reporting began, he had journeyed to Phoenix to help arrange hotel accommodations and the dozens of minor details needed to set up an operating office. And now, working as a reporter on the team, Lyneis had some doubts. "It's not that I don't think we've got some damn good stuff," he groused one night in Koziol's room over a drink. "It's Greene. Sometimes he scares. the shit out of me. I think he's making decisions and doing things that we all ought to be consulted about." "What do you mean?" "I think he's trying to engineer reaction to the stories." Over the past several weeks, several reporters, including Lyneis, had noticed strangers in the IRE office late at night. The strangers were all met by Bob Greene, who then gave them entire files to read. Several of them had made notes. George Weisz saw Greene give files to two Phoenix police officers. Koziol noticed a couple of FBI agents come up one Thursday night and stay in the IRE suite until past 2:00 A.M., poring over the reporters' files. Wendland spotted two state, legislators over a two-night period in mid-January reading the narcotics files. When he asked Greene about it, Greene became extremely defensive. Greene's gruff explanation was that both legislators had been carefully "screened and checked" and had been given the files so that they could familiarize themselves with the extent of the state's narcotics problem. When the IRE stories were written, the two would I 'push for special legislation and cite our reporting with praise." On another occasion, when Lyneis tried to voice a complaint that some reporters and IRE members had serious reservations about indiscriminately sharing the files with law enforcement people, Greene became angry, shouted "Fuck it," and stormed out of the room. "What I think he's doing is trying to set up story reaction," Lyneis said. "And I don't think that's right. Our job is to report, not to pass legislation." And there was a major controversy within the ranks of IRE itself. Though IRE was sponsoring the Arizona investigation, the reporters working on the project were not working for IRE. Instead, they were working for their newspapers or, in the case of the few whose employers refused to pay their expenses, on their own time. Many of the Phoenix reporters were not even members of IRE. And IRE, many felt, had become stagestruck. In November, during the very middle of the investigation, the IRE directors, meeting back East, decided they had a valuable property. So in a special board meeting they voted to hire a high-powered New York literary agent, who would negotiate the sale of "exclusive rights" to the IRE story. Most of the working reporters in Phoenix were never officially told of the planned deal. Instead, they learned of it secondhand in January, when the IRE board and administration began calling Phoenix each day to talk to Greene, Myrta Pulliam, or Koziol-the only IRE officers in Arizona. "It's perfect," said Pulliam one day in early January to Koziol. "This way, we have complete control of everything that's written about us. If we don't like the author the agent gets to do the book, or if we don't like what's written, then we have veto rights. Plus, we get half the profits." Pulliam was one of three IRE board members from Indianapolis. Harley Bierce, who had been an $18,000-a-year reporter on the Star, which was owned by Myrta's father, was appointed executive director of IRE at $24,000 a year. Ed DeLaney, an Indianapolis attorney whose law firm represented the Star, was secretary of the group, even though he was not a journalist. To the members of the reporting team in Phoenix trying to finish the project, the three became known as "The Indianapolis Triumvirate." Although DeLaney and Bierce remained back in Indiana for the most part, the constant series of phone calls between them and Pulliam began to grate on the working reporters' nerves. There was too much IRE talk of a "deal" when the success of the project should have been paramount. Ron Koziol, who as IRE president had approved the hiring of a literary agent in November, had serious doubts in January. "It was ridiculous," he confided to Wendland. "We never should have done it, especially not in the middle of the project. We're supposed to be a group of reporters, not Hollywood hustlers. This story doesn't belong exclusively to IRE or anyone else." But what disturbed Koziol the most was the Indianapolis faction's insistence on having editorial control. "We're supposed to be dedicated to the First Amendment. And now the board wants to decide just what can and cannot be written about us. What they really want to do is censor the story." Jack Taylor, a respected investigative reporter from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City and a member of the IRE board, shared Koziol's concern. After failing to stop the board at a hastily called meeting from okaying exclusive filming of the team in operation by a Hollywood producer who promised to pay IRE $25,000—a project that never came off despite Bierce's success in ramrodding it through for board approval-Taylor bitterly resigned from the group. The working reporters in Phoenix did their best to ignore the political machinations of Indianapolis. But the dreams of IRE glory pushed by Bierce and Pulliam disgusted many of them. There were better things to do-like going to the dog races to investigate football players. Early on in the project, the reporters had come across a prosperous Phoenix businessman who, besides being a top booster of the Arizona State University football team, was also an extremely close friend of the ASU coach, Frank Kush. Reporters eventually found nothing improper about the way the businessman, Anthony Nicoli, maintained his relationship with Kush and the football team. But they had come across indications that ASU football recruiting was overly aggressive. So, when IRE team member George Weisz learned in mid-January that a number of high school athletes had been brought in by Kush from all over the country for a firsthand look at ASU, the IRE reporters decided to tag along and secretly observe the way the athletes were wined and dined. Actually, it was Riverside Press reporter Dick Lyneis and Idaho Statesman staf fer Ken Matthews who first came across the ASU recruiting information. They had talked to Steve Chambers, a junior offensive tackle for ASU. Chambers said that the year before Coach Kush had made arrangements to take a number of high school recruits to Phoenix's Greyhound Park, where they were given money and betting tips. "They'd say, 'Why don't you go and bet on those two dogs?' said the young college player. "The high school kids were doing pretty good, too. They won on about nine out of every ten bets. It was getting pretty wild." A number of other past and present ASU players were interviewed. The dog track outing seemed to be a standard part of Kush's recruiting program. Several other players confirmed that money exchanged hands between the coaches and the recruits. But there was only one way to find out for sure. On January 16, IRE assembled a six-member surveillance crew. They arrived at the Greyhound Park dog track shortly before seventhirty and split up into several groups. On the way into the two-tiered clubhouse, Weisz found out from the track reservations girl that there was an ASU dinner -reservation for forty-five, seated in the lower right section of the clubhouse. Reporters had no problem identifying the young high school recruits, most of whom were dressed in brightly colored letterman jackets or sweaters. Several ASU varsity players acted as guides. Head coach Frank Kush, dressed in a dark blue leisure suit, was the center of attention, Several assistant coaches were also present. IRE reporters, posing as tourists and track regulars, witnessed a number of the high school recruits placing bets and winning surprisingly often. Weisz, who had graduated from college only the summer before, decided to find out more. Casually dressed and looking like he belonged in the group, he began talking with the high school players as they stood in line waiting to place bets. On three occasions, Weisz chatted with a husky young Florida youth, whose white football shirt proclaimed him to be "Bo." Although the youth had complaints about "lame" girls provided the recruits during their three-day visit to ASU and wanted to know if Weisz could send a couple of "fun chicks" up to his room in the Holiday Inn, Bo was basically having a pretty good time. He told Weisz that each recruit had been given ten dollars by the coaching staff at the start of the night, but when that sum was gone, he himself had been handed another twenty dollars to bet with. Bo's roommate on the recruiting trip was another Florida high-schooler, a safety. "Hey, man, you know where we can score with a couple of chicks?" the safety asked Weisz, apparently thinking the IRE member was one of the ASU player-hosts. Weisz just grinned. It must be all that Florida orange juice, he thought. But the roommate also admitted that the betting money had come from the ASU coaching staff. "Whenever we run out, all we got to do is just go up to the coaches," he said, sounding rather impressed with the arrangement. He was only about fourteen dollars ahead for the night, he told Weisz, though "one guy at our table is really cleaning up. He's won sixty bucks already." During the third race Weisz was standing next to Jerry Uhrhammer, the Oregon reporter. Uhrhammer, accompanied by IRE researcher Kay Nash, who posed as his wife, was trying to look like a picture-happy tourist taking photographs of the track. Actually he was snapping pictures of the recruits making bets. Weisz tugged Uhrhammer's sleeve, indicating that they should keep quiet. For not two feet away was ASU head coach Kush, who had briefly left the main group of recruits for a private conversation with one of the assistant coaches. Little did Kush know that much of what the two said was overheard by Weisz. "Look, there's about fifty reporters in town, asking about gambling and the track," Kush wanted the assistant coach to know. "Do you think it's going to hurt us?" "No. They're just asking a lot of questions. They talked to Steve." Steve Chambers, the offensive tackle who had first tipped the reporters to the dog track outings, had obviously so informed his coach. "Maybe we'd better be careful," the assistant worried. "Naw," said Kush. "They're just asking some questions." For a moment, the two coaches lowered their voices. The roar of the crowd watching the last stretch of the third race drowned the conversation out. By the time the crowd settled down, the coaches were returning to their seats. As they left, Weisz heard the assistant note that "I had to get money for these guys," indicating the happy high-schoolers. "Yeah, I know," said Kush, walking out of the reporters' earshot. Later, just as the players and coaches were leaving, Weisz found the kid the safety had said was the big winner. He was a husky Texas boy. "Hey, buddy, how'd you do?" George asked. The kid beamed. "I won sixty dollars," he said. "That's pretty good, huh? They only gave me twenty to start with." "Who gave you twenty?" Weisz grinned back, hoping the kid wouldn't be spooked by the question. "The coach. Pretty nice, huh? This is one hell of a school." Three days later, Dick Lyneis contacted Frank Kush for an official reaction. "Believe me, our recruiting program is all aboveboard," Kush insisted. "I'm on the board of trustees of the Football Coaches Association. I see the kinds of things that go on. And I run my recruiting the right way." Lyneis asked Kush whether the dog track was the proper place to take young high school recruits. "What else is there to do on Sunday nights?" shrugged the coach. "Everything else is closed, even the university's food service. Well, the track is only a mile and a half away, and there aren't that many people there on Sunday nights. So it's a good place to take the kids. "Do the kids bet on the dogs?" asked Lyneis. "No, there's very little of that. Maybe once in a while." "We have learned that some of the recruits really bet quite a lot," said Lyneis. "Some of them win pretty heavily." "Absolutely not," said Kush, looking shocked at the question. "Oh, maybe once in a while two or three of the kids will get two bucks together and bet on a dog. But that's all." "We're also told that you or your coaches give them money to bet with." "That's absolutely untrue." Kush really could not have said otherwise, not if he didn't want major problems from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which had been conducting major investigations into college football recruiting programs in recent years. But the reporters' night at the dog track was not destined to be part of the series of stories produced by the team. While it was one of a number of interesting things the team stumbled across during the five months in Arizona, it did not relate to organized crime and political corruption. So it simply went in the files. By the last two weeks of January, most of the reporting was complete. Suddenly, there was an end in sight. The months of around-the-clock digging had taken their toll among the full-time reporters. They were dog tired. Tom Renner was perhaps the most fatigued. With the exception of a Christmas break, he had been away from home since September. An old ulcer was acting up again. It looked like he would have to go into the hospital for a few weeks. "I'll tell you this, though," he said. "Even though I'm more proud of this story than anything else I've worked on, I'll never, ever, get involved with a project like this again." Even Greene, the tireless bulldog, conceded that he was drained. "No more," he said. "This is my swan song. It's back to Long Island when this is over and from then on, the only out-of-town traveling I want to do is with my wife, on vacation." John Rawlinson, who with Drehsler had come up from the Arizona Daily Star and remained full-time on the project, was similarly exhausted. But Rawlinson had another problem. In late January, his wife filed for divorce. Rawlinson didn't particularly want to talk about it. But his long absence from home obviously didn't help. Fortunately, they had no children. They had been married less than a year. Some of the loose ends to be straightened out included interviews with Arizona's hoodlums. The months of work had clearly shown a major expansion of the Joe Bonanno family. Thus, Rawlinson, who had briefly interviewed the aging mobster a couple of years before, telephoned him on January 22 to set up an appointment. Bonanno remembered Rawlinson. "Yes, you were a nice, quiet man. Polite. But what good if you come down, question me?" said Bonanno. "Any kind of question would not be good for me." Rawlinson explained the information the team had developed on Bonanno and his activities. "We'd like your side." "I don't care what anybody says about me because I am at peace with myself and my God," he said. "There is nothing to be arranged. I have nothing to say." But the mob boss did have an opinion on the Bolles murder. "In fairness to good people, the people behind that bomb should be punished," he said. "What happened to Mr. Bolles was bad. I believe in the law. If you do something bad, you should be punished. I make a lot of mistakes in my life, no question. But I try to learn from these mistakes. I am at peace." For the record, Rawlinson had to run at least one question past Bonanno. "Is it true, as law enforcement officials charge, that you are one of the country's major organized crime figures?" "Thank you for calling," was the reply. "Goodbye now." Bonanno hung up. But there were a number of other, more accessible, though lower level, hoods to contact. The IRE investigators had come up with 102 persons in Phoenix alone who were either members or close associates of the mob, running a prosperous but highly disjointed network of various organized crime scams. About three-quarters of the hoodlums identified by the team were from Chicago, the rest from New York. For the most part, they were bottom-drawer characters, many of them the brothers or distant relatives of big-time hoods unable to make it back home in the more structured, competitive East Coast cities, where mob businesses were run with sophisticated, long-established efficiency. The Chicago faction was the largest but the most unorganized in the Phoenix crime family. They were rivaled by a considerably smaller New York group. So far, few overt hostilities had surfaced between the two factions, though the former New Yorkers were much sharper. They also were loyal to Joe Bonanno and thus benefited from his organizational strengths, while the Chicago hoodlums were having trouble consolidating their various operations. Most of the action in Phoenix concerned the three traditional mob endeavors: prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking. The Chicago interests were believed by police to be under the basic control of Joseph "Papa Joe" Tocco, the brother of Albert Tocco, one of the Cosa Nostra's ranking Chicago bosses. A police listening device planted in a Phoenix warehouse in 1972 picked up a discussion in which Tocco outlined a $12-million bootleg-tape scam which would pirate the music recordings of major-label artists. Tocco was not pleased when IRE reporters tried to talk with him at his Phoenix restaurant. "If you guys are reporters, you better get the fuck out of here before I get mad," he shouted one afternoon in late January when Dave Overton came to call. For emphasis, Tocco picked up a screwdriver and waved it menacingly in the reporter's face. So much for that interview. On the New York side, and considerably more talkative, was Bonanno pal Edward "Acey" Duci, a short, beer-bellied man with slicked-back hair and the tattoo of a black panther on his right arm. Duci, who had left New York in the mid-sixties, ran a go-go bar in West Phoenix; he was an old-time bookie, though he swore to reporters that he was now "one-hundred-percent legit." "I don't care much for these Chicago guys," he told Koziol one night. "They're nothing but punks. They come here to Phoenix to make waves. I think they're nothing but rejects from the Chicago mob." Duci liked to carry around in his wallet old newspaper clippings about his East Coast ties to organized crime. He spent most of January 15 with IRE reporters. In the afternoon, he was with Rawlinson and Becker, who stopped by his bar for a lengthy chat over a half-dozen beers. That night, Koziol and Drehsler dropped in. It became obvious to the reporters, and was later confirmed by police, that Duci was into a lot of things, particularly prostitution, which flourished in a string of at least sixty-two massage parlors that ringed the city. How Phoenix, with 800,000 residents, could support so many different whorehouses was beyond the imagination of IRE reporters. Later, they learned that the massage parlors did most of their business in the summer, when daily temperatures often climb well over a hundred degrees. When Phoenix housewives take the children to cooler mountain climes, many husbands apparently find solace in the sleazy storefront parlors. "Hey, you know who you guys ought to talk to?" Duci told reporters late that night. "You guys ought to meet my partner, Fat Louie." "Who?" asked Koziol. "Fat Louie." The reporters knew well of whom Duci spoke. But rather than apprise him that Fat Louie was a prime subject on their hoodlum interview list, Koziol decided to play along. Fat Louie was really Robert Louis Amuso, another Eastern transplant, whose many specialties included shaking down the area's massage parlors once a week. "Yeah, Fat Louie will give you guys some great quotes about being in the Mafia." A meeting was arranged a few days later for the Caravan Inn Bar in downtown Phoenix. Koziol showed up a few minutes late. As promised, there was Duci, sitting at a table with a huge hulk of a man. "This is my partner, Mr. Amuso," beamed Duci as the Chicago reporter joined them. Koziol's mouth dropped. Amuso was dressed like something out of an old George Raft movie, wearing a black, three-piece suit, a black shirt, white tie, and sunglasses. "Ah, tell me, Fat Louie," said a surprised Koziol as he sat down, "do you always dress like that?" "Naw," said Amuso. "I thought I'd just dress this way for you. You know, to kind of fit the mold." Amuso said his main business was running five massage parlors. "They aren't really that much work," he said. "I spend most of my time sitting at home, watching soap operas on the television. I can tell you the plots backwards and forwards. They're pretty true to life, you know." Koziol and the two characters chatted amiably for a half-hour or so. At one point, Koziol mentioned the Chicago mob's action in the bootleg tape racket in Phoenix. "Shit," offered Duci. "That ain't nothing." He turned to his partner. "Tell him about those tapes you were selling that didn't have any music on them." Amuso snickered. "Yeah, that's right. But that was strictly legit. See, there's nothing bootleg about a tape with no music on it." That led Duci to inform Koziol of another Amuso scam. "My partner here is also in the television business." "What do you mean?" Again, Amuso, clearly enjoying the interview, was only too happy to answer. "Sure, I sold TV's," he said as Duci began giggling. "Yeah, I sell 'em real cheap. They're color TV sets. I deliver them sealed right in their factory box." "Only thing is," interrupted Duci, anxious to get to the punch line, "those TV sets don't have any insides. Just the chassis." "Look, Louie," said Koziol a few minutes later, trying to get the interview on track again, "let's get back to the massage parlors for a minute. I understand you've been known to shake a few of them down." "No, not me. Do I look like I belong to the Mafia or something? "You ask me that, dressed the way you are?" That reminded Duci of still another story. "One time, my partner here, he goes into this massage parlor, see? He says he wants his payoff. And to demonstrate he means business, he pulls out an automatic and begins twirling it around his finger as the madame stares real big-eyed and scared. Well, he's twirling the piece and all of a sudden, the magazine drops out on the floor. All the girls started laughing and yelling. They kicked his ass right out of there." Both Amuso and Duci denied any involvement with crime other than the tape scam and scoffed at any suggestion of an organized crime syndicate in the city. "Look, we may be no angels, but this is a pretty nice town," said Duci. Both men, though, had opinions about the murder of newspaperman Don Bolles. "It was stupid that they killed Bolles," said Amuso. "If he had written something bad about me, I'd have just slapped him around a little." "Yeah, that bombing was a pretty stupid thing," agreed Duci. "I mean if you're going to kill a man, you forget all that movie stuff. The only way to do such a thing is to take a thirty-eight and blow his brains out. Simple." Perhaps what amazed the reporters most was the pure gall of the hustlers and con men they had encountered in Phoenix. Another Phoenix man of interest to IRE was Herb Lieb, 56, a former Chicagoan and the owner of a dress shop and a ritzy, members-only nightspot called the Jockey Club. He was identified in numerous police reports as a contact man for major mob figures. People like James "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno, a mob enforcer from the West Coast, were seen in Lieb's company when visiting Phoenix. Lieb was also a boyhood pal of Allen Dorfman, a convicted swindler and the main money-mover for the corrupt Central States Pension Fund of the mob-infiltrated Teamsters Union. And, in Phoenix, Lieb was a close personal friend and business associate of Harry Rosenzweig. "I'm as close to Harry as any man living today," said Lieb, a slim, slightly balding man, the afternoon he was visited by Wendland and Koziol. "And Harry never did anything wrong in his life." Lieb admitted that he had other friends who had raised police eyebrows. "Sure I know a lot of guys that might be called hoodlums. Hey, I'm from Chicago. I grew up on the West Side. A lot of my friends got into the rackets. Others became judges. I know them all, they know me. But I've never had any business dealings with those guys. I'm a legitimate businessman. Sure, I know some guys. But I'm away from that kind of shit. I could have had their money anytime I wanted to if I wanted to. But I'm not that kind of guy." Before the interview ended, Lieb wrote out temporary guest passes for his private club for the reporters. "When you guys get a chance, drop by. I'll show you a good time." Back in the IRE office, Greene thought it was an invitation his reporters could not refuse. "I don't know what he wants you guys for, but there has to be a reason." About nine o'clock that night, with Drehsler and Weisz covering both the front and rear entrances of the club, Wendland and Koziol walked inside. It was an ornate, plushly decorated disco, designed by Dave Stevens, the same architect who had remodeled the infamous Herb Applegate party house the reporters had had such difficulty locating two months before. A sunken dance floor dominated the interior; there was a small game room for backgammon players and a leather-padded bar. Two large, stained-glass windows over the dance floor gave the place an atmosphere of refined but modem elegance. It didn't take long for Lieb to spot the reporters, who were sipping drinks at the bar and watching the club fill up with well-dressed young Phoenicians. "Hey, you know, fight after you guys left this afternoon, I talked to Harry Rosenzweig," Lieb said. "And Harry's real upset about the kinds of questions you guys are asking." He paused to let the message sink in. "Look, Herb, we really didn't come by to talk shop," lied Wendland. "We just wanted a nice, quiet place to unwind. Let's not get bogged down in business." "Sure, sure," said Lieb. "I imagine you guys have really been working your tail ends off. No problem. Have you enjoyed Phoenix?" The reporters wanted to leave an impression with Lieb that they were tired and depressed, that they had had it with reporting. "It's okay." "What do you mean, okay? This is a great town. Great people." "You see, Herb, it's just that we're kind of tired of going around and sticking our noses in other people's business," said Koziol. "Right," Wendland agreed. "Like this afternoon. You know, we really hated asking you those questions. I mean, you're a nice guy, Herb. So's Harry, I suppose. I mean, we really don't like upsetting people." "Yeah," said Koziol. "This place is more our style." Lieb chatted with the reporters a few minutes, sizing them up. He offered to buy them dinner, which they politely refused. About ten, he excused himself. "I'll be right back. I got a couple things to attend to." "What do think?" Koziol asked after Lieb had moved off. Wendland shrugged. "We'll know soon enough." They had just an hour remaining. Before departing the hotel, they had agreed to leave the club by eleven. If Wendland and Koziol weren't out by then, Drehsler and Weisz were to come inside looking for them. Lieb came back in about forty-five minutes. "Still enjoying yourselves?" "Hey, we sure are," said Koziol. Several women had approached the reporters, offering dark-eyed greetings as if they were regulars. "Look, one thing, Herb. We aren't supposed to be in here, you know? This Bob Greene guy we work for is a real stickler about the reporters socializing with people they're investigating. So if anyone ever asks, we weren't here, okay?" Lieb was swallowing the bait. "No problem, I understand. He must be a real ass to have you guys out snooping around about Harry. Say, how would you guys like to meet Harry? He said he'd be glad to talk to you. I could set it up for Tuesday." "No. I don't think we should," said Koziol. "Maybe later. But that sort of thing should be handled formally, you know?" "Sure, sure. It's just that Harry and I are really upset by the things you guys have been hearing. Those stories are really wild. I'd really like to know who's spreading that kind of shit around about me. It would be worth money to me. I'd pay your expenses. I'll pay you to get to the bottom of this." Koziol glanced at Wendland to see if it had sunk in. It had. Lieb was offering them what sounded like a bribe to reveal their news sources. It was eleven o'clock. And Lieb, before continuing the conversation or setting a price, had been pulled away by a young woman patron and taken to a nearby table, promising to be right back. "We got a problem," said Koziol, glancing at his watch. "I know. You'd better get out there. Let the other guys know everything's cool." Koziol got up and went outside. "Hey, where'd your pal go?" Lieb was back. "He ran out of cigars," said Wendland. "He'll be right back. Had to go out to the car." Lieb nodded. A few minutes later, with Koziol back at the bar, Lieb said he had a friend he wanted to introduce the reporters to. It was Joe Martori, the young lawyer whose family had been friends and business partners of Bob Goldwater and Harry Rosenzweig. Martori, a short, well-dressed man, seemed hostile. "I read a magazine article where the leader of your group, a guy named Greene, said you guys were here to assassinate Phoenix," he said. Wendland and Koziol begged off. This was no time or place to get into an argument. Instead, they smiled and repeated the same line they had given Lieb about sneaking away from the hotel. "We don't talk shop on off hours," Wendland said. Martori turned friendly. He talked about Phoenix, how he used to write sports for the Notre Dame college paper, and the pride he had in his family, which numbered twenty-nine, including uncles, brothers, and cousins. They were interrupted by a telephone page for Ron Koziol. Great, thought Wendland, here we've told these people that no one knows we're here and now Koziol gets a telephone call. It was eleven-thirty. Koziol took the call from a phone near the main door. It was Greene. "You guys were supposed to be out of there by eleven," he said. Let's go." Koziol had explained the situation to Drehsler when he had slipped out of the club a half-hour before. He thought Greene would have gotten the message. "Things here aren't moving on schedule," Koziol whispered into the phone. "Everything's fine. We need a little more time." Koziol hung up and, making sure he wasn't noticed, sneaked outside again to explain the situation to the backup reporters before returning to the group. Martori was still there, as were a couple of his law partners. But time was running out. The reporters wanted to be alone with Lieb again, to have him amplify on his remarks about paying for their news sources. Bribing a reporter isn't illegal, though such an offer certainly indicated impropriety. And that could be reported in print. But they needed more. So far, no price had been mentioned, no specific duties. Lieb looked like he had more to say. But he certainly wouldn't go further with Martori there. And Martori, who turned out to be quite amiable, showed no intention of leaving. A second phone call from Greene prevented any further discussions. "Goddamn it, I told you to leave. I meant leave," he shouted over the phone to Koziol. "It's almost midnight. Now get your asses out of there and get them out now." He slammed the receiver down without waiting for a reply. There wasn't much else to do but leave. Hastily, the reporters made excuses about having to meet a friend and took off. Outside, after pulling away from the Jockey Club, they drove into the parking lot of a nearby shopping center, followed by Drehsler and Weisz. "Damn it, what did you do that for?" shouted Wendland. "Why did you guys have us pulled out of there? We weren't ready to leave. Things were just getting to the point where we'd know exactly what the guy meant." Drehsler and Weisz were just as puzzled as Wendland and Koziol. They had understood the situation inside the club, that everything was okay except for a difficulty in getting alone with Lieb. "It's Greene, then," said Koziol. "He made the decision on his own?" Drehsler and Weisz nodded. "Look, we understand. You guys could have stayed in there all night as far as we were concerned," said Weisz. "We were there just to make sure nobody carried you guys out." It took the reporters several minutes to notice because of their heated conversation, but directly overhead and shining its bright lights on the parking lot was a police helicopter. Moments later, a squad car screamed into the lot, quickly followed by a second. The first stopped behind the IRE cars, while the second went to a far end of the shopping center. Ironically, moments before the reporters had pulled in, somebody had smashed the window of a jewelry store in the shopping center. Police, responding to the silent alarm, found only a broken window and four hollering newspaper reporters. After viewing the reporters' ID's, the police left, shaking their heads. Later, after calming down, the reporters would realize how lucky they were not to have had a trigger-happy cop respond to the alarm and mistake them for jewel thieves. It became one of the team's funniest stories-four of the country's allegedly top reporters so deep in a discussion that they didn't even know they were surrounded by a tense squad of armed police officers. At the hotel, a similar shouting match with Greene ensued. >From Koziol and Wendland's point of view, Greene had been trying to second-guess them from a position of ignorance. He wasn't inside the club and thus had no way of knowing what the situation was. They were. And in their judgment, they hadn't gotten everything possible from their news source. Greene didn't buy any of it. The issue as he saw it was clear. They had all agreed beforehand to leave by eleven. Eleven came and went and the inside team was still inside. They had not stuck to the plan. It made no difference to Greene that the outside team was completely aware of what was going on in the club. A plan was a plan and it hadn't been followed. At 1:00 A.M., they all got tired of shouting at each other and went to bed. In the morning, it was as if the argument had never occurred. Fat Louie, "Acey" Duci, Herb Lieb, "Papa Joe," high school kids being touted on dogs at a betting track, Harry Rosenzweig. The names and incidents seemed to blur into a carnival of the macabre. Phoenix was a world unto itself—a place where money was God and the hustler and con man were the priests. It was a city in need of help. pps. 222-238 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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