To Leave But Not Go
From Sokushinbutsu
We had an early lunch.
She told me, “The kid was flying from Venezuela into O’Hare and then coming here in a rented car he paid cash for. He’d done it eight or nine times before he set off any alarm bells. He clearly knew someone at O’Hare, and he knew they were coming for him at your place. They think he cleaned house because he knew they were coming. Somebody in the DEA or Chicago police let him know and he split.
“They’re not even gonna call on you to testify when they catch him. You’re safe as houses.” She was having shells with pesto and artichoke hearts and speck, it came with a poached egg rested on top, with a dot of truffle oil and red and black pepper on the rim of the dish. She was drinking prosecco. I had a cheeseburger and a beer.
I told her, “I don’t know shit about it. I met the kid at the bar in the little downtown by my house. He paid rent early and in cash. I almost never saw him.”
“They staked your place out. They knew he wasn’t there. They came for him, but the search warrant was for the house and it’s your house. You just got drawn into it.
“They said they were within their rights to execute the search warrant. They said sorry about the food. I asked if you could be compensated for damages. They said no. I said what if I sued for ‘em. They said, and this is the good part, it would be unwise to sue the Iowa City Police Department. They’re there to help you. The implication being that it would be disadvantageous to have a less than amicable relationship with local law enforcement. I chose not to pursue it further.”
“You’re very wise.” I said.
“You know, he seemed like a good kid.”
“They said they thought he was probably moving small weight of cocaine and selling it off to maybe one or two people, but they have nothing on him.
“He has a lease on a fancy sports car. They’re gonna snag him when he comes in to pay on the lease. The dealer says he shows up early and pays in cash. They’ll have him in jail in Illinois by the end of the month. They’ll try to get him to roll on whoever is letting him through customs in O’Hare. He’s 25. No record. Not even a ticket.”
“Yeah, I knew when I got back to the house that he was into something.”
“Yeah, Steve. They said the only thing they were pretty sure about was his name was Steve...
“You’re gonna be finding cereal between the floorboards in that kitchen forever.”
“You’re not wrong, Fati.
“You still seem great to me. You still great?”
“Yeah, things are fine. There’s less running to do and more money. Lawyering is a good career. I still hear from people we both used to know. Nobody is in any trouble. They just pay me in case they get into some. Same as you.
“This seemed like a fun one, so I came down. You seem good too, all things considered.”
“Standard rollercoaster.” I said. “I’ll get lunch.”
“I can’t let you do that, Vic. Wouldn’t be ethical. I’ll take it as a write off and bill you for it.”
“I take it all back.”
“All what?”
“All the nice shit I said.”
I ordered another beer. She still had wine to drink.
She was in her car driving back to Chicago by 12:30.
the day before
There isn’t anybody at the Bureau who says, “Ok guys, let’s do this one by the books.” unless they know they are being recorded and it’s gonna end up being subpoenaed for an investigation… by no means.
The Bureau is literally above the law. Local cops know this. The CIA and the DEA know it, but they don’t like it and all of this is beside any sort of point.
Brian had not done the due diligence of calling off the dogs. No one at the Iowa City PD had been notified about the kid, Steve. No one at the DEA really knew what Brian was up to.
Sometimes he didn’t worry about things like that. He’d worked with Steve a long time. Steve had gone off and come back. Steve didn’t want to be the kind of guy he was when he was working for Brian.
Brian knew the solution to any attitude problem at work is more money, so he let Steve get a taste.
In the cocaine game there is always an ungodly sum of cash that is on its way from a crime scene to evidence.
This was before the era of civil asset forfeiture. Now a guy can just take the money, any law enforcement agency can just take the money out of evidence. That’s what civil asset forfeiture is. Money doesn’t even become evidence; it just becomes the property of the arresting agency. In the eighties and nineties the Bureau and the CIA had to be kinda sneaky about it. They had to intercept it.
This is all still off topic.
Because Brian didn’t let anybody know that Steve was going to be part of an operation, the local police assumed the guy running coke into town was committing a crime.
Brian had got Steve a winky special clearance through the airport in Chicago. Steve definitely could have walked through customs at O’hare with sticks of dynamite ringing his chest. As it was he was bringing one or two five ounce balls of finished hard candy cocaine into the country in his clothes pockets.
An ounce is roughly thirty grams. Iowa city is a seller’s market. It’s not a street market. There’s some coke in the bars, but the real money is Physicians and grad students- People who almost never buy it and are not “coke heads”. They’ll pay a hundred dollars for a nice gram of real coke.
Wholesaling at fifteen hundred dollars an ounce leaves room for a dealer to make a hundred percent profit. More importantly local distributors get to talk to Steve when he’s a little jacked up and working for the Bureau.
He brought the line of conspiratorial bullshit to the table that it was his job to bring. He made friends. It had already started to happen and he could see it in the world around him. Steve brought rhetoric intended to disrupt the permissive lefty subculture he was feeding coke to from within its own moorings.
As a sort of fuck you to the whole thing, Steve had begun to tell people he was an FBI contractor almost immediately after he sold them coke.
The effect was first astonishment then the anticipation of trouble and nearly immediately thereafter the calm conclusion that the federáles do not give a shit about law and order. Steve was game. The FBI was game. No amount of trouble could come of this.
People who were once terrified of you trust you more than they trust their friends because they learned that trust out of its lack. Steve was no-shit. When Steve told you some fucked up thing the Bureau was into, you just believed it.
Any resignation Steve had about planting dissent in the coke fueled literate left just read like some post trauma haunting.
Everything is fake.
When Brian got wind of some DEA in Iowa City he went to the house and had Steve clean his room and run for it. It was the afternoon before the last time he paid Vic the rent.
“You gotta go.”
Brian had just walked into Steve’s room in Vic’s house. “Get up, kid. They’re gonna come raid the house.”
Steve packed up and left. He’d decided the most normal thing he could possibly do was to meet Vic and pay his rent.