The Undertaker

“An occupational hazard. You should be more careful about the clients you take.”

“True enough,” he sighed as we continued walking around the park. “So tell me what you want. And tell me what you have that I am supposed to find so interesting.”

“What I want is some information on Louie Panozzo. What was it that he had on Jimmy Santorini?”

Billingham looked at me for a moment. “Suffice it to say that this meeting never took place, Mister Talbott. I spoke to my client. Frankly, I advised him that we should not talk to you, but a man can get very disconsolate when he is locked up inside a Federal Penitentiary, surrounded by all that barbed wire and knowing he will be very, very old when he finally does get out.” Billingham stopped walking, his eyes drilling into me. “But be advised, if you are playing games with him, you will learn that Jimmy has no sense of humor what-so-ever.”

“Neither does Ralph Tinkerton,” I answered. “And if I don't stop him, it won't matter who Jimmy is pissed at.”

We resumed our walk. Every time we crossed a new sidewalk, he led us off in a new direction, like a freighter in an old war movie zigzagging to avoid submarines. Until a few days ago, I would have thought Charley Billingham a paranoid nut, but that was when I still trusted funeral directors, doctors, and county sheriffs. I never did trust lawyers. Who does?

“All right. You asked me about Louie Panozzo,” Billingham began his story. “He worked for Jimmy in Newark. He was not “family” or a “made man” or anything nefarious. He was merely an ordinary, nine-to-five bookkeeper, but he had access to all the financial records and all the accounting. No, that is not quite correct. They were his financial records, his “books” if you will, and he knew where every dime came from and went. That means all the drugs, women, numbers, the unions, loan sharking, money laundering, the scams, guns, booze, the bookies, the legitimate businesses Jimmy ran and the crooked ones. Panozzo had the details of everything that went into the till. More importantly, he kept “the pad”: the record of the payoffs Jimmy made to the police and half the elected and appointed government officials throughout eastern New Jersey and New York. Unfortunately, the FBI seized Panozzo on a trumped-up wire fraud charge. Instead of trusting me to get him off, he accepted a plea bargain from the U. S. Attorney and rolled over, first to that bastard Hardin, if you'll pardon my language, and then in court.”

“I know that.”

“Of course you do,” Billingham smiled, making me feel like a complete idiot. “And as I think you are aware by now, when Louie left Newark, he took an electronic copy of all of Jimmy's master accounting records for the past five years with him.”

“That's what this is all about? The bean counter's books?” I asked.

Billingham looked at me as if I was a first year law student who had just farted in the middle of one of his lectures. “No, Mister Talbott, this is not about the books, it is about power. Those records not only include the various items about Jimmy's operations I enumerated, they also include dozens of transactions with the other “families” in the Tri-state area — joint ventures, as you might call them — so those computer files can put many, many people in jail. No one knows that. Jimmy does, of course, I know it, Gino does, and now you do.”

“Tinkerton knows too. He tried to carve them out of me with a scalpel.”

“Not exactly. He knows the files exist and that they contain information on Jimmy's operations in New Jersey, perhaps the payoffs as well, but that is all he knows.”

“So who has them, Charley?”

“We had been hoping you do, Mister Talbott,” he smiled. “The Feds don't have them. If they did, they would have used them by now, and half the politicians and crooks on the Atlantic seaboard would already be in jail. And Rico Patillo doesn't have them. If he did, he would already be squeezing and muscling people.” He stopped and looked at me. “I know you are still skeptical about the value of those records, but did you ever see the “Untouchables” movie? The one with Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness and all that?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well, in real life, when Al Capone was convicted and sent to prison, it was for income tax evasion, not the murders or numerous violent crimes he committed. It was the accountants who got him, the “bean counters” as you call them. With Louie Panozzo's accounting records, you could control a five-state area, perhaps even the government in Washington itself. That's what makes them the most explosive bits of computer code since the Manhattan Project, and whoever has them has his finger on the trigger.”

“So it wasn't simply a matter of Panozzo holding a news conference and saying he made the whole thing up?”