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Chapter Eighteen
Medford, Oregon
CONNOR MURPHY LOVED THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. He had lived most of his life on the East Coast, and still traveled there frequently. But when it came time to retire—he’d decided to choose for himself. To actually choose, in a Thoreau-ian way, where and how to live for the first time, to live intentionally. He was fifty-five, with a generous pension from the federal government. He had worked for the DEA for 30 years and had seen more layers of crookedness and infamy than most cops saw in a lifetime. A grown daughter had finished college as she had promised and had moved in with her boyfriend. His marriage had ended years before—at first with recriminations and anger over his long hours and dangerous profession—but then over the years, with acceptance and a kind of distant regard.
He’d taken a hiking trip to Crater Lake and decided that that’s where he would settle. He bought himself a puppy—a purebred yellow lab with a thoughtful and easy disposition—and they’d arranged their lives around a cozy house outside Medford, and regular afternoon walks among the ancient conifers.
A Democrat all his life, he found himself strangely drawn to the candidacy of Claire McCracken. He acknowledged to himself that it was partly because after all those years of observing the basest impulses of human nature—he’d decided that women were actually better people than men were. Women were more apt to make decisions based on the core value—loyalty—that to him seemed most important.
Oh, they made bad choices—stayed with men that humiliated and abused them, did things for love or loyalty that their instincts for self-preservation should have made impossible. But maybe that was part of it, too. Women had much less instinct for self-preservation than men did—stories of mothers that starved themselves so their children had food, who denied themselves all kinds of things. Did men do that? Of course they did—honorable men—Connor thought. But still, he believed, women were more likely to make decisions based on their determination of the greater good, rather than on their own narrow self-interest. Of course, he’d never shared this belief with the hardened veterans of the DEA—but increasingly he’d come to believe it was true.
There was something about Claire McCracken, in particular, that inspired him. Obviously, she was a liberal Democrat, but one who seemed to have concern for traditional values—and he didn’t mean that as code for gay-bashing or discrimination, as it was sometimes used. No, he meant it as respect for America, respect for a kind of can-do, frontier spirit that viewed every challenge as an opportunity and every opportunity as a blessing. He meant it as a sense of community—it was small town America with parades on July 4th and kids in camp uniforms paddling canoes, and blueberry cobbler set out on picnic tables draped with vinyl checked tablecloths. It was the sound of lawnmowers and the smell of sweet cut grass, and airplanes dragging banner advertisements over a crowded summer beach “skyvertising” half off margaritas to six-year-olds making sand castles.
If he’d ever thought about it, Connor might have noticed that it was always summer in his version of America. It was, reasonably enough, his own childhood. Cape May, New Jersey is populated less noticeably by its current year-’round residents or summer visitors, than by the famous Victorian mansions that line its leafy boulevards. Locals called them “painted ladies”—the curiously exuberant, architectural expressions that ironically now serve as a kind of memorial to some the area’s very solid citizens of the last century. If their adornments—a little frivolous, a little garish, and over-colored—seem a strange choice for such conservative yeomanry, the sheer mass and volume of their arrangements speak to a very solid, very permanent temperament, much given to sense, masquerading as sensibility.
Off the fabled, tourist-attracting streets, were the smaller houses. The houses in these neighborhoods didn’t have the fun- house dimensions and folly of the mansions on the main avenues, but they were appealingly trim and sturdy nonetheless. Connor had grown up amid a close-knit clan of Irishmen—an assortment of aunts, uncles, and older cousins that mostly came and went, as their own circumstances or inclinations dictated—without apparent discussion or discord.
There wasn’t always a lot of money, but there was always enough to eat. And somehow everyone made a contribution. A cousin would leave a bundt cake on the breakfast table. An uncle had carved out a plot in the backyard where he planted enormous egg-shaped watermelons that grew with a kind of proud self-sufficiency in the brown dirt. Another relative had contributed the thicket of raspberry bushes lined up against the neighbor’s fence like sentries; its tempting fruit half-hidden among bristling needles as fine as hair. His mother’s tomato plants (bright red and green fruit—and in some years, yellow) grew against the lattice of an arbor in an inverted “V” on teepees of sticks. It was a world of community, order and sufficiency. In the 1950s, it was already old-fashioned.
Growing up, his father, a chief warrant officer with the Coast Guard, was Connor’s model of rectitude and toughness, a distant figure, admired and mostly unknown. His mother, gentle and loving, was his paragon of womanliness and disinterested generosity. She was the exact personification of mothers on 1950s television: tidy, aproned, and in control.
But it was his brothers and cousins who were his childhood compatriots and co-conspirators. It was with them that he rode bikes to Sunset Beach to find the “Cape May Diamonds”—the clear quartz pebbles washed hundreds of miles down the Delaware River as it rushed for the Atlantic. It was with them that he dug up worms from the backyard and carried them in coffee cans to go fishing from the pier with their homemade poles. It was with them that he stole his father’s binoculars to scout birds on the peninsula. And it was with them that he tried to get the younger kids to laugh by making faces during interminable Masses at the Star of the Sea Catholic Church.
When Connor was seven, he had a religious experience, only it wasn’t at the Star of the Sea. It was the day the Magnarama 24 television arrived on the delivery truck, courtesy of the Magnavox Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Every Saturday night at 9:30, he and his younger brother would sprawl on the living room rug in breathless anticipation of the newest installment of the adventures of the mysterious Paladin of Have Gun Will Travel. For 30 minutes, the Murphy boys would track the adventures of the craggy-faced, gun-slinging mercenary as he offered his services to anyone in need—for a cool $1,000. Except, of course, for widows and orphans, whom the kind-hearted Paladin exempted from payment.
Paladin, cool East Coast sophisticate that he was, lived a rather dandified (if rootless) existence at San Francisco’s finest hotel. But to the consternation of the rough-talking Western roustabouts, he could spring into action at a moment’s notice with his Colt .45 snug in its engraved holster, his faithful horse Rafter saddled and ready. Calls of “bed time” were ineffectual—neither of the boys would even twitch until the final stanza of the song that began:
Have gun will travel reads the card of the man
A knight without armor in a savage land
His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.
Two hundred and twenty-six episodes later, Connor was a federal agent. He just didn’t know it yet.
The television cost $249.50, an extravagance, when the average American salary was just over $3,000 a year. But the Murphy family got by. In Connor’s childhood, nobody was ever very rich or very poor. Except sometimes unaccountably after someone died, the family might find a mattress full of money that in her later years had apparently cushioned the old bones of a maiden aunt, or some savings bonds that no one had ever cashed in.
Of course, intellectually, Connor realized that things had changed a lot since his youth. Few people kept backyard chickens (although, apparently, Connor had heard, that was changing) or planted victory gardens. But Connor’s vision of America persisted. Americans had gotten away from self-sufficiency in a way that was not healthy and not smart, he thought. So when he moved to Oregon, Connor had planted a little
garden in his patch of loamy soil. Later, he’d added a little lean-to greenhouse.
Claire McCracken spoke to the vein in him that considered self-sufficiency and autarky a kind of a moral obligation. She talked about a commitment to children, to the poor, even to those who’d been discriminated against, less as a campaign slogan than as an animating principle of her life.
The other thing that attracted Connor to McCracken was her sheer unmistakable smarts. Sure, Okono had the same fancy degrees from the same fancy schools—and people routinely described him as “brilliant.” But like many of her supporters, Connor saw in McCracken something noticeably lacking in Okono; a total command of the issues. She didn’t grope for words when asked a difficult question—she practically bounded forward to answer it. There were no teleprompters, no stage show theatrics, so far her supporters had shown no signs of fainting as they did with Okono from the sheer Beatlemania of the guy. It wasn’t shtick, it wasn’t hype. It wasn’t even purely politics. McCracken just struck Connor as a real person, a real smart person—but a real person just the same.
It’s an overused maxim that a federal agent learns to use his instincts. If he doesn’t have good instincts, one way or another, he won’t last long in the field. You had to be able to sense—in an almost chemical way—who was telling you the truth and who was shoveling shit. People made it out as if it were some sort of sixth sense—and maybe in a way it was—but it was no more or less scientific than a dog being able to detect explosives. Part of it was training, sure—but part of it—almost inarguably the larger part—was natural ability. Scientists had documented that nervous people, people who were lying—gave off different physiological cues or microexpressions. They blinked more frequently, their blood pressure rose. A DEA agent had to be able to listen to someone, hear him speak and watch him move and gesture, and decide quickly if the cues matched. If they didn’t match—well, there was always a reason.
Okono’s cues didn’t match. He lowered his gaze when he should have been making eye contact. His mouth stretched in a big Hollywood smile. But the eyes didn’t smile—they remained wary, considering. When challenged, his posture changed; defensive, stumbling, aggrieved. When people stretched out their hands—cameras captured the momentary irritation, resentment. Okono had to make a conscious effort of will not to shirk from the commoner’s touch. What the reporters who covered him quickly discerned—but their editors never allowed them to report—Connor picked up long-distance, via videotape on the evening news. Okono was less cool than cold. Okono was selfish, hard-hearted, mercenary—and, for Connor, the coup de grâce—loyal only to himself.
Connor, like most of America, had heard that Chicago politics were notoriously corrupt. But he also knew what many Americans did not, that Chicago politicians had immeasurable influence. Due to gerrymandering, eight of Illinois’ 19 congressional seats had some part of the city in their districts. When one considered how large a state Illinois was, and that Chicago only represented twenty five percent of the population, scoring three additional seats in Congress—for no good reason at all—should have been hard to justify.
So when Connor read in the Chicago papers that Okono had had a relationship with Joey Ali, a notorious political “fixer” in Chicago, his antennae were already raised. One thing Connor knew about was the psychology of criminals. He knew that someone like Joey Ali, who was a major bagman in Chicago politics, and shortly to be indicted on 24 counts of racketeering violations, did not have a close relationship with a politician unless there was a major pay-off. No one got out of those relationships for less than what they were given. It was kind of like using one of the check cashing places ubiquitous in poor neighborhoods; they’d give you your money immediately—but you paid for the convenience in the end. Curiously, a news media that had salivated at the prospect of financial malfeasance by the McCracken family—virtually ignored the Okono-Ali story. And something about the raw injustice of that decision infuriated Connor. He decided to investigate on his own.
First, it was just a couple of calls. He kept hearing the same thing. Okono had openly lobbied for tens of millions of state and federal tax credits, credits used principally by his developer buddies like Ali. And there was no doubt Joey Ali was dirty. Records documented that he had been awarded millions of those federal and states subsidies to build public housing that was now being condemned as substandard and abandoned all over the district and the state. Connor’s sources confirmed that at least twenty of those projects—maybe more—were in Okono’s own district, so the chances that Okono could have been unaware of what was going on was hard to believe. And there was mounting evidence that despite his denials, Okono had actually written letters in support of Joey Ali’s development plans. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots.
The newest rumors were that Okono and his pals were guaranteeing their own comfortable retirements by pushing to have Chicago—specifically the bombed out, still smoking embers of the mostly derelict South Side of Chicago—play host to the 2016 Olympics. Creating the infrastructure for an Olympics has historically been a losing economic proposition for the host city. The requirements of providing venues for the Olympic games were too huge and too varied to be easily absorbed and repurposed afterward into the public and private use facilities its advocates always promised. It was hard to imagine, for example, that the South Side of Chicago would develop, post-Olympics, a pressing need for archery or badminton facilities. More than the expense of the facilities themselves, were the exorbitant cost of the transportation networks required to bring spectators to the venues. After the excitement of the Olympic games, many cities found the light rail lines they’d installed at enormous expense barely used, the stations deserted.
However, for developers who owned land—frequently land in otherwise undesirable locations—it was a home run. City officials were being cagey, but the word on the street was that un-named developers had just been paid $86 million dollars by the city to purchase South Side property. Whether the city had included that in their Olympic cost estimate of $1.27 billion was unknown.
What’s more, Joey Ali had strange—especially for those who thought he was Italian—Middle-Eastern ties. The press either never knew or never reported that Ali traveled more than twenty times to Pakistan between 2004 and 2006. Theoretically, regular visits to a country that was training most of the world’s jihadists—alone—probably should have raised some red flags in the media. After all, it’s a twenty-two hour plane trip and Islamabad is not exactly party town. Why all the visits? Connor wondered. Ali had never reported any overseas business interests in Pakistan or the Middle East on his business or personal tax filings.
For those who dismissed the trips as some sort of in-consequential “family business”—it might have been inconvenient to point out that all Joey Ali’s immediate family were already in the U.S., and if he was sending money to relatives, that was easy enough to manage electronically. In any case, if Ali had been traveling to the Middle East on family business, he would have been traveling to Syria. Joey Ali was Syrian, not Pakistani.
There were lots of rumors. Former Okono volunteers told whispered tales of Joey Ali carrying black plastic garbage bags of cash to Okono’s congressional campaign headquarters. Insiders at Ali’s management firm hinted to investigators that properties bought by Okono had been flipped to buyers who paid a premium—properties the insiders claimed were never registered in Okono’s name. Connor suspected none of it could be proved. But there were good reasons to wonder how Okono financed his increasingly expensive lifestyle. The salary of a state senator was notoriously meager and Okono had never had much of a law practice. True, he’d written a book that had made the bestseller list, but that seldom generated the kind of profits necessary to finance a lifestyle like Okono’s. Yet he lived in a multimillion-dollar mansion, wore designer clothes, and sent his kids to an expensive private school. The money was coming from somewhere.
True or not, Joey Ali clearly believed he had connections in hig
h places. When the special prosecutor handed out a 24-count indictment, Joey Ali was not unduly worried, apparently. Connor’s FBI contact told him that one of Ali’s employees would testify at trial that Ali had told her not to worry about the federal indictments—Joey Ali had been assured, he said, that the current special prosecutor was going to be replaced. No less a personage than the frozen-faced, helmet-haired U.S. Speaker of the House, Ali told his employee, would appoint a new prosecutor who would drop all the charges. At the time, the woman thought Joey Ali was crazy.
Chapter Nineteen
Chicago, Illinois
THEY STARTED WITH THE PEOPLE who had worked closely with Antwone Green.
The teachers and principal at the school at which he had worked insisted they simply didn’t know much about him. He had rarely participated in after-school activities or socialized with the other teachers. They’d assumed he was too busy with his work at the church, they said.
When they started to interview church members, most of the members of the choir refused to discuss Antwone Green, Kevin DuShane, or the church, except in the most general terms. There was such uniformity to the witnesses’ responses, it was impossible not to suspect that they’d been coached. “Yes, they’d worked with Antwone.” “No, they couldn’t imagine why anyone would harm him.” “No, they’d never suspected he was gay.” “No, he’d never had any relationships with members of the choir or church that they knew of.” “No issues with drugs or money problems as far as they knew.” He had a beautiful voice, they all agreed, a deep sonorous bass.
All suggested, unsolicited, that they thought he had been depressed or “down” lately, but stopped short of suggesting his death was a suicide. Apparently, The Minister had shown no such reticence. He had given a sermon immediately following Green’s death about how they all needed to minister not just to the flock, but to the shepherds, which seemed to suggest Green had taken his own life. But when pressed by Harrison and Johnson, the choir members demurred. “They couldn’t say” and “wouldn’t want to speculate” they told the police.