Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (6 page)

Build up a company on paper, inflating its value with a flood of sales, a flood of cash flow. After compromising its assets, taking as much as you could, sell the company to someone else. He would find, over time, that the process usually took about eighteen months. He sold Lee Ackerman Diamond Valley in early 1965, more or less on this schedule.

They went to the police department on Washington Street—business partners now—to register Warren as an out-of-state convict. This was on February 18, 1965. Afterward, Ackerman drove Warren uptown to North 44th Street to speak to the real estate commissioner, J. Fred Talley, about finally getting a license. In his briefcase, Warren had an envelope containing $200, a measly figure he had picked himself, but having seen Talley a few times before, he knew he had not underestimated him.

He had “spent some time with Uncle Sam,” he’d told Ackerman, implying that it was for tax evasion, something that could have happened to anyone with the wrong accountant. “Lots of hassles and lots of ways around the hassles—that’s what my year in Danbury was like. Probably not so different from the air force,” he’d said. It somehow sealed their relationship, the casual way he spoke of his time in prison. Ackerman happened to belong to a group called Heart, Inc., which helped find employment for rehabilitated convicts. Warren’s past made him feel like a friend, not just a business partner. His rehabilitation was an indication of things they had in common: resilience, grit, an instinct that the world was manageable if you had half a brain.

“This is Uncle Fred,” Ackerman said, standing behind the commissioner, leaning forward with his hands on Talley’s shoulders. “Uncle Fred is a tough old sumbuck.”

Talley was still seated at his desk, looking dyspeptically at Warren with small eyes behind large, dark-framed glasses. He was a fat man with a sunken chin and protruding ears and a pinched, inverted mouth—a slumping octopus of a man in a brown suit and a bolo tie.

“Nice to see you, Fred,” said Warren drily.

“Don’t get me all greased up. It’s too early in the day to get fucked,” Talley said.

“All this barnyard talk. I’m not used to it.”

Talley put a fist to his mouth and coughed. “Lee’s an old friend of mine,” he said. “That’s why you’re here. You know how many people I have working under me?”

“I have no idea.”

“Three. Three investigators for the state of Arizona. All I can do is make your life a little harder or easier. Just like you can make mine harder or easier.”

Ackerman patted Talley’s shoulders and indicated that Warren should sit down in one of the chairs in front of the commissioner’s desk. “I hear you got top scores on the exam,” Ackerman said, looking at Warren.

Warren didn’t answer. He saw that Talley had the license already prepared, saw it sitting on top of a pile of documents. Talley slid it across his desk and Warren looked at the commissioner’s signature and the state seal and then at his own name,
Nathan J. Warren,
typed in beside the words
Western Growth Capital, Inc.,
the name of the land company he had just started with Ackerman after selling him Diamond Valley.

“Tell your son he can start work next month,” Warren said to Talley.

“Give him till May. Let’s say May fifteenth.”

“Fine. I’ve got something for you in a little envelope here.”

“Tell your friend John Roeder it’s been a long time.”

“I’ll do that. I’m sure we’ll all be seeing a lot of each other from now on.”

The big fish answer to the small fish. That’s what Warren’s mentor, Nathan Voloshen, had liked to say. The small fish were the ones who would protect you from the big fish. The small fish—the party officers, the county and state bureaucrats—were the ones who enabled the big fish—the judges, the politicians—to live out their public lives.

At Voloshen’s level, it was the New York Stock Exchange, it was building highways in Florida, it was doing favors for the Duvalier government in Haiti. Voloshen was an attorney and lobbyist who did his deals not on K Street but right inside the office of the U.S. Speaker of the House, John McCormack. He had brought Warren to Washington, D.C., just a few days after Warren’s parole in 1960, and had had him put his feet up on McCormack’s desk. He had asked him how it felt. It had felt like a veil of immunity. Some alchemy of odors and fabrics and dark mahogany had made the law seem a perfect abstraction, a power you partook of by desecration, by putting your feet up on a congressman’s desk and dialing a number on his phone.

A year later, he was in Phoenix. Five years later, he was a millionaire.

3

D
avid Rich was speaking to his accountant, Ed Lazar, the door closed on an office covered in framed citations for contributions to Israel and local charities. Rich was a small, neat man with an animated face and cheerfully mischievous eyes. His dark suit, and the solemnity of what they were discussing, were somehow lightened by his East London accent, which sounded almost Australian.

“I watched Lee Ackerman turn into someone I didn’t recognize,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve known him for eighteen years. Most of that time we were in business together. He was handsome, he had a good head for numbers, you couldn’t help but like Lee. But then he came to me before Diamond Valley’s collapse and asked me to buy twenty-five thousand dollars of mortgages.”

They were worthless—Ackerman had mortgaged the same piece of land two or three times, thinking, perhaps, that it didn’t matter, that since the time payments were so small, no one was ever going to take title anyway. But half of the mortgages weren’t even current. Rich had lost the whole $25,000.

Ed ran his hand over his knee, looking down, assessing the story because it didn’t jibe with what he thought he knew. Dave Rich had been one of his clients for the past several years. It was only this week that he had learned of his connection to Ned Warren. He was trying to remember a series of newspaper stories from the year before—1967—about Warren and Ackerman, the kind of thing you skimmed if you read it at all, letting the photos and their captions do most of the work: “Lee J. Ackerman, Politician, Investor,” “Nathan J. Warren, Two Prison Terms.” It was the kind of story that left a strong but blunt impression, enough to muster an opinion about if it came up in conversation but not enough to support that opinion. He remembered there were some fraudulent deals. Selling land in a bar, phony sales. He remembered something about Warren’s prison record. He’d been in Sing Sing. Ed remembered that.

“Ned was into all kinds of rackets,” Rich said, breathing out in disgust. “But this was years ago, fifteen years ago. I understand, I did some checking up on him, too. He’s in business with Richard Stenz now—Richard’s some sort of higher-up in the Republican Party, very straight. Before I made any loans, I talked to Richard and he told me that Ned was completely reformed. Now, I agree with him, but I also understand your concerns. It wasn’t Ned, though, it was Lee who came in here and sold me those twenty-five thousand dollars of bad mortgages.”

“Where is Ackerman now?”

“Lee? It’s a tragedy—the company’s in bankruptcy, he’s in personal bankruptcy. His house is on the market. The last I saw him, he wouldn’t sit down, he was so anxious. Lee was never anxious.”

Ed nodded slowly, his eyes moving away from Rich to the pictures on his wall. “Warren’s books look fine,” he said. “The last audit was Arthur Andersen. They’re not exactly in the business of lying for people, not for people like Warren anyway.”

“I told Ned you were my accountant,” said Rich, clasping his hands on his desk and leaning forward. “I recommended you, and I wouldn’t have done that if I thought Ned was a crook. He’s made a pile of money in the last few years—Prescott Valley, this Queen Creek venture with Stenz. It’s in his own interest to keep on the straight and narrow, don’t you think?”

They’re not exactly in the business of lying for people, not for people like Warren anyway.

It was a stupid thing to say, Ed thought in the car later that afternoon. The question it raised, of course, was why was Warren looking for a new accountant in the first place? Was it because Arthur Andersen had been too “conservative”?

He was on Camelback Road, driving to Warren’s house in Paradise Valley. He had spoken to Warren that afternoon on the phone and told him yes, they had a deal, he would bring over some initial paperwork they could go over together. He had done this without thinking it through all the way, or rather he had wanted to do it and had allowed himself to make the call before working through all of his misgivings. It was a big account. If they took it on, it would be one of Gallant, Farrow’s biggest accounts. Sam Gallant himself had encouraged Ed to give it his consideration.

When he’d hung up the phone, Ed had realized that he was curious about Warren in a way he would not have expected. He’d realized that he was looking forward to seeing Warren at his house instead of at his office.

He found the street he was looking for, North Dromedary Road, but then strayed off it, not in any hurry, wanting to just drive for a while, to look at the surroundings, the city’s wealthiest neighborhood. The desert was still a vivid presence there, pink sand between the spacious two- or three-acre lots—vivid, but tamed. There were palm trees, paloverde trees, brilliant red bougainvillea draped over walls the color of mud. It was quiet, no other cars out. Trails led up to the boulder formations at the foot of Camelback Mountain, but no one was out walking on them. He finally got back on North Dromedary Road and began following its switchbacks up the mountainside, the road steeper and steeper, until he was almost unable to move any farther. Piles of crushed rock blocked the way in places, and slopes of crushed rock spilled off the edge, over the sheer, hundred-yard drop down the mountainside. He saw a gated driveway and wondered if that was the turnoff he was looking for, East Grandview Lane, Warren’s street. He put the parking brake on and got out of the car and took a closer look but could see nothing except extended driveway through the bronze grillwork.

He sat in the car for a moment, frustrated. If he went farther up, there was no guarantee he would be able to turn back around—his car was a large Pontiac sedan—and eventually he decided he might have missed the turn, and so he began the difficult task of backing his way down, using the side mirror to keep the edge of the road in sight. It turned out that he had passed East Grandview Lane on his way up the mountainside. East Grandview Lane was smoothly paved. He could see what he guessed was Warren’s house beyond a curve in the road lined with perfectly spaced date palms. 4958 East Grandview Lane. He parked the car and took his briefcase and walked around the bougainvillea-covered wall to the low pale green rotunda where the front door was. Thin white columns held up the roof, whose greenness turned out to be the verdigris of weathered copper. He did not use words like
verdigris.
He did not look at the house, with its graceful, botany-inspired details, and think of Frank Lloyd Wright. It struck him as an unusually pleasant, understated house, a kind of ideal house he had never seen or thought of or imagined before.

“You must be Ed Lazar,” a woman said, answering the doorbell. She was attractive, tanned, thin, her blond hair held loosely in a clip. Behind her, two black Dobermans were barking and pawing the carpeted floor. “Boys, stop it,” she said, twisting toward them, a cigarette cocked at a perfect right angle to her hip. “Down.” She looked at him again with a flat grin, a thin bar of flawless white teeth. “I’m Barbara Warren.”

Inside, the front room was like an observation deck, its curved walls and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a protected sense of distance from the view outside, all of Phoenix stretched out beyond the palm-lined mountainside. There was the secretive hush of wealth—artwork, Navajo rugs, dark wooden furniture—everything kept clean and ordered by someone else, there for your enjoyment, there for you to use or just to look at. She showed him back into a den with a wall made of bare slate-colored rock—the actual side of Camelback Mountain—and then into a sunroom with opened windows, their iron frames painted brown. There were terra-cotta pots filled with geraniums, gardenias, jasmine. At the back of the room was a white bar shaped like a teardrop, where Barbara Warren poured him a Scotch, took his briefcase and jacket, and then showed him outside.

Warren was sitting at a glass table by the pool beneath an umbrella, reading a paperback novel and fingering a tall blue glass beaded with condensation. The table was covered with newspapers—the
Arizona Republic
and the
Phoenix Gazette,
the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
—an ashtray, cigarettes, a yellow pad and pen. He wore a clean white robe and espadrilles. His damp hair was slicked back after a swim in the pool. With his deep tan, the robe hanging open as he backed up his chair and stood to say hello, the impression he gave was of a man who had been everywhere and had laid out every aspect of his current life with a deliberate sense of what the options were.