Madman's Thirst (3 page)

CHAPTER 4 – BULLETPROOF

Everett Harvey put his coffee in
the cup holder. It was mid-afternoon and his was the only car parked in the
Dunkin’ Donuts lot in a strip center on Bay Street. He pulled down the visor
and opened the mirror. There were white crumbs in his moustache. Harvey took a
napkin and brushed them off. He looked down and swiped his tie and pants legs.
He ignored his jacket, which could camouflage anything. Harvey looked around
the front seat and did a hasty cleanup. But he knew he would miss some. Nancy
would notice and pitch a fit. But nobody can go into a Dunkin’ for just coffee,
for Christ sake!

 Harvey was a triple dipper.
Having done 20 and out in the N.Y.P.D., he was nearing the end of a concurrent
25-year stint in the Army Reserve, with a cushy staff sergeant billet right on
Staten Island in Fort Wadsworth. An overachiever – working on a Masters in
Education at the College of Staten Island – Harvey was cognizant of the
blessings of multiple pensions and thus also covered the police beat for the
Richmond
Register
.

The transition from cop to
reporter was jarring at first – he had been programmed to hate the media – but
now loved the job. He reported to an editor, Bob Pearsall, who had balls, and
his own background cut him plenty of slack with the local cops. They assumed,
rightly, that Harvey wasn’t out to screw them. As a result, he crossed more
crime scene tapes than any other reporter. A penchant for colorful checkered
sports coats made him easy to spot; most cops now knew him by sight. He was
patient with the rookies who gave him a hard time, politely asking them to
check with a superior. If that didn’t work, he put his 240 pounds in their face
and told them he was arresting kids their age when they spilled out of their
fathers’ condoms. 

Harvey was already vested in the
paper’s pension plan and planned to call it quits soon. He felt bad about
leaving Pearsall in the lurch – the man knew a good crime story – but with
three pensions (the triple dip) and a teacher wife nearing retirement (another
dip at the entitlement trough), not to mention Social Security (a quintuple
dip?) warmer climes beckoned. In fact, he was reading a brochure about the new
Gary Player golf community in the Smoky Mountains when his police scanner
crackled. Then three squad cars, sirens blazing, shot past.

Five minutes later, Harvey pulled
up to an obvious crime scene, bracketed with police cars, ambulances and
anxious neighbors. He felt sick. It had nothing to do with the sinkers he’d
downed. He knew the house.

A grim-faced cop lifted the yellow
tape for him.

“It sucks, Ev. Big time. I’m
sorry.”

Harvey heard his name being
called. He looked up to the front door, where District Attorney Daniel O’Connor
was waving him up. Harvey bent under the tape and headed up the walk with a
growing sense of foreboding. What was the D.A. doing here? O’Connor was pale as
a ghost. This was bad.            

***

Robert Pearsall was tired. The
Richmond
Register
was a “p.m.” paper. It hit the newsstands just before noon and was
on stoops or in doorways all across the borough by the time most people got
home from work in “the city,” as Staten Islanders universally referred to
Manhattan. That meant his day usually started before dawn.

The newsroom was quiet, a sea of
empty cubicles. More than half the editorial staff had been let go over the
previous three years, as the Internet decimated the paper’s traditional
advertising base. Circulation, which had peaked at 70,000, was now around
40,000, and that didn’t tell the whole story. The 70,000 figure was reached when
the Island had a population of 200,000. Since most papers were then home
delivered, that meant that just about every Islander not in diapers read the
Register
.
Today the population was half a million, the majority new arrivals with no
affection for their “hometown newspaper.” There was talk of the
Register
going weekly. The paper’s new $25 million headquarters and state-of-the-art
printing plant, built with cheap money four years earlier, was already obsolete
and a financial drain. Pearsall often longed for the crowded and decrepit
newsroom he started in, with its steel-desk ambiance and bustle.

Pearsall put his feet up. His
shoes were black, and clashed with the off-the-rack brown suit he was wearing.
At least, he noted, his socks matched his maroon tie and suspenders. His
daughter, a typically clothes-conscious teen-ager, tried to get him to wear a
belt. With his thin face and balding pate, the suspenders made him look like a
banker in a 1940’s Capra movie, she said. While delighted in her movie taste,
he stood firm on the suspenders. When you have a pot belly, narrow hips and no ass,
trousers tend to slip south unless anchored around the shoulders. He hoped she wouldn’t
notice the damn shoes!

Pearsall had worked at the paper
all his professional life, starting on the night staff as a reporter writing a
blizzard of “meeting” notices churned out by Staten Island’s legions of religious,
veteran, political, social, cultural and metastasizing not-for-profit groups.
All of them got three sprightly-written paragraphs, buried inside. Pearsall and
his colleagues rarely went to any meetings; most of the stories were phoned in
by participants, usually a designated “press” person who drew the short straw.
The information was recited verbatim, and there wasn’t much room for creativity
on the part of the “reporter” taking it all down. How many ways can you say
that 35 Rotarians at the Mandalay Restaurant listened to a speech by the
Commander of the local Coast Guard base? But Pearsall did his best, even
surviving the prankster who reported that the Association of Gynecologists had
elected Dr. Seymour Vulva as its president. He was more careful after that.

 But during the same nighttime
hours when Rotarians were getting soused at local bars, other people were
occasionally getting themselves murdered, raped or trapped in fires. Those
stories weren’t phoned in. Since the paper’s “crack” police reporter at the
time, an often drunk ex-flatfoot named Padraic O’Malley, checked his ambition
at his favorite pub by 6 p.m., a night staff reporter might catch a juicy
story.

Unlike the other night reporters, Pearsall
never ignored one of these stories, and soon his editors noted that he rarely
made factual or stylistic mistakes, or needed much rewriting. He quickly moved
up the editorial ladder, avoiding, for the most part, the petty squabbles rampant
at a small-town monopoly newspaper. He was a natural for the city editor’s job,
all he ever coveted, never aspiring to the executive editor’s position, which would
have meant getting involved in office and local politics. Moreover, while he
was fairly facile with computers and appreciated what they could do in a
newsroom, he had no desire to lead the paper into the New Age and was happy
when management brought in a young technocrat from a Silicon Valley daily as
executive editor.

The “techie” was Beldon Popp, who
had never been a “line” editor, selected for the job because he’d been a
computer teacher at one time. But he turned out to be a decent manager and
deserved credit for revamping the
Register’s
award-winning computer
system and saving what circulation was left. More importantly to Pearsall, Popp
rarely interfered in the day-to-day operations of the newsroom.

Robert Pearsall was part of a
dying breed – the crusading newspaperman. Not that he’d fallen off a turnip
truck. He knew a certain amount of corruption was inevitable in a small,
insular community where the “old boy” network was ingrained. Indeed, he was
prepared to look the other way when favors and accommodations between and among
local elected officials and judges made life easier for Staten Islanders who
were otherwise at the mercy of the larger city’s unfeeling bureaucracy.
Islanders looked after their own – and Pearsall was first and foremost an
Islander.

But Pearsall always had his eye
out for real corruption and hypocrisy, which, while never in short supply on
Staten Island, had become bolder as the
Register’s
influence waned. Older
residents who remembered a less-crowded and less-corrupt small-town Staten
Island were fleeing to New Jersey and the Sun Belt, and the borough’s
burgeoning immigrant population could care less about local news coverage. The
politicians and crooks were having a field day, safe in the knowledge that the
“Manhattan media” typically ignored Staten Island unless a plane crashed on it.

Pearsall knew his days were
numbered. He had come close to putting in his papers two years earlier, after
the tragic, though not unexpected, death of his wife. Veronica Pearsall lost a
two-year battle with breast cancer and he was left with a teen-age daughter to
raise.

Then came the nursing home
scandal. Most of the nursing home and assisted living facilities in the borough
were locally owned and operated and, for the most part, did a fairly good job.
But one group of homes, run by an Arkansas-based corporation called Paradise on
Earth Inc., wasn’t living up to its name. Indeed, its mortality rate was
beginning to ring alarm bells even in the live-and-let-die world of Staten
Island political and medical circles.

Pearsall had his reporters look
into Paradise’s operations. One of them went undercover as an employee. Within
two months, he discovered gross abuse of helpless patients, including rape,
Medicare fraud, instances of euthanasia among patients without relatives and
black market sale of drugs. The hygiene in the clinics would have been a
disgrace in the Third World and on its own would have counted for the high
death rate. But patients were also being given outdated or diluted
prescriptions.

Pearsall ran a series, but
suspected that Paradise’s corruption was systemic. He dispatched two reporters
to investigate the company’s facilities in other states. Armed with the early
stories, they convinced frightened administrators in other Paradise operations
to open up. The subsequent revelations that, in addition to its other
atrocities, the company traded in body parts, soon hit the national media.
Congress stepped in. The
Register’s
series, led by thundering editorials
written by Pearsall himself, won a spate of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize
,
the first in the paper’s 109-year history. There was even a slight, and
temporary, surge in circulation.

The paper’s downward spiral soon
resumed, but Bob Pearsall wanted one more feather in his cap before retiring. He
thought he might get one if his latest suspicions panned out. He reached into a
desk drawer and pulled out a beat-up, coffee-stained Hagstrom map of Staten
Island. There were newer, flashier Chamber of Commerce maps in the drawer that
were in many ways superior, and certainly more current, but he liked the feel
of the Hagstrom and the way its streets looked. Besides, the older map had been
used so often it had a “crease” memory. It took him only seconds to refold it.
When he tried to close the new maps it looked like he was having a seizure.
Often as not the map cover wound up on the inside.

He lay the map flat on his desk
and stared at it. He had used a red magic marker to circle two areas: the
former oil-tank farm in Bloomfield on Staten Island’s west shore and the mothballed
Naval Home Port in Stapleton on the east shore. Unlike the newer maps, the old
Hagstrom didn’t indicate the Home Port property in Stapleton, so Pearsall wrote
the name in with a ballpoint.

Someone was quietly buying up land
all the way down to the water line surrounding both tracts. The name that kept
popping up was Dr. Nathan Bimm, a millionaire former plastic surgeon turned
real estate developer.

Pearsall despised Bimm. He had
built a fabulously lucrative chain of “nip-and-tuck” clinics on Staten Island
but sold his practice suddenly just before a Federal Medicare Fraud task force
discovered tens of millions of dollars in overbilling. Pearsall suspected, but
could never prove, that Bimm had a silent partner in the clinics – the Lacuna
crime family – which warned him of the impending investigation. In any event,
Bimm escaped prosecution and through political contributions and sweetheart
real estate deals was now considered to be the right-hand man of Borough
President Mario Blovardi – or vice versa, Pearsall thought cynically.

In most cases it was obvious Bimm was
merely arranging the recent land purchases for a third party. But who? The
Lacunas? What could they get out of it? Both tracts, which each ran to several
hundred acres, were presumably spoken for. In Bloomfield, NASCAR had purchased
the oil-farm property and was planning a race track and stadium, a project
Pearsall opposed but suspected would never get off the drawing boards anyway.
And the Home Port land had recently been sold by the city to a Hong Kong-based firm
for development as a mixed-use community of residential high-rises and
shopping.

But the editor’s distrust of Bimm,
who he blamed for much of the recent construction blight on Staten Island,
prompted him to assign his two best reporters to dig deeper. So far they had
drawn a blank on both the who and the why. It was early innings, he knew, and
they were hampered by the fact they really didn’t know what to look for and had
been reduced to grasping at straws.

The latest straw being a historical
coincidence about the two properties that one of the reporters, Chris Tighe,
dug up on the Internet. Pearsall had actually been snippy with the kid on the
phone for wasting time on something that had no relevance.

“It’s a nice human interest
story,” the reporter argued.

“Bimm isn’t human,” Pearsall
retorted. “Just find out what he’s up to.”

After he hung up he berated
himself for his unforgivable lack of objectivity. The damn Pulitzer had obviously
gone to his head. But the kid’s story idea was dumb. Who cared about a project
so asinine that it was abandoned in the 1920’s?