The Last Collection (6 page)

To the people who knew about Solly the Hawk, he was simply a tough, ruthless man who didn't take no for an answer; but to Big Moishie who really knew him, he was anything but that. Tough? Yes. Physically there was no one tougher. Even as a boy on City Hall Street there was no one who could beat him. Ruthless? Yes, but only if he was up against a ruthless person. The real truth about Solly and the key to his success as a collector was that he was a master psychologist. The thought had occurred to Big Moishie more than once that had Solly come from a different background, he could have—would have, without a doubt—become a famous man.

The Hawk had
saichel
—insight, judgement and common sense. Along with this he had imagination and courage.

And he applied these qualities when it came time to go out in the streets and collect.

In the early days when they were first getting the business off the ground and when their clients were of questionable character, the Hawk had to rely more on his toughness and his courage than on his intellect. As the business grew, however, they were able to become more selective in their choice of clients to a point where they were dealing in most cases with businessmen, bookies and people of some means. They were people who, for one reason or another, had gotten over-extended and needed cash in a hurry.

There were very few problems and, where difficulties did arise, they were resolved in most cases by Solly going and, as he put it, ‘having a liddle talk wid dem.' A little talk by the Hawk usually cleared things up in a hurry.

The thing that Big Moishie could never quite understand was why the Hawk enjoyed collecting so much. There were times when he felt that Solly was actually hoping he would have to go out and have a little talk with someone. Big Moishie liked nothing better than to sit in his office and not move a muscle. People would come, people would go. Deals would be made. Big Moishie would sit. They came to him. There was no reason for him to move. If they didn't come to him, there was always the telephone. Why should he have to get up and run around?

Solly, on the other hand, was always on pins and needles. He couldn't stand the office. He had to be on the move. He was always ready to pay someone a little visit; always prepared at the drop of a hat to go have a little talk with someone who was in arrears on a payment.

As their own venture became more successful, Solly had more and more time on his hands. With his partner's approval, he began to take on free-lance jobs. At the same time, he began concentrating more on various ways to beat the system, which to him was basically corrupt, full of loopholes and run mostly by wolves with voracious appetites. Next to collecting he most enjoyed thinking up gaffs, and over the years he and Moishie had come up with some ingenious schemes for ripping off the system or the players in it. There was a point where they had so many good ideas that they opened a consulting service to sell them for a sizeable fee, but soon stopped when they saw their ideas were often wasted by incompetents.

Sometimes one of them would come up with a plan that could keep them busy for weeks or even months. The record gaff was one such deal.

Solly had discovered from a friend who owned a music store that a major record company had a very interesting sales incentive policy. In order to encourage the retailers to carry their label, they offered a plan whereby at the end of the year the retailers could return any unsold records and receive a rebate of $3.00 per disc. The company would then sell these returned records to discount stores or jobbers for $1.00 apiece.

The Hawk quickly made contact with half a dozen acquaintances in the retail record business to set things up. Then, acting as a jobber, he began buying huge lots of records at $1.00 apiece from the manufacturer. He brought them to those stores with whom he had made arrangements. The store owners then returned them to the manufacturer for $3.00. For his trouble, the store owner kept a dollar; Solly and Big Moishie took two.

It took almost three months before the record company wised up and that was due only to the greed of one of the retailers who tried to go into this on his own and inadvertently tipped the manufacturer.

Before it all came to an end, however, Solly and Big Moishie had made something in the vicinity of $28,000.00. This particular scheme was one of their all-time favourites in terms of the amount of satisfaction it had given them. It was a scheme which had taken advantage of a loophole in the system. They had found the loophole and exploited it. And it was all legal.

It was clean. True, someone had to lose somewhere along the line. Better it be a gigantic record company with a hundred subsidiaries worth a half-billion dollars than some poor shmuck who would get sucked into a deal through his own greed and lose his pants.

Big Moshie had never had the slightest compunction about pulling off that kind of deal where the big machers were ripped off. In fact, he'd never had any reservations about conning anyone who was stupid and greedy enough, nor had Solly; that is, until now.

Big Moishie had noticed him changing over the last year. It had come slowly. It was nothing he could put his finger on but there had been a change. He couldn't define it, and if someone were to have asked him to explain himself, he would have been at a loss for words. Quieter, more subdued? Yes and no. He still talked as much as ever; was still forever telling stories. But . . . He couldn't put his finger on it.

If not for the telephone gaff, Big Moishie probably wouldn't have given it much thought. It was Solly's indecision about concluding the telephone gaff which convinced him that the Hawk had changed.

Two years before, they had bought a large tract of land some seventy miles north of Montreal, after it had been brought to their attention by a very knowledgeable individual that the provincial government was seriously considering that particular site for a new university which would eventually accommodate forty to fifty thousand students and would be spread over as much as five hundred acres.

They moved fast to buy up as much of the area as possible. Most of the land was barren and off the beaten track and was worth at most about $200.00 an acre. However, because the land was owned by many individuals, it took them a while to put it all together in a block and, as they went from one prospective seller to another, the word got around that someone was buying up land and the price rose so that, by the time they had made their final purchase, their cost averaged out to around $250.00 an acre. But they weren't unhappy, knowing that in the not-too-distant future they would easily turn the land over for at least three or four times what they had paid for it. A cousin of Claude Lemay's acted as front man to buy the land.

There was an old farmhouse on the site and Lemay's cousin moved in there rent-free and did a bit of truck farming. A back-to-back deed locked away in the safe in Solly and Big Moishie's office showed that Lemay's cousin had sold the land to them and that they were in fact the real owners.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out as they had expected. After a year had passed, the government announced that they had been planning a great university in the Laurentians but that this project was now postponed indefinitely. The Hawk and Big Moishie decided to unload their land. They weren't interested in holding onto it now, especially when they could be putting their money into something with a fast return. The problem was that when they put the land up for sale, they not only couldn't get their price but they couldn't even make back their original investment.

This, coupled with the fact that they had originally been hoping to make a substantial profit, disturbed them. It bothered them so much that, after receiving a few ridiculously low offers for the land, they decided to take Draconian measures to resolve their situation. They discussed it as they did all of their ventures, trying to come up with an idea, an approach, a solution.

Then Solly decided to take a week off and go down to the Concord in the Catskills. It was there that the Hawk found what was to be the answer to their land problem in the person of Marvin Saltpeter.

Marvin Saltpeter was a man looking to make a fast buck. He had money. Black-market money that he had made from his motel just outside of New York City. He was looking to get into something, preferably in land and preferably in Canada. He heard there were some big deals to be made in Canada. Americans were buying up land like crazy in Quebec. Solly let him talk. Occasionally he would drop a word here and there about land dealings. Saltpeter kept talking.

Solly continued to drop the odd hint here and there, suggesting that he was more than knowledgeable about the real estate situation in Quebec; that he had access to sources which, if properly used, could make a man wealthy overnight. Saltpeter kept talking. Yes, he heard you could shmear in Quebec. That was a big thing in Quebec. Just like in South America. A little greasing in the right place and you could be a made man. Saltpeter's eyes were bulging as he began to question Solly about everything. “He looked like he was going to shit in his pants,” was the way Solly had described Saltpeter's excitement to Big Moishie.

The Hawk hadn't really planned to con Saltpeter, but the more Saltpeter talked, the more his greed became apparent. He seemed like a gigantic leech ready to suck up anything and everything that he could latch onto. Who did Solly know? Who could be reached? How? He'd show Solly his appreciation. He'd look after him. He loved land deals. He wanted a land deal. He needed a land deal. He had lots of money. Money was no object. Who did he have to talk to? Who did he have to shmear? When Solly finally made the decision to take Marvin Saltpeter, he felt a warm glow spread through him.

Every man was greedy about something at one time or another, and most men, given the opportunity for unlimited gain, would take it without serious question, but the Hawk was a snob. Men could be greedy but they should at least have the class to keep it under control a little, to disguise it. He always felt that those who could not were potentially capable of the most evil acts and deeds.

He set Marvin Saltpeter up for the kill. “Yes,” Solly told him. He knew the head of the Quebec Roads Planning Department. With the proper introduction, he could be reached. They were now planning a major extension of the Laurentian Autoroute. Solly had already bought up several sites over which the new road would pass. He'd see what he could do for Saltpeter. He would call him if he could set things up. That was the basic groundwork.

Back home in Montreal, the Hawk and Big Moishie began to think how they would handle their fish now that they had him hooked. Finally, after many days of talking it over, they decided on a plan. The Quebec Roads Planning Department was located in the Confederation Building on Bleury Street. This government agency occupied the entire second floor of the structure. They inquired and found that there were a few small vacant offices on the third floor. Using a shell company, they rented one of these spaces on a month-to-month basis.

Then they brought in an ex-Bell Telephone technician by the name of John Sanky. Sanky's first job was to locate the main telephone conduit for the building. Once done, he found the cable leading to the main switchboard of the Roads Planning Department. He cut into this line and linked it up to a master console in the office on the third floor. This meant that any call destined for the offices of the Roads Planning Department would ring first on the master console in the office on the third floor.

The idea then was that Solly would call Marvin Saltpeter in New York and tell him that he had set up a deal whereby Saltpeter would get certain inside information for a fee. Solly would say that he wanted to stay out of it and that Saltpeter could do the deal himself; that he had already spoken with the Chief of the Roads Planning Department who was expecting a telephone call from Saltpeter. Saltpeter would come up to Montreal. The clincher would be the telephone call. If Saltpeter had any doubts, he would look up the address and telephone number of the Roads Planning Department. He would see that they checked with the address and phone number given to him by the Hawk. Solly and Big Moishie were certain that this simple fact would erase any doubts in Saltpeter's mind.

He would call the number and ask for Mr. Guy Gervais, the head of the Department, identifying himself as Mr. Marvin Saltzman from New York. Waiting in the office on the third floor would be a woman usually used by Claude Lemay as part of his call-back system in his bookie operation. On the day when Marvin Saltpeter was to phone the offices of the Roads Planning Department, she would take all incoming calls. She would then pass all those calls, except Marvin Saltpeter's, through to the main switchboard downstairs where the receptionist would deal with them in her normal manner.

When Saltpeter called, Lemay's woman would pass it off to a second phone next to her which would be answered by another female employee of Lemay's. After all, someone in Guy Gervais' position had to have his own private secretary. It wouldn't appear good if the call went directly to Lemay-Gervais. During the brief time that the receptionist and the secretary were on the phone with Saltpeter, a tape recorder would be playing, giving off background noises of a large bustling office—typewriters clacking, people, voices, etc.

After the secretary answered the second phone, she would pass the call to a third phone, simultaneously shutting off the tape so that Saltpeter would get the effect of sudden quiet such as one would unconsciously expect in the office of a high government official.

To carry the effect all the way through, Lemay would answer in French and carry on for a bit in that language even after Saltpeter had identified himself. After the preliminary introductions, Lemay would arrange a meeting at a rented house in the country. The house would be properly set up to suggest that it was the home of an important planner. One room would be set up as a work area, with drafting tables, large wall maps, graphs, aerial photographs and other relevant items.