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Authors: Steve Cavanagh
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table.
He continued. “The only man who can order a hit in my organization is me. I control all kills. This way I do not start wars with other gangs, and I make sure my men do not kill each other. To do this, I have one man who is my torpedo.” He pronounced it tor-pedd-o . “It is old Soviet name for hit man. This man comes to me and me alone. In front of him, I tear an old, one-ruble bill in half. I give him one half of the bill. In this way, he becomes torpedo. When I need a man killed, I write down that man’s name on my half of the bill and it is sent to torpedo. He will check if his half of the bill matches the one he has been sent. If they are a match, he knows the order is real and that it comes directly from me. In this way, the old way, my men have trust from me and I have total loyalty from them.”
“And this Witness X, Little Benny, he was your torpedo, right? So why the hell did he keep the note?” I said.
“In Soviet Union we called a one-ruble bill tselkovy , meaning the whole one . It means that the torpedo has my whole heart in trust and loyalty forever. The torpedo is supposed to burn the bill after the job. Most do not. They keep their rubles. Old ruble bills can be hard to find these days. They are like a badge of honor. Some even have the one-ruble bill tattooed on their backs. I do not allow tattoos. We wear our pride in our eyes, not on our skin.”
I couldn’t react in case the jury saw me, but I wanted to put my hands over my head and scream. The courtroom no longer felt huge. It felt small and public and dangerous. I wondered where Amy was being held. Was she, too, feeling enclosed, trapped, and afraid? If I let myself wonder what was happening to her, I would go crazy.
Instead I started thinking. “Pass me the case files,” I said.
Volchek looked into the suitcase. He seemed to be looking for a particular file. He found one and handed it over. It said DOCUMENT EXAMINERS on the spine of the folder. I began flicking through it. Volchek had gone to nearly every major criminal defense firm in the state and gotten reports from several forensic document examiners. The index to this file said there were eleven such expert reports. Volchek must have been desperate. I flicked through to the concluding summary of each one of the reports. They all said the same thing—in their opinion, Volchek wrote that name on the ruble bill.
Miriam continued her opening statement.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will also hear from the victim’s family. You will hear from Tony Geraldo, the victim’s cousin. He’ll tell you about his cousin’s dispute with the defendant. He’ll tell you about the threats that the defendant made to Mario Geraldo’s life. He’ll tell you he feared the defendant would kill his cousin or arrange for his murder.”
That name, Tony Geraldo, seemed to stir some memory for me, but I was so wired that I couldn’t trace the thought. Miriam stepped into a nice rhythm.
“You’ll hear from the police officer who arrested and interviewed the defendant. You’ll hear this officer describe his investigation…”
My interest trailed off. I’d found the witness list in the file of papers. In all, we would hear from five witnesses. A small, tight, well-prepared group. Miriam avoided the usual machine-gun approach to prosecution, which relied on the hit-and-miss tactics of just keeping going with witness after witness after witness and something somewhere is bound to stick. She knew better than that. The forensic document examiner, Dr. Irving Goldstein, was the first witness. A good strategy, I thought. Get the boring bit out of the way and put a smoking gun in the hand of the defendant on day one. But I saw this as my biggest chance. Volchek must have spent a fortune getting all those reports and paying all those lawyers only to get back the same result every time— It’s your handwriting . As far as he was concerned, this witness was a lost cause. He couldn’t
He continued. “The only man who can order a hit in my organization is me. I control all kills. This way I do not start wars with other gangs, and I make sure my men do not kill each other. To do this, I have one man who is my torpedo.” He pronounced it tor-pedd-o . “It is old Soviet name for hit man. This man comes to me and me alone. In front of him, I tear an old, one-ruble bill in half. I give him one half of the bill. In this way, he becomes torpedo. When I need a man killed, I write down that man’s name on my half of the bill and it is sent to torpedo. He will check if his half of the bill matches the one he has been sent. If they are a match, he knows the order is real and that it comes directly from me. In this way, the old way, my men have trust from me and I have total loyalty from them.”
“And this Witness X, Little Benny, he was your torpedo, right? So why the hell did he keep the note?” I said.
“In Soviet Union we called a one-ruble bill tselkovy , meaning the whole one . It means that the torpedo has my whole heart in trust and loyalty forever. The torpedo is supposed to burn the bill after the job. Most do not. They keep their rubles. Old ruble bills can be hard to find these days. They are like a badge of honor. Some even have the one-ruble bill tattooed on their backs. I do not allow tattoos. We wear our pride in our eyes, not on our skin.”
I couldn’t react in case the jury saw me, but I wanted to put my hands over my head and scream. The courtroom no longer felt huge. It felt small and public and dangerous. I wondered where Amy was being held. Was she, too, feeling enclosed, trapped, and afraid? If I let myself wonder what was happening to her, I would go crazy.
Instead I started thinking. “Pass me the case files,” I said.
Volchek looked into the suitcase. He seemed to be looking for a particular file. He found one and handed it over. It said DOCUMENT EXAMINERS on the spine of the folder. I began flicking through it. Volchek had gone to nearly every major criminal defense firm in the state and gotten reports from several forensic document examiners. The index to this file said there were eleven such expert reports. Volchek must have been desperate. I flicked through to the concluding summary of each one of the reports. They all said the same thing—in their opinion, Volchek wrote that name on the ruble bill.
Miriam continued her opening statement.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will also hear from the victim’s family. You will hear from Tony Geraldo, the victim’s cousin. He’ll tell you about his cousin’s dispute with the defendant. He’ll tell you about the threats that the defendant made to Mario Geraldo’s life. He’ll tell you he feared the defendant would kill his cousin or arrange for his murder.”
That name, Tony Geraldo, seemed to stir some memory for me, but I was so wired that I couldn’t trace the thought. Miriam stepped into a nice rhythm.
“You’ll hear from the police officer who arrested and interviewed the defendant. You’ll hear this officer describe his investigation…”
My interest trailed off. I’d found the witness list in the file of papers. In all, we would hear from five witnesses. A small, tight, well-prepared group. Miriam avoided the usual machine-gun approach to prosecution, which relied on the hit-and-miss tactics of just keeping going with witness after witness after witness and something somewhere is bound to stick. She knew better than that. The forensic document examiner, Dr. Irving Goldstein, was the first witness. A good strategy, I thought. Get the boring bit out of the way and put a smoking gun in the hand of the defendant on day one. But I saw this as my biggest chance. Volchek must have spent a fortune getting all those reports and paying all those lawyers only to get back the same result every time— It’s your handwriting . As far as he was concerned, this witness was a lost cause. He couldn’t
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