Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
The power players in Boston called State Senator Jason Hardwick the 'Hobo Politician', and not because he rode the Amtrak from Springfield to Boston each day. Senator Hardwick was famous among the lobbyists that prowled the state house cloakrooms as a man who always had his hand out. There is a certain acceptable behavior mode among thieves, sometimes confused with honor, and in Hardwick's case, this meant truth in advertising; he didn't pretend to be anything other than he was.
Most politicians tried to balance their avaricious behavior with the occasional moral stand, or at least some party loyalty. Senator Hardwick dismissed them scornfully with his famous sarcasm. "I'm here to make money, no bullshit. If I wanted to help people, I'd be in Washington." Reform politicians often found his honesty more palatable then that of their half-ethical colleagues. At least you could always check with his campaign treasurer and find out which way he was going to vote.
The senator was very popular at home because he brought his Springfield district more then its fair share of pork. Quite a feat for a senator from the neglected western section of the state. Part of his success was due to the seniority which got him strategic positions on powerful committees, but the deciding factor was the hard work and long hours of behind the scenes maneuvering. Nobody had ever accused this hobo of being lazy.
The voters in his district appreciated how hard he worked to get them the new commonwealth data processing center and the regional medical center, just to name a few. Hardwick had a single reason for working so hard. The more dollars the state spent in his district, the more graft he could extort. It was a sort of symbiotic relationship, although the identity of the host organism wasn't always clear.
There were two folders waiting on the desk in the senator's office when he came up from the train station Thursday evening. One, labeled "Mag Lev" had been requested by him, and prepared by his primary aide, Susan White. The other folder was labeled "Wilkins Valve". He looked at it in surprise. He was familiar with Wilkins, of course. They had still been a major employer in the district when he entered the senate thirty-two years before. However, they employed less staff then most restaurants for the past decade, and he didn't remember the last time the name had even come up. First things first, he thought, and pick up the "Mag Lev" folder.
"The principle of magnetically levitated trains (MLT's) was originally demonstrated at M.I.T. in the early sixties," he read aloud, a habit formed by a lifetime of public speaking. "High powered magnetic fields maintain the, blah, blah, blah," he cut himself off, skimming down the page looking for a dollar figure. Halfway down the summary page, it jumped out and hit him in the face like a glass of ice water. $5,000,000,000. Five Billion Dollars. He backed up a few sentences. "One popular route envisions an MLT running along side the Massachusetts Turnpike, making use of the current right of way. Speeds of up to three hundred miles an hour would be achievable in the long straight stretches in the western part of the state. The current estimate for a Boston to Albany link is $5,000,000,000."
The tragedy of Hardwick's career was the limited amount of graft he'd been able to take in from the Big Dig, which was strictly a Boston project. Eleven billion dollars, and he'd barely gotten his toes wet by voting against outside auditors every time it came up, the sole senator from western Massachusetts to do so. A generation of cheap politicians had put their kids through Harvard on the back of Big Dig corruption, draining resources from other state projects. Boston had a new tunnel, everybody else had potholes.
He said the figure again with reverence, drawing out the l's for several seconds. "Five Billion Dollars." What cap to his career a little piece of that action might make. He skimmed on, looking for the next dollar figure. "Two hundred thousand dollars with matching federal funds immediately available for feasibility studies. Ten percent Small Woman Owned Business (SWOMBA) set-aside, blah, blah, blah. Phase II engineering studies covering all aspects of the project are estimated to cost between five and ten million dollars, and could be completed by the end of FY '02." Damn, two more years till the real money could start flowing. Well, maybe he could cash in by threatening to be a dam. He made a note to have Susan give him a verbal summary of the rest, and turned to the Wilkins folder.
"Jason," the yellow stick-on read, "This guy called out of the blue today with an offer that could make your business incubator idea a reality, Susan." He opened the folder, which contained a single paragraph summary clipped to a thick sheaf of fax paper. His trained eyes slid vertically down the paragraph and he sighed in disgust. Not a dollar sign to be seen, he'd have to read it straight through.
"A Mr. Kevin Weaver who represented himself as the corporate attorney for Wilkins Valve called from Georgia today. He said that the Wilkins' board of directors had decided that it would be necessary to demolish all of their buildings on the site in Springfield in order to lower the tax burden, pending eventual sale of the property. Mr. Weaver suggested that given the ongoing slump in commercial real estate values, it was in no way certain that Wilkins would ever recover any further moneys invested in the site. Therefore, they are interested in selling the intact site, complete with buildings, remaining furnishings etcetera, to the city, state, or any independent authority which could use it for whatever they see fit. To fulfill the sundry legal niceties, they are offering it at a sale price of one dollar."
There it was, no wonder he missed it. His eye had learned to filter out any figure under a thousand. Hmm, he thought. The mayor probably is over there right now, sizing it up for a new high school or a casino. He began flipping through the fax paper as he tried to recall the complex in his mind's eye. Big. Big and dirty, was the impression he retrieved from his memory. The fax sheets sported shrunken drawings of property lines and descriptions of buildings that amounted to a laundry list of square footage's. The last faxed page was an authorization letter from Wilkins, signed by Weaver, giving the bearer the right to inspect the premises. He left the Mag Lev folder on his desk, scooped the Wilkins folder into his briefcase. The office clock showed 9:42 P.M. He turned out the light, locked the door, and headed home.
Four miles across town at Wilkins Valve, a semi-trailer pulled up to a sliding chain link gate. The Ant rolled the gate back, standing in one place and pulling with vigorous hand over hand motions that would have done a lobsterman proud. The semi pulled into the yard, followed by a dark blue Lincoln, driven by Mark O'Flahthery, president of PDC. Anthony rolled the gate shut, but faked the chain, not padlocking it. The semi and the Lincoln followed his bobbing flashlight past twenty-three building, and into the dipping yard. Less then two minutes after turning onto Wilkins Road, the truck was quietly idling, hidden from view.
O'Flahthery moved with the confidence of a man used to finding himself on hostile ground after dark. Motioning with their flashlights on either side of the trailer, Anthony and his new employer got the semi backed up to the crumbling cement dock of Fourteen building. The driver chocked front wheel with an aluminum wedge roped to the cab and went around to the back of the truck. He slid up the overhead door, and pulled a steel sill plate from the interior of the trailer to bridge the slight height difference of the dock and trailer floor. The Ant raised the overhead door directly opposite.
The Peace Dividend Corporation was the brainchild of O'Flahthery's partner, Abu Singh, who had been a backroom computer whiz with the CIA. O'Flahthery, a name he had assumed for the purpose of incorporating PDC , had been a field agent in Europe during the Cold War, who had gradually been shifted into an administrative jobs before going into early retirement with the first Bush Administration. Two messy divorces had taken a toll on his personal finances, and his golden handshake from the agency was just sufficient to keep him out of bankruptcy court. The pension disbursements wouldn't kick in until he became sixty-two, four years away.
Abu Singh, at thirty-six, was a younger man then O'Flahthery, but the two had become close during their mutual service at Langley. They weren't friends, exactly, but they recognized in each other the complementary skills needed to accrue a pile of money, and the lack of morals that would allow them to do it quickest fashion possible. It had taken them almost three years of planning to put their scheme into motion, and they expected it would make them millionaires in less then a year. Their estimate had been conservative.
With O'Flahthery as the front man, they had gone into the hazardous waste disposal business. They stayed away from radioactive materials, which are carefully watched the regulatory agencies, and subject to the scrutiny of environmental groups as well. They also avoided medical waste, which was controlled by the mob, a high profit extension to the Family owned hauling firms. Their chosen areas of operation were with industrial chemicals, used solvents and lubricants. PDC dealt mainly with small, privately owned businesses, taking the low grade stuff that could often be moved without an extensive paper trail.
The paper trail was the domain of Abu and his magical personal computer. Invoices, bills of lading, receipts from authorized storage facilities or certifications of destruction, everything was faked or forged, with the exception of the checks they accepted for their low priced services. They could afford the low prices, since they never actually disposed of the materials. Nor did they dump them illegally, the fear of premature publicity far greater then the risk involved in the action. What they did was stored the stuff illegally in little leased spaces, all over the state. The question wasn't if they'd get caught, simply when. In the meantime, the dollars piled up in the overseas bank accounts.
O'Flahthery considered himself an expert on human nature, which he claimed gave him his powers of persuasion. His customers would continue to accept PDC's legitimacy as long as his prices and the visibility remained low.
If a couple of barrels of hydrocarbons had turned up in a local swamp, a customer's conscience might break through his self-deception, and cause him to call the authorities. O'Flahthery was in no hurry to kill the golden goose, but when the day came, he was prepared with two safe passports, secretly kept active from his cold warrior days.
Another big profit item was obsolete electrical power equipment. Transformers and switches that were built before W.W.II often utilized PCB's and other carcinogenic fluids for electrical insulation. When these units were taken off-line due to a service change, or actual failure, their disposal costs were a time bomb for the current owners. Loaded in the semi were six large Westinghouse transformers from a old manufacturing building in downtown Worchester that was being renovated for office space.
At seven thousand dollars apiece, PDC had underbid their nearest competitor by nineteen hundred dollars a unit. Cheap enough to get the work, not so cheap that the other disposal contractors would get overly suspicious. Forty-two thousand dollars in exchange for an impressively full clipboard of forms in quintuplet. Total cash outlay for PDC was one-thousand dollars rental on a truck and large fork lift, and five hundred dollars for Anthony Bovine.
Fourteen building was a small, square structure, little more than a corrugated iron shed on a thick concrete slab. The interior consisted of a large open space, about a ninety feet on end. During its operational lifetime, it had served as a parts and maintenance depot for the large electric motors drove the hoists and cranes. All that remained in the building were two sets of symmetrically placed bolts protruding from the floor that had once anchored a heavy winding machine and a high speed testing rig. There was no live power to the building, nor were there any Detex keys inside. There was no reason to believe anyone would set foot in the place in the foreseeable future. The Ant was counting on that.
The driver had the transformers unloaded and standing in a neat line against the back wall in less then a half hour. Anthony was rolling the gate closed behind the two vehicle convoy before he realized he hadn't exchange a single sentence with the truck driver. No matter, he thought, patting the envelope O'Flahthery had handed him. He was in business.
The Ant returned to the main post in the vestibule by way of three long connecting buildings on Wilkins Road. There was some cold coffee standing in the pot, so he poured himself a half a mug and placed it in the small microwave. Five hundred bucks, he thought, listening to the soothing hum of the oven's fan. With the two grand he'd made selling all of the chainfalls, he had enough to buy his brother's T-Bird. The bell dinged, and he took the reheated coffee from the nuker. "Life is good," he proclaimed out loud.
The coffee leapt out of his hand and onto his shirt as a police cruiser with blue light flashing screeched to a halt two yards from the door. Anthony stood paralyzed, unable to react as the steaming hot coffee soaked into his shirt. Betrayal! The certainty of the fact seared his brain. O'Flahthery set him up. But why? Both policemen were out of the cruiser, the driver coming around the hood at a run. There was an explosive rap on the window frame, and Anthony lurched into motion towards the door. I'll narc, he decided, and felt himself suddenly calm. I'll see that bastard do time.
He unlocked the door, and two Springfield police officers pushed past him into the building, one still wielding the nightstick he'd used so effectively to break Anthony's trance. Anthony began his statement without prompting, eager to show his cooperation. He held up the envelope and said, "This envelope was given to ..."
"Where the fucking john," the cop with the nightstick interrupted, "I've never been here before. Quick! Bathroom!" he shouted at the uncomprehending guard, who finally pointed to the right.
The cop sheathed his stick, took off rapidly with a little hop step off, trying to keep his knees pressed together. "Hope he didn't startle you." said the other officer apologetically, then he swallowed and his face visibly paled. "Oh, damn. I think better go too. The cook at the Mystery Wok must have caught a sick cat."
Anthony was suddenly alone for the second time that evening, and he stared at the envelope in his trembling hand. Then he let out a yell, dropped it, and ripped off his uniform shirt. He pulled the T-shirt out from his body, holding the steaming wet cloth away from his skin. "Shit!" he shouted, staring at the large red blotch on his stomach, "Shit, shit, shit."