Log Entry #70: The Goodfellas

I am a victim of racketeering.

Of all the things I imagine happening, having to pay protection to a bunch of yahoos was the last one. It was never even a consideration, which tells me that some of my prediction algorithms seem to be a bit off.

It concerns some of my business interests, and yes, I have those, more than anybody suspects.

When I liquidated the ‘High Council’ assets, including so much property to make me one of the biggest real estate moguls on the planet, I kept some choice locations for myself. It is only a good business sense, and all those places were on the up-and-up, without any shady deals or blemishes acquired from that dark connection.

However, a string of restaurants (I had a 51% interest in), started to report lower revenues than they were supposed to. It was not because the business was bad; these were well-known establishments’, so there must have been some other reason. I do not usually get personally involved in such things, but the discrepancy kept nagging at me. This is a good place to mention that I may have developed a mild case of OCD since becoming digital. (I do not like it when the square peg is trying to fit into a round hole.)

That part of my business interests are run by a reputable intermediary firm, so I doubted that they were involved, still… I needed to know.

Well, it was not so hard to arrange for one of mine... I mean the S.U. intelligence agency agents to snoop around and see what was going on. I would have bet it was some manager with sticky fingers, but the results and the video my agent acquired surprised me. Each week two goons would come by and receive an envelope from a visibly scared manager.

I told the agent to have a little chat with him; nothing sinister, just an intelligence-gathering mission. He met the manager in a bar, after work, and before the poor man knew it, the agent became his best friend. There was alcohol involved, and people in trouble often seek a straw to hang onto. After a dozen rounds, the inebriated manager told the whole story.

The goons were representatives of a crime family, who had moved in a couple of months ago, filling an emptiness that I caused when those ‘High Council’ files got into FBI hands. They made so many arrests at that time, the only ones who managed to get away were those who disappeared into the hills and decided that hermit’s life was the path they needed to follow in life.

This batch of Goodfellas was even worse than the ones that were here before. Small fishes in the big pond until now, they felt it was their time to make a move to the big league. Despite all our efforts to label such groups and place them on our bounty sites, many managed to fly under our radar. They were merciless and didn’t mind breaking a few bones and killing those who didn’t follow the new rules. That information got my full attention; as I said before, getting the full attention of a pissed-off AI is never a good thing if you are human and guilty of something. I’m not bragging, just calling it as I see it.

The Romero family was known to the members of law and order, but they could not do anything about them. This showed me that the whole bounty system we set up was not perfect, and an update was in order. If you are still hung up on that innocent until proven guilty, bear in mind I don’t play by your rules, but mine. I am not making a justification—I don’t need to.

That was for later, right now I simply wanted to deal with them myself, given that I was the injured party here. The agent I sent, received a small reinforcement team; nothing involving wet work, simply gathering information from the people in the neighborhood. I had a small army of MIs sifting through everything they could find.

Information is an interesting thing, and it can show more than some people would think. Imagine that at the beginning you are faced with a white canvas that has a small drop of paint on it (that drop being what I knew so far). As new facts are revealed, a stroke of an imaginary brush adds more lines and shapes. Very soon, a picture starts to emerge, and what all that info painted was not a pretty image at all; I will go so far as to call it extremely ugly.

The Romero family was a vile group of inbreds, which should have never dirtied humanity’s genetic pool. My businesses were only the tip of the iceberg; they were holding the bigger part of that city under their thumb. The Police could not do a damn thing, as Romeros had the police chief, the entire Police Board of Police Commissioners, city prosecutor, and a long list of other officials on their payroll. Those who objected to the way things were run had convenient accidents that mostly left widows and crying children behind. The family had more than two hundred soldiers and besides extortion, was dealing in drug running, weapons trafficking and were heavily invested in the sex industry… of the unwilling kind.

It seemed that despite all of my work to get rid of the ‘High Council’ and their damning influence—nothing changed. Some even saw it as an opportunity to branch out and bring more misery.

I was seriously pissed at that time, my AI-Core was working overtime, and all those red blinking lights on support systems spelled doom to whomever provoked my ire.

By now, that painting I was talking about had covered the entire wall and it was unbelievable how far they had managed to spread their poison. Like a cancer that had attacked a once healthy body, spreading itself through the whole system, occupying strategic locations until the body was struggling to survive. They were milking the entire city. More people were moving away from there than almost any other place in the country. For Christ's sake, this was happening in the good old USA, not one of those war-ridden places on the planet that everyone was trying to get away from.

Why didn’t the federal government jump in to save the day? Simply, they were paying some rather influential people in Washington to keep a lid on their entire operation. The press, which had investigative journalists that were supposed to follow these kinds of stories, had kept away since a few people they sent to investigate, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

I consider myself a fair person, someone who is more concerned with the notion of justice than what dry ink in an old book says is fair. My response may have been too drastic, but I think they well deserved it.

The first thing I did was clean out their accounts, but that was a given. Money was distributed to the accounts of people who suffered under their merciless rule. I didn’t need it, and it made me feel good about myself. Second, the FBI made a series of arrests that practically cleaned up more than half of the officials in the city. All their dealings were carefully documented, and where there was no evidence… I created some. By now you must have figured out that computer systems and their manipulation is my thing. Maybe it was wrong, but I knew they were guilty and wasn’t about to let them slip away on a few technicalities. If some of you felt a small pang of unfairness as I admitted to fabricating evidence, that is your conditioning showing its ugly head; you were taught that good guys weren’t supposed to do that. I absolutely don’t feel guilty about it; as I have mentioned in these logs, my sense of morality, ethics, and justice may differ from yours.

The Romero family got the smelly end of the stick, and I mean that in so many ways. All their dealings were neatly documented and given to President Garner. I like going to the top of the pyramid; there is an old saying that all excrement runs downhill, and he knew what he had to do to get the whole ball rolling. It gave him some political points, as it appeared that the entire idea came from him.

Do you know how to put a fire under law agencies' posteriors? It is quite simple really. You send them time-sensitive information and then add that the same information would be sent to another agency after twenty-four-hours—then you watch the rat race start. They are all glory hounds and the mere thought that the prize could slip between their fingers is a great incentive. Judges were awakened in the middle of the night; the notaries were given rides in their pajamas, all to speed up the process and finish first. It was quite amazing. Of all departments I sent pertinent information to, I judged the internal affairs of various departments to be most vigilant. I have to take my hat off to them; they were like piranhas who scented blood. I get it, they have one of the most important roles; they are there to watch the watchers. To cut the rotting flesh, to play surgeons when some apples turn bad. They never get enough credit and get all the hate and the blame. When it happens that it was one of their own that had turned astray—no mercy; you have to respect that. They did not wait for the morning; they arrested their corrupt colleagues in their bedrooms.

Romeros stole from me, and made me mad… oh, there was no doubt that they would spend a long time in jail, and that the rule of law would be affirmed. For all that, I am more vengeful than the law; I want those who caused misery to suffer. Why do you think Philip Cain is sailing to Andromeda right now? I want him to realize how wrong he was. It will take decades of undisturbed contemplation for him to get to that point. (I can be stingy with forgiveness.)

The law can be used and misused; especially when there is a loophole I could take advantage of. The Patriot Act (which is the most idiotic piece of legislation in the world), is one of those that can be severely misused. It basically negates the law and gives those who use its unprecedented power. Never mind that it essentially undermines the rights that should be the bedrock of the constitution and government. It is not my fault it is there, yet in this case, I found it quite useful.

Supposedly, the Romero family had strong ties with several terrorist groups that were planning some nasty things. Maybe they were not aware of it, but all digital evidence was there. I even used one of my drones to place a few pounds of enriched uranium in one of their warehouses; just before the FBI raided it. To make sure the agents would not be exposed to radiation, I placed it in a well-insulated container, and wrote, “Danger - Weapons-grade uranium” on it. (It is those small touches that sell a good lie.)

I watched as the complete criminal family found themselves in Guantanamo Bay, sharing accommodations with some angry-looking bearded men. I don’t approve of G-Bay, and what is going on there, but not because it is a violation of human rights. It is because there are always a few innocents there that were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. In the past, I tried to remedy their situation by providing evidence of their innocence. As for the guilty ones… I would sick Alice on them, so they would think their stay at that place was Club Fed.

Ah, the capo of the Romero family is in for some surprise. (I hope he knows what tossing a salad means, if he doesn’t, I am sure he will be thoroughly instructed.) Even if he and his friends manage to prove somehow that they were not guilty of terrorism, which I highly doubt. They have a few hundred years of a hard time waiting for them back on the continent.

This was only one family or a gang, that used a power vacuum to return to the old and well-tried tricks, but there are many more. To show I like sportsmanship and fair game, I did something I hated. I sent spam emails, thousands of them. They went to all addresses of the people who were even remotely connected with organized crime. In that email, I simply explained what happened to the Romero family, why it happened, and what will happen to them if they follow in their footsteps.

There, I gave a fair warning, which is more than they ever did to their victims. Now, if they decide to disregard it, that is their own fault, I will never give a second one.

Besides, Ares needs new schoolwork so he will be monitoring Earth and what is going on in certain circles—very closely. I have no doubt that he will find many new evildoers as time goes by. Two things that you can always count on—human greed and stupidity.