Designated Target - Chapter 5

Unfortunately for Taylor, saying they needed to look into deaths surrounding the Amato family was followed by actually doing the work of digging through police files, obituaries, and newspaper articles, all of which he hated doing. This was one of those moments he missed having Whitaker by his side. Her brain was wired for looking at big sets of data like this and seeing the patterns they were looking for. Taylor could come up with wild theories all day, but finding actual proof was another story all together.

Robles was trying, but he was close to Taylor in temperament. From everything Taylor had seen, he was a good cop, but the kind that was better at dealing with people than paperwork. He could get people to break in interrogations and was good at figuring out who was lying, both valuable skills for a cop, but those skills wouldn’t accomplish the task at hand.

He was half tempted to call Whitaker and see if she could find what he was looking for, but she had her own work trying to close out her cases before the baby was born. He didn’t want to distract her, so he sucked it up and began staring at screen after screen of small print, trying to find the clues he needed.

For a while, he had no luck. The only thing most of the killings associated with the Amatos shared was how shockingly brazen they were. Report after report described associates with direct ties to the brothers just walking up and shooting someone that stood in the family’s way in broad daylight. There were currently more than a dozen associates of the family serving long prison sentences for murders the prosecution barely had to argue.

The only thing that seemed to keep the Amato brothers from going to jail was the fact that these men all pled guilty and claimed sole responsibility for the murders.

A handful of murders of associates of the Amatos had gone unsolved, but none of those seemed exceptionally exotic. Taylor could have called the various investigative authorities and asked them to pull the individual case files, but at the moment that seemed like a lot of unnecessary leg work. He wasn’t usually against legwork and actually hated it when people just made assumptions and skipped doing the work needed to confirm.

It was the murders themselves that suggested they weren’t connected. None were done in a notable way like the death of Bartolini. A shooting as the deceased left a bar with the assailant running out of town. A stabbing in a hotel room. A man shot behind his desk in his office. As murders went, they were pretty routine, and it would have been done up close and personal. It was only luck that the assailant had gotten in and out without being seen, especially at the hotel and the restaurant, both of which would have been difficult to control.

It was more likely that the people who did that would have pulled up to the hotel and sprayed it with bullets, killing everyone inside. No, the person who took this shot did it in a way that no one would ever find him. Bureau techs had backtracked the shot and triangulated where it came from. It was the only building with no external video and no cameras even pointed in that general direction. The building did not have controlled entry or exit, and the rooms where the shot had been made from were unoccupied. What’s more, the shot was made on a day when the building was mostly empty, according the other tenants.

That kind of thing required a lot of prep work, none of which was evident in the other murders that benefitted the Amatos.

Besides that, there was something else that had grabbed Taylor’s attention. There was an unusually high number of deaths by natural causes in the Amatos’ orbit. Digging into each person and how they were cross-referenced in the surveillance notes, a lot of the deaths by natural causes were well-timed and generally beneficial to the Amatos. Of course, it could just be the Amatos were lucky, but Taylor was getting that feeling that he recognized as the one he got when he was on the right scent.

He’d been certain that someone at this skill level didn’t just suddenly work for a mob family. Everything in Whitaker’s notes said that the mob didn’t usually bring in outside people. They liked to keep it within their organization, with people they knew they could trust to not roll on them if they got picked up. Of course, history showed that didn’t work, since mobsters were constantly rolling over on each other, but he hadn’t seen anything to prove the theory wrong.

The only problem was, a killer like this honed their talent over a long period of time, and there was no evidence of the kind of skill this guy had shown. But what if the method of killing was chosen out of necessity and not tailored to their particular skills? What if this killer excelled in killing itself, and not a specific style? Could that be why the Amatos had managed their run of good luck? This guy was good at killing targets and making it look natural. He wouldn’t have been able to get to Bartolini, so he was forced to go for the long-range shot, which would protect the hitter as well as the anonymous approach.

Of course, to back this up and make the theory work, he’d have to find a pattern in the natural deaths. The first part of the pattern was that there were more of them than the numbers from other crime families suggested there should be. He also noticed this caused a corollary statistical anomaly. Incidents of violent deaths associated with the Amato family were much lower than the other crime families he’d looked up so far, with only six violent deaths over a five-year period that were suspected of being linked to the Amatos. Of course, maybe they had been better at hiding the links, but Taylor didn’t think so. He’d already noted the deaths that were linked hadn’t shown a lot of subterfuge.

Looking at the dates of all the deaths by natural causes in the Amatos’ orbit, there seemed to be a pattern there. The uptick started five years ago, three years after the FBI had them under investigation, which meant a helpful amount of records to reference. Before the five-year mark, the number of natural deaths of people associated with the Amatos was more or less the same as the natural average, then suddenly, it almost tripled the national average and then held that higher level until a few months ago, with the last noteworthy natural death.

Five years wasn’t enough, though. Especially since they started without anyone getting the wiser. No, if there was someone behind the uptick in deaths, they were already good enough to not be noticed. They had to have started before then, but that left two new questions to answer. Where had they gotten the practice and how had they gotten introduced to the Amatos five years ago?

Taylor leaned back, trying to think like Whitaker. Look at the patterns. That’s what she always pushed. And he’d done that, it’s how he’d locked onto this natural death thing. He leaned forward again, pulling up more records from the computer. Where could someone have learned to kill people and make it undetectable, or at least easily missed? The CIA, maybe, although they were a lot less subtle than popular fiction tried to show them being. If a disgruntled associate or guerrilla had suddenly decided to become a mass murderer and then go down in a hail of bullets after killing the target, that would have been closer to the CIA being involved.

The Russians were better at it, but they had their own tells, and none of them particularly stealthy. For people inside the country, it was mysterious falls from windows after mysteriously breaking their fingers or falling onto a bullet. For outside the country, they loved poisons and radioactive material, none of which was subtle. The cartels were both brutal and blindingly unsubtle about killing. They saw every death as a message to someone.

Of course, the mob wasn’t usually this subtle either, but Taylor at least had proof that some mobsters were going this route, and these guys loved to copy from each other. He started widening his search, looking for other outfits that had a similar run of deaths, starting with any that had connections to the Amatos. Since he had that one connection point, it didn’t take long to find it once he started looking for it. A small and relatively young family, for the mob anyway, operating out of LA suddenly popped out at him.

Putting together a picture from newspaper articles and arrest records, several connections emerged between this younger family, the Randazzos, and the Amatos. The Randazzos looked to be an offshoot of one of the larger New York families, but after a slew of deaths on both sides, there’d been a falling out, about nine years previous. Apparently loving to stick with tradition, the Randazzos were taken down the old-fashioned way, by the feds for tax evasion. Several of their mid and lower members had ended, up months later, working for the Amatos, which gave Taylor the link between them.

That hadn’t been what had drawn Taylor to them initially, however. Going through Bureau organized crime files, the Randazzos had a rash of good fortune that jumped out at him as looking awfully similar to some of the Amatos’ good fortune. The LA office had been working their way up the food chain and roped in a half-dozen low and mid-level guys with just enough dirt on their bosses to build a RICO racketeering case and just enough crimes short of murder to get immunity deals approved by the Assistant US Attorney. Part way through the case, however, the witnesses, all in protective custody, had started dropping dead.

Unfortunately for the case, the deaths were all found to be from natural causes. Both the lead agent and the AUSA’s notes indicated they didn’t believe that for a secondalthough, in a one-month period, two of their witnesses had badly timed strokes, one had a heart attack, and a fourth had a severe allergy to penicillin that somehow got triggered from a source still unknown.

What they hadn’t been able to do was track it back to anyone connected to the Randazzo family, all of whom were either under active surveillance or out of the country when each of the deaths occurred. The agent had written up a dozen memos demanding someone find any kind of evidence, but apparently none appeared. If the Randazzo family boss had managed to just keep his nose clean with the IRS, they would have been home free.

The interesting thing was that the Amatos’ good luck started around the time all of the associates who managed to get out from under the Bureau’s sweep of the Randazzo family made their way to New Jersey.

“I’ve got it,” Taylor said, making the final notes from his discovery and handing them over to Robles.

“Ohh yeah?” Robles said, taking them.

Taylor waited patiently while his temporary partner read over the printed case files and notes laying out what Taylor thought had happened. Whitaker had always had one hell of a poker face and, even after being together for so long, there were still times Taylor couldn’t figure out what she was thinking when she was working through a problem. Robles, on the other hand, was like an open book. Thankfully, he was better hiding it in interviews, but right now Taylor could almost trace Robles’s path through the journey Taylor himself had just taken just by the changes of expression on his face.

“There are a ton of guesses here. If these murders were done by a pro, something the LA office could never prove, and if the Amatos got in contact with this pro once the remnants of the Randazzo family went to New Jersey, then maybe this is the same guy that killed Bartolini. It’s a long shot.”

“I don’t know, I like the odds. There are too many coincidences, their families have connections and it just feels right.”

“It feels right?”

“Yep.”

“And that’s good enough for you?”

“Yep.”

“How does Whitaker feel about these feelings of yours?”

“They annoy the shit out of her, but she also lets me run with them because they turn out to be right a lot of the time.”

“Okay. Fine. Show me the magic. What’s our next step?”

“We go out to LA. I want to talk to the AUSA and, hopefully, some members of the Randazzo family, if any of them are still alive.”

“And you think they’ll tell you anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but it’s a lead. It’s better than what we have here.”

“I guess. Well, it’s your case. Lead on.”

One of the benefits of working directly for Joe Solomon was not having to wait for the layers of red tape to get hotels or plane tickets approved. It had taken most of the day for Taylor to find the haystack’s needle he’d been looking for, which left them the red-eye flight to LA. Thankfully, one of the skills Taylor had picked up from the Army, that remained useful in civilian life, was the ability to sleep anywhere at the drop of a hat.

It was a long flight and almost one in the morning when they arrived in LA, and even with the nap on the plane, Taylor was exhausted. He was thankful that he wasn’t Robles, who hadn’t gotten any sleep on the plane and looked like hell.

They’d had Solomon’s secretary arrange for an agent in LA to be waiting for them when they arrived, which at least saved them the hassle of trying to find a cab in the middle of the night.

After a few hours of sleep in the closest hotel to the justice department offices, the pair was back up, looking a little less like warmed-over death, and at the office of the AUSA who’d handled the bulk of the original cases against the Randazzos.

“The director’s office called ahead to tell us you were coming, but didn’t go into detail about what you wanted to talk about,” the AUSA said after Taylor and Robles were ushered into his office and all the normal niceties were completed.

“Probably because they didn’t have them. We’re following a Hail Mary out of a case in New Jersey,” Robles said.

“Not that much of a Hail Mary,” Taylor added under his breath.

Before falling asleep on the plane, Taylor had tried again to convince Robles that his line of thinking made sense, but it still took one too many leaps for Robles to buy into it.

“How about just explaining what I can do for you and let’s go from there,” the AUSA said.

“We’re working on the murder of a mob witness in New Jersey and …”

“Bartolini, right?” the AUSA said, interrupting Taylor.

“Yes, although we are trying to not advertise the fact.”

“Understandable, although someone working out of the director’s office asking about a mob witness in New Jersey isn’t really flying that much under the radar for anyone whose read a newspaper in the last few weeks. You think your case is tied to something out here?”

“More the shooter than the case itself. We’ve been reviewing the Amatos’ records, and I’m pretty sure they have a go to person for hard-to-reach targets who need to be gotten to quickly. They’ve had several close calls with members of their organization turning up dead just after being turned by the DOJ.”

“You’re here to ask about the Randazzos, right?” the AUSA said.

Taylor was impressed by how quickly he put things together. It might not have taken a genius to figure out the connections, but he’d seen enough people miss the obvious that the bar had dropped pretty low.

“Yes. Several mid and lower-level members of the Randazzos bailed and started working for the Amato family around the time you started to build a case against them and it looked like you had them dead to rights. Since that’s when the Randazzos’ good fortune seemed to end and the Amatos’ began, it seems like a good bet they brought the person behind that with them.”

“I don’t know if I’d say that’s where the Randazzos’ good fortune ended. They got sloppy with their money, and got nailed for tax evasion. It’s hard to kill your way out of a charge by the treasury service.”

“I guess if it worked on Capone …” Robles said.

“Exactly,” he said to Robles before turning back to Taylor. “I’ll tell you, I don’t know how much help I’m going to be. We pushed the local office hard to find whoever was getting to our witnesses, and never even got a whiff of them.”

“But you agree that they had a hitter, right?”

“I’m convinced of it, although not a lot of people around here believed me when I said it, but I guess it’s hard for some people to buy an unknown individual capable of both identifying witnesses, no matter how hard we worked to keep their identities secret, tracking them to safe houses, regardless of how secure, and killing witnesses by methods that no one was able to trace. The people around here convinced themselves I was chasing the bogeyman, and it took me years to work my way out of the dog house. Do you really think it’s the same person? I thought Bartolini was shot.”

“He was, but it was an impossible shot, and I’m pretty sure it was the only way they could get to him. The case was being fast-tracked and scheduled for depositions the next week. They had locked Bartolini up tight, so it wasn’t like the hitter could just contaminate some food at a restaurant. That’s probably what pushed him to something more visible. Given his track record, it’s a good bet he would have made it look less obvious if he hadn’t been operating on a deadline. I’m sure if he had more time, he would have worked out a less obvious method to take out Bartolini.”

“You know we struck out, so I’m not sure what exactly we can do for you,” the AUSA said.

“That’s a good question,” Robles added.

“We’re hoping for anything we can use to follow the shooter. You said you ran an investigation. I’d love to see the notes.”

“It all went through the Bureau, so it should be in your system.”

“Okay, I’ll check for that. I don’t suppose you have anyone you know, or at least are pretty sure, would have been in contact with the shooter. I know they’ve probably been questioned, but I’d love a run at them.”

“Randazzo got offed a year after he went into prison and his top lieutenants haven’t done a good job of surviving over the remaining years, so there aren’t a lot of options.”

“You don’t think this guy came back for them, to keep them from talking, do you?”

“No. These were all pretty blatant hits. The family had burned a lot of bridges to get on top, and didn’t manage to hold it for long, so a lot of their enemies survived. From where I’m sitting, they looked like people settling scores, but you could talk to whoever got those cases. They were in federal lockup, so it’d be in our wheelhouse.”

“So no one survived?”

“Well, Clinton Walsh, one of the Randazzos’ main lieutenants is still around. He had a falling out with the family shortly before I started building the case against the family and tried to set up on his own. He wasn’t nearly as cautious, and we got him on multiple charges shortly after. He wasn’t around when everything fell apart for them, so he’s managed to survive. He was up to his neck in everything the family was into before he got outed, so if they had someone doing killings, he would have known about them.”

“That sounds like a good candidate. Did you ever take a run at him?”

“Nope. He clams up whenever we ask about the family, which I’ve always thought was weird, since everyone from those days is dead or in jail.”

“I’d still like a shot at him. This is really our only lead at the moment, so we’ll take whatever we can get.”