Hoax Read online

  To those most special,

  Patti, Rachael, Roger, and Billy

  and to the memories of my legendary mentors,

  District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and Henry Robbins

  In the beginning…

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE LOVELY EARLY JUNE EVENINGS in New York City when the new leaves on the trees were still lime green, and the salt air was blowing in from the harbor fresh and warm as a cup of espresso at the Ferrara café on Grand Street.

  Several blocks west of that hundred-year-old institution, Roger Karp stood with his twin sons on the sidewalk where Grand crossed Crosby, soaking in the last rays of the setting sun. Giancarlo had his face turned to the west like a sunflower, smiling serenely behind dark Ray Charles glasses. But Zak was obviously troubled, frowning and kicking at the curb. Finally he said, “I still don’t understand why that baby had to die. Why does God let good people die and bad people live?”

  The question caught Karp—Butch to all who knew him, the current district attorney for the county of New York—off guard. Several weeks earlier, the eleven-year-old boys had surprised him by asking if they could study for the bar mitzvah—the right of passage into manhood for Jewish boys—and then he’d surprised himself even more by agreeing to help teach their classes.

  The whole family seemed to have embarked on spiritual quests. His wife, Marlene Ciampi, and their daughter, Lucy, were trying to “find themselves” in the New Mexican desert, and now the boys. But he didn’t consider himself to be on particularly good terms with God dating back to the death of his mother when he was in high school. Yet, here I am, left to field questions from the twins that I don’t know if I have the answers to, he thought.

  At the last class, they’d discussed the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, in which God caused the couple’s firstborn son to die because of their sins. The boys thought that was unfair to the baby, and he didn’t really have an answer to their complaints as he thought so, too. He tried to show that it was a story about actions having sometimes unforeseen consequences, and thought he’d made his point.

  However, Zak was obviously still troubled, and Karp wanted to say something meaningful. For some reason, the question had brought to mind his mother, her beautiful face thin and drawn by her battle with cancer, in pain and desiring the peace of death. It was the most painful time of his life, yet all that he would become had been determined then.

  “I don’t really know, Zak,” he said. “All I can say is that there seems to be a sort of economy to the world, a sort of balancing act. I don’t even know if there’s a grand plan to all of it, or if that’s just the way it is. But sometimes you have to wonder: What if we could change the past when something bad happens? Would that always be a good thing?

  “For instance, what if that baby had lived? David and Bathsheba had another son later, you know. His name was Solomon, and he became the wisest of all kings. There’s a story about how two women once came to his court, both of them claiming to be the mother of a baby boy. He listened to the women and announced that he couldn’t decide who the real mother was. So he ordered his men to cut the child in two and give half to each woman.”

  “Oh great,” Zak complained, “another baby gets whacked.”

  “Well, no, because one of the women pleaded with the king not to kill the boy. ‘Let her have the child,’ she said. And you know what happened?”

  “No,” the boys answered dutifully.

  “Solomon said he knew that she was the real mother because she would rather have lost her baby than let him be hurt. So he gave her the child…it was a test.”

  “Pretty smart,” Zak conceded.

  “Yes, it was,” Karp said. “But more than that were the larger concepts we got from Solomon that became part of the foundation of western law and civilization. In this case, holding impartial hearings to weigh the evidence in front of wise people in the community to settle disputes with justice.

  “But getting back to your question, Zak, what if the first son of David and Bathsheba had lived and became the next king of Israel? Maybe we would have never even heard of Solomon. And would the first child have been as good a king? Would he have been fair and wise? Or would he have waged unjust wars, murdered innocent people, and made life-and-death decisions according to his whims? Would the world we live in today be worse or better?”

  Karp paused. There was a time he didn’t believe what he was telling the boys, and he wasn’t sure of it even now. “So maybe in the economy of the world…,” he closed his eyes and tried to recall an image of his mother before the disease, her smile and laughter, “…maybe there is a reason why bad things happen to good people, even if it also hurts the people who love them.”

  He opened his eyes. The facades of the taller buildings in the Financial Center that faced the sun were anointed in a golden glow as befitted the financial capital of the world, the windows reflecting the ending of the day like newly minted bullion. Rising from the streets and sidewalks, the symphony of traffic, the underground rumbling of the subways, the laughter, shouts, and conversations of eight million people blended together into a constant hum as though the breathing of a single enormous creature. So full of energy and life that it had been able to absorb a wound like September 11, 2001, and, while vowing never to forget, became even more than it had been, stronger, better.

  Karp loved his city, and yet he was grateful for the little harbor out of the storm that was Crosby Street, where he and his family lived in a loft on the top floor of a five-story brick building built around the turn of the century. He liked the look of his ’hood, as the boys called it, a throwback to another time.

  Still paved with cobblestones, Crosby was almost more of an alley than a street, too narrow for delivery trucks to drive past each other without one climbing up on the curb. Rickety old fire escapes clung to the sides of the buildings like steel insects trying to look in the windows, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the days before dryers when clotheslines filled with the day’s wash would have been hung between them.

  The street level and walk-down shops still retained some of the street’s old flavor—like Anthony’s Best Shoe Repair and Madame Celeste’s Tarot Parlor and Piercing Studio (Free Reading with Navel or Nipple Piercing). Other businesses reflected the ever-changing ethnicity of the neighborhood. The bottom floor of his building was occupied by the Thai-Vietnamese restaurant supply store. And still others reflected the times. Down a block was the Housing Works Used Bookstore—proceeds of which were used to provide housing for people infected by HIV and AIDS—a favorite hangout of Marlene’s. It was a great place to sit down in peace with an old book and a good cup of coffee that didn’t come from one of the ubiquitous Starbucks that had sprung up all over the city.

  Surrounded by the crowded sidewalks and heavy traffic of more famous streets like Houston, Broadway, Mott, and Canal, he and Marlene thought of Crosby Street as a haven from the more impersonal city “out there.” They had remained in the loft even after they could have afforded to move to tonier digs. Then gradually others had seen the possibilities, and lofts like theirs were now going for a million and more, but the Karp and Ciampi clan wasn’t selling.

  He looked at his sons, both of them now standing quietly shoulder-to-shoulder as close as possible without actually touching, yet connected as only twins could be. A breeze ruffled the dark curls of their hair—a legacy from their Sicilian-American mother—and they laughed because they were young and alive. I wish they could have met you, Mom, he thought.

  The reverie came to an abrupt end when a dark blue Lincoln town car pulled up to the curb and a large, muscular black man in a suit got out. Clay Fulton was the chief of the NYPD detectives who were assigned to the district attorney’s office as investigators. The twins, who’d known him all of t
heir lives, were delighted with his arrival and immediately started peppering him with requests for a tale about taking on the bad guys single-handedly. “Can’t tonight, got to talk a little business with your dad,” he said, making eye contact with Karp to let him know what he had to say wasn’t for the twins’ ears.

  Karp sent the disappointed boys in to do their homework and turned to Fulton. They were both big men. The DA maybe a little taller at six foot five, most of it still in decent shape despite the debilitating demon—middle-age—and a bum knee from an old basketball injury. Fulton was twenty pounds heavier, though all of it was lean muscle as it had been back in his playing days as a middle linebacker for Penn State.

  “What’s up?” Karp asked.

  “They’ve made an arrest in that quadruple homicide,” Fulton said. “The rap star, ML Rex, and his buddy, from Los Angeles, plus the two hookers.”

  “Yeah?” Karp said. The foursome had been gunned down on a Saturday night ten days earlier while sitting in a limousine in East Harlem. It was a bloodbath that had all the earmarks of a gangland hit.

  As a tone-deaf, rhythmless white guy who still thought the Beach Boys and the Animals were the beginning and end of rock and roll, Karp wasn’t up on the rap scene. But the twins had filled him in on the particulars of gangsta rap and the simmering conflict between the East Coast and West Coast rap camps. Some sort of modern day Hatfields and McCoys, he gathered, only this feud was conducted with assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns.

  The media was all over the story, engaging in a little East Coast–West Coast rivalry of its own. The Los Angeles Times had flown in a team of reporters and photographers to Manhattan, as had several West Coast television news stations; the New York papers and stations had, of course, escalated to match. Nor was the story confined to the two cities. Karp had gone apoplectic when the National Enquirer came out midweek with crime-scene photographs showing the torn and twisted bodies that had been ML Rex, his manager, Kwasama Jones, and the Gallegos twins, late of Queens. The photographs—obviously sold to the tabloid by some enterprising police crime-scene technician—ran under the headline Bloody Rap War Erupts in the Big Apple. The accompanying story quoted a half-dozen anonymous sources who as much as said that the murders were committed by East Coast thugs and that more bloodshed was likely. There was even a line from an unidentified source that contended “the NYPD and DA’s office are dragging their feet because ML was from Los Angeles, man.”

  One of the mysteries had been cleared up after a few days when the detectives finally tracked down the limousine driver, who’d been lying low in his apartment in the Bronx. Apparently he’d seen the killers approach and took off running, then was too frightened of retaliation to come forward.

  As if Fulton knew what he was thinking, the detective said, “The chauffeur identified the suspect in a lineup. We’re good to go.”

  Karp hoped that the arrest would at least stop the rumors. But it didn’t explain why Fulton had driven over to tell him about it. Normally he would have called, or even left it for the morning at the office. There had to be something particularly alarming or sensitive about the latest development. “So who’d they collar?”

  “Well, not surprisingly, the deceased seemed to make enemies wherever he went,” Fulton replied. “But the best lead was that he had been involved in an altercation at a club on West Thirty-eighth Street the night before his murder with a local rapper named Alejandro Garcia. Apparently the two exchanged death threats, and this Garcia is recently out of juvie for shooting some other Harlem gangster. The detectives who picked him up told me that he had a rep even before that shooting as a real hard case.”

  Karp frowned. Alejandro Garcia—he thought he’d heard the name before, but couldn’t place it. “Anything else?”

  Fulton shrugged.

  Good, Karp thought, maybe the press will move on to the next bit of bloody mayhem or sex scandal…hopefully, in someone else’s town. But then he recalled an axiom he’d learned from Francis P. Garrahy, the legendary former district attorney of Manhattan. “It’s the supposedly easy cases that get messed up,” the old man had told him once when Karp was still a wet-behind-the-ears assistant DA. “It looks like a slam dunk, so everybody relaxes, gets sloppy—the cops, the prosecutors—then before you know it, the bad guy walks.”

  “Garcia lawyered up?” Karp asked Fulton. If the suspect invoked his right to remain silent or asked to see a defense attorney, it wasn’t likely he was going to answer any questions.

  “Nope,” Fulton said. “But he hasn’t said much, other than he had nothing to do with it like they always do. I thought you might want to try to talk to him.”

  “Okay, give me a minute to get the boys settled and let’s go down to the Tombs and see if he’ll chat,” Karp said. He turned for the door but stopped when Fulton mumbled something about there being “something else.”

  “Yeah? What is it?” It wasn’t like the detective to beat around the bush.

  “It seems that the twins, Zak and Giancarlo, were also present during the altercation at the club. In fact, they may have been in the middle of it.”

  For a moment, the city seemed to hold its breath. The traffic, the subways, the voices all stopped to listen as Karp swore.

  1

  Eleven days earlier…

  THE AIR IN THE NIGHTCLUB PULSED TO THE REPETITIVE throbbing of a bass guitar as two spotlights swept above the bobbing heads of the audience. With the recent ban on cigarettes in Manhattan restaurants and bars, the wraiths of smoke that danced to the beat in the glare of the lights emanated from quick secret tokes on marijuana pipes, giving the big room a smokey-sweet smell and a decidedly outlaw ambiance.

  The beams of light met at center stage and focused on a pair of young men who had stepped from behind a curtain. The men—one black and one Hispanic—sauntered to the center of the stage where they were handed microphones by the master of ceremonies like eighteenth-century duelists accepting pistols. But instead of “ten paces turn and fire,” they stood two feet apart, glaring at each other and seemingly oblivious to the throbbing music and the pumped-up crowd.

  Six inches taller than his counterpart, black rap musician ML Rex was thin as a slab of bacon and wore a loose muscle shirt to show off a bevy of thick gold chains and tattoos on his mocha-brown skin meant to impress “the bitches and the busters.” His left shoulder bore a tattoo of the ornately drawn numerals 10-78, the police radio ten-code for “officer needs assistance.” The inference was that he was a cop killer, though he’d never actually had the balls to shoot at someone who was ready to shoot back. Drive-bys and firing indiscriminately into crowds had been more his style back in his gangbanging days in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. But the 10-78 tat went with the gangsta rap image he cultivated, as did the drawing on his right shoulder of a large-breasted and nude woman posing with a semiautomatic handgun above the inscription Guns & Hos.

  The son of a hardworking grocer and a domestic servant, ML Rex had been given the name Martin Luther King Johnson. His parents had greatly admired the fallen civil rights leader, but that was all ancient history to “Marty,” as only his mother still called him. His heroes were superstar athletes, rappers, and, especially when he was young, the OGs—old-time gangsters in the ’hood—because they had the money.

  He’d insisted in junior high that he be called Mustafa Khalid Mohammed after a sudden growth spurt to six foot two had him fantasizing about a lucrative future career in the NBA, and he decided that an Islamic name sounded more sensational. However, his talent with a basketball did not grow with his body, and he’d had to look elsewhere for the attention he craved.

  With both parents working long hours and little else to do away from the gym, he’d gravitated to the Bloods street gang that infested his neighborhood like the red-brown cockroaches that took over the house he grew up in every night when the lights went out. The gangs made life difficult, even dangerous, for any young person who might have had a mind of his own
and dreams that included college or actually working for a living. But Mustafa was lazy and so he fit right in—selling crack cocaine and taking the occasional potshot at members of the rival Crips gang.

  He might have ended up like so many of his friends—in prison or in a cemetery—but he’d discovered a talent for the violent, misogynist rhyming to music known as gangsta rap. Combined with a certain knack for getting his foot in the door and ingratiating himself with people who mattered, he’d found his ticket out of the poverty of his youth and away from the ’hood where a boy could get shot for the color of his clothes. He took the stage name ML Rex. Someone had once told him that rex meant king in some fucked-up European language—so he thought Martin Luther King, ML Rex, was pretty clever. Now, except for the occasional pilgrimage back to Crenshaw Avenue and 103rd Street to show that he was still a Blood at heart, he lived in a nice upscale apartment in Brentwood. Not quite Beverly Hills, he conceded to his envious friends, “but the same ’hood where O.J. kilt that white bitch, homes.”

  Despite the look of impending violence on his face as he stared down at the teenager in front of him at the nightclub, Martin aka Mustafa aka ML Rex was in a great mood. Some of that had to do with the two fat lines of cocaine he’d snorted immediately before leaving the dressing room backstage, the daylong use of which caused him to grind his teeth until his jaw ached. But his ebullience had even more to do with a business meeting he’d demanded that morning with his record label’s executives.

  His first CD, Some Desperate S**t Fer Ya, had been recorded in Los Angeles but produced by Pentagram Records, the main offices of which were in the Penn Plaza building off Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. A single from the CD My Baby a Crack Ho’ had reached number six on the hip-hop charts for two weeks, and the CD had gone gold, but then it tumbled back off as quickly as it had climbed aboard. He was wealthier than he’d ever imagined growing up on the streets, but he was very disappointed not to have reached the elite status of rappers like Eminem and Snoop Dogg. The way he saw it, Pentagram’s failure to pour more money into promotion had cost him a platinum record and his rightful place among the hip-hop hierarchy.