Justice Denied Read online

  Justice Denied

  Robert K. Tanenbaum

  For those most special:

  Patti, Rachael,

  Roger, and Billy

  Acknowledgments

  With utmost respect, to my partner and collaborator, Michael Gruber, whose genius flows throughout this book, and who is primarily responsible for this manuscript.

  Special appreciation must be extended to my friends Archie Dickranian, Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian, and Wally Karabian, for their wise counsel, particularly for vital historical background regarding the birth of the Armenian nation and the nightmarish 1915 Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenians; and to their colleagues on the Truth Squad,* who, together with Archie, Wally, and the Archbishop, struggle for justice for Hampig Sasoonian and fight for official Turkish acknowledgment of the genocide.

  With heartfelt gratitude to Mel Glass, Bob Lehner, and John Keenan for their friendship, guidance, and passion for justice during my years at the Manhattan D.A.’s office.

  *Alex R. Baghdassarian, Paul Krekorian, Jacob Adajian, Stephen Saroian, Sally Cotrel, William Paparian, Paul Geragos, and George Garikian

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

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  4

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  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

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  18

  A Biography of Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Gallery Books: A Preview of Bad Faith

  1

  A fat man with a jaunty air and five minutes left to live walked out of the Izmir Restaurant on Third Avenue and 46th Street on the island of Manhattan and turned east. He moved with the twinkle-footed gait adopted by many of the stout, but his progress would have been faster had he not, at nearly every convenient window, slowed to check his image in the reflecting glass. He saw a bland moonlike face, neatly mustached in the manner of the late King Farouk, a face that demanded topping with a fez but which at the moment supported a smoke-colored homburg. Below the man’s several chins there lay a heavy silk rolled collar, a large-knotted Sulka tie in burgundy, and a dark double-breasted pinstripe suit of a beautiful, if antique, cut. Small oxblood cordovan shoes were on his feet, kid gloves were on his hands, and he had a fawn cashmere topcoat resting on his shoulders, in the manner of Italian filmmakers of the fifties.

  It was a Sunday morning, and though few of the other strollers were as formally dressed as the fat man, he did not draw unusual attention, not in that neighborhood. The United Nations, whose headquarters stands on First Avenue between 48th and 42nd streets, employs thousands of diplomats, most of whom live in the immediate area, and many of whom are peculiar in their dress. The fat man was, in fact, a diplomat, but his mission this morning, as every Sunday morning, was personal.

  He was a man of fixed habits. Each morning save for the holy day of Friday, he arrived at the Izmir at eight and ate Turkish pastries and drank thick, sweet coffee, while he perused the New York Times and Washington Post, together with the previous day’s editions of an Istanbul and an Ankara newspaper that had come by air. This occupied no more than ninety minutes.

  Then, on the four weekdays and Saturday, he would walk down 46th Street to the tall slab of One U.N. Plaza, where he had his office. On Sunday, he would instead turn south on First to the Tudor City apartment block, where he had his mistress.

  He had reached the intersection of Second and 46th. Traffic was light, but there were a number of pedestrians about, enjoying the late winter sunshine. A young woman in a stocking cap walked a blond afghan hound. A couple in Norwegian sweaters pushed a stroller containing a well-bundled toddler. A blue-black man in a Burberry loden coat and an African cap spoke in French to a like-colored woman wearing a turban. Across the street, the proprietor of a northern Italian restaurant unrolled his awning. It was a peaceful Sunday in one of the more peaceful and pleasant New York neighborhoods, a district that was exotic without being dangerous and policed like the Kremlin because of all the diplomats.

  The light changed, and the fat man twinkled across the broad avenue, casting an interested glance at the girl with the afghan. As he mounted the curb, he heard a car door open, and a figure moved into his path. The morning sun pouring westward formed a corona around the shape of a man. The fat man smiled and politely moved to his right, but the shape moved to block his way. The fat man looked more closely at the person before him, squinting hard against the light. There was something wrong about the man’s head: it was bright blue, he was wearing a ski mask.

  The fat man turned sharply, alarm flooding his body, and saw that there was another man blocking his path to the west. He had no difficulty seeing that this man wore a ski mask and a blue parka, and that there was an automatic pistol in his hand.

  The fat man was frightened, but he was not a coward. He was a Turk, and Turks are tenacious in defense. He grabbed the lapel of his slung topcoat, whipped it out at the face of the man in front of him, and took three rapid steps toward Second Avenue. He heard a woman scream, and shots, many shots, and felt them strike his body, and saw the white, distorted face of the girl with the afghan whirling across the sky as he fell.

  The police were there in four minutes, a sergeant and a patrolman from the permanent mobile post set up at the U.N. to control the almost perpetual political demonstrations. They secured the crime scene, rounded up a group of stunned witnesses, and made the necessary calls. They prevailed on the proprietor of the Villa d’Este Restaurant to make a room available for processing these.

  Shortly thereafter came the meat wagon from the medical examiner and the car from the crime-scene unit and an unmarked Plymouth Fury containing two homicide detectives out of Midtown South. The two detectives were a Mutt and Jeff act: one tall, angular, watery-eyed, with a lugubrious tan fringe hanging below his bony nose—Barney Wayne; the other shorter, younger by a dozen years, stockier, darker, a feisty man and a cigar chomper—Joe Frangi.

  Both of them bore the rank of detective second grade. Wayne thought that being a detective second grade was pretty good going. He was not the sort of Wayne who gets called “Duke” in the NYPD. Frangi thought the same but also thought that he himself was good enough for a gold hat and meant to get one. Frangi thought Wayne was a good guy but a little too cautious. Wayne thought Frangi was a good guy but a little too reckless. They were a reasonably good team: neither the flawless heroes of the TV shows nor the corrupt villains of the hard-hitting investigative reports. Like most NYPD detectives, they were somewhat heroic and somewhat corrupt.

  Wayne and Frangi introduced themselves to the sergeant. The sergeant was glad to see them, and to turn over possession of the crime scene. The sergeant was a detective from Brooklyn who had been placed back in uniform on a series of crummy details, of which this U.N. thing was one. Placing detectives “back in the bag,” as the saying went, usually for crowd control duties, is a means of petty discipline or harassment in the NYPD, and is one reason why crowd control in the City is often unpleasant for the crowd.

  “What do we got, Sarge?” asked Frangi.

  The sergeant gestured at the prostrate corpse. “They hit him at ten past eleven. It’s a fresh one. The owner of that Italian restaurant called it in.”

  Frangi said, “‘They’? We have witnesses?”

  The sergeant nodded. “Yeah, at least half a dozen. I put them over in the restaurant. Two guys in ski masks did it and got out in a blue car.” He pointed at crime-scene technicians photographing the tire marks left by the putative blue car.

  “They hauled ass down Forty-sixth. They must have come right by me.
”

  “You didn’t spot the car?”

  The sergeant shrugged, then laughed. “Hey, I got my hands full with the fuckin’ Palestinians or Pakistanis or whatever the fuck they are.”

  The sergeant was about to get himself in trouble trying to think of a way to explain how a blue car with two assassins in it driving like a bat out of hell away from a place where moments before at least ten shots had been fired, that place being not a hundred yards from the sergeant’s own command post, had escaped all notice. Embarrassed for the man, Frangi forestalled any further lies by asking the sergeant to show him the witnesses. They walked off toward the restaurant.

  Wayne approached the corpse. As usual at such moments, he let his mind go blank, to convert it into a receptive sponge for any clues that might be invisible to the willing intellect. As usual, his mind remained blank, except for a vague sadness about the finality of death. The murdered man was not wearing two different shoes or unmatched socks. He did not have in his mouth, which was open and full of congealing blood, a mysterious signet ring, and Wayne, sighing, did not believe that he would find in the man’s pocket a torn matchbook with the killer’s name written on it.

  Wayne moved away to let the crime-scene man put plastic bags over the victim’s hands, a routine procedure, and then, stepping carefully to avoid soaking his shoes in the thick blood, he went through pockets.

  Frangi, meanwhile, was getting names and addresses of the eyewitnesses and writing down where they had been at the time and place of the crime and whether they had seen anything. He decided to start with the young dog walker, who was apparently the witness closest to the crime. She had by this time recovered from her hysterics and was sipping coffee. Her afghan was quivering at her feet, chewing on a beef knuckle supplied by the proprietor.

  Frangi established the basic facts: two shooters, both had shot. There was no talking from either the shooters or the victim. The victim had tried to get away by flinging his coat. The shooters had not taken anything from the victim. They had reentered their car and driven off.

  No, she hadn’t taken down the license plate number. No, she hadn’t recognized the make of car. Yes, she would be available to look at different pictures of cars. No, she hadn’t noticed anything peculiar about the shooters. They were average. She couldn’t tell their race because they had been wearing ski masks and gloves.

  The other witnesses added little to this except that, by a miracle, the restaurant proprietor had spotted the car for a ’77 or ’78 Ford Fairlane two-door. His sister had one just like it.

  Wayne watched the body being bagged and loaded into the waiting M.E. wagon, and he then put the evidence bags with the pocket contents into a cheap plastic briefcase and walked over to the restaurant.

  The press had picked up the scent already, and the sergeant had called in a few more troops to handle the growing crowd of journalists and photographers. People shouted questions at Wayne and poked microphone tubes at him and held up recorders in the din to catch some marketable vibrations from his lips. He waved them off and pushed past into the restaurant along a path kept clear by the uniformed men.

  Wayne put his briefcase on the table where Frangi was sitting and sat down himself.

  “Have some coffee,” said Frangi. “It’s the first time I ever got good coffee on a crime scene. Probably the last too. I hear the jackals make it for a terrorist attack.”

  Wayne raised an eyebrow. “We’re always the last to know. The target’s right, anyway.” He removed a clear plastic evidence bag from his briefcase. It had in it a long European-style notecase that had once been tan but was now almost entirely covered with red-brown stains. It had a rough half-inch wide hole punched through it.

  “Got one right through the passport. The vic’s name is Mehmet Ersoy. He’s the cultural attaché at the Turkish embassy to the U.N.”

  “Holy Christ! Ah, crap! The slicks’ll be all over us on this one.”

  “Yep. I’m surprised they’re not here already. Uh-oh, I spoke too soon. They’re playing our song.”

  The sound of sirens coming closer could be heard. “Hey, I just remembered,” said Wayne. “Did you call D.A. Homicide?”

  This was new. An instruction had been passed down from the chief of detectives that the detective in charge of a crime scene in a suspected homicide was to call the newly reconstituted homicide bureau of the New York D.A.’s office immediately upon arrival at the crime scene.

  Frangi said, “Yeah, I made the call. Our luck, we’ll get a fourteen-year-old girl just out of law school.”

  Now the little restaurant’s window reflected the beams of a half-dozen red lights as the slicks arrived, in increasing order of rank, for it would never do for a superior officer to arrive on a scene without his inferiors stacked up to show that they too were on top of things. An elaborate system of delays and phone calls built into the vitals of the NYPD insured that this would ever be the case.

  Thus Wayne and Frangi had to tell their story to the lieutenant in charge of their precinct squad, who told it to the duty captain, who informed the deputy chief in charge of Manhattan, who told the deputy commissioner, who told the deputy mayor. It was somewhat unusual to have a deputy mayor on a slick, but the mayor knew that the U.N. brought forty thousand jobs to New York, and he was determined to let the world know that whether or not lesser New Yorkers fell like flies, the flesh of the international community was as sacred to him as that of his sainted mom.

  After the word had gone down and the deputy mayor had posed gravely before the cameras to ritually renew the City’s marriage to the World Body and its every minion; and after the man from the P.C.’s office had come out strongly against terrorism in general and especially in New York (not forgetting to boast about the matchless anti-terrorism capacity of the NYPD); and after each level of command had left in decreasing order of rank, each one telling the next one down that there better not be a fuck-up on this one, they wanted clearance yesterday, and whosoever got the blame if there were to be a fuck-up (and it would certainly not be himself) would spend the rest of their career in a blue bag guarding a motor pool in the South Bronx; after all that, when there was no one left in the restaurant but the lieutenant, the two detectives, a half-dozen irritable witnesses, a restaurateur wondering whether a story he would tell for years was worth losing a Sunday lunch hour, and a dog who had to pee, Wayne said, “Hey, Lou, could you tell us one thing? What’s all this horseshit about terrorists? We don’t know zip yet. The guy’s old lady could’ve had him whacked for the insurance or something.”

  The lieutenant stared at him. He motioned the two detectives to follow him into the restaurant’s small bar.

  “Nobody told you?”

  “Naw,” said Frangi. “I mean, what the fuck, we’re just the detectives on the case, why give us any information? It’d be like cheating—”

  “A guy called the Post and CBS. He gave the time and place and the name of the vic and said he was the Armenian Secret Army, and then a lot of political horseshit. We got a transcript back at the house.”

  “Armenians, huh?” said Wayne. “You think it’s legit, Lou?”

  The lieutenant rolled his eyes. “The fuck I know. The brass wants a terrorist. If it turns out the guy was dorking some big gaupo’s kid sister, well, we’ll have to work around it. But, guys, I need speed on this one. Whatever you need—cars, radios, stealers up the ying-yang, whatever. Red ball, all right?”

  Wayne and Frangi exchanged a look. Wayne said, “We’ll toss his place, see if he’s into anything naughty. His office too, maybe—”

  “Uh-uh, the office is out. It’s foreign territory,” said the lieutenant. “The guy’s a dip; we’re gonna move like silk around most of the people he knows. You understand the drill.”

  “It’s like parking tickets,” said Wayne.

  The lieutenant shaped his face into a false smile. “You got it. No leaning. Please, thank you, yessir, nosir. Any intrusion on U.N. mission property, and that includes motor
vehicles, has to be cleared up the chain to the P.C. After you’ve made your calls and figured out who you need to talk to at the mission, if anyone, I need to clear it in writing. There’s a form.” The lieutenant paused and lit a cigarette from the butt of his old one. He asked, “You run the car yet? No? Well, get on it, and when you get the printout, check it for Armenian names.”

  “Armenian names?” asked Frangi wonderingly. “You think these big-time terrorists used their own car on a hit?”

  “It shows movement, dammit,” snapped the lieutenant. “And call B.S.S.I. too. There’s a guy there, Flanagan, he’s waiting for your call.”

  Frangi made a sour face. The Bureau of Strategic Services and Intelligence, the former Red Squad, was not popular with street detectives, who considered politically motivated crime of such trivial concern that it was not worth the time and money expended on it. Besides that, B.S.S.I. did not put people on the pavement, which meant they were kibbitzers rather than helpers.

  The lieutenant caught the look. “Just do it!” he said. “Okay, you got the word. I want to be kept up on this on a daily basis, follow?”

  Frangi let his head loll and dangled his arms at shoulder height, miming a marionette. In a squeaky voice he said, “Hi, kids! I’m a detective. Want to play with me?”

  The lieutenant shook his head and allowed himself a sour grin as he left.

  Wayne said, “Movement, huh? Tell me, you think this case is gonna be a serious pain in the ass or what?”

  “Well, the first movement I’m gonna make is my bowels,” replied his partner. “And after that I think we should movement the witnesses out of here before they all starve to death.”

  “Yeah,” Wayne agreed, “and speaking of which, we could make a movement toward getting some lunch. Maybe the guy here could give us some veal scallopini on the arm, seeing how we brightened up his day so much. Hello, Roland.”

  This last was directed toward a man who had just entered the restaurant. Both detectives smiled and greeted him warmly, because he was evidence that they would not, amid their other troubles, have to put up with a fourteen-year-old girl assistant D.A.