Formerly Fingerman by Joe Nelms Read Free Book Online Page A

when all it’s going to do is give you a headache? It made more sense to attach his name to projects that, if successful, he could claim some degree of participation in and, if failures, he could walk away from virtually untouched. Frank Fortunato and Brittany Marinakos were not the only ones with self-serving PR plans.
    Part of Anfernee’s own internal approval process had to do with names of projects. He needed a quick and easy-to-remember nickname that associated him with the case. Nothing he would use on a day-to-day basis, but something that he could drop into conversations as extra support to his granite-like foundation of mediocrity. Oh, that construction company extortion racket sting? I was the foreman of Operation Demolition. The White Slavery bust? Of course I know about it. You’re looking at the John Wilkes Booth of Operation Abe Lincoln. They didn’t always make sense. But they were memorable and would associate Anfernee with these high-profile cases in the minds of his coworkers and superiors enough that he could count on job security for years to come.
    It was this philosophy that had taken Anfernee straight to the middle. Number one hundred thirty-eight with a bullet. No longer the grunt, but not really the boss. He was one of the guys the never-in-the-field bosses looked to for approval of their milquetoast proposals, asked to write memos and reports, and relied on to “look into” things. All tasks he could farm out to underlings while taking credit for their hard work himself. He would probably never make chief this way, but chances were even better that he would never get canned no matter how bad the economy got. And he was fine with that.
    Anfernee’s burning ambition was to continue employment until he no longer needed to work. Another eight years and he would be riding his pension straight to Henry’s Fork for an equivalent period of fly fishing.
    In other words, he was no Brittany. So, it was unlikely that he would show too much excitement this early in the process. There were so many details to hear before he gave his approval. What was Brittany’s plan, exactly? How would she justify the warrants they would need? Would the name of her plan play on the front page of the paper? Was it amenable to memorable ancillary nicknames that could be applied to him? Critical stuff. Stuff that everyone else in the department was already thinking about.
    Not surprisingly, when Frank Fortunato made his big play to become the celebrity mobster, the FBI took notice. If there’s one thing the American public likes more than a big flamboyant bad boy, it’s a big flamboyant target. And Frank was playing right into the inevitable cycle of celebrity. He had started to believe his own hype. It was simply a matter of time before he was ripe. The fact that he was now planning a murder really worked out well for everyone involved. Except for the guy with the other other thing.
    The decision on how to bring the Maraschino family down was a much-debated one within the department. Some factions felt strongly that they should stay the course of undercover work that would lead to the arrest of lower-level gangsters who would then be coerced to flip on their bosses, the bosses then coerced to flip on their bosses, and so on. They referred to it as The Domino Theory . Another camp championed focusing solely on income-tax evasion. Their plan was to determine the inner workings of the Maraschino crime family and calculate its total cash intake before swooping in and arresting the grand poobah for income tax evasion. Operation Tax Cut . Yet another camp favored good old-fashioned catch and punish. Chase down the guys who were doing the crimes and put them in jail. Project Clamp Down . Behind closed doors, this was referred to as Project Old School as it was considered to be a pretty outdated and pointless plan.
    None of the names were particularly savory in Anfernee’s mind. They lacked