How to Get Away With Murder in America by Evan Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

Ricky never stopped working for him.

It Comes a Time
     
     
    While Ricky ascended the CIA ranks, Albert continued his social advances in Florida. In 1985, when President Reagan came to Miami’s Omni Hotel to tout successes in the War on Drugs, Albert was given a seat of honor. If irony were an explosive substance, the room would have blown sky-high. Reagan devoted part of his speech to attributing to Fidel Castro the flow of cocaine into Miami and issuing him a warning: “I have a message for Fidel Castro about the drug trade. Nobody in his regime is going to get away with this dirty drug business.”
    Blaming Castro and other communists for America’s drug woes was a surrealist narrative the administration was selling to the American public, in part to justify its wars in Central America. Albert must have understood the absurdity of Reagan’s remarks better than anyone. But later, when speaking unwittingly to an undercover cop, he was struck by something else—that he had gained such close access to the president. As Albert put it, “Here’s a guy—me—organized crime, all kind of bullshit. The fucking CIA or Secret Service clears me, and I’m sitting next to the president. These are things I can’t figure out.”
    Despite his efforts to build a good civic image, the old Albert sometimes peeked out from behind the mask. In 1984, while eating dinner at a Hallandale Beach restaurant with Bobby Erra and a mafioso named Carmine Scarfone, Albert argued with Scarfone, produced a gun, and shot at him, wounding him in the arm. Although news of the shooting circulated widely, witnesses, including Scarfone, refused to testify. More than a thousand dignitaries attended Albert’s next San Lazaro dinner.
    Albert’s success inspired him to dream. He told people he wanted to run for office. There was one impediment, however: He was not a U.S. citizen, and his felony convictions posed a challenge to becoming one. Albert petitioned the governor’s office for a pardon of his old crimes. He persuaded Florida’s outgoing attorney general, Robert Shevin, to write a letter stating that he found Albert’s “integrity, character, and personal conduct to be irreproachable.” Congressman Pepper wrote one describing Albert as “a friend, a conscientious young man, and a very responsible businessman.”
    His effort to clear his record would prove to be his undoing. Albert began paying crooked cops in the Hialeah and Miami-Dade police departments to destroy files pertaining to his past crimes, believing that if the records no longer existed, his lawyers might find it easier to have his records legally expunged. When an MDPD intelligence unit got wind of his activities, the department set up a sting.
    In July 1985, an Irish Cuban cop named Rosario Kennedy met with Albert at a mall in Doral to offer to sell him files. Kennedy was wired with a recorder, and he inspired such trust that during the half-dozen meetings that followed, Albert poured out his heart. In the first meeting, Albert spoke of his ambitions to enter legitimate business:
    This is no bullshit. I’ve been getting tremendously into real estate buildings. Everywhere the intersections are coming in. I-75 is going to be tremendous. I bought some lots for $32,000. I just been offered double my money. Why? Because an Arab Jew went before the county commission and got approval for a housing project. The cocksucker got a special use exemption, and now it’s worth $100,000 an acre.
     
    Albert schooled Kennedy on the ways of the world:
    There ain’t no fortune out there that hasn’t been made illegitimately—the Kennedys, the bootleggers, the Huns, whoever it might be. You think Governor Graham or his father never did nothing wrong in his life? How many people did they swindle out of land?
     
    And Albert grew introspective:
    It comes a time to get away from that shit I started with. Taking people down, scheming, robbing—everything that’s against the law. Sooner or later