Careful What You Wish For by Lucy Finn

Author:Lucy Finn [Finn, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

Although my Internet search turned up a few facts that went into my Kato folder, I quickly became frustrated by the maddeningly little that I uncovered about the salvage yard’s owner. I did find a report that George London had bought up a large tract of land several years ago that turned out to be dab-smack in the middle of a highway expansion. Had it been a lucky guess? I doubted it. London turned a very quick multimillion dollar profit. But George London, on paper, looked simply like an astute businessman and pillar of the community. The owner or joint owner of dozens of companies, he was unusually generous to only one big “charity”—political contributions. Officeholders from Scranton to Harrisburg had accepted hefty sums for their campaigns, and if I counted in the monies given through London’s companies, the amount literally climbed into the millions. I’m sure London saw every dollar as a wise investment.

Oddly, though, few people actually knew what George London looked like. Not one single picture of him appeared in the archives of any local media. One news story described him as “reclusive,” rarely appearing in public and never attending charity functions or social events. And tucked away in an old news story, which I had found only by following a series of links, was a heart-stopping find: a felony conviction from a quarter century ago and rumors about London’s ties to a Philadelphia crime family. Back after the devastating Wilkes-Barre flood of ’72—the disaster during the Nixon administration that gave birth to FEMA—London had gotten a suspended sentence for running a scam to obtain flood relief money. Considering the huge sums involved, a suspended sentence, for a felony no less, smelled rotten. I was surprised it hadn’t given birth to a major scandal. I could use the LexisNexis search engine to get the details, but reading through the material might take me days, and I didn’t know if it would have any bearing whatsoever on the Katos’ problems. I made a note of the date of the trial and stuck it in the folder.

As to the alleged mob ties, I found no hard evidence that Citizen London was “connected” to the Scarfos, Testas, Bufalinos, D’Elias or any other Pennsylvania mafia family. Nothing of substance had ever surfaced. Recently London had tried to get state approval to turn one of his Pocono properties into a gambling casino. He had been turned down in favor of granting a license to a Seneca tribe who promised to turn an antiquated city racetrack into a major gambling emporium. This huge project was supposed to boost the area’s sagging economy.

Even so, the ruling caused a community uproar: The Valley remained an old-time Methodist and Assembly of God stronghold where gambling was a vice, no two ways about it. But no amount of protest stopped the Seneca and work was going forward. For complicated legal reasons, Native Americans enjoyed loopholes in the gambling regulations that allowed them to thumb their noses at the white man’s laws.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.