Friends of the Family by Tommy Dades

Author:Tommy Dades
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

As the investigation expanded into new and promising directions, trying to maintain secrecy was like trying to catch the wind in a strainer. While there was no direct evidence that anyone outside the task force had learned about it, all of a sudden inexplicable things began happening.

On a beautiful afternoon in late fall 2003, Mike Vecchione was in his office making last-minute preparations for the surrender of Brooklyn’s Democratic political boss Clarence Norman. For Vecchione, this was the culmination of a long undercover operation. Another crooked politician was going to take a fall. The media was going to love this one. This was a front-page indictment.

So when Vecchione’s phone rang he just assumed it concerned the last-minute details of Norman’s arraignment. To his surprise, it was his sister. “Mike,” she said anxiously. “You’d better get right home.”

His first thought was his eighty-three-year-old father, with whom he lived in the house in Queens. “What’s the matter? Is Dad okay?”

“No no no, he’s fine. But somebody broke into the house. They wrecked it.”

“I raced out to Queens,” says Vecchione. “After my divorce I’d moved into my parents’ small home until I could get resettled. It was just a temporary stop; I didn’t expect to be there more than a few months. Then my mother died unexpectedly and my father had a quadruple bypass and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. There was no way I could leave my father there alone. Ten years later I was still living there.

“My father lived on the main floor, while I had a small bedroom and office upstairs. It wasn’t terrible; the house was close enough to my ex-wife and my two sons to enable me to get over there easily and often. It wasn’t perfect, but it had worked out well for all of us—until I got that phone call.

“I didn’t know what to expect. By the time I got home the cops were already there. Somebody had really wanted to get in—they’d taken a big chance by kicking in the side door in daylight. I began walking through the house, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Whoever it was had ransacked my bedroom and my office. They’d pried open locked desk drawers and dumped them on the floor, pulled out every bureau drawer and thrown the clothes around the room, they’d ripped apart the closet and stripped the bed, they’d knocked over the bookcases and cabinets. My whole life had been dumped on the floor. I couldn’t believe it—and then the situation got worse. A day earlier I’d cashed a large check to cover my son’s high school tuition and my Christmas gifts. That money was gone, I figured.

“And then I went down into the finished basement. What they’d done down there was even worse. They’d stuffed up the toilet with paper, then defecated in it and flushed it over and over and over and then left it running. The basement floor was flooded with fecal-polluted water.

“But truthfully, it was what I discovered on the first floor, my father’s floor, that really shook me up.

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