NF (2008) If Looks Could Kill by M William Phelps

Author:M William Phelps [Phelps, M William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non fiction, true crime
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2008-10-16T14:00:00+00:00

47

Jonas Little had known Jeff Zack for a few years. They had worked together for a temp agency. Jonas, who said he knew Bonnie well, was a forty-two-year-old hard-looking drifter, with salt-and-pepper hair, a scruffy mustache, bulgy eyes, pronounced chin and the wrinkly face of a guy who had done his share of time in the clinker. Right off, he admitted some of the rotten things he had done in the past. But Jeff Zack, he insisted, was no damn better.

Little claimed to have reached out to a cop friend after he heard Jeff had been murdered, and told him he believed Jeff was murdered by an “Iranian businessman” who worked at one of the malls where Jeff had several vending machines. McFarland, who picked Little up at the jail and drove him to the APD, was curious, of course, as to a motive. Why Iranians? How did they fit in? Little was claiming Jeff’s vending machine business was a façade for something else—something entirely illegal.

“Its main purpose was a front for gunrunning,” Little told the CAPU. “Jeff sold guns to [various people].”

Not one or two pistols he bought at a Wal-Mart or off the street, Little insisted. But crates of automatic weapons. Jeff Zack, Little said, was a major gun trafficker in Akron.

If true, here was another layer of Jeff Zack’s character the CAPU had no idea existed. Could the guy’s past be any more complex?

Little was scared of talking to the CAPU, but, McFarland reported, he opened up mighty quick once he knew the stakes. Little said he had been with Jeff on several occasions when Jeff delivered the guns. “Whenever Jeff would make a [vending machine] delivery,” Little told McFarland, “he would pull into a receiving area behind these stores. He would enter the rear of [one] store first. The back door was always unlocked.” Little was shaky, speaking with a hurried distress, yet sounded sure of himself. “Once inside the back of the store, he would go down a long and narrow hallway to get into the business area of the store.” He drew a map. Sketched out the entire area of the mall he said Jeff had routinely visited.

Right there was the door. He drew an X. There, that Dumpster, that’s where Little said he saw the motorcycle parked.

Motorcycle?

Entering the mall from the back, Little said, allowed Jeff to go from store to store and deliver the guns to several customers he had in the same section of the mall.

McFarland was confused. How could a guy have walked through the back of a mall with all these guns and no one noticed?

“The longer weapons, such as rifles and AK-47s,” said Little, “would be brought in green-and-black fiberglass cases. The handguns, such as 9 millimeters, .357s, and .44s—never anything smaller than a .38—would be brought…inside twelve-pack soda pop cartons.”

At first, Little’s details impressed McFarland. It made his story sound credible—however over the top it may have seemed. “Whenever Jeff dealt with the Iranians, he would speak with them in a foreign language, like Arabic.

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