The Underboss by Dick Lehr

Author:Dick Lehr [Lehr, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

ON THE third attempt, after Morris okayed the Quinn teams’ descent down Snow Hill Street, he refused to put too much stock in how smoothly things were going. He sat in the car with Kennedy, tracking Quinn’s progress, waiting for another shoe to drop. Throughout the day there’d been no surprises. The opening move went off without a hitch. It involved agents Cloherty and Buckley. Starting in the late afternoon, they’d taken up their position in the back of a lookout van parked on Prince Street a half block from Angiulo’s office. From there, they watched the office for the departure of each of the Angiulos. The monitoring took hours, with brothers sometimes departing only to return shortly afterward, but nothing else could begin until the lookouts sent word that Angiulo and his minions had left for the night.

Morris heard from the lookouts around midnight, which wasn’t too bad. By the agents’ head count, the office was empty. He then dispatched other teams of agents to scour the streets, including a pair to relieve Cloherty and Buckley from the van, which got colder and colder as the night wore on. The new pair would monitor the street while Quinn was inside. Cloherty and Buckley split up and joined new partners in two of the roving FBI vehicles.

In little more than an hour, everyone was in place. Quinn, Richard, and the locksmith had left Morris’s car and easily made their way to the foot of Snow Hill and Prince. The Quinn team was about ready to make its final crossing, past the lookout van and to the front door of 98 Prince Street. Encouraged, Morris, for the first time during any of the attempts, ordered his three electronics specialists to stand by The techies were going to follow Quinn in, once Quinn’s team was safely inside the office. The chief’s radio crackled with reports from lookouts that the street remained quiet.

Morris listened as Quinn, in a hushed voice, described his team’s slow progress. Even though the FBI had carefully counted heads, every member of the break-in operation knew that this wasn’t an absolute guarantee the office would be empty

There was no guarantee, because even their best informants could not provide such critical information as whether someone was assigned to sleep in the office. In all the surveillance and intelligence work they’d done to prepare for the bugging, the FBI still did not know exactly what went on in the office from midnight until dawn.

Morris and Quinn had struggled with this gap, and, hard as they tried, could come up with only one idea. They could have an informant secretly drop a tiny microphone behind a couch during a daytime visit to the Angiulo headquarters. That way the FBI could determine whether anyone was inside the office late at night. But what if the mike made a noise when it hit the floor? What if it rolled out from under the couch? If the Angiulos caught their man, he would surely be killed and the bugging plan would have to be abandoned.

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