Dirty Dealing by Gary Cartwright

Author:Gary Cartwright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935955023
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press

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It was a year of presidential elections, and nobody was more keenly aware of it than Jamie Boyd. Like certain animals that detect subtle vibrations in the atmosphere or imperceptible shifts in the earth before a natural disaster, the U.S. attorney had the jitters. It seemed certain that the Republicans would nominate Ronald Reagan, and even if they didn’t, Boyd’s own party appeared doomed to take the pipe with Jimmy Carter. Boyd needed only a couple more years of government service to retire with full pension, but if his sense of the political climate was correct, he could be out of a job in January.

Eighteen months had passed since the murder attempt on James Kerr, and a full year since the murder of Judge Wood, and the term of Jamie’s grand jury was about to expire with hardly anything to show for its investigation. It had looked promising for a while the previous fall. FBI director William Webster had made a symbolic trip to San Antonio to observe the six-month anniversary of Wood’s death and had reminded the media: “It is slow and meticulous. It’s a very difficult case for an investigator to work, because tangible results aren’t produced quickly. It takes a patient investigation to work cases of this sort.” Though the grand jury had interviewed a number of characters with shady reputations, including Boston crime figure Salvatore Michael Caruana, and convicted hit man Charles Harrelson (along with his wife, Jo Ann), none of them could really be described as suspects. Seven witnesses swore that Harrelson was in Dallas on the day of the murder. Caruana had never been much of a suspect: computers at the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) supplied information that the Patriarca crime family was involved in smuggling weapons into Mexico, South America, and Lebanon in return for narcotics, and that the crime family controlled drug trafficking in Fort Lauderdale, where Jimmy Chagra had run his big scam. It seemed likely that Chagra had financed some of Caruana’s transactions through connections in Juárez, but this hardly implicated him in the assassination. Boyd was convinced that the same person or group “willed” the shootings of Wood and Kerr, and he was absolutely sure the Chagra family was involved; but he didn’t have a fiber of evidence. Boyd had also subpoenaed Jimmy’s friend Peter Krutschewski, but he was in custody in Michigan at the time and unable to appear before the grand jury. There had been tips, of course, hundreds of them; they were all worthless. “I haven’t talked to a motor mouth yet who was reliable,” Boyd said. “You wouldn’t believe the stack of letters I’ve received from prisoners who claim they know something about the assassination. Of course, they all want to get out of jail first.” Typical was a Fort Worth con named Robert “Cowboy” Parrish, who told the grand jury he overheard some Bandidos talking about “hitting” several judges. Parrish had been held on state murder charges since three months before Wood was killed.

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