The Wolf

1.



Los Angeles, California

Spring, 2013

It should have been me.

Not Lisa.

And not my girls, that’s for damn sure.

And not anyone else, not when you take a hard look at it. It was me they targeted. Me they wanted. It’s me they’ve always wanted. But they couldn’t touch me. So they reached for the ones they could get. And I let them walk right into it.

I wanted Lisa and the girls to fly on a private jet with bodyguards sitting in front and back and another team waiting on the ground. That was the way it was meant to happen. That’s the way it would have happened if I had held firm. But I let myself be talked out of it.

Lisa didn’t want our three kids raised in a bubble. She wanted them to grow up as normal kids leading normal lives—­or as normal as they could be when you consider who I am and what I do. She had always wanted that—­ a normal life. We both knew going in that normal was never going to be easy, not with me around. You want safe and secure, move to a small town and marry the local grocer. But when you fall in love with a guy like me, the unthinkable comes with the vows.

I am a cautious man.

I don’t trust strangers, am uneasy in large gatherings—­from weddings to concerts to dinner parties of more than ten—­and travel with a discreet security detail close enough to take action if the need arises. I have a carry permit and never venture out minus at least one loaded weapon. I don’t adhere to a regular schedule; instead I vary everything—­from workouts to the times I eat my meals to the routes I take to work sites and meetings. I am not troubled by any of these habits and, in truth, I derive comfort from knowing I’m in control of my surroundings. It allows me freedom and enables me to focus on the tasks I need to accomplish.

These habits help me excel at what I do. But they do not make me an ideal husband or father. I imposed these restrictions on my family, and while I see them as a necessary precaution, they chafed at their existence. My wife detested any security outside of a home alarm. The kids wanted to be able to have sleepovers minus background checks, go to parks and outdoor events without being in the company of armed men who made their presence known. The resentment was a cause for friction.

“Why can’t we, just this one time, go on vacation like everyone else?” Lisa had asked me.

“We are going on a vacation like everyone else,” I said. “Does it really matter how we get there?”

“The kids are not going to live your life when they grow up, Vincent,” Lisa said. “They’ll be out there on their own. The sooner they see what that’s like, the better it will be for them. And as I recall, you went to Italy when you were a teenager and you went alone.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But I get your point.”

“We’ve never traveled as a family,” Lisa said. “I don’t think our kids have even seen the inside of an airport.”

“They’re not missing much,” I said. “Long lines, bad food, lost luggage. Am I leaving anything out?”

“I’m serious, Vincent,” Lisa said, reaching for my hand and holding it gently against her side. “Let them be kids, just this once. They’re so excited about this trip. I am, too.”

“If I get on that plane,” I said, “it might as well be a private jet. First class will be me, you, the kids, and our bodyguards.”

“Then don’t get on the plane,” Lisa said. “I’ll go with the girls and you follow us later with Jack. You still have that real estate deal to close, right?”

I felt the argument sliding away. “That’s right,” I said.

“Get that off your plate and then you and Jack can meet us in New York,” Lisa said. “Give the two of you some time together.”

“It doesn’t feel right to me, Lisa,” I said. “At least not now. In a few years, maybe then might be a better time.”

“You said you wanted a normal life for them,” Lisa said. “Did you really mean that or were they just words?”

“I meant it,” I said. “I don’t want them to be like me in any way.”

“Then normal needs to start right now,” Lisa said. “With this trip.”

I pulled Lisa close to me and held her in my arms. “I love you,” I said. “And I’ll do anything not to lose you or the kids.”

“I love you even more,” she whispered in my ear. “And always will.”

So, going against my nature and judgment, I agreed to allow some air into my hermetically sealed world. For my kids and for Lisa. They wanted a taste of what passes for normal life, to move about freely, not be confined by my rules. And I went along with it, deluding myself into thinking that they would still be safe, they would still be there for me to hold them close.

That no harm would come to them.

That I was the only target of interest.

It was a move that should never have been made. I allowed my love for family to obscure my distrust of the world. I put them out there without the protection they needed, the safeguards required. I let them go. And I will never forgive myself for that.

My name is Vincent Marelli and I own your life.

I know you’ve never met me, and if you are lucky you never will. The chances are better than even you’ve never heard of me, but in more ways than you could think of, I own a piece of you. Of everything you do. I don’t care where you live or what you do, a percentage of your money finds its way into the pockets of the men I lead. We are everywhere, touch everything and everyone, and always turn a profit. And once we’ve squeezed every nickel we can out of you, we toss you aside and never bother giving you a second thought.

You lay down a bet at a local casino or with the bookie in the next cubicle, we get a cut. You take the family on that long-­planned vacation, a large chunk of the cash you spend—­highway tolls, hotel meals, the rides you put your kids on—­finds its way into our pockets. You smoke, we earn. You drink, we earn more. Buy a house, fly to Europe, lease a car, mail your mother a birthday present, we make money on it. Hell, the day you’re born and the day you’re buried are both days we cash out on you.

And you’ll never know how we do it.

That’s our secret.

We’re never in the headlines. Oh, you’ll read about some busts and see a bunch of overweight guys in torn sweatshirts with tabloids folded over their heads do a perp walk for the nightly news, but that’s not us. Those rodeo clowns are the ones we want you to think we are. Those are the faces that get Page One attention, headline trials, and triple-­decade prison sentences. We have thousands of guys like that and we toss them into the water any time federal or local badges need to make a splash, make the public think they’re out there serving and protecting.

We remain untouched.

At least, we did. Until this happened.

We are the most powerful organization in the world.

In the last twenty years nearly every top-­tier branch of organized crime has joined our union: from the three Italian factions to the Yakuza in Japan, the Triads of China, the French working out of Marseilles, the Algerians, the Israelis, the Greeks, the Irish and the British. We are now one. A powerful and ruling body so strong, we are beyond the reach of any government, let alone an ambitious local district attorney out to make a name. We have become what the old-­timers like Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky dreamed about.

We are a United Nations of crime.

We took the business of crime off the streets and brought it into the dark, wood-­paneled rooms where the real money and power live. It didn’t happen overnight and there were some bodies dropped along the way. In those early years, not every crew greeted the plan with applause. That’s understandable. These were men and women used to doing business their own way. It wasn’t easy to make them look at the bigger picture, have them see that the arrival of a new century brought with it an opportunity to take what we did in a more lucrative direction. But enough of them got it. They understood that the way we had accumulated wealth in the last century would take us only so far in this new one. That in order not only to compete but thrive and control the power levers, a modern gangster needed to be educated, as skillful with a spreadsheet as he was with a gun and a blade. The modern mob boss would need to be as comfortable inside a boardroom as his relatives had been inside a union hall. The muscle end would always be easy to find. The ones with the knowledge and expertise to dominate a corporate structure would take time to develop.

By the time the new century was welcomed, my group was in complete command. We had infiltrated the corridors of power from Wall Street to hedge funds to insurance companies and oil conglomerates. We were knee-deep in the political and medical worlds and cut a wide path in the hotel, art, jewelry, and airline businesses. You add to that gambling, drugs, sports, and sex and we owned it all. By the spring of 2011 thirty-­one percent of the currency spent in the world found its way into our pockets.

It should have been a gangster’s paradise, but in my world, hell is never far away. Terrorist organizations wanted no part of our methods and we wanted even less to do with their chaos. Besides, the way those groups traveled, the light of the law was never far behind. If they crossed into our turf for any reason, they were taken out, no questions asked, no arguments given. It worked pretty well for a few years.

Then along came the Russians, 1.5 million members strong, well-­organized and even better financed. They laid low for close to a decade, letting the Cold War dust settle before tossing their muscle and cash to the terrorists. My group liked to get the bulk of their work done under the radar and preferred to conduct business in countries with stable governments. The Russians were the opposite. They thrived on worldwide unease—­the more of it there was, the better they liked it. They had connections with forty-­seven of the 191 terror organizations around the world and were the key financial suppliers for twenty-­three others. Their money flow was endless and they were quick to supply them with any weapons and high-­tech equipment they desired. The Russians also knew their way around what any terrorist outfit most craves—­a dirty bomb. Thirty percent of the Russian crew came out of the Cold War with degrees in physics and chemistry. That combination alone, working with the wrong people looking to cause serious damage, would deal my business a lethal blow.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, we also faced a growing problem south of the border. In 2008 the Mexican gangs got their hands on some terrorist money, working on the simple assumption that any enemy of the United States was sure to be a friend to them. The cartel bosses set up a drug pipeline, buying thousands of kilos of hash and heroin from the eighty-­seven terrorist outfits around the world functioning as suppliers. In return, instead of paying in cash, they closed the deal with shipments of all calibers of guns, tossing in the clips for free. It wasn’t lost on me that the guns traded by the Mexicans to the terrorists were American-­made and stolen.