The Good Rat Read Online Free PDF

sentences are diabolical. For a cup of coffee, you could do decades.
    But RICO also comes with a five-year statute of limitations. The indictment must be handed down no more than five years after the last criminal act in the conspiracy wascommitted. Anything more than that and, as far as RICO is concerned, it’s like it never happened.
    The cops’ last known murder for the mob was in 1992. The indictment was dated March 2005. No good.
    If the U.S. Attorney’s lawyers tried something cute to slip around that technicality, they would have to get by the mountain named Judge Jack B. Weinstein. Sitting in the Brooklyn federal courthouse, Weinstein for all his life has been a lighthouse in the fog. His books Weinstein on Evidence and Cases and Materials on Evidence are religious documents in law offices and classrooms. And his thought here on opening day was that the statute of limitations remained in the way of this case.
    For an example of how these problems can turn out, all anybody had to do was remember what had taken place in a courtroom just down the hall. Joe Massino, the last big Mafia boss, commander of the Bonanno outfit, was convicted of federal hijacking charges while being acquitted of several more serious matters, such as conspiracy to leave dead bodies scattered around the city. His lawyer jumped up and said that the hijackings occurred more than five years before the indictment. The judge turned it over to the jury. It took them minutes to throw the case out. Soon Massino was back out on the streets, though he would not remain there for long.
     
    Because of Weinstein, I start taking notes with the tiring feeling that it could all be useless. If the judge is warningabout the statute’s time limitations this early, he could throw the thing out and leave me with nothing.
    Herewith to the government’s rescue comes the only crooked accountant whose clients might have been more dishonest than he was. Before Weinstein the U.S. Attorney now states that a man named Stephen Corso can show that the criminal conspiracy kept going even after the cops retired to Las Vegas. Corso himself is quite a solid citizen: He stole clients’ tax-return money, then told them that if they didn’t wire him more funds immediately, they’d be arrested for fraud. Of course he had never sent in the clients’ taxes to begin with.
    Comes now June of 2002, and Corso is driving to work in Manhattan from his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, when on his cell phone a worried person in his office tells him that FBI and revenue agents busted in early and were all over his files. As by now he had taken over $5 million in tax money, he thought this could get tricky.
    So he drove to Kennedy Airport, left the car in long-term parking, and fled to his Las Vegas office. And here, too, they came, an agent’s hand in every file. Next an officer walked in holding out handcuffs and asked Corso if he wanted to wear them or—now offering a miniature tape recorder—this wonderful gadget instead. Corso’s first choice was not jail. They put him out on the streets of Las Vegas with the recorder.
    Swaggering down the same streets was loud Louie Eppolito. Of course they met in the sun—the FBI steered itthat way. Corso told Louie that he had two Hollywood producers, young imbeciles, coming into town. They wanted movie scripts about authentic cops and crooks. That huffing noise whistling through the room was Louie blowing the dust off some old movie scripts he had written. They also wanted methamphetamine. Being a decent parent, Louie sent his son Anthony out to buy drugs in a nightclub for nine hundred dollars, a figure that might prompt the law to say it was a crime. Young Eppolito brought the drugs to Corso, whose office now was a control room for federal agents. According to the U.S. Attorney, this was proof of Eppolito’s involvement in an organized conspiracy of murder and other crimes that continued to a point in time well within the five-year statute