The Specialists Read Online Free PDF Page B

legs gone, and Eddie and Frank and the skinny dago and the nigger captain, and by God he was going to have himself some fun.

SEVEN
    The colonel waited patiently while Helen Tremont wheeled the tea cart around the oval oak table, serving mugs of coffee and wedges of Danish pastry to each of the five men. When she left the room, he leaned forward, his arms on the table before him.
    He said, “Albert Platt. Born September four, nineteen twenty-one, in Brooklyn. Raised in the Brownsville and East New York sections of that borough. Arrested nineteen thirty-six for auto theft, served six months in Chatworth Reformatory. Nineteen thirty-eight to forty-one, arrested five times on charges ranging from simple assault to rape. Charges dropped for lack of evidence. Inducted into the armed forces in nineteen forty-two, dishonorably discharged later that same year. Arrested nineteen forty-four, assault with a deadly weapon. Charges dropped. Arrested nineteen forty-six, homicide. Witnesses refused to testify. Arrested nineteen forty-eight, homicide. Witness mysteriously disappeared, charges dropped.”
    The colonel sipped at his coffee. “No arrests since nineteen forty-eight,” he said. “Until that date Platt operated primarily in Brooklyn and Long Island. In nineteen forty-eight he moved across the river to New Jersey. He established a connection with a group of New Jersey racketeers, including Philip Longostini, known to intimates as Phil the Lobster. Longostini’s interests included several restaurants and nightclubs in Bergen County, two suburban garbage collection services, a vending machine corporation, two bowling alleys, and a chain of laundry and dry-cleaning establishments. He was also reputed to control bookmaking and loan shark operations in northern New Jersey, and wielded unofficial power in at least three labor unions.
    “By nineteen fifty-two Platt had established himself as Longostini’s chief enforcer—I believe that’s the term?” He looked for confirmation to Manso, who nodded. “Platt’s activities in this capacity were not such as to lead to his arrest, but it would seem that at least a dozen acts of murder were carried out either by him or under his orders.” The colonel placed the tips of his fingers together and looked thoughtfully at them. “I have read that one should be pleased when criminals turn to legitimate enterprise, that this will in some mysterious way effect their reform. This is a witless notion. The only result is that the enterprise itself becomes illegitimate. For that matter, I have read that crime does not pay and that criminals come to a bad end. Philip Longostini’s bad end came in July of nineteen sixty-four at his four-acre estate in Englewood Cliffs. He died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-three and left an estate estimated at . . . well, this is immaterial, isn’t it?”
    The colonel’s eyes worked their way around the table, focusing in turn upon Murdock and Dehn and Simmons and Giordano and Manso. He said, “Edward?”
    “Sir?”
    “The photographs.”
    Manso passed him a large Manila envelope. The colonel opened the clasp and withdrew half a dozen 8-by-11 photos. “Edward was able to take these in Las Vegas,” he said. “Albert Platt appears in each. In this photograph you will note the man immediately on Platt’s right. Edward?”
    “Buddy Rice. He drives Platt’s car and bodyguards him.”
    “I believe you said he carries a gun.”
    Manso nodded. “A forty-five in a shoulder rig. He’s also supposed to be very good with a knife.”
    Dehn said, “You got all this in Vegas?”
    “I spent a day asking a few questions.”
    “He get any kind of a make on you?”
    “I don’t think so. We were at the same crap table once, but between the broad on his arm and the trouble the dice were giving him I don’t think he paid any attention to me.”
    The colonel waited until the photos made their way around the table and returned to him. He gathered