The owners thought it would increase business, but it only increased the number of people who stopped, posed for snapshots and drove off.
As the nineties dawned, Zargoza saw the beginning of the end of cocaine. The Diaz Boys did not. Zargoza diversified, and in five years he had parlayed his drug proceeds into enough savvy criminal enterprises that he pulled even in wealth and stature to the Diaz Boys. As the nineties waned, the only reason Zargoza would buy into a coke run anymore was uncontrollable avarice and the sporadic favor he owed the Diaz Boys in return for having used their muscle to limber up stubborn clients. And, though nobody would admit it, they liked to hang out together, mainly to bust each other’s balls for old times’ sake. Surviving fraternity brothers, the Last of the Mohicans. Sometimes they drank at the motel bar and sometimes they drag-raced after midnight around the bay.
Zargoza had a small chop shop in Ybor City and a hand in a nursing home Medicare scam, but most recently he concentrated on the boiler room telephone bunco operation he had set up at Hammerhead Ranch. He gutted and connected the last four rooms of the motel into a giant office and furnished it with military surplus desks, telephones, copiers and postal meters. Zargoza’s callers worked sucker lists that cost up to fifteen bucks a name. The room hummed with the overlapping patter of con men.
“This is your lucky day, Mrs. Castiglioni! You’re our grand prize winner. Now just give us your credit card number so we can verify eligibility and pay our modest processing fee…”
“No, you won’t wait to ask your husband when he comes home, and we won’t wait either, Mrs. Shoemaker, because this offer is only good for the next five minutes! You’re not a loser, you’re a winner! And your husband will be so proud of you. Now, I want you to start reading that credit card number when I count to three. One…two…”
“You’re king of the world, Mr. Boudreau! This is your big day! Do you believe in God, Mr. Boudreau?…Good, because God wants you to get out that credit card…”
The con men made regular runs to the coffee machine but didn’t pour any coffee. Zargoza may have been against the drug business, but not drugs, and he provided his phone operators with an unlimited supply of complimentary cocaine. It was an expensive experiment, but Zargoza immediately saw profits spike due to increasingly predatory salesmanship.
“Feeding them coke was the smartest thing I ever did,” Zargoza told Tommy Diaz as he gave a tour of the operation. “Look at ’em intimidating those old bastards. Check out that satanic sparkle in their eyes. You don’t get that from Folgers.”
Zargoza stopped at the coffee stand and dipped a flat wooden stirring stick in a pile of white powder. He stuck it under his nose and snorted.
His arms flew out, and he fell against the wall, shattering a full-length motel mirror. He pawed at his stinging nose like a dog that just stuck his snout in a fire-ant hole.
“Jesus! Who put the fucking nondairy creamer in the cocaine jar?”
“Sorry, Z,” said one of the phone men. “The coke’s in that other jar today.”
“Let’s get some labels on this stuff. God knows what’s in Coffee-mate!”
“Sure thing, Z.”
Zargoza turned to Tommy. “You got to get out of cocaine, man. It’s passé. It’s just not chic anymore. Brings too much heat. Now, wire fraud-that’s where it’s at.
“We send out fake insurance invoices and credit card bills. We scare old people into buying home security systems that we get at Radio Shack for a fifth the price-say stuff like ‘Did you know Mrs. Crabtree on the next street was anally raped by winos?’ We mark up water-filtration systems eight hundred bucks, tell the old bags they need it or they’ll grow kidney stones like avocados.
“For a while we took out second mortgages on houses we didn’t own. Amazingly easy. Get a fake driver’s license, find a nice home and start calling mortgage brokers. The business is so competitive they almost make you take the money at gunpoint. They Xerox your license and hand you the cashier’s check. They don’t even take you to the house to make sure you have the keys. So you cash out the check and you got a month’s head start until the homeowner gets a new payment book in the mail and calls the mortgage company and says, ‘What the hell’s this?’”
Tommy Diaz nodded approvingly.
“The key is not to get too greedy in any one scheme,” continued Zargoza. “I’ve survived through diversification-getting out of every scam just a little bit early, before the authorities catch on. Since it’s not violent crime, the complaints have to reach a critical mass in some government office before it comes off the back burner. By spreading out the scams, you spread out the complaints… I tell ya, this new generation coming up”-he made a dismissive wave of his arm-“they reject many lucrative areas of crime simply because they’re not glamorous enough.”
They walked by a table where a man sat hunched over cartons of eggs working with a counterfeit USDA ink stamp.
“I still got the chop shop in Ybor City, to anchor the portfolio, but otherwise I’m only expanding in the white-collar sector,” Zargoza told Tommy. He reached into a file and handed Tommy Diaz a document from the secretary of state’s office.
“Amalgamated Eclectic Inc., a Florida corporation,” said Tommy, reading the fine official certificate. “Impressive.”
“Wait till you hear about my latest venture. Sweepstakes. Look at this great mailer! Big letters: ‘YOU’VE WON MILLIONS!!!’ Gets ’em every time. I was receiving the offers so often myself that I figured they had to be making money.”
“Who’s this in the little picture on the mailer?” asked Tommy Diaz.
“Some has-been personality. I figured I needed a celebrity endorsement. All the stars these old people remember-they’re nobodies today. You can get ’em to endorse anything real cheap.”
“Sounds like you’ve thought this all out,” said Tommy.
“You know the best part? You meet a much better class of people in this line of work. In the drug business everyone’s a backstabbing scumbag looking to rip you off or turn you in. But in telephone fraud, your victims are all sweet, polite, law-abiding citizens who would never think of taking advantage of you. Why can’t everyone be like that?”
The two stared out the back window in quiet contentment and watched a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the sides pull up to the motel office.
4
Hammerhead Ranch had a wonderful, sweaty Florida seediness to it. The bargain pricing drew an interesting cast, who slinked around the pool and the bar. The sidewalk outside the rooms had orange-brown rust stains from the sprinklers. Rooms one to eleven ran parallel to the beach along the long part of the motel’s L layout. Zargoza’s four-room boiler operation occupied rooms twelve to fifteen-the short part of the L that ran toward the water. Every room had a story to tell.
Room one: It was 1971. A forty-year-old man stood on a bright afternoon in the Fra Mauro highlands. His name was Edgar Mitchell. He held what looked like a long-handled gardening tool and he slowly scooped up a few little gray rocks and some dirt. Then Mr. Mitchell got in a rocket ship and flew to the third planet in our solar system, called Earth. The United States government looked at the moon rocks for a while and gave a few of them to a man named President Nixon. Mr. Nixon gave some of the rocks to people who ran other countries, to try to get them to like him. He gave one rock the size of a Cocoa Puff to a man at the top of the government of Honduras. The Honduran head of state was ousted in a violent coup and the rock fell into the hands of a rebel leader named Ché Gazpacho, who put it in a special case on his credenza. Gazpacho was killed a week later when the military regained control during the chaos following a hotly contested soccer match in the capital of Tegucigalpa. The moon rock was grabbed by one of the lieutenants storming the rebels in the presidential palace, who was forced to give it to the general who entered the room behind him, who in turn was forced to give it to his long-legged mistress, who was using sex as a weapon and had unrealistic expectations of a singing career. The mistress gave the rock to an incompetent theatrical agent in the Dominican Republic named Shecky, who was later discovered in a filing cabinet in sixty feet of water. The rock turned up six months later in the lint and Wrigley gum wrappers at the bottom of a hooker’s purse at the Hemingway Marina in Cuba, and she used it to get smuggled aboard a sailboat piloted by an American with a press visa who curses the day he put the rock up for collateral during a scag relapse in a leather bar on South Beach. The rock found its way to a pawnshop in Dania, where it sold for fifty dollars in food stamps. It changed hands three more times in a tight circle of people in the porn industry before ending up in the possession of a man who was trying to arrange a black market telephone auction from room one of Hammerhead Ranch.