The first arrests took place Sunday morning when LAPD Detectives Fairchild and Ventura were called into separate offices by Internal Affairs Division, told to surrender their shields, weapons, clips, and IDs, and told that they were to be formally charged with accessory to fraud and conspiracy to murder the four FBI agents. Ventura was informed that IAD and the FBI knew about the secret transfer of funds to his newly established offshore accounts—installments of $85,000, $15,000, and $23,000. No bank transfers had been found in Detective Fairchild’s name, but the officer was informed that the investigation was still ongoing. Both detectives were interrogated.
Detective Ventura hung tough, but Detective Fairchild folded. He not only admitted that Ventura had gotten him involved in the cover-up of the murder of Richard Kodiak, but said that it was Ventura who had traced Donald Borden’s and Gennie Smiley’s whereabouts in the Bay Area, and fingered them both to Trace’s Russians for the professional double taps to the head. According to Detective Fairchild, Ventura had even bragged that “for another twenty thousand I would have dumped the fucking bodies myself, and done a better job of it than those assholes.” Fairchild admitted in a signed deposition that Ventura had referred to Dallas Trace as “the goose who was going to lay them both a lot of golden eggs” and that further dealings with the fraud Alliance had been planned. Fairchild said that Ventura had threatened to murder him if he opened his mouth about the conspiracy.
Both police officers were taken into custody. Fairchild negotiated a deal with the district attorney for leniency in exchange for turning state’s evidence. Neither the FBI nor the LAPD made any announcement of the arrests—the men were being kept in an FBI safe house in Malibu for extensive interrogation—and anyone calling the precinct and asking for either detective was told that they were “working undercover and unavailable” while the phone calls were traced. Two of the calls came from Trace’s American bodyguards, and one of them was traced to the Russians’ Santa Anita house.
Syd expressed her concern about Dar’s safety to him during the five days before the projected arrests of the main players, but Dar had answered easily—“What’s to be afraid of? The FBI are all over the Russians, Trace’s American thugs are being followed…I’m safer than ever before.” Syd was too busy preparing for the raids to spend time at the cabin with Dar, but she did not seem reassured.
That Monday before the raids, Dar and Lawrence had also rigged fiber-optic cameras in the cabin. Dar chose two positions, both on the south interior wall, so that the two lenses would cover everything in the large, single-room cabin except the closets and the one bathroom.
Dar used his key to unlock the hidden trapdoor, led Lawrence down the steep stairs, and then unlocked the door to the storeroom.
“Holy shit,” said Lawrence, “trapdoors, secret rooms…You a spy, Dar? A spook?”
“No,” said Dar, embarrassed that he had kept this place a secret. “I just needed a safe place to store some stuff. You understand.”
“Not really,” said Lawrence. He looked around the room again. “My God, it looks like the last scene in that first Indiana Jones movie…that big warehouse full of crates. You got a sled named Rosebud in here somewhere?”
“No,” said Dar quietly. “I had to burn that one winter when I ran out of firewood.” He led his friend through the corridors between crates and showed him the padlocked air-vent grille. “If you ever need to get out of here, just unlock this and crawl, Larry. It’s about two hundred feet to that old gold mine I told you about once. It eventually comes out in the steep gully east of here.”
Lawrence shook his head. “I don’t think it’d do me any good.”
“There are extra keys upstairs,” said Dar. “Keys for the trapdoor, the door to this room, and the grille padlocks…They’re in a leather case under the ice tray in the fridge.”
Lawrence shook his head again. “OK, but that’s not what I meant. I just don’t think I’d fit in that particular air shaft.”
Dar looked at the vent, then looked at Lawrence, and nodded. “Well, if you were ever trapped down here when things were…unpleasant…upstairs, just bolt the steel door and stay here. The room’s shielded and fireproof and the air is drawn in from the cave, so even if the cabin burns down above you, this place would be safe.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lawrence, obviously unconvinced. “Trudy and I are going to be at our condo in Palm Springs the rest of this week,” he said. “Unless you need me here, I mean.”
Dar shook his head. “No. And be careful in Palm Springs until we hear that Trace and the Russians and all the rest are behind bars.”
Lawrence only grunted and patted the pistol in his shoulder holster.
They hooked the two fiber-optic cables and their transmitter to the cabin’s power supply, and then to the auxiliary generator as backup. Then they ran antenna wire up through the wall and onto the roof of the cabin. After that, they hiked downhill from the cabin—keeping the cabin between them and the viewing field of the Czech video camera up the hill—and set up the second outdoor camera in the burned-out stump of a huge old Douglas fir just where the grassy, open hillside began. Then Lawrence returned to the cabin while Dar took the receiver/monitor—concealed in his tan rucksack—and hiked several hundred yards up the hill.
“Got a picture?” came Lawrence’s voice over the cell phone.
“Yes,” said Dar. He switched back and forth between cameras two and three. The wide-angle lenses each gave a bugeyed view of the room, but every part of the cabin except the bathroom and the inside of the closets was clearly visible on the tiny monitor screen. These lenses had no pan or zoom controls, but were effective in very low light conditions.
“Now I know what you’re up to,” said Lawrence on the phone.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” said the private investigator/adjuster. “You’re planning a huge orgy up here and you want to get it all on tape.”
Dar tried camera four. It panned up and down the slope, showing the entire approach to the south side of the cabin. With the wide-angle lens he could see miles across the valley to the south and zoom in on objects up to a hundred yards away.
On the same Thursday morning that saw the arrest of Dallas Trace, Attorney William Rogers—the East L.A. lawyer who had helped Father Martin create the Helpers of the Helpless—was pulled over to the side of the road on his way to work. As the attorney stepped out of his vehicle, joking with the state patrol officers in their CHP car about not seeing the stop sign, FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies, and LAPD officers converged on the site.
Rogers was handcuffed, read his rights, and loaded into one of the cars. Syd was told by the agent in charge that Rogers began weeping and demanding to call his wife, Maria. The agents did not tell the attorney that his wife had been arrested moments before at her office headquarters for the Helpers of the Helpless.
In hospitals all over Southern California, local police and FBI agents accompanied by INS officials began their sweep, interrogating and eventually arresting more than sixty Helpers from a group of more than a thousand detained. All hospitals and medical centers in California barred their doors to the Helpers that same day. In the files at Maria Rogers’s Helpers of the Helpless Headquarters in East Los Angeles, the names of more than a hundred insurance-fraud cappers, doctors, attorneys, and facilitators were gathered.
Dar sited the fifth video camera on his property on Tuesday. For several hours he hiked the hundreds of acres of property he knew so well. Finally he decided on the best sniper nest above the cabin—a small, level, grassy area shielded by low boulders on two sides and by huge boulders behind it. Lying there with his old M40 Sniper Rifle and Redfield scope, Dar found that the range—a little under two hundred yards—was almost as perfect as the view. There were clear shots between the scattered trees of the cabin, the entrance to the cabin, and the parking area west of the cabin. The roost was protected by the overhang of rock ledges behind it and by steep slopes on either side. It was perfect; too perfect.