“You’ll eventually have to talk to them, if they determine this package is relevant. But . . . Mrs. Levine, I really need to look at it, and talk to my superiors in Washington.”
Alone inside the house, she seemed more nervous about him. Jake took out his cell phone, called Danzig’s office. Gina answered: “This is Jake. I need to talk to the guy.”
“I thought you were all done?”
“I am. But something came up, and this is pretty urgent.”
Danzig came on the phone a minute later, his voice cautious. “Jake? I’ve been hearing some rumors about Madison . . .”
“The city, or the woman?”
“The city . . .”
“Yeah. I was there. Things are rough. But: I’ve made contact with the package in question. I need you to establish my bona fides with a woman here . . . It’s important.” He glanced at Levine and smiled. “She doesn’t necessarily trust me, given the circumstances. I would like to have her call the White House, and have her switched up to your office so she could talk to you for a second.”
“Is this absolutely necessary?” He didn’t want to do it.
“I think so, sir. We’ll have to talk to the FBI, though. There’s another copy, somewhere in Madison.”
Silence, then, “Tell her to call.”
“You can call the White House?” Levine asked doubtfully.
“Sure. It’s basically an office building with a big lawn,” Jake said. “This is the only way I could think to prove that I’m okay.”
She called Washington directory assistance, got the main number for the White House, and at Jake’s instruction gave her full name: “This is Sarah MacLaughlin Levine, calling for Mr. Danzig.”
She had to wait a minute, then said, “Yes . . . yes.” Another few seconds, then, “Yes. Yes I do.” She looked at Jake. “Okay, thank you. I’ll talk to him. Okay. Thank you.”
“They said you’re official.” She was more confident now. “They said you were coordinating with the FBI.”
“I am—but before we get too far down that road, we have to assess the contents of the package. We don’t want to get caught up in a fraud; we have to make sure that everything is legitimate; that they’re for real.”
“One thing, though,” she said. “This is about your . . . vice president. How do I know you just won’t throw them in the river?”
Jake tried to look as pious as he could: “Mrs. Levine, this package is going to come out, sooner or later. There are copies. Once I have it, there’s no way I can bury it. If I did, I’d go to prison. But we have to make sure that it’s real.”
“It’s real,” she grunted. “Landers is crookeder than a hound dog’s leg. The whole bunch of them are crooked.”
The package was almost exactly that: a cardboard box that said Xerox on the side, and that had once held ten reams of 92-bright white printer paper. Inside the box was a stack of notebooks, some files, and three DVD disks in a Ziploc freezer bag.
“We hoped . . . ,” Levine said tentatively, as Jake began thumbing through the paper. “You know, my husband passed away three years ago. He had an infarction. I hoped that maybe because I helped out, you know, that I could get help getting a job. They took my husband’s pension away, those people at ITEM, those big shots, they said he elected to get more money early, or something like that.”
“We can talk about your help,” Jake said. “I think you’ll be okay. If you tried to get to the authorities.”
“I tried, Lord knows I tried,” she said. “I knew Al from when he was fund-raising, I knew he was well connected in Washington. I thought that was the best way to get this to the proper people.”
She put Jake in the living room to read, brought a package of Oreos and glasses of orange juice as he worked.
The package described a standard piece of corruption, notable only for the arrogance shown by the vice president and his friends, and the size of the return. The highway project involved reconstruction of about ninety miles of Wisconsin’s federal Highway 65, from its intersection with Interstate 94 a few miles east of the Minnesota line, to the town of Hayward in the north woods.
“Highway Sixty-five is the main road from the Twin Cities up to the Hayward Lakes resorts,” Levine said. “My husband worked on the project for six years, it was a big deal, you bet.” She dug around in the kitchen cabinet, found a Wisconsin road map, and traced the line of the highway with a finger. “The project was on the up-and-up. The project saved lives . . . It was only later that the trouble started. My husband was a comptroller on the project, and there was trouble right away with equipment. That’s all on disk one, the books.”
The general contractor, ITEM, subcontracted with several dozen smaller independent companies to do the planning, environmental studies, equipment and materials supply, earthmoving, and paving.
The key was in the heavy equipment. One of the companies, Cor-Nine, leased twenty-odd pieces of heavy equipment, mostly heavy dump trucks, along with a few graders, to ITEM over four years, for a total package price of $7.3 million. They also paid Cor-Nine $210,000 for maintenance and repairs.
“That’s what really made me laugh, when Ron told me about it,” Levine said. “The maintenance, that was hilarious.”
“Too much, or not enough?” Jake asked.
“I suppose you’d say too much, since the equipment didn’t exist,” Levine said.
“Didn’t exist.”
“Didn’t exist. Ron said you couldn’t see it, even at the time. The equipment could always be somewhere else . . . You’re only talking about one piece for every five miles or so of the road, and there were so many little contractors coming and going that nobody but ITEM knew who was doing what.”
“They did the whole highway at the same time? They didn’t just do ten miles at a time?”
“Normally, a project would be staged, maybe over fifteen years or so. To maximize the return, they had to do the whole thing while Governor Landers was in office,” she said. “They already had a two-lane highway going up, so they constructed another two lanes beside it, all at once. After that was done, they coordinated the old highway with the new highway in stages—essentially, cleanup work, building intersections. That was legitimate, too. It minimized the traffic and business disturbances in all these small towns along the way . . .” She tapped the small towns on the map.
“And Cor-Nine was Landers and his pals.”
“No, no. Cor-Nine was some people you never heard of, a bunch of Frenchmen.”
“Frenchmen?”
“Yeah. They were a French-based equipment-leasing corporation that, after you traced it to France, came back to the Bahamas and then disappeared,” she said. “If anybody asked, ITEM could say that all they knew was that they were leasing equipment at a good price. If the money disappeared, it was some kind of French tax-avoidance deal. Couldn’t blame ITEM for that.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Jake commented.
“I was a bookkeeper before I got married,” she said. “I know about money.”
“So how did the money get to Landers?”
“Through his brother. Sam.”
“The guy in Texas,” Jake said. The vice president’s colorful sibling, big hat and big boots, a lime green Cadillac with longhorns welded to the hood.
“Right. Sam Landers goes down to Texas, a hot real-estate market for retirees—no state income tax, warm weather. He sets up a development company. The vice president and his friends own about seventy-five percent of it and Sam has the rest. The key thing, though, is the financing. The Landers family had no money—but Sam managed to get financing for his Padre Island apartments from . . .”