I sat down on the steps like a student, minus the latte. I dug my cell from my backpack and made a phone call.
“AP, Foreman.”
“Jack? It’s Hailey.”
“Hailey?” he said, mildly surprised. “I thought I’d said something to piss you off. I called you and you never returned my message.”
“My phone was stolen,” I said.
“Really? That’s too bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need a favor and I don’t have a lot to exchange for it. Maybe I could buy you a lunch or something.”
“Depends what the favor is,” he said.
“For you, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I need some background information, the kind of things reporters talk about but can’t or don’t print.”
“About what?”
“A man named Adrian Skouras. He was a mathematician at UC Berkeley and died of cancer three months ago. His obit was glowing, but I need to know if there were things about him that were, I don’t know, unsavory.”
“Mmmm,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Right off, can I ask you if this guy grew up locally?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Do you remember if he’s related to a guy named Anton Skouras?”
“That was his father. You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure, he’s probably the biggest unindicted racketeer in San Francisco.”
“He is?”
“Unofficially, yeah. Officially, he’s a ‘prominent businessman.’ I haven’t had the opportunity to write about him that often. Someone who writes for the business pages over at the Chron would know his story better than me, printable news and unprintable rumors both.”
“Could you ask someone over there?”
“It depends: Where are we going to lunch?”
“Anywhere,” I said, guessing that his innate decency wouldn’t let him hold me up for anyplace expensive.
“You know where Lefty O’Doul’s is?” he said.
“I know it,” I told him. Dim and comfortable, with old-style cafeteria-line food.
Before we hung up, Jack said, “Why are you interested in Skouras, anyway?”
I said, “I think he stole my cell phone.”
twenty-three
When I saw Jack Foreman waiting on the sidewalk outside Lefty’s, he was smoking, of course. I noticed that he’d let his hair grow since I’d seen him last. He’d probably just been too busy to bother getting it cut. He wasn’t the type to change styles out of vanity, or to care that the new length made his gray more noticeable.
When he saw me, he tossed the cigarette down on the sidewalk and stepped on it, looking at me appraisingly. “You’ve lost weight,” he said. “Come inside, we need to get some calories into you.”
We went in and moved through the cafeteria line, then settled in at a booth. Lefty’s was never empty, but it wasn’t packed, either, and quiet enough for us to talk. We sat under the photographs of Tinker and Evers and Chance, and I looked at Jack and said, “So tell me about this Skouras guy.”
“Well,” Jack began, “he came from a big family in Greece. Before World War Two, they had money and landholdings, all that. But then came the German occupation, then the civil war, and it all went away. Tony Skouras talks about this in interviews, how he came here as a teenager with nothing, determined to rebuild. It’s his bootstraps story.
“What he doesn’t talk about,” Jack said, “is that his first business venture in his twenties was to buy a pair of X-rated movie houses. He built those into a chain, and added a line of adult DVD-rental stores. They were so profitable that he was able to sell by the age of thirty and buy a shipping line, which was, on the surface, a more respectable trade.”
“Why ‘on the surface’? That sounds a lot more respectable than pornography.”
“Well, he’s using the shipping line and his import business to bring stolen art and antiquities into the country,” Jack said, “but that’s not the big deal. The bigger problem is he’s bringing in illegal immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He’s got contacts in the Balkan states, where a lot of people’s lives have been ripped up by the civil wars there, and they’ll do anything to get out. If it were just undocumented young men looking for work that Skouras was bringing in, that’d be one thing, but a big part of the trade is young women. Skouras supplies prostitution rings. Essentially, the guy’s a human trafficker, and he’s said to dip into the rings he supplies quite a bit, like a private dating pool.”
I nodded.
“None of that’s been proven. The feds have sniffed around him; the SEC has subpoenaed papers, but he’s got good accounting and good lawyering and nothing’s stuck. In the past few years he’s branched out further into legitimate enterprises. He owns a minority stake in a film studio in L.A., and he opened a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero, Rosemary’s, named for his wife. As far as I’ve heard, there’s nothing dirty about those operations.”
I nodded.
“But then there’s this. About ten years ago, Skouras got interested in horse racing. He went in big, bought a costly colt from Dubai and had it brought here and stabled at Golden Gate Fields. Then it didn’t live up to its potential. After it finished out of the money in several races, its heart just exploded during a routine exercise gallop.”
“Drugged?”
“That was never proven,” Jack said. “Which probably wasn’t much of a consolation to the exercise groom who suffered a compound pelvic fracture in the fall.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Let’s see, what other Skouras rumors can I dazzle you with? Oh yes,” he said. “There’s a very faintly whispered story that Tony had a daughter on the other side of the sheets, but that’s never been confirmed.”
I said, “A lot of the shit that sticks to him seems to be sexual-the X-rated theaters and the prostitution and an affair, and yet he was a family man. He had this genius kid.”
“He had two sons,” Jack reminded me. “Milos was a chip off the block. Followed his father into the family businesses, until the day he died of ‘food poisoning.’” He put finger quotes around the words.
“You think he was murdered?”
“Seems likely,” Jack said. “The kid was a piece of work. I guess Adrian was different. If you read his obituary, you’d know more about him than I do. Adrian never comes up much in conversations about his father. He certainly didn’t go into the family business. I think they were estranged.”
Nidia had said as much in our one conversation about him.
“Is his wife still alive? No, she’s not,” I said, remembering Adrian’s obit. “Not a very long-lived family, are they?”
Jack shook his head. “The funny thing is, though, Tony Skouras was never a good bet to outlive his wife, much less both sons. He had heart trouble and had undergone major bypass surgery four years ago. It wasn’t supposed to be a real long-term fix,” he said. “People keep expecting this guy to drop in his tracks, but it never happens. He’s a survivor. He just goes on and on.”
I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to ask. So I said, “You want some coffee?”
We went back to the cafeteria line and bought some, Jack stirring his a little too much, with the random gestures of a smoker who’d rather be outside having a cigarette. Then he asked the question I’d been expecting: “So, what’s your interest in Tony Skouras?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I can’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, I knew you were going to say that,” Jack said.
I’d expected him to dig, and said as much. “That’s it? You’re satisfied with that?”
“I don’t think it’s going to help me any to be dissatisfied.”
“I thought all reporters refused to take no for an answer.”
“Are you kidding? We hear no all the time,” Jack said. “And you’re thinking of the Hollywood version of journalism, where a reporter hears a hot tip one day and two days later there’s a big story splashed across A1. Real investigative journalism takes time. It takes slow circling around your subject, Freedom of Information Act requests, compiling and synthesizing of information. It doesn’t happen overnight.”