Hammerhead Ranch was falling apart, but that was its charm. The entrance was the gate of an Old West corral-two upright posts connected at the top by a wooden plank with the name of the motel and the cattle brand “HR” burned in a circle. In the middle of the plank was the stuffed head of a hammerhead shark with a rope lasso around its neck. The motel was a single-story L-shaped ranch house. The building stayed white, but the color of the trim changed every other year. Pink, blue, yellow, orange, seafoam green. It was originally the Golden Palm Inn, built in 1961, then the Coconut Grove, the Whispering Palms Lodge, the Econo-Palm Motor Court and Herb’s Triple-X Honeymoon Hideaway (“in the palms”). Then the owners got back from a trip through Texas on Route 66. They’d driven by Amarillo and seen the ten half-buried cars at the landmark Cadillac Ranch, and the rest is roadside Florida kitsch history. The owners contacted charter fishermen and taxidermy shops and in three months had purchased ten stuffed hammerhead sharks, which they planted in a row behind the swimming pool.
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.