Dunetown was once a quiet friendly little town. Now it had 24-hour porno palaces, neon
casinos, a big racetrack and was run by the Cincinnati Triad. Together with the Special
Operations Branch of the Dunetown Police Department, Kilmer aims to put them out of
business.
WILLIAM DIEHL
HOOLIGANS
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1984 by Hooligans, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan—American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-50862
ISBN Q-345-31201-5
This edition published by arrangement with Villard Books
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Ballantine Books Edition: May 1985
Map by David Lindroth
This book is dedicated to Virginia, who is the love of my life;
To Michael Parver, for his support and friendship through the tough times,
and for Stick;
And to my father, the most gentle and loving man I have ever known, who died before it was completed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks and gratitude to my family and friends for their constant encouragement and support: to my mother,
Temple, Cathy, John and Kate, Bill, Melissa arid David, Stan arid Yvonne, Bobby Byrd, Carole Jackowitz,
Marilyn Parver, Michael Rothschild, Billy Wallace, Frank Mazolla, the Harrisons of Lookout Mountain, Mark
Vaughn, Barbara Thomas, jack and Jim.
To a true and trusting friend, Don Smith, whose wit and wisdom always help.
To my good friend, C.H. “Buddy” Harris, of the Treasury Department, for his selfless assistance and attention to
detail, and to his wife, Joan, and daughter, Robin.
To Director Charles F. Rinkevich, Deputy Director David McKinley, Kent Williams, Charles E. Nester, Morris
Grodsky, and the other officers of the Treasury Department‟s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center,
Brunswick, Ga., for their invaluable technical assistance.
To George Gentry and the many other men who served in Vietnam and shared their experiences and feelings
with me.
To George, Bill, Bear, B.L., Nancy aid Slavko, Sandy, Jim, Frankie and Jingle, Larry, Averett, Ted, Mike, Kurt,
Richard, Ruth, Dayton, and all my friends and associates of the late, great Higdon‟s on St. Simons Island, Ga.,
for sharing their names, friendship, time, and experiences with me.
To my editor, Peter Gethers, a man of awesome insights, and to Susan and Audrey, and the rest of his sterling
staff.
To Marc Jaffe, for his continued faith.
To Irene Webb, my favorite wonder woman.
And to a treasured and lasting friend, Owen Laster, at once and always, a gentleman of the realm.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS BRANCH
The fish trusts the water, And it is in the water that it is cooked.
_HAITIAN PROVERB
PREFACE
DUNETOWN
Dunetown is a city forged by Revolutionaries, hammered and shaped by rascals arid southern rebels,
and mannered by genteel ladies.
Dunetown is grace and unhurried charm, azalea-lined boulevards and open river promenades, parks
and narrow lanes; a city of squares; of ironwork and balustrades, shutters and dormers, porticoes and
steeples and dollops of gingerbread icing; of bricks, ballast, and oyster shells underfoot; a waterfront
place of massive walls and crude paving, of giant shutters on muscular hinges and winding stairwells
and wrought-iron spans; a claustrophobic vista where freighters glide by on the river, a mere reach
away, and sea gulls yell at robins.
It is a city whose heartbeat changes from block to block as subtly as its architecture; a city of
seventeenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and taverns; of ceiling fans and Tiffany windows, twostory atriums, blue barrel dormers, Georgian staircases and Palladian windows and grand, elegant
antebellum mansions that hide from view among moss-draped oaks and serpentine vines.
Dunetown is a stroll through the eighteenth century, its history limned on cemetery tablets:
HERE LIES JENIFER GOLDSMITH
LOVING WYF OF JEREMY
WHO DIED OF THE PLAGUE THAT KILED SO MENY
IN THESE PARTS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1744
JAMES OLIVER
A FAST TONGUE AND HOT TEMPER
DEAD AT 22 YRS. OF HIS ACE
IN A DUEL WITH LT. CHARLES MORAY
WHO SHOT QUICKER AND WITH KEENER EYE
These are its ancestors. The survivors become the city‟s power brokers, the rulers of the kingdom,
dictating an archaic social structure that is unchanging, and defined by its metaphor, the Dune Club,
restricted to the elite, whose money is oldest, whose roots are deepest, and who, for more than a
century, have sequestered it from time.
Thus the years have passed Dunetown, leaving behind a treasure: an eighteenth-century serfdom
whose history trembles with ghost stories, with wars and brawls and buried loot on shaggy Atlantic
beaches; whose people have the heritage and independence of islanders, their bloodlines traced to
Irish colliers, Spanish privateers, to Haiti and Jamaica, and Cherokee reservations.
Its bays, marshes, and rivers still weave a city composed of islands: Alec, Skidaway, Thunderhead,
Buccaneer, Oceanby, Sea Oat, and the wistful, Gatsby-like isle of Sighs, a haunt of the rich, its
antique houses serene against the backwaters of the sea, where one might easily envision a solitary
and forlorn Jay Gatz, staring across the water at the solemn light on Daisy‟s pier
The past is everywhere,
If you listen,
For that is not the wind you hear,
it is the whispering ghost of yesteryear.
Reality, to Dunetown, is history to the rest of the world.
INTRODUCTION
A Walk Through Dunetown
J. THOMPSON,1972
PROLOGUE
Sunday: Dawn The small trawler was heading north an hour before dawn on the eighth day out of
Cumaná, Venezuela, when the captain of the four-man crew first spotted the red trouble light blinking
on the mast of the sailboat. He made it a mile or so away when he saw it the first time. The trawler
was ten miles at sea and thirty-five miles northeast of Fernandina, Honda, at the time. The captain
watched the light for half an hour as his rusty scow drew closer.
In the gray light just before the sun broke, they were close enough to see the sailboat, a rich man‟s
toy, dead in the water. It was a forty-footer, with a man on deck. The man had removed his shirt and
was waving it overhead.