The Blue Zone

KATE, SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. CALL HOME QUICK!

Kate stared. She’d never gotten a message like that before. She didn’t like the sound of those words. Her mind flashed through the possibilities—and all of them were bad.

“Tina, sorry, but I gotta call home.”

“No sweat. I’ll just start the small talk rolling with Max.”

With a jitter of nerves, Kate punched in the speed dial of her parents’ home in Larchmont. Her mom picked up on the first ring. Kate could hear the alarm in her voice.

“Kate, it’s your father.…”

Something bad had happened. A tremor of dread flashed through her. Her dad had never been sick. He was in perfect shape. He could probably take Em at squash on a good day.

“What’s happened, Mom? Is he okay?”

“I don’t know.… His secretary just called in. Your father’s been arrested, Kate. He’s been arrested by the FBI!”

CHAPTER THREE

They took the cuffs off Raab inside FBI headquarters at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, leading him into a stark, narrow room with a wooden table and metal chairs and a couple of dog-eared Wanted posters tacked to a bulletin board on the wall.

He sat there staring up at a small mirror that he knew was the two-way kind, like on some police drama on TV. He knew what he had to tell them. He’d rehearsed it over and over. That this was all some kind of crazy mistake. He was just a businessman. He’d never done anything wrong in his entire life.

After about twenty minutes, the door opened. Raab stood up. The same two agents who had arrested him stepped in, trailed by a thin young man in a gray suit and short, close-cropped hair, who placed a briefcase on the table.

“I’m Special Agent in Charge Booth,” announced the tall, balding agent. “You’ve already met Special Agent Ruiz. This is Mr. Nardozzi. He’s a U.S. Attorney with the Justice Department who’s familiar with your case.”

“My case …?” Raab forced a hesitant smile, eyeing their thick files a little warily, not believing he was hearing that word.

“What we’re going to do is ask you a few questions, Mr. Raab,” the Hispanic agent, Ruiz, began. “Please sit back down. I can assure you this will go a lot easier if we can count on your full cooperation and you simply answer truthfully and succinctly to the best of your knowledge.”

“Of course.” Raab nodded, sitting back down.

“And we’re going to be taping this, if that’s okay?” Ruiz said, placing a standard cassette recorder on the table, not even waiting for his response. “It’s for your own protection, too. At any time, if you like, you can request that a lawyer be present.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.” Raab shook his head. “I have nothing to hide.”

“That’s good, Mr. Raab.” Ruiz winked back affably. “These things have a way of always going best when people have nothing to hide.”

The agent removed a stack of papers from the file and ordered them in a certain way on the table. “You’ve heard of a Paz Export Enterprises, Mr. Raab?” he started in, turning the first page.

“Of course,” Raab confirmed. “They’re one of my biggest accounts.”

“And just what is it you do for them?” the FBI agent asked him.

“I purchase gold. On the open market. They’re in the novelty gift business or something. I ship it to an intermediary on their behalf.”

“Argot Manufacturing?” Ruiz interjected, turning over a page from his notes.

“Yes, Argot. Look, if that’s what this is about—”

“And Argot does what with all this gold you purchase?” Ruiz cut him off one more time.

“I don’t know. They’re manufacturers. They turn it into gold plate, or whatever Paz requests.”

“Novelty items,” Ruiz said, cynically, looking up from his notes.

Raab stared back. “What they do with it is their business. I just buy the gold for them.”

“And how long have you been supplying gold to Argot on Paz’s behalf?” Agent in Charge Booth took up the questioning.

“I’m not sure. I’d have to check. Maybe six, eight years …”

“Six to eight years.” The agents glanced at each other. “And in all that time, Mr. Raab, you have no idea what products they make once they receive your gold?”

It had the feel of a rhetorical question. But they seemed to be waiting for an answer. “They make a lot of things.” Raab shrugged. “For different customers. Jewelry. Gold-plated stuff, desk ornaments, paperweights …”

“They consume quite a lot of gold,” Booth said, running his eye down a column of numbers, “for a bunch of desk ornaments and paperweights, wouldn’t you say? Last year over thirty-one hundred pounds. At roughly six hundred forty dollars an ounce, that’s over thirty-one million dollars, Mr. Raab.”

The number took Raab by surprise. He felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. He wet his lips. “I told you, I’m in the transaction business. They give me a contract. All I do is supply the gold. Look, maybe if you tell me what this is about …”

Booth stared back, as if bemused, with a cynical smile, but a smile, it appeared to Raab, that had facts behind it. Ruiz opened his folder and removed some new sheets. Photographs. Black-and-white, eight-by-tens. The shots were all of mundane items. Bookends, paperweights, and some basic tools: hammers, screwdrivers, hoes.

“You recognize any of these items, Mr. Raab?”

For the first time, Raab felt his heart start to accelerate. He warily shook his head. “No.”

“You receive payments from Argot, don’t you, Mr. Raab?” Ruiz took him by surprise. “Kickbacks …”

“Commissions,” Raab corrected him, irritated at his tone.

“In addition to your commissions.” Ruiz kept his eyes on him. He slid another sheet across the table. “Commissions in the commodities market run, what? One and a half, two percent? Yours go as high as six, eight percent, Mr. Raab, isn’t that right?”

Ruiz kept his gaze fixed on him. Raab’s throat suddenly went dry. He became aware he was fiddling with the gold Cartier cuff links Sharon had given him for his fiftieth birthday, and he stopped abruptly. His glance flicked back and forth among the three agents, trying to gauge what was in their minds.

“Like you said, they use a lot of gold,” he answered. “But what they do with it is their business. I just supply the gold.”

“What they do with it”—Agent Booth’s voice grew hard, losing patience—“is they export it, Mr. Raab. These novelty items, as you say, they aren’t made of steel or brass or gold plate. They’re solid bullion, Mr. Raab. They’re painted and anodized to make them look like ordinary items, as I suspect you know. Do you have any idea where these items end up, Mr. Raab?”

“Somewhere in South America, I think.” Raab reached for his voice, which clung deep in his throat. “I told you, I just buy it for them. I’m not sure I understand what’s going on.”

“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—Booth leveled his eyes at him—“is that you’ve already got one foot in a very deep bucket of shit, and I guess we just want to know, regarding the other, if it’s in or out. You say you’ve worked with Argot for between six and eight years. Do you know who owns the company?”

“Harold Kornreich,” Raab answered more firmly. “I know Harold well.”

“Good. And what about Paz? Do you know who runs that?”

“I think his name is Spessa or something. Victor. I met him a few times.”

“Actually, Victor Spessa, whose real name is Victor Concerga”—Ruiz slid a photo forward—“is merely an operating partner in Paz. The articles of incorporation, which Agent Ruiz is laying out for you, are from a Cayman Islands corporation, BKA Investments, Limited.” Ruiz spread out a few more photos on the table. Surveillance shots. The men looked clearly Hispanic. “Are any of these faces familiar to you, Mr. Raab?”

Now Raab grew truly worried. A trickle of sweat cut a slow, cold path down his back. He picked up the photos, looked at them closely, one by one. He tremulously shook his head. “No.”

“Victor Concerga. Ramón Ramírez. Luis Trujillo,” the lead FBI man said. “These individuals are listed as the key officers of BKA, to whom the simple household products your gold is converted into are consigned. Trujillo,” Ruiz said, pushing across a surveillance shot of a stocky man in a fancy suit climbing into a Mercedes, “is one of the leading money managers for the Mercado family in the Colombian drug cartel.”

“Colombia!” Raab echoed. His eyes bulged wide.

“And just to be clear, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz winked. “We’re not talking the B-school here.”

Raab stared at them, his jaw in his lap.

“The gold you purchase, Mr. Raab, on behalf of Paz, is melted down and cast into ordinary household items, then plated over or painted and shipped back to Colombia, where it is reconstituted into bullion. Paz is just a sham operation. It is one hundred percent owned by the Mercado drug cartel. The money they pay you … for your ‘transactions,’ as you call them, is derived from the business of narcotics distribution. The gold you supply”—the agent widened his eyes—“is how they ship it home.”

“No!” Raab leaped up, this time eyes fiery, defiant. “I have nothing to do with that. I swear. I supply gold. That’s all. I have a contract. This Victor Concerga solicited me, like a lot of people do. If you’re trying to scare me, okay, you got my attention. It’s working! But Colombians … Mercados …” He shook his head. “No way. What the hell do you think is going on here?”

Booth just rubbed his jaw as if he hadn’t heard a word Raab had been saying. “When Mr. Concerga came to you, Mr. Raab, he said he wanted to do exactly what?”

“He said he needed to buy gold. He wanted to convert it into certain items.”

“And how was it that in order to do that he was first introduced to Argot Manufacturing?”

Raab recoiled. He saw it now. Clearly. Where this was starting to lead. Argot was owned by his friend. Harold. He had introduced them.

And for years Raab had been paid handsomely for having set up the deal.

That was when Nardozzi, the Justice Department lawyer, who had to this point remained silent, leaned forward, saying, “You understand the definition of money laundering, don’t you, Mr. Raab?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Raab felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His face turned totally white.

“I didn’t know anything!” He shook his head. Sweat was suddenly soaking through the back of his shirt. “All right, I … I did take commissions from Argot,” he stammered. “But that was more like a kind of finder’s fee—not a kickback. I was just a go-between. People do it all the time. But I swear, I had no idea what they were doing with the gold. This is crazy.” He searched the agents’ faces for an understanding eye. “I’ve been in business twenty years.…”

“Twenty years.” Ruiz clasped his hands across his stomach, rocking backward. “That’s a number we’re going to be coming back to from time to time. But for now … you say Concerga came to you first?”

“Yes. He said he wanted to manufacture some items of gold.” Raab nodded. “That I would be the broker of record for him, if I could find someone. That it would be very lucrative. I put him in touch with Harold. I never even heard of BKA Investments. Or Trujillo. Harold’s a good man. I’ve known him since we first got into the business. He just needed work.”

“You’re familiar with the RICO statutes, aren’t you, Mr. Raab?” The U.S. Attorney unlatched his case. “Or the Patriot Act?”

“RICO …” The blood drained out of Raab’s face. “That’s for mobsters. The Patriot Act? What the hell do you think I am?”

“The RICO statutes state that all it takes is knowledge of a criminal enterprise or a pattern of involvement in one to constitute a felony, which your brokering of the arrangement between Paz and Argot—not to mention the stream of illicit payments you’ve received from them over a period of years—clearly represented.

“I might also draw your attention to the Patriot Act, Mr. Raab, which makes it illegal since 2001 not to report checks in excess of twenty thousand dollars from any foreign entity.”

“The Patriot Act?” Raab’s knee shot up and down like a jackhammer. “What the hell are you saying here?”

“What we’re saying,” Special Agent Booth cut in, casually scratching at the short orange hairs on the side of his head, “is that you’re pretty much fucked and fried here, Mr. Raab—pardon the French—and what you ought to start thinking about now is how to make this go your way.”

“My way?” Raab felt the heat of the room under his collar. He had a flash of Sharon and the kids. How would they possibly deal with this? How would he even begin to explain …? He felt his head start to spin.

“You don’t exactly look so good, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz pretended to be concerned. He got up and poured him a cup of water.

Raab dropped his forehead into his hands. “I think I need my lawyer now.”

“Oh, you don’t need a lawyer.” Agent in Charge Booth stared wide-eyed. “You need the whole fucking Department of Justice to make this go your way.”

Ruiz came back to the table, pushing the water across to Raab. “Of course, there might be a way this could all work out for you.”

Raab ran his hands through his hair. He took a gulp of water, cooling his brow. “What way?”

“The way of keeping you out of a federal prison for the next twenty years,” Booth replied without a smile.

Raab felt a pain shoot through his stomach. He took another sip of water, sniffing back a mixture of mucus and hot tears. “How?”

“Concerga, Mr. Raab. Concerga leads to Ramirez and Trujillo. You’ve seen the movies. That’s the way it works here, too. You take us up the ladder, we find a way to make things disappear. Of course, you understand,” the FBI man added, rocking back with an indifferent shrug, “your buddy Harold Kornreich has to go, too.”

Raab stared at him blankly. Harold was a friend. He and Audrey had been to Justin’s bar mitzvah. Their son, Tim, had just been accepted to Middlebury. Raab shook his head. “I’ve known Harold Kornreich twenty years.”

“He’s already history, Mr. Raab,” Booth said with a roll of his eyes. “What you don’t want to happen is for us to pose the same questions to him about you.”

Ruiz maneuvered his chair around the table and pulled it up close to Raab in a chummy sort of way. “You have a nice life, Mr. Raab. What you’ve got to think about now is how you can keep it that way. I saw those pictures in your office. I’m not sure how twenty years in a federal penitentiary would go over with that pretty family of yours.”

“Twenty years!”

Ruiz chuckled. “See, I told you we’d come around to that number again.”

A surge of anger rose in Raab’s chest. He jumped up. This time they let him. He went over to the wall. He started to slam his fist against it, then stopped. He spun back around.

“Why are you doing this to me? All I did was get two people together. Half the people on the fucking Street would have done the same thing. You throw the Patriot Act in my face. You want me to turn on my friends. All I did was buy the gold. What the hell do you think I am?”

They didn’t say anything. They just let Raab slowly come back to the table. His eyes were burning, and he sank into the chair and wiped them with the palms of his hands.

“I need to speak with my lawyer now.”

“You want representation, that’s your decision,” Ruiz replied. “You’re a cooked goose, Mr. Raab, whichever way. Your best bet is to talk to us, try and make this go away. But before you make that call, there’s one last thing you might want to pass along.”

“And what is that?” Raab glared, frustration pulsing through his veins.

The FBI man removed another photo from his file and slid it across the table. “What about this face, Mr. Raab? Does it look familiar to you?”

Raab picked it up. He stared at it, almost deferentially, as the color drained from his face.

Ruiz started laying out a series of photos. Surveillance shots, like before. Except this time they were of him. Along with a short, stocky man with a thin mustache, bald on top. One was through the window of his own office, taken from across the street. Another of the two of them at the China Grill, over lunch. Raab’s heart fell off a cliff.

“Ivan Berroa,” he muttered, staring numbly at the photograph.

“Ivan Berroa.” The FBI man nodded, holding back a smile.

As if on cue, the door to the interrogation room opened and someone new stepped in.

Raab’s eyes stretched wide.

It was the man in the photo. Berroa. Dressed differently from how Raab had ever seen him. Not in a leather jacket and jeans, but in a suit.

Wearing a badge.

“I think you already know Special Agent Esposito, don’t you, Mr. Raab? But should your memory need refreshing, we can always play back the voice recordings of your meetings if you like.”

Raab looked up, his face white. They had him. He was fucked.

“Like we told you at the beginning”—Agent Ruiz started picking up the photos with a coy smile—“these things seem to go best when the person has nothing to hide.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Kate barely caught the 12:10 train at Fordham Road to get back to her parents’ home in Larchmont, squeezing into the last car just as the doors were about to close.

All she’d had time to do was grab a few personal things and leave a cryptic message for Greg on the way: “Something’s happened with Ben. I’m heading up to the house. I’ll let you know when I know more.”

It took until the train pulled away from the station and Kate found herself in the midday emptiness of the car for it to hit her—body-slam her, was more like it—just what her mother had said.

Her father had been arrested by the FBI.

If she hadn’t heard the panic in her voice she would have thought it was some kind of joke. Money laundering. Conspiracy. That was crazy.… Her dad was one of the straightest shooters she knew.

Sure, maybe he might finagle a commission here or there. Or put a family meal on the company tab once in a while. Or fudge his taxes.… Everyone did that.

But RICO statutes … abetting a criminal enterprise … the FBI … This was nuts. She knew her father. She knew what kind of man he was. There was absolutely no possible way.…

Kate bought a ticket from the conductor, then leaned her head against the window, trying to catch her breath.

Reputation was everything to her dad, he always said. His business was based on it. He didn’t have salesmen or some fancy arbitrage program or a back room filled with hustling traders. He had himself. He had his contacts, his years in business. He had his reputation. What else was there beyond his word?

Once, Kate recalled, he had refused to handle a large estate sale—it was well into seven figures—just because the executor had shopped it to a friendly competitor on the Street and Dad didn’t like the appearance that he’d been bidding for the job against his friend.

And another time he’d taken back an eight-carat diamond he’d brokered in a private sale after two years. Just because some shyster appraiser the buyer had found later insisted that the stone was a little hazy. A six-figure sale. Hazy? Even Em and Justin told him he was nuts to do it. The stone hadn’t changed! The woman just didn’t want it anymore.

The Metro-North train rattled past the housing projects in the Bronx. Kate sank back in her seat. She was worried for him, what he must be feeling. She closed her eyes.

She was the oldest—by six years. How many times had her father told her what a special bond that created between them? It’s our little secret, pumpkin. They even had their own little private greeting. They had seen it in some movie and it just stuck: a one-fingered wave.

She looked a bit different from the rest of them. She was wide-eyed and pretty, kind of like Natalie Portman, everybody always said. Her hair was shoulder-length and light brown. Everyone else’s was thicker and darker. And those sharp green eyes—where did those come from? Flipped chromosomes, Kate always explained. You know, the dominant-recessive Y … how it skips a generation.

“Pretty,” her dad would tease her. “I just can’t figure out how she got to be so smart.”

Leaning against the glass, Kate thought of how many times he had come through for her.

For all of them.

How he’d leave work early to come home and catch her soccer games in high school, once even hopping a plane a day early from the Orient when her team had made the district finals. Or drive all over the Northeast to Emily’s squash tournaments—she was one of the top-ranked juniors in Westchester County—and coax her back to earth when that famous temper got the best of her after she lost a tough match.

Or how at Brown, after Kate had gotten sick, when she took up crew, he’d drive up on weekends and sit there on the shore and watch her row.

Kate always figured that her dad was such a committed family guy because, truth was, growing up, he’d never had much of one of his own. His mother, Rosa, had come over from Spain when he was a boy. His father had died there, a streetcar accident or something. Kate actually never knew that much about him. And his mother had died young as well, while he was putting himself through NYU. Everyone admired her father. At the club, in his business, their friends—that’s why this didn’t make any sense.

What the hell did you do, Daddy?

Suddenly Kate’s head started to throb. She felt the familiar pressure digging into her eyes, the dryness in her throat, followed by the wave of fatigue.

Shit …

She knew that this might happen. It always came on with stress. It didn’t take but a second to recognize the signs.

She dug through her bag and found her Accu-Chek—her blood monitor. She’d been diagnosed when she was seventeen, her senior year.

Diabetes. Type 1. The real deal.

Kate had gotten a little depressed at first. Her life underwent a radical change. She’d had to drop soccer. She didn’t take her SATs. She had to watch her diet strictly when everyone else was going out for pizza or partying on Saturday nights.

And once she had even fallen into a hypoglycemic coma. She was cramming for a test in the school cafeteria when her fingers began to grow numb and the pen slipped out of her hand. Kate didn’t know what was happening. The dizziness took over. Her body wouldn’t respond. Faces started to look a little gauzy. She tried to scream—What the hell is going on!

Next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital two days later, attached to about a dozen monitors and tubes. It had been six years now. In that time she had learned to manage things. She still had to give herself two shots a day.

Kate pressed the Accu-Chek needle into her forefinger. The digital meter read 282. Her norm was around 90. Jesus, she was off the charts.

She dug into her purse and came out with her kit. She always kept a spare in the fridge at the lab. She took out a syringe and the bottle of Humulin. The train car was not crowded; no reason she couldn’t do this right here. She lifted the syringe and pressed it into the insulin, forcing out the air: 18 units. Kate lifted her sweater. It was routine for her. Twice a day for the past six years.

She pressed the needle into the soft part of her belly underneath her rib cage. She gently squeezed.

Those initial worries about what it meant to live with diabetes all seemed like a long time ago now. She had gotten into Brown. She had changed her focus, started thinking about biology. And she started rowing there. Just for exercise at first. Then it created a new sense of discipline in her life. In her junior year—though she was only five feet four and barely 115 pounds—she had placed second in the All-Ivy single sculls.