Avenger

When his Filipino manservant brought the pasteboard card to his terrace, he glanced at the words "attorney-at-law," frowned, and wondered who his visitor might be. The name rang a bell. He was about to tell his manservant to ask the visitor to come to the bank later in the morning, when a voice behind the Filipino said, "I know it's an impertinence, Mr. Ackerman, and for that I apologise. But if you will give me ten minutes, I suggest you will be glad we did not meet in the glare of attention at your office."

Ackerman shrugged and gestured to a chair across the table.

"Tell Mrs. Ackerman I'm in conference at the breakfast table," he instructed the Filipino. Then to Dexter, "Keep it short, Mr. Dexter."

"I will. You are pressing for the prosecution of my client, Mr. Washington Lee, for having allegedly skimmed almost a million dollars from your clients' accounts. I think it would be wise to drop the charges."

The CEO of the East River Savings Bank could have kicked himself. You show a little kindness and what do you get? A ball breaker ruining your breakfast.

"Forget it, Mr. Dexter. Conversation over. No way. The boy goes down. There must be deterrence to this sort of thing. Company policy. Good day."

"Pity. You see, the way he did it was fascinating. He broke into your computer mainframe. He waltzed through all your firewalls, your security guards. No one is supposed to be able to do that."

"Your time is up, Mr. Dexter."

"A few seconds more. There will be other breakfasts. You have about a million clients, checking accounts and deposit accounts. They think their funds are safe with you. Later this week a ski

Ackerman put down his coffee and stared across the park. "It's not true, and why should they believe it?"

"Because the press will be there and the TV and radio media will be outside. I think up to 25 percent of your clients could decide to change banks."

"We'll a

"But that's what you were supposed to have had before. And a kid from Bed-Stuy with no school grades broke it. You were lucky. You got the whole million dollars back. Supposing it happened again, for tens of millions in one awful weekend, and it went to the Caymans. The bank would have to reinstate. Would your board appreciate the humiliation?"

Lou Ackerman thought of his board. Some of the institutional shareholders were people like Shearson Lehman and Morgan Stanley, the sort of people who hated to be humiliated, the sort who might have a man's job.

"It's that bad, uh?"

"I'm afraid so."

"All right. I'll call the DA's office and say we have no further interest in proceeding, since we have all our money back. Mind you, the DA can still proceed if he wants to."

"Then you'll be very persuasive, Mr. Ackerman. All you have to say is: 'Scam, what scam?' After that, mum is the word, wouldn't you say?"

He rose and turned to leave. Ackerman was a good loser.

"We could always do with a good lawyer, Mr. Dexter."

"I've got a better idea. Take Washington Lee on the payroll. I'd have thought fifty thousand dollars a year is about right."

Ackerman was on his feet, Blue Mountain staining the table linen brown.

"What the hell should I want that lowlife on the payroll for?"

"Because when it comes to computers, he's the best. He's proved it. He sliced through a security system that cost you a mint to instal, and he did it with a fifty-dollar sardine can. He could instal for you a totally impenetrable system. You could make a sales point out of it: The safest database outside of Switzerland. He's much safer inside the tent pissing out."

Washington Lee was released twenty-four hours later. He was not quite sure why. Neither was the ADA. But the bank had had a bout of corporate amnesia, and the District Attorney's Office had its usual backlog. Why insist?

The bank sent a town car to the Tombs to pick up their new staffer. He had never been in one before He sat in the back and looked at the head of his lawyer poking in the window.

"Man, I don't know what you did or how you did it. One day maybe I can pay you back."

"OK, Washington, maybe one day you will."

11 The killer

When Yugoslavia was ruled by Marshal Tito it was virtually a crimefree society. Molesting a tourist was unthinkable, women safely walked the streets, and racketeering was nonexistent.

This was odd, considering that the six republics that made up Yugoslavia, cobbled together by the Western Allies in 1918, had traditionally produced some of the most vicious and violent gangsters in Europe.

The reason was that, post 1948, the Yugoslav government established a compact with the Yugoslav underworld. The deal was simple: You can do whatever you like, and we will turn a blind eye under one condition-you do it abroad. Belgrade simply exported its entire crime world.

The speciality targets for the Yugoslav crime bosses were Italy, Austria, Germany, and Sweden. The reason was simple. By the mid-1960s, the Turks and the Yugoslavs had become the first wave of "guest workers" in richer countries to the north, meaning that they were encouraged to come and do the mucky jobs that the overindulged indigenes no longer wanted to do.

Every large ethnic movement brings its own crime world with it. The Italian Mafia arrived in New York with the Italian immigrants; Turkish criminals soon joined the Turkish "guest worker" communities across Europe. The Yugoslavs were the same, but here the agreement was more structured.

Belgrade got it both ways. Its thousands of Yugoslavs working abroad sent their hard currency home each week. As a Communist state Yugoslavia was always an economic mess, but the regular inflow of hard currency hid the fact.

So long as Tito repudiated Moscow, the United States and NATO remained pretty relaxed about what else he did. Indeed, he ranked as one of the leaders of the nonaligned countries right through the Cold War. The beautiful Dalmatian coast along the Adriatic where the sun shone became a tourist Mecca, bringing in even more foreign exchange.

Internally, Tito ran a brutal regime where dissidents or opponents were concerned, but he kept it quiet and discreet. The compact with the gangsters was run and supervised not so much by the civil police but by the secret police, known as State Security or DB.

It was the DB that laid down the terms. The gangsters preying on the Yugoslav communities abroad could return home for R and R with impunity, and they did. They built themselves villas on the coast and mansions in the capital. They made their donations to the pension funds of the chiefs of the DB, and occasionally they were required to carry out a "wet job" with no invoice and no trace back. The mastermind of this cosy arrangement was the longtime Intelligence boss, the fat and fearsome Slovenian Stane Dolanc.

Inside Yugoslavia there was a little prostitution, but well under local police control, and some lucrative smuggling, which again helped official pension funds. But violence, other than the state kind, was forbidden. Young delinquents reached the level of ru

Those hard of hearing on this issue could find themselves in a remote prison camp with the cell key dropped down a deep well. Marshal Tito was no fool, but he was mortal. He died in 1980, and things began to fall apart.

In the blue-collar Belgrade district of Zemun, a garage mechanic had a son in 1956 and named him Zoran. From an early age it became plain that the boy's nature was vicious and deeply violent. By the age of ten, Zoran Zilic's teachers shuddered at the mention of him. But he had one thing that would later set him apart from other Belgrade gangsters like Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan. He was smart.