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What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pe
The problem was, Kaiser saw no hope for a quick resolution. The Double Eagle group was tied to at least a dozen unsolved rape, kidnapping, and murder cases in and around Concordia Parish and Natchez, Mississippi. And while Kaiser had made remarkable progress during the past twenty-four hours, it might take weeks or even months to solve them all. The surviving Double Eagles were tough men who had never been compromised, much less infiltrated. Breaking them would be difficult. The one Eagle who had shown signs of wanting to wash his conscience clean—a terminal cancer patient named Gle
It was Sexton’s working files and notes that Kaiser hoped to access by breaching the computers of the Natchez Examiner. Early that morning, Kaiser had learned from Sexton’s girlfriend that the injured reporter had given a bundle of Moleskine notebooks containing the results of years of Double Eagle investigations to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Examiner. Kaiser had tried both bribes and threats to persuade Masters to allow him access to those notebooks, but so far she had refused. Just before going to bed, his wife had told him that she’d spoken to Masters (who was a great admirer of her work) about them all being on the same side, and Jordan believed the publisher would allow Kaiser access to the notebooks tomorrow. He’d made up his mind to subpoena Sexton’s records under the Patriot Act in any case. But as he’d lain awake in the dark beside his wife, he’d begun to believe that waiting even eight hours for that information would be a mistake.
Though few knew it, Kaiser had twice today visited Henry Sexton in the hospital, and during the second meeting he’d heard a story that had stu
He did not, however, know anything about the rest of Morehouse’s Ke
The aborted plot to kill Robert Ke
After Kaiser heard this, every instinct told him that Carlos Marcello’s approach to Frank Knox about killing RFK in 1968 was not the first time the mobster had gone to the former marine for that kind of help. In 1961 and ’62, Frank Knox had been training Cuban expatriates in a South Louisiana camp funded by Marcello. And in 1963 Marcello had even more reason to believe Robert Ke
What complicated Kaiser’s effort to redeem the Bureau’s record—and honor—was the fact that the Louisiana State Police were working against him. In a uniquely southern twist, the chief of the LSP’s Criminal Investigations Bureau was the son of Frank Knox. Forrest Knox had worked hard to distance himself from his family’s racist past, and he’d been so successful that many Louisiana politicians supported him as the next superintendent of the state police. For Kaiser, this possibility represented a nightmare. If his suspicions were correct, Forrest Knox was the architect of a statewide criminal organization that used corrupt police officers and ex–Double Eagles to facilitate drug smuggling, gambling, and prostitution—the rackets once ruled by the Marcello organization of old. Whispered rumors that Knox had used a state police SWAT team to wipe out drug competitors during the chaos of Katrina were starting to seem more like fact than fantasy. Worse still, Kaiser had begun to uncover co
“I’m almost through,” said one of the technicians behind Kaiser. “They have better security than I expected. It’s run out of the home office in South Carolina.”