"No. He's a good customer. He knows how it works, and he sure didn't want to take a check. You pass a check for that kind of money through a bank, and the IRS is all over you."
"Yeah," Vito said. "So what did Mr. Clark do?"
"He took the croupier out in the woods and shot him in the ear," Mr. Rosselli said, smiling broadly.
Mr. Cassandro laughed appreciatively.
"Kidding, of course," Mr. Rosselli went on. "No, what Mr. Clark did was make a couple of phone calls to get the money."
"I thought you said there was only a couple of hundred big ones in the other place," Vito asked.
'There was," Mr. Rosselli replied, and then asked, "Vito, what do you know about offshore banks?"
"Not a hell of a lot," Vito confessed.
"The thing they got going for them is their banking laws," Mr. Rosselli explained. "They don't have to tell the fucking IRS anything. How about that?"
"I heard something about that," Vito said. "Fuck the IRS."
"You said it. So what happens is that if you have to have, say, a couple of million dollars where you can get your hands on it right away, instead of a safe, where it don't earn no interest, you put it in an offshore bank, where it does. Understand?"
"Yeah," Vito said appreciatively.
"So Mr. Clark makes the telephone calls, and says he needs a million two right away to pay a winner, and it's set up. It's really no big deal, it happens all the time, not a million two, but five, six hundred big ones. Once a month, sometimes once a week. It goes the other way too, of course. Some high roller drops a bundle, and we put moneyin the offshore banks."
"Yeah, sure," Vito replied.
"But this time, we run into a little trouble," Mr. Rosselli said.
"No million two in the bank?" Vito asked with a smile.
"That's not the problem. The problem is moving the money. A million two is twelve thousand hundred-dollar bills. That's alot of green paper. You can't get that much money in an envelope, and drop it in a mailbox."
Vito tried to form a mental image of twelve thousand one-hundreddollar bills. He couldn't remember whether there were fifty or one hundred bills in one of those packages of money with the paper band around them. But either way, it was a hell of a lot of paper stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills.
"So what we have is people who carry the money for us," Mr. Rosselli said. "I guess, you're a cop, you know all about this?"
"No," Vito said honestly. "I figured it had to be something like that, but this is the first time I really heard how it works."
"It's a problem, finding the right people for that job," Mr. Rosselli said. "First of all, you don't hand a million dollars to just anybody. And then, with IRS and Customs watching-they're not stupid, they know how this is done-you can't use the same guy all the time, you understand?"
"I can see how that would work," Vito said.
"Anyway, the way it usually works, we take the money out of the bank, offshore, and give it to one of our guys, and he goes to Puerto Rico, and gets on the plane to Philly, and somebody meets him and takes the bag."
"Yeah," Vito said.
"The problem we have is that we think that IRS is watching the only guy we have available," Mr. Rosselli said.
"Oh," Vito said.
"So the way those IRS bastards work it is they make an anonymous telephone call, anonymous my ass, to either Customs or the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and tell them somebody, they give a description of our guy, is smuggling drugs. So when he's picking up his bag at the carousel, they search his bag. The Narcotics guys don't have to have the same, what do you call it, probable cause, that other cops do. You know what I mean."
"Probable cause," Vito said. "You need it to get a search warrant."
"Well, they don't need that. They can just search your bags, ' looking for drugs.' They don't find no drugs, of course, but they do find all that money."
"And then what happens? You lose the money?"