Chunk and Roberto drew their pistols from under their shirts. A car approached, and they quickly dropped them to their sides until it passed. Chunk stepped up on the one front stair to the door and tried the knob. It was locked. He looked at Roberto, who raised his left hand in a knocking gesture. Chunk shook his head no.
The door was weather beaten, not thin and not strong. Chunk figured he could lean into it, break it open. He made a breaking open motion to Roberto, who shook his head no. In that instant, Roberto knocked loudly. Chunk stepped back, ran at the door and broke it open. A small room to the right had two mattresses and no one in it. He kept running down the hallway, heard voices as he burst into what was the kitchen. One man reached for his gun as Chunk shot him dead. Two others were behind the dead man, and Chunk shot them. A fourth man came in from another room, behind Chunk. He had a knife and as Chunk swung around the taller man slashed at Chunk. Chunk avoided the knife by stepping back. He looked at the man for a second and said, “Never bring a knife to a gun fight,” and he shot him dead.
A fifth man, the San Salvadoran, went out the back door. There were three shots, from what sounded like two guns Chunk thought as he ran out the back door. The San Salvadoran was on the ground with a gun in his hand, trying to raise it up. Chunk shot him. Paco was on the ground wounded. Shot in the leg, bleeding.
“Roberto, help me.” Chunk said calling to Roberto who came out and was now beside him as he lifted Paco up. “We’ll carry him to the car and do a tourniquet there.”
Paco said, “You gotta stop the bleeding now. It looks bad Chunk.”
“Shut up or it’s gonna look a lot worse. You’ll live,” Chunk said as he and Roberto Calo placed Paco’s arms around their necks and carried him back through the house.
There was a large duffel bag on the floor. There were several one kilo bags of cocaine in various stages of being cut and packaged for retail sales. There were piles of money on the counter by the sink.
“Hold him up for a moment,” Chunk said, and he grabbed the bag, swept the money off the counter into it, then picked up the bags of cocaine and placed them in the bag. The open ones spilt the white powder over the bag, and the money. Chunk then swung the bag over his shoulder. He replaced Paco’s arm around his neck.
They walked out the front door as a car passed by with music blasting and the driver in a trance. They carried Paco around the corner to the car and laid him down in the back seat. Chunk tore off part of his tee shirt and put it into the bullet hole. Paco screamed. “Be quiet. You yell like a girl,” Chunk said with a smile, and he laughed. Through his pain, Paco managed a smile.
Then Chunk took off his belt, ripped Paco’s pant leg open and wrapped it around the leg, just above the bullet hole. He placed the end of the belt in Paco’s hand. “Hold this and keep it tight. It will stop the bleeding till we get you to the doctor.”
They drove over the cobblestoned streets with Paco reeling in pain with each bump.
They were down the hill and onto the beach highway back toward Recife in less than a minute. No police.
“You can’t take me to a hospital with a gunshot, Chunk,” Paco said, adding, “They’ll call the cops.”
“I have my own doctor. You just relax,” and in ten minutes, they crossed the bridge over the Capibaribe River. “Paco, you fool look. And he pointed to three boys diving off the bridge into the river.”
“I must be dying,” Paco said, half laughing, half crying as he too remembered how he first met Chunk.
“It’s a sign from God. You will be fine.”
Roberto Calo was silent but impressed with the fearlessness of his business partner and his loyalty to his men.
In another five minutes, they pulled up to a private home in the rich Derby neighborhood. He told Roberto to look after Paco, that he would be right back.
Chunk knocked on the front door of the pink stucco villa with the green tiled roof. A maid answered, and Chunk said something to her. She went away and shortly a man appeared. Paco recognized him; it was the doctor from the hospital many years ago who had saved Raphael’s eye.
Chunk spoke with him for a moment. He indicated to Chunk to pull the car into the driveway to the left of the house and to the back, which he did.
The doctor never said a word. He helped Paco out of the car. Chunk and Calo carried him into a small office that the doctor used as a home examining room. They placed Paco on the table. He leaned back and passed out from loss of blood.
The doctor pulled Paco’s pants off, leaving him naked from the waist down. He pulled the belt off and pulled the wad of tee shirt out of the bullet hole. It had stopped bleeding. “OK, let me work,” indicating to Calo and Chunk they should wait outside. The doctor washed his hands rapidly, and as they started to leave the office, he pulled an instrument bag onto the table.
“Chunk, come back, I can use your help. I need you to hold onto him in case he wakes up. I don’t have any anesthesia to give him,” the doctor said as he was already prying his way into Paco’s thigh with an instrument looking for the bullet.
Paco winced in his semi-coma as the pain increased.
After several minutes of prying, the doctor found the bullet and removed it. He cleaned the wound and put several stitches inside the leg and several more into the outer skin.
“Ain’t going to happen, Doc,” Chunk said pulling Paco’s pants back on him. “You need to tell me what I need to do to help him recover in my house. And I will need you to make a house call tomorrow.”
“Sure, Chunk, I’ll come by. The best thing right now is to get him into bed resting. He’s going to need lots of liquids.”
Calo, who stayed also and looked on, found the relationship between respectable doctor and drug dealer fascinating. Fascinating that a doctor would do Chunk’s bidding so willingly.
They carried the now partly conscious Paco to Chunk’s car and again laid him down in back.
The doctor carried out a small bag and handed it to Chunk. “Here’s some more bandages and antiseptic. Change the bandage twice a day and put some of this on the wound. It will help prevent infection. Watch for a fever. If it he gets bad Chunk, you’ll have to bring him into a hospital.”
“Got it, Doc, thanks,” and they drove off.
Over the next week Paco did start to get better. The doctor came by three of the first four days that Paco was at Chunk’s home. In this same time frame, Pedro, Paco’s twin, took over his brother’s drug operation and filled Chunk in on the results of the attack on the rival dealers. Of the six other locations, there was only one person at four of the locations and Paco’s men killed all of them. At one location there were two men, and a brief gun battle took place before Paco’s men overwhelmed them and killed them. The sixth location was the only failure. One of Paco’s men was killed, another wounded. There had been four men in the house. Three were killed, the fourth got away. Paco’s men were searching for him. They knew who he was, kidnapped his sister, and told his mother that if he didn’t surrender they would cut his sister’s head off.
On the fifth day, Chunk ordered it done. “Cut her head off and drop it off on the mother’s front door. These people think we’re playing with them. Leave a note under the head that if her son ever appears in Purnambuco we will kill her.”
Pedro argued that the girl was only fifteen. “She didn’t do anything. She doesn’t know any of us and can’t harm us.”
“Pedro,” Chunk began angrily, “you know better. No witnesses. Her brother knows what went down, knows who we are. If we let the sister go, he will see it as a sign of our weakness. It will only encourage him.”
“But, Chunk?” Pedro pleaded.
“What’s the matter with you? Have you gone weak on me? Look what they did to your poor brother. What they did to his men. What they tried to do to our business. No. Do it and don’t qu
estion me again.”
Pedro acknowledged Chunk.
Pedro was troubled; he did not sleep that night, and arose soaking wet with sweat.
She’s a kid, he told himself as he drove to the safe house where she was being held. When he got there he entered the house, grabbed the girl, slit her throat and when she was dead he cut off her head. That night he left her head with the note at her mother’s front door. After that Chunk’s gang never had trouble from the San Salvadorans again.
Chunk, the homeless boy on the beach, had become a murderous menace. The madness that was his behavior grew worse as he got older. It was as if all men, but for those in his enterprise, were competitors and needed to be eliminated. But, he was respectful of customers or those who could help him like the doctor, the good doctor. And as the years passed the respected included the politicians and the builders who were using his cement. He was respectful of them—as long as they did what he wanted.
When Mercosur, the South American free trade treaty, was passed it promised to open a new era of regional growth for all Latin American companies. One export from Argentina and Mexico that quickly found new markets in Brazil was cement. Brazil was going through a great growth spurt and construction was leading that boom. Cement exporters from Argentina and the giant Mexican cement company, Cemex, were posing new problems, more complex than Chunk had ever encountered.
These foreign exporters would offer the cement at a very good price but would also seek to horizontally integrate themselves into the builders by offering a full supply chain: delivering the cement to the site, mixed in their own trucks, they would frame and block the targeted areas, such as foundations or ascending floors. They would do this all for the same price as Chunk’s bags of cement, which did not have the added value of the supply chain.
Chunk’s cement company, CDL Cement, was significant in size but significantly unprofitable and could not compete. He had professional managers running the company, but his presence was more as a silent partner. As the competition heated up, losses grew, and Chunk became less silent.
His company president, a middle aged man by the name of Ignacio Braun, had been a general manager for one of the divisions of the company. After assuming ownership Chunk met with Ignacio and the chief financial officer. He described what he expected from the company, offered the job of President to Ignacio, who asked Chunk “what about the current president, Juan Lopez.”
“Mr. Lopez has a new assignment. Retirement. What other questions do you have for me?”
He had none. He accepted the job, and unfortunately he accepted Chunk’s terms: Chunk wanted 20 percent revenue growth and 15 percent net profit. He expected this from a company with 5 percent gross margins that was losing one million dollars on fifty million dollars of sales. The problem for Ignacio would be the way the new company would deal with missed expectations; it would not be a lower performance review, a missed bonus or even a firing. It would be far more personal.
Chunk along with Carlos who was overseeing other businesses would meet with Ignacio and the CFO monthly to review the progress of the cement business.
Sadly for them and their immediate successors progress was not fast enough. Newspapers reported it strange that two presidents of the CDL Cement Company had met violent deaths.
The third time was a charm for DeLuna. He installed Carlos as president along with a new chief financial officer. During the course of the three years that DeLuna and Carlos had been micromanaging, Carlos actually learned quite a bit about the cement business, plumbing its depth with rigorous questioning of everyone in and out of leadership positions. Carlos, in fact, had become quite popular inside the company with midlevel managers. He had risen from the shadows where he had been assigned by Chunk as a special assistant to Ignacio and then succeeded his dead predecessor.
Together with the company’s larcenous sales vice president, Carlos put a plan in place to lock out the foreign competition, since local competition had been dealt with already. Each state in Northern Brazil had a director of construction permitting: no permit for a site, no building. Through a series of relationship building experiences with these gentlemen to some of the bordellos in another division of CDL, they treated the state executives like royalty. Plenty of cash changed hands, funded from the drug operations.
Now developers were willing to pay a higher price for CDL cement since dealing with that particular company always made permitting easier, especially when the state directors could see the contract had been signed designating CDL. Each state director was given a significant bonus for every approved permit that carried a CDL contract.
Carlos’ sales director for CDL felt like his sales force had been significantly expanded with developers looking to make sure CDL was included in every application, along with state directors only awarding permits to CDL tie ins.
The price rose on cement; CDL learned some of the lessons of horizontal integration and were now selling extended services at much higher prices than those of the Mercosur players who surprisingly just could not compete with CDL.
Chapter 29
The inner walls of Auburn prison are so high that on a summer’s day the sun only hits the full court yard for the one hour from just before noon to just after noon. As he passed through the quadrangle at 1 p.m., no sun shone on three quarters of the grass. CJ Strong was hoping that on this visit by his mother, Billy Stevens would be accompanying her.
“Well, if that no good Billy Stevens isn’t here in the next week,” his mother told him over the phone two weeks before this visit, “I’ll collar him by the ear and drag him here with me.”
And when Louise Strong saw the face of her son, she saw the hope sag. She knew what it meant.
“I saw your face, CJ. It dropped when you saw me. Or I should say when you didn’t see Billy with me.”
“No, I just had a thought about something else.”
“No, I know you, CJ. Do you want to tell me what this is about? Something happened when Billy came to visit you, what is it now, six months ago.”
“Nothing happened, Mom.”
“It has something to do with that picture I brought to you, doesn’t it?”
“Mom, let it go. I just enjoyed Billy’s visit and would like to see him again.”
And on her return to Stamford, Louise Strong wangled an invitation out to dinner with her sister, Jackie, Billy Stevens’s mother.
“I went to see CJ the other day,” Louise began as they sat in Antonio’s, an Italian restaurant they could both walk to on Stamford’s West Side and where the food was good and the prices low.
“And how’s he doing?” Jackie Stevens asked her older sister.
“Not so good. The time Billy went to see CJ it really perked him up. But Billy hasn’t been back and CJ is down.”
“Huh,” the younger sister replied.
“Why, huh?”
“Well, I didn’t say anything at the time, but Billy was totally different after he came back from seeing CJ. I mean he was happy, really happy. He was upbeat for weeks afterward, then it all went away. He became his old gloomy self again.”
“I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“After I went to see CJ, after Billy’s visit, he had me bring an old photo of the two of them playing football one afternoon at the Barnes, with Parker and a bunch of his friends.”
“And?”
“Well, it has something to do with that picture.”
“He’ll be home in a while. He went with his father to the Y. It’s the only time I can expect him home. When we leave here, my dear sister, we’re going to have a little talk with Billy. And we’ll see that his father is there to help us get to the bottom of what’s going on.”
“Thanks, Jackie.”
“We’re all we’ve got.”
“We’re all CJ’s got.”
And like clockwork, at nine fifteen, just after open gym on the courts of the Stamford Y closed, the two men walked in to the presence of the two waiti
ng women.
“Louise, nice surprise,” Willy Stevens said to his sister-in-law.
“Hi, Willy. Hi, Billy,” Louise laughed, “Sounds like a song.”
“Hi, Aunt Louise,” Billy said warily. Since the day CJ was arrested, Louise Strong knew Billy Stevens was somehow involved with whatever happened the night Augusto Santos was murdered. She knew the way he slinked into her apartment that morning and the way he slinked out when the detectives showed up to arrest CJ that he was somehow involved. And Billy knew his aunt knew. He was uncomfortable in her presence. He avoided her when he could; he ducked out of family dinners often.
“Boys, we need to have a talk,” Jackie Stevens began.
“You don’t need me,” Billy said.
“You are the one we do need. Daddy, we need you here to help us sort something out,” Jackie Stevens said.
“What’s up, Louise,” Willy Stevens said, looking at Billy with a wondering eye.
And for the next half hour, almost six years after Augusto Santos was killed, Louise Strong went over her concerns from the past few months, going all the way back to the morning after the murder. She ended by saying, “I always knew CJ never killed that man, and you knew it too, didn’t you, Billy.”
Jackie Stevens gasped at the thought. Willy Stevens looked at his son and said, “If you ever expect to step through that door again, you answer your aunt right now.”
“No,” Billy began, “I don’t. I don’t know who did it.”
“What does that picture of you and CJ and those boys playing football have to do with it.”
“What picture?”
“After you went to see CJ, he became happier. He asked for a picture of all of you playing football at the Barnes house.”
“I don’t remember any picture.”
Willy Stevens backhanded his son in the head, “Tell the damn truth.”