• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Finally, after a few more minutes of the agent trying to get me to take my hand out of my pocket, I asked, “Am I under arrest?”

When he said no, I told him, “Go fuck yourself.” His next move was to walk up to me, stick a .357 Magnum in my chest, and shove me in the shoulder in an attempt to push me away from the car. Immediately, I shoved him back, and then everybody in the garage became tense, certain there was going to be a problem.

Finally, Boeri turned to Jimmy and said, “Ask Kevin to come over here.”

“Kevin, come on over here,” Jimmy said.

“Okay,” I said, and walked over there while the other agent stood there silently, bullshit because I wasn’t intimidated by him and his gun, and because Jimmy had spoken a few words and I had done what he had said.

A couple of other agents went into Jimmy’s car and pulled out their transmitter and battery pack. “We know what you’re doing,” one agent told Jimmy.

“You know nothing,” Jimmy told him.

“We know what we know,” the agent said.

“You don’t got a thing,” Jimmy said. With that, all four agents took off. As soon as they were gone, Jimmy and I hopped into the car and shot over to Louisburg Square. When we got to Jimmy’s condo, which was three levels, we could see that the plywood beneath the bow window on the first floor had been pulled down. It was obvious that the agents had originally drilled through the side of the window and inserted the microphone from the outside, managing to place their transmitter and battery pack underneath the bow window. But now the transmitter was gone. They had retrieved all their equipment.

Unfortunately, however, an innocent bystander suffered because of the garage scene. The elderly father-in-law of the owner of the garage, who was in his late eighties or early nineties, was there when the agents ran in with their guns drawn. Immediately, they stuck a gun on the owner of the garage, as well as on Jimmy and me, and also shoved the barrel of a gun under the armpit of this old man.

“Leave the old man alone,” Jimmy told the agents. “He has nothing to do with anything.” But they kept the gun on him. Badly shaken up, as soon as the agents left, the old man went into the hospital, where he suffered a heart attack. Two or three days later, he died. There was no doubt, for his family or for Jimmy and me, that this old man, no physical threat to anyone, had died because of the shock of someone shoving the barrel of a gun up his armpit.

The day after the incident, Jimmy and I were still trying to figure out how anyone had gotten into his car. We knew there were three alarms in the car, one of them a pressure sensor, so that if anyone got in the car, the weight alarm would go off. There was also another pressure sensor under the mats, and the windows and doors were protected with a regular car alarm. Yet, somehow, someone had bypassed all three alarms and never set one of them off. How had they been able to put that bug in the car?

Suddenly, as I was looking at the outside panel on the passenger side, I thought that maybe it looked a bit off-center. When I pulled it off the bottom of the passenger door, I studied the 8-inch-wide molding that ran around the side. I took it off and, sure enough, there was a hole gaping through the door. The door panel had been wired with copper wiring, which they had obviously used for their antenna. They must have used a hand drill to cut a hole into the outside of the door and then inserted tin snips to make the hole big enough to hold their equipment. That night in February when Jimmy had caught them coming from his car, they must have been trying to change the batteries in their equipment. Since it was so cold out, it would have been necessary to change the batteries every twelve to twenty-four hours.

After all this happened and they removed their equipment, Boeri and Reilly spoke to Jimmy about the people whose condo at Louisburg Square they had rented in order to insert the bugs. “They didn’t know anything about what we were doing,” the agents told