Evening's Empire Read online

  also by ZACHARY LAZAR

  Sway

  Aaron, Approximately

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Zachary Lazar

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The photographs on pages vii, 116, and 199 are copyright © Bettmann / Corbis.

  Author’s note: The events in this book are based on my research of what happened to my father over thirty years ago. Where the record was incomplete, I have written what I think might have taken place.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07225-0

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To my mother and Stacey and Richard

  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  Why art thou so far from helping me; and from

  The words of my roaring?

  —Psalm 22

  PROLOGUE

  In the fall of 1996, a few days after my wedding, an article about my father appeared in the Arizona Republic, an updating of the old, unhappy story:

  The men from Chicago were efficient.

  In the shadowy stairwell of the parking garage on North Central Avenue, they placed four .22-caliber shots into the chest of accountant Ed Lazar and one into the back of his head.

  They then partially unscrewed a light bulb near the door and disabled a fluorescent fixture, throwing the area into total darkness.

  It was hours before police found the body Feb. 19, 1975. It was two decades before they found out who killed Lazar and why.

  On Tuesday, they revealed the truth, along with information about a string of murders in Phoenix that they know or suspect was carried out by Chicago mob killers.

  That information, among other things, throws new light on the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976.

  Phoenix police said that Ned Warren, Sr., then the king of Arizona land fraud, ordered the hit on Lazar, his bookkeeper and business partner.

  They said John Harvey Adamson, the chief assassin in the Bolles killing, finally told police a year ago that Warren had ordered the hit on Lazar.

  Adamson did not take part in the contract on Lazar, police said.

  The killers who did take the contract, two Chicago Mafia hit men, murdered Lazar the day before he was to testify in front of a Maricopa County grand jury about Warren’s bogus real-estate deals, in which millions of dollars were swindled from thousands of investors.

  “He was going to name Ned Warren as the godfather of land fraud in Arizona,” said Sgt. Mike Torres, a Phoenix police spokesman. “Ned Warren was the natural suspect, but there was no one to give him up.”

  Warren was eventually convicted of fraud and bribery and died in prison in 1980.

  … “Ned Warren went to Adamson and asked him to kill three people; Lazar, (Arizona Real Estate Commissioner) J. Fred Talley and a third person whose name he could not remember,” Torres said.

  … Talley, who said he issued real-estate licenses to convicted felons, was suspended amid an investigation into whether he helped Warren in his activities.

  Talley later retired and died of a heart attack.

  The new information about the Lazar killing and the plan to kill Talley recalls a lurid period in Arizona’s history—the late 1960s and 1970s—when land-fraud artists roamed the state in sharp suits, gouging money from buyers and investors across the country and the world.

  —Arizona Republic, October 2, 1996

  Ninety miles north of Phoenix, in Yavapai County, Arizona, is a large subdivision of mobile homes and small, single-story houses called Verde Lakes. The land once belonged to a sprawling ranch, dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the nearby town of Camp Verde had been established to fend off raids from the Yavapai and Apache tribes that had lived for generations in that region. In the summer of 1969—the summer of the moon landing—my father, Edward Lazar, and his business partner, Ned Warren, Sr., financed a down payment on this land with a loan from a London-born entrepreneur named David Rich. They paid this money into a trust, and the company they formed, Consolidated Mortgage Corporation, hired crews to remake the ranch house into a clubhouse, to excavate a small lake where there had been none, to bring in breeding pairs of ducks, and to plant three-inch-high sapling trees. They did not build houses on the land, nor did they intend to. Verde Lakes existed as a possibility. As a fact, it was empty desert divided on a map into quarter acre lots. The plan was to retail hundreds of these lots to small-scale investors, many of them nearing retirement, who would build their own houses there or resell the land once its value rose. The company hired Cesar Romero, the actor most famous for playing the Joker on TV’s Batman, as a public relations spokesman. They installed roads and utilities and water lines for homes that did not yet exist. They did all of this on credit, soliciting capital from banks, corporations, and private investors throughout the country, using as collateral and sometimes selling as securities the mortgages on the lots sold by the company’s salesmen. For a brief while, my father was a paper millionaire. For a much longer time, he was in financial crisis. At one point, he and his partner, Warren, were personally $2 million in debt. When my father got out of the land business in 1973, he had nothing to show for his four years of struggle. I was five years old then. He was a devoted father according to everyone I’ve talked to, though I have almost no memories of him that I can feel certain are true and not the kind suggested by photographs.

  On the CBS Evening News of February 21, 1975, Walter Cronkite appeared seated before a map of Arizona to deliver a story about my father and his business partner, Ned Warren, Sr. “Thousands of investors, many among those who could least afford it, have bought Arizona’s land worth far less than they paid for it,” Cronkite read. “The multimillion-dollar fraud is under investigation, but now there’s a startling new development—a gangland style murder.”

  Cronkite looked down at his cue card before reading the last phrase, as if the word gangland, pronounced by Cronkite as gang-lund, could not be said without a slight pause to distance himself from its tabloid crudeness.

  There was a shot of a stretcher being rolled toward an ambulance, an ambulance that to our eyes now looks like a large station wagon or a hearse. The body on the stretcher, covered with a blanket from foot to head, was identified by the on-scene reporter in the clipped style of a newsreel: “The victim, Edward Lazar, found in a Phoenix garage Wednesday with five bullets in
his body.”

  The two homicide detectives in their sport coats collapsed the stretcher and pushed it into the ambulance. There was an image now of a press photo of my father’s face. The cameramen had positioned the photo on a bed of fabric so that, with this border, the picture could fit the dimensions of a TV screen. It was black and white—all of this footage was in black and white. When you watch it now, it has the unreal quality of a crime movie trying to capture a “period.”

  My father looked eager and shrewd in the photograph. He was still in his early thirties when it was taken. His eyes penetrated the frame, as if he could easily and accurately read the gaze of whoever might be looking back at him. His dark hair was short and his lips were parted, not in a smile, but as if to say something precise and illuminating in the midst of a dispute.

  The reporter continued: “Lazar was scheduled to appear yesterday before a grand jury investigating sales of virtually worthless land for as much as four hundred million dollars. Lazar’s testimony was expected to focus on his onetime business associate, Ned Warren, Sr., a mysterious figure widely known in Arizona as ‘the Godfather of Land Fraud.’ ”

  That phrase, “the Godfather of Land Fraud,” had bedeviled my father for at least five months before his death, since Warren’s first indictment. It had started as a joke—two or three years before, someone had given Warren a birthday present of director’s chairs printed with the words The Godfather on the backs—but now the joke had become an epithet in dozens of newspaper stories written about Warren, often containing a reference to his prison record, his land “swindles,” and, most recently, the payments that he, along with my father and other associates, had made to government officials. The word Godfather now chimed with the word gangland to produce Mafia.

  On-screen, the handsome, sixty-year-old Warren moved slowly and confidently down a courthouse hallway, trailed by reporters and cameramen. He was faintly smiling, well dressed in a conservative gray suit, his hands either crossed in front of his waist or in the pockets of his pants. He looked as if the extent of his secrets was faintly comic to him, as if no one would ever suspect half the things he knew, or as if most of what he had done would be impossible to prove. He seemed to know all of this as he walked the courthouse hallway, and he wasn’t wrong.

  I have an essay my father wrote when he was twelve years old, a schoolboy’s essay about the Hebrew poet Hayim Bialik. In 1946, the essay won first prize (“Choice of $25 U.S. Savings Bond or a week at Herzl Camp”) in an annual contest held by the Minneapolis Zionist Youth Commission.

  … Bialik’s popularity should not only be attributed to his poetic genius, but also to his personality in general, to his brilliancy of thought and to his responsoveness [sic] to the needs of his people.

  As long as there lives a Jew who still delights in beauty, imagery, and poetry, so long will the immortal words of Hayim Nachman Bialik be found on the lips, in the minds and in the hearts of Israel.

  When I first discovered this essay, I saw in it evidence of a straight-A student, earnest, eager to please. When I looked at it a little longer, I saw evidence of a boy smart enough to conceal a total lack of interest in the poems of Hayim Bialik beneath a lilting arrangement of phrases (“on the lips, in the minds and in the hearts of Israel”). I don’t know how to connect the fact that my father saved this essay and prize citation with the fact that he was murdered in a garage. His story refutes an idea I seem still incapable of outgrowing, the idea that who we are plays some part in shaping our lives, or, as Heraclitus put it, that character is fate.

  Five bullets. One in the back of my father’s head, four in his chest. At nine o’clock in the morning on February 19, my father, arriving at work in an office building on Phoenix’s North Central Avenue, was met by two hit men from Chicago, Lee DiFranco * and Robert Hardin, who forced him into a stairwell and shot him five times with a .22 semiautomatic pistol fitted with a homemade silencer, probably a Coke bottle. They left the shell casings on the ground but unscrewed the fluorescent light in the stairwell to prevent anyone from discovering too soon what they’d done. After taking whatever cash had been in my father’s money clip, DiFranco, according to Hardin’s account, placed a dime on my father’s forehead. They left behind his car keys and credit cards, and they left his briefcase on the ground outside the opened door of his Pontiac Grand Ville. They were paid $10,000 for this. Neither of them ever went to jail.

  . . .

  Ned Warren didn’t speak on the CBS Evening News of February 21. He was “not available to newsmen,” the reporter said.

  Instead, the next person to speak was Attorney General Bruce Babbitt, future candidate for president, future secretary of the interior, at that moment riding the land fraud scandals in Arizona toward the state’s governorship. In 1975, he was gangly and wore glasses, and he hunched forward in his chair like a graduate student in a seminar room. “As a prosecutor,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’m not about to speculate publicly about who murdered Ed Lazar. But when a man with Lazar’s knowledge and background is murdered on his way to the grand jury, in the style in which he was murdered, it would be very coincidental to attribute it to some extraneous reason that is not related to those facts.”

  The last man to speak put it more bluntly. He was another of Warren’s former business associates, a man named James Cornwall. He was tall and slightly jowly, with the sideburns and pomaded hair of the revivalist preacher Billy Graham—appropriate, since Cornwall had just become a minister himself. His suit and tie were of an expensive-looking subtle plaid, and he sat with one hand across his knee to reveal an elegant wristwatch. He seemed at ease, despite the fact that he was facing sixty-six counts of fraud, forty years in prison.

  “Mr. Warren has told me he had the ability to pick up the phone and have people maimed or killed,” Cornwall said. “I believed it at the time, and I believe it now.”

  On the afternoon before this story appeared on the CBS Evening News, more than four hundred people had attended my father’s memorial service at the Sinai Mortuary Chapel, which did not have enough seats for such a large crowd. There were my parents’ friends—the Korts and the Goodmans, the Finebergs and the Starrs, the Kobeys and the Shers—young Jewish couples, their children in school for the day. There were our next-door neighbors, Carol and Dick Nichols, who had taken me the night before with their sons, David and Craig, to a soapbox derby and spaghetti dinner to give me some time away from the confusion of adults crowding our house. There were members of the Jewish Community Center, where my parents played tennis, and of Temple Beth Israel, where my sister, Stacey, and I went to the annual Purim carnivals dressed in costumes my mother made out of towels, construction paper, and glitter. There were my grandparents on both sides, my aunts and uncles. There were the associates of Gallant, Farrow, and of Laventhol, Krekstein, Horwath and Horwath, the accounting firms my father had worked for before and after his stint in the land business. David Rich, the London born entrepreneur, was there. Ned Warren, though he had befriended my parents socially in the four years my father was his business partner, was not.

  None of it made any sense to the people at the memorial service—this story of hit men in a stairwell, Ned Warren picking up a phone and ordering them there. It was something out of a movie—not even a realistic movie. There was the grief over the young man they’d all had a special liking for, and then there was the sense that his death would never seem real, that the sudden violence was so incongruous with his personality that the two could not be held in the mind at the same time. They thought about my father’s sly smile, the way he sometimes seemed to look at everybody from an amused distance, and then they thought about the front-page photo of his body slumped in a stairwell, the banner headline: Grand Jury Witness in Probe of Warren Is Slain Gang Style. His friends were in the furniture business or in real estate, practiced law or accounting or engineering. Their wives played mah-jongg and tennis and golf. Like my father, the men rooted for the ASU football team, took their fam
ilies on vacation to Lake Havasu or San Diego. My father could be quiet. There was something he held in reserve, a mystery about him, even a romance, but there wasn’t crookedness, there wasn’t criminality. He was not your average CPA—women liked him, he had an adventurous side, he liked to drink. This adventurous side may have been why he got into a risky business like land development in the first place. But no one at the memorial service imagined he had “ties to the underworld,” or even knowledge of enough wrongdoing to be murdered. No one thought that.

  In the parking lot outside, a reporter named Al Sitter from the Arizona Republic was taking down license plate numbers to see if any of them corresponded to figures of organized crime. The shame, added to the grief, was now beginning. Before long, my father would be appearing in news stories as the “lieutenant” to Ned Warren’s “Godfather,” the one man, now dead, who had “intimate knowledge” of the full extent of Warren’s criminality. Eventually, my father would come to look like a con man with a flashy suit and a Cadillac, or even a full-blown mobster, perhaps a relative of the Jewish gangster Hymie Lazar, as one line of thought ran. He was murdered twice in this way.

  I remember his forehead being broad, with lines scored across it (lines that even then I thought I would inherit and by doing so know I was an adult). I used to try on his boots, stumbling toward the fireplace, with its mesh screen pulled closed by a thin chain. I remember the family room’s white shag rug, its console stereo with the plastic arm on which you could stack several records at once. I remember an avocado linoleum floor in the kitchen, a “passway” that looked into the living room (dark in memory, small and long). The living room, the family room, the kitchen—I remember the rooms. Whatever I write here about my father will have to be a kind of conjuration.

  The evening the two detectives came to our door to bring us the news of the murder, my mother sent my sister and me to our rooms. From across the house, I could hear my mother laughing, a high-pitched, unabashed kind of laughter that sounded more and more illicit as it went on. When I went out to see what was happening, she was sitting on the couch, bowing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane.