Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  “Very cozy,” said Abel, “but what if they can prove the charges?”

  “Oh, they should be able to prove some of the charges,” said H. Trafford Jilks matter-of-factly. “But as long as Henry Osborne stays tucked away, they’re going to find it very difficult to nail you on most of them. But you’re going to have to live with the fact, Mr. Rosnovski, that most of the real damage has already been done whether you’re convicted or not.”

  “I can see that only too well,” said Abel, glancing at a picture of himself on the front page of the Daily News, which H. Trafford Jilks obviously had brought with him. “So you find out, Mr. Jilks, who the hell bought that file from Henry Osborne. Put as many people to work on it as you need. I don’t care about the cost. But you find out and find out quickly, because if it turns out to be William Kane, I’m going to finish him once and for all.”

  “Don’t get yourself into any more trouble than you are already in,” said H. Trafford Jilks. “You’re knee deep in it as it is.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Abel. “When I finish Kane, it’ll be legal and way aboveboard.”

  “Now listen carefully, Mr. Rosnovski. You forget about William Kane for the time being and start worrying about your impending trial. It will be the most important event in your life unless you don’t mind spending the next ten years in jail. Now, there’s not much more you can do tonight. I’ll get my men looking for Henry Osborne, and I’ll issue a short press statement denying the charges and saying we have a full explanation that will exonerate you completely.”

  “Do we?” George asked hopefully.

  “No,” said Jilks, “but it will give me some much needed time to think. When Mr. Rosnovski has had a chance to check through that file of names, it wouldn’t surprise me to discover he’s never had direct contact with anyone in it. It’s possible that Henry Osborne always acted as an intermediary without ever putting Mr. Rosnovski fully in the picture. Then my job will be to prove that Osborne exceeded his authority as a director of the group. Mind you, Mr. Rosnovski, if you did meet any of the people mentioned in the file, for God’s sake let me know, because you can be sure the Justice Department will put them on the stand as witnesses against us. I’ll leave a copy of the file for you and we’ll start worrying about that tomorrow. You go to bed and get some sleep. You must be exhausted after your trip. I will see you first thing in the morning.”

  Abel was arrested quietly in his daughter’s apartment at 8:30 A.M. and driven away by a U.S. marshal to the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The brightly colored St. Valentine’s Day decorations in store windows heightened Abel’s sense of loneliness. Jilks had hoped that his arrangements had been so discreet that the press would not have discovered them, but when Abel reached the courthouse, he was once again surrounded by photographers and reporters. He ran the gauntlet into the courtroom with George in front of him and Jilks behind. They sat silently in an anteroom waiting for their case to be called.

  When they were called, the indictment hearing lasted only a few minutes and was a strange anticlimax. The clerk read the charges, H. Trafford Jilks answered “Not Guilty” to each one on behalf of his client and requested bail. The Government, as agreed, made no objection. Jilks asked Judge Prescott for at least three months to prepare his defense. The judge set a trial date of May 17.

  Abel was free again, free to face the press and more of their flashing bulbs. The chauffeur had the car waiting for him at the bottom of the steps with the back door open. The engine was already running and the driver had to do some very skillful maneuvering to escape the reporters who were still pursuing their story. When the car pulled to a stop on East Fifty-seventh Street, Abel turned to George and put his arm on his shoulder.

  “Now listen, George, you’re going to have to run the group for at least three months while I get my defense worked out with Mr. Jilks. Let’s hope you don’t have to run it alone after that,” said Abel, trying to laugh.

  “Of course I won’t have to, Abel. Mr. Jilks will get you off, you’ll see.” George picked up his briefcase and touched Abel on the arm. “Keep smiling,” he said, and left the other two men as they entered the apartment building.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without George,” Abel told his lawyer as they settled down in the living room. “We came over on the boat together nearly forty years ago and we’ve been through a hell of a lot since then. Now it looks as if there’s a whole lot more ahead of us, so let’s get on with it, Mr. Jilks. Nothing new on Henry Osborne?”

  “No, but I have six men working on it, and I understand the Justice Department has at least another six, so we can be pretty sure he’ll turn up, not that we want them to find him first.”

  “What about the man Osborne sold the file to?” asked Abel.

  “I have some people I trust in Chicago detailed to run that down.”

  “Good,” said Abel. “Now the time has come to go over that file of names you left with me last night.”

  Trafford Jilks began by reading the indictment and then he went over each of the charges in detail with Abel.

  After nearly three weeks of constant meetings, when Jilks was finally convinced there was nothing else Abel could tell him, he left his client to rest. The three weeks had failed to turn up any leads to the whereabouts of Henry Osborne, for either Trafford Jilks’s men or the Justice Department. Jilks’s men had also had no breakthrough on finding the person to whom Henry had sold his information, and the lawyer was beginning to wonder if Abel had guessed right.

  As the trial date drew nearer, Abel started to face the possibility of actually going to jail. He was now fifty-five and afraid of the prospect of spending the last few years of his life the same way he had spent three of the first few. As H. Trafford Jilks had pointed out, if the Government could prove it had a case, there was enough in Osborne’s file to send Abel to prison for a very long time. The injustice—as it seemed to him—of his predicament angered Abel. The malfeasances that Henry Osborne had committed in his name had been substantial but not exceptional; Abel doubted that any new business could have grown or any new money made without the kinds of handout and bribe to different people documented with sickening accuracy to Trafford Jilks’s file. He thought bitterly of the smooth, impassive face of the young William Kane, sitting in his Boston office all those years ago on a pile of inherited money whose probably disreputable origins were safely buried under generations of respectability. Then Florentyna wrote, a touching letter enclosing some photographs of her son, saying that she still loved and respected Abel and believed in his innocence.

  Three days before the trial was due to open, the Justice Department found Henry Osborne in New Orleans. They undoubtedly would have missed him completely if he hadn’t landed in a local hospital with two broken legs. A zealous policeman discovered that Henry had received his injuries for welching on gambling debts. They don’t like that in New Orleans. The policeman put two and two together and later that night, after the hospital had put plaster casts on Osborne’s legs, the Justice Department wheeled him onto an Eastern Airlines flight to New York.

  Henry Osborne was charged the next day with conspiracy to defraud and he was denied bail. H. Trafford Jilks asked the court’s permission to be allowed to question him. The court granted his request, but Jilks gained very little satisfaction from the interview. It became obvious that Osborne had already made his deal with the Government, promising to turn state’s evidence against Abel in return for lesser charges against him.

  “No doubt, Mr. Osborne will find the charges against him surprisingly minor,” the lawyer commented drily.

  “So that’s his game,” said Abel. “I take the rap while he escapes. Now we’ll never find out who he sold that goddamn file to.”

  “No, there you are wrong, Mr. Rosnovski. That was the one thing he was willing to talk about,” said Jilks. “He said it wasn’t William Kane. He would never have sold the file to Kane under any circumstances. A man from Chicago called