The document laid out every dirty land grab, every payoff, every threat made to witnesses. North told the lawyer to sign it. If he refused, things would become very unpleasant.
Krivins understood he had no real choice. With a shaking hand, he signed every page.
Then he asked whether they were going to kill him. To his surprise, North said no. The papers, he explained, would land on the desk of a federal prosecutor the next day.
Krivins would stay alive and spend the next fifteen years in a federal prison camp or worse, depending on how the case shook out. The lawyer, suddenly seeing the shape of the rest of his life, begged North to shoot him instead.
North said death would be too easy. Then he left him tied to the chair in the basement.
A few days later, Krivins was arrested near the southern border carrying a large amount of cash and a false passport. The confession North had forced out of him gave the case real momentum. In court, Krivins received fourteen years and forfeited nearly everything he owned.
That left two key men: the crooked investigator and Victor Grayson. Major Crimes investigator Sergeant Paul Pannick had built a comfortable life on bribes. Over the years he had acquired a nice apartment and a luxury car, both conveniently registered in his mother-in-law’s name.
He had closed the veteran’s case in exchange for $50,000 from Grayson. He had not even bothered to visit the hospital. He simply wrote that there was insufficient evidence of a crime.
But once the city started buzzing with stories of what was happening to the men involved, Pannick realized he was in danger too. He called Grayson and demanded protection and money to leave the state.
Grayson snapped at him and said that if he ran or talked, he would be buried. Left alone with his fear, Pannick gathered his cash and fled to a remote cabin owned by his mistress.
He hid there for three days. On the fourth morning, as he tried to leave in his car, North’s men were waiting by the gate. One blow to the back of the head dropped him cold.
He woke tied to a chair in an abandoned barn that smelled of old hay and manure. North sat across from him in the dim light and calmly listed his side accounts, his bribes, and his role in burying the veteran’s case.
North reminded him that he had sold out a beaten war veteran for a stack of dirty cash…
