Chapter 17 - THE FEDERAL INDICTMENT
On Wednesday morning, the federal courthouse in Camden was surrounded by a wall of television vans, satellite dishes, and reporters shivering in the crisp October wind. The flashbulbs popped like continuous lightning against the granite steps as a single black sedan pulled up to the side entrance.
The rear door opened.
Dominic Valente stepped out into the glare of the lights. He wasn't wearing his overcoat. He wore a tailored charcoal suit, his white shirt buttoned at the collar without a tie, his iron-gray hair combed straight back from his forehead. He didn't look down at the microphones thrust into his face by reporters shouting competing questions about tax fraud, racketeering, and unrecorded slush funds.
He walked up the steps with the steady, measured stride of a man who had walked those same stone corridors in his mind a thousand times before.
In the second-row gallery of Courtroom 4B, sitting quietly behind the prosecution's table, a middle-aged man in a gray suit watched him enter. Special Agent Miller of the FBI did not smile, but he gave a single, imperceptible nod of his head as Dominic took his seat beside his defense counsel—a high-priced corporate lawyer from New York who was already frantically shuffling a stack of federal injunctions.
The judge’s gavel struck the oak bench with a sharp, dry crack.
"United States versus Dominic Valente," the clerk announced, his voice echoing off the high vaulted ceiling of the courtroom.
Dominic did not look at the prosecutor. He did not look at the reporters crowded against the glass partition at the back of the room. He looked straight ahead at the walnut-paneled wall behind the bench, where the seal of the United States hung beneath the golden arms of the eagle.
May you like
For twenty years, he had believed that power was something you held in your hand—a gun, a ledger, a safe behind a brick wall. But sitting there in the quiet courtroom, listening to the federal prosecutor begin to read the list of charges compiled from fifteen years of meticulously audited records, Dominic finally understood what Marco had known all along.
The city didn't belong to the man who owned the buildings. It belonged to the man who remembered the names of everyone who had ever been buried in the cellar.
