The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(16)

Cole didn’t want to be just another kid working a corner. He wanted to be the black Meyer Lansky. No more drug addicts. No more gunfights on the streets. If you clean the money, you get clean yourself. You wear a suit like a legitimate businessman. Fuck that, you are a legitimate businessman.

By the time he was twenty, Cole had a minority share in a dozen restaurants. In barbershops. In car washes. Even a few laundromats. Any business that handled cash, with minimal recordkeeping, Cole wanted a piece of it. He’d mix in drug money with the cash proceeds and deposit it all as legitimate income.

The entire time, he kept a low profile. No flash. He paid federal agents to keep him out of the files. FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, even Interpol. Cole stayed invisible.

He bought more businesses all over the country. Better restaurants, nightclubs. If the bartender would take a hundred-dollar bill from you without blinking, Cole wanted to meet the owner.

He got so good at it, he started handling other people’s money. Not from rival gangs, of course. Some lines don’t get crossed. But there were plenty of other criminal enterprises with money that needed cleaning. He didn’t get nervous about taking that money from white men in suits and giving most of it back to them. In fact, he would use the opportunity to learn everything he could about their operations, every last detail, until he could take over from the inside, like a Greek soldier from a Trojan horse, eliminating anyone who dared stand in his way.

By the time he was thirty, Cole had grown smarter and even more powerful. He expanded overseas, first in the Cayman Islands, then in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Belarus—any country with soft banking laws. He always kept the money moving, more and more of it, faster and faster, in amounts small enough to avoid suspicion, but times a hundred, then a thousand, using accounts in other people’s names. People he could trust. People who knew the penalty for betraying him. The money would be round-tripped from one “smurf” account to another, Kraków to Rio to Jakarta, before coming back to Chicago.

When the time was right, he moved back into the drug business, but he did it the smart way, on the wholesale end. There was already a direct pipeline from the Mexican cartels to Chicago—Cole took this over and made life easier for the Mexicans by giving them one single contact to work with. Then he supplied the product to high-level dealers who would move it throughout the entire Midwest. So instead of having a thousand customers, he had twenty or thirty, all men he could trust. This was how he managed the risk and maximized the revenue. Then he channeled that money into more and more legitimate businesses.

He hired the best accountants. He hired the best attorneys. And he paid off the dirtiest cops. He grew his business into an empire.

Most cops know how to follow criminals. Only a select few of them are good at following money. Cole stayed ahead of them for years until they finally brought him down on a federal RICO case. He’d been here in Terre Haute ever since.

It was a story Mason never thought he’d hear. Not from Darius Cole himself. He never thought he’d make a second trip to the Secure Housing Unit. Or that the third trip would be permanent.

The same two men came to get him that day. Mason ignored the stares and followed them out of the cellblock. As he walked between them, he had time to think it over. It must have been a hell of a first conversation or there wouldn’t be a second. But what did Cole really want from him? If he wanted Mason’s ticket punched, that would have happened already. Out in the yard or in the cafeteria. You wouldn’t walk the man right to your cell.

When he got there, Cole was sitting at his desk with his back to him. He turned and gave Mason a quick nod. He was wearing the same rimless reading glasses that made him look like a prison librarian.

“Why am I back here?” Mason said.

Cole turned in his chair and took off the glasses. He didn’t look like a librarian anymore. “You’re back here,” he said, “because you got something I wanna know more about.”

“Look, Mr. Cole . . .”

“Read up on you,” Cole said. “Got some questions.”

Cole reached behind him and grabbed a folder from the desk. As he opened it, Mason saw his own mug shot from four years ago on the top page. This was his criminal file.

“You’re dialed in,” Mason said. “You’ve got this whole place wired. Is there anything the guards won’t bring you?”

“You’re a Canaryville boy,” Cole said, putting his reading glasses back on and starting to flip through the pages. “‘Father unknown.’”

Mason didn’t respond to that. He didn’t like seeing this man reading through his file, but once again figured it was probably a great time to keep his mouth shut.

“Tough way to start your life,” Cole said. “Don’t learn how to be a man, sometimes, until it’s too late. You put work in on the streets for over fifteen years, never spent more than one night locked up.”

Mason watched Cole flip back to the first page.

“‘Possession of a stolen vehicle,’” he said, reading from the page. “Got a few of them here. You work for one shop? Freelance? How’d that work?”

“Whoever paid. I moved around.”

“‘Possession of burglary tools’? Man’s branching out. But that one got dropped, too. Nothing ever sticks to you.”

Cole kept reading the file.