Chapter 6
He processed this with the efficiency of a man who has spent thirty years doing rapid assessments of situations he was not expecting and adjusting his position accordingly. "You were going to take the whole thing down whether I cooperated or not."
"Yes," I said.
"So what do you actually need from me."
"Testimony about the routing protocol," I said. "The specific dates. The communication channel Vulov used for the manifest windows. And the name of the other dock supervisor."
He looked at me for a long moment. "There are two of them."
"I know there's one more. I need the name."
He told me the name.
I confirmed the recording was capturing it clearly.
Gerald's team had the name within four minutes through the monitoring equipment, and they had a federal agent at that dock supervisor's home address within forty minutes, which was fast enough that the dock supervisor had not yet received the communication that would have told him the alley meeting had not gone as planned.
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Falco cooperated for eleven weeks. His attorney negotiated the specific terms, which reflected the specific extent of his knowledge, which was genuine and which the prosecution found substantially useful. The attorney was good and the terms were not light but they were considerably less than what he would have faced without the cooperation, and Falco understood the arithmetic of this clearly.
The Vulov organization was indicted on seventeen counts. The two men in the alley provided testimony under separate arrangements. The material that had been moving through the port was ceased at the next scheduled container arrival, which meant it was ceased on a Tuesday in December, on a dock in the rain, in a container that was opened in the presence of federal agents and representatives of the relevant treaty organization and which contained, not what the manifest said it contained, but what Gerald's team had known it contained for six months.
