Chapter 9

We decided to try to keep the Carnoli family off balance by backing off for a week or so. It was a psychological ploy intended to confuse them. We were not sure how much good it would do, but we wanted to give it a try.

As an alternative, we thought that we would try to break up some of the neighborhood gangs that were causing so much trouble in the poorer sections of the city. We had no particular group or neighborhood that we wanted to target, so we let the news reports choose for us. There seemed to be a particularly vicious gang, The Dots, operating out of a African-American neighborhood. They were concentrating on drugs and prostitution, with a little numbers and a lot of protection thrown in.

Their neighborhood was called The King Place because of a now-defunct housing project called The MLK Towers. All but one of the apartment buildings had been razed, but one of the towering buildings was still there. It had been taken over by The Dots as their headquarters and main base of operations for their prostitutes. One entire floor of the old tower was now a brothel, and the word was that the women working there were of all races, and none were there voluntarily. There was no question about it—there were 42 sex slaves working in that building.

The information I was able to get was that the third floor was the brothel, the fourth floor was devoted to drugs, and a few of the gangs leaders lived on the next three floors in absolute luxury. The ground floor was strictly used for meeting rooms and as a reception point to control who had access to the upper floors. The next floor (the second floor) was used for offices for the various departments of the group's business activities. For example, this was the floor where a John paid for his brothel visit before he was allowed up to the third floor.

It seemed to us that cleaning out that remaining tower was going to be necessary if we were going to knock off this gang. The question was, could only four people conquer up to 120 gang members? We figured that it could be done, but careful planning would be required. The first thing we needed were the plans to the building. That was no problem, Dan could get those for us.

We held a council of war with Gail as the leader. The first thing she pointed out was that we did not have the number of people required to assault the tower in the conventional military sense. Therefore, we had to give up any idea of killing a large number of the gang members. However, it was her opinion that we could break up the gang simply by showing that they were not invincible and not living in an impregnable fortress. On the other hand, we needed to kill the gang leaders to keep them from reorganizing at another base of operations.

We all readily understood her points, but wondered how we were to accomplish anything. That's where Gail had a real hilarious stinger: she proposed gassing the tower with a mixture of materials that produced the worst stink that humans had ever smelled. It was something that the Israelis had come up with and could be mixed up from readily available components.

It would take us about a week to gather the raw materials and produce the mixture, but it had to be done away from the house. If the mixture was spilled within the house, there was no way to get rid of it, and the house would be a total loss! She proposed that we dose the tower liberally with this mixture and wait for the occupants to come pouring out. There were only two effective exits, since the first and second floor windows were sealed and glazed with an effectively unbreakable laminate of glass and plastic. All we had to do was to release the mixture within the building and station ourselves at the two exits where we could pop off the leaders as they showed themselves.

I had the solution for the manufacturing plant. All we had to do was to buy one of those inflatable buildings and work inside there. When we got through, we could save the structure for the next time we needed it, or we could burn it if we had to get rid of evidence. We could install the bubble inside the building where I had tortured Snake Carnoli. Any damage to that building was a small loss, anyway.

We voted unanimously to follow Gail's recommendation, so I went after the inflatable structure and the others started gathering the raw materials and the lab ware necessary to make and mix the components. All of us had taken high school chemistry, and that was all of the lab experience that we needed if we were careful. Believe me, if the stuff smelled as bad as Gail described, we were going to be damned careful. I went all of the way and bought four hazmat (hazardous materials) suits just in case. There was no point in taking chances!

Gail wrote out specific detailed instructions for us to follow, and we three did the grunt work while she supervised. The job actually took nine days, but we could do better next time, if the opportunity came up. The result was a liquid with a very low boiling point. A test tube of the stuff would boil in your hand if you grasped it with a tight grip. We were certain that the temperature in the middle of the day was high enough to vaporize the solution sufficiently to permeate the tower, all we had to do was to get it inside the building.

Access to the building was going to be easy. The Dots had no concept of tight security. People wandered through the lobby of the building without being challenged, even Whites, so we figured on filling four one-liter-size Florence laboratory flasks with the liquid, waltzing in, throwing the stuff at a convenient wall, and running like hell before we got a smell of the stuff. The choice of flask type was because of its shape: the main body of the flask was a large sphere of thin glass and the neck was a cylinder which made a convenient handle. The result was similar to the German "stick-grenade" without a safety pin. This style flask was somewhat fragile, but ideal for this application.

We decided to make our attack early in the morning, just before daylight. We figured that this would give us the cover of darkness and exhausted, doped up opposition so that we would have the least immediate reaction to our raid. The two exits were well lit, and the lights were never turned off, so we would have no problem aiming at the intended targets. We had studied pictures of the leaders, so we were sure that we could spot them in the crowd. We picked out our shooting positions the day before the raid, so we were well prepared when we finally moved in.

Bill and Carol took the east exit and Gail and I took the west exit. At 4:37 AM, we walked through the doors, carrying our Uzis in one hand and our flasks in the other. We already knew where we were going to throw the flasks, so that was not something to delay us. Each exit was a revolving door flanked by two conventional doors. Each one of us used a conventional door, and we entered the lobby without anybody paying attention to us. We were wearing conventional trousers and casual shirts over our black uniforms, so any person just glancing at us would think that we were one of the locals.

At 4:38, Gail signaled for us to throw our flasks. We did and ran from the lobby. We'd already got a mild whiff of the odor, so we had plenty of incentive to get the hell out of there! We were in position to shoot by 4:41 and were just waiting for the fun to start.

It took about five minutes for the first people to show up at the doors. They were coughing and carrying on like they were the head end of a riot. It was hilarious to see the nearly nude gang members stumble out of the building as they tried to escape the fumes. The ventilation system was going strong, so the fumes were quickly carried to the upper floors. After about 15 minutes, naked women came pouring out of the building—we figured that they had to be the sex slaves, but nobody was trying to keep them in line. Once out the door, they took off running to who knew where. We fervently hoped that they made good their escape.

Right after the women, the leaders started to show up. Gail and Bill were equipped with sniper rifles for the occasion, and they were able to pick off all eight of the gang's upper echelon as they tried to escape. Carol and I used our cellphones to keep in touch, and we left for the car as soon as all eight men had been accounted for.