alien sent down to study strange Earthling ways.
Now I had a better role to play—the Man Who Just Awoke from a Hundred Years in a Coma and Had a Lot of Catching Up to Do.
The first three Google pages were rich with information, which took almost an hour to read or download for future study, then it petered out. I kept clicking through the pages, however, having learned that some of the most rewarding material was often twenty, thirty, or even a hundred pages in. The Google search algorithm was a marvel of speed and efficiency, but it wasn’t omniscient. Often the best stuff was tucked deep inside the search, where the less obsessive never took the trouble to look.
And this was no exception. On page sixty-three was the retirement notice in the University of Michigan alumni magazine of an FBI Special Agent named Shelly Gross, who’d spent the last ten years of his career setting up task forces around the country focused on organized crime, most recently in Connecticut, where he decided to settle down in Rocky Hill, a fact corroborated by an obituary on his wife in the Rocky Hill Post .
The singular success of the Connecticut project was noted in several sources. There was no mention of Shelly, but quite a bit on the nature of the various rackets the task force targeted, and the methods by which they seriously compromised criminal enterprise.
I jumped from there into a people search, which quickly yielded results for the only Shelly Gross living in Connecticut. I also tried to locate three crime bosses that my initial research had shown to be deeply entangled in the state’s rackets over a long period of time, but not surprisingly, the public search sites yielded very little. There were more legal, professional search programs for tracking people down, but I’d never felt compelled to use them, on the theory that the cost would never justify the improved penetration.
I now abandoned that qualm, which quickly led me to a short list of three overachieving punks: Ronny DeSuzio, Ekrem Boyanov, and my favorite, Sebbie “The Eyeball” Frondutti. He was an entrepreneurial underboss who’d set up a satellite operation in Connecticut for one of New York’s prominent crime families. He had a taste for nightlife, having rolled up through acquisition and intimidation a string of restaurants, strip joints, night clubs and other entertainment venues across the state and into Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
This provided Sebbie with diversified revenue streams, legal and illegal—including unregulated gambling, prostitution, drug sales and cigarette smuggling—enmeshed in such a way that confounded regional law enforcement. Until Shelly rode into town. Backed by Federal resources and leverage, he’d soon built up a rock-solid case against Sebbie, leading to a racketeering indictment.
Sebbie was an hour away from being arrested when he dropped out of sight. There was a lot of conjecture by the media that the disappearing act had followed a tip-off from someone inside the investigation. The team was led by Shelly Gross, but included undercover cops with the State Police. Predictably, the Feds implied the leak came from the staties, and vice versa. That they were able to try and convict everyone involved in Sebbie’s little empire other than Sebbie himself never cleared the air of rancor that hung around the prosecution.
Before moving on, I took note of the name of a reporter, Henry Eichenbach, who wrote a long exposé on Sebbie for the Connecticut Post . I searched for him on the Post ’s web site, but he wasn’t listed among the editorial staff, so I went back to Google and found his blog. This was expected, since any newspaper reporter with a pulse sets up a blog in anticipation of the mad dash to online media. I read through the site, noting he was working on a book about the Fed’s secret Connecticut organized crime task force. The date of that posting was almost three years old. I checked Amazon unsuccessfully for a
Now I had a better role to play—the Man Who Just Awoke from a Hundred Years in a Coma and Had a Lot of Catching Up to Do.
The first three Google pages were rich with information, which took almost an hour to read or download for future study, then it petered out. I kept clicking through the pages, however, having learned that some of the most rewarding material was often twenty, thirty, or even a hundred pages in. The Google search algorithm was a marvel of speed and efficiency, but it wasn’t omniscient. Often the best stuff was tucked deep inside the search, where the less obsessive never took the trouble to look.
And this was no exception. On page sixty-three was the retirement notice in the University of Michigan alumni magazine of an FBI Special Agent named Shelly Gross, who’d spent the last ten years of his career setting up task forces around the country focused on organized crime, most recently in Connecticut, where he decided to settle down in Rocky Hill, a fact corroborated by an obituary on his wife in the Rocky Hill Post .
The singular success of the Connecticut project was noted in several sources. There was no mention of Shelly, but quite a bit on the nature of the various rackets the task force targeted, and the methods by which they seriously compromised criminal enterprise.
I jumped from there into a people search, which quickly yielded results for the only Shelly Gross living in Connecticut. I also tried to locate three crime bosses that my initial research had shown to be deeply entangled in the state’s rackets over a long period of time, but not surprisingly, the public search sites yielded very little. There were more legal, professional search programs for tracking people down, but I’d never felt compelled to use them, on the theory that the cost would never justify the improved penetration.
I now abandoned that qualm, which quickly led me to a short list of three overachieving punks: Ronny DeSuzio, Ekrem Boyanov, and my favorite, Sebbie “The Eyeball” Frondutti. He was an entrepreneurial underboss who’d set up a satellite operation in Connecticut for one of New York’s prominent crime families. He had a taste for nightlife, having rolled up through acquisition and intimidation a string of restaurants, strip joints, night clubs and other entertainment venues across the state and into Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
This provided Sebbie with diversified revenue streams, legal and illegal—including unregulated gambling, prostitution, drug sales and cigarette smuggling—enmeshed in such a way that confounded regional law enforcement. Until Shelly rode into town. Backed by Federal resources and leverage, he’d soon built up a rock-solid case against Sebbie, leading to a racketeering indictment.
Sebbie was an hour away from being arrested when he dropped out of sight. There was a lot of conjecture by the media that the disappearing act had followed a tip-off from someone inside the investigation. The team was led by Shelly Gross, but included undercover cops with the State Police. Predictably, the Feds implied the leak came from the staties, and vice versa. That they were able to try and convict everyone involved in Sebbie’s little empire other than Sebbie himself never cleared the air of rancor that hung around the prosecution.
Before moving on, I took note of the name of a reporter, Henry Eichenbach, who wrote a long exposé on Sebbie for the Connecticut Post . I searched for him on the Post ’s web site, but he wasn’t listed among the editorial staff, so I went back to Google and found his blog. This was expected, since any newspaper reporter with a pulse sets up a blog in anticipation of the mad dash to online media. I read through the site, noting he was working on a book about the Fed’s secret Connecticut organized crime task force. The date of that posting was almost three years old. I checked Amazon unsuccessfully for a
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