[Lady Justice 22] - Lady Justice and the Conspiracy Trial Read online

  In retrospect, my bravado in confronting the mafia boss was probably not the smartest thing, but in the end, it worked out. Marchetti was amused by my audacity and curious as what I would do next.

  Maggie had actually been abducted by Angel Alvarez, a Columbian drug lord. Maggie had taken a listing on a house seized by the Feds. The woman who had cleaned the place for Maggie found a computer with all the Columbian’s drug contacts and information. Alvarez had taken Maggie and offered to trade her for the computer.

  In the end, he had no plan to release Maggie and was in the process of taking both of us when Marchetti’s men intervened, saving our lives.

  I’ll never forget Carmine’s words when I thanked him. “Nonsense! We both simply did what was right. Maybe someday the shoe will be on the other foot and I’ll need the assistance of a fine private investigator. Who knows?”

  He was letting me know, in a not too subtle way, that I was indebted to him. Not a comforting thought.

  “You want me to talk to Marchetti and ask him if you’re on his hit list?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Come on, Kevin. That’s like picking at a scab. You just might be making an old wound bleed again. Like I said, if they wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “That may be true, but I just can’t take the chance. Will you do it or not? Think of it as your wedding gift to me.”

  As much as I hated the idea, it looked like I’d be asking for another chat with the godfather of the Kansas City mafia.

  In spite of our recent encounters, Marchettii and I weren’t exactly best buds. He didn’t share his personal cell number with me and we certainly weren’t Facebook friends. Someone told me he often dined at Antonelli’s Italian restaurant, and that’s where I found him on my previous visits.

  It’s probably not a wise move to interrupt a gangster during his meal and try to have a conversation while his spaghetti is getting cold, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  The first time, I just barged in and soon found myself in a hammerlock, compliments of two of his ever-present bodyguards. I didn’t want to make that mistake again.

  As soon as I entered the restaurant, I asked the maitre d’ if Mr. Marchetti was dining today. When he answered in the affirmative, I gave him my card and asked him to present it to the Don. He didn’t seem exactly thrilled, but he complied.

  A few moments later, one of Marchetti’s goons appeared. “You’ve got two minutes,” he growled.

  As usual, Carmine had a drop-dead gorgeous girl on either side.

  A big smile crossed his face when he saw me. “Walt Williams, my favorite gumshoe. Always glad to see you, even though it always seems to be while I’m trying to enjoy my meal.”

  I thought about suggesting we exchange email addresses, but then thought better of it.

  “Thank you for seeing me. I appreciate it.”

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  “Well, this may sound a bit strange, but I’d like to talk to you about Manny Sorveno.”

  “Ahh, the dear, departed Manny. What about him?”

  “I’m sure you probably know that Manny was after Kevin McBride who testified against his father, and that Kevin was involved in the gunfight that killed Manny.”

  “And if my memory serves me correctly, you were involved in that gunfight as well,” he said smiling.

  I certainly hadn’t expected that.

  “Uhhh, yes, I might have been,” I replied, suddenly apprehensive.

  “You’re probably wondering why you and your partner are still walking around, me knowing what you did. In a word, Manny was a punk. From what I hear, old Scarface was a stand-up guy, but Manny couldn’t be trusted. I knew he wanted my job and I was always looking over my shoulder wondering when he was going to make his move. Frankly, you two knocking him off was a big load off my mind.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “So tell me again why you’re here.”

  “Kevin wants to get married, but he wouldn’t if he knew he had a price on his head.”

  Marchetti grinned, “I love you two guys. You’re both willing to piss me off to protect the women you love. That’s rare these days.”

  He whispered something to one of his goons who departed to the kitchen.

  The goon returned a few moments later with a bottle of wine.

  “Here,” Carmine said, handing me the bottle. “This is a Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, 2010. Give it to Kevin and tell him congratulations for me. He has nothing to worry about.”

  I thanked him, and as I turned to leave I heard him say, “That’s two, Walt. Don’t ever forget.”

  It was a not so subtle reminder that I was in his debt twice over and that scared me more than the apes who escorted me out of the restaurant.

  CHAPTER 7

  Needless to say, Kevin was relieved that his name was not on some gangster’s to-do list.

  Once he had the green light to proceed, word of their impending nuptials spread through the building like a plague.

  Maggie was on the phone to Veronica immediately, offering her services as a wedding planner. The Professor, a confirmed bachelor, reckoned that marriage was the high sea for which no compass had yet been invented. Jerry shared that getting married is like buying a dishwasher: You’ll never have to do it by hand again. Bernice dropped some hints to Dad who quickly responded, “Don’t even think about it!”

  For me, this surprising turn of events proved to be a welcome distraction from the manila envelope in my safe. But once the hubbub died down, I was right back to my melancholy musing.

  Finally, I gave in. I hadn’t really examined the contents of the envelope closely. Once I determined what was in it, I tucked it away immediately hoping that if it was out of sight, it would be out of mind, but that certainly hadn’t been the case. I reasoned that I owed it to Carson to at least see what evidence he had found.

  Included in the envelope were mini-cassettes with recordings of his three interviews with Falcon where the Air Force pilot described his participation in the program known as Indigo Skyfold. Also on cassette was his interview with Kristen Meghan, the military scientist whistleblower who was silenced by her superiors for finding and attempting to expose the chemical stew being spewed into our skies.

  There were photos of the unmarked planes supposedly used to disperse the chemicals, parked in the Pinal Air Park at Marana, Arizona.

  There were many articles on HAARP, the massive high frequency antenna array in Alaska that had been linked to not only weather modification, but also military deterrence.

  None of this was new to me. I had discussed all of these things with Carson as well as Professor Katz. They were all part of Katz’ paper that I turned over to Thornhill, who covered each one admirably in his novel, Lady Justice and the Conspiracy.

  Then I spotted a document labeled ‘Shield.’ This was something I hadn’t seen before.

  The document was purported to be an interview with a scientist involved in Operation Shield, whose official capacity was in direct research of atmospheric issues in relation to pollutants.

  The name of the scientist was not revealed to protect his identity which I totally understood. He was referred to only as ‘Deep Shield,’ obviously a play on ‘Deep Throat,’ from Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men.

  According to Deep Shield, scientists back in the 70’s were concerned about the depletion of the ozone layer which protects us from the sun’s damaging ultra-violet rays. They calculated that unless something was done, the ever-increasing damaging rays would eventually bring an end to civilization as they knew it.

  Hence, Operation Shield was born. It was a global program whose purpose was to fill our skies with enough aluminum and barium to shield us from the damaging UV rays, but not enough to block the sunlight needed for warmth and photosynthesis.

  This was exactly what Falcon described as Operation Indigo Skyfold.


  Deep Shield said that while the USA and Russia were the primary contributors to the program, many European Union Nations and members of the United Nations contribute to one extent or another.

  To insure that the spray is not used for purposes other than climate control, the spray canisters are distributed in a triple-blind operation, so no nation knows exactly where their particular batch was manufactured.

  When asked, Deep Shield acknowledged that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement and had been warned that the program was a matter of national security and any breaches would have dire consequences.

  A final entry indicated that Deep Shield had committed suicide. The method used was a hose run from his car's exhaust pipe into the closed car in his garage. His wife found his body and said that there was no suicide note.

  Another whistleblower conveniently dead or missing along with Falcon, Frank Katz, Louise Shipley, and maybe Jack Carson.

  The reference to all of the countries participating in Operation Shield made me think about the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris from November 30th through December 12th of 2015.

  I Googled the conference and read that 196 representatives had attended. That represented pretty much every country in the world.

  My first thought was that climate change due to the emission of greenhouse gasses must be real for so many countries to participate. Then I remembered Thornhill said Michael Crichton had written a book, State of Fear, in which he totally debunked the idea of global warning.

  My curiosity was aroused, so I went online and ordered the book from Amazon.

  In it, Crichton presented chart after chart showing annual temperatures from 1930 through 2000. While there were certainly changes from year-to-year, when taken as a whole, the charts did not support the notion that the temperature had increased over that seventy year span.

  I loved his explanation that made a mockery of the whole global warming concept.

  “You’ve all heard the claim that something called ‘global warming’ is occurring because of an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But what you haven’t been told is that carbon dioxide has increased by only a tiny amount. They’ll show you a graph of increasing carbon dioxide that looks like the slope of Mount Everest. But here’s the reality. Carbon dioxide has increased from 316 parts per million to 376 parts per million. Sixty parts per million is the total increase. Now that’s such a small change in our atmosphere that it is hard to imagine. How can we visualize that?

  “Imagine the composition of the earth’s atmosphere as a football field. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen. So, starting from the goal line, nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight yard line. And most of what’s left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That’s pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe, folks. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field.

  “You are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eights of an inch – less than the thickness of a pencil. It’s a lot more carbon dioxide, but it’s a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet, we are to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern.”

  If what Crichton said was true, why in heaven’s name would the whole world be up in arms and hold a two-week conference hammering out a strategy to limit the emission of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses?

  Then a thought occurred to me.

  What if this conference wasn’t about carbon dioxide at all? What if it was just a cover for the real agenda --- geoengineering and weather manipulation?

  I pulled out the photo of the HAARP installations worldwide that Louise Shipley had brought to Kansas City.

  There were installations in every country that had participated in the Paris Conference, the US, the UK, Europe, Russia, China, and more.

  I needed another set of eyes to see what I was seeing, and tell me whether I was on to something or way out in left field.

  I knew just the people to talk to, Arnie Goldblume and Nicholas Thatcher.

  To say that these two men were suspicious of the government would be an understatement. They were the founders of a group known as the ‘Watchers.’ Their stated purpose was to be a watchdog organization keeping an eye on government shenanigans.

  When Jack Carson first approached me about the chemtrail conspiracy, I visited with the two of them in their office on Warwick Boulevard. They confirmed that they had been preaching against the trails of poison for years, but with no success. After all, the fluffy white streaks across the sky had become so commonplace over the years that the average guy on the street paid them no attention, and who in their right mind could ever consider the possibility that our government was poisoning our planet on purpose?

  I gave them a call, and as usual, they were glad to have me stop by.

  After exchanging pleasantries, I showed them what I found in Crichton’s book debunking global climate change, and asked them their opinion of the Paris Conference.

  Arnie smiled, “As usual, Walt, you’re right on target. In order to make sense of it all, let’s look at the definitions of weather and climate.”

  He pulled out an old dictionary. “Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind velocity and barometric pressure.”

  He flipped some pages. “Climate, on the other hand, is weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period. Nick, get me the NASA chart.”

  Nick rummaged through a file cabinet and handed Arnie a document.

  “Take a look at this, Walt. It looks very similar to the charts in Crichton’s book.”

  “This was published by NASA in 1999, and James Hansen, a top climate scientist wrote, ‘Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought.’”

  “But I don’t get it,” I protested. “I listened to the State of the Union address, and the president bragged on the Paris Conference as one of his proudest achievements.”

  “Really?” Nick replied, pulling a newspaper from the file cabinet. “Listen to this. It’s an article by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post Writers Group, reprinted in the Kansas City Star on December 22nd, 2015, ten days after the conference ended. ‘Yet the climate deal brought back from Paris turns out to be no deal at all. It is, instead, a series of carbon-reducing promises made individually and unilaterally by the world’s nations. No enforcement, no sanctions, nothing legally binding. What the climate change conference produced instead was hot air. China promises to begin reducing carbon emissions fifteen years from now. India announced it will be tripling its coal-fired electricity by 2030. Meanwhile, the president is effectively dismantling America’s entire coal industry.’”

  “So what do the both of you think the conference was really about?”

  “We think the same as you,” Arnie replied. “The real agenda of the conference was not climate, but weather. The climate of our planet is not changing appreciably, but the weather certainly is! Droughts in California, record snowfall in New England, a super-hot El Nino, tornadoes and hurricanes in the winter. And it’s all happening because countries all over the world are seeding the sky with chemicals and heating thousand square kilometers of the ionosphere to over 50,000 degrees.”

  I shook my head. “It’s unbelievable that our government can stand before the entire nation and tell bold-faced lies.”

  “Oh really?” Arnie sneered, “You mean the same government whose FDA said there was no cancer-causing arsenic in chicken, but now says there is, but it won’
t hurt you? The same government that switched the water supply in Flint, Michigan, from Lake Huron to the brackish Flint River to save a few bucks, and now the children are suffering from irreversible lead poisoning, dooming them to lower IQ levels, behavioral problems, growth delays and other neurological ailments? That government? And speaking of water, why after all these years and study after study showing that fluoride has no positive effects on our teeth, and is, in fact, a deadly poison, is it still injected into over 60% of the nation’s water supply?”

  Arnie had made his point.

  “And did you also know,” Nick interjected, “that this conference in Paris was the twenty-first time the nations had gotten together like this. Certainly enough time to co-ordinate a global geoengineering program.”

  “Speaking of that, what do you know about Operation Shield?”

  Arnie breathed a long sigh. “Operation Shield. The poor goobers who conceived this operation really believed that 89% of all species would become extinct and humanity would struggle to last two more generations unless they could find a way to plug the growing hole in the ionosphere and shield the planet from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. So they started spraying and zapping. Never mind that what they were spraying was dangerous. If fact, your ‘Deep Shield’ stated they knew that the heavy metals and polymers they were spraying could cause as many as two billion deaths worldwide, but given the supposition that the very future of humanity was at stake, two billion was an acceptable risk. The ends justified the means. So now, after years of global terraforming and geoengineering, they have created a monster. As the old saying goes, ‘you shouldn’t mess with Mother Nature,’ and that’s exactly what they have done, completely altering the earth’s weather pattern. And to add insult to injury, they spew their propaganda about global warming due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses to cover their butts. Unbelievable!”