Scene from a screenplay.
Read on:
High level 50-ish VP chief of staff type…call him Skeets. Skeets Parsons. Out jogging in the Fort Marcy Park area…right near where they found Vincent Foster. Suddenly three black cars pull up. One in front of him, one behind, and a stretch limousine to his left. Out of the limo steps someone who looks very Secret Service…earpiece, suit, haircut…the works.
Secret Service #1: Step into this car please, Mr. Parsons. We have a problem. National Security, sir.
Parsons does as he is told. The Secret Service guy gets in behind him. Inside the car are the Vice President…Vice President Marshall…a driver and two other Secret Service looking men. BIG men. Serious men. Maybe just a little rougher around the edges than Secret Service men usually look.
Marshall: Sorry to bother you right now, Skeets, but this is an emergency. I’ll fill you in as we drive.
The cars take off in DC formation. Lead car, VIP car, follow car. No lights, no sirens. Helicopter shot that shows them clearly headed AWAY from DC. Road sign shot says “Langley – 2 mi.”
Skeets: Gee, boss. Where are we going?
Marshall: There’s been an accident, Skeets. We’re headed to a CIA hospital at Langley.
Skeets: Oh NO!!! What happened?
Marshall: Someone got shot.
Scooter: Who?
Marshall: You.
Both of the men in the back grab Parsons and pin him to the seat. The third man takes out a small pistol. Skeets struggles, but it’s no use.
Skeets: What!!!???? What!!!??? What did I do!!!???
Marshall: Well, asshole…you didn’t do anything. Yet. And I am here to make sure that you DON’T do anything.
Scooter: But boss!!! BOSS!!! You can count on ME!!!
Marshall: Yeah. Well, just to be sure…
Here’s the deal. The Special Prosecutor is going to charge you in a few weeks. He can’t get the President’s guy, but he’s got you right in the cross hairs. He’s going to indict you on about 30 years’ worth of charges.
Skeets: Yeah, but BOSS!!! You said that would work out. You said that it would take at LEAST a year or two for that to go to trial and that the President would pardon me if I was convicted!!!
Marshall: Well…things have changed.
Skeets impotently struggles a little more, but it’s hopeless.
Skeets; But boss!!! I won’t rat you out!!! You know me!!!
Marshall: Yeah. I know you. You glorified Yalie gofer. You’d rat out your mother if you had to. If I could, I’d just have you killed and be done with it. But I can’t. Too much publicity already. So here’s the deal. “Plato ó plomo?” Ever hear those words before?
Skeets: Nooo…
Marshall: Some of my…Mexican friends use the phrase. It means “Silver or lead?” They ask that question when they want someone to clearly understand the alternatives which are being offered.
Skeets: Huh???
Marshall: Shut up, asshole. Like I said…here’s the deal. We will back you all the way with the Special Prosecutor. We will get you the shortest sentence possible. And the President will pardon you if and when he can. But the way things are going, he may NOT be able to pardon you. You may have to do four or even five years.
Skeets: Oh NO!!!
Struggles some more.
Marshall slaps him across the face.
Marshall: Get your shit together!!! You knew what was at stake here!!! We’ll see to it that if you DO have to spend time in jail, it will be at a federal country club. No Bubbas to fuck with you, good food, even a fucking squash court and a computer to write another one of those weak-ass novels of yours.
PLUS…for every year that you are in jail, we will deposit $5 million in that offshore bank account of yours.
Skeets: “I have no bank…”
Marshall smacks him again.
Marshall: What? Do you think I’m STUPID? (Hits him a third time. Hard. Skeets folds.) I know every dirty deal you’ve run in the last 30 years. Why do you think I hired you in the FIRST place???
Those $5 millions? That’s the silver. The plato.
Driver: We’re almost there, sir.
Marshall nods. The Secret Service guy with the small gun leans over and shoots Skeets in the foot.
Skeets screams. Marshall hits him again, and Skeets’ holders tighten their grip on him until he stops thrashing and subsides into muffled sobs.
Marshall: And THAT’S the plomo!!! Just a little down payment. Something to remember us by. No Joe Valachi shit from YOU, motherfucker!!! ONE WORD about what’s really going down…ONE WORD…and I will kill you, your family, your boyfriend…yes, I know about that, too…and your mother as well.
Shock and awe, baby. Shock and awe…
YOU knew the deal.
Shot of the cars going through a side gate outside of CIA headquarters in Langley and directly into a tunnel beneath a large, anonymous looking building.
Back in the car…darker outside now, as if it is in an underground passageway. Shot of several men in hospital blues waiting outside the car with a stretcher.
Marshall: These nice men will fix your foot now. It’ll only hurt for a few months. Tommy knows his business. (Shot of the Secret Service type shooter giving a tight grin and nod of recognition.)
Marshall: But you WILL remember…
Won’t you.
Skeets is hobbled out of the limo, onto the stretcher dolly and wheeled away.
The cars disappear into the darkness at the end of the tunnel.
Fade to black.
Yup…
“Not a WORD, asshole…”
“Not one WORD!!!”
Yup…
AG
There are screenplays that you CAN get produced…
And screenplays you can’t.
Guess which one THIS is.
AG
What a FUN read!
Wouldn’t it be somethin’ …
The only other thing that came to mind was that Scooter was playing the Michael Jackson-perfected sympathy card…. claim you got injured, get yourself to a doctor (or in Jackson’s case, to a hospital before court in the morning), and emerge with visible proof (crutches).
Wow!!
That one will be playing in my mental theater for a long time.
Waaaay too much fun…and the real kicker was that picture. I’d completely forgotten for some reason about him being on crutches.
Will we have any more installments?
Depends on how heavy Mr. Fitzgerald really is.
And who is in his corner.
HE’S got handlers and allies, too, or else he wouldn’t have gotten THIS far.
And I DO mean “in his corner”.
Like in a prizefighter’s corner.
Because that’s what this guy is.
He’s a prizefighter, and he’s in only the early middle rounds of what is going to be one HELL of a battle before it’s over.
Take a good look at him.
If you know anything about boxing…he’s the CLASSIC Irish fighter. (Me too…from a long line of ’em. He could be one of my cop cousins who went to night school and became a prosecutor, boxed for kicks and to make a lilttle extra money. That’s how come I recognize him.)
Now if you know anything about boxing, you know that the so-called “sterotypes” are more often true than not. And what defines an “Irish” fighter?
Someone who WILL NOT GIVE UP. Someone who is often outclassed in terms of sheer physical skills but just keeps on coming until the opponent breaks down. Someone who will take three punches to lay one good one in there.
And…the good ones…someone who wins much more often than he loses, and when he does “lose”, the other fighter is often never the same afterward.
Take a look at this guy.
Irish Micky Ward. The contemporary prototypical “Irish fighter”, American style.
See the resemblance?
I do. Look at the mouths. Look at the eyes. You do NOT want to mess with a man who holds his mouth like this in repose. You do not want to mess with someone who looks directly THROUGH you when he looks AT you, either. Trust me.
If you never saw Ward fight…he’s retired now…let me tell you. Watching him fight a good opponent…and his trilogy with Arturo Gatti was as good as it gets…was like watching an Old Testament morality play.
He simply WOULD NOT GIVE UP. Gatti was faster, stronger, younger…and Ward beat him once and really fought Gatti to a draw the other two times, no matter WHAT the scorecards might have said.
Well…Fitzgerald is in the same boat, and cut from the same mold.
He’s fighting trillions of dollars worth of sheer power, and I do not think that we have any idea who or what is on HIS side. Certainly elements of the old-guard CIA (what’s left of it), the remains of the old money establishment for which the CIA has been police force and bodyguard for about 50 years, the remnants of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party (What’s that…about 15% of the total Dem package? 30% No more, for SURE, or Small K kerry would never have been the candidate in 2004..)…and…others yet to stand up and be recognized.
But this man is going to put a hurtin’ on BushCo.
I can see it in his eyes.
Why?
Because it’s his job.
Because that’s what he does.
Because he CHOSE “what he does” at least in part because he loves a good fight.
And most importantly…I think that these people just flat PISS HIM OFF!!!
Have you looked at his resumé?
Really.
Ckeck it out. (From Wikipedia)
After practicing civil law, Fitzgerald became an Assistant United States Attorney in New York City in 1988. He handled drug-trafficking cases and in 1993 assisted in the prosecution of La Cosa Nostra figure John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family. In 1994, Fitzgerald became the prosecutor in the case against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others charged in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1996, Fitzgerald became the National Security Coordinator for the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There, he served on a team of prosecutors investigating Osama bin Laden.[2] He also served as chief counsel in prosecutions related to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
On September 1, 2001, Fitzgerald was nominated for the position of U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois on the recommendation of U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (no relation), a Republican from Illinois. On October 24, 2001, the nomination was confirmed by the Senate.
Let’s review this.
Working class Brooklyn Irish.
Think Pete Hamill + Jimmy Breslin.
Flatbush.
Think mean streets. By the time THIS guy was there, think outnumbered, too.
Jesuit educated…means he went to Catholic grammar and intermediate schools too, probably. Me too, for a while. Although it is currently fashionable…and richly deserved…to diss what is left of the Catholic hierarchy at the present time, there WAS a time when if you survived their teaching and came out whole, you came out HELL of a man or woman.
Pre-moral relativity, to say the least.
Amherst, Harvard, back to Brooklyn to fight that TEMPLATE of BushCo, the Mafia. Cheney is just Gotti writ large; Rumsfeld reminds me of no one more than Carlo Gambino; Bush is the usual stooge set up to take the heat, Rove and Libby are bought and sold gofers; people like Perle and Wolfowitz are consiglieris, the powers-that-be who profit off of the Mafia are the multinational corporations and arms dealers…same same, up and down.
Then 8 or 10 years in “national security”. Now you KNOW he mets lots of folks there…spooks, people like Richard Clarke who walk the line between spook ands non-spook…LOTS of people. And you ALSO know, good Irish Catholic boyo that he is, that Mr. Fitzgerald took moral stock of every single one of them.
And cast his lot accordingly.
So here he is.
Man…the motherfuckers LIED to him!!!
In CONFESSION!!!
THAT penance is going to be heavy.
200,000 Hail Marys and 20 years in jail if he has HIS way.
BET on it.
So, Father Pat…best of luck to ya’.
Keep the faith.
And have a nip or two every night.
It’ll help ya sleep.
‘Cuz…you’re going to need your strength, young Patrick.
These are some bad, BAD boys.
Best of luck to you…
Arthur Gilroy
Peace