Deadline(155)
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ON THE DAY of the dog raid, Virgil delivered D. Wayne Sharf to the Buchanan County jail, where he was held on a federal warrant. The feds left him there for two days, then a marshal showed up and hauled him away to Chicago. Nobody in Trippton ever saw him again, and Virgil heard later that he’d been convicted of something, but never heard what happened after that.
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THE ATTORNEY GENERAL at first denied knowledge of the dog raid, but when it became apparent that the pro-dog people outnumbered the anti-dog people by about 99.5 percent to 0.5 percent, he quickly shouldered his way into a number of TV interviews in which he implied that the dog raid was part and parcel of his investigation into the Buchanan County school board murders and embezzlement.
That whole circus was good for several consecutive days of coverage. The governor’s race was a long way off, however, so the AG slow-walked the prosecution, squeezing as much juice out of it as he could. Since the school board members were accused of multiple murder-ones, he could hold them in jail as long as he wished, without bail, as long as the defense attorneys didn’t file for a speedy trial.
The defense attorneys weren’t filing for speedy trials because they were all going to Mass on Sundays to pray for some kind of intervening information or event that would give their clients at least a chance for a reduced sentence. That didn’t work out.
In the end, after six months of meticulous and media-saturated investigation, in which it was determined that the defendants had embezzled very close to eight million dollars from the Buchanan County schools, they were all convicted of murder and a variety of subsidiary crimes involving murder (conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, etc.) and embezzlement. They all received thirty-year terms, with no chance of parole.
Viking Laughton tried to argue that he was a humble newspaper reporter with no knowledge of the crimes, which made the rest of the defendants so angry that they ratted him out on the Kerns murder, and he went down on all counts.
Masilla, the auditor, ratted them all out, and since there was no evidence that he knew of the planned murders, and since his deal eliminated the possibility of charging him with felony murder (murders in the process of committing another felony, the embezzlement), he was convicted only of the various money crimes, and given ten years. Minnesota being a socialist state that allows prisoners to set up businesses inside the prison (they get to keep relatively little of what they earn, much of it going to the state or to a victims’ fund), Masilla was able to create an accounting business for the many convicts who had money or dope hidden on the outside. His reputation for probity quickly spread, and within a year or so he had a clientele that stretched from the Attica Correctional Facility in New York to Folsom State Prison in California.
“You know what we didn’t get?” the assistant attorney general, Dave, asked Virgil. “Those bonds for the new school stadium. I know of the dealers on those, and I suspect the board and the dealers would have split up a cool three mil on that deal alone. The way they worked it, they’d have front-ended the payout. . . .”
He went on for a while, but Virgil dozed off; bond amortization discussions did that to him.
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BUSTER GEDNEY GOT as far as Biloxi, Mississippi, where he rented a mobile home and got a half-time job as a welder and machinist working for a farm implement dealer, under the name Jefferson Jones. He could hardly make it on that money, so he began manufacturing three-shot burst kits for .223s, and sound suppressors. His first really good customer was a meth cooker who brought a DEA undercover agent to Buster’s first sales meeting.
Buster delivered the equipment, right on schedule, and was arrested right on schedule, along with the meth cooker, and when his fingerprints delivered an immediate hit, was extradited to Minnesota to stand trial on the murder and embezzlement charges. He was so pathetic, blubbering on the witness stand, that the jury acquitted him of the most serious charges, and he drew a five-year sentence for misprision of a felony.