Crime Beat

Eddines murder, the first of the week’s cases to be closed.
    From the witnesses they had learned that they had what was basically a “smoking gun” case; open and shut. Eddines had stolen jewelry from his sister and the man who had given it to her came after him—with two friends and a gun. The detectives spent the morning hours taking statements from the witnesses and preparing warrants for the three suspects. It will just be a matter of catching them. They go home with the case, for the most part, cleared.
    The good luck doesn’t end with the Eddines case. Vicki Russo comes in to work and gets a little bit of the wish she made outside Walter Moody’s apartment four days earlier. The wish for a “gimme.”
    A friend of the long-sought-after Troy is on the phone saying that Troy wants to come in and talk about Moody. Russo says that’s fine, she’ll be waiting. A break is a break, even if it comes after a week of chasing dead ends.
    When Troy comes in, Russo and Allen sit him down in one of the squad’s interview rooms. It is just big enough for a suspect and two interviewers to sit around a table with fluorescent lighting above. The only window, small, square and mirrored, is in the door.
    The suspect, whose full name is Troy Tetreault, age 18, begins by saying he was there when Moody was murdered but he didn’t do it. He ends by admitting he did it, but only because he was defending himself. Moody was attacking me, he says.
    But all of the explanations Troy offers do not explain how someone defending himself would stab his attacker between the shoulder blades and then ransack and rob his home. Troy is charged with first-degree murder, and case number 38 is now counted as cleared.
    W HAT HAS BEEN a bad week has turned out well for the homicide squad. Two out of three cases cleared. Moody’s murder is the 31st cleared so far this year, a better than 75 percent rate.
    In future weeks, Walley and Ciani would continue to work the Connable slaying but it would remain unsolved. The detectives would get no closer to the three men of Group Two than they were the night one of them opened fire on Group One. In mid-August, Ciani would leave the police department to join a private investigation firm. The file on Connable would remain open on Walley’s desk, the detective waiting for a break, a name or a clue that would lead to the shooter. But it wouldn’t come, and he would have other cases to follow.
    The murder pace would continue in Fort Lauderdale, with the city surpassing the previous year’s murder toll of 42 by the end of July and steadily heading toward the all-time high of 53. Two detectives would be temporarily assigned to the squad to help handle the case flow.
    Sitting at his desk one day not long after the last week of June, George Hurt would ponder whether the pace was here to stay, whether three murders a week would no longer stand out as an aberration in Fort Lauderdale.
    “Believe me, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he says. “But you can’t really predict what will happen. I’ve been hoping that this is just an oddball year. It used to be that four or five homicides a month meant a very heavy month. Now that doesn’t look so bad to me.”
    Whatever happens, Hurt says, the homicide squad is ready.
    “Whether there are 45 or 75 homicides, we are here,” he says. “I could say that old saying about it being a dirty job but somebody has to do it, but I don’t look at it that way. I see it as being a dirty job but somebody has to know how to do it. We know how. We do good work here.”

THE OPEN TERRITORY
THE MOB SQUAD
They are the most covert of cops, working in the shadows and watching the underworld. They’re closing in on the Open Territory.
    SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL
    March 29, 1987
    L ITTLE NICKY was driving his white Rolls-Royce on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, heading for some dinner, when he saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. He pulled over.
    Nicky immediately recognized the cop walking up to his window. It was one of the local detectives who stopped him from time to time to tell him to watch himself down here.
    “Mr. Drago, howya doin’?” Nicky said after rolling down the window.
    “Fine, Nicky,” the detective said. “You got your license with you?”
    “I better have that, right Mr. Drago?”
    “Yeah, Nicky, you better.”
    Nicodemo Scarfo, reputed overlord of mob activities in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and frequent Fort Lauderdale