Page 314 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
to take the political risk of rocking the boat. [You might recall that he had also led the TPF into Columbia to initiate the bust.] Years later, when I was a Rosenman partner, Jay called me on behalf of the new magazine that he had founded with Stephen Brill, The American Lawyer, trying to get information concerning a scandal that involved one of the firm’s senior partners, but I refused to discuss the matter with him. The last time I saw Jay was at a 2012 political fundraiser given by friends in Washington, Connecticut.)
The most interesting assignment that I had that summer involved working with another TPF officer who was assigned to the department and had worked undercover for about two years as, of all things, a park- ing meter collector. Through his work, he had confirmed that a large number of collectors and drivers in the Manhattan division were steal- ing coins from the meters. That might sound like something trifling, but it was estimated that millions of dollars in quarters had been swept away in condom-like devices that they used when they opened the meters for collection into the supposedly impregnable canisters that were designed for that job.
Using precise numbers, the officer told me that the meter men worked in rotating groups of threes, of which one was a driver; that only a certain number of collectors stole; that a lower percentage of drivers than collectors stole; that no theft would occur unless everyone on the random team was a participant; and that the quarters were routinely traded for dollars, at a discount of course, at a bar called Vallengo’s, when all of the drivers, whether or not they stole, would gather for drinks every day after work.
The plan was to obtain a search warrant, make the searches at Val- lengo’s and, theoretically anyway, seize the booty and arrest that day’s miscreants, who, it was presumed, would not take the fall alone. My job: draft the affidavit in support of the application for the search warrants. Unfortunately, I knew a little law—too much. For starters, I knew that, for the search to be legally sufficient, there had to be demonstrable prob- able cause underlying it. I also knew the evidence that was to be searched
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