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like that when you speak with the kids?” I asked.
    “Like what?” he said.
    “You just sounded like you were still on the streets.”
    “Yeah,” Sam said. “Five minutes ago, I thought you were running for Congress. Just now, I thought you were going to ask me to spot you in the chow line.”
    “I guess I don’t even notice it,” he said. “The devil, he’s in all of us, or he tries to be. Maybe that’s him trying to weed his way out into the world.”
    This devil-and-God talk was wearing thin—if I had a core belief, it was probably one my dad taught me: never write bad checks. He’d done it enough to know, but when applied to every aspect of your life, it was good advice.
    “Anyway,” Eduardo said. He cleared his throat, and I could tell he was about to try to tell his story without sounding like a thug. “I told the feds who Junior had killed, what shots he’d called, gave them information on the drug trade we had. But mostly? Mostly they wanted to get control of the prisons. At the time, Latin Emperors ran all the prisons up from Florida to New York. La Eme had the West Coast; Texas Syndicate was running Texas, Oklahoma—that cowboy shit. Black Guerilla Family and all those Blood and Crip sets run the South and places like Rikers. But we were political, too, and that made it different. We had clout.”
    “Funny,” Sam said, “I don’t see the Latin Emperors running some Attica game.”
    “Not from the outside, you don’t,” he said. “But it’s a whole other culture on the inside. And we ran it. By the time I was running the show, I was like Obama. All hope and change and all that. Junior, he didn’t see it like I saw it. He was down for crime, not empowerment. That’s where we diverged. So I gave up what I gave up and things got easier for me, relations cooled inside, and eventually I got my release and now here I am.”
    “And where is Junior?” I said.
    “He was released last year,” he said.
    “Blood in, blood out,” I said. “So I take it he’s looking for yours now?”
    “More a pound of flesh,” Eduardo said. “He wants in on this business, says because of our oath to each other, every dime that passes through Honrado, half is his. And he wants to run Latin Emperor business through here, launder their money through my organization. And he wants payback. I think that is the largest issue. He did twenty-five years.”
    “How’d he get out?” Sam asked.
    “Overcrowding,” Eduardo said. He gave a shrug. “Good behavior. Paid off the right people. These things happen. He may have been the kingpin all these years, but I suspect even he saw after a while that the path to getting out of prison was paved with nonviolence.”
    “So, call the cops,” I said. “That’s an easy extortion case.”
    “I can’t,” he said. “I got pulled over two weeks ago right here on the corner. I thought maybe I’d run through the stop sign. Instead, the officer came to my window and handed me that envelope. Didn’t say a word. Just dropped it on my lap. Three days ago, there’s a knock on my door, at my home, and it’s another officer. He tells me he was just in the area and wanted to make sure I was still alive. That’s all he says.”
    “You recognize this cop?” Sam asked.
    “No, I’d never seen him.”
    “Thing is,” Sam said, “anyone can get a cop uniform, and anyone with a little time and money can get a cop car. So you don’t know if you’re dealing with real police.”
    Eduardo squirmed in his seat. He was being eaten up by this, but there was something more. We just hadn’t gotten to it yet. “You see, that’s true. But the fact is, we’ve ... they’ve ... had police on the payroll for thirty years.”
    “You telling me the Latin Emperors employ crooked cops?” Sam said.
    “Mr. Axe, please, tell me you are aware that the Miami PD has a rich history of being on the take. Since the days of Al Capone.”
    “Okay,” I said, “so the Emperors have bad cops