I shook my head. “Probably not possible. The laundering process protects them. Too many hands. Money came into their pension fund through a bank. Legal, aboveboard, just good old-fashioned business.”

I had told Bob Kennedy the same thing on the phone today. That the Greenlease money was a dead-end unless his accountants were miracle workers at exposing dirty laundry.

Stoic in his disappointment, Kennedy had said, “We’ll, uh, get him next time.”

I’d called Hoffa, too, with the “good news.” He laughed at “Booby” coming up empty again. But to put it in context, when I spoke to Bob, he was on a secure government line; Hoffa had to go to a phone booth.

I said to Greenlease, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve probably made more money off these sons of bitches than they ever got out of you.”

“How is that?”

I shrugged. “Every damn one of these St. Louis gangsters drives a Cadillac.”

Initially that hit him like a punch; then he began to chuckle and finally outright laugh. He stood, as did I, put his arm around my shoulder and walked me out. Told me he’d again made arrangements at the Hotel President, where I could leave the loaner Caddy.

At the door he said, “I hope you won’t consider this overly, well, uh…bloodthirsty of me to say.”

I half-smiled. “Bloodthirsty?”

“Yes. Perhaps I allowed myself to take too seriously the, well, stories about you that one hears. About the bad people who sometimes disappear when they come into your sphere of influence.”

“Some of that’s exaggeration, sure.”

“But, Nate, I just would like to know…that Costello character. When he had a gun to his temple—wanting to die…why not let him pull the trigger?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t do that, sir.”

“In heaven’s name, why?”

“He hadn’t suffered enough.”

* * *

In 1959 Joe Costello tried to kill himself with pills before being sent to prison for two years on gun charges. He ultimately self-destructed in a more imaginative way. After selling out to his ex-partner at the Tic Toc Club, a drunken Costello lost his head when the new owner refused to give Ace cabs exclusive loading privileges at what had been Joe’s own club. He shot and killed the ex-partner outside Tic Toc there on the DeBaliviere Strip. Facing trial on a murder charge, Costello—seeing a psychiatrist regularly and suffering from hypertension, liver trouble, and diabetes—died in July 1962 at age 53 of a heart attack at home. A Cadillac was parked out front.

A bitter, depressed Lou Shoulders, 63, had a fatal heart attack a little more than a month earlier. This freed Dolan up that same year to finally make a statement echoing what he’d told me in 1958; but the ex-patrolman still did not identify Barney Baker, though his description of the fourth man counting money in Costello’s rec room fit the big, tiny-headed Teamster thug perfectly.

Elmer Dolan never returned to law enforcement, instead working for a building materials firm and then a liquor distributor, both in St. Louis. In July 1965, with the FBI acknowledging his perjury had been out of concern for his family’s lives, Dolan received a full pardon from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Dolan died of a heart attack at 45 in 1973.