“Did he mention a place? A time?” Ted sensed a trap. Hired thugs wouldn’t grab him inside the Century Club, but there would be no way to avoid them if they wanted to take him on the street. A neutral location, on the other hand, might mean that Ted could actually trust the old bastard.

“Keller v. Zuckerman/Scotto LLC. One o’clock tomorrow. He said you’d know what that meant.”

A complicated case that had dragged through the system for years. A pair of shady lawyers had bought buildings in East New York and converted them to affordable-housing units, using government grants. Once these two sharks filled the apartments with Section 8 tenants, they had leveraged the buildings with loans from banks and private lenders, borrowing more than the properties could have ever drawn at auction. Then the mortgage crisis swept through Brooklyn, and Zuckerman/Scotto LLC stopped paying. For anything.

Everybody sued, but the courts were swamped, and foreclosures took forever. Misters Zuckerman and Scotto managed to collect three years’ rent from their tenants without paying a dime for taxes, interest, insurance, maintenance, or heating fuel. Zuckerman, despite a vigorous defense by Hasting, Fitzmaurice, and Barson, eventually went to jail and was, no doubt, still there.

Scotto wasn’t so lucky. On his way home to Staten Island one night, a delivery van sideswiped him on the Verrazano Bridge. When Scotto got out of his car to exchange insurance information with the van driver, two men burst out of the side door, grabbed the lawyer, and boosted him over the rail. Two hundred twenty-eight feet later, he hit the water on an incoming tide. His body was recovered near a pier at the end of Bay Ridge Ave.

It was Ted’s first real-life lesson in the difference between justice and the law.

Ted understood the Judge’s code. Lionel Keller, a tenant who had merely wanted his heat turned on, had lived in a Zuckerman/Scotto-owned three-building enclave on Dumont Avenue. HFB LLC had been forced to step down as counsel to the commercial real estate company while pursuing Zuckerman’s criminal appeals. Ted, having been lead counsel to that company, followed the progress of the various suits. Mr. Keller sought to recoup rent after living in his apartment for three years with no heat and intermittent water service. He was represented pro bono by a top-tier law firm that took his case all the way to Albany and the New York State Court of Appeals. Keller lost. Judge Fitzmaurice cast the deciding vote.

That was Ted’s second lesson.

He had no idea what had become of the unfortunate Mr. Keller, but the buildings were still there. It had been a rough neighborhood back then and probably still was. There was a good chance that Ted and the Judge would be the only white faces in sight. Loitering Russian mobsters would have nowhere to lurk. It meant that Ted could trust the Judge—possibly.