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Los Angeles
1947
Cole Phelps felt like he was dying. Maybe he was. He didn’t know anymore. To be honest, the past couple months had been such a Hell, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he really was dead and this was just God’s punishment for his various sins.
But no. Cole coughed up the dirty water just like a living person would, feeling the mud coating his body. His suit was torn and wet. His hat was missing. (“Really, Cole?” he scolded himself. “Priorities!”) He finally opened his eyes.
“God, I hate storm drains,” Cole said, forcing himself onto his feet. It had stopped raining. He stood outside a rusted drainage grate, where he’d been unconscious for who-knows-how-long. He began going through the details of the arson case in his head — when he rendezvoused with Biggs he would need to prepare his testimony against the conspirators and get the evidence to the Assistant D.A. Plus whatever else Kelso had up his sleeve.
Snapping Cole out of his deep thought, however, was a black sedan pulling up on the dirt road in front of him. He instinctively reached to his hip, but found nothing but a bare holster. Two men in dark suits stepped out of the car, its headlights blaring into Cole’s eyes.
“Uh… Can I help you?” Cole fumbled.
“Cole Phelps?” the men in black asked.
“Yes, actually. How…?”
“FBI. We’ve been watching your career with great interest. It’s a shame the LAPD put you out to pasture like that.”
“Look, if you could just give me a ride—”
“We think you’d work well with us, Mr. Phelps. We have a special assignment that would benefit from your skills.”
“But my arson case—”
“Mr. Phelps, it’s either this, or your ex-wife putting you on trial for adultery and your current employers sending you up the river. We need your help, and you’d be doing yourself a favor by coming with us.
Cole thought about this. If he stayed, the LAPD would just write him off as an adulterous liar trying to regain his former glory. His family still wouldn’t talk to him. Kelso would still hate him. And nearly everyone involved in the Suburban Redevelopment Fund would still get off easy.
“Alright, what do you want?” Cole asked.
“Good answer. Now, have you ever heard of the Empire Bay Mafia?”
---
Empire Bay
June 15, 1951
“All units, all units, an explosion at the Empire Arms Hotel, repeat, explosion at the Empire Arms Hotel,” the radio called out. Cole, now a Federal agent heading up Empire Bay’s organized crime task force, heard the call and raced to the scene in his unmarked car. The building looked like its top had been blown off; smoke bellowed from the upper floors as fire trucks sped past him. By the time he got there, however, the fire seemed to be under control.
“Cole Phelps, FBI,” he said as he approached the Empire Bay detectives already on the scene. “What are we looking at here?”
“Your guess is as good as ours, Agent Felps,” one of them said.
“If you want to head up and take a look around, be our guest,” the other said before walking away.
“It’s no wonder you guys have a crime problem,” Cole muttered as he went inside. Ambulance attendants were on the scene, carrying away injured, while firemen came down the stairs, their faces black with soot. Cole, however, instinctively pressed the elevator button.
“Hey Mac, you’re gonna be waiting a while if you go up that way,” one of the firemen told him. “Elevators are out.”
Cole sighed, and started heading up the stairs.
---
“Phelps, FBI,” he told the Fire Marshall when he reached the scene. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“Wow, the Feds are involved in this?” the Fire Marshall remarked. “Must’ve been some pretty important guys. You wanna know what I think happened? Well there’s no rupture in the gas lines, so I’d figure it was a bomb of some sort. Some EBPD officers marked up where they think it went off, in the conference room down the hall.”
“Thank you.”
Cole walked through the charred corridors, looking down at the dead bodies that littered the floor. He saw the Empire Bay coroner down the hall.
“Phelps, isn’t it?” the coroner asked. “I remember you from the papers, that scandal in L.A.”
“How many dead are we looking at here?” Cole asked, changing the subject.
“From the explosion? Around a dozen, give or take.”
“Then what about—?” Cole began, gesturing to the large amount of dead bodies down the corridor.
“Gunshots. Some unis confirmed it by finding shell cases and marks on the walls. Whoever set off this powder keg wasn’t going to leave it to chance.”
Back at the stairs, Cole found the hotel owner, William Armeson, demanding to be let through. The uniformed officers denied him entry.
“This is my hotel, I need to personally assess the damage!” he told them.
“Is there a problem here?” Cole asked. “Phelps, FBI.”
“...No, not at all,” Armeson nodded.
“Then you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, would you?”
“Fine, but be quick about it. I have to call the insurance company about this.”
Now Cole was in his element. He took out his notepad and considered the evidence seen thus far.
“Who had this space booked today?” Cole asked. A simple question should result in a simple answer. But whether he was in Los Angeles or Empire Bay, people kept making it more difficult.
“Hmm, I can’t be sure of that. I’m just the owner, I don’t have knowledge about everyone who rents out our conference spaces. You’ll have to check with the concierge.”
Phelps sincerely doubted that. “Sir, what will the papers and your insurers think when I tell them that you ignorantly allowed dangerous persons onto your premises? They’ll crucify you in an instant.”
“Fine, fine,” Armeson relented. “It was the Clemente family. They asked me personally for a discount on the conference room and I practically gave it to ‘em!”
“The Clemente family?” Cole asked, surprised. “As in the Clemente crime family?”
“Hey, I don’t ask what business my guests are involved in, I just accept payment and make arrangements.”
“And now dozens of men are dead, and your hotel is in shambles. I hope your insurers are kind.”
In the corner, uniformed officer hung up the phone. “Agent Phelps!” he called out. “There’s another dead body down in the parking garage.”
“Any witnesses?”
“No, but people downstairs are saying they saw two guys drive off, chasing Alberto Clemente’s car.”
---
Cole got down to the parking garage, instantly spotting a dead body and some skidmarks heading away from it. Officers were already guarding the area.
“Agent Phelps, FBI. Mind if I take a look?”
“Go right ahead,” the officers nodded.
Phelps kneeled under the yellow tape, standing over the dead body as it sat against the wall. “Likely cause of death? Gunshot wound,” Cole said to himself as he inspected the body. “Age? About 17.”
He found the man’s wallet and examined it more closely. “Marty Santorelli? That’s an Italian name…”
He stood up and looked around for the nearest Gamewell. Running out to the sidewalk, he picked up the blue phone and spoke to the operator. “FBI Agent Cole Phelps, I need an address for a Marty Santorelli.”
“Only one address listed by that name, Agent Phelps,” the operator told him. “In Oyster Bay.”
---
As Cole was on his way to Santorelli’s apartment, another call came through on the radio.
“A double homicide reported just outside of Midtown. All other units standby.”
He swiftly turned around and made his way there. At the scene, there were two men in a car, riddled with bullets.
“Phelps, FBI,” he told the officers on the scene. “Anything I need to know?”
“Plates are registered to Alberto Clemente, which I assume is the name of the guy in the back seat.”
“That would make the guy in front his driver,” Cole nodded.
He would find no leads here nor at Marty Santorelli’s apartment, leaving the case cold (much like all the other Mafia-related homicides in Empire Bay), but he resolved to watch the apartment closely in the future.
---
Some months later, his watching paid off, as he saw a man with a dark hair and a medium build arrive at the apartment, in a weird outfit to boot. He looked pretty familiar.
Cole knocked on the door. “FBI, open up.”
Vito Scaletta opened the door. “What’s the problem, officer?”
“That’s funny, because this residence is still listed under Marty Santorelli, isn’t it? And last I checked, he was dead.”
“A friend of his gave it to me. Must have forgotten to sign some papers or something.”
“I see. By the way, I didn’t catch your name, Mister…?”
“I didn’t give it out,” Vito said, shutting the door.
Cole sighed and returned to his car.
---
September 25, 1951
Phelps pulled up to the home of Tommy Angelo, finding the dead man’s body on the lawn. Caution tape had already been erected around the front lawn, as officers surrounded the crime scene. To his surprise, another FBI agent was on the scene.
“Agent Phelps, I presume,” the man said. “Agent Cox. First one of our informants gets killed, now this.”
“Informant?”
“You didn’t know? Henry Tomasino was feeding the Bureau of Narcotics info on Empire Bay for months.”
“Oh, I’m not with Narcotics,” Cole responded. “But the Mafia’s never been involved with drugs before.”
“I’ll have them send you a dossier,” Agent Cox nodded. “Anyway, what a piece of work they made of ol’ Tommy.”
“Who was he?”
“Was a member of the Salieri Crime Family over in Lost Heaven. Got put in Witness Protection, wound up here.”
“Any idea of the attackers?”
“We had some luck chasing them but no luck in identification. Any guys who got close enough are deader than Tommy here.”
---
September 26, 1951
Cole walked around Zavesky Observatory (which looked much like the Griffith Observatory from back home, Cole noticed), the site of a massive mob shooting. Dead bodies covered every nook and cranny, blood pooling on the floor underneath them. Cole didn’t know where to begin. Luckily, someone notified him of an assault across town that might be related, saving him from this bloodbath.
Pulling up to the scene, he saw a crashed car and at least two injured men, with the driver still sitting dead in the front seat. A uniformed officer filled him in.
“They say they were taking their friend ‘Joe’ to a party when he freaked out and kicked the crap out of them.”
“Are they credible?”
“You’ll have to ask them when they get to the hospital. I’m going to ride with; you’re free to look around the car before the coroner gets here. Maybe see if this ‘Joe’ really exists.”
Cole followed the officer’s suggestion and took a look around. First, the body. No identification in his pockets. Next, the car. Nothing there. Then, the license plate. The operator told him over the Gamewell that no car was registered with that number.
“Must be false plates,” Cole muttered.
Finally, Cole took a look around the bushes in front of where the car crashed. Stepping through the hedge, he spotted some footprints in the mud.
“Bingo,” Cole said to himself.
Cole followed the trail all the way to Union Station, where he spotted Joe Barbaro, suspected member of the Falcone Family, at the ticket booth.
“Look man, I just escaped with my life,” he told the attendant. “I gotta get out of the city. Lost Heaven’s a no-go, and I can’t set foot in New York or New Bordeaux.”
“Well sir, that leaves the Birkland line. From there, you can get as far as Chicago if you’d like.”
“Good, fine, perfect, I know some guys up there I can go to, just please gimme the ticket already.”
As the attendant gave Joe his one-way ticket, Joe felt a shiver run up his spine. He had a sixth sense about these things; he was being followed. Not wanting to give himself up, Joe took the ticket and tried to disappear into the crowd, but Cole followed close behind (not too close, though).
Out on the platform, the train pulled up to the station. Cole followed Joe on board, but Joe was more clever than he looked. He stepped off of the train briefly, fooling Cole into getting off just before the doors shut and the train began to pull away. As Cole chased after the train, Joe gave him a smirk and a wave. He opened up the window.
“Hey, if you see my pal Vito, tell him I said ‘Hi,’ would ya?” Joe called out over the roar of the train’s engine.
Cole threw his hat to the ground. He figured he could beat the train to Birkland if he drove fast enough with the sirens blaring. But no.
He was assigned to Empire Bay. And here, he still had a few fish to fry.