I go over what Jules told me: cable news is prepping a longer story on the organization. Owen will find his way there. Owen will find his way there, Nicholas, all of us. Nicholas was an integral part of the organization for decades. He was chief legal counsel, an unofficial consigliere to leadership—and, most critically, a trusted advisor to Frank himself. There is no way that Nicholas escapes having his story told in a larger way in conjunction with theirs.
So I can’t deny that this is just a small respite from seeing Nicholas’s name in the news again, from seeing Owen’s name alongside it.
And that is the least of it. I know it in my gut.
Because the other thing Jules said keeps pushing its way to the forefront of my mind, more immediate and more terrifying:There’s been a changing of the guard.
Mirroring what Grady said:Everything has changed.
Which leads to a question about the past that I need to figure out the answer to—a question that will influence how I go about keeping us safe in the present: What, exactly, did it change from?
And why, exactly, did any mercy—for me, for Bailey—need to go with it?
Forty-Three Years Ago
The best advice Nicholas’s father ever gave him was this:Never let fear make your decisions.
Of course, his father offered this advice shortly before Nicholas’s seventh birthday, as justification for his own decision to head off for a new life with a girlfriend out in California, while opting to leave Nicholas and his little brother and their mother behind in Texas. Despite that (and, also, because of it) the advice stuck. And it was the first thing Nicholas thought of when he agreed to meet Frank.
Because, if Nicholas was being honest, fear waswhyhe said yes. He was thirty-one years old with a family to support and crushing law school and college debt. The kind of debt that didn’t get paid off from a civil servant job. And he feared what would happen if he said no to a crime boss. Would he be killed for that? Did these kinds of people kill for things like that? Would it all lead to Nicholas inadvertently abandoning his family, just like his father had? Nicholas had organized his life to do the opposite of his father.
And still we can do tricks in our minds, can’t we? Especially when the impossible seeps in. Which is exactly what Nicholas did. He convinced himself that it wasn’t fear guiding him. In fact, he convinced himself it was closer to the opposite.
It was the promise of freedom.
Meredith was working full-time as a guidance counselor and leaving the kids with her mother, which she hated. But they neededMeredith’s salary unless Nicholas left the Austin public defender’s office.
He was making a difference there, wasn’t that the point? But now there were other points. Meredith and their children. The main points. Nicholas would do whatever was needed for them. He interviewed for a partner track position at a tony criminal law firm. It would mean a move to Houston, where the criminal law firm had their headquarters. Meredith would be able to stay home with the kids, but she would be far from Austin and her parents. It was a trade they were gearing up to make, if Meredith decided she wanted it. She couldn’t seem to decide. She was trading the guilt of not taking care of her young kids with abandoning her unwell father.
This was where they were, perched at that inflection point, with two realities that weren’t quite working for them. Being presented with a third reality. Because of Harris Gray.
Harris Gray was a young man who had been caught selling prescription pills at a fraternity party on UT-Austin’s campus, and whose case had been assigned to Nicholas. It was an open-and-shut case for the state. Harris was caught with the drugs in hand.
But Nicholas had managed to get it dismissed.
This was why he loved his job. He loved helping people who needed it. Who needed it more than a young kid like Harris, who grew up with nothing and got out over his skis to correct that? Nicholas thought that Harris would take his second chance and do things differently. That was until Nicholas learned that Harris worked for the organization.
Every criminal lawyer in the United States was familiar with the organization and the family at its helm. It wasn’t a crime syndicate the way folks traditionally thought of crime syndicates: narcotics and prostitution, loan sharking. Extortion. Murder.
Frank Campano Pointe II did things differently from the generations before him. He and his leadership team operated the organization out of South Florida, focused on more sophisticated revenue streams like international online gaming and brokerage fraud. Most notably, they bulked up their OxyContin business long before their competitors saw the opening there.
That was where Harris Gray came in. Harris Gray—whose open-and-shut case Nicholas had managed to make less open-and-shut.
This is what led to a phone call from Frank himself. And a job offer from Frank. A job offer that would allow Nicholas to spend most of his time still taking on pro bono cases and helping out at the public defenders and staying in Austin. A job offer that would have Nicholas consulting on a high level with Frank’s legal team when future criminal matters arose. A job offer that he wanted to discuss more in person.No strings, Frank had said.
Did Nicholas believe there were no strings? Not exactly, no. The very nature of agreeing to the meeting already involved strings. But if Nicholas had declined the invitation, that would be a different kind of string. The string connecting Nicholas to the organization was already in place as soon as Frank saw how good Nicholas was at his job—and as soon as Frank decided he wanted more of him. Because Frank was used to getting exactly what Frank wanted.
Never let fear make your decisions.
What about when fear and freedom started to feel like the same thing?
Frank flew Nicholas and Meredith to Miami on a private plane. It was going to be a three-day vacation, care of Frank, the only obligation was one face-to-face meeting.
It was the only time that Meredith had ever left her kids, except when her grandmother died. Meredith had flown to Italy, to hergrandparents’ small farm in Tuscany to bury her. Then she flew straight home. Less than three days.
Nicholas expected Meredith to pull out of the trip at the last moment. All the way to the airport it felt like it could go either way. She kept biting on her thumbnails, the way she did when she was thinking or nervous or both.
But something shifted in his wife when they drove through the airport gates, straight up to the tarmac, the private plane waiting for them. Even Nicholas was a little wooed. He had been on planes before but never on a private plane. Never on a plane just for him.
