My wife Sofia when she served as Fausto’sconsigliere…
Various foot soldiers…
And phone numbers for all of theCosa Nostrafamilies throughout Italy.
The flip phone was different.
It held the numbers for all his spies – the ones only Faustoknew about.
Police in other mafia dons’ territories…
Politicians in his pocket…
And, most tantalizingly, moles inside other organized crime families.
Besides Fausto’s laptop, which contained purely financial and banking information, the flip phone was the single greatest treasure trove my uncle had left behind –
And it was completely impenetrable.
Not because of a password, though.
Oh, no.
My uncle had been something of a Luddite. He hated the relentless march of technology. As a result, he had refused to upgrade the flip phone as the years passed, repeatedly claiming that ‘it meets my needs as is.’
The truth was, Fausto had a paranoid streak – which is an excellent quality in aconsigliere. The more complicated technology became, the quicker Fausto was to assume someone else could hack it and spy on him.
For instance, he had refused to put up surveillance cameras on the estate while my father was still alive, claiming that they could be used against us.
Now that I knew what he’d done behind our backs, he probably just wanted to make sure no one could film his clandestine activities and accidentally discover his treachery against our family.
Refusing to upgrade his phone wasn’t quite as unreasonable as it sounds. After all, nuclear missile silos in the United States reportedly still run on technology from the 1970s to guardagainst internet hackers. Ancientness can be its own sort of defense.
Fausto had bought the flip phone years before they required passwords, so that wasn’t the issue. The problem was that all the names in the phones were cryptic jumbles of letters and numbers.
M C N 15
T
MS //
My uncle was known for his near-photographic memory. I’m sure he remembered the meaning of every entry – but if there was a code behind the names and numbers, it was indecipherable tome.
I scoured the text messages for identifying clues, but aside from the dates they were sent, there was very little information. Everything was so vague that it was meaningless without knowing the context.
The package will be there at 7.
Next Monday at noon.
Tick tock, tick tock.
The only other clue was a printout from our contact in the Florence police department. I had given him all the numbers on the flip phone to find out who owned them.
Unfortunately, 99% of the phone numbers were listed as ‘Fausto Rosolini,’ which told me they were burner phones he had bought and handed out.
The cities where the phones were primarily used were scattered throughout Italy: Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Bologna, and dozens of smaller towns.
There was no rhyme or reason, and no way to determine who was on the other end.
