"William Tuning - Terro-Human - Fuzzy 04 - Fuzzy Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuning William)

This was not to say that Hugo Ingermann would turn honest business from his
door. During the seven years or so that he had maintained his busy law
practice in Mallorysport he had represented at least eight clients who were
completely honest and respectable persons. He owned some land north of the
capital city. And he was a partner in several perfectly legal businesses-to
say nothing of being a major shareholder in a dozen more.

Ever alert to the opportunities which abound on a colony planet, Ingermann was
also the architect and principal advisor of several loosely and informally
organized conglomerates in Mallorysport.

Ivan Bowlby's entertainment enterprises-telecast productions, prize-fights,
nightclubs formed the visible surface of his activities. Out of
sight-prostitution, murder for hire, the black-market, and a little dope
business here and there.

Spike Heenan's specialty was gambling: crap games, numbers, bookmaking, and
fixing sports events. His respectable front-in which Hugo Ingermann was a
partner-was a company which leased vending machines and electronic games.

Raul Laporte's talents leaned toward racketeering, extortion, plain
old-fashioned country-style crime, and stolen goods. He had expertly developed
a system of fences for illegal sunstone buying when the Company had been the
only legal buyer for them. Rather than let that part of his operation lay
fallow since the Pendarvis Decisions, Laporte had sketched out a plan to
expand into straight robbery of sunstone prospectors right at the diggings-cut
out the middleman-just as soon as he could find time to organize the operation
personally.

The most respectably-fronted of Ingermann's proteges was Leo Thaxter, Loan
Broker and Financier-also shylock, smuggler, bag-man, and protection
racketeer. He used Laporte's strongarm employees for collections.

When Thaxter came to Zarathustra ten years earlier, he had fooled around with
some small-time rackets, set up some crooked labor unions and a couple of
marketing cooperatives to put the squeeze on planters. Nothing really big,
though, until he fell under the tutelage of Ingermann some four or five years
later-who had showed him how to make good money by laundering bad money and
investing the profits in six-for-five loans to people who couldn't borrow
anywhere else.

His sister, Rose Thaxter, had married Conrad Evins, who later became the chief
gem-buyer for the CZC. At the height of the Fuzzy craze, the three of them had
kidnapped some Fuzzies and trained them to get into the Company gem vault
through the ventilation system. Ambitious enterprise that; the vault contained
upwards of one hundred million sols worth of sunstones.

They almost got away with it. Two minor henchmen, Phil Novaes and Moses
Herckerd, had been caught inside Company House with the loot. Herckerd managed