Ezra Prentice did not believe in half-measures. When he waged war, he waged total war. The campaign to dismantle Frank Brennan was not a single, surgical strike; it was a coordinated, three-front assault, a blitzkrieg designed to annihilate the man's power, break his will, and shatter his empire in a matter of days. Each front of the attack was delegated to the arm of his empire best suited to the task: the mind, the ghost, and the fist.
The first attack, the war of the mind, was a silent, devastating assault on the source of Brennan's power: his money. The task was given to Baron von Hauser's team of forensic accountants, the same meticulous, amoral geniuses who had unraveled the financial webs in Cambridge and Berlin. Working from a secure, anonymous office suite in a downtown skyscraper, they descended upon Frank Brennan's financial empire like a pack of digital wolves.
Bobby Kennedy's investigators had been stymied by legal procedure, by warrants and subpoenas that Brennan's lawyers could tie up in court for years. Von Hauser's team faced no such constraints. They hacked, bribed, and infiltrated. They peeled back the layers of the Teamsters' vast pension fund, an institution Brennan treated as his personal, billion-dollar piggy bank. What they found was a cesspool of corruption far deeper than even the Kennedys had imagined.
They traced hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal, unsecured loans made from the pension fund to mob-controlled construction projects in the burgeoning casino landscape of Las Vegas and the corrupt urban development schemes of Chicago. They uncovered a complex money-laundering scheme that funneled union dues through a series of shell corporations in the Caribbean, with a significant percentage flowing directly back into Brennan's own secret, undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland. They compiled a mountain of irrefutable, criminally prosecutable evidence of racketeering, embezzlement, fraud, and conspiracy. It was a case so detailed, so perfectly documented with account numbers, wire transfers, and sworn affidavits from bribed bank officials, that it would not just indict Brennan; it would obliterate him.
While the accountants were waging their silent financial war, the second front opened. This was the war of the ghost, an intelligence attack on Brennan himself. Ezra's domestic surveillance teams, the best in the private sector, were unleashed. They were masters of their craft, moving through the world with an invisible patience.
They placed a sophisticated, miniaturized bug in the base of a lamp in Brennan's lavish office at the Teamsters' headquarters in Washington. They put a magnetic listening device underneath his favorite table at his preferred Italian restaurant in New York. They bugged his car, his home, his secret apartment where he met with his mistress. They built a complete, 24-hour audio portrait of his life.
For weeks, they listened to the mundane details of a corrupt man's existence. But then, they got the break. Brennan, arrogant and feeling untouchable after his triumphant defiance of the Kennedy committee, held a secret meeting in his office. His guest was a powerful, conservative senator, a man who was one of Jack Kennedy's most bitter political rivals.
Ezra's team listened, the tape recorders spinning silently in a surveillance van parked a block away. Brennan, his voice thick with whiskey and self-satisfaction, was bragging. The recording was crystal clear.
"…don't you worry about the Kennedys, Senator," Brennan's voice boomed. "The pretty boy and his little brother can't touch me. They're choirboys. They don't know how the world really works." There was a pause, the clink of glasses. "Besides, if they push me too far, I've got an insurance policy. A big one. Old man Kennedy thinks everyone's forgotten how he made his first fortune during Prohibition. All those shipments from Canada… a lot of my old union boys drove those trucks. They remember. They kept records. I push a button, and the whole Kennedy myth goes up in smoke."
Ezra now possessed a recording that was pure political dynamite. It was not only a confession of blackmail, but it could be used to utterly destroy not just Frank Brennan, but one of Jack Kennedy's major political opponents as well.
The third and final front of the war was the most brutal. It was the war of the fist. With the financial and intelligence attacks complete, it was time to physically break Brennan's power base. Ezra decided this was the perfect test for his newly reorganized Fire Brigade. He gave the order to Sullivan in Spain.
A small, elite, four-man team was selected. They were the best of the best, men who had been forged in the fires of Sullivan's new, brutal training regimen. They were not the undisciplined thugs Dubois had recruited; they were ghosts, disciplined, professional, and utterly lethal. They were led by Sullivan himself. They were flown to the United States on a private jet, entering the country under deep-cover identities.
Their mission was not to kill Brennan. That would be too crude, too messy. Their mission was to surgically dismantle his infrastructure of fear in a single, coordinated night of terror.
The attacks were launched simultaneously at 2:00 AM, a synchronized symphony of violence across three cities.
In Detroit, their target was Anthony "The Hammer" Gallo, Brennan's top enforcer, a notoriously violent mobster responsible for a dozen unsolved disappearances. Two of Sullivan's men intercepted him as he was leaving a late-night card game. They moved with a silent, terrifying efficiency. They disarmed him before he could even react. They did not kill him. They dragged him into a dark alley, and with the cold precision of surgeons, they broke both of his legs with steel pipes. They left him writhing in agony, a simple, typewritten note pinned to the lapel of his expensive suit jacket: STAY OUT OF POLITICS.
In a warehouse district in Chicago, the second target was a depot used to store Brennan's vast inventory of stolen and contraband goods, a key source of his untaxed income. Sullivan himself oversaw this operation. Using a highly advanced, shaped explosive charge, they blew the steel doors off the warehouse. They then used incendiary grenades to turn the entire building and its multi-million-dollar contents into a raging inferno, a beacon of destruction that could be seen for miles.
The final visit, in New York, was the quietest and perhaps the most terrifying. The last member of Sullivan's team, a man who specialized in psychological operations, paid a visit to the home of Lou Feldman, Brennan's most trusted accountant, the man who personally cooked all the books. He didn't break down the door. He picked the lock and let himself in, moving through the silent house like a phantom.
He found Feldman asleep in his bed. He did not harm him. He simply sat in a chair in the corner of the darkened bedroom and waited. When Feldman woke an hour later, sensing a presence in the room, he saw the silhouetted figure. Before he could scream, the man spoke, his voice a calm whisper. He placed a single, glossy photograph on the nightstand. It was a picture of Feldman's two young children, taken from a distance as they played in their schoolyard that very afternoon.
"You have one chance to cooperate with the federal authorities, Lou," the man said softly. "I strongly suggest you take it." He then stood up and walked out of the house as silently as he had entered, leaving the terrified accountant alone with the photograph and the ruin of his life.
In his lavish penthouse apartment, Frank Brennan was asleep, blissfully unaware that his entire empire was crumbling around him in a single, coordinated 24-hour period. His money was being traced, his muscle was being broken, his secrets were being recorded, and his confederates were being turned. He was a powerful, brutish street brawler who had just been systematically and invisibly dismantled by a ghost. And he had no idea who, or what, had just hit him.
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