When word of the grand jury's line of inquiry leaked out, Tony Boy Boiardo's "bagman," Ralph Vicaro, warned Rigo, "Keep your mouth shut and remember you have a pretty daughter in Suffern." After Rigo was subpoenaed to appear before the panel, he found a note in his car: "This could have been a bomb. Keep your mouth shut."

So Rigo lied to the grand jury. But the panel kept calling him back, each time inching closer to the truth-that he was padding his bills in an attempt to make up the ten percent he was kicking back. Meanwhile, IRS agents started poring over his books.

"I had . . . a three-way squeeze going," he explained later. "Boiardo's people on one hand. I had the Essex County grand jury on the other. And I had, now, the federal people in the act. I was getting desperate."

Rigo wilted under the "heat." He decided to cooperate with the federal authorities. Through an intermediary, an appointment with Lacey was set up, but two days later Rigo received an anonymous telephone call: "Keep the hell away from the federal building!"

Rigo fled south of the border-to Acapulco. Through Peter Flanigan, President Nixon's "Mr. Fixit" at the White House, an appointment was set up at Justice. Rigo flew to Washington and told his story to Will Wilson, then head of the Organized Crime Section. Wilson summoned Lacey to the capital.

"Fred left on a Wednesday [December 3], carrying nothing, not even a spare shirt, and began to interview Rigo," Stern recalls. "On Thursday he called me up and asked me to come down. I flew down there Friday morning."

With Stem went two of Lordi's assistants who had worked on the county grand-jury investigation, Donald Merkelbach and Michael Riccardelli.

The four prosecutors met with Rigo at the Justice Department. "He told his story," Stern continues, "these long, involved payoffs over years, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash systematically being paid over to public officials through organized-crime figures. He kept diaries that were coded, in which he made notations of how much he was paying to whom. Agents of the Internal Revenue Service went and got them. It was basically the IRS that was supplying the manpower at this point.