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I smiled at him again.

“You stupid bitch.”

He didn’t seem to say it in anger. It was more like he was verbalizing the obvious, for my own benefit as well as his.

“Now, there’s the John Gallo my father knew and hated.”

“You stupid, stupid bitch,” he said. “Do you know how much worse things can get for you going forward?”

“As another practical matter? Yeah, I probably do.”

“You asked me over here to discuss the sale of the team,” Gallo said.

“And that’s exactly the discussion we’ve had. Just not the one you anticipated. But that’s on you, frankly, and not me.”

Gallo stared at me as if somehow really seeing me for the first time.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

He smiled again and lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

“Do you ever worry that something might happen to you the way it did to your father and your youngest brother?”

“Is that a threat, John?”

“More like a promise.”

“And that’s an overused cliché,” I said. “Or maybe, now that I really think about it, you’re the cliché.”

I got up then and walked around my desk and went over to my door and opened it.

“Now get out of my office,” I said.

Ninety-Five

WHEN JOHN GALLO WASback in the car, Erik Mason said, “He called when you were inside. He wants to see you.”

From the back seat, Gallo said, “Now?”

“Yes, sir,” Mason said. “Mr. Barr indicated that he wanted me to drive you to his house as soon as you were in the car.”

Michael Barr lived in a mansion on Scott Street that was more like a fortress, one that Barr had originally purchased for thirty million dollars back in the 1990s.

If Michael Barr wasn’t the wealthiest person in San Francisco, he was close enough. He had made his fortune in construction and real estate, from downtown San Francisco all the way to the Monterey Peninsula, before expanding his interests to casinos in Las Vegas and London and as far away as Macao. Barr, more than any other big casino owner, took the lead in online gambling in the United States when other casino owners were running away from it.

And over time he had become a prominent and respected member of San Francisco society, backing an endless series of good causes in the city, creating foundations for the homeless and abused women.

It meant that somehow Michael Barr had managed, despite being a public figure, to largely keep hidden the fact that he was one of the most powerful and ruthless private arms dealers in the world. John Gallo knew that Barr did enough business with the United States involving legal weapons for the federal government to conveniently overlook the vast illegal business he did internationally, in a world he helped control as well and as formidably as any Saudi Arabian or Syrian or Russian.

In addition, Michael Barr had controlled Gallo, and Gallo’s own businesses, for years, ever since Gallo had nearly gone under during the housing crash from the second Bush presidency. The extremely well-kept secret, for both Barr and Gallo, was that it wasn’t John Gallo who had become obsessed with owning the Wolves. It was Michael Barr.

It was Barr who first imagined completely altering the map of San Francisco with a new stadium and what would be the biggest municipal real estate development around it in UShistory. He had watched from across the country the way the Barclays Center had helped transform Brooklyn, in New York City. He had seen this happen with other stadiums and other arenas around the country.

Michael Barr didn’t need a team or a football stadium to enhance his arms dealing around the world. Nor did he need it for his various other enterprises, both inside and outside the law. But he saw a world where the two went hand in hand, and the possibilities for money laundering and leveraging other parts of his empire could be limitless.

It almost made Barr laugh sometimes, seeing sports-team owners in the United States act like they were the real gangsters. But they were amateurs. He was not. Maybe there would be a baseball team for him down the line. Or a basketball team. Or both.