Sure, I’ve put a bullet in a kneecap to pry loose information, but I don’t consider that torture. Just expedience. The kind of torture Reed Farrell administered was not designed to make you talk—more like scream. My late, longtime back-up guy, Boyd, had worked with Farrell once and swore he never would again. Boyd hadn’t witnessed any of the rough stuff, but later got freaked out to learn that the hit he’d set up resulted in some middle-echelon Cincinnati mob guy having his fingers, toes and dick cut off systematically with garden shears, then dumped to die, bleeding out of those various new orifices. Seemed Farrell had been a field medic in Vietnam and picked up tricks from the Cong—he could make punishment of that kind last without the victim passing out or going into the kind of shock that robbed the client of the satisfaction of the target’s suffering. Mob hits were something I had occasionally done, and that was true for everybody who worked through the Broker, but those jobs were the minority.
