So if it was just normal business, they met at the beach. This day, however, Bap told them to meet him at the zoo, outside the reptile house.
The subject was a guy named Jeffrey Roth.
“Who?” Mike asked.
“You heard of Tony Star?” Bap asked, his face pressed up against the glass, staring at a spitting cobra.
“Sure,” Mike said.
They all had heard of Tony Star. He was a rat from Detroit, whose testimony had put half that city’s family away. Rocco Zerilli, Jackie Tominello, Angie Vena, they were all doing time because of Tony Star. The papers had a field day with the irresistible headline TONY STAR WITNESS.
“He’s ‘Jeffrey Roth’ now, in the Witness Protection Program,” Bap said. He started tapping on the glass, trying to provoke the cobra into attacking. “You think you could get one of these guys to spit at you?”
“I don’t think they want you doing that,” Frank said. He felt bad for the snake, which was just minding its own business.
Bap looked at him like he was nuts, and Frank got it. “They” probably didn’t want Bap killing people, hijacking trucks, shylocking money, and running gambling operations, either, so he probably wasn’t going to stop tapping on the glass at the zoo. Indeed, Bap tapped on the glass some more, then asked, “Guess where Star is living now? Mission Beach.”
“No shit!” Mike said.
It was a personal affront, a rat living right in their own backyard.
Frank and Mike had had many discussions on the subjects of rats. It was the worst-possible thing in the world to be, the lowest of the low.
“You gotta be a stand-up guy,” Mike had said. “We’re all grown men; we know the risks. If you get popped, you keep your mouth shut and do your time.”
Frank had agreed, absolutely.
“I’d die before I’d go into the program,” he’d said.
Now they had a guy who had put half the Detroit family in the joint, and here he was, hanging out and enjoying himself on Mission Beach.
“How’d they find him?” Mike asked.
The spitting cobra had curled itself into a ball and looked like it was asleep. Bap gave up and moved on to the puff adder in the next cage. It was wrapped around a tree limb, coiled and looking dangerous.
“Some secretary in the Justice Department that Tony Jack’s got on the arm,” Bap said, tapping on the adder’s cage. He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Frank. The note had an address in Mission Beach written on it. “Detroit wanted to send their own guys, but I said no, it’s a matter of honor.”
“Fuckin’ right it is,” Mike said. “Our turf, our responsibility.”
“And it’s worth twenty grand,” Bap said.
The puff adder struck at the glass and Bap jumped back about five feet, losing his glasses in the process. Frank suppressed a laugh as he picked them up, wiped them off on his sleeve, and handed them to Bap.
“Sneaky fuckers,” Bap said, taking the glasses.
“They’re camouflaged,” Mike said.
Frank and Mike went out and bought some geeky clothes that made them look like tourists and checked into a motel on Kennebec Court on Mission Beach. They spent most of their time looking out through venetian blinds at Tony Star’s condo across Mission Boulevard.
“We’re kind of like cops,” Mike said the first night in.
“How do you figure?”
“I mean, this is what they do, right?” Mike asked. “Stakeouts?”
“I guess,” Frank said. First time he ever felt sorry for cops, because being on a stakeout was boring. It gave whole new meaning to the word tedium. Sitting there drinking bad coffee, taking turns going to Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, or a local taco joint, eating off your lap on sheets of greasy paper. What this garbage was doing to his insides, Frank could only guess. He knew what it was doing to Mike’s insides, because it was a small room, and when Mike opened the door as he came out of the bathroom…Anyway, Frank started feeling bad for cops.
He and Mike would take shifts, one of them keeping watch out the window while the other grabbed some sleep or watched some bad television show. They only got a break when Star went out, which he did at 7:30 every morning to go jogging.
They discovered this the first morning when Star came out the front door of the building in a purple jumpsuit and running shoes and started doing stretches against the rail of the building steps.
“What the fuck?” Mike asked.
“He’s going running,” Frank said.
“He should go fucking running,” said Mike.
“He looks good, though,” Frank observed.
Star did look good. He had a nice tan, his black razor-cut hair was neatly brushed back, and he was thin. They decided only one guy should tail him, and Mike took the job. He came back an hour later, sweaty and incensed.
“Fucking guy,” Mike huffed, “goes jogging around the marina like he don’t have a worry in the world. Scoping the chicks, looking at the boats, soaking in the sunshine, working on his fucking tan. Cocksucker is leading the good life while friends of his are in the hole. I’m telling you, we should hurt this motherfucker before we take him out.”
Frank agreed—Star should suffer for what he’d done—but those weren’t the orders. Bap had been very clear about that—“quick and clean” was how he wanted it. Get in, do the job, get out.
The sooner the better, as far as Frank was concerned. Patty hadn’t been too thrilled about him going away like this.
“Where are you going?” she’d asked.
“Come on, Patty.”
“What for? Why?”
“Business.”
“What kind of business?” she’d pressed. “Why can’t you tell me? You’re just going out to party with your buddies, aren’t you?”
Some party, Frank thought. Sharing a cheap motel room with Mike Pella, listening to his constant toilet mouth, sucking in his cigarette smoke, smelling his gas, spending hour after tedious hour looking out the window, trying to establish the pattern of some rat’s pathetic life.
Because that was the key, a pattern.
Bap had coached him on that. “Guys lapse into habits,” he had told Frank. “Everyone does. People are predictable. Once you can predict what a guy’s going to do and when he’s going to do it, then you can find your opening. Quick and clean, in and out.”
So they knew he went jogging around the marina every morning. Mike wanted to do it then. “We get ourselves some fag tracksuits, we run up behind him, and we pop him in the head. Done.”
Frank vetoed it. Too many things could go wrong. One, him and Mike jogging—they’d stick out like polar bears in a sauna. Two, they’d be out of breath, and it was hard to shoot accurately when you were out of breath, even from short range. Three, there’d just be too many potential witnesses.
So they had to figure something else out.
Problem was, Star wasn’t giving them many openings. He lived a very boring life, predictable as death and taxes, but very tight. He’d go jogging in the morning, then come home, shower (presumably) and change clothes, then go to his job at an insurance agency, where he’d work from ten to six. Then he’d walk back to his condo and stay there until he went jogging again in the morning.
“This is one dull motherfucker,” Mike said. “He don’t go out to no clubs, no bars, don’t pick up no broads. What, the guy just sits in there jacking himself off every night? Biggest excitement in this guy’s life is ‘Pizza Night.’”
Every Thursday night, 8:30, Star had a pizza delivered to his door.
“I love you, Mike.”
“You going fag on me?”
“Pizza night,” Frank said. “Star buzzes the guy in.”
This was on a Tuesday, so they pretty much relaxed for a couple of days, laid low, and waited for Pizza Night. Wednesday night, they ordered a pizza from the same joint, ate it, and saved the box.
At exactly 8:25 Frank was at the front door of Star’s building with
the pizza box in his hand. Mike was in the work car on the street, ready to drive them out of there and to intercept the pizza guy with some sort of bullshit if he had to.
Frank rang the bell and shouted into the intercom, “Pizza, Mr. Roth.”
A second later, the buzzer sounded and Frank heard the metallic click of the lock opening. He went into the building, walked down the hallway to Star’s unit, and rang the bell.
Star opened it a crack, keeping the chain on the door. Frank could hear the drone of a television. So this was the rat’s big life, Frank thought, treating himself to a pizza while he watches the boob tube.
“Pizza,” Frank repeated.
“Where’s the usual kid?” Star asked.
“Sick,” Frank said, hoping this thing wasn’t going south. He got ready to kick the door in, but Star opened it first. He had his money in his hand—a five and two ones.
“Six-fifty, right?” Star asked, holding out the bills.
Frank reached into his pocket like he was digging for a couple of quarters.
“Keep the change,” Star said.
“Thanks.” A fifty-cent tip, Frank thought. No self-respecting wise guy in the world would give a fifty-cent tip. No wonder he turned rat. Frank handed Star the pizza box, and when the guy’s hands were full, Frank pushed him inside, kicked the door shut behind him, and pulled the silenced .22 pistol.
Star tried to run. Frank put the bead on the back of his head and fired. Star fell forward and crashed into the wall. Frank stepped up over Star’s prone body and aimed at the back of his head.
“Rat,” Frank said.
He pulled the trigger three more times and walked out.
The whole thing had taken maybe a minute. Frank got in the car; Mike put it in gear and drove away.
“How’d it go?” Mike asked.
“Fine,” Frank said.
Mike grinned. “You’re a machine,” he said. “‘Frankie Machine.’”
“Wasn’t that the name of a guy that Sinatra played in the movies?” Frank asked.
“The Man with the Golden Arm,” Mike said. “He was a junkie.”
“Great.”
“But you,” Mike said, “you’re the man with the golden hand. Frankie Machine.”
The name stuck.
They took Ingraham Street down to the floodway. Frank got out, smashed the pistol on some rocks, and threw the pieces into the water. Then they dumped the work car in a strip mall parking lot in Point Loma, where they found two other cars waiting. Frank got into his and drove downtown, dumped the car, took a taxi to the airport, then another taxi back home.
Nothing ever came of it.
The San Diego cops pretty much took a pass on the case, sending a message of their own to the feds: If you’re going to put a snitch in our yard and not tell us about it, what the hell do you want us to do?
The truth is, nobody really likes snitches, not even the cops who make their bread and butter from them.
Frank got up the next morning, made coffee, and turned on the television. It was showing the kitchen of some hotel in Los Angeles.
“What, you’re surprised?” Mike asked him later that morning.
“Kind of.”
“I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” Mike said.
And that’s the way it is, Frank thought. Bobby gets two in the head, Nixon gets checks.
There was a lot of celebration down at the cab office when Nixon got elected. One of the first things the new president did was to transfer the San Diego federal prosecutor who was putting so much pressure on the guys.
The indictments against Bap were dropped, although Forliano went into the can.
Other than that, it was back to business as usual.
Frank and Mike split two thousand dollars for the Tony Star job.
Frank bought an engagement ring with his cut.
24
So he was a married man when he met President Nixon.
It was 1972.
Partially as a reward for the Tony Star thing, Frank and Mike had been bumped up from driving cabs to driving limousines and Town Cars.
When they weren’t driving, they were on the hustle. Frank probably put more hours in than your average working stiff, but it was different. It wasn’t like you were working for that hourly wage, with Uncle taking his piece out of it. Even though they were working hard, it didn’t feel like working; it was more like playing a game.
Which is why they called it “scoring,” Frank guessed.
That’s what they did in those days: They scored; they went out on scores. They scored merchandise off the backs of trucks, street tax from bookies, vig from shylock money, no-show jobs on construction projects.
They ran card and dice games, sports books, and lotteries. They made round-trip runs across the Mexican border—alcohol down and cigarettes back. They practically had a license from the San Diego cops to rip off drug dealers.
They were scoring, making money, although not much of it stuck to their hands. Most of it they had to kick up to Chris, who kicked up to Bap, who kicked up to Nicky Locicero. Even with all their scoring and hustling, they really weren’t getting ahead. Frank resented it, but Mike, being from the East Coast, was more old-school.
“It’s the way it is, Frankie,” he’d lecture when Frank would complain. “It’s the rules. We’re not even made guys yet. We gotta show we can earn.”
Frank wasn’t into the whole “made guy” thing. He really didn’t give a damn about all that old Sicilian stuff. He was just trying to make a living, stash away enough money for a down payment on a house.
Three-plus years of busting his hump and he and Patty were still renting a walk-up apartment in the old neighborhood. And he was working all the time—when he wasn’t on a score, he was driving the limo, mostly back and forth from the airport to La Sur Mer Spa up in Carlsbad.
Mike about shit when he heard Frank had driven Moe Dalitz from the airport to La Sur Mer, or just “the Sur,” as it was known to the locals and cognoscenti. Dalitz went way back—he had been an admiral in Detroit’s “Little Jewish Navy” before the Venas moved in and chased him to Cleveland. He eventually became Chicago’s eyes and ears in Vegas, where he was considered “the Jewish Godfather.”
“Dalitz fucking built the Sur,” Mike said. “He got the Teamsters to put up the money.”
The Teamsters’ Central States Pension fund was jointly controlled by the Chicago and Detroit families, Mike explained. The go-between was a insurance executive named Allen Dorner, the son of “Red” Dorner, who was buddies with Chicago boss Tony Accardo.
“Dorner?” Frank asked. “Yeah, he was in my car.”
“Dalitz and Dorner!”
“Yeah, they were going to play golf,” Frank said.
The Teamsters played a lot of golf at La Sur. They kept Frank and Mike very busy running them back and forth from the airport, or around town, or out at night. Frank figured that’s why he’d been bumped up to Town Cars—the bosses wanted a connected guy driving the car so that the Teamsters and the wise guys could talk without worrying about it.
“Just drive,” Bap had told him. “Keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”
It wasn’t just Dalitz and Dorner, either. It was also Frank Fitzsimmons, who had taken over as president of the Teamsters while Hoffa was serving his sentence. Fitzsimmons loved the Sur so much, he bought a condo there and started holding the union’s annual board meeting at the hotel.
Then there were the out-and-out wise guys, mostly East Coast higher-ups getting out of the snow for a while. There was Tony Provenzano, “Tony Pro,” who ran the New Jersey Teamsters, and Joey “the Clown” Lombardo, who was the liaison between Chicago and Allen Dorner.
And Detroit guys—Paul Moretti and Tony Jacks Giacamone, who ran Hoffa.
One day, Bap called Frank and Mike, told them to get their limos “spit and polished,” to look sharp themselves, and be over at the airport exactly at nine the following morning.
?
??What’s up?” Frank asked. He figured something big was going on, because the night before he’d made two trips to the airport to pick up Joey the Clown and Tony Pro, and they’d checked into suites at the Sur.
What was up was that Frank Fitzsimmons, president of the Teamsters, was going to hold a press conference at the Sur to announce that the union was going to endorse Nixon for reelection.
There’s a surprise, Frank thought. The whispers around the Sur were that the Teamsters had funneled millions of dollars of illegal funds into Nixon’s campaign fund. In fact, the spa had become the virtual West Coast headquarters for the Teamsters since Dorner had bought himself a condo overlooking the fourth green.
Frank smirked. “So this is why Nixon pardoned Hoffa?”
Bap smiled and said, “Hoffa is nothing but a cheap leg breaker, out of his league with the big money. Fitzsimmons and Dorner are raking in so much cash, most people don’t want Hoffa back in office. Hoffa wants them clipped, but the fact is they’re making everybody too much money. Listen and learn, Frankie. Making money for other people is what keeps you breathing. Never forget that.”
Frank didn’t.
“Anyway,” Bap said, “after the press conference, you’re driving the union guys to the Western White House. You might meet the president, Frankie.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
Bap smiled, but Frank could see there was hurt behind it.
“I’m not on the list,” Bap said. “None of the guys are.”
“That’s not right, Bap.”
“It’s all bullshit,” Bap said. “The fuck do I care?”
But Frank could see that he cared.
In the morning, with his car gleaming, and himself in a freshly pressed black suit, Frank drove to the private airstrip in Carlsbad to pick up Allen Dorner from his private jet. Word was that Dorner had laid out three million dollars to Frank Sinatra for the Gulfstream, and that the money had come from the Teamsters’ fund.
“Good morning, Frank,” Dorner said as he stepped off the plane onto the tarmac.
“Good morning, Mr. Dorner.”