I didn’t think they could win. As tough as Angelo and Pudge were, they had coasted on reputation for far too long. These new crews had no feel for what they had accomplished and no regard for the weight their names carried. To them, they were old men blocking their way to a fortune. I didn’t want them to fight, but I didn’t know how to keep them out of it. I sensed the same doubts from Nico, but he was too much the loyal soldier to speak out. He also had a lot to gain in the event they were victorious and he would do nothing to risk that possibility. I knew of their aches and pains and how, despite strong exteriors, they were slowly losing another war, the one with age. I wanted them to die in a way that I knew they would hate. As old men in the comfort of a warm bed in a safe home. What Pudge always called “a gangster’s nightmare” was my greatest wish for both of them.
• • •
I STOOD IN the near darkness of the Brooklyn Aquarium and watched a shark slink its way past the thick glass. Angelo watched the shark move with sleek precision and turned to me. “They usually attack straight on,” he said with admiration. “Come in fearless, no matter who it is they’re up against. They’re the gangsters of the sea, keep what they want and take what they need.”
“How long before it all starts?” I walked away from the glass, the gleeful cries of running children echoing off the carpeted walls of the packed aquarium.
“It’s chess not checkers,” Angelo said. “The first move’s your most important. Somebody will make it soon enough.”
“I can do more than you’re letting me do,” I said in a low voice. “You’re calling in every member of your crew, but you’re not looking to me. And you can’t say it’s because I’m too young. You were a lot younger when you went out to fight.”
We were about to walk past a long wooden bench facing a school of various shapes of jellyfish. Angelo reached out a hand and gently grabbed my elbow. He was always conscious of those around him, constantly scanning faces, trying to discern young couples out on a weekend trip from federal agents working a surveillance job. “Let’s sit for a bit,” he said. “Give the crowd a chance to thin out.”
“You want a drink?” I asked. “They sell water and soda in the gift shop.”
“We’ll get some on our way out.” He stared at the jellyfish quietly for several moments and then turned to me. “You like to hear the stories,” Angelo said. “And I’m glad. You need to know who we were and who we are before you can become a part of it. But there’s another part to it, to us, a darker one. And that’s what will tell both of us if the life is for you or not.”
“I don’t know if I can kill somebody,” I said, anticipating his concerns as well as my own. “There’s been some rough stuff on some of the jobs I’ve been out on with Nico, but nothing that came close to something like that.”
“It’s not the killing,” Angelo said. “It’s living with it. You have to make it become a part of your life, like reading yesterday’s newspapers. There’s a lot of people out there think they can do that, but not many can. If you’re one of them, you have a chance to be a great gangster. If you can’t, you can still be a good man. You just can’t ever be both.”
“What do you want me to be?” I asked him.
“A good man isn’t much help to me,” Angelo said. “But you’ll stay out of this war, sit back from it, watch and learn. If we make it through, then we’ll continue on our way.”
“What if you don’t make it?” I stood and faced him. “What if going into this war kills you?”
“Then the lessons are over,” he said. “And that leaves you with no other choice but to be a good man and lead an honest life. That might be the best thing I ever did for anybody.”
“You don’t have to die for that to happen,” I said.
“Yes I do,” Angelo said.
Angelo then stood, patted a warm hand across my face, turned and walked slowly away, deeper into the bowels of the crowded aquarium.
• • •
RICHARD SCARAFINO LEANED his head against the side of the dirty redbrick wall, a toothpick jammed into a corner of his mouth. He was rail thin, tall and wore a tan jacket that hung loose off the shoulders and arms. He slid his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and spit into a small puddle to his right. He was twenty-two years old and in charge of a renegade crew of thirty-five that was no longer content dealing pot and cocaine to college freshmen. He turned around and nodded to a man sitting on a full garbage can, smoking a cigarette. “He’s coming out of the bar now,” Scarafino said. “Him and that fucking dog.”
Tony “Mesh” Palucci tossed the cigarette behind the trash and walked over toward Scarafino, standing just behind him, both hidden by the shadows of the alley. “Look at him,” Tony Mesh said. “Walking without a worry in the world. Like he’s some kind of king.”
“So long as he stays alive, he is the king,” Scarafino said, watching Angelo and Ida walk along the far side of the street, both of them shielded by the passing traffic and the crowd of people milling around. “It’s up to us to change that.”
“Then why are we wasting time?” Tony Mesh said. “Why don’t we just take him out?”
Scarafino looked behind him and stared into Tony Mesh’s glazed brown eyes. The two were first cousins and had grown up together, both raised by Richie’s mother in Commack, Long Island. They had each served full tilts in upstate juvenile homes on rape and robbery convictions and had started their criminal careers by boosting foreign-made cars parked along Queens Boulevard during afternoon rush hour, selling them off to chop shops in the Bronx, up near Yankee Stadium. Tony Mesh had a snap temper, a quick trigger and a seventy-five-dollar-a-day heroin habit. He lifted weights every day and drank Jack Daniel’s mixed with milk to help soothe an agitated stomach.
“If we’re gonna take on this guy and his crew, then let’s be smart about it,” Scarafino said. “Coming at him with our guns out is what he’d expect us to do. He may look old to you, but don’t let the look fool you. That’s why we clip off his guys one at a time, always staying under the radar, as far from blame as we can get.”
“But if he goes down, his crew walks away looking for a new boss,” Tony Mesh said with a shrug. “Maybe they might even come work for us.”
“What do you do, wake up in the morning and take stupid pills?” Scarafino asked, annoyed. “The only place his crew will ever lay eyes on us will be at our funeral. They’re old world. When their boss goes down, they’re gonna be looking for the triggers that did him in. But when the time is right, if we play it right, he’ll agree to sit down and talk to us. That’s only if he sees he’s better off with us on his side.”
“And what’s talking to him gonna get us?” Tony Mesh asked, turning his back on Scarafino and walking toward the garbage cans. “A boss like him is gonna take one look at you and me and see nothing more than a couple of skells. Might have somebody put two in our heads right there at the meet, that’s how pissed off he might get. You ask me, we got a better shot at him out here in the open. But then again, what do I know? I’m stupid.”
“Look, he may not think it and he may not know it, but a guy like him needs a crew like ours.” Scarafino looked away from Angelo and at his cousin. “It’s up to me to help him figure that out.”
“How’s that add up?” Tony Mesh asked, lighting a fresh cigarette and blowing a thin line of smoke into the darkness. “Him needing us?”
“You sit on top for as long as Bones Vestieri and you get comfortable in that chair,” Scarafino said. “You may not want to get your crew all bloodied up fighting a war nobody wants to fight. That’s where we fit in like a shoe. He’ll find out enough about us before the sit-down to know that, if nothing else, we can handle the blood end of the business. We’ll knock heads with the Colombians or with that black crew up in the Heights. All we want is a chance to pull a trigger for him. In return, he cuts us a piece off the pie.”
“That all sounds good to the ears, Richie,” Tony Mesh said. “And if it happens, I’ll be mo
re than happy to tag along and play whatever song he asks me to play. But if, instead of a warm welcome, he stiffs us with the cold shoulder when we sit down across from him, what then?”
Richie Scarafino leaned back against the wall and waited for Angelo and Ida to return from their walk. He took in a deep breath and let it out slow, his eyes closed, his hands slapping in rhythm against his thighs. “Then he’d be the stupid one, not you,” Scarafino said.
• • •
PUDGE SAT IN a thick red leather chair, a large mug of coffee on the side table to his right. He looked over at the slender black man sitting across from him, his arms stretched out along the back of the leather couch, and leaned forward to place a hand on his leg.
“It’s not something that can be avoided, Cootie,” he said. “None of us asked for this, but it’s here now and now is when we have to deal with it.”
Cootie Turnbill gazed out the large double windows to the left of the couch. There, four stories below his brownstone, he could see the streets of Harlem begin to show signs of early-morning life. These were the streets that Cootie Turnbill had controlled since the end of World War II, splitting all the profits from his numbers, booze, trucking and carting businesses fifty cents on the dollar with Angelo and Pudge. The arrangement had earned millions for all of them and, except for the occasional tussle, had kept the neighborhood free from any gangster wars. Little Ricky Carson and his KKK crew were eager to bring all that to a quick and vicious end.
“What the hell kind of black gang boss names his crew after the Klan?” Cootie asked Pudge. “That supposed to be their idea of cute?”
“Cute or not, they got their eyes marked for your streets. They only know how to do that one way, and talking about it isn’t it.”
“They’re a big crew packing big guns.” Cootie pulled a cigar from the front pocket of his velvet robe and held it gently in his hands. “Shoot people they have no beef with, just to show that they can. They talk more about dying than they do about living. We’ve tussled with some crazy bastards in our time, Pudge, but I don’t think any one of us has seen the likes of these.”
“They’re no different than we were starting out,” Pudge said with a shrug.
“You and Angelo up for this?” Cootie asked, resting the cigar on the coffee table separating him from Pudge. “It’s been a long time between dances for all of us. Won’t take long for Ricky Carson to find that out, if he hasn’t already.”
“It’s been a while since we got our nails dirty,” Pudge said, leaning back in his chair. “No doubt about it. But I don’t see it as a question of choice. It needs to be handled. Now, will your crew be there for us, the ones up here as well as the ones you got stashed down in the Bahamas?”
Cootie Turnbill smiled at Pudge and clapped his hands together. “Even with the guns from down there, Carson’s crew beats mine by at least two to one. Seems like every black kid with a gun and a driver’s license is on his team.”
“They got the numbers but not the experience. We don’t need to outgun them. We need to outthink them. If that happens, we might get lucky enough to sneak away with a win.”
“Before you came up here, I was thinking back to the first time the three of us teamed together in a war,” Cootie said, his stylish short-trim Afro specked with puffs of gray, the bottom of his handmade slippers leaning against the sides of the coffee table. He was fifty-eight years old now, still with a handsome face and a relaxed manner. Hidden below the calm surface, buried by years of comfort, wealth and security, sat the first black gangster to be accepted into organized crime’s ranks. He was also one of its most ruthless killers. He was a low-tier numbers runner on Pudge’s payroll when he stepped between Angelo and the blade of an assailant’s knife in an East Harlem bar on a humid summer night in 1942. The man reached out and slashed Cootie across the chest, slicing open his shirt and several layers of skin. Then he moved to finish off the dazed and wounded Angelo who was lying on the ground by his feet. Cootie pulled a handgun from his hip and pressed the nozzle firm against the man’s throat. Staring into the man’s eyes, he pressed on the trigger and put two bullets through his throat and out the back of his neck.
“Skin Reynolds and his demented crew,” Pudge said. It was as if they were talking about a favorite family picnic. “They came at us out of nowhere, and if they were only as good as they thought they were, they would have handed us our ass in a glass jar. There’s no way we take that war without you in it, Cootie.”
“We got them all but Skin,” Cootie said, resting his head against the back of the couch. “He ran a little too fast, even for us. Thought he was better off taking a ten-year stretch in Sing Sing than going up against our guns. But it didn’t work out like he planned. Hadn’t even finished doing six months before he was found dead in his cell block.”
“Some plans can do nothing but fail,” Pudge said. “Let’s hope that the one we got isn’t one of them.”
“What is the plan?” Cootie asked, resting a hand on his old friend’s shoulder.
Pudge looked at Cootie with a knowing nod. “The same plan we’ve had since we started in this business. We’re way too old to come up with something new.”
“No need to repeat it then, because I know it by heart,” Cootie said. “Live to kill. It’s what we know and it’s how we go.”
• • •
PABLITO MUNESTRO STARED down at the two head shots lying on the center of his bed. He was wearing a denim shirt and snakeskin boots, his pants curled up in a corner of the large, airy room. He leaned back against two thick fluffy pillows and grabbed a half-empty vodka bottle off the night table. He took a long, throaty swig from the bottle, then tossed it to a man in a gray suit and black felt hat standing to his right.
“Are these the two everyone is so afraid to piss off?” he asked, pointing at the photos and looking at the faces of the four men standing in front of him around the bed. “These two old men?”
“No one is afraid of them, Pablito,” a young man in a zippered running suit said. “But they are worried about who’ll come in their place if anything should happen to them. The Italians don’t figure to sit back and let us walk all over their turf.”
“That’s too bad,” Pablito said. “Because unless they all want to die, that’s their only choice.”
“If there’s a way to move in on the Italian’s action without a lot of guns,” the young man said, “then that’s something we might want to look into.”
“The Italians ain’t gonna hand over shit,” Pablito said. “They need to see bodies stack up before they start to think you’re serious.”
Pablito Munestro was thirty years old and a millionaire several times over, moving in a swift and lethal manner from the impoverished back streets of Cali, Colombia, to a duplex apartment in an Upper East Side condo. He had a solid build and was magazine handsome, with long dark hair falling to his shoulders, tender eyes and a smile that could warm the most indifferent of women. He was blind in one eye, the result of a childhood playground accident, and controlled a drug empire that earned in excess of $50 million a year. He was the first of the Colombian dealers to target entire families for death if any one member was tagged an enemy of his crew.
His mother pulled up stakes and took her family out of the slums of Cali and moved them to the promised land of Florida when Pablito was a toddler. It was there that he began his drug career as a ten-year-old boy, running money between pickup drops for a Miami-based drug boss named Diego Acuz. He killed his first man when he was twelve, and by the time he was fifteen had a full crew of a dozen dealers, most of them twice his age, dealing coke for him out of a burrito-and-beer stand in South Beach. On his eighteenth birthday, Pablito took over the Acuz crew by pumping three bullets into his boss’s head and then piloting a twenty-three-foot sailboat forty miles off the Florida coast and dumping the body into the chilly, shark-infested waters. He had been in New York less than two years and had already wiped out four rival gangs. His sights were now set on A
ngelo and Pudge’s powerful crew and their millions in yearly income. Pablito was ranked tenth on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and wanted nothing more than to be the biggest gangster to run the table in America’s largest city.
“We’ll be ready to move by Monday,” the man in the suit, Pablito’s older brother, Carlos, said. “The Italians asked for a meeting at a restaurant in Queens across from the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.”
“Ours or theirs?” Pablito asked.
“Neither,” Carlos answered. “We had it checked out. It’s an independent. No ties to any crew.”
“Go in heavy, just in case,” Pablito instructed.
“It’s only a first meeting,” Carlos said. “I don’t expect them to try anything. The word we get on them is that they move only when they have to, and when they do, it’s slow at its fastest.”
“That’s the word they want you to hear,” Pablito said, looking up at his older brother, the two photos gripped in his right hand. “Forget all that and remember who it is you’re going up against.”
“We outgun them, outnumber them and outrun them,” Carlos said with a puffy confidence. “There’s no place for them to go that we can’t reach.”
Pablito grabbed a gold cigarette lighter off the end table and snapped it open, his eyes staring down at the thin line of fire. He picked up the two photos from the bedspread and ran the flame under them. He held them as they burned. “All that will sound a lot better to me after I know that these two have both been buried,” he said.
Then, Pablito dropped the burning pictures at his brother’s feet, jumped from the bed and walked out of the room.
• • •
ANGELO AND PUDGE walked quietly in the wooded area, their heads down, the sun hidden from view by the thick tree coverage above. I followed close behind, watching as Ida sniffed her way through the rough, looking to surprise a squirrel and enjoy an early lunch. We had left the city in the middle of the night, Angelo doing a rare turn behind the wheel, Pudge up front next to him. I sat in the back with Ida’s heavy head resting on my knee. Bobbie Gentry’s throaty voice filled in the silent gaps as she sang “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on the car’s eight-track system. Outside, the city landscape quickly slipped past, replaced by the small-town feel of upstate New York. We stopped twice to gas the car and walk Ida and once to grab a quick coffee and buttered-roll breakfast. Angelo was clearly more at home navigating the eight-cylinder jet black Cadillac down the hard Manhattan side streets than he was winding his way through two-lane backcountry roads.