“This doesn’t seem the kind of place that serves pizza and meatball wedges,” Carlos said, looking around at the oak-wood walls and thick leather booths. Turn-of-the-century crystal lamps lined the sides of the large room and candles in Venetian-glass holders rested in the middle of each well-adorned table. The diners surrounding the booth were well-dressed, well-mannered and rich, old money blending in with the new millions being made on Wall Street.
“It’s a neutral,” Pablito said, his eyes on the brunette as he leaned in and kissed her gently on the neck. “We can talk without having to worry about anybody trying to pull any shit.”
“It’d be nice to see the Italians do something other than talk,” Carlos said with a disgusted wave. “We’ve been walking all over their crew and they haven’t raised a hand up to push us back. The cops are giving us more problems. Now that’s a day I thought I’d never live to see.”
“We agree to whatever they ask,” Pablito said, looking away from the brunette and taking a long swig from his drink. “Especially if they come in looking to make peace. From our end, it’s nothing but empty words. By the time you put up your Christmas tree, we’ll have full control of their outfit.”
Carlos paused as a waiter placed a large plate filled with a New York strip steak and grilled vegetables in front of him, then threw a glance to the wine steward, who rushed over to fill the three empty glasses with a Mouton Cadet. The young Munestro cut into the medium-rare meat, shoved a hunk into the corner of his mouth and looked at his watch. “He’s already ten minutes late,” he said. “I should shoot him just for that.”
“Don’t get agitated,” Pablito said, placing a hand on his brother’s arm. “It hurts the digestion. Eat your meal and worry about the Italians when they’re sitting down across from you.”
Pudge walked in alone, shook hands with the maître d’, whispered a few words into his ear and was then led over to the center booth. He nodded at both brothers, smiled at the brunette and slid into his seat across from them. He was wearing a dark blue sports jacket over a pale blue polo shirt and dark slacks and rested his arms on top of the starched white tablecloth.
“You were late and I was hungry,” Carlos said, pointing the sharp end of his knife at the remains of his meal. “But don’t worry, I’ll make sure it goes on your tab.”
“I know you and I know your brother,” Pudge said, looking at Pablito and nudging his head toward the brunette. “But her, I don’t know.”
“It’s not important for you to know her,” Pablito said. “Whatever you came here to say, I got no trouble with her hearing it. But if you find you got a problem with that, order a drink, finish it and get the hell out.”
Pudge turned to look at the brunette, giving her a smile and a nod. “I’ve never asked a woman to leave a table in my life,” he said. “I’m too old and she’s too beautiful for me to start now.”
A waiter walked over to the table and put a scotch straight up in front of Pudge, a sparkling glass of mineral water alongside it. Pudge lifted the glass and held it out across the table. “To your health,” he said.
“Screw that,” Pablito Munestro said, ignoring the toast. “I want to know what you’re ready to hand over to me. Once that’s made clear, I’ll let you know how we stand with it.”
“The way I see it, anything I put on the table is not going to be enough,” Pudge said, resting his glass next to the candle. “The two of you came into this looking to take it all. Anything less is a walkaway.”
“A live man with empty pockets always comes out ahead of a dead one,” Carlos said.
“These last three months, your crew has taken control of almost twenty-five percent of my weekly business,” Pudge told him. “And you did it without asking anyone’s permission. You just reached out and grabbed.”
“Fuck permission. Where are we, in school? Got to raise our hand to get what we want? Don’t waste my time, Grandpa. Take Carlos’s offer and get out while your eyes are open and you can breathe without pain.”
“I can’t go back to Angelo with that,” Pudge said. “It would put him in a really bad mood and I’d have to hear him piss and moan for weeks. Trust me, that’s not something I want to have to do.”
“We’re taking it all.” Pablito leaned against the edge of the table, his voice lower, his eyes on Pudge. “We’re not even leaving a crumb on the floor for the two of you to fight over. The entire operation, from numbers to trucking, is gonna be run by my crew. If you’re smart, go home, pack and leave.”
Pudge sat back in the thick leather booth and took a slow sip of his scotch, put it down and picked up the glass of mineral water. He drank the water down in long, thirsty gulps, looking past the two Colombians over to the booth behind them where two young men in business suits were enjoying a quiet meal, their table littered with stock tabulations and legal pads. “I got two first-class tickets to Miami in my jacket pocket,” Pudge said. “Take them and go back to where you came from. Make sure your crew leaves the same day as you. If you say no to my offer, then there’s nothing I can do to keep either one of you alive.”
“Who the fuck you think you’re talking to, you washed up piece of shit!” Carlos shouted at Pudge from across the table. “You come here to scare me, you old goat? You think your tough talk can scare somebody like me? Somebody like my brother?”
Carlos stood up, stared down at Pudge, raised his right hand and slapped him hard across the face. Pudge took the five-finger blow, ignored the glances from the other patrons, and smiled up at Carlos. “I didn’t come here to scare you,” he said in a calm voice.
Pablito and Carlos reached into the sides of their jackets, their fingers on the handles of high-caliber revolvers. The brunette next to Pablito pulled a .38 special from behind her back and jammed it against Pablito’s temple. The two businessmen in the next booth turned and held two .44s against the back of the Colombians’ heads. “I won’t stay for dinner,” Pudge said, sliding up and out of the booth. “The food here’s too rich for my stomach. Old guy my age has to watch what he eats.”
Pudge smiled at Pablito and Carlos, then nodded at the brunette and the two businessmen with guns. He walked through the main room of the restaurant, never turning to look back, as he heard the gunfire and watched the patrons scatter and scream. When he reached the front door, Pudge shook hands with the maître d’ and patted him on the shoulder. “I hope to see you again soon,” the maître d’ said to him.
“Not until we do something about the noise in here, Frank,” Pudge said, smiling at him. He waited as the maître d’ held the door open, then walked up the three short steps to his waiting car, a brisk breeze from an early fall night blowing against his face.
• • •
THE TWO PLANES taxied down the dark runway, their lights low, rumbling toward an old hangar on the outskirts of a small Long Island airport. I sat next to Nico in a car at the rear of the hangar, Angelo in the backseat, his eyes fixed on the planes coming his way. Alongside us, cars were parked three deep, lights and engines down, each with a driver and a detailed set of instructions. The two-engine prop planes had come in from Canada, each of them weighed down with forty heavily armed men, on loan to Angelo from affiliated crews nationwide. They were on a forty-eight-hour turnaround and would be back on their own streets in less than three days.
The planes came to a stop, their engines idling as the side doors slid open. A small team of airport personnel placed wooden blocks under the wheels and lodged ladders up against the doors. A long line of men in coats and hats, each one carrying a black leather case, stepped off the planes, walked to the waiting cars and got in. As soon as each car had its full complement of passengers, it kicked into gear and sped out of the airport hangar.
This was my first exposure to this level of organized crime power. I had not yet grasped the reach that gangsters like Angelo had, the fact that through a series of clandestine phone calls and early morning meetings, they could muster an army from cities throughout the United Stat
es, an army determined to eliminate any enemy at their door. It was a power few had and fewer still knew existed. By the time those men reboarded the waiting planes for the return flight back north, every member of Pablito Munestro’s crew would be left for dead. What time remained for the assassins would be spent working to wipe out the renegade Red Barons team, holed up in Queens and Nassau County safe houses since the night Tony Mesh’s body had been found.
“Wait five minutes after the last car pulls out,” Angelo said to Nico, both of them standing in the rear of the hangar. “Then we head back to the bar. Pudge should be waiting for us by the time we walk in.”
This was the danger and the power of Angelo Vestieri that so many feared, and for the only time in my life I felt uncomfortable in his company. I was even more uncomfortable in the knowledge that he would know. A true gangster can smell out a person’s strengths and weaknesses in a matter of minutes, but what they can sense most of all, what their bodies are most attuned to, is the scent of fear. I also knew, standing there next to Angelo inside an airport hangar that had been turned into an assault center, that I could never be a great gangster. Angelo was indeed one, any small doubts that I may have had were scraped away by this impressive show of force. He had planned and maneuvered a total elimination of his enemies. He had sacrificed the lives of many of his own men, hiding his coldness and ruthless abilities under the protective cloak of an aging boss. It was a battle plan few would ever be able to match.
Angelo tapped me on the shoulder with the edge of his folded-up newspaper. “Does this bother you?” he asked, watching the last of the cars drive out.
“A little.” I nodded, turning toward him in the dark interior, his face half-lit by the lights off the underbelly of the two empty planes. “I know who those men are and I know what they’re here to do.”
“But you don’t know who those men are.” Angelo leaned forward, one hand on my elbow. “And you don’t know what they’re here to do. Which means there’s no reason for you to be scared.”
I stared back at Angelo, peering into the semidarkness, realizing that I had been brought to the hangar to be taught an important lesson. Of course, he could never just tell me directly, that was not his way. And I was never certain if what I surmised was the lesson he was trying to teach. Even now, I hope that I was wrong. Because after that night, what I thought was that regardless of how much Angelo loved me or how devoted we were to one another, he would not hesitate to have me killed if I posed the slightest threat to his domain. In all the lessons of the gangster life he would give me across the span of many years, this unspoken one would have the most lasting impact. And it was on that night that I also first wondered, during those long, quiet moments standing inside an empty hangar in a small Long Island airport, if I would ever be able to do the same to him. Was I filled with enough hate to order the murder of someone I cared about? Had I been touched enough by death to be rendered a cold witness to it? I honestly did not know. What I did know was that if I could not, to Angelo I would be a failure. In the real world, such failings are viewed as blessings.
To a gangster, they are a curse.
“What happens now?” I asked Angelo, my mouth dry, my neck and back cold with the sweat of a young man’s terror.
“What’s meant to happen,” he said in a distant voice. He turned back toward the open rear door of his Cadillac and got in. I followed in his steps, shutting the door behind me. Nico slid the car into drive and slowly pulled out of the airport hangar. Outside, as a heavy rain enveloped us, I sat back, closed my eyes and tried to erase from my mind the horrors I imagined.
• • •
THE OLD WOMAN gently eased the key into the door lock and slid it to her right. The thin wood door creaked open and she nudged past it, two plastic bags filled with milk, eggs, cheese, bacon and fresh parsley in her gnarled hands. “Richie?” the old woman shouted toward the back rooms of the quiet apartment. “Richie, c’mon, wake up. I bought some breakfast. I’ll make us a nice frittata and a pot of coffee. Let’s go. Get out of that bed.”
The old woman rested her bags on the small kitchen table and walked toward the end of the railroad apartment where her only son, Richie, spent the bulk of his mornings, locked in his room, sleeping off another night of drink and dope. Anna Maria Scarafino had no illusions about her son. She knew he dealt drugs and was in business with people who ended their day with murder. She was well aware that the crisp twenty-dollar bills he often stuffed inside the front pockets of her apron were wrenched from the pried-open hands of hardworking people. But she had long ago resigned herself to such a fate, soon after her husband, Gennaro, took off with the Irish widow with the shapely legs and the longshoreman’s pension half a dozen years ago. Since those bleak days, other than her son Richie, no one else had come forward to help pull the family cart. And if the rent and grocery money he gave her came from someplace other than a weekly paycheck, she had learned to turn a blind, if not so innocent, eye to it.
Anna Maria pulled a cigarette from out of her housedress, lit it and kept walking through the well-kept rooms. “Richie,” she shouted down the hall, exhaling a thick puff of smoke out her nose and mouth. “What is it with you? Are you deaf, now?”
She turned a small corner and stood at the entrance to her son’s room. She turned the handle on the door and tossed it open. Her eyes moved from the empty bloodstained bed up to the wall, the cigarette falling out of her mouth, her hands clasped hard against her lips, squelching both a scream and a violent urge to vomit. There was Richie Scarafino, her only son, born two weeks premature, hanging from his bedroom wall, four thick nails pounded into his hands and feet, thick clots of blood bubbling off his cold skin and running down the blue paint and onto the white sheets. The dark end of a twelve-inch butcher’s knife poked out of the right side of his rib cage. His eyes were beaten shut and his head was hanging to one side. Anna Maria fell to her knees, bowed her head and cried over the mangled body of her boy, Richard Scarafino, a young man who wanted so very much to be a gangster. She stayed that way for the rest of the morning, her low, painful moans echoing off cold, uncaring walls now streaked with the stains of death.
• • •
I STOOD NEXT to Pudge, both of us gripping the railing on the top deck of the Circle Line cruiser taking us down the Hudson River. I stared out at New Jersey, the spray of the salt water cooling my face. Around us, young couples held hands and older ones sat on wooden benches under warm blankets wrapped around their legs.
“I like being out on the water,” Pudge said.
“I’ll always remember that boat you rented for me and some of my friends last summer,” I said, leaning closer to him. “You told us all we were going to catch a hundred lobsters each.”
“I lied. But at least we had some laughs.”
“We don’t do much of that anymore.”
“What did you think a war was going to be like, Gabe?” Pudge asked.
“I don’t know what I expected.” I shrugged. “I didn’t think so many people would have to die.”
“And it bothers you?”
I didn’t answer, except to ask another question. “Doesn’t any of it bother you?”
“No,” Pudge said. “Not now when I’m old and not when I was young and starting out. I always knew it was a part of what I had to be. And I was okay with it.”
“I used to love being a part of it all,” I said, choking back the urge to cry. “Now, I’m more scared than anything else.”
“You love the power,” Pudge said. “What you don’t love is what you have to do to keep that power.” He hesitated, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “Angelo thinks you can be one of us. And he’ll do everything to make that happen.”
“But you don’t think that?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Pudge said. “You got the head for it and the respect for it. But you’re too nice. And there’s no room in our life for anybody nice.”
“What happens if Angelo comes to think the same th
ing?”
“That’s when it’ll get rough,” Pudge acknowledged.
“And you’ll go along with whatever he decides to do?” I asked.
“I don’t pick anybody over Angelo, little man. Not even you.” Pudge’s eyes were hard now and strangely distant. For the first time, he scared me. “That’ll be your war to win,” he whispered. “Or lose.”
• • •
PUDGE PARKED HIS car under the highway overpass and walked toward the dark, abandoned pier. Overhead, the passing cars rattled the road foundation, for decades now in desperate need of repair. He walked up to the pier entrance, stopped, looking to his left and right for any sign of activity. The combination of a full moon and the reflected lights that came down off the cars rushing out of the city cast the outside of the pier in a hazy glow. The old battered doors were shuttered and the moorings were rusty and loose. In its younger days, this very same pier was clogged with ocean liners and cargo haulers, bringing in thousands of dollars each week in swag earnings for Angelo and Pudge. The money they had earned working off the piers had given each of them the capital to expand into other business ventures. Pudge walked forward and shook his head, saddened to see yet another remnant of his youth reduced to rubble.
The Mercedes came at him at a high speed from his left. The headlights were off, the tires squealing on the cobblestones. The shadowed silhouettes of four men sitting inside the car were all that Pudge could make out. He faced the oncoming car, his back to the splintered wood of the pier’s front doors, his hands resting flat against the side of his legs, the fingers of each gripped around a cocked gun. Pudge took a deep breath and waited, the car now close enough for him to see the driver’s face. He relaxed his body and then threw himself to the ground, rolling to his right, coming up on his knees, facing the right side of the car, his arms held out, the two guns up and firing bullets into the tinted windows. He saw the driver’s head slump against the wheel as the Mercedes crashed into the pier door, its front end bursting through the weathered old wood.