The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  ‘OK,’ Costello said. ‘Petrelli and the biggest fucking wreath you ever saw.’

  Adonis nodded. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said again.

  Costello tossed him the notepads. Told him what Cheesebox had to say about the movie producers meeting with Genovese.

  ‘Maybe he wants to star in a movie,’ said Adonis.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Costello. ‘What the hell’s he up to?’

  As long as all the families kept working together and avoided another war, nothing could interrupt their winning streak. And all the bosses wanted to carry on working together. All of them except Genovese. The one man who could bring an end to the golden age. Who didn’t get it. That was the thing about golden ages, you never knew when you were living in one. They only ever existed in retrospect. But Costello knew. Because he’d helped usher it in.

  And Genovese was threatening it.

  The waiter came over and Costello ordered another soup, Adonis a steak.

  ‘Speaking of our friend in New Jersey,’ said Adonis, ‘I had a call from my boy over in the tenth.’

  The tenth was the tenth police precinct, Chelsea. Where Adonis had a cousin who sent information their way.

  ‘Last night they arrested some kid in a sweep on one of them cafeterias off Washington Square Park,’ Adonis said. ‘Selling dope. When the cops searched his pad they found enough of it to have him sent away for fifteen to twenty. Back at the precinct he offered to rat out his whole supply line, including where his supplier got the dope from.’

  ‘Vito Genovese?’ said Costello.

  Adonis nodded. ‘Said he had evidence,’ he continued. ‘Offered Genovese up right there in the room, to my cousin.’

  This was why Costello told his men never to deal drugs. Not for some moral reason, but because the prison sentences were so harsh, people cut deals, ratted out their bosses to escape them. Drugs were a crowbar into a man’s soul.

  ‘What did your cousin do?’ Costello asked.

  ‘Said he’d think about it. He called me up this morning. Maybe we could turn him.’

  Costello nodded, thought about it. Adonis was suggesting they coerce the kid, make him one of their own informants, someone in the Genovese camp who could feed them information. Costello already had a mole over there in New Jersey – Nick Tomasulo – but Costello had a feeling Genovese was onto him. Genovese wasn’t inviting Tomasulo to important meetings anymore, wasn’t letting him hear anything that Costello might find useful. He was being treated in much the same way Costello treated Bova, the gym-owner-come-pimp in Costello’s camp who was a rat for Genovese.

  ‘What do you think?’ Costello asked Adonis.

  ‘Tomasulo’s compromised.’ Adonis shrugged. ‘We need a new mole. It’ll take a while for this kid to work his way up, but it’ll be worth it.’

  It would take a good few years for the kid to rise up the ranks and be useful. Way too late for him to supply anything worthwhile in regards to Genovese’s meeting with the movie-men.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Costello asked.

  ‘The kid? Still locked up in the basement of the tenth. My cousin’s waiting on our word.’

  Costello drummed his fingers on the table. Thought about Genovese and the movie-men.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s turn the kid. Tell your cousin to set him loose and we’ll pick him up in a couple of days. I’ll speak to Anastasia about helping.’

  Adonis nodded.

  When they needed to turn someone, they got Anastasia to do it.

  Their food arrived.

  Costello’s soup tasted terrible compared to the one he had in Little Italy, but he sucked it up anyway. As they ate they went through Cheesebox’s notebooks. A lot of movie-man talk. Which films were coming out, which ones looked like turkeys, which actors were causing problems on set, which ones were sleeping with each other. Adonis drew Costello’s attention to an anecdote about the actress Barbara Stanwyck.

  ‘Barbara Stanwyck,’ said Adonis. ‘Who’d have thought. Good-looking girl like her.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Just, you wouldn’t think she’s the type.’

  When they finished eating Costello took an orange from the bag, peeled it and ate. Adonis eyed him. Costello craved a cigarette.

  They rode the elevator down to the ground floor.

  ‘You coming to Duke’s?’ Costello asked.

  Adonis shook his head. ‘I’ll go and speak to my cousin, get things set up.’

  Costello nodded. ‘I’ll talk to Anastasia. He should be there today.’

  They went outside and got the concierge to hail them cabs.

  ‘Barbara Stanwyck, hunh?’ said Adonis.

  Next.

  ‘Where to, mac?’ said the cabbie.

  ‘Cliffside,’ said Costello.

  ‘Cliffside, New Jersey?’ said the cabbie, in a tone like Costello was an idiot.

  ‘Yeah, Cliffside, New Jersey. You know another Cliffside you wanna tell me about?’

  ‘You’re crazy, pal,’ said the cabbie.

  He turned to look at Costello, to tell him to get out of the cab. It took a moment before his jaw dropped.

  ‘I mean. Yes, sir. Straight away.’

  He turned back around, flipped the flag back up so the fare wouldn’t be reported and they merged into traffic.

  Costello sneezed, blew his nose. He poured eucalyptus oil onto a handkerchief, held it up to his blocked sinuses. The cabbie flicked looks his way through the rearview as they headed downtown, towards the Lincoln Tunnel. Costello knew the man wanted to ask him questions, but didn’t know where to start. Costello stared out of the window. He craved a cigarette. He craved another batch of the old woman’s chicken soup.

  He turned to look behind him and in the trail of traffic saw two black sedans. He always picked up tails at the Astoria, the agents who followed him knew he was a creature of habit. He turned back around. He’d long ago given up trying to figure out exactly which parts of the government were stalking him – the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Intelligence Divisions of the NYPD and the IRS. The only agency not interested in him was the FBI, Costello was certain of that. J. Edgar Hoover was too busy looking for communists to bother with organized crime, and Costello wanted to keep it that way. Hence his interest in the Waldorf meeting.

  Costello had met Hoover a few times in nightclubs around New York; they had a mutual friend in the gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Costello had found Hoover pleasant company. Hoover being in charge of the FBI was the best bit of luck the Mob had ever had. The one government agency with the reach and resources to take on the Mob, and it was headed by a man who had gone on record saying he didn’t believe there was such a thing as organized crime. No one was sure why Hoover thought it, or said it, at least. What mattered, though, was keeping it that way, and part of that was getting the FBI off the movie industry’s back.

  Around a decade earlier the film studio bosses had looked around their industry and seen most of the workers they relied on had been unionized, a consequence of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Many of the unions were radical, were demanding things, many leaned hard to the left. To get rid of what they saw as communists holding the industry hostage, the studio bosses had done what no sensible person should ever do in those situations – they called in the Mob. The Mob further infiltrated the unions it already had its tentacles in, infiltrated others, then started breaking them up, blackmailing, cracking skulls. Within a few years they’d taken control. It was only then that the studio bosses realized what they’d done – replaced unions backed by communists, with unions backed by the Mob.

  Now they were in charge, the Mob put the bite on way worse than the communists ever did. What did the studio bosses expect?

  Then came Senator McCarthy and HUAC and the anti-communist probe into Hollywood, a whole decade too late. If the movie industry didn’t distance itself from the communists, the FBI would come sniffing around. The best way to stop it all befor
e it became a problem was for the industry to make a big statement that it was with the government, and the best way to do that was to throw the Hollywood Ten under a bus. That way everything stayed as it was – feds vs reds – and the Mob could carry on doing as it pleased. The golden times would roll ever on.

  Hence Costello trying to swing the vote at the Waldorf meeting in favor of blacklisting. Hence Cheesebox bugging the hotel.

  But in the middle of all this, Genovese was talking to film producers. Why? Costello needed to get to the bottom of it. Genovese ousting him wouldn’t just be a disaster for Costello. If Genovese took over the Mob, the golden days were over, because Genovese would run the organization into the ground through violence and bad choices and a basic lack of understanding, because Genovese was everything Costello wasn’t – he used violence liberally, smuggled drugs, refused to work with non-Italians, believed power came from shows of force. Costello never understood this logic – to him, the greatest sign of weakness was needing to display your strength.

  The cab hit the Lincoln Tunnel and everything went dark. In the blackness Costello thought about the meeting at Duke’s, about the appointment with Dr Hoffman in the late afternoon. Dr Hoffman had told Costello the cause of his insomnia was depression of spirits, the cause of his depression of spirits was a lack of self-worth, and the cause of that was his inferiority complex. Or something like that. The solution was to better himself, the doctor had told him, and one way to do that was to consort with better types. It was shrink talk for stop hanging around with mobsters and you’ll feel better.

  And here he was on his way to Duke’s.

  If Costello could have stopped consorting with the Mob, he would have done it. He never wanted to be a mobster, and somehow he’d ended up boss of the whole goddamn thing.

  The cab came out of the tunnel and sunlight flashed, bleaching Costello’s vision. He closed his eyes, waited for the burn to fade. They spun round the Weehawken helix and headed north towards Cliffside. Costello took in Jersey. All around he saw smoke-stacks, a hinterland of factories and warehouses. To his right were the docks, some burned and rotting in the mud, others alive with traffic – cargo ships, freighters, tugs, lighters, towboats carrying railroad carriages across the sparkling river to the fuzz of Manhattan in the distance.

  They headed up Palisade Avenue and the cabbie pulled up outside the drab exterior of Duke’s Bar and Grill. Since the thirties New York’s gangsters had been moving to Jersey to escape New York State’s zealous prosecutors. So Duke’s had become a hang-out. There was good food, soundproof rooms, a suite upstairs. Some of the Jersey-based bosses were there every day. Costello made a weekly visit on Tuesdays.

  Costello got out of the cab. He looked down the street and saw the two black sedans that had been tailing them had pulled up a block further back. He sifted through his bankrolls; he had one in each trouser pocket, right side for spending, left side for loans. He peeled off a hundred and passed it to the cabbie.

  ‘Jeez, thanks, Mr Costello, sir.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Costello.

  ‘Sir,’ said the cabbie, having finally summoned up some courage. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Costello. ‘But quit with the sir, would ya?’

  ‘Got any tips for getting rich?’

  Don’t drive a cab, Costello thought.

  ‘Sure, bub,’ he said. ‘Steal a dollar a million times.’

  The cabbie frowned at him. Costello grinned.

  ‘You steal a million dollars,’ he said. ‘They’ll be after you all your life. But steal a dollar a million times, no one bats an eyelid.’

  The cabbie thought about it and grinned. Laid out in those words was the definition of the rackets, of the skim. Take the thinnest of slices enough times, and you’d end up a millionaire and no one would be all that bothered.

  Costello turned. The cab drove off. The cold air made Costello cough. He hunched over, felt like he might puke, had to wait a few moments for it all to subside. He rummaged around his pockets for the glass bottle of cough syrup he’d bought in the pharmacy, opened it, downed half of it right there on the street. As he wiped his mouth he looked about him. Noticed more Fed sedans parked on the other side of the street, outside the Palisades Amusement Park.

  He turned and walked to the back of the restaurant, to the entrance the mobsters used, went up the stairs, stepped inside a close, smoky room. The blinds were drawn, giving everything contours. A dozen men were in there, arranged around a table that was strewn with money, wires, telephony equipment, tools, racing forms, newspapers, tumblers of whiskey, beers, plates of food.

  There they all were in the murk, the lords of the underworld. The racketeers. The vampires. Costello made out Albert Anastasia, Joe Profaci, Tommy Lucchese, Willy Moretti, his brother Solly, Vinnie Mangano. Assorted capos. The five families were all represented, the Jersey families, too. Here were many of the men Costello had convinced to invest in Benjamin Siegel’s Las Vegas delusion. The men Costello owed millions to. And maybe one of these men had conspired with Benny to steal the two million bucks Gabriel was currently looking for.

  Costello ran his eye over them, one by one. He thought again of Dr Hoffman’s advice on consorting with a better class of person.

  ‘Frank,’ said a few of the men who’d spotted him.

  ‘You been grocery shopping?’ said Willy Moretti on seeing Costello’s paper bag.

  Costello settled down at an empty spot near the middle of the table, peeled an orange.

  ‘You hear about Capone?’ someone shouted at him from the depths of the room.

  ‘Sure,’ said Costello.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ said Moretti.

  ‘Last time Joe was down in Florida he went by the compound,’ said Vinnie Mangano. ‘Al was sitting at the edge of the pool with a fishing rod. “Watcha doing?” Joe asked him. “Trying to catch a fish,” he said. Trying to catch a fish in a swimming pool.’

  There was a pause as they all considered this.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ said a voice somewhere Costello couldn’t make out.

  The chit-chat resumed.

  He turned to look at the television perched on the sideboard. It was tuned to a broadcast of the HUAC hearings, showing a flickering image of a furtive, bookish man, sitting on the other side of the table from the committee, reading a statement into a microphone. The glow of the television screen in the otherwise murky room made Costello think of the old woman’s apartment that morning, and the phosphorescent Jesus, sickly green, floated in the darkness of his mind’s eye.

  Next to the television was a radio, with a wire coming out of it that led to a telephone receiver. Cheesebox had connected the race wire to the radio for them, so they could hear the race commentary coming out of the radio, instead of having someone listen in on the telephone and relay them the details second-hand.

  Costello made eye contact with Anastasia, the Mob’s murderer and torturer in chief. Anastasia was in the rival Mangano family, but he and Costello were close, much to the annoyance of Anastasia’s boss. Costello nodded at Anastasia, signifying something was up. Anastasia nodded back. He was a pudgy man with a bulbous nose, and he exuded a sharp, penetrating menace. He’d been a founder member of Murder Inc, the gang of hitmen for hire who killed over four hundred people all through the tail-end of Prohibition, the Depression, and into the forties. Anastasia’s personal tally was rumored to be in triple-digits. These days he passed himself off as a businessman.

  Costello thought about those triple-digits, about consorting with better types. He got the handkerchief with the eucalyptus oil on it and put it to his nose. The stench of cigarettes in the place was simultaneously making his cold worse, and making him want a smoke.

  ‘Hurry the fuck up,’ said a voice. ‘The race is about to start.’

  Costello checked his watch. It was the Champagne Stakes at Belmont. The men in the room would all be gambling. Every one of them was an inveterate horseplayer. Under other circumst
ances Costello would have put a few grand on that morning with his bookies in Detroit and Cincinnati. But he couldn’t be seen to be gambling while he owed the other men in the room so many millions; it just wouldn’t seem right. Even if one of the men might well have stolen two of those millions back.

  Solly walked up to the sideboard where the radio was. He turned up the volume on the radio and the race commentary boomed out of the speaker. It drowned out the sound of the HUAC hearing coming from the TV. Costello looked at the black-and-white flickering screen again. It had cut from the HUAC hearings to the face of someone he recognized. Senator McCarthy, talking into a microphone. He was different to when Costello had met him; his face a little fatter, his eyes a little narrower.

  ‘Who’s got what?’ Costello asked, turning to the room.

  ‘A grand on Vulcan’s Forge,’ said Willie.

  ‘Vulcan’s Forge, too,’ said Lucchese. ‘Five grand.’

  ‘Two gees on Vulcan’s Forge,’ said Anastasia.

  Everyone else chimed in. All in all, they’d staked close to fifty thousand on the race. All on Vulcan’s Forge.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Costello. ‘What d’you all know?’

  The men sniggered.

  ‘What’s the odds?’ he asked.

  ‘Seven to one.’

  The race started. The commentator’s voice boomed out of the radio speaker. Vulcan’s Forge was nowhere. The men’s faces dropped. They started cursing the horse and the trainer and the jockey and the punk who cut the grass. Then, at the halfway call, Vulcan’s Forge was in third, then, with two furlongs to go, he was in second. And everybody was up and screaming in Italian. Then, with a hundred yards to go, he was in first.

  He brought it home.

  Everyone was up, cheering, dancing, someone starting throwing the stacks of cash on the table into the air, a rain of twenties, fifties, hundreds. Someone started singing Funiculì, Funiculà like they were all at a wedding and then everyone else joined in, dancing round the table, through the rain of dollar bills.

  This was the weekly strategy meeting.

  This was the golden age.