Angelo sighed heavily. He got up slowly and walked to a phone booth across the room. He was a tall, scrawny, bald, and relentlessly dapper man in his late fifties. He had brush strokes of white paint on either side of his head above the ears; no hair above that. He was cocoa-dark with a nose like a macaw’s beak. There was no jewelry on him, but nobody would ever call him any slob. Angelo was the consigliere of the Prizzi family. He was inclined to overvalue cunning as a human quality. It was his conviction that there was no situation imaginable that he couldn’t plot his way out of. Even among Sicilians he was viewed charily because of his deviousness. “People look at television,” he said to his son Charley, “and they think everybody in the business is an ignorant strong-arm. I never strong-armed nobody in my life. When they see me they think I’m a rich dentist. Always dress quiet. Keep the suit pressed, the shoes shined, and let them think you are a civilian. And always wear a hat when you leave the house.”
He took the OUT OF ORDER sign off the mouthpiece of the telephone, put it in his pocket, and dialed Corrado Prizzi’s private number.
6
Corrado Prizzi sat in his favorite chair gazing dreamily, out of the large window sixteen feet away, at the view of lower Manhattan, which resembled the teeth in the lower jaw of a tyrannosaurus rex, while he absorbed the tenderness of Aroldo’s cavatina “Sotto il sol di Siria.”
Corrado Prizzi was the inventor of franchised crime; sort of a Sicilian Thomas Edison. His organizational vision had broken the patterns of merely local or regional organized crime and had made his own family an international presence that financed and designed local criminal organization and its enterprises down to the last detail, in the manner of the 803-page manual for the operation of a neighborhood McDonald’s. The Prizzi family, because of Corrado’s foresight, was in partnership with more than seventy percent of the families working in the United States: Mafia, black, Hispanic, Jewish, cowboy, and Oriental, in such high-yield activities as narcotics, gambling, tax-free gasoline, counterfeit merchandise, pornography, labor racketeering, junk bond financing, prostitution, toxic waste disposal, loan sharking, and extortion. These were industries that required capital to maintain quality and excellence. Corrado Prizzi provided the seed capital, the know-how, and a vastly growing array of political protection.
When he was seventeen Corrado Prizzi became a qualified man. When he emigrated to America with his wife and infant son Vicenzo in the following year, 1915, they were well-to-do compared with other Sicilian immigrants. They had $900—a big edge which, with his training as a specialist, enabled Corrado to build a family of compari that would grow as a syndicate and a kinship unit.
The year after he landed in New York, after he had established strong bonds with the Irish and Jewish hoodlums in lower Manhattan, he and his family followed the mass movement of immigrant Sicilians to Brooklyn, to the area between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Navy Yard. Corrado organized the lottery and that provided the backlog of operating cash with which he established his legitimate front: an imported cheese and olive oil business and his storefront bank. Originally the bank was there to receive deposits and send money back to the old country. Most of the time, storefront banks like his operated outside the restraints that bound state and national banks, and there were ample opportunities for fraud. There was no doubt that his interest rates on bank loans were high, but so were the risks. He was investing in poverty which could pay back only in small amounts—so much so that he was obliged to establish a small Black Hand unit to ensure collections. Individuals who were unwilling to repay him would suffer the consequences by losses of their peace, their businesses, or their lives. The plain fact was that immigrants who wanted to start up businesses were forced to go to his storefront bank for capital. After a while, in some of the cases, he wrote off part of the loans in exchange for an interest in the businesses. The experience gave him a knowledge of banking that was to profit him in later years.
He established his own ethnic-political machine and, because he was fair, because the immigrants needed someone to tell them how to get started in a strange, new country, he handed out patronage in return for support on Election Day. As he accumulated capital he bought into other political organizations in other parts of Brooklyn and in Manhattan, as an invisible partner of such men as James March (aka Antonio Maggio) and Paul Kelly (aka Paolo Vacarelli), keeping ward and political machines in power; obtaining exemptions from city ordinances for businessmen; arranging bail and obtaining pardons; sponsoring dances, parades, picnics, boat rides, bazaars, and church functions; and adding to the ranks of mourners at funerals.
In 1928, the young man Angelo Partanna, whom Corrado had brought over from Agrigento to run the lottery, bribed a woman clerk in the office of Charles J. O’Connor, the liquor administrator in charge of permits, for the withdrawal of tens of thousands of gallons of prohibited liquor for “medicinal purposes.” The stolen permits were serially numbered and had a rubber stamp facsimile of O’Connor’s signature. Corrado Prizzi sold the liquor at the official underworld curb exchange that ringed police headquarters along Kenmare, Broome, Grand, and Elizabeth streets in Manhattan and that met day and night to carry out business. In two years, back when the purchasing power of the dollar was ten-to-one against what it would become, Corrado Prizzi made two million dollars, the capital that financed his move into vaster, more widespread operations long before his competitors could get there.
Don Corrado was mafiusu—from the Sicilian adjective that has been used since the eighteenth century to describe people and objects as “beautiful” and “excellent.” Elsewhere, modern man sought wealth as a means of acquiring material objects; the mafiusu sought wealth as a means of commanding obedience and respect from others. Elsewhere, man believed that power follows wealth; Don Corrado knew, in his medieval mind, that wealth comes from power.
The room where he spent most of his time was in a house owned by a Bahamian company, whose shares were held by an Anstalt in Liechtenstein. The don didn’t own anything but seemed to live very nicely on his Social Security payments. These were, thank heaven, still untaxable in the late 1960s.
He was a pitiably old-looking man though he had only just reached seventy-one. He was small, wore suits that were two sizes too big for him in such a way that he appeared shriveled and unprotected. Angelo Partanna said that the don believed that looking old and feeble gave him an edge and, after his wife died, what was to stop him?
He shuffled when he walked. He smiled wanly when he smiled, which fortunately wasn’t often since it was a smile that chilled the bones.
Every room in the don’s house was decorated the way he remembered the furnishings of a Sicilian duke’s country mansion that he had seen when he was twelve years old, while the duke was away in Paris for the season. He could remember every room he had entered that day as if he were looking at a set of photographs. The room Corrado Prizzi lived in was a replica of a room decorated in 1872, following the decor of the duke’s father’s palace in Palermo, which had been decorated in 1819. So, while the furnishings of the Prizzi house were not modern in any way, they were rich, if a little worn; fringes, velours, ormolu, and gilt-framed pictures everywhere; carved cherubim, and portraits of Jesus in his many manifestations, as well as several realistic limnings of St. Francis of Assisi.
The telephone rang. Still listening to the Verdi, he reached out and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“This is Angelo, Corrado. You remember Vito Daspisa who worked with his brother Willie in the—”
“I know him.”
“He killed two cops. Now he is inside his apartment out at the beach surrounded by a giant stakeout of cops and television people.”
“So?” The don tried to listen to the music and to Angelo Partanna at the same time.
“So he sent for Davey Hanly and he—”
“Hanly?”
“The Borough Squad. The bag man for the Department in Brooklyn.”
“Ah.”
“He told Hanly he would give him the whole rundown on our East Coast shit operation if Hanly would get him out.”
“If Hanly would get him out? Vito Daspisa is one of our people.”
“Yeah.”
“One of our people and he offers to betray us so they can get him out? I can’t believe it. I took his father in when the Horowitz Novelty Company failed. The father handled punch-boards for Frank Costello.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Where are you?”
“In a bar across the street from his apartment. I got Hanly with me.”
“We gotta take Vito off the payroll, Angelo. Us, not them.” He hung up.
Angelo left the phone booth and went back to the table where Hanly was waiting. He sat down heavily. “I am disappointed. This man come to us nine years ago when his brains was running out of his nose because he was getting his head punched off as an Armory fighter. We took him in. This is how he pays us back.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Angelo. How do you want to handle it?”
“All anybody wants is for this crazy cop-killer to be dead, Davey, but the Department has to get the media credit after all the trouble you guys are going through. Without risking any more cops’ lives.”
“Yeah? How do we do that?”
“We’ll send my son Charley in.”
“Charley?”
“Give him a temporary rank of first-grade detective and some name off the department’s personnel computer for his protection. Get him an assault rifle. He’ll handle everything.”
“I’ll have to clear that, Angelo.”
“Why not? It makes sense.”
Hanley left the bar and plunged into the crowd.
7
Angelo drove through the traffic from Flatbush to Mid-wood to get Charley from night school. He, too, was proud of Charley’s determination to get a high school diploma. Charley had quit school when he was fifteen to go to work as a helper on an ice truck for what looked like a lot of money to him—forty-eight dollars a week. Louis Palo, a neighborhood guy who was about five years older than Charley, had come off the ice truck to go to work for the Prizzis and he recommended Charley for the job.
Angelo didn’t try to stop Charley, but he said, “I hope you ain’t gonna be sorry about quitting school.” Charley didn’t know what Pop was talking about. He left the ice truck when he was sixteen because Pop got him a job as a runner in the counterfeit liquor stamp operation. He was a made man at seventeen (although he made his bones at thirteen under very unusual, but necessary, conditions), the same age his father had been made in Sicily. After that, his advancement in the environment was assured. From seventeen until twenty-one he worked in Religio Vulpigi’s setup, which handled high tech in-flight robberies and the hijacking of negotiable securities. They lifted passenger baggage holding jewels and money on commercial airliners and heavy freight shipments coming through La Guardia, Newark, and Idlewild.
When Charley was twenty-one he was transferred to be the bridge man between the mob-owned racetracks around the country and the racehorses they had to keep buying in England and Ireland at the right prices so there would always be enough to keep running enough races for the bettors to keep pouring the four hundred million dollars a year into the business.
Charley was drafted when he was twenty-four. Eduardo, the don’s other son, could have fixed it, but Charley said all the guys his age were going in so he went in. He wound up in Special Forces for fourteen months because he was good with weapons and had high tech skills, then he was blown right out of it in a Cong attack on a U.S. base near Pleiku in the Central Highlands.
Pleiku was the South Vietnamese Army headquarters for patrols against Cong infiltration routes coming down through the jungles from Laos and Cambodia. Charley’s detachment was billeted three miles away at Camp Holloway. His outfit guarded a fleet of U.S. transport and observation aircraft and helicopters. The Cong hit at about 2 A.M. on February 7th, 1965, with mortars and heavy automatic fire. Eight Americans died and more than a hundred others were wounded; ten U.S. aircraft were destroyed. Charley had the bone in his right thigh shattered. After four operations, the last two in Washington, his thighbone was replaced with an aluminum rod. He was just turning twenty-seven when he walked out of the hospital and went back to Brooklyn, where the don turned out practically the entire family at the old Palermo Gardens and gave him the party of the year.
When Charley came back from Nam he told Pop he would sign up for night school. Pop was so proud he told the don, and the don had Charley come over to the house so he could tell him he’d done the right thing; he was a real American.
They ate a tremendous lunch. Charley couldn’t believe how much a little old guy like the don could put away. The don asked him when he would get his diploma.
“Like in two and a half to three years, padrino.”
“Do they have a thing at the night school after you finish the job?”
“I don’t know, padrino. They never said.”
“How are you doing in the school so far?”
“Okay, I guess. I run a B+ average. I was elected Secretary-Treasurer of my class.”
“If they have a graduation I wanna know, because me and Vincent are gonna be there. Amalia, too. If they don’t have a graduation I gonna ask Eduardo to talk to the head of the Board of Education to have them set one up.”
“You pay me tremendous honor, padrino.”
“Whatta you talkin’ about?” the don said. “You are gonna have a high school education, the first soldier we ever put on the street with a high school diploma.”
The Luis Muñoz-Marín Junior High School in Midwood operated from 7 to 10 P.M. as a night school. Charley was in a class with eleven other adults; two-thirds were women; six Puerto Ricans, four blacks, a Russian woman from Brighton Beach, and Charley. The teacher was a blocky determined Norwegian from Bay Ridge named Mr. Matson. The desks, meant for twelve- and fourteen-year-olds, were small for a lot of the night class. Charley had to sit in a chair on the far side of the room. He sat there daydreaming about Mardell La Tour. Tonight could be the night. He had set up a careful pattern after that first lunch. He didn’t want her to think he was some kind of a wolf. But enough time had gone by. Enough confidence had been built. He was only human, for God’s sake, but tonight could be the night.
He had attacks of dizziness when he thought about Mardell. He found it impossible to imagine her either: (a) naked, or (b) lying down. But he was as eager to know those two things as any astronomer-topographer who had ever sought to map outer space. Not only was she a spectacular girl, she had a body on her that was bringing him to his knees because, with Mardell as it had never been with anybody else, there was no place else to go. Also, there was no denying it, she had an unusual imagination. He had found out what Buckingham Palace was, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica his father had given him on his twelfth birthday. When he found out, he had to decide that Mardell must be some kind of a nut.
The gleaming jewel of the night school class was Señora Roja-Buscando, who sought to answer every question put by Mr. Matson, interrupting the answers by any other student to the point of exasperating Charley so much that he broke his rule of never putting fear into a woman. Night after night, he poured fear over the señora, but it had absolutely no effect. She dominated the class, giving advice, scorn, and pity; winning Gold Star after Gold Star. She had four more stars than Charley.
Angelo drove his beat-up Chevy straight to the school, got directions from the office to find Charley’s classroom, and stood outside the room staring through the glass pane of the top half of the door, hoping to catch Charley’s attention. He had to tap on the glass with a dime. The entire class and Mr. Matson looked at him. Pop made motions at Charley to come out. Charley cleared his throat and spoke to Mr. Matson. “That’s my father,” he said.
“You better go out.”
“You shoo tell your father that he shoon innarupt the class,” Señora Roja-Busca
ndo said. “We are serious here. This is no time for grittings.”
Pop drove Charley to the beach. On the way he explained what had to be done.
“Vito?” Charley cried out. “Vito Daspisa? He’s my best friend!”
“He’s finished, Charley, and he knows it. He wanted to give the entire shit operation to the cops.”
“But I know him all my life.”
“Vito’s trouble is he’s a hothead when he has a couple lines in him.”
“Why does a guy who is a natural wine drinker for hundreds of years go around fooling with that stuff?”
“He’s an American, Charley. He is integrating. His old man was just as much of a hothead, and he only took wine. He got himself killed because he lost his temper in a game of pool and peed on the cue ball because he missed a shot.”
“Jesus, Pop.”
Charley knew Vito from the old neighborhood since they were five years old. When they were teenagers they used to make side money together playing semipro stickball all over south Brooklyn. One summer Vito was the menace at a crap game Charley ran on Sunday mornings at Coney Island. Vito was a natural athlete, a hulk. When he was eighteen he took his shot at being an Armory fighter in the lightweight division, and Charley was his manager. Vito boxed under the name of Dimples Tancredi because if his mother found out what he was doing she would beat the shit out of him. The second time Charley ever did the job on anybody was because of Vito. A gambler named Four-Eyes Ganz had been bothering Vito to throw fights so Ganz could clean up on the bets. Vito had told him to fuck off but he kept coming back. The whole thing got Charley’s goat so he slammed Ganz and his bodyguard against the wall in Vito’s dressing room and told them if he ever saw them again they would be dead. Like a dummy, Ganz came around five nights later and made the same proposition to Vito, so Charley put them in a car with the Plumber driving, took them out to the southwest part of the Belt Parkway, and gave it to them. Nobody missed them.
Prizzi's Family Page 3
