“Okay. I’ll send in my bid tomorrow.”
Al appeared in the doorway. He nodded and made a copacetic sign like he was the beer endorser in a TV commercial.
“Good, Matty,” Charley said into the telephone. “I’m glad you cooled down.” He hung up. He raised his eyebrows at Melvini.
“Up the coast from Miami a little,” Melvini said. “Hollywood, Florida. In an apartment on Forty-sixth Avenue, I wrote down the address, under the name of Fred Goldberg.”
“Gimme the address.” Melvini handed it over. “Santo out there?”
“Sure.”
“Send him in.”
Santo came into the office, closing the door behind him.
Charley said. “We found Matty.”
Santo grinned. When he was around bosses he was Captain Amiable.
“You got backup in Miami?”
“Sure.”
Charley passed the piece of paper across the desk. “Tell them to see Matty tonight.”
“I’ll handle it myself,” Santo said.
“Have somebody tip off the local papers after you see Matty. I wanna let people know we are serious about these franchises.”
17
At 5:00 P.M. on March 10, 1990, at the don’s house in Brooklyn Heights, Charley had his final meeting with his father and Don Corrado, grateful that he had been spared an invitation to lunch. It was five hours before his departure from Kennedy for Zurich with Maerose. Charley was ready and stable when he went into the meeting but kind of disoriented when he came out.
He had had a general idea of what they wanted him to do, but now it hit him that he was probably seeing Brooklyn, from the inside, for the last time in his life. Flashes of stickball games and the little broads, Coney Island, and the welcome feeling he had every time he drove over the bridge lit up a scene with people he thought he had forgotten. The don and his father had asked him to do some pretty whacked-out things in their time, but this one he felt like it had never hit him before.
“Everything is set at this end, Charley,” the don said. “All you gotta do is work hard at your end beginning tomorrow in Europe. Harry found a nice house for you and the doctors they got is the best.”
“I’m not so sure what I’m supposed to do,” Charley said.
“All you do is listen to Maerose,” the don told him. “She knows both operations, she can talk like Eduardo sounds, and she knows what you should wear and how you should sound. She’s been running the PR people at Eduardo’s for eleven years besides a lotta other things, so she’ll also handle that end of the operation. By the time you get back, you’ll be well-known here.”
“That’s the whole thing,” Charley said. “To certain people I am already well-known.”
“Charley, lissena me,” his father said. “You’re not gonna be around to be known to anybody anymore. Mae and the don got it all figured. You leave tonight and you are what it says on your new passport—Charles Macy Barton. Meanwhile, next week back in Brooklyn Charley Partanna gets sick, goes inna hospital, then he goes with the angels. We got a funeral organized that is gonna convince all those people you are talking about that you ain’t around no more.”
“Before the funeral even,” the don said, “nobody is gonna connect you with Charley Partanna. You won’t be here. You’ll be in Switzerland where you’re gonna get a new face, new prints, new clothes, and a whole new life.”
“But who is gonna be buried?”
“Just the casket. There won’t be nothing in it.”
“It is gonna be a terrific funeral, Charley,” Pop assured him. “I’ll send you all the coverage on it. You’ll be knocked out.”
“I was gonna have them make a video of it,” the don said, “but they got a different kinda current over there.”
“So make one anyways,” Charley said. “I’ll play it when I get back.”
Charles Macy Barton, as he rode in the forward cabin of a Swissair flight from New York to Zurich that night, said to his wife, Mary, “Don’t ever tell the Prizzis how to rob a train.”
“It will be beautiful,” his wife said. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“Well, it’ll getta lotta people out in the fresh air.” He thought for a while. “Mae?”
“Yeah?”
“How’m I suppose to run a business as big as Eduardo’s? I read in a magazine it was the biggest business in the world.”
“So?”
“So how do I run it?”
“Charley, lissena me. You are gonna have PR people telling the country how smart you are, you are gonna have economists, cost accountants, trained executives with high batting averages in sales, production, marketing, buying, personnel, all around you, giving you the answers.”
“That figures, but how does it work?”
“We set up a schedule of meetings with people—the home office people plus we bring them in from all over the country. You lissena them. You don’t say yes you don’t say no. You put a little fear in them. They go out and do it.”
“Suppose they are wrong what they tell me. How would I know? What then?”
“Every week the computer brings you a list of what the companies won or lost. These are compared to last month, six months ago, and last year. Statistics back it up. They say how much money the public has, will have, used to have, how they are spending it and where. You’ll know which companies are winning and which are losing.”
“Like a form sheet.”
“Yeah. So if some companies are winning, you tell them they are doing good. If they are losing, you bring them into New York and you put the fear in them. It’s no different from running a division for the family.”
18
It had taken seventeen months, until February 1990, for Charley and an insistent sales force to place all of the franchises with the right buyers on acceptable terms, which involved cash down payments and secured credit arrangements of slightly more than $30 million and assured continuing royalties of 11.2 percent on the gross earnings of each franchise, all net profit. Thirty-one people had to be taken out during the negotiations but, surprisingly, only a few of these were discontented Prizzi soldiers. Mostly it was people from the other families and a couple of greedy Orientals. Finally, it had to go to the Commission to get straightened out.
Two-thirds of the eighteen active franchises went to organizations outside the family: three of the five families in New York took over the shit business and the gambling except in Spanish Harlem; the flesh operations went to United Bamboo, a Taiwan-based organization founded by Chiang Kai-shek (the leadership of which, in a statement to the Business Day section of The New York Times, said that they had been drawn to set up operations in New York out of admiration for Corrado Prizzi’s concept of controlling available “air space” in the city for use by his building construction operations, so they paid $7,382,010 for the air space franchise for New York, Long Island, and Jersey, then were attracted by the food and automobile operations and bought the franchise for the extortion business, which called for making a tremendous settlement with Santo Calandra because he was very possessive about that). The Black syndicate acquired the numbers and lottery franchise, two large savings banks, the jai alai holdings, and a national brokerage operation.
Many Sicilian competitors interpreted the Prizzi withdrawal into franchising as a sign of weakness and did their best to wrest control of various divisions, mainly the shit business, and, to an extent, the national football book, but Charley Partanna’s management skills defeated these attempts. Nine killings and it was all over because Charley also made a case before the Commission.
More than 700 former Prizzi workers were absorbed into the new franchises. For the remainder, compulsory retirement plans were activated by bribes, threats, and a minimum number of payoffs, the net cost to the Prizzis in pensions and bonuses being $4,821,649.07, a miracle of persuasion. A staff of 117 enforcer/collectors was held out of the old labor pool. Santo Calandra was in charge of running this operation, supervising a team of
tested people who “had done the work,” as Santo explained as he laid out his table of organization. The unit reported directly to Angelo Partanna, who was the link to Don Corrado Prizzi.
On March 18, 1990, Charley Partanna died of infectious meningitis at the family-owned hospital, Santa Grazia di Traghetto. Due to the nature of the illness, the body was not laid out for open casket viewing. Charley had been a popular leader and an established figure throughout the environment. The mourning for the loss was extensive throughout the Sicilian, police, judiciary, media, Hollywood, and political communities; therefore, his death, coming upon the heels of the Prizzi family withdrawal from street operations, created confusions. But the Prizzis were off the street by then, so it didn’t matter to them.
The funeral was a colossal event even for a city the size of New York. The media worked it for all it was worth for three full days prior to the funeral. Every family in the country sent delegations. Don Pietro Spina personally sent a representative, “Mi nuncio,” from the old country. The five TV networks utilized twenty-six cameras and crews to provide the kind of coverage that had been equaled only by presidential inaugurals, working out the details from each setup with the PR people of the Prizzi family, who were on loan from Barker’s Hill.
Movie stars, sports champions, and capos from rival families put in pleading bids to be made pallbearers. As a token, as opposed to a real, gesture, the mayor of the City of New York offered to proclaim a “Charley Partanna Day.” The New York Post’s coverage of the funeral, led by a copyright story by Abner Stein, biographer of the famous, which would appear in his forthcoming book on celebrity funerals, perhaps said it best, leading out of the headlines, which took the entire front page, to a page three story with a carryover to a page and a half of pictures.
GANG BOSS PLANTING
THRONGED BY THOUSANDS
BY ABNER STEIN
NEW YORK—Charles “Charley” Partanna, the feared and fearful “boss” of the powerful Prizzi crime family, was buried today, attended by tens of thousands of mourners, at the cemetery of Santa Grazia di Traghetto, the “lucky” parish church of the Prizzi crime family.
The sealed bronze casket had solid silver and bronze double walls. The body lay upon a couch of white satin with a tufted extra cushion for his left hand to rest on. At the corners of the casket were solid silver posts carved in intricate, but dignified, designs. The casket itself was modest in a hushed silver gray, wholly content with the austere glory of the carving and the simple scroll set into the casket top, which read: Charles Partanna, 1937–1990. Silver angels stood at the head and foot of the casket with their heads bowed in the light of the ten candles that burned in the golden candlesticks they held in their hands. On a marble slab beneath the casket was the inscription “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Over all this lay the soft mantle of the perfume of flowers whose total retail value was estimated to be $88,900 in the form of wreaths, blankets, lyres, hearts, and placards made by woven orchids, lilies, chrysanthemums, carnations, and roses. The Unione Siciliane, trade association and lobbying force of the Honored Society, sent a 9 foot by 12 foot placard of lilies of the valley which read “Goodbye, Pal” in giant letters of superimposed forest violets.
Softly treading, deftly changing places in the Guard of Honor were Charles Partanna’s friends and co-workers in their well-tailored dark suits. To show their grief in the traditional manner, none of them had shaved in the past three days, revealing their blue-steel jaws in sharp relief. Three were weeping.
In the soft light of the candles at the head of the $38,590 casket sat Angelo Partanna, a senior executive of the Prizzi family, father of the deceased, a picture of parental sorrow. A highly placed source in the Prizzi family said that Corrado Prizzi, aged 95, was too overcome by grief to attend the obsequies, that his medical and security advisers had pressed him to remain at home.
The eulogy, spoken by the deceased’s pastor, Father William Passanante, after a requiem mass, delivered a blessing from the Vatican and the White House, then spoke of Mr. Partanna’s many kindnesses and his generosity.
The dense congregation of mourners overflowed the church, out into the street and filled both sides of the Doris Spriggs Freeway.
To the Dead March from Saul close friends and associates of the departed—caporegimes, or family soldiers all—bore the casket to the hearse. Close behind, with solemn tread, numb with sorrow, followed Angelo Partanna and close members of the Prizzi family. Plainclothesmen circulated quietly among the funeral party on guard against any unwarranted attacks.
For many blocks in every direction, from the street, from the windows of buildings and rooftops, thousands of people watched the cortege forming. Three miles long, it included thirty-one cars and trucks to carry the flowers, three bands, and a police escort. Police Commissioner Herbert Mitgang had forbidden the New York Police Department to join the mourners, but when the great procession had crossed the Verrazano Bridge to reach the Santa Grazia de Traghetto cemetery on Staten Island, an Honor Guard of NYPD officers had formed, led by Lieutenant David Hanly (ret.), former head of the Brooklyn Borough Squad.
As the cortege started for the cemetery, more than 10,000 people fell in before and behind it. Mounted police had to clear a path through the dense crowds so that the mournful motorcade could advance. Mrs. Angelina Fambia, 22, gave birth to a baby daughter in a telephone booth at the first intersection crossed by the procession, although this was not discovered until 47 minutes later, after the cortege had passed.
At the cemetery about 8,000 more people waited to watch the kneeling mourners as the thousands following the cortege poured into the cemetery, some people needing to stand bare-headed in the rain as far as three hundred yards from the grave site. Father Passanante led the mourners in reciting a litany, three Hail Marys, and the Lord’s Prayer, his face obscured by the hedge of television network and radio microphones.
PRICE PLANS TRIPS TO FIVE STATES
EARLY THIS YEAR, WITH MORE LATER
BY DICK ADLER
Special to The New York Times
NEW YORK, March 19—Edward S. Price, international business leader and philanthropist, widely regarded as a possible Presidential candidate in 1992, said today that he would travel to Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and California and that “there will be more” national trips by the mid-year.
The widely admired big business executive, whose company, Barkers’ Hill Enterprises, may be the largest in the world, has repeatedly said he is not running for President, denied that the trips were linked to a race for the White House. But many national political figures, who have told Mr. Price he must signal his intentions by early 1990 if he is to have any chance of winning the Presidential nomination, said they view his travel plans as the early stage of a White House campaign.
“There is no basis to saying I’m being coy about running for President,” Mr. Price said in an interview. “If I chose to explore the Presidency, I wouldn’t do it in a backward way. I’d say I’m exploring the Presidency.”
But when asked outright if he was running, he did not completely rub out the possibility of a race. “It’s what I always said: I have no plans,” he said.
He added that in the past he had frequently turned down speaking engagements elsewhere in the country for fear of generating speculation about the Presidency and that, as a result, “I have forfeited the opportunity to say good things.”
The five states he will visit include ones considered crucial to any Presidential race. Florida, North Carolina, and Texas in the South, an area where many strategists have said Mr. Price needs to spend time to soften an image as “a Northeastern liberal.” Many national strategists say the South could be the key in the 1992 race for the Presidency.
“I would suspect that for Edward S. Price this is the first stage of something,” said Gov. Gordon G. Manning of Connecticut. “This is the first I have known of any concrete evidence that he might really be an interested candidate. The fact th
at, although he has traveled to individual cities in the past, he disclosed five trips at one time is viewed by national strategists as an intention to send a signal.”
Later in the interview, however, Mr. Price sounded a theme that he has been talking about more and more and that many expect would be the thrust of a Presidential campaign. He talked about the failure of the Heller Administration and by Washington generally to recognize that economic problems—unemployment, the Federal deficit, the imbalance in trade, third-world debt—are interconnected and require a broad, unified solution. “With this wonderful opportunity the Party has fought to win comes a very heavy burden of responsibility because you now have to produce.”
19
They sat comfortably in the stube of Harry Garrone’s villa overlooking Zurich and its lake in Switzerland, reading the media reportage of Charley’s funeral in New York.
“This is sensational coverage!” Harry Garrone said. “What a turnout!”
“Where does he get that ‘feared and fearful’ crap?” Charley asked, staring at the newspaper.
“Seventeen PR people worked nine hundred and sixty-two man-hours to set it up and to turn out the crowd,” Maerose said. “The woman having the kid in the phone booth was a good touch. My people tell me that something happened with the normal circuits to the Vatican so they had to bring the blessing in by satellite.”
“That’s good,” Harry Garrone said. “Like a verce from the sky.”
Harry was Maerose’s second cousin, whom Charley had known all his life, and the family’s prime money-mover. “Jesus, you sure know how to make a cuddiruni pizza, Mae,” Harry said. “I love Swiss food, but, you know, I miss the old-fashioned stuff.”
“Charley made it,” Maerose said.
“He can cook?”
“Wait’ll you taste his sfasciatelle and his nipitiddata.”
“Come on, fahcrissake!” Charley said. “Tell me what’s gonna be.”
“Tomorrow morning we drive to Lucerne and you go inna clinic there,” Harry told him. “I got the very best face man inna world, Dr. Abe Weiler, an artist.”
Prizzi's Glory Page 9
