Prizzi's Glory

by Richard Condon

  “Where is Eduardo? He ought to be here,” Charley said.

  “He was here. He hadda go to Iowa.”

  “Iowa?”

  “The campaign.”

  “Amalia’s out,” Mary Barton continued. “That leaves Calo.”

  “Calo is too dumb to think like that, and he loved the don,” Charley said.

  “So that means nobody done it, but the don ain’t here,” Angelo said.

  25

  Edward S. Price was taking his run for the presidency seriously. He had lured away the former chairman of the Republican National Committee to become his principal campaign adviser. He had announced his choice for the vice-presidency on the ticket as Caspar P. “Junior” Lear, the billionaire agro-industrial farmer. He had formed and had announced a shadow cabinet, carefully weighted with gloriously prominent men and women, one black, one yuppie, one astronaut, a former secretary of state, and a champion of women’s rights, among the power brokers, deal makers, and technicians, each one chosen for the number of PACs he could guarantee to bring into the campaign.

  The looming presence of presidential primaries in a third of the fifty states had changed all campaign tactics. Times had changed since money could be spread around among local political bosses in 90 percent of the states for a guarantee that the right nominating delegates would appear at the convention. Nineteen ninety-two would be the first election where the process would be refined to the point of (almost) constituting an open nomination in both parties, and Franklin M. Heller, the incumbent, running unopposed, already had it sewn up for the Democrats. At least 66 percent of the total Republican delegates would be determined by the finish on Super Tuesday, March 8, 1992. So, for one thing, victory, state by state, depended upon the candidate having a lot more money to spread around than any other candidate and not only for advertising and legitimate campaign expenses. Blocs of nominating votes could be delivered in the states that didn’t run primaries and the people who could deliver the blocs still cost an arm and a leg.

  There were early primaries and late primaries. A candidate needed a war chest of from three to six million dollars to finance the former so that he could have the stamina to hang in for the latter.

  12,856 NEW PACs SWING

  BEHIND PRICE CANDIDACY

  MARSHALTOWN, IOWA, December 29—In a simultaneous vote of confidence from Political Action Committees in 43 states, representing groups as various as the Alaskan Field Hockey Association, the Italian-American Baptist League and the United Fruit & Berry Pickers, what appeared to be the widest pre-election swath of voters in the nation’s history committed their support en masse today for the Republican Presidential slate of Edward S. Price and Caspar P. Lear, Jr. This extraordinary avowal will add thirteen million dollars to the campaign chest of the already widely supported ticket of one of the country’s most acclaimed businessmen and the billionaire farmer who seeks the nomination as his Vice-President. The nation-wide support of the 12,856 PACs will swell the Price-Lear ticket’s estimated available Republican campaign funds by the addition of assured Federal matching funds to more than sixty million dollars.

  The candidate who is a far-off second to Price’s campaign expenditure is Connecticut Governor Gordon Manning who, until today, was rated as the front-runner. “There is something very fishy about this sudden rush of PAC money to Price,” Governor Manning said, “but we can’t put our finger on it.”

  “While the meaning of this great tide is overwhelming in terms of financial support,” Edward S. Price said, “what it really means is that millions of American voters have put their money where their hearts are.”

  “Until this morning,” said Carter B. Modred, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, now chief political adviser to the Price-Lear candidacy, “this looked like the first election in modern times with a really open nomination in the Party, but that is over now. Ed Price and Junior Lear sure look like they have it locked up.”

  (continued on page three)

  WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES

  11,488 PACs FOR HELLER

  WASHINGTON, D.C., December 29—An election bombshell was thrown into the arena today when the White House announced that 11,488 PACs with swelling electoral funds, in a national coalition of support by such voting groups as the Farmer’s Benefit Sodality, the Friends of Afghanistan, and the Steeple Jacks of America, threw their unanimous support behind the reelection of Franklin M. Heller with twelve million nine hundred thousand dollars of concentrated support.

  “Never in the history of our great nation,” the incumbent candidate said to the assembled press, “has such totally simultaneous partisanship been accorded to a candidate for the highest American office. The action brings further proof, if such were needed, that the Democratic ticket will sweep to victory in November.”

  (cont’d page 3)

  Charley was summoned to the White House on the afternoon of the announcement. The president saw him alone in the Oval Office. The president, with those great salt tears that had made him so celebrated as a politician filling his eyes, said to Charley, “Never have so few been given so much by so many. You and your people have won my gratitude, Charley, and I think you know what that means—you can have anything you want that is within my power to give you.”

  “Godfrey and ginger, Mr. President! That’s just the beginning.”

  “By God, you warm my heart, Charley!”

  “The law also allows us to make unlimited contributions to the party’s individual state organizations, and I’ve just been waiting to do that under your direction.”

  “Well, then! I’ll send my people to you in New York!”

  “There’s something else, Mr. President—if I’m not being too presumptuous—”

  “Presumptuous? You are manifesting the American way of life!”

  “I’ve also been able to get together an unmarked fund of five million dollars for street money, Mr. President.” Street money was the green cash that the vote brokers, who merchandise and deliver blocs of votes, spend (and hold out) to move large single-minded units of neighborhood voters into the polls. The money is delivered to clergymen, young lawyers, scoutmasters, and schoolteachers, who, in turn, distribute ten- or twenty-dollar bills to the voting blocs to which they have been assigned. Street money had swung key districts, even key states, in close elections.

  “Call me Frank,” Heller said hoarsely, choking up with the emotion of this man’s generosity. “And you gotta know that I’m not going to forget this.”

  The week following the disappearance of Corrado Prizzi’s body, while being the best Edward S. Price and F. M. Heller had ever known, was the worst Angelo Partanna, Amalia, and the Bartons had ever experienced and that included the Appalachia meeting. The matter of the body’s disappearance had, as a matter of family policy, been kept away from the attention of the police. Angelo had made discreet inquiries throughout the American crime community about any news concerning the snatching of any dead bodies of prominent people, but he drew a blank.

  Charles Barton checked with his father twice a day. Amalia waited beside the phone at the Prizzi mansion for three weeks, but no call came. Mary Barton, insofar as her pregnancy permitted it, sat vigil with Amalia, trying to persuade her to close the big house and to move into the Barton quadriplex in New York, trying to bribe her with the promise that she could do all the cooking, but Amalia would not hear of it. “Close the house? So how could they get in touch?” she said. “And Calo will stay on the door, so don’t worry about me.” After making that effort, Mary Barton seemed to disappear from view. She stayed in her bedroom at Sixty-fourth Street most of the time, ate very little, and grew gaunter and more haggard with worry about the indignity that had been dumped upon her grandfather’s body, wherever it was.

  Perhaps Charles Barton was the hardest hit by the body-snatching. For all the years of Charley’s (former) life, Corrado Prizzi had been his hero, just as Angelo Partanna had been his model. He could not conceive of anyone having t
he barbarism to violate the don’s body when he had been alive and the horror doubled at the thought of anyone desecrating the meaning of such a man by denying him burial in consecrated ground when he was dead.

  Charley stood in front of his surrounding mirrors in his changing room at the top of Barker’s Hill and the various bathrooms of the great house on Sixty-fourth Street and spoke binding oaths of vengeance upon whoever had committed the sacrilege against justice. He vowed to hunt the perpetrators down if the doing consumed all the days of his life, in his spare time. He pressed his father for news of the netherworld, for wisps of information from any and all rumors, but each day erected the blank wall of hopelessness between the possibility of a Christian burial for his don and the necessity for inflicting terrible punishment upon the desecrators.

  As Charley brooded, his hero, quite blue, slept on at flashfreezing temperatures, belonging to the ages, as his host ship made the long diagonal run from New York to Brazzaville in the African Congo.

  26

  Eduardo succeeded in arranging the meeting with Angelo to read his father’s last letter of simple wishes for his family by sending a limousine to bring Angelo from Brooklyn to Newark Airport and instructing his pilots to land the Ronald Reagan for a forty-minute stopover between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Bangor, Maine.

  The two men sat in the office section of Eduardo’s campaign plane behind a locked door. Angelo produced the letter and handed it over. Eduardo adjusted his reading glasses to study the letter.

  TO MY BELOVED FAMILY,

  I have very little to leave you except my love. My clothes, my personal effects, my paintings, furniture, and phonograph records, together with this house, were all given to the Blessed Decima Manovale Foundation long years ago for, you see, I wish to leave this world as I had once entered it: without possessions. You have all done so well in this new country of ours that I am filled with pride of you. How wise you were, Amalia, to save that nest egg of $500,000 from which you will have the interest for the rest of your life, then to pass that interest on to your son, Rocco. How generous you were, my Eduardo, son of my hopes and dreams who realized every one of those hopes and every dream, to form the Price Foundation at the very outset of the establishment of the Barker’s Hill Enterprises which will provide, in the majority sense of 51 percent, control of its funds and purposes by my great-grandsons, Conrad Price and Angier Macy Barton, to be administered by their loving parents until the brothers reach the age of thirty years. That you retained 20 percent of the funding of the Foundation for yourself is as I would have wished it, my son. May happiness and glory be yours for all of your days. My grandchildren, Maerose and Teresa, Arthur and Rocco, being of sound minds and bodies were successful in their own rights and to them I wish every continuing happiness, but to my grandsons I leave, to Arthur, my Ingersoll pocket watch, the timepiece of railroad engineers, and to Rocco, my John F. Kennedy FT boat tiepin.

  (Signed) Corrado Prizzi

  Witnessed by: Batsford Glick

  Governor, State of New York

  Carter B. Kilgore

  Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court

  Cencetto Balugi

  Papal Nuncio

  Patrick Joseph Mulligan

  Secretary-General, United Nations Organization

  Eduardo’s eyes were filled with tears. He could not read on through the list of the other twelve witnesses to the intimate note his father had left behind. As he wiped his eyes he thought again that, more than ever, he had to find some way to offset his father’s parsimony in some forthright tax-free way, not that the money itself mattered, but just to get a little back to show that he was not entirely that easily outsmarted, even by such a Sicilian as his father.

  “I’m just a little surprised that he didn’t remember you with a little something,” he said to Angelo.

  “He let me have eight percent of the franchise operation. I mean, what more do I want? I never travel and I don’t even eat out much anymore.”

  “Eight percent must be a rather good piece.”

  Angelo shrugged. “Fifteen, sixteen million a year.”

  27

  Mary Barton was so preoccupied with the disappearance of her grandfather’s body that it was not until Christmas Eve that she realized she had not had a report from Charley on his power breakfast at the White House.

  They had a quiet Sicilian sort of dinner, cooked by Charley in the Sixty-fourth Street house after refusing twenty-three social invitations because, quite suddenly, Mary Barton, in addition to the shame and grief over her grandfather’s disappearance, had begun to show her double pregnancy in a spectacular way.

  “What happened at the breakfast with Heller, Charley?”

  “At the breakfast, nothing. Four of the other people he had there froze out the president trying to make me notice them.”

  “You never got a chance to talk to Heller?”

  “Before. They sent me upstairs to where he lives. He was genial in a sour way.”

  “Of course he was genial and sour. He’s a politician. What did he say?”

  “He said he would appreciate my support.”

  “He wants you to set up some PACs?”

  “Yeah. What’s that?”

  “Political Action Committees—a license to bribe.”

  “Where do I get them?”

  “Pop has them.”

  “Anyway, he’s going to send his people to see me in New York for the pickup. And he asked me if I wanted Treasury in the next administration.”

  “Treasury? What kind of a dead end is that?”

  “Dead end?”

  “Did you ever hear of anybody ever going from Treasury to the White House? And I am talking even Andrew Mellon.”

  “I never followed that stuff.” He straightened up with alarm. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Herbert Hoover went from Commerce to the White House, but that was a freak thing. Through the cabinet is the wrong route.”

  “Wrong route for who?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? Eduardo isn’t going to make it—he has a lousy personality and he’s a widower. Eduardo is the next attorney general, but, even if I’m wrong and he does make it, by law he’s good for only eight years. You’ll be only 64 in the year two thousand and one, which is exactly the right age for a president.”

  “What the fuck is this, Mae?”

  “Watch the language, Charley. And my name is Mary, remember? You’ll have eight years experience at running Barker’s Hill. How is running Barker’s Hill different from being president of the United States? But we’ve got to bring you up the right way—like if you started as vicepresident—Coolidge, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford made it on that route—or through solid foreign policy experience, like ambassador-at-large, because the voters will know that you know the domestic thing.”

  “Mae, lissena me—”

  “I’m not saying you should get State. After all, they gave Al Haig State and look what happened. Let me think about it for a while.”

  “Are you nuts, Mae?”

  “Charley, fahcrissake! Anybody can be president! Look at Reagan! When are you going to understand that all it takes is an organization to keep up the heavy day-and-night PR, big PACs, and some good comedy writers. Hype and money. And we got both of those more than even Reagan ever had.”

  The twins were born on February 16, 1992. Suddenly, to his horror, Charley was on his own. Mary Barton lost all interest in Barker’s Hill operations, in Charley’s career, in the pressing decisions he had to make every day with which she had always helped him, even during the chaotic period of her grandfather’s disappearance. For three months, ever since they had returned to New York, their routine had been to confer on the problems of Charley’s day from 4:00 P.M. each afternoon until dinner, then for three hours after dinner. They had refused invitations. Mary Barton just dropped out as her husband’s counsel, seeking forgetfulness of the shame that had happened to her grandfather b
y using her babies as an excuse.

  “Charley, fahcrissake!” she said when he protested that he needed her to make the right decisions. “They’re your kids, too! You think I’m gonna let them eat cow’s milk when I got these two jugs on me?”

  “But millions of dollars are involved here!”

  “So the company will only make seventy million tomorrow instead of seventy-two. What is this? You are surrounded by the most expensive business talent in the country. So if one of them asks you a question, you ask one of the others for the answer. How do you think Eduardo ran the company?”

  Mary Barton spent most of her waking hours with her children. She rolled them in the double pram to Central Park every morning and every afternoon, trailed by Al Melvini for security. Melvini was in his early sixties. He had a big paunch and heavy jowls. He was devoted to Maerose, whom he no longer dared to call Maerose, but Mrs. Barton. He carried two pieces, one in a back holster and one at his ankle. He kept ten to fifteen yards between himself and Mrs. Barton. She sat on a park bench, rain or shine, while the babies got their required time in the open air. She talked to them, beamed at them, and on mild days, changed their diapers in the carriage. At home, she supervised the nannies and took no calls until the babies were sleeping. She knitted their garments, sat up with them if they cried at night and, endlessly, plotted their future, having enrolled them at Groton and Harvard at birth.

  And Charley came into his own. He felt the power. He was no longer the petticoat president of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. After the twins had been weaned, Mary Barton turned her terrible concentration upon New York’s nouvelle society to launch herself (and her husband) in fullest battle regalia.

  28

  Except when it was raining, Charley didn’t use his car and driver, which rolled along silently four feet behind him so that he could listen for the cellular telephone as he walked to the office, leaving Sixty-fourth Street at 6:45 in the morning and arriving at the Barker’s Hill building at 7:04. Once he was delayed en route because he had to beat up a mugger who had obviously mistaken him for a mark, so most mornings he left the house with Al Melvini, the reliable strongarm. Seven hours sleep was enough, Mary Barton had explained to him, and he had to stay on top of the new job, hence the shocking hour of departure from the house. She had organized everything, at the office and at home, so that no sweat was involved. Each night before he left the office, he called for different files to take home. He didn’t read them at home, but he had them at his desk early the next day because Mary Barton had drilled into him that he must look busy at all times. Miss Blue had been told that no one was to enter his private office unannounced, so that, whenever people did need to come in, she would sound the warning button under her desk with her knee, and they would find Charley poring over papers.