by Jose Latour
“Series is tied. We won’t do it tonight, either.”
In the Braves’ last chance, McDougald fumbled Schoendienst’s grounder but recovered in time to throw him out. Logan walked on a full count, but then Mathews swallowed his eleventh strikeout of the Series. With two outs and a lonely runner on first, the outcome of the game seemed nearly a foregone conclusion when Logan stole second unmolested as Duren wound up. Then Hank Aaron singled to left, scoring Logan.
The phony admen were mesmerized. Rancaño bit his nails; Loredo had his eyes stapled to the floor; Fermín chewed on his cigar.
Bob Turley replaced Ryne Duren and was disrespectfully greeted by Adcock with a single to center, Aaron taking third. With Felix Mantilla running for Adcock, Frank Torre, batting for Crandall, sent a soft liner to the edge of the outfield grass that McDougald grabbed to end the game with a Yankee victory.
“Waiting is over,” Fermín said, and heaved a sigh of relief. “Tomorrow we’ll be rich.”
…
Angelo Dick’s corpse turned up in Queens, New York, at 6:16 A.M. on Thursday, October 9, 1958. It lay prone on the gravel footpath leading from the sidewalk to the porch of his abortion-racket partner, Joe Notaro. Once he recovered, the Bonanno sottocapo dialed a number in Hempstead and ordered a servant to wake up the boss.
“I’ve got trouble at home, Mr. Bonanno,” the racketeer said when the fifty-three-year-old don of one of the five New York Mafia families came to the phone.
“What is it?”
“Frankie found a stiff in the garden. Guy I used to know: Angelo Dick.”
“Never heard of him,” the boss said too fast. Bonanno assumed his phone was wiretapped on a permanent basis.
“He used to work at a Havana casino. Hadn’t seen him for months.”
“You called the cops?”
“Not yet.”
“I think you ought to. Right now.”
“Sure. I just wanted you to know I’ll be late.”
“All right, Joe.”
“Bye.”
“See you.”
Bonanno hung up and smiled. He had the guileless looks of a church minister, a scientific genius, or any other man who only learned about organized crime on the screens of his TV set or local theater. Well aware of this, he was given to examining his reflection in the bathroom mirror to ponder how, by his shifting from smile to laughter, his brown eyes became more candid. Or how much kindness flowed following the relaxation of his frown, or the measure of astonishment in his lips when they rounded into an “Oh” brimming with admiration. But even in its normal state, his face displayed a childish innocence that perfectly masked a mind in permanent unscrupulous activity.
Sitting on the swivel chair behind his desk, he reflected on the news. Unbelievable precision. The date lacked significance since he just needed to project weakness before launching the offensive. But this sacrifice of the pawn twenty-four hours prior to the first raid was a Naguib masterstroke. His agent had aged the way good wines do—superbly.
He remembered when, unemployed, starving, and in ragged clothes, Elias Naguib had begged him for work one night in 1930. Naguib was an immigrant like himself, approximately his age. He had felt something close to commiseration for the poor bastard, so he took him for granted, slipped him a fin, and sent him to Frank Labruzzo, figuring the Lebanese would sweep floors at one of his warehouses. But after six months of taking on increasingly complex jobs, Naguib had become rookie of the year, doing everything and doing it well. By 1935, though, the now husky and well-clothed Elias became sick and tired of being constantly bypassed for promotion because he hadn’t been born in Sicily. And even though Bonanno had understood the unfairness of that code and how it harmed business, as the youngest of the original capos he had to wait ten more years to bend it. Naguib had the good taste to keep the true reason to himself during the interview at which he asked permission to invest his savings in his own Cuban venture.
Bonanno knew the country. In fact, it had been the first stop he had made after leaving Marseilles aboard a freighter in 1923. Not a bad place. Good living standards if compared with those of other banana republics, graced with a pleasant climate and some pretty nice pieces of ass in the streets, what with the racial mixture. He had spent a few weeks in Havana before Sicilian friends smuggled him into Florida.
His former subordinate had moved to Havana in 1936, floated a small company to import precious stones, gold, and silver, and became a wholesaler. He visited New York often for transactions, paid his respects, and took Labruzzo to dinner at fine but inexpensive trattorias in Brooklyn. In 1948, embarrassed as if demanding an undeserved honor, Naguib had invited Bonanno to the 21 Club. The don had realized that the favorable winds of prosperity were blowing over Cuba, or at least over that part of the island where the Lebanese had his business.
Naguib was never ostentatious, never bragged or asked for favors, yet three years later, on November 15, 1951, at Bonanno’s twentieth wedding anniversary, the Lebanese presented Fay Bonanno with a quite expensive diamond necklace. This prompted the don to take the self-effacing Lebanese seriously; he ordered an in-depth investigation.
The grateful Elias was found to have excellent governmental, judicial, and police connections on the island, a little over $500,000 deposited in a savings account at the Metropolitan Avenue branch of Chase Manhattan, a new $85,000 residence in Havana’s choicest suburb, and was setting up a huge operation: shipping stolen cars from Key West to Havana to sell them all over Cuba. The man would become a multimillionaire in a short time. As was true everywhere else in the world, knowing the right people was the touchstone for success in Cuba, Bonanno had concluded at the time.
Then a military coup and the ensuing replacement of hundreds of government officials had utterly pulverized the influence network woven by the Lebanese. The reconstruction was complete by 1955, when Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello had made their big push in Havana.
Bonanno knitted his brow. It was only fair to acknowledge Meyer’s contribution to the Cuban expansion, his long-term observation and frequent visits, how he had preserved old relationships and nurtured new ones, the way he had oiled gears with favors and money. Bonanno had done the same in Montreal, but hadn’t declared it off limits to friends. He wasn’t reluctant to share alcohol—during or after Prohibition—gambling, loan-sharking, or protection. But now Lansky and Costello refused to share Havana and were closed to reason—despite the fact that in the Commission calm deliberation had always prevailed.
In 1957 Anastasia had clumsily tried to force his way in by organizing the hit on Costello, and now he lay six feet underground. Lansky had grown better entrenched than ever in Cuba, so Bonanno had devised and presented to Joseph Profaci—father-in-law of his son Salvatore and don of another Mafia family—a common strategy to bolster their position in the Commission and persuade Lansky and Costello to change their minds. Remembering Naguib had been unavoidable: What the Man on the Spot did best was map out perfect schemes that he then had others execute while he pulled the strings like a consummate puppeteer.
Bonanno glanced at the wall clock, looked for a personal phone directory in the middle drawer of his desk, dialed a very special phone company number, and asked for an immediate person-to-person call to Havana. He carefully returned the receiver to its place and recalled the Cuban survey he’d ordered last Christmas. Millions in gambling, large-scale smuggling, additional profits in the hotel trade, the probability of marijuana farming. His grateful former subordinate would secure for himself a good bite in future Cuban profits if he could discredit Lansky, force him to admit his arrogance and excess confidence, make him realize that those he had excluded from the Cuban turf had long arms. And when simultaneously overwhelmed by hits within the stronghold, emphysema, gastritis, and hypertension, Lansky would allow the Bonannos, the Profacis, perhaps even the Colombos, to dance the rumba.
The phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Your Havana party is on the line,
sir.”
“Thank you. Elias?”
“Morning, Joe,” Naguib said.
“Morning, Grumpy, how are you?”
“Fine, and you?”
“I’m not complaining.”
“How’s everybody?” the Lebanese asked.
“All right. Listen. Joe pulled me out of bed fifteen minutes ago. Found a stiff in his garden. Dick something. No, wait, Dick’s the last name. Name is … Oh, hell, I can’t remember. Joe says the guy used to work down there; he could use your help. You knew this Dick?”
“No,” Naguib said.
“Maybe you could find out. Just in case cops want to pin anything on Joe.”
There was a silence. Both men were smiling broadly. “Listen, my friend, this is a big town,” was Naguib’s guarded response. “You happen to know what this guy did for a living?”
“Joe said something about a casino.”
“Not my line, but I’ll keep my ears open and let you know if I learn anything.”
“Fine. Hey, Elias, just out of curiosity, when did that business rumble you told me about surface?”
Naguib pondered the question for a few seconds. Probably it referred to the date when Di Constanzo had been tipped off about the abortion racket. “You mean the airline company rumble?” he asked tentatively.
“Yeah.”
“By the end of August, around the twenty-fourth, maybe the twenty-fifth.”
“I thought so. Okay, I guess that’s all. Will you watch the game today?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world,” Naguib said. In fact he couldn’t care less.
“I hope we win. Well, take care, Grumpy. Bye now.”
“Bye-bye.”
Bonanno made some mental calculations after hanging up. A week to verify the source, two for investigations, and two for consultations. Then a couple of days to question and calm down the lamb, one for travel, one more to finish him off and plant the body where Profaci and himself would learn of their failure. Lansky had swallowed line, hook, and sinker. By noon tomorrow he’d learn how the Jew took the first solid punch. Bonanno was hoping for a brain hemorrhage resulting from uncontrollable high blood pressure.
Four
On G day—the G standing for graduation, according to Heller—Mariano Contreras awoke remarkably calm. He had anticipated the same stress he’d experienced in the past when something long awaited or carefully mapped out had been about to take place, like the day he had been released from the penitentiary, or that on which he had perpetrated his first really profitable, well-planned heist. Instead, he lay relaxed by seven hours of deep sleep, satisfied with what they had accomplished so far, confident of a favorable outcome.
Contreras believed self-satisfaction dangerous and never devoted more than two or three minutes to it. He jumped out of bed and went into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he came out, donned his clothes, ordered breakfast, then trotted down the steps and woke Heller out of a bad dream. From the smaller bathroom, his partner hummed a song that had been in fashion for a while. He was still at it when he returned to the living room rubbing shaving lotion on his face, naked to the waist.
“You happy?” an intrigued Contreras asked.
“Just whistling in the dark.”
Contreras smiled. Abo had never bungled a job, but like all ex-cons he hated holing up; Contreras knew he could use a change of air. “How about going up to the pool after breakfast?” suggested the man in charge.
“Hell, yes! Let’s get out of this mousetrap.”
A half hour later, wearing jackets over open-necked dress shirts, both men sat by the swimming pool on the roof. Several guests on deck chairs tanned their limbs under a benignly warm sun. Four teenagers gave up their clownish pirouettes on the diving board after realizing that Heller was watching them. Suspecting that they didn’t want to make him feel bad, the fake paralytic maneuvered his wheelchair to face the vast gray sea; Contreras also turned his reclining chair around. They sipped espresso and smoked in silence, taking in the cityscape and the sea, the breeze playing with their hair.
“I’ve never broken anyone,” Heller suddenly said.
Contreras turned a little to look at his buddy. He had the resigned expression of first-time blood donors lying on stretchers, facing an initiation that couldn’t be postponed.
“You may not have to.”
“But you never know, right?”
“Let me put it this way,” Contreras said, and made a reflective pause. “You take nothing for granted. If tonight one of those bastards thinks you’re afraid, sees you hesitate, he’ll try to knock you over, and then you’ll have to break him. So, he should know you mean it. You tell him ‘Don’t move’ and he moves, you beat him with the stock—once, hard. Best way to operate is by talking and acting tough. I believe they’ll go along okay, ’cause some guys are willing to risk their lives for their dough, but for other people’s dough …”
He didn’t complete the sentence; instead Contreras laboriously lit a cigarette against the wind. Heller pretended to rearrange the blanket covering his legs in order to scratch his right kneecap unnoticed.
“Yeah, but our actions should be commensurate with their reactions. If they—”
“‘Commensurate.’ A lawyer’s fancy word. You know what our actions should ‘be commensurate with’? With our goal, Abo. And our goal is to clean the fucking place, no matter what.”
Heller nodded thoughtfully, and for almost a minute pondered whether he should voice his last reservation. Contreras treated him like a son; he trusted the man and knew how to calm him down if he blew a fuse. So, he risked his wrath.
“Ox, we’ve been frank to each other all the time …,” he began, in a soothing tone of voice.
“Hail Blessed Virgin Mary! Abo, please, don’t make one of those cheap lawyer’s introductions of yours. What the fuck is on your mind?”
“You sure about the alarm? I mean, it’s unbelievable that with so much mazuma in there …,” said Heller, eyeing Contreras warily.
“I’ll be damned!” Pretending to be angry, Contreras rolled his eyes and clapped his hands once. “To the others that was a pleasant surprise; nobody mentioned it again. You’ve been mulling it over for God knows how long. There’s no alarm, compadre; that’s a fact. For three reasons: First, the keister is embedded in concrete and the only door to the office is barred; second, they take security precautions; and third, they believe nobody here has the guts or the brains to go after them.”
Heller took the demitasse to his lips, sipped the espresso, and let his gaze rest on the monument to the victims of the Maine. “Perhaps tomorrow they’ll reconsider,” he said.
…
At 11:15 A.M., Nick Di Constanzo ascended the two steps to the porch of Lansky’s leased house, rang the bell, then lit a cigarette. The two-story, sixteen-room sandstone residence at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, Miramar, had marble floors, a swimming pool, and a four-car garage. The front and back doors and the windows, built of precious wood, were protected with ornate security grilles.
Casino de Capri’s top executive wore a dark green sport jacket over a white Van Heusen polo shirt, light gray slacks, and black loafers. He splurged on clothing and devoted no less than ten minutes every day to choosing what to wear. He also experienced the delight of art collectors when he found a tailor capable of making a garment that fit him well.
Jacob Shaifer opened the front door, nodded curtly, uttered “Hi,” and then led Di Constanzo around a costly and excessively furnished living room to the poolside terrace, where his boss was taking the sun and having breakfast.
“Morning, Meyer.”
“Hi, Nick. Take a seat; let me finish with this.”
As Shaifer left, Di Constanzo sat on a yellow iron love seat with thick plastic-covered cushions and gazed around the well-kept garden, enjoying the cool breeze and the rustling leaves of a tall mango tree. Lansky wore a mustard-colored silk bathrobe over his pajamas and appeared
to be rested, at peace with himself. Between sips from his third cup of coffee, Number One lit a cigarette.
“Okay, shoot,” Lansky said.
“They found him this morning.”
“Says who?”
“Pete.”
Lansky arched an eyebrow, cocked his head, looked at a second-floor window. “Chapter closed. I suppose we won’t eat bananas for a while,” he halfheartedly said at last, then smiled at the overused play on words.
Even though Meyer Lansky didn’t like Bonanno, he perfectly understood his keen interest in new places. But since meeting him in the Roaring Twenties as a Maranzano subordinate, he had scorned the Italian’s nice-guy looks and prosperous-banker demeanor. The man was as unscrupulous as anybody, something that Lansky would have sincerely admired had the Italian cast his façade only toward the public. But as the years went by and Bonanno further developed his sanctimonious front, he had come to love his act so much he even performed it during Commission meetings. His lines always included high-sounding platitudes, in which words like “brotherhood,” “friendship,” “respect,” “understanding,” “sharing,” and “peace” abounded. The kind of crap politicians feed to fools, Lansky had long ago concluded. Well, he had called the Italian’s bluff.
Di Constanzo stubbed out his butt in an ashtray atop a glass-topped iron coffee table. He had misgivings—he couldn’t get rid of a measure of respect for Angelo’s work, and considered him naive, but not a traitor. Even after being pistol-whipped, the hall supervisor had not only rejected any direct or indirect Bonanno representation in Havana, but had denied that Notaro had tried to lure him into changing sides. Angelo’s eyes had reflected the sincerity that only a superb actor could have faked in such critical moments.
“I believe Notaro manipulated him,” the Capri man said.
