Charlie tells Livorsi to get Vito and meet him at the restaurant. Several cars fill with Joe’s soldiers. Charlie and Terranova pile into the asylum of Joe’s sedan. Almost immediately, Terra-nova begins to sweat.
The driver winds his way through the back streets of the city to Coney Island and pulls into a garage not far from Scarpato’s restaurant. Joe, Charlie, and Terranova wait in the sedan while waves of soldiers scout the small café and surrounding neighborhood. When all is clear, they give the signal. Joe, Charlie, and Terranova step from the sedan. The breeze coming off the ocean is a relief from the cramped, hot quarters.
Soldiers surround Joe as he walks from the garage to the restaurant; Vito heads for the kitchen. Joe the Boss sends two of his soldiers to join Vito. Terranova nods to Livorsi to go with them. Scarpato and his mother are laboring over a hot stove.
Scarpato brings Chianti to the table. His mother brings the antipasti.
Charlie takes control of the wine. Scarpato scurries back to the kitchen.
Ciro sips wine and calms his nerves, “Maranzano’s got us all jumpy. I’ll be glad when he’s out of the way. My nephew can rest in peace. Maybe I can get a good night’s sleep, too.”
It is a clever ruse and Joe falls for it.
Charlie says, “I got a few things that will interest you only I don’t want nobody eavesdropping, not even the cook. Whadya say I tell Scarpato to take a hike? His mother is hard of hearing. She’s the real cook anyway.”
“Send one of the boys to keep him company,” Joe says. “Make sure he doesn’t make trouble. I don’t need him makin’ no phone calls.”
Joe picks up the Chianti. He raises a salute and watches Terranova slug back the wine. Mama Scarpato brings out a lobster dish and then returns to the kitchen for the pasta dish.
The long, green awning that stretches from the front door across the sidewalk and ends at the curb serves as an effective barrier, blocking an outsider’s view of the restaurant. Joe’s guards stay on the far side of the leaded glass and make sure nobody enters. Charlie throws the heavy bolt on the front door while Mama Scarpato pulls the shades. She brings bowls of Zabaglione and cups of Italian coffee, then busies herself with scrubbing pots and pans. All the while the boys talk about the old days and their victories. Ceiling fans whirl lazily overhead.
“I have a couple of guys that will help us,” Charlie says.
“Tommy Lucchese and a couple of his boys. They got no use for Maranzano either.”
“Ha!” Joe says. “Lucchese is an opportunist. I wouldn’t trust anyone from Tom Reina’s family.”
“Opportunity is the key to his loyalty,” Charlie says. “And he’s got a great cover story. You killed his boss. Maranzano will expect his loyalty to the cause. Lucchese will give up Maranzano’s location. Then we make our move.”
“That’s your big idea?” Joe says. He looks at Terranova. “Do you go along with this? Tommy Lucchese turning over Salvatore Maranzano?”
Terranova nods. “Tommy and I go way back. He isn’t interested in this war any more than the others.”
“We have much to think about,” Joe says. “How about a little Briscola while our meal settles?”
Charlie retrieves a deck of cards Mama Scarpato has brought from the old country for just such a purpose.
Charlie pulls a two from the deck, leaving the other 39 cards, to adjust for having three players. The deck consists of four suits: coins, cups, batons, and swords. Charlie deals three cards to each player and puts the remaining deck in the middle of the table with one card turned face up. The face card is the trump suit. For this round, it is batons.
Charlie smokes while he waits for Joe to make his move.
Joe stares at his cards and thinks of the men he’s lost, a mental exercise that he performs daily to keep his rage fueled and his mind sharp.
Peter Morello, the Clutch Hand—shot dead sitting in his office with a couple of his paesans, including Terranova’s stepbrother.
Joseph Pinzolo—murdered in the middle of the afternoon in the Brokaw.
Al Mineo and Stephen Ferrigno—ambushed at the Alhambra apartments by Maranzano’s men, who were hiding in an apartment on the first floor.
“It’s your move,” Charlie says.
Joe leads with the three of cups. The play moves to Terranova.
* * *
The Chianti flows freely as the card game proceeds. Charlie feeds cards to Joe and somewhere between the wine’s buzz and a lucky feeling, Joe gets an idea.
“I should have listened to Morello in the beginning, God rest his soul. He warned me to kill this viper before he got too big. I thought I could cut him down to size. I was wrong. Charlie, I want you to get with Lucchese, but not with your plan. Tell Lucchese you want to meet with Maranzano. I hear he has offered amnesty to anyone who will kill me. Go to him. Tell him you are willing to give me up to them.”
Charlie says, “I’ll never get a gun past his men.”
“Lucchese hands you the gun after you are searched,” Joe the Boss says. “You shoot the bastard. It’s all by the book, bing, bing, bing. I won’t seek revenge.”
Joe lays down the cards in his hand, victory in the Briscola match.
He is smug, almost bitter. The deal of the cards rotates to Terranova. Charlie slides a loaded revolver from a holster taped to the underside of the table.
“I never thanked you for all you done for me,” Charlie says to Joe. “Not properly, anyway. You took me off the streets and showed me how to be a ruthless son of a bitch. I didn’t always appreciate the lessons, especially when those micks beat the shit out of me.”
He runs his finger along the scar on his face. His fingers bump over the irregular beard that sends his whiskers this way and that. Joe pours more Chianti and tips his glass toward Charlie.
“We toast the end of Maranzano’s war,” Joe says.
Charlie stands abruptly. His chair falls backwards to the floor. He raises the .38, takes aim, and fires. One bullet through the head, followed by four more through Joe’s thick body as Vito and Ciro join in. Even in death, Joe’s disgust with Charlie shows through. Tabula rasa. Clean slate.
* * *
The newspapers whip up fears of a gang war that never materializes. Two weeks pass and the only activity of any consequence is Al Smith celebrating the opening of the Empire State Building, an event that ignores the struggle for tenants as the economy slides deeper into Depression.
Meyer and Charlie take the elevator to the 86th floor of the new skyscraper and take in the view of New York. Across the Hudson is New Jersey, land of dispute between Waxey Gordon, Longy Zwillman, and Richie the Boot. Around the corner is Harlem and the rising conflict between the Dutchman and his Irish nemesis, Legs Diamond, who has sucked a new mick into the struggle, a guy named Vincent Coll.
No matter which direction you look, there is trouble.
Charlie says, “Something is gone in Terranova.”
Meyer agrees. Some men are forged by battle; others are broken.
The sun disappears on the horizon and bathes the city in warm, rosy hues.
Charlie sets himself up in a new apartment, 115 Central Park West, The Majestic, and tries to guess how things will play out with Joe the Boss gone.
Charlie says, “What’s next?”
Meyer says, “We give Maranzano his head. Let’s see what he does with it.”
Chapter Twenty-One
A Clean Conscience Makes a Comfortable Pillow
SPRING 1931
Like a phoenix, the Majestic, a twin-towered housing cooperative, rises from the ashes of the financial crisis. Would-be buyers are lured by the blaze of Art Deco splendor. Three stories of limestone underpin the twenty-six stories of light brown brick that gracefully reaches for the sky. Steelwork, perfected in the rise of the Empire State Building, sculpts luxurious wraparound corner windows and wide terraces on the upper floors.
The Majestic overlooks Central Park. Trees frame a view of the Lake. It is about as far from the Lower East Side as
one can get without winding up in Harlem. Charlie buys a corner unit with a balcony overlooking Central Park West and settles into his new paradise.
“The neighborhood ain’t half bad,” he jokes to Meyer, who has come to see the place. “This started out as a hotel but that idea collapsed right along with Wall Street. After that they were going to build luxury apartments. Each unit was gonna have twenty-four rooms. What the hell would I do with twenty-four rooms? Open a whorehouse?”
Meyer has brought a bottle of 25-year-old Glenlivet and he opens it and pours two glasses.
Charlie shows off his collection of Persian rugs, Stickley furniture, Mica lamps, and William Morris wallpaper.
“When you’re rich, even your furniture has names,” Charlie says.
Meyer eases into the oak-and-leather chair snugged next to a reading table and lights a cigarette. The lamps cast a warm orange glow over the room. Meyer envies the distinctly masculine air.
Meyer says, “I’m betting Ada Hector didn’t do the decorating.”
“You see that light?” Charlie nods to the two-foot tall bronze lamp perched on a reading table.
The lamp is more of a sculpture than a light. The lamppost rises at a sixty-degree angle from the base. The pale-yellow globe atop the pole doesn’t even try to come close to providing enough light for reading. This lamp is about the sleek nude pressing her hips to the lamppost, arching backwards while holding tight the top of the pole with both hands.
“Polly gave it to me,” Charlie says. “She said the place needed some class.”
Meyer says, “I thought you were paying tribute to the girls in Times Square.”
Charlie laughs. The Claridge has become the place to play cards and hump whores. The quiet of the Majestic is much more to his liking.
Meyer says, “You never talked about Joe the Boss.”
Charlie settles back on the couch. His droopy eye comes to life.
“I’ll tell you, the old bastard sure as hell enjoyed his last meal. He was in hiding so long, he was losing weight. When I stood up to let him have it, he didn’t say a word. He knew the score. I could see it in his eyes. If you ask me, I think he was relieved. All that Sicilian bullshit was taking its toll. The night Maranzano’s guys got Mineo and Ferrigno really spooked him. He almost got his head blown off. He was lucky that night. What were the odds of him surviving another attack like that one?”
Charlie tells the story of the Alhambra incident as if he is reliving the experience. Meyer wonders if Charlie might have been with Joe the Boss that night. Maybe his life was in as much danger as that of Joe the Boss. Maybe that prompted Charlie to meet with Salvatore Maranzano to bring the war to an end.
“It ain’t easy to miss a target as big as Joe the Boss,” Charlie says. “Not if you get a bead on him. Unless the shooter’s too eager, or too far away. If you ain’t got nothing bigger than a .38, you gotta get in close. If you can’t get in close, take a sawed-off shotgun, a pump-gun, something you can tag the bastard with. Two bullets and the guy goes down. At the Alhambra, these guys were yelling and screaming. Bullets were flying everywhere. Joe was livid after. I don’t think he thought he could be found. You saw he went deeper into hiding after that. Can you imagine if they would’ve cut him down that night? It would be an entirely different story today. We got lucky.”
Meyer says. “Maranzano would have taken all the glory.”
“He’s still taking all the glory,” Charlie says.
Charlie stares at the floor, the image of the lifeless body of Joe the Boss superimposed on his brain. Blood everywhere. The story of the death made front page news in the Times. Four bullets in his back and one in his head. That’s what the paper wanted everyone to remember.
What Charlie remembered was something else altogether. He stood for the kill. Joe saw the gun and pushed back from the table to escape but Charlie was quicker. Joe’s head flew backwards when the first bullet hit. Bits of bone and brain blew out the back of his skull and spattered across the floor. Vito bolted in from the kitchen, delivering two more shots that lodged in Joe’s back. Terranova freed the revolver taped under the table in front of his seat and shot wildly. Two of his bullets went into Joe’s back and the heaving mass of flesh fell to the floor. Blood soaked the tiles.
The shooters’ car was found two miles away, abandoned, the paper said. Three discarded pistols were found in the back seat.
For the first time in as long as he can remember, Charlie answers to no one. He looks at Meyer in a confusion of relief and nervous anticipation. Here he is still alive, living in an uptown apartment. Without a doubt, he is one of the most powerful gangsters in New York.
Meyer says, “Have you talked with the new Caesar?”
“He got what he wanted. He’s busy wallowing in his victory. There’s a lot of guys eager to kiss his ring. Bunch of bullshit. He’d better enjoy it while it lasts.” Charlie pours more whiskey. “Funny but I thought by the time we made it uptown a lot of this bullshit would be gone. The Boss ain’t even cold in his grave and we got the Dutchman’s brawl in the Bronx makin’ the news already.”
“It’s Coll,” Meyer says, meaning Vincent Coll, the latest defector from the Schultz mob. “Arthur didn’t treat the kid right. Now he’s got trouble. It was Madden who brought Coll along. It’s Madden who will have to take him out.”
Charlie says, “Fucking Irish. Too hot-headed for their own good. I don’t want this to get in the way of taking out Maranzano. Did you notice that the newspapers are saying Joe the Boss was ‘bigger than Al Capone’? Front page.”
“One down,” Meyer says. “One to go. When we’re done, they can thank us.”
Charlie says, “Yeah, they’ll be shaking our hands through our prison bars.”
* * *
Vincent Coll and Fats McCarthy stake out a beer drop in the Bronx.
“Goddamn monkeys at the zoo eat better than we do,” Coll says.
The twenty-two-year-old strawberry blond is frustrated. He wasn’t getting his fair share of the beer take from the Dutchman’s coffer. He paid his dues. After all, the Dutchman used Coll’s gang to expand his influence in the Bronx, used them as enforcers, brought them in on the beer business, and then kicked them to the curb when the time came to pay up.
Coll and McCarthy wait in the bed of a canvas-back pickup truck half a block from John Soricelli’s beer drop. Soricelli is still with the Dutchman. Coll reasons that whatever affects Soricelli affects the Dutchman. It’s his theory of rob Peter to take down Paul.
“When will the Jews learn not to fuck with the Irish?” Coll says.
Coll has surrounded himself with the toughest of the Dutchman’s Irishmen, and a few Italians to boot: Patsy Del Greco, Dominick Odierno, the Basile brothers, Frank Giordano, one and all disgruntled recruits.
“I think my arse is frozen tight to this fucking truck,” McCarthy says.
McCarthy checks his watch. Owney Madden’s beer truck is running late. It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. He pulls back the canvas top to take a better look around. In the distance, the construction work on the Triborough Bridge has stalled in the wake of the stock market crash. The area around the beer drop reflects the general neglect of property in the Bronx. McCarthy fears the drop has been abandoned.
Another hour rolls by. Coll throws off a knit cap and rubs his fingers hard atop his head, trying to shake the cold. McCarthy shifts his stiff legs and stretches his back. Coll smokes a cigarette and stares up at the moonlight. Outside there is nothing.
“Fuckin’ traitor,” Coll says. “What kind of man throws in with a German Jew over his own people just so he can have a nightclub? What the fuck? The Cotton Club is in the middle of Harlem. If he really is somebody, what the hell is he doing in Harlem?”
“He came from England,” McCarthy says. “Never trust the English.”
Coll lights another cigarette and breathes in a long drag.
“Count it up, Fats. At ten bucks a keg…son of a bitch, that’s a couple of gra
nd’s worth of beer right there coming in on Madden’s fucking truck and we’ve been freezing our asses off for a hundred-fifty a week. What kind of shit is that?” He snorts and falls back.
Suddenly the familiar rumble of a truck breaks the despair. Soricelli swings open the doors of the garage. The truck pulls into the yawning cavern. A faux brick wall separates two back-to-back garages. A handful of men swarm the trucks. The garage door closes.
McCarthy signals to the two other trucks filled with his boys.
Coll says, “You saw what Charlie Lucky did, din’t ya? He knocked off his boss. He’s no fool. You gotta take what belongs to you. The beer business in the Bronx belongs to us and we’re taking it back.”
McCarthy nods. Coll pulls a pipe bomb from a duffel. They shift to the front seat. Coll turns over the ignition and waves to the boys in the truck behind him. They pull out and position themselves. Madden’s driver pulls out after them.
Coll rolls up alongside Madden’s truck. McCarthy chucks the pipe bomb into the cab and Coll speeds away. Fire consumes the truck and sears the awnings off of a storefront. Coll whistles in delight and beats the roof of the truck with the flat of his palm.
“That’ll show ’em,” he yells.
Coll is on to his next target. Joey Rao, a 5’7”, 190-pound thug who partners with Ciro Terranova to expand the Dutchman’s interests in the Bronx, spends most of his waking hours at the Helmar Social Club on East 107th Street in Harlem. The Helmar is a hangout, plain and simple, a place where Rao can oversee his rackets: drug trafficking, policy banking, a bevy of slot machines in Harlem, and a booming beer business.
Coll decides on the moment of attack. Giordano fetches a stolen sedan. The gang piles in, each of them armed with a fully loaded Thompson. Coll takes the wheel. He eases into first gear, suppressing the surge of adrenaline pulsing through his veins. The heat of the July afternoon combines with the mass of bodies and turns the car into a furnace.
Nobody says a word.
They cruise through Harlem. Streets fill with kids escaping their own brick ovens to play in open fire hydrants.
Coll rounds the corner of Second Avenue and heads down 116th Street. Near Lexington, he spots Rao and Amato chatting. He hits the gas. A lineup of machine guns fills the car’s open windows. Bullets fill the street with panic. Kids dive for shelter. Amato is hit in the neck and head and drops like a sack of potatoes. Rao is hit, too, but manages to take cover behind a car. Another of Rao’s confidants staggers bleeding toward the Alpi Restaurant. The bullet in his back seems to have cut something necessary for coordination. He bursts through the door yelling for a doctor.
A Bloody Business Page 45
