He told this to Arafat and his people while looking to the left and then the right and then up above. At least a few nearby noticed that Teitelbaum displayed such nervousness that it appeared he would collapse. Arafat sat there for a few moments. One of his aides said they had thought about staying because of the mantle of the UN, which was what Giuliani expected. That he had embarrassed them would be sufficient. Then he could say Arafat stayed because of the anti-Israeli UN. But Arafat decided to let them drown in acid. He and his aides stood and walked out in the middle of the performance.
Bruce Teitelbaum, high apprehension subsided, now swaggered like a wild boar. He was indisputably the most important Jewish name in city affairs. He was next to a mayor who did virtually nothing each day except to get into the papers or to meet girlfriends. He was content to have Teitelbaum keep the people in love with him, and if it meant Teitelbaum giving contracts out to Jewish organizations, then let him do all he wants of it. Giuliani was going to run for president or vice president or senator, whatever, and it would cost tens of millions, and Teitelbaum knew how to get the money.
Much of it came from builders, who are crooks with blueprints and are thus at ease with people in City Hall. Teitelbaum handled anything that was needed to keep someone like Eugene Ostreicher, the father, sending in the cash. Joseph Spitzer, who lives in a building on Fifty-ninth Street in Brooklyn’s Borough Park along with Richie Ostreicher, the son, is celebrated for bringing $83,000 into Giuliani campaigns. Nothing in New York—no fire chief complaining, and certainly no young Mexican—is allowed to get in the way of that. “How could you say that we gave him the city for his eighty-three thousand?” Teitelbaum said. “We raised eight hundred and thirty thousand dollars from builders. Spitzer gave eighty-three thousand.” Spitzer was given a placard that allowed him to park almost anywhere in the city. He usually could be found in the City Hall offices of Teitelbaum and then his successor as the chief of staff of the Giuliani office, Anthony Carbonetti. Whatever Spitzer needed done, they did.
AT FIRST, THIS SEEMS to start in another universe from an obstacle to building in Williamsburg that required help from City Hall. In the 1930s, Louis Carbonetti and Harold Giuliani, the mayor’s father, grew up together in East Harlem, on the streets of Tommy (Three-Finger Brown) Lucchese, Joey Rao, and Trigger Mike Coppola. Harold Giuliani pulled burglaries and holdups. He told the court he did it because of unemployment. He went to Sing Sing prison for sixteen months. Carbonetti did not go to prison. Louis Carbonetti became a second for professional fighters, a bucket carrier who between rounds would lean over the ropes and clean a fighter’s cuts. While Carbonetti attended school on First Avenue and in Stillman’s Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue, he received a merit appointment as assistant secretary to a new state supreme court judge, Thomas Aurelio. Carbonetti’s merit was that he knew Aurelio, and also every mob guy in his district. A wiretap of Frank Costello, prime minister of the underworld, and Aurelio was played in public by authorities hoping to block Aurelio. On it, Aurelio said, “Francesco, how can I thank you?” And Costello said, “When I tell you it’s in the bag, it’s done.”
When he came out of prison, Harold Giuliani married a young neighborhood woman and moved to Brooklyn, where he worked saloons, collecting for bookmakers and loan sharks. His son, Rudy, was born in Brooklyn. Harold took his son to East Harlem on Sundays, where they saw neighborhood friends and then went with the father’s friend, Lou Carbonetti, to games at Yankee Stadium. Harold Giuliani then moved Rudy to the Long Island suburbs, taking him away from street life.
Carbonetti wound up being defeated for a Democratic district leadership in East Harlem. That left him jobless; you can’t be in a judge’s office if you lose your own district. But he had his own cut man, East Harlem’s city councilman, the Rev. Louis Gigante. His brother, Vincent (The Chin) Gigante, ran the underworld, but he never as much as served mass for his brother. Father Gigante was to become a true builder of his city, as opposed to a cheap talentless developer. At the most searing, disturbing time in the Bronx, when fires and hopelessness were beyond anybody’s capacity to repel, Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent his housing administrator, Edward Logue, to visit Gigante at his parish, St. Athanasius. “Is there some way you could build up here, or are the threats and violence too much?” he asked Gigante.
“We do not tolerate violence. We do not accept threats,” Gigante said.
With state subsidies, Gigante took empty buildings and turned them into new apartments. Over three thousand people lined up for a day and a half to apply for his first apartments.
“God bless Father Gigante forever,” Logue announced.
Logue then wrote a famous memo to Rockefeller: “Suppliers and sub-contractors and vandals tend to hesitate before bothering Father Gigante.”
Father Lou often could be found in the 115th Street clubhouse of Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, who was the second in charge of Vincent Gigante’s gang. Tony was the Tip O’Neill of the underworld and would reside forever in Rudy Giuliani’s mind. Rudy had to know Tony from early years just by walking the street with his father and Carbonetti. Fat Tony was twelve when he drove a truck for Dutch Schultz. Later, Fat Tony’s club, the Palma Boy Club—there is no s because there is no s—on 115th was around the corner from Lou Carbonetti’s Democratic district clubhouse.
The man from around the corner from Fat Tony’s old headquarters, Louis Carbonetti, now became the first Carbonetti to work in City Hall. When Abe Beame was the mayor and Father Gigante’s friend, and Stanley Friedman was his chief assistant, Father Gigante took Carbonetti down to City Hall and as much as put him in an office and said, “Here’s where you work.”
He had a son, Lou Carbonetti Jr., who would be the first to follow him onto the city payroll.
Rudy Giuliani went on to become the United States attorney for New York. He made sure he became famous as the zealot who broke the Mafia. Familiarity. At the same time he had a fascination with mafiosi and even imitated Fat Tony Salerno’s speech. A Giuliani indictment brought Fat Tony into federal court in a trial of Mafia bosses. Giuliani did not prosecute Fat Tony himself, but it was his indictment. At a break one day, Fat Tony got up and brushed past guards who were supposed to stop him and went to the railing in front of the spectators’ rows. A man waiting at the rail handed Fat Tony a cigar. Fat Tony inspected it. The day before, when the same man had brought Fat Tony a cigar, the mobster had exclaimed, “Bring me a thing like this!” and broke the cigar in half and threw it on the floor. This time, the man said, “It’s Cuban, Tony.”
Salerno grunted and put the cigar in the breast pocket of his suit.
Now he said, loudly enough for the large room to hear, “Did you bring me a gun?” He pointed at the prosecutor. “I want to shoot this prick.”
Then he motioned to the judge. “I’d like to fuckin’ shoot her, too.”
Later in the trial, they played a wiretap of Mafia capital punishment jury deliberations. Fat Tony put on a large yellow headset to listen. It also could be heard on speakers in the courtroom. The tape played for about a half hour, and every voice in crime except Fat Tony’s was on it voting to have someone killed. In the spectators’ front row, Fat Tony’s man brightened. He gave a satisfied nod to Fat Tony. Listening through the earphones in the front of the room, Fat Tony made a face that said, all right.
At this moment there came over the tape the one decisive vote of the mob. It was the unmistakable voice of Fat Tony Salerno calling out, “Hit!”
Fat Tony shrugged. What are you going to do? “Good night, Irene,” he muttered to the guys at the defense table,
The Carbonettis—father, son, and eventually grandson and wife—worked in the two mayoral campaigns of Harold Giuliani’s son, Rudy. When Giuliani won, he had Lou Carbonetti Jr. helping to hand out city patronage jobs. Then Lou junior had a private copying business that folded and he owed $100,000. It was discovered that he used two driver’s licenses. He had to leave the regular city government and take over a private nei
ghborhood organization called a Business Improvement District. His former wife, JoAnna Aniello, received a job in city housing.
The grandson, Anthony Carbonetti, was made the patronage dispenser for the city, under Bruce Teitelbaum. He then was made the chief of staff of the whole administration. Carbonetti’s resumé is nonexistent. His last job before City Hall was that of a bartender in Boston. On his 1994 financial disclosure forms he listed a scorching hand at Atlantic City as a source of income.
By 1998, he didn’t need slot machines. His salary at City Hall was $115,000. Public jobs are never supposed to give the appearance of impropriety. While gambling in Atlantic City is legal, and you’re even entitled to report winnings no matter how preposterous the claim, for somebody in New York’s City Hall, it still looks at least lousy.
Carbonetti and the English language were opponents. Some of the most painful moments in City Hall came whenever he sat in his small office and dictated letters. Incidentally, the size and location of a government office is meaningless. Bare and shabby are common. It is the phone or the memo that does it.
Anthony Carbonetti also was as subtle as a thrown brick. On the phone, he told commissioners, “You’ve got to do this. Just do it. Don’t ask me anything. Just do it. This is for a friend of the mayor’s.” His special interest was the Brooklyn Hasidic community. He didn’t have to bother with calls and return calls with Hasidim. Sitting in his office was Joseph Spitzer, who owns a huge four-story house in Borough Park. It has a marble front and a stoop with polished brass banisters. Records show that residents of this house included Chaim Ostreicher, Eugene’s son, and Faye Schwimmer, Ostreicher’s daughter and Leon Schwimmer’s daughter-in-law. It was helpful to find this on record, for Ostreicher and those around him denied the fact that the house even existed. “We don’t know Spitzer,” one yelled. “He has zero to do with us.”
Spitzer talked to Carbonetti, and Carbonetti talked to a commissioner.
If you had building violations or even a building collapse and were Hasidic, City Hall took care of everything. What did a report by a building inspector or a fireman mean? The builder was the mayor’s friend, or had relatives raising funds for him.
A Mexican immigrant like Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez didn’t count.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eduardo moved into a space on an upstairs floor in an attached frame house that was across the street from Grady High School in Brighton Beach. The landlord, who lived on the first floor, was never seen, and the Mexicans were crowded onto the second. There was a kitchen, bathroom, a small bedroom, and a large front bedroom with dark brown paneling and a blue carpet. The large bedroom had two windows looking down at the stoop and street. A television set was in one corner of the room. Eight from Mexico slept and lived there when Eduardo arrived. They slept on the floor on thin pads and pillows. You picked your place to sleep and then it became yours. Eduardo slept between Alejandro and Mariano Ramirez, Gustavo’s brother. They had their heads to the wall under the windows. The room was long enough so that their feet did not touch those of the others sleeping with their heads against the opposite wall.
Eduardo was stunned by the bathroom. Never before had he seen one in a house. With nine people and one bathroom, there was an implied agreement that each would take no more than ten minutes. He soon learned that each time somebody slipped past him, it would be ten minutes of listening to running water. Let three get ahead and you lose a half hour. He realized that he had to stand around as if thinking of something and then suddenly jump at first click of the bathroom door opening. He often lost out to a shoulder and a fully slammed door. The most familiar sound in the house was that of someone rapping on the bathroom door to get the occupant to hurry.
In the kitchen there was a stove and a sink; a house with running water in San Matías was at best rare. A turn of the handle brought a flame out of the stovetop. Magic. There was a large round table for the group to eat at. They each paid $95 a month in rent and $25 a week for food. Martha, who was the sister of Gustavo and Mariano, lived in the small bedroom with her husband. She was on the lease and handled the rents and cooking. Martha had three children at home in San Matías with her mother in the rooms right behind where Eduardo’s family lived. Her brother Gustavo had left two children in Mexico with his wife. One day Gustavo’s wife left the children with Gustavo’s mother in San Matías and said she was going to look for work. Instead, she went off with a man and never returned. This left the grandmother in San Matías with six grandchildren. All her upbringing and beliefs told her there was something worse ahead, a catastrophe, a tragedy falling from the sky, and she never could see it, but now suddenly it was in front of her at night. In a dream she had, she was in line at the window of the appliance store for the money order from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and instead of a man with her money order, there was a skull, a death’s head, with eye sockets fixed on her.
In the morning she told this to Eduardo’s father at the brickyard.
He didn’t believe her.
“If it happens, what will I do with all these children to feed?” she asked him.
He doesn’t remember what he said, exactly. He knows he just went to work at bricks. Of course her death’s head vision never materialized. Something worse would: a clerk in the window shaking his normal head. No, no money order from Brooklyn.
Alejandro lived on the floor next to Eduardo for the same reason as Eduardo: to send enough money home to soften the path when he returned. But every night he reminded himself that he’d never thought he would be here living alone and his wife would be home in Mexico with his children. On most nights he thought of his marriage. He’d married his wife in a civil ceremony with his mother and father present. He wore a shirt and he knew she’d worn a dress, but he couldn’t remember what it looked like—you only wore a white dress for a big church wedding. He remembered going with her to the clinic for their first baby. He was there at 6 P.M. and waited with her in one room, where she was monitored, and then she went into the delivery room and he stayed outside. They didn’t know whether it would be a boy or girl. Each wanted a niña, and that’s what they got.
He’d set up an upholstery shop in a room in the house opening onto the street. He had to rent a compressor because he couldn’t afford to buy one. He had to borrow or rent other equipment. Air pistols, saws to cut—they would cost another 20,000 pesos.
His biggest job had been for 7,500 pesos. He did the whole room—walls, sofa, love seat, and chairs—in fifteen days, and was very proud of it. Fine. But often he could not get a compressor to rent and he had to tell customers who showed him photos of what they wanted that he couldn’t get to them until the week after next.
He had been earning the equivalent of about $150 a week. Alejandro and his wife and her brother talked about Alejandro changing what looked like a bleak future: He was going to earn $150 a week and probably less for all of his life. Alejandro and his wife had been talking of his going to America and had agreed that he could try heartbreak for a year and a half for the money. He could earn enough to buy upholstery tools. Then he could work at home and support a family without sweating blood. But this was not Italy, where the men leave Sicily for seasonal work in desolation and loneliness in the north, in Switzerland even, but return to Sicily at the end of the season. A Mexican going to New York must cross the border like a wanted criminal. No husband could return for a simple visit, and no wife could follow him to New York.
Alejandro’s wife, who suddenly realized that she would be alone with the children for a year and a half, had been shaken. Her brother helped make the decision: The only way for Alejandro to give his wife and children a future was to change the order of their living now, and for Alejandro to go to New York.
He’d gotten up at 5 A.M., and his wife went with him on the bus to the Puebla airport. She came inside, kissed him goodbye, and stood alone as he went through the gate to the plane to Hermosillo in Sonora. From there he went across a border that was unexpectedly
unguarded that night. Ahead of him was Brooklyn and loneliness.
At Brighton Beach, Gustavo had gotten him a job at $7.50 an hour working construction. His arms soon advertised his work. He has iron bars for upper arms. He is 5 feet 6 inches and 135 pounds or so. He has a mustache and a young smile.
He worked for a builder named Eugene Ostreicher and his son, Richie. They were doing a lot of housing in one section of Brooklyn called Williamsburg.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mariano, who slept on the other side of Eduardo in the room at Brighton Beach, came from the house directly behind him in San Matías. His mother and her family kept pigs in pens outside their adjoining cinder-block huts. Anytime they came up short on food, they yanked one of the pigs out of the pen, slit its throat, and went on a steady diet of pig meat. Visitors were happily fed because there wasn’t an ice cube in San Matías to keep the carcass unspoiled. If the children became tired of the diet, that was their worry; they could show their ribs. If the pig meat ran out for all, then everybody had rib cages sticking out.
In Brooklyn, Mariano worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. He didn’t know the street it was on, only how to get there. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he wasn’t working in the afternoon, much less tomorrow. He was single but couldn’t go near the topless bars and whorehouses on Fifth Avenue. Lucino Hernández, at thirty-one the oldest in the group, told everybody that the Fifth Avenue bars were dangerous because they get raided by police and anybody without papers could wind up being deported at the flash of a badge.
When they were not out of the house for work, they stayed in their room and watched shows on the Spanish-language stations or talked or slept. On Saturdays they drank. As none of them had a paper to show anything more than name and address, they were inordinately afraid of immigration agents, who in their minds were everywhere. Each day there were reports of a white immigration van on a street somewhere in Brooklyn. When they were walking to work, the impulse was to say something to a pretty young woman, but it was Lucino who always stopped them.
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Page 8
