Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  When his secretary answered, I hung up in a sweat. I couldn’t sleep that night, and the next morning I called in sick to work and then headed to Penn Station to buy a ticket for the train to Long Island. I stood in front of the passenger-car steps until the conductor blew his final whistle, when I had a failure of nerve and stood back. I should have felt foolish on the way back to my apartment, but I told myself that I didn’t really have to make the trip because I had such a complete picture of what would have happened if I did.

  I would have gotten off the train and into a taxi that would have let me off at Grumman’s corporate entrance. Employees would have streamed out at quitting time, and finally the stragglers and a few harried executives taking their work home. I would have been thinking about leaving when a dapper-looking middle-aged man would emerge from the glass doors—about five feet tall, with graying hair parted in the middle as if by calipers, and carrying an attaché case that resembled a suitcase next to his diminutive form.

  I imagined approaching him: “Mr. Abramowitz?”

  He would have given an inquisitive look and seemed about to stop before thinking better of it.

  “Mr. Abramowitz?” I would have followed as he upped the tempo of his stride. “I would like to ask you a couple of questions.”

  He would have gone even faster.

  “Nano? Isn’t that what Nicky Fortune calls you?”

  That would have stopped him.

  “I was a friend of Kathleen Kennedy’s…”

  Here he would have turned and come toward me, dropping the attaché case as if preparing to jump up and punch me in the face despite being more than a foot shorter.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he would have said in that high-pitched, helium voice that Geist had described so well. “Stop harassing me. Get the fuck out of my way!”

  Then, without another word, he would have turned and quick-stepped away, leaving me standing there flat-footed.

  It was such a compelling vision that I caught myself wondering over the next few years if I had actually seen this man Nano or merely imagined that I did.

  In addition to plunging me into behindness, Kick’s death held Jack down for several weeks at the end of his first term in Congress. Smothered by its uncompromising weight, he sat in his congressional office late into the night after his staff had gone home, staring at the walls with the radio playing in the background. But ultimately the death, so unexpected, hurried him along, making him see once again, as he had so clearly when we were kids, that time was his enemy and that he dare not proceed cautiously in his life or his career. He could not defer to his political elders or stand in line waiting his turn.

  When the Old Man at times urged just such an approach, Jack didn’t argue; he respectfully heard him out and then continued to move forward at his own chosen pace, which from now on was always full speed ahead.

  The unspoken reckoning he’d had with his father after the events in Hollywood led him to create compartments in his life. The one he assigned to the Old Man acknowledged his stature, but reduced his status to that of an engaged adviser—listened to but not automatically obeyed; allowed to offer opinions but not make decisions; no longer the architect of Jack’s fate.

  It was an arrangement that could have caused an eruption. But Jack handled it with finesse, and surprisingly so did his father. The Old Man was used to working alone and in the shadows, having done exactly that for much of his life. He didn’t complain about being kept at arm’s length but willingly took on the black work of politics, the jobs usually given to the untouchables, without having to be asked.

  One of these jobs was keeping the lines of communication open with people such as Solomon Geist. When I once summoned the courage to ask the Old Man how he could bear to do this, given Geist’s treachery in the fall of 1945, he waved me off: “I’ve got a memory like an elephant. I don’t forget and I sure as hell don’t forgive. But I also don’t throw away people who might be useful to us someday.”

  That someday came late in 1959, when the Old Man—at what cost none of us ever knew—got Geist to make a connection with members of the Chicago Outfit, among them Sam Giancana, whom I once met briefly when I was in Las Vegas with Jack for a fundraiser and thought of ever after as a gorilla in a man suit.

  After a few Geist-mediated sessions with the Old Man, Giancana apparently agreed “to help get out the vote”—as his fellow Chicago mobster “Handsome Johnny” Roselli wryly put it—if Jack got the nomination. In return, the Old Man said that a Kennedy administration would smother the unending federal investigations into organized crime that had become one long national headline in the 1950s and threatened to become even more of a problem in the next decade.

  The deal eventually occasioned some harsh words between Big Joe and Bobby, who usually set the gold standard for family loyalty but had made pursuit of the Mob from his time as staff counsel to the McClelland Committee into his manhood ritual, and would turn up the heat even higher when he became attorney general, whatever his father had promised.

  Nobody, including Bobby himself, seemed to take note of the fact that his deep animus to Giancana and his ilk was nullified by his central role in the CIA’s scheme to use Giancana’s crew in its opera bouffe efforts to kill Castro. And as is now well known, the bizarre dance done by the family and the Mob was symbolized most famously by the fact that while Giancana did this clandestine work he was also clandestinely sharing with Jack the favors of Judith Exxner, to whom Jack had been introduced by Frank Sinatra at Geist’s behest, thus establishing a circuitry that would have ominous consequences for all.

  This ball which Geist helped set rolling into the epicenter of history came to an abrupt halt for him one August afternoon in 1963 when he was stopped on Fairfax Avenue waiting to turn left into the Canter’s Delicatessen parking lot and a man in a Dodgers hat and sunglasses who was never identified ran up to the driver’s side of his aqua Cadillac and shot him point-blank in the left temple, afterward jumping into a car double-parked across the street and disappearing from history.

  Calling it a “gangland hit,” the LA Times speculated that the murder might have been caused by Geist’s alleged support of Crazy Joey Gallo in the war that Gallo was then waging against Joe Profaci for control of what became the Colombo family. Perhaps. But when I heard about it I immediately remembered Fortunato’s face that fall afternoon in 1945 when he stopped on a side street near Warners after killing Molly Maguire and gave Geist an indescribable look while his pistol inscribed small, prophetic circles in the air.

  There are many things I’ll never know, but one thing I knew for sure was that the Old Man never intended to keep the promise with which he had blackmailed and suborned Val. According to FBI documents declassified in 1976, his effort to get Fortunato deported was eventually blessed by the Truman administration, after heavy lobbying by Hoover, and pursued strenuously from 1946 to 1948. But Italy, not being stupid, refused to take him, so Big Joe’s plot ultimately collapsed.

  Never knowing exactly where Nicky Fortune was, but often feeling with prickly skin that he might be nearby, I made an effort to keep tabs on him while he lived in limbo in the U.S. and elsewhere. He was a somewhat drab figure in comparison with the real peacocks of organized crime; someone who was a member of no family and who, in Mafia parlance, always “ate alone”; a face typically near the edges of the group photos surreptitiously snapped at the big Mob gatherings that made their way into the tabloids, although it seemed to me that in these shots he always looked anxious to get back to more important business.

  Fortunato was at the famous summit at the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1946 where Lucky Luciano tried to become head of the Commission and Meyer Lansky reluctantly agreed to the hit on his longtime friend Bugsy Siegel because of the skimming that had taken place during the construction of the Flamingo.

  Fortunato was called before the Kefauver Committee hearings in 1951, the event that formally introduced most of America to organized cr
ime and also demonstrated the growing importance of television. Large groups of people dropped everything to stand in front of appliance-store windows during lunch hour and watch the perversely telegenic criminals testifying on the small black-and-white screens embedded in the big walnut consoles.

  The networks covering the event played up the backstory of Fortunato’s wartime service, so his appearance was the most highly anticipated of all. When he reluctantly took the oath and then sat ramrod straight before the Senate committee, regarding the members with sovereign contempt, the gallery in the hearing room—and in the nation as a whole—edged forward in anticipation. But unlike Frank Costello, for instance, who brought the house down by responding indignantly “I pay my taxes!” when Senator Kefauver asked him what he had ever done for his country, or Bugsy Siegel’s moll Virginia Hill, who ended her testimony by screaming at the committee members, “I hope an atom bomb falls on all of you!” Fortunato sat as stone-faced as Bartleby in the witness chair for three-quarters of an hour, giving the same anodyne response to all the questions: “I choose to avail myself of the protections offered by the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

  Perhaps worried about his ratings, Kefauver finally dismissed him in disgust: “You may step down, Mr. Fortunato. We have other witnesses waiting who understand that all of America is watching these hearings and looking for answers.”

  Fortunato was glimpsed again a few years later in another group photo, this one taken in Palermo at the 1957 “Pizza Connection” meeting at the Grand Hotel des Palmes.

  He was present the same year at the infamous gathering at Joe “The Barber” Barbaro’s fifty-acre estate in Apalachin, New York, where a hundred of the top figures in the Syndicate met to deal with Vito Genovese’s claim to be capo di tutti capi after he sent Crazy Joey Gallo to assassinate Albert Anastasia as he was getting a shave in a Manhattan barbershop.

  According to the account in the Washington Post, Fortunato was one of a handful of mobsters who escaped the police raid on the estate by running out the back door of the house and tramping through the heavily wooded area behind Barbaro’s property to a back road, destroying their expensive suits and alligator shoes in their pell-mell getaway.

  It was tempting to see him as a sort of Kilroy of the Mob—always there but never front and center; not complicit in any of the coup and assassination attempts and not a crucial participant in the grand debate that agitated organized crime in the 1950s and ’60s about whether and then how to get involved in narcotics, which the more entrepreneurial members of the Commission saw as a hedge against the likely decline of gambling, loansharking, and other of the old ways. But I always thought that Fortunato was content to remain behind the scenes because he had only one real item of business: vendetta.

  When the news first reached me on November 22, 1963—sweeping through the room like a mistral while I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club—I had only one question: Where was Fortunato when those shots in Dallas shattered America’s belief in rationality and made speculations bearing the stamp of behindness into a national pastime?

  I didn’t get an answer until Bobby was leaving the Justice Department when his feud with LBJ reached a breaking point a year after Jack’s death. He invited me to his office one day while movers were packing up, and we chatted about family matters for a half hour before I got my courage up to ask him about Mob involvement in the assassination.

  “You too?” he snarled. “I thought you of all people would avoid this shit. Aren’t there already enough nutcases out there without you joining up too?”

  But I could tell from the look that had crossed his face when I asked the question that he himself was also living under the shadow of a doubt. Possibly because he was willing for me to consider what he could not, either professionally or personally, he called in one of his aides in the Organized Crime Unit at the end of our meeting and told this young man about my historic association with Jack, then ordered him to let me spend the rest of the afternoon in an annex looking at “a few files.”

  The one on Fortunato that was brought to me was thin, although a few suggestive unknown facts had survived the heavy marker-pen redactions.

  One was simply an interesting footnote to history: he was with Lucky Luciano in January 1962 at the Naples airport when Luciano, after meeting with an American film producer and agreeing to cooperate in a movie about his life, collapsed of a heart attack and died.

  More to the point were documents showing that in the spring of 1963, when he got in some unspecified trouble with one of the New York families, Fortunato had spent time in New Orleans under the protection of Carlos Marcello, the Mob boss who was later reported by some of his fellow inmates in a federal prison in Texarkana to have bragged that he had masterminded Jack’s assassination.

  But this brief ray of light was eclipsed by a set of FBI field reports that answered the question I began with: Where was Fortunato when Jack died in Dallas? They provided a definitive answer—with Johnny Rosselli in Beverly Hills, participating in a roast of Frank Sinatra at the Friars Club.

  That should have been that. But since Bobby had given me the opportunity, I glanced at some background interviews that FBI agents had done with people who had known Fortunato when he was coming up in Chicago.

  Among those mentioned were Isadore Abramowitz, identified by the field agent as a vice president of operations at Grumman, and Jacob “Sparky” Rubenstein—the two people who, along with Geist, had been saved by Fortunato from a beating or worse nearly fifty years earlier, and with whom Fortunato had remained tight ever since. Geist had cashed in his chips a couple of months before the assassination, but I asked Bobby’s aide if the other two men had files.

  “Nothing to speak of on Abramowitz,” he replied, “but a huge a.k.a. file on Rubenstein, as you might expect.”

  When I gave him a confounded look, he hesitated a bit and then said, “The attorney general vouched for you, so I guess it’s okay.”

  The file he brought was as thick as the Gutenberg Bible. It told how Sparky Rubenstein had kept knocking at the door of the Chicago Outfit throughout the late Thirties and early Forties, desperate to become a made man. But as one mobster later told an FBI interviewer, apparently with a straight face, “He didn’t have the mental stability we like to see in our associates.”

  Condemned always to be one of the small fry looking longingly at the pools where the big fish swam, Rubenstein hung out with his friend Nano before and after the war and was in Southern California playing the horses and staying with Solomon Geist for a couple of months in 1946, a year after Jack and I were there. Afterward he was back in Chicago still orbiting around Fortunato and hoping to be invited to join the club. He finally gave up and moved to Dallas in 1948.

  When he got there, Jacob Rubenstein changed his name to Jack Ruby. He ran a succession of sleazy nightclubs over the next twenty-five years, supplying free booze and hookers to off-duty cops and working hard to give everyone the impression that he had juice and was connected.

  According to his file, the newly minted Ruby had traveled to Cuba in 1959, where for reasons not clear he paid a visit to Santo Trafficante, then jailed in Havana’s Trescora prison. Trafficante had controlled vice for the Syndicate during the Batista years and would be recruited after his release by Johnny Roselli to participate in the CIA’s farcical assassination plots against Castro.

  The file also showed that Ruby knew Sam Giancana from the old days, and had stayed close to Joe Campisi, lieutenant of Carlos Marcello, who had shielded Fortunato in New Orleans during his time of unspecified troubles.

  Chary of raising any higher the lid of Pandora’s box, the FBI had trod lightly on these and other coincidences in its investigation of Ruby. Agents did not make much of the unusually high volume of long distance calls that Rubenstein/Ruby made in the weeks leading up to the assassination, nor did they strenuously pursue the persistent rumors that cops on the take had let him into the supposedly well-secured basement of the Dallas
Police Department the morning Oswald was being transported. They gave short shrift to informants’ claims that he was paying off a Mob IOU when he pulled the trigger.

  Left hanging as well were Ruby’s comment in his weird jailhouse interview with Earl Warren in June 1964 that he had “been used for a purpose” and the words he employed in his urgent request to the chief justice for a change of venue, “I want to tell the truth but I can’t tell it here because my life is in danger.”

  Instead of seeing the circumstantial as possibly real and diving down into it, the Warren Commission and J. Edgar Hoover himself ignored the banal poseur whose tenuous Mob connections they saw as merely the elevator music of his Willy Loman life; a loony and a loser who was being deeply sincere for once when he said that the only reason he wanted to get Oswald was to pay him back for the pain he had caused Jackie and the kids.

  I could see how the FBI and the Warren Commission investigators might have taken Ruby at what they saw as his face value. I understood their reluctance to give the country a reason to sink deeper into the whirlpool of behindness brought on by the assassination, a new and dangerous way of thinking that would challenge all official explanations of everything for years to come.

  But I also knew in my gut that Ruby was not just a tawdry bit player in the Dallas drama. He was the Best Supporting Actor, the event’s indispensable man who had an even more crucial role than that of the lone crazed assassin himself—creating the silence that drove Jack’s death into a dead end, killing the possibility of definitive answers and creating a mystery that was ultimately insoluble and therefore open ever after to a category five hurricane of hallucinatory speculation, like my own, which made all the sense in the world and no sense at all.

  If he had been functioning when Jack was killed, the Old Man would have used all his assets to try to get to the bottom of things. But by then he was mired in vascular catastrophe as a result of a massive stroke in 1961 that left him with skin melted like candle wax on the left side of his face; eyes wandering; hunched and spavined and unable to walk; and robbed of all language except the nonsense word “Nuuu,” which he shouted fiercely during his useless speech therapy sessions and at all other times, never again making sense although his around-the-clock caretakers came to believe that they could distinguish a rudimentary language of hatred and despair in the different intonations of this single sound.