The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  “What man, baby?”

  “Next to the punch bowl. His name is J.D. Palladino.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, he’s been a big donator to the Black Easter Bunny. He heads up the whole Italian-American Convention for a Cleaner Manhattan.”

  Senator Karp stopped him in the corridor of the Senate Office Building the following day to ask him if he were out of his mind to allow his picture to be taken with J.D. Palladino and Benjamin Disraeli Dawes.

  “Who is Benjamin Disraeli Dawes?”

  “You were standing beside him in the picture.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s the most important black wholesaler of heroin in the United States.”

  “I’m shocked!”

  “You’ve got to do something about that, Bart.”

  “What? What should I do?”

  “I think you should ask for Agatha Teel’s help to get that negative out of the newspaper files.”

  Bart got on the telephone in his office and insisted that Teel set an earliest meeting, then and there. He felt he had every right to be indignant. He was running eleven points ahead of the nearest party rival for the nomination, and two point four points ahead of the president. He was about to announce his candidacy and on the fifteenth of January he would begin real campaigning around the country, barnstorming and bribing his way into the hearts of the people. So he was truly irritated that Teel had put him on this spot. He had to go up to New York for the appearance on Meet the Heat and to talk to the Southern District people. He pressed Teel for a meeting after that.

  “Why don’t just the two of us have a real nice little supper right here?” Teel said.

  The wine was a very good Taittinger ’59 bubbly, and he enjoyed hearing the cork pop and watching the smoke curl out of the bottle and seeing the golden champagne pour into big, paper-thin crystal glasses because Teel had handed him the negative of the annoying picture in a Daily News envelope as he had stepped out of the elevator into her living room.

  They clinked glasses and smiled happily at each other.

  “How did those two men ever get anywhere near that picture?” Bart asked amusedly.

  “Well—they are big contributors.”

  “To the Black Easter Bunny?”

  “Well, yes. To the Black Bunny, too.”

  “And to what else?”

  “I am a criminal lawyer. And Mr. Dawes and Mr. Palladino are my clients.”

  “Ah. Yes, of course.”

  “I’d like you to become one of my clients, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not?”

  “What for?”

  “I think I can get your sister back, for example.”

  He dropped the glass of champagne and did not know he had dropped it. He stared into Teel’s eyes, unable to speak. His face drained. His mouth moved convulsively. He put his hand tightly across it.

  “Four years is a long time,” Teel said sympathetically.

  “How did you know that?” He was able to whisper.

  “I guess interest is the key to life,” she said.

  “Where is Enid?”

  “Safe.”

  “Oh, God!” He stood up and walked away from Teel. After a while he got control of himself. He stood facing the window as if he were watching the street. “How long have you known this?” he said.

  “About four years.”

  He turned to her. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “I thought—about now—you’d want her back.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Senator—please! I am not the agent for the kidnappers.”

  “What do you want?”

  “There are two separate transactions here,” Teel said. “One is getting you your sister back. The other is having you sign a paper which I need signed—and that’s all there is to it.”

  “What paper?”

  “Have a glass of this good, old champagne,” Teel said. She got another glass, then filled it and hers too. “Sit down, Senator,” she said pleasantly, smiling at him sympathetically. He returned to a chair near her, lifted the glass and took three sips from it.

  “You’ll want to read the papers I’ve drawn, but we’ll talk about them first,” Teel said. “They are a statement from you which tells the world at large that you made all arrangements to supply J.D. Palladino with raw opium, that you used your influence with members of the Senate to secure the cooperation of the Inter-American Bank and restored foreign aid for Haiti, in payments to the President of Haiti, so that the opium could be processed into heroin in Haiti for sale throughout the United States and that you used your share of the profits from this to secure your nomination and election to the Senate as you have been doing to get the Presidency. That’s all.”

  He wanted to have the single-shot Liberator pistol in his hand. He wanted to kill her. He covered his face with his hands and leaned forward on his knees for a few moments, then he looked at her and said, “Miss Teel—I am more than halfway there. I have over twenty million dollars committed to key state organizations. I—I am almost certain of the nomination. If you—”

  “Senator Simms!” she said in a troubled voice. “You have this all wrong! I want to help you. I think our country needs you in the White House.” She filled their glasses again to the brims. “Hear me out,” she said. “I intend to give these papers back to you and so that you will know that they could not have been copied we will put them in the nearest bank, under an escrow agreement. When your sister arrives here we will make an exchange. I give you your sister. You sign the papers, then together we take the papers to the bank.”

  “Why?”

  “I may need help and if I need it I may need it fast.”

  “What help?”

  “I don’t need it yet. And if I don’t need it by inauguration day, on the second of January 1977, you get the papers back to burn.”

  Bart closed his eyes and leaned back, breathing irregularly. Teel sipped champagne as she flipped through the pages of The New Yorker. More than five minutes went by.

  “When can you have my sister brought to New York?”

  “You can meet her in this room on January fourteenth.”

  “Must it be here?”

  “Yes. I give her to you. You sign the papers for me.”

  9

  1969–1976

  In her first full year in the narcotics enterprise, 1969–70, Teel grossed $91,983,426. By the end of 1969 she had finished the reorganization of the makeshift sales and distribution apparatus which William Buffalo had improvised. Her effectiveness for his organization was so dramatically profitable that other wholesalers and dealers were happy to cooperate with her in setting down procedures that greatly increased their mutual profits while not requiring that the increase be shared with the pay-off side of operations. She kept bringing in more and more territories, more and more users. By 1973 she was sharing total profits with the entire black narcotics-merchandising national community, but always invisibly.

  In 1972, Teel’s own share of the national turnover was $423,441,829. In order to distribute the money into normal bank accounts across the country so that her Army Corps commanders, returning in ’76, would have instant access to it for operational needs, she had established her network of hundreds of business enterprises, service organizations and drops. This meant steady and heavy expenditure for personnel, equipment, stock and overhead. By 1973, Teel was the owner-manager of commercial assets and accounts receivable whose value exceeded $780 million.

  When she had had William Buffalo require all black distributors and dealers to cut away from the Sicilians as their source of heroin and blow, the giant stirred uneasily. Expected gang warfare began but Teel provided such strong protection and such emphatic counterattack that the Sicilians, glutted with the fat of their enormous profits for so many decades, decided to play it the straight way: they owned the law (they thought), they owned the streets (they thought) and they (certainly) owned the people who used thei
r heroin.

  Teel made sure Buffalo (and later Dawes) kept the black operations strictly inside the black ghettos. The Sicilians had the police and the Bureau lean very hard on the blacks but Teel increased her payoffs and, rather than get themselves into an auction for police and Narcotics Bureau services, the Sicilians decided to cool it.

  When the Chinese de-briefed Enid Simms and passed the word to Teel of the heroin connection between Senator Simms and J.D. Palladino, grandest of all Sicilian operators, Teel developed her plan to control the entire national heroin market. There could be no possible anxiety now about whether the revolution would be securely financed.

  She decided either to merge with the Sicilians or to eliminate them as competitors. In any event, she would control the importation, distribution, sales and collections on all heroin sold in continental United States—a euphemism which included eleven Canadian cities—in a way that booze and beer had never been controlled by any one unit during Prohibition.

  In November 1974 Teel called J.D. Palladino to ask for an appointment for herself on behalf of her client, Binchy Dawes. Mr. Palladino said he would be glad to see her. It was an amiable meeting and after some light talk about the Black Bunny and Mr. Palladino’s current favorite charity, Italian Boys in Leavenworth, Teel got down to business by saying, “Mr. Dawes has taken a good look at his computer print-outs and everything tells him that there is a very, very big five years ahead.”

  “Dawes uses a computer?”

  “Why not?”

  “Of course, why not?”

  “The print-outs show the way for Mr. Dawes and you to make a lot more money than he—or you—have ever made before.”

  “How come?”

  “The computer indicates that price wars are out. Why have a lot of trouble? Most of all—why have double overhead?”

  “Double overhead?”

  “What he is saying is: why not combine all strengths and eliminate all weaknesses that are costing both of you money?”

  “I don’t get this.”

  “Who has the best connections with the law? The Sicilians. Who has the best street operation and potentially the biggest market? The blacks. Both sides seem to have about the same supply of Number Four and Mr. Dawes feels, if his costs are less than yours, then he wants to pass those savings along to you, he wants to combine all the shit there is on one big five-billion-dollar bag and—according to the computer print-out—increase his take and yours by eighteen percent, none of it claimable by the payoff.”

  “Are you talking about a merge?”

  “That’s it. Exactly.”

  “Merge? Merge with niggers? Excuse me, Miss Teel.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t, there isn’t another family in this country which would okay a thing like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s ours, that’s why. We found the whole business. We made the whole thing in this country. We set up the cops and the Feds and the politicians and everything else like France and Turkey and you think a black guy is gonna come in here and take half of it away with our permission?”

  “The black part of the industry already has over thirty-eight percent, Mr. Palladino. Mr. Dawes isn’t asking for any half. Like every merger he would take out what he puts in. But both sides could win eighteen percent.”

  “No, Miss Teel. Absolutely never. Tell Dawes for me that I would get out of the business altogether and so would every other Eyetalian or Sicilian family before they would do business with a buncha niggers. I apologize to you in advance, Miss Teel, but I want Dawes to understand.”

  “Well—we tried, Mr. Palladino.”

  “Listen, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

  He stood up. The audience was over. They shook hands ritualistically. He walked her to the door. Dino was waiting in the French room. “Show Miss Teel to the elevators, Dino,” Mr. Palladino said. “Can we drive you anywhere, Miss Teel?”

  “No thanks, Mr. Palladino,” Teel said softly. “My Rolls is waiting.”

  On February 16, 1976, Teel called Colonel Pikow into a meeting. Their meetings were rare. They met in Teel’s uptown bunker, which was thirty-nine feet below street level, under a used car lot and junk yard at 157th Street and Seventh Avenue. Each entered the bunker through different tenement buildings. In the bunker Chelito sat behind a screen next to the principal door with an Armalite rifle propped against the wall beside her. Pikow drank plain tea. Teel sipped chilled wine.

  “How’s everything?” Teel said, all relaxed.

  “You know better than I do,” he smiled at her.

  “You’re looking great.”

  “Not as good as you.”

  “We don’t meet much, do we? But I have a story to tell you. On September 11, 1931—instead of saying once upon a time—about two years before I was born—a nice, tight operation took place on one day right across the United States. That was the day Luciano Americanized the Mafia by murdering sixty-one of the old-timers—the Founding Fathers whom the new generation mocked as The Moustache Petes. The old guys weren’t all that old and they were powerful men. They had done a great job—for their time—but they had to go because crime had to be nationalized and industrialized and the Moustache Petes didn’t understand where the real buck was anymore. Prohibition was less than a year from being over and Luciano decreed that the whole game was going to have to be played under new rules. I mean, like Maranzano was still smuggling aliens for nickels and dimes when gambling, skag, and big industrial extortion were waiting right up ahead.” She stopped herself short. “Hey, Peek! Don’t tell me you know all about this stuff?”

  “We mentioned it at the War College. But, the fact is, Teel, we’ve done it ourselves sixty or seventy times in the past three thousand years.” He smiled benignly. “Power grabs aren’t new.”

  “So what happened for Luciano?” Teel tested Pikow.

  “He killed all the old Sicilians and scooped up the billions.”

  “That’s right!” Teel said with excitement. “And that’s what we gone do. The Sicilians are through in the dope rackets. Their time is over. The black man moves in.”

  “When will the transfer of power happen, Teel?” Pikow asked mildly.

  “I’ll have a list for you in about five days. If you think three weeks is enough time to plan the operation, then we can set the date right now.”

  “Three weeks will be fine.”

  “I want an all-black executive on this. Bring in Winn, Anderson, Weems and Dawes. No mix-up about who is taking over. Everybody on the operation got to be black so all the Sicilians know who done it—did it, I mean.”

  “About how many executions?”

  “Roughly about six hundred and nineteen in the Thirty Cities. That is their entire executive. When they are gone, we inherit. I’ll have Dawes’s whole organization standing by to make sure everybody understands that.”

  “One thing we know,” Pikow said. “The user doesn’t care who sells it.”

  “Make a big note. J.D. Palladino won’t be on the list. He’s gone run the Haitian end for me. They ain’t nobody know the shit business better than J.D. Palladino.”

  It averaged out to about twenty hits per city, more or less. Men were shot in bowling alleys and in Turkish baths. One hundred and nine were thrown out of high windows in the Gr-1 exercises. Sometimes their women and children had to go with them. It was a precisely executed military operation. Only three Sicilians escaped and one of those was Palladino. The work was done by squads handled by Freedom Fighter sergeants. Officers were forbidden to get into any operation personally, but Winn had a couple of grudges in Chicago; old scores from prison, nothing to do with Sicilians or the Jones industry. She cut the throat of one of them, settled behind a fan magazine in a beauty parlor. She Gr-2’d the other one, a variation on Gr-1: threw the woman under a subway train. Chelito personally killed sixteen.

  The Sicilians went as they had lived, like anyone
else; in pool halls and taxi cabs; while they were counting money and while they were getting laid. Sixty-one people who were not on the list went too, the innocent by-standers of song and story: cab drivers, kids, pushers, waiters and shoeshine men. The most waste was in the dope houses but a witness was a witness.

  At the close of the Sicilian business day on March 13, 1976, Teel controlled the narcotics industry of the United States and Canada and everyone involved preferred it that way: one pay-off system for graded politicians and police; one simple share-out with customs and immigration people and the Narcotics Bureau, and one high, insured standard of shit. Teel believed in moving the very best because it addicted quicker, made for worse withdrawal reactions and therefore was better business in the long run.

  With a single merchandising and marketing organization Teel was able to upgrade the efficiency of the distribution of shit in the prisons by a 37 percent factor. She accepted IOUs that were collectable on the street ten days after the customer left state care. Very few tried to evade payment. She tripled sales among the college crowd and high school kids because the invidious situation no longer existed in which the Sicilian opposition would use its press and police contacts to start up a school-boy junkie scare, making it bad for the other side. Teel had schools where the teachers were pushers.

  Everything went smoothly now from maker to wearer, straight into the veins and brains of the kids, with no public whining. Teel was able to increase her own profits by 134 percent by eliminating middle-man breaks along the line. She processed in Asia and in Haiti. But she by-passed the wholesalers and except in rural cases, the dealers, and went straight to dope houses and pushers who sold directly to the market. She had it cut by her own people, then her own people sold it to the bottom so that the bulk of the benefit went to Teel. She was able to increase the payoff to the political people and the police, the judges and the prison system, the armed forces commanders and the educational system, because it paid her best to pay them the most. By the time she had her new-style organization laced up tight she had increased the basics of profit to 3,112 percent, the Freedom Fighter financing was assured, underwritten by the very people the Freedom Fighters would kill. A lot of junkies would be swept away; the Nathan Hales of the new revolution. A lot of establishment “leaders,” paid to allow this financing by drugs whose indelible records of corruption were in Teel’s sure hands, singing their betrayal, would find this used against them in People’s Courts. The people would turn on them, Teel knew, and rend them.