by Hesh Kestin
Apparently the Brooklyn bookies, most of them Jews, loved him—perhaps he’d made some money for them by intentionally dropping a bout or two—and so it was relatively easy for him to sell them his services to protect them from the Two Eyes, Brooklynese for the Eye-talian and Eye-rish hoods who preyed on them, taking as much as a quarter of their gross revenues. In any business a hit at the gross—that is, before expenses—can sink the venture: the bookies had heavy overheads, not least paying off the police, and this surcharge must have hit them hard. Shushan’s pitch must have been very attractive. In return for a fixed weekly fee, Shushan would chase away the Two Eyes, providing protection without demanding to examine the bookmakers’ books. “Shushan,” Justo said. “He didn’t care how much the bookies made, only what he did. But you know how it is with bookies...”
“No, Justo. I don’t. How is it with bookies?”
“Cautious. Chinga, for them the odds was just as good they’d go with Shushan and then the Two Eyes would take Shushan out. The bookies wanted to see the new system work.”
“The first client is always the hardest,” I said, and as I did wondered where I’d read that. It was as though there was someone else in my head I’d never met. “How’d he do it?”
“He waits for the Two Eyes, in this case Irish, to come to one of the bookies and collect. Then he and another guy, a cop in fact, stops the micks and collects what they collected. Of course they object. So Shushan...”
“So Shushan...?”
“So Shushan, you know, defends himself. He and the pal beat the shit out of the micks with the old Louisville sluggers, but instead of finishing the job leaves them to go tell their boss what happened. Then he actually returns the cash to the bookie, which made an impression, I can tell you. You can figure out the rest.”
“Tell me.”
“The micks come after Shushan with a dozen hitters, but being micks they don’t figure this would be expected. Somehow or other they got caught under the El on Livonia Avenue, near where the Pennsylvania Avenue IRT stop is. The thing is, no firearms. Shushan just dropped them with baseball bats and a few iron bars, you know the kind, with the twists in them. But no guns. I mean, his guys were carrying just in case, but it was a real quiet operation. Like in the Corps: never use a grenade when a bayonet will do. Maybe if they’d been killed, the micks, it would have made the papers and everyone would be excited, but this way they were just put in the hospital, absent a few teeth here and a kidney there, and when they came out they decided to leave off this particular bookie.”
“And the others?”
“Divide and conquer. All the gangs was competing for the bookies, who were seriously exposed individuals. In that business, these guys, after all, we’re talking people like me, just accountants. Shushan removed the Two Eyes from one bookie after another. He said it was like picking off bedbugs. In a year he had every bookie in Brooklyn, and Manhattan in the theater district and in East Harlem. After that he made peace with the Itals, and the micks they just moved off. Most of them their sons were in the police anyway—in one generation they went from giving bribes to taking them.”
Without the city’s immigrant population, the Fulton Fish Market would not have been as big as it was. The Italians and Jews were always big seafood eaters, and all Catholics up until the Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1966, were forbidden from eating meat on Fridays. As a result New York ate more seafood per capita than any other city in the country. Trucks brought lobsters and cod into the market from Maine and Nova Scotia and mussels and crabs from the Chesapeake Bay along with hand-size shrimp from the Gulf Coast. Lake fish came in from Canada and Minnesota. By the sixties exotics like swordfish and red snapper were being air-freighted through LaGuardia and Idylwild (soon to be renamed John F. Kennedy International), along with game fish from the Caribbean. On the Belt Parkway headed to Lower Manhattan vans carried fresh tuna from Montauk and clams and oysters on ice from the Great South Bay. All of this traffic converged every night on one relatively small market on the East River. From the beginning what the papers called the mob and what young Bobby Kennedy, in the fifties counsel to the Senate Commission on Organized Crime, called “the Maafya,” was able to control the choke points to and from the market.
To retail fish sellers in the five boroughs, this meant a hefty tax on the wholesale price of fresh fish. The truckers had to pay to reach the market, and the retail fish guys had to pay to take their fish out. And every year they paid more: the Italian families that controlled the Fulton Fish Market grew ever more greedy as demand for fresh fish declined because supermarkets now carried frozen fish. The middle and upper classes could still afford fresh, but the poor preferred fish-sticks at the supermarket for half the price. Decent restaurants demanded fresh, but luncheonettes and diners and the neighborhood chop-suey palaces were more sensitive to price than quality. It was a classic spiral. The less demand for top-quality fresh seafood the more the goombahs took on each truckload—they were responsible to their bosses to make sure total “earnings” did not decline—but the more prices rose to cover these higher surcharges the less fresh fish was sold. To stay competitive with the supermarkets fresh-fish dealers would go as far as Boston and Baltimore, anything so as not to be taxed to get into the Fulton market. With less traffic at the market, surcharges rose, which caused prices to rise, which caused demand to drop, which caused prices not to fall, as in classical economics, but to rise, as in Italian economics: the goombahs had to keep revenues up. One day the brother of a bookie who was enrolled with Shushan came with a proposition: for every dollar Shushan saved the wholesalers he could keep fifty cents. In the late fifties the mob was taking $5,000 a day in fees out of the Fulton Fish Market—the equivalent fifty years later of ten times that.
But the methods that had worked with the bookies would not have worked here, not least because in the Fulton Fish Market Shushan was not dealing with a dozen competing and often chaotic gangs but with one family, the Tintis, who had controlled seafood in New York for twenty years. To further complicate matters, Silvio Tinti and his son Dickie were licensees: their permit to operate in the fish market came from Vito Genovese himself, whose organization received a percentage of the Tinti take. At that time the Genovese cartel controlled the New York and New Jersey docks, a good deal of the gambling and most of the white prostitution in the metropolitan area, farming out “properties” to under-bosses in a system so feudal it lacked only castles and moats. But in 1959 the Genovese operation lost its leader when Genovese began a fifteen-year sentence in the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta. So Shusan went to Don Vitone’s chief executive officer, Auro Sfangiullo, a Sicilian who affected dark glasses day and night and was never seen in public attired in anything but one of two impeccably tailored double-breasted Roman suits, a black and a gray. It was known not to approach him on days when he wore the black.
Sfangiullo was so attired when Shushan went to meet him in Little Italy in the rear of a long, narrow coffee shop on Mulberry Street called Dolce Far Niente. Today the area is part of Chinatown, most of the hard-core Italians having moved to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, to Long Island or to New Jersey. But in 1959 Mulberry Street was the heart of Little Italy. Dolce Far Niente was Sfangiullo’s office. Everyone in the place was on the Genovese payroll, including the owner, the chefs, the waiters and most of the diners.
On a hot day in August Shushan entered the coffee house alone, carrying his suit jacket over his shoulders in the Italian fashion. When he got past the first tables, where Sfangiullo’s bodyguards sat as motionless as the stone lions outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, he removed the jacket, hung it on a chair by an empty table to show he was unarmed and greeted his host by calling him dottore. Instead of kissing him on the cheeks like an Italian he took the older man’s right hand in his and planted a long dry kiss on his knuckles.
“When a Jew thinks like a Sicilian it makes the Sicilian think like a Jew,” Sfangiullo said, not smiling. He offered a ch
air. A waiter brought an espresso and a glass of cold water.
“Mediterranean people, dottore,” Shushan said.
“The macedonia di frutti here, it’s good.”
“Coffee will do fine, dottore. I’m grateful for that.”
“For what are you not grateful?”
Shushan sipped his coffee. “I’m given to understand the Genovese interests are troubled by conditions in the Fulton Fish Market.”
“What idiot said this?”
Shushan tapped the side of his head twice. “Logic, dottore. Every year less fish arrives at the market, and less fish leaves it.”
“People are eating less fish.”
“Less fresh fish, dottore. Every year fresh fish becomes more expensive. Either they buy their seafood in a supermarket, which you and I know is garbage, or they eat meat, which has always been cheaper. And when they do buy fresh often now it comes from markets beyond the control of the Genovese family.”
“Even on Friday many people have stopped eating fish,” Sfangiullo said. “It’s a new time. People don’t do the right way.”
“I agree.”
“So your proposal is what, to make people eat more fresh fish? To compel these ingrates, which we have loyally served with our protection for two decades, to buy fish only if it comes from the Fulton market? You are a smart boy, Shoeshine. I saw you fight several times. Even when you was fighting you fight smart. A very impressive young man. So how can I assist you?”
“I’ve come to assist you, dottore.”
“Maybe you are not a Jew at all but a secret Sicilian, eh?” Sfangiullo said. “If your tongue goes any further up my ass it will come out my mouth. Another coffee? Pastry maybe?”
“dottore, I want to take over the Fulton Fish Market under the auspices of the Genovese family.”
“I want to grow hair on my penis.”
“Because I can make sure the Genovese family earns more.”
Sfangiullo tapped his left ear with his right hand.
“In the first year, dottore, I will raise your revenues by twenty percent.”
“How is that?”
“As you know, I provide certain services to certain people in Brooklyn and in a few spots in Manhattan.”
“As I know.”
“I am willing to turn over part of my fees from this enterprise, a going concern. The family will benefit immediately.”
“The Fulton market is not a big profit for us, and it will not be for you. The Tintis are experienced businessmen. Even under the Tintis it declines.”
“The Tintis are experienced in the business of killing the cow for meat when it can provide so much more profit in milk.”
Sfangiullo removed his glasses. His eyes were small, yellow in the whites, and unmatched—one blue, the other a soft honey brown. Maybe he wore the glasses so people would not stare. Maybe he had sensitive eyes. “Talk in a language I can understand.”
“With your permission, dottore,” Shushan said, and rose and went back to pick up his jacket. Slowly he withdrew from his inside breast pocket a folded sheet of lined paper, like that torn from a school notebook. “These are the numbers as I have understood them to be.”
Sfangiullo brought the paper close to his eyes. “Who gave you these ridiculous figures?”
Thus began a long negotiation. Shushan had been watching the traffic to and from the Fulton Fish Market for three months. He had carefully interviewed the wholesalers. He had counted the trucks that entered and left. He had talked to the police to learn how much was being paid to keep the NYPD from disturbing the Tinti collectors who stopped the trucks. He had grown close to an associate of then Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and discussed with him the decline of the market and the loss to the city. Shushan knew more in fact about the Fulton Fish Market than the Genovese family did. As feudal overlords all they cared about was earnings. They left the actual work, the details, to the Tintis. And the Tintis were not bright. “The Tintis are running a good business into the ground, dottore. I am betting it can be revived.”
“And you are willing to pay twenty percent more for the privilege?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then you must be willing to pay thirty percent, if you are so certain.”
“Twenty is my limit, dottore. It’s the first offer and the last.”
“And what is our share of the growth of this business if you are right?”
“A fixed fee, dottore.”
“The Genovese family does not work on a fixed anything. Except sporting events.” It was a joke.
“Think of it this way, dottore. Right now you have a percentage of a sum that falls every year. I am offering to pay you for the privilege of replacing the Tintis what you are getting today from the Tintis plus twenty percent.”
“To be negotiated annually.”
“Never to be negotiated again, dottore. And don’t forget, you will never have to wake up in the middle of the night thinking, Those cheating Napolida Tintis are holding back. With my proposal you will have no bookkeeping, no suspicions, no anger. Every month a bag will arrive with your current take plus twenty percent.”
“No more coffee? A Coca-Cola maybe? It’s a hot day.”
“You’re too kind, dottore.”
“In one week you will have an answer.”
“Thank you, dottore. It has been an honor to meet you.”
“As it happens, Shoeshine, you are the first Jew I like.”
“Thank you. And one more thing, if I might.”
Sfangiullo placed his dark glasses on the bridge of his long nose and made a face like he had just stepped in shit.
“If we have an agreement, dottore, you must take care of the Tintis. If I so much as smell a Tinti within a mile of the Fulton Fish Market we no longer have an agreement.”
“Are you serving terms to the Genovese family, my son?”
“Not at all, dottore,” Shoeshine said, rising and putting on his coat. “We are structuring a deal.” With that he took the older man’s bony hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it so lightly Sfangiullo felt nothing.
At least this was Justo’s take on what occurred at Dolce Far Niente. It must have been close to the truth because the next week Shushan had the license for the Fulton Fish Market. Despite all the novels and films and television shows, organized crime is not about honor or family or tradition but cash. With revenues declining the Tintis had found themselves in the same position as any corporate chief who does not produce. They had no recourse: To raise a hand against Shushan would be to challenge Auro Sfangiullo, and thus Vito Genovese. They protested, they argued, they begged. They lost.
That Justo had to explain this was proof even to me of how little I knew about the real world. With my nose in books, I had grown up with the idea that money was something that might or might not appear as a result of work, but that the object of what one did was not money. It was pleasure, satisfaction, art. My first role model had been my father, who was a detective because he loved it, and when they took that away he did privately what he could no longer do for the NYPD. My second was Eugene del Vecchio, a poet who made his living as a professor. Neither had ever earned more than two hundred a week.
Sitting in that aerie above the suite and learning first from Justo and then from my own investigations into the files, it appeared that the world did not turn on self-image, aesthetics, eros or the odd joint. It turned on power, which could find its form as muscle or money or both. Not that I took seriously Shushan’s so-called iron will, but I had to laugh that a man so much a part of the world of muscle and money could have chosen me as heir.
Two phone calls later I stopped laughing.
21.
Ira-Myra’s had already returned when I came downstairs with Justo. Miguel the tailor was gone, three altered suits neatly arrayed on one of the two green-leather couches. Next to them was a pile of folded clothes from my apartment and on the floor a stack of books, my Olivetti portable typewriter in its sky-blue zippered case and,
packed in a carton that had once held bottles of Foxx’s U-bet Chocolate Syrup, all the loose sheets of paper, notebooks and scribbled-on flotsam that Ira-Myra’s had been able to gather up.
“I didn’t take nothing from your kitchen, boss,” Ira said.
I looked at Justo. “More boss?”
“It’s a hierarchy,” Justo said. “You got to learn to accept it.” He turned to Ira. “The new boss don’t want to be called boss.”
Ira looked at me with the puzzled, head-cocked expression of a large confused dog.
“Forget it,” I said. “You can call me anything you want. You too, Justo. I’m not the boss, I’m not going to be the boss, but the truth is it’s just not worth the effort to fight with you two over something that’s going to go away when your real boss shows up.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear, boss,” Ira said.
It was midnight, but I wasn’t tired. I was hungry. I’d been hungry for several hours, but in the excitement of new circumstances and in the fear that had created those circumstances I had forgotten to eat. I seemed to have become accustomed to the circumstances. But my stomach wasn’t. It was audible. “I’m going down for some deli—you two want to join me?”
