The Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  Bellarosa said to the two cops, “Thanks, boys. I owe you one.”

  Meanwhile, I can’t even get a cop to interpret complex and contradictory parking signs for me. But that was yesterday. Today, the cop near the open car door touched his cap as I slid in beside the don. What a screwy country.

  Vinnie had jumped into the passenger’s seat up front, and Lenny pulled away, moving slowly until he was clear of the crowd, then he gassed it.

  We headed downtown, then Lenny swung west toward the World Trade Center, then downtown again to Wall Street. Obviously, he was trying to lose anyone who might be following.

  We passed my office building, the J. P. Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street, and though I was still supposed to work there, I felt a sudden nostalgia for the old place.

  We drove around for a while, no one saying much, except that Vinnie and Lenny were congratulating the don ad nauseam about his great escape, as though he had something to do with it. I really detest flunkies.

  Bellarosa said very little in return, but at one point he leaned over to me. “You did real good, Counselor. Right up until the end there.”

  I didn’t reply.

  He continued, “You got to be careful what you say to the press. They twist things around.”

  I nodded.

  He went on, “The press ain’t lookin’ for facts. They think they are, but they want a good story. Sometimes a good story has no facts. Sometimes it’s funny. They think this stuff is all funny. This stuff with the Mafia and all. The big Cadillacs, the cigars, the fancy suits. Somehow they think this is all funny. Capisce? That’s okay. That’s better than them thinking it’s not funny. So you keep it funny. You give them funny stuff. You’re a funny guy. So lighten up. Make it all sound funny, like it’s a big joke. Understand?”

  “Capisco.”

  “Yeah. You did fine with that lady judge. Alphonse fucked himself up. He talks too much. Every time he opens his mouth, somebody wants to put their fist in it. He’s pissed off now, but he’s gonna be a lot more pissed off when the press starts asking him about the car bullshit this morning and the frame-up thing. You didn’t have to say all that shit. You know?”

  “Frank, if you don’t like the way—”

  He patted my knee. “Hey, you did okay. Just a few points I gotta make so you know. Okay? Hey, I walked. Right?”

  “Right.”

  We kept driving around lower Manhattan. Frank ordered Lenny to pull over at a newsstand, and Vinnie got out and bought the Post for Frank, the Wall Street Journal for me, and some medical journals for himself, mostly gynecology and proctology. Lenny shared the journals with Vinnie at stoplights. I like to see people try to improve their minds.

  I had some paperwork with me relating to the bail: the receipt for five million dollars, the bail forfeiture warning, and other printed matter that I looked over. I also had the arrest warrant now, and the charge sheet, which I now read. Most important, I had a copy of the indictment, which ran to about eighty pages. I wanted to read it at my leisure, but for now, I perused it, discovering that, indeed, all the evidence against Frank Bellarosa was in the form of five witness statements. There was no physical evidence putting him at the scene of the crime, and all the witnesses had Hispanic names.

  I had never asked Bellarosa about the actual murder, and I only vaguely remembered the press accounts of it. But from what I could glean from the witness statements, Juan Carranza, driving his own car, a Corvette, left the Garden State Parkway at about noon on January fourteenth, at the Red Bank exit. With him was his girlfriend, Ramona Velarde. A car in front of the Corvette came to a stop on the single-lane exit ramp, and Carranza was forced to stop also. Two men then exited the car behind Carranza, walked right up to his car, and one of them fired a single bullet through his side window, striking Carranza in the face. The assassin then tried the driver’s door, and finding it unlocked, he opened it and fired the remaining four bullets from the revolver into Carranza’s head. The girlfriend was untouched. The assassin then threw the revolver on the girlfriend’s lap, and he and his companion got into the front car that had blocked the exit ramp, abandoning their car behind Carranza’s.

  The witnesses to this assassination were Ramona Velarde and four men who were in a car behind the car from which the assassins exited. Each of the four male witnesses stated frankly that they were Juan Carranza’s bodyguards. I noted that none of them said they fired at the men who had bumped off their boss. In fact, they stated that they put Ramona Velarde in their car and jumped the curb onto the grass, driving around the assassins’ abandoned car and the Corvette, but they made no attempt to pursue the assassins. The subtext here was that they recognized that their boss had been hit by the Italian mob, and they didn’t want to be dead heroes. The New Jersey State Police determined that this rubout had federal drug and racketeering implications and contacted the FBI. Through an anonymous tip, Ramona Velarde was picked up, and she subsequently identified the four bodyguards, who were all picked up or surrendered within a few weeks. All of them agreed to become federal witnesses.

  The issue of identification seemed to me a little vague. Ramona Velarde was only a few feet from the assassin, but I don’t see how she could have seen his face if he was standing beside a low-slung Corvette. All she could have seen was the hand and the gun. Similarly, the assassin and his partner would have exited their car with their backs to the four bodyguards, who had let that car come between them and their boss. However, all four men stated that the assassin and his partner glanced back at them a few times as the two men stepped up to Carranza’s Corvette. All four of the men said they recognized the face of Frank Bellarosa. Ramona Velarde picked Bellarosa’s photo out of mug shots.

  Well, as I read this interesting account of gangland murder, it did certainly sound like a mob hit, Italian style. I mean, it was classical Mafia: the boxed-in automobile, the girlfriend left untouched, even the bodyguards left alone so that the hit didn’t become a massacre, which would draw all sorts of unwanted negative press. And the abandoned car was stolen, of course, and also Italian style, the murder weapon was left behind and was clean as a whistle. The amateurs liked to use the same gun over and over again until somebody got caught with it, and ballistics showed it had about a dozen murders on it. The Italians bought clean guns, used them once, and dumped them immediately at the scene before strolling off.

  I thought about this testimony I was reading in Bellarosa’s Cadillac. It was quite possible that the murder had taken place exactly this way, and the witnesses were telling the truth, except for the identification of Frank Bellarosa. I’m no detective, but it doesn’t take many brains to realize that a man such as Bellarosa, even if he wanted to personally commit a murder, wouldn’t do it in broad daylight where half the population of the New York metropolitan area could identify his face.

  But apparently someone in the FBI office or the U.S. Attorney’s office saw this murder as an opportunity to cause problems in the underworld. Therefore why not assign it to the number-one Mafia boss? And I thought, if Bellarosa was right that the murder was done by the Drug Enforcement Agency, then the DEA would most probably choose a modus operandi of the underworld, e.g., an Uzi submachine-gun attack to imitate Colombians, a knife or machete attack to imitate the Jamaicans, a bomb assassination as the Koreans had used a few times, or the cleanest, safest, and most easily imitated attack—a Mafia rubout.

  I realized that what I was doing was formulating a defense in my mind, but beyond that I was trying to convince myself that I was defending an innocent man. Trying to be objective, trying to be that universal juror, I evaluated what I knew of the case so far and found that there was a reasonable doubt as to Frank Bellarosa’s guilt.

  I glanced at Bellarosa as I flipped through the indictment. He noticed and said to me, “They named the guys who testified against me. Right?”

  “Yes. Four men and one woman.”

  “Oh, yeah. Carranza’s girlfriend. I remember that from the papers.’’ He asked,
“She said she saw me?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  I said to him, “They’re all under the federal witness protection program.”

  “That’s good. Nobody can hurt them.’’ He smiled.

  I said to him, “They won’t make good witnesses for a jury. They’re not upright citizens.”

  He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.

  Lenny stopped in front of a coffee shop on Broadway. Vinnie took coffee orders, then went inside to fetch four containers.

  We drove through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, then came back into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel.

  The car phone in the rear rang, and Bellarosa motioned for me to answer it, so I did. “Hello?”

  A familiar voice, a man, asked, “Is Mr. Bellarosa there?”

  John Sutter is a fast learner, so I replied, “No, he’s at Mass. Who is this?”

  Bellarosa chuckled.

  The man answered my question with one of his own. “Is this John Sutter?”

  “This is Mr. Sutter’s valet.”

  “I don’t like your sense of humor, Mr. Sutter.”

  “Most people don’t, Mr. Ferragamo. What can I do for you?’’ I looked at Bellarosa.

  “I would like your permission to speak to your client.”

  Bellarosa already had his hand out for the phone, so I gave it to him. “Hello, Al. . . . Yeah. . . . Yeah, well, he’s kind of new to this. You know?’’ He listened for a while, then said, “You ain’t playing the game, either, goombah. You got no right to complain about this.’’ He listened again, a bored expression on his face. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what? Look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Am I complaining? You hear me shooting my mouth off?”

  I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, of course, but I couldn’t believe the end I was hearing. These guys were talking as if they’d just had a disagreement over a game of boccie ball or something.

  Bellarosa said, “You think I’m gonna use dirty money for bail? Check it out, Al. You find it’s dirty, it’s yours, and I’ll come back to jail. . . . Yeah. Save yourself some time. Don’t get technical.’’ He glanced at me, then said into the phone, “He’s an okay guy. Get off his case. He’s a real citizen. An important citizen. You don’t fuck with him, Al. You fuck with him, you got serious problems. Capisce?”

  Me? Was he talking about me?

  Bellarosa said to the U.S. Attorney, “I’m sorry you’re pissed off, but you should just think about it. Okay? . . . Yeah. I’ll do that. Catch you on TV tonight, right?’’ Bellarosa laughed. “Yeah. Okay. See ya.’’ He hung up and went back to his newspaper.

  Madonna mia. These people were crazy. I mean, it was as if they were playing at being Americans in public, but between themselves some sort of ancient ritual was taking place.

  No one spoke for a while, then Bellarosa looked up from his paper and asked his boys, “Okay?”

  Lenny replied, “I never spotted nobody, boss.”

  Bellarosa glanced at his watch, then asked me, “You hungry?”

  “No.”

  “You need a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I got just the place.’’ He said to Lenny, “Drive over to Mott Street. We’ll get a little lunch.”

  Caffè Roma is a fairly famous spot in the heart of Little Italy. I’d been there a few times for dinner with out-of-towners. But it wasn’t on Mott Street. I said to Bellarosa, “Mulberry Street.”

  “What?”

  “Caffè Roma is on Mulberry Street.”

  “Oh, yeah. We’re not going there. We’re going to Giulio’s on Mott Street.”

  I shrugged.

  He saw that I didn’t appreciate the significance of what he was saying, so he gave me a lesson. “Something else you got to remember, Counselor—what you say you’re doing and what you’re doing don’t have to be the same thing. Where you say you’re going and where you’re going are never the same place. You don’t give information to people who don’t need it or to people who could give it to other people who shouldn’t have it. You’re a lawyer. You know that.”

  Indeed I did, but a lunch destination was not the kind of information I kept secret or lied about.

  But then again, nobody wanted to shoot me at lunch.

  Twenty-eight

  Little Italy is not far from Foley Square and is also close to Police Plaza, the FBI headquarters at Federal Plaza, and the state and city criminal courts. These geographical proximities are a convenience to attorneys, law enforcement people, and occasionally to certain persons residing in Little Italy who might have official business with one of these government agencies. So it was that we could actually have pulled up in front of Giulio’s Restaurant on Mott Street in Little Italy within five minutes of leaving Foley Square. But instead, because of other considerations, it took us close to an hour. On the other hand, it was only now noon, time for lunch.

  Giulio’s, I saw, was an old-fashioned restaurant located on the ground floor of one of those turn-of-the-century, six-story tenement buildings bristling with fire escapes. There was a glass-paneled door to the left, and to the right, a storefront window that was half-covered by a red café curtain. Faded gold letters on the window spelled out the word GIULIO ’ S .

  There was nothing else in the window, no menus, no press clippings, and no credit-card stickers. The establishment did not look enticing or inviting. As I mentioned, I come to Little Italy now and then, usually with clients, as Wall Street is not far away. But I’ve never noticed this place, and if I had, I wouldn’t have stepped inside. In truth, my clients (and I) prefer the slick Mulberry Street restaurants, filled with tourists and suburbanites who stare at one another, trying to guess who’s Mafia.

  Lenny drove off to park the car, and Vinnie entered the restaurant first. I guess he was the point man. I stood on the sidewalk with Bellarosa, who had his back to the brick wall and was looking up and down the street. I asked him, “Why are we standing outside?”

  Bellarosa replied, “It’s good to let them know you’re coming.”

  “I see. And you really can’t call ahead, can you?”

  “No. You don’t want to do that.”

  “Right.’’ He never looked at me, but kept an eye on the block. There are many fine restaurants in Little Italy, all trying to keep a competitive edge. A shortcut to fame and fortune sometimes occurs when a man like don Bellarosa comes in and gets shot at his table. A terrible headline flashed in front of my eyes: DANDY DON AND MOUTHPIECE HIT .

  I asked my lunch companion, “Has anyone been knocked off here?”

  He glanced at me. “What? Oh . . . no. Yeah. Once. Yeah, back in the Prohibition days. Long time ago. You like fried squid? Calamaretti fritti?”

  “Probably not.”

  Vinnie opened the door and stuck his head out. “Okay.”

  We entered. The restaurant was long and narrow, and the rows of tables had traditional red-checkered cloths. The floor was ancient white ceramic tile, and the ceiling was that pressed tin with glossy white paint on it. Three ceiling fans spun lazily, keeping the smell of garlic circulating. On the plain white, plaster walls were cheap prints, all showing scenes of sunny Italy. The place wasn’t much to look at, but it was authentic.

  There weren’t many diners, and I could see waiters standing around in red jackets, all stealing glances at don Bellarosa. A man in a black suit rushed toward us, his hand prematurely extended, and he and Bellarosa greeted each other in Italian. Bellarosa called him Patsy, but did not actually introduce him to me, though he was obviously the maître d’.

  Patsy showed us to a corner table in the rear. It was a nice comfortable table with good fields of fire.

  Lenny had arrived, and he and Vinnie took a table near the front window with a good view of the door. Now we had interlocking fields of fire, which was the first requirement for a pleasant lunch at Giulio’s.

  Patsy was obsequious, the waiters bowed and bowed and bowed as
we walked by, and a man and a woman, apparently the owner and his wife, ran out of the kitchen and stopped just short of prostrating themselves on the floor. Everyone was grinning except Frank, who had this sort of Mafia poker face on that I’d never seen before. I said to him, “Come here often?”

  “Yeah.’’ He said something to the owner in Italian, and the man ran off, perhaps to kill himself, I thought, but he returned shortly with a bottle of Chianti and two glasses. Patsy uncorked the wine but Frank poured. Finally, after a lot of fussing around our table, everyone left us alone. Frank banged his glass against mine and said, “Salute!”

  “Cheers,’’ I replied, and drank the wine, which tasted like grappa diluted with tannic acid. Yuk!

  Frank smacked his lips. “Aahh . . . that’s good. Special stuff. Direct from the other side.”

  They should have left it there.

  A few more people had entered, and I looked around. The clientele at lunch hour seemed to be mostly locals, mostly men, and mostly old, wearing baggy suits without ties. I could overhear a mixture of English and Italian around me.

  There were a few younger men in good suits, and like a vampire who can tell its own kind at a glance, I recognized them as Wall Street types, trendy twerps who had “discovered’’ Giulio’s the way Columbus discovered America, i.e., it ain’t there until I find it.

  Here and there I noticed tables at which were men who I thought might be in Frank’s business. And in fact, Frank nodded to a few of these people, who nodded back. Despite the informality of the place and the fact that it was warm, only the Wall Street twerps and a few of the old men had removed their jackets. The rest of the clientele, I was sure, were either wearing shoulder holsters or wanted everyone to think they were. Frank, I knew, could not be armed, as he had just been through a booking and search. Lenny and Vinnie, I knew, were armed. I was basically unarmed, except for my three-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen and my American Express Gold Card.

  I said to my client, “Are you satisfied with the way it went this morning?”