by James Lepore
6.
In the months leading to his disbarment, Chris had lain in bed countless times waiting for the noise to die down in his friend’s infantile club two stories below before he could sleep. But the bar was quiet when he returned to Bedford Street from his meeting with Joseph at around ten o’clock. Chris remembered as he climbed the stairs that Vinnie had mentioned that he had switched “ladies” night from Wednesday to Thursday as a means of jumpstarting the weekend, when business was at its peak. Chris’ apartment had been carved out of a larger one that ran across the front of the four-story building. His matchbox living room was on the corner, and had a window that led to a fire escape that was lit from below by the glow from the neon “African Queen” sign above the club’s door. The dramatically scripted sign was in hot yellow, except for the “i,” which was bright green and in the shape of a thick palm tree, or, if you preferred, a fat penis.
Chris brought three cold Coronas outside and sat above the palm tree/penis, which alone among its fellow letters flicked on and off at regular intervals. New York is never actually quiet, but only relatively so, and tonight was a relatively quiet night, especially with the club being slow. There were the usual sirens and horns in the distance, and the steady buzz of the city that no one really hears unless they choose to.
Chris’ post-divorce run of good fortune ended – though he did not know it at the time – on the March day in 2001, when Paulie Raimo walked into his office carrying federal indictment papers in his pocket. Chris’ age, Raimo, who lived in Hempstead on Long Island, had grown up in Brooklyn where he began his criminal career at the age of fifteen selling marijuana in his high school cafeteria. Twenty-five years later, he had graduated to stock fraud and was now charged as a co-conspirator in a classic pump-and-dump scheme. He and two other mob types – all linked to Jimmy Barsonetti, the recently ensconced don of Brooklyn – were alleged to have muscled their way into control of a small brokerage in Great Neck. Once established, they began making substantial purchases of selected stocks on margin via straw men, pumping the price of these stocks up by lying to the firm’s clients about the issuing company’s performance, then selling at large profits before the stocks fell back to their real values. Over five million dollars had been made before the NAS-DAQ and NYSE computers flagged the brokerage and arrests were made.
Chris had handled enough pump-and-dump cases, both as a prosecuting and a defense attorney, to know that each had the same basic storyboard, although there were several things about Raimo’s that heightened his interest. First and foremost was the name of the lead trial attorney for the government, Ed Dolan. Dolan, fifteen years an Assistant U.S. Attorney, was the head of the same task force started in the mid-eighties by then United States Attorney and now Mayor, Rudolph Guiliani, a task force that had put large-scale Italian-American organized crime virtually out of business in New York by the early nineties. U.S. v Raimo involved three low level thugs who did not even know enough to include an occasional loss among their illegal trades so as to at least keep the stock exchanges’ computers confused. The real target was almost certainly Barsonetti, a newcomer who rumor had it had carved out his Brooklyn fiefdom by killing off the last remnants of the once mighty Velardo family. The plan – a typical prosecutor’s tactic – would be to get Raimo or one of his co-conspirators to turn on Barsonetti. Not until Barsonetti was indicted would a lawyer of Dolan’s stature appear as lead counsel. But here he was handling a nickel-and-dime case that would normally be in the hands of an assistant a year or two out of law school.
Second, the lawyers representing Raimo’s co-defendants refused to enter into a joint defense agreement with Chris. These agreements, which provide for the sharing of information among defense counsel, are common in cases where co-conspirators have the same basic defenses, and are not likely to turn on each other. What was it that these lawyers, or Barsonetti, who was surely paying the legal fees and pulling all of the important strings, knew that Chris did not? Third was Raimo’s attitude. A loser with two short prison terms under his belt, Paulie seemed to Chris almost from the beginning more to be feigning worry than actually feeling it. Even when Dolan made it clear that the government would not plea bargain – that Raimo would either have to plead guilty to the entire fifteen count indictment or go to trial – the former teenage marijuana dealer turned stock hustler did not really seem fazed.
These were not signs that Chris missed. It was just that he could not fathom their meaning at the time. When he himself was indicted, in the fall of 2001, on the strength of evidence surreptitiously taped by Raimo, their hidden meaning took a back seat to Chris’ active – not to say manic – cooperation with his lawyer in his own defense. His acquittal, a year later, brought tears of relief to his eyes, but his joy was short-lived. Less than a month later, he was notified that the Bar Association had begun disbarment proceedings. It was Ed Dolan who had made himself lead counsel in U.S v. Raimo, Ed Dolan who tried, and lost, U.S. v. Massi, and Ed Dolan who filed the formal complaint with the Bar Association that led, after another bitter, year-long struggle, to Chris’ disbarment. And now Dolan was trying to pin the murder of Paulie Raimo on him, to send Chris to the gas chamber. Farfetched? Not if you knew the players and their histories. Not if you saw Ed Dolan’s fifteen year old face, as Chris did, a few hours after he returned from identifying his father’s body at the Bellevue Hospital morgue on a cold and bitter morning in February of 1977.
“Your fucking father! Your fucking father!” Ed had screamed. “Your fucking father!”
“What?” Chris had replied. “My father what?”
“He killed my dad. Shot him dead. Your fucking grease ball wop fucking father!”
Ed’s face was white, and his lips were blue from waiting under the Sixth Avenue el in the cold for Chris to walk by on his way home from school. It was not a sight Chris was ever likely to forget, and he hadn’t. He remembered it, and the bloody fight that followed, as he finished his last beer. Joe Black brought death home with him that day, and now Chris wondered if it ever really left. Maybe, he thought, he would have to exorcise it with a killing of his own.
No one knew why Ed Dolan Sr. interfered in the business between Joe Black Massi and Johnny Logan at Valerio’s Tavern on that February night in 1977, least of all Joe Black. There was talk afterward that Logan and Dolan were partners in the renegade numbers, drug and loan shark operation that Logan was known to be running in the recently opened and crime-plagued Two Bridges Houses where Logan lived and whose twelve thousand residents were a dream market for his rackets.
In those days, the entire Lower East Side, from Houston Street down to the Manhattan Bridge, was controlled by Richie Velardo, who was then in his early sixties, and in command of a gang of some two hundred soldiers of various rank, all of them violent men. Logan had been somehow deluded into thinking that he did not have to turn over a percentage of his profits to Velardo, or even ask his permission to operate in the don’s territory. Perhaps the warnings he had been given had not been forceful enough, or perhaps Logan, seeing opportunity in the upheaval and turmoil taking place throughout the city at the time, wanted to start a war, to wrest control of the Two Bridges area from the Boot. What better way to do it than to poke his finger directly into Velardo’s eye? One thing was certain: Logan had no idea his impulse – either to be an outlaw among outlaws, or to carve out a kingdom of his own – would resonate far into the future and affect the lives of people completely unknown and unconnected to him at the time.
In 1977, the ten-block-by-thirty-block strip of Manhattan along the East River between the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges was a no man’s land of grime-coated tenements, facing each other, row upon row, across streets that baked under the summer sun and turned heartlessly cold in winter. Except for a handful of ill-conceived federally financed public housing projects – which only served to ghettoize the area even more – this part of the Lower East Side was little changed physically from the first part of the century when it w
as a cauldron of dirt poor immigrants from all over the world.
It was into this unhappy landscape that Joe Black Massi drove from his apartment on Carmine Street, across Lower Manhattan, to confront Logan. He had received a late call from Andy O’Brien, the owner of Valerio’s and on the Boot’s payroll for years, informing him that Johnny Logan, the would-be capo, was having a drink in the back room with an unknown companion.
Joe Black’s car, a five-year-old, nondescript Ford, had barely had time to warm up by the time he parked it on Madison Street across from the fortress-like footings of the Manhattan Bridge. The cold bit at him as he walked the two unlit, windblown blocks to the bar, where, entering, he was happy to feel the flush of heat in the front room, and also to note that the place was empty. O’Brien, behind the bar, nodded toward the back, and, without bothering to shake hands or say hello, Joe took off his heavy wool overcoat and scarf, and pushed open the door to O’Brien’s “club,” a twenty-by-twenty, windowless room with a worn out hardwood floor and three or four wooden tables and chairs, where regulars could have a private conversation or an all night card game.
Inside, at a table in the far right corner, he found Logan and Dolan, who he knew by sight and of whom he had heard stories of his days in the late forties and early fifties as an enforcer – for what side Joe did not know – in the series of wildcat strikes that broke the once iron grip of Joseph Patrick Ryan on the then thriving International Longshoremen’s Association on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront. The yellowed lamp hanging over their table cast a deceivingly mellow glow over the two Irishmen, whose dark eyes revealed little, except for a gleam of displeasure at the appearance of Joe Black in the room.
“I need to talk to you alone,” Joe said, directing his gaze at Logan, who was sitting on the right side of the table.
“What about?” Logan answered. He and Dolan looked at each other, and then back at Joe, who was standing just inside the door, about ten feet away, in partial darkness.
Joe did not reply. He rarely said anything twice, or made any effort to press his opinions on others. On the table between Logan and Dolan was a bottle of Canadian Club, about two-thirds full, and two glasses.
“This is my friend, Ed,” said Logan. “I know what you’re here for. You can talk to both of us. Have a seat.”
Joe walked over and put his coat and scarf neatly over the back of a chair to his left, then returned to his position near the door. At five-nine, a hundred and eighty pounds, wearing a navy blue turtleneck sweater and black slacks, there was nothing spectacular about Joe physically, except for his dark eyes, perhaps – the way they seemed to see you and not see you, as if you were already dead.
“The don has accountants,” said Joe. “Did you know that?”
It was Logan’s turn to remain silent. Dolan had not yet said a word, but he seemed restless, and this Joe Black noticed.
“They have made a study of your business,” Joe continued. “They believe – with caution – that you have made a profit of two million dollars in the last year. Don Velardo wants one million dollars, in one week. Also, you must stop doing business until he permits you to resume.” He spoke in the formal, stilted, slightly hesitant English of the European peasant who, driven by shame and ambition, had worked with great intensity not to master it so much as to keep its complexities and maddening contradictions at bay.
“And what if I refuse?” Logan said.
“Then I will cripple you. And if you continue to refuse, I will kill you.”
“Who is this fucking goombah?” Dolan said, putting his hands – massive, powerful hands – on the table in front of him.
Joe lifted his sweater at the waist, and put his hand on the barrel of his gun, a .44 Magnum, in 1977, one of the most powerful handguns you could buy, legally or illegally. At ten feet, it would take off Dolan’s arm at the shoulder, or his head at the neck for that matter. Joe had not had to use it as often as people thought. Displaying it was usually all that was usually necessary, his reputation being the most effective weapon in his arsenal. But tonight it was not enough, as Dolan – six-two and all muscle – in one motion, rose, lifted the table in his hands, and hurled it at Joe like a discus. Its leading edge slammed into Joe’s chest, knocking him violently backward against the door and pinning him there for a split second that seemed like an eternity to the three men in the room. Joe Black’s sternum was broken, but he did not know it at the time. He flung the table back toward Dolan and crumpled to the floor, spinning quickly as he did behind the table where he had laid his coat. Dolan picked up a chair, lifted it over his head and advanced toward Joe, who rose to one knee and drew his gun. When Dolan was three feet away and the chair was at the top of its arc, Joe fired, the bullet taking Dolan in the chest and stopping him dead in his tracks, literally. As Dolan’s body slumped to the floor, Joe turned the gun on Logan, who had not moved from his now almost comically exposed seat at the vanished table.
“Do you have a gun?” Joe asked.
Logan nodded.
“Put it on the floor, slowly.”
Logan did as he was told, his limited imagination never having offered up a scene such as the one he had just witnessed. Joe picked up the gun, a cheap, .22 caliber revolver – a throwaway – and checked the cylinder, which was full. He then shot Logan once in the stomach with it. Joe wiped his Magnum clean with his sweater, then bent over and placed it firmly in Logan’s right hand, placing his free hand gently, almost, it seemed, respectfully, on Logan’s chest as he did, to prevent him from toppling over. Placing his hand over Logan’s hand, his trigger finger over Logan’s, he fired the gun into the opposite wall, ensuring a positive paraffin test, if the police were inclined to do one. He let the Magnum fall to the floor. Dolan was lying on his side, the blood from his chest wound soaking into his flannel shirt and thick wool sweater.
Joe wiped Logan’s revolver clean, and, kneeling beside Dolan, placed it firmly into a grip he formed with the former longshoreman’s right thumb and fingers and fired it past Logan’s left shoulder. Hoping that both Dolan and young Logan were in fact right-handed, Joe rose and surveyed the carnage. Logan was still sitting in his chair, blood oozing through his fingers where he clutched his stomach, his face drained of its color, his eyes fast losing their connection to the world. He was still breathing. Ed Dolan was not. As Joe was putting on his coat, the door creaked open about twelve inches and Andy O’Brien first looked, then sidled into the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Is anybody out there?” Joe asked.
“No.”
“Call the police,” Joe said, quietly, looking around the room one last time. “Leave everything as it is. I wasn’t here.”
O’Brien was staring at the two bodies, his eyes grimly accepting the heavy price of Richie The Boot’s protective services.
“Did you hear me?” said Joe. “I wasn’t here.”
“Yes. I heard you.”
“The kid’s still alive. Give me a minute, then call. He might get lucky.”
There were fifty thousand longshoremen on the New York and New Jersey waterfronts in 1950, and fifteen thousand in 1970. By the end of the century, there would be only a few thousand. Containerization, not corruption, killed the union – and the trade – that Ed Dolan had, as a strapping and courageous young man newly arrived from County Armagh, fought so hard and so long to save. This he might have been able to accept, since it applied across the board, but the post-Ryan, governmentrun daily shape-ups, where work was not necessarily or automatically based on seniority, were a bitter blow. The very fairness he fought to impose on the system operated to exclude him from the steady work he needed to maintain his dignity and feed his family.
By the early seventies, he was working one or two days a week, at most, unloading ships. The rest of the time, he was mostly idle, unable to find work in a city whose economy was in a free fall, and where almost any job he could do was controlled by unions who would be loathe to admit a middle-aged newcomer eve
n in good times. When his young cousin, Johnny Logan, called, in late 1976, to offer him a piece of his business at the Two Bridges Houses, in return for Dolan’s “muscle” as Logan had absurdly put it, Ed, angry and disillusioned, decided to give it a try. He was afraid of no man, and anything, he felt, would be better than hanging out in saloons or watching his son go off to school while he stayed home with nothing to do.
Dolan’s wife Margaret was off on a five-day tour of Jersey City’s saloons when he was killed. The police had no choice but to take Ed Jr. out of school and bring him up to Bellevue to identify his father’s body. When he returned, Johnny Logan’s girlfriend Moira, a darkly beautiful young woman in pointy boots, a red leather jacket and a striped scarf, was waiting for him in front of his apartment building on Washington Street in the West Village. Johnny was alive. She had been allowed in to see him for a second before his surgery. Joe Black Massi killed his dad, then gut shot Johnny, then made it look like a shootout between the two cousins. It was no shootout. Don’t believe anything else. Andy O’Brien worked for Richie Velardo. He’ll lie to save his own life. It was Joe Black. He’s the murderer.
Moira, tears, makeup and strands of wet brown hair streaking her face, hugged Ed Jr. and cried on his shoulder as they stood in the small tiled foyer of his tenement. There was a vulnerability, a nakedness, in Moira’s eyes that had caught at Ed’s stomach. Now, breathing in her perfume, he felt an intense stab of desire, and was immediately shamed by it. Then he watched the building’s tired old wooden door swing quickly open and shut as she left to return to Beth Israel Hospital. He had not cried. That would have to wait. He had to figure out how to find his mom. But before that, there was something else. He had to find Chris Massi. Chris had to know how much he hated him. He had to know.
