“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“He told me to treat you badly. He said that will make you love me.”
“I don’t want to love you,” she said.
“But I do want to treat you badly,” he said.
“Then why don’t you?”
“It’s still early,” Nilo said, pulling the girl to him, even as he thought, I am surely one of God’s chosen creatures. And life will only get better. America is full of opportunities, if one is wise. He just felt bad that the Falcones were too stupid ever to have figured that out.
* * *
AS THE TWO GIRLS LEFT Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the skies had darkened, and they ran all the way back to the Falcone apartment, arriving just moments before the rain started. No one else was home and Tina brewed tea, and like two dowager queens, she and Sofia sat by the apartment’s front window, watching the sudden cold September rain, driven by gale winds, crashing against their window. Thunder echoed through the canyons of the streets and lightning danced among the clouds.
“I love it when it’s like this,” Sofia said. “It makes me feel so small and insignificant. It makes all my problems seem unimportant. I can almost feel God right here with me.”
“Mmmmm,” Tina mumbled, not looking at her friend.
“You’re not paying any attention to me,” Sofia said.
“Yes, I am. You feel insignificant and God’s with you, right?”
Sofia blushed. What had seemed like an insight a moment ago now was only a childish outburst.
“Oh, never mind,” she said in mock irascibility, and they both sat in companionable silence for a few minutes.
“Where’s Tommy been today?” Sofia finally asked.
“He has some woman somewhere,” Tina said airily. “A waitress.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes. I heard Papa telling Mama about it. He didn’t know I heard. It is some waitress in that diner where we met Tommy that night.”
“That big blonde?” Sofia asked.
“I guess so. I don’t really remember seeing her.”
“And Tommy’s there now?”
“I guess so,” Tina said again.
“Do you think that they’re—”
“That they’re doing it? Probably right now. All sweaty and sliding all over each other. At least, I don’t think they’re trading recipes,” Tina said. “Would your insignificant self like more tea?” she asked with a smile. “Since God’s with you, ask him if he’d like some, too.”
“Sacrilege,” Sofia said. “You’ll have to confess that to Mario.”
“Some other priest,” Tina said, picking up both teacups. “I don’t go to Mario anymore.”
Sofia followed her into the kitchen. “Oh, it’s like that, is it?” she said. “Your sins are too great to tell your brother about?”
Tina laughed. “Not yet. But I’m afraid that someday they will be, and I want to have a priest who doesn’t know me … just in case.”
They sat at the kitchen table, waiting for more water to boil on the stove. “How is your cousin?” Tina asked.
“Charlie? He’s fine. I can’t get over how things have changed at home ever since I went to see him. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
“You like him,” Sofia said.
Tina laughed. “He’s a clown, a little man in a good suit, acting tough. The only things nice about him are his hands. Real long fingers. You know what they say long fingers are a sign of?”
“No. You want to tell me?”
“Wait till you grow up,” Tina said.
There was another long silence while the building shook with the crash of three thunderclaps in rapid succession.
“Do you ever think about that?” Tina asked.
“About what?”
“Oh, having babies. And, you know, the part that comes before.”
Tina walked away and busied herself at the stove with the tea.
“Well, do you?” she asked again.
“I don’t know. It just all seems so awful and messy,” Sofia said. “Why don’t we just run off together, you and me. Go live in the woods and eat berries.”
“I hate berries,” Tina said.
She carried the two cups of tea back into the parlor. As she set them on the windowsill, Sofia asked from behind her, “I suppose you’d like to do it with him?”
“Do what with whom?”
“You know. With my cousin.”
Tina hesitated. “Papa would die of apoplexy and I would die of shame. Your cousin is a lowlife.”
“Tina?”
“What?”
“Have you ever done it with anybody?”
“No. I try not to think about it,” Tina said. “I don’t have time. I’m going to be an opera singer. Doing those things wastes your energy so you can’t sing as well.”
“You could always sing flat,” Sofia said, and both girls laughed loudly.
“Tina?”
“Yes?”
“You have a lot of boys come over now from where you work. Have you ever let a boy touch you?”
“Yes,” Tina said slowly. “A couple of times. Only up here, though.” She touched her bosom.
“Boys from work?”
“Sometimes,” Tina said.
“Nilo too?”
“No,” Tina said. “He’s my cousin. That’s almost illegal. Why? Has he tried anything with you?”
“No,” Sofia said. “But he wants to. You know, he’s moving out of Mrs. Annacharico’s. He’s going to take an apartment of his own somewhere. If we wanted to do it, we would even have a place to do it.”
Again both girls grew silent.
“You know,” Sofia said after a moment, “maybe if I loved somebody, really loved somebody. Otherwise I don’t think I want to do it with anybody. No man, anyway.”
“What do you mean, ‘no man’?” What else is there?” Tina asked.
Sofia was silent and Tina said, “Nilo’s very handsome. And you’re always with him when you’re teaching him.” She poured more tea. “You were lucky to get that job. I tried to teach him to read, but he didn’t have any money then and I was just doing it for free. Now that he’s a big real estate salesman, I guess he’s got lots of money for lessons.”
“I don’t think he’s selling real estate anymore.”
“Maybe not,” Tina said. “One night I heard Papa telling Tommy that Nilo is working for Salvatore Maranzano.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s another gangster. Like your cousin.”
Sofia said, “It’s all too much for me. And I don’t know anything about gangsters. Everybody’s always talking gangster this and gangster that, but I don’t know. Sure, Cousin Charlie sells Papa illegal wine to serve in his restaurant. But so what? Everybody does that. I heard that uptown, they are even starting places, like restaurants, that sell liquor right out in the open. They call them talkeasies or something. Prohibition is stupid. No one pays attention to it.”
“Speakeasies,” Tina said. “I’ve heard Papa talk about them. But it’s not just selling liquor, you know. The gangsters do other things, too.”
“Like what?” Sofia asked disbelievingly.
“Oh, gambling, murder, they even sell women.”
“I hear those things, too,” Sofia said, “but I don’t know what I believe. I think you hang around with too many policemen.”
Outside, the rain was letting up. Sofia said, “How do those women do it? You know, let strange men put their hands all over them.”
“Better strange men than no men,” Tina said flippantly.
“Oh, you talk a good game,” Sofia said. She looked out the window again. “Maybe in this world, I love only you,” she said, and then suddenly embarrassed by her own honesty, she added quickly, “Do you wish you knew what would happen in the future?”
“I do know. I’m going to be a big star. You’re going to be happily married to Nilo, who is goi
ng to be the richest man in the world, and you’ll have lots of little children, and I will be their godmother.”
“And life won’t be dull or dirty?” Sofia asked.
“No,” Tina said, looking out the window, too. “Life won’t be dull.” Both girls giggled. “Dirty maybe, but not dull.”
• New York City was awash in liquor. Speakeasies were sprouting like weeds, beginning to operate around the clock, and they had a big thirst. Traditionally, many Italian families had made their own wines, and now their products were snapped up by the gangs for resale. Stills were set up in almost every barn and deserted factory building in the city. Across the river in New Jersey, plants—operating under the guise of cereal manufacturers—were pouring out thousands of barrels of beer every week. European liquor was being shipped into Canada and Mexico and then smuggled across the borders or in by boat for sale in the United States. Outnumbered Coast Guard and alcohol enforcement agents worked around the clock to halt the shipments but with little success. And still, New York wanted more … more … more.
• There was such a demand for liquor that some bootleg gangs began to rob the booze shipments of other bootleg gangs, and as the era of generalized lawlessness spread, a new criminal name was heard in the city: “Kid Trouble.” Hardly a week passed without Kid Trouble hijacking one of Joe Masseria’s liquor shipments, and a ten-thousand-dollar bounty was instantly put on his head by an angry Masseria. No one knew Kid Trouble’s identity, but, fanned by a growing string of tabloid newspaper stories, his exploits quickly began to take on the aspect of a Robin Hood legend. Working with only a small group, Kid Trouble was fearless and, when necessary, brutal. Bootleg drivers who offered any resistance to a hijacking were killed without warning. By the end of 1921, Masseria had increased the bounty on Kid Trouble’s head to twenty-five thousand dollars.
• Jack and Charlie’s 21 Club opened, eventually becoming the most famous gin mill in the city. A night on the town now meant dinner at the Little Restaurant, later renamed Sardi’s, then a Broadway show, and finally a trip to the nearest speakeasy for a night of carousing.
• Soon after his late-night meeting with Luciano, Meyer Lansky had begun to pay less attention to his penny-ante gambling rackets. Working with his underaged but deadly partner, Ben “Bug” Siegel, Lansky branched out into stealing cars and making them available to different gangs. Slowly they developed a stable of Jewish toughs who thought nothing of killing, and when he thought they were ready Luciano convinced Joe Masseria that the Bug and Meyer gang could do a good job of protecting Masseria’s liquor shipments from being hijacked on the streets of New York, and, if they ran into him, ridding the city of Kid Trouble in the bargain. Masseria complained about the price but finally went along. It was easy to go along with the persuasive Luciano.
Meanwhile, Lansky and Siegel had made it their mission to protect Luciano from murder at the hands of any other mobster. They needed him; they planned to go a long way together.
• On a summer evening in 1921, Luciano met another young man named Frank Costello in a speakeasy on Forty-fourth Street at Eighth Avenue. Annoyed because the dapper and older soft-spoken Costello seemed to be a favorite of Masseria’s, Luciano argued with him and then pulled a knife. Cooler heads prevailed and later Luciano apologized. Costello, he had found out, was close to Arnold Rothstein, the Broadway gambler who had fixed the 1919 World Series and who had provided a lot of the seed money for new crime organizations. Luciano considered this a good contact to have, and soon he convinced Masseria to put Costello in charge of all the bribes being paid by Joe the Boss to city hall and to the courts.
“Costello,” Luciano said, “is a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
• Margaret Gorman, sixteen, measuring 30-25-32, won the first Miss America contest in Atlantic City.
• Eddie Cantor was a Broadway star, singing “Ma! (He’s Making Eyes at Me).”
• Enrico Caruso died. The world mourned. New York City got drunk and everybody sang America’s favorite song: “Ain’t We Got Fun?”
CHAPTER 4
February 1922
Nilo had started out as an errand boy, hanging around Maranzano’s office, delivering envelopes to city hall and to lawyers’ offices, collecting envelopes from dingy betting parlors, frustrated because he knew big things were being done and he had nothing to do with them, but he did his job anyway.
His regular sexual interludes with Betty—and then with an endless string of other willing girls, available in Maranzano’s speakeasies—helped, but he still champed at the bit, waiting to be given work that he thought was worthy of him. He was impatient, but he knew he had some curious hold on Maranzano. When I am ready, he will call on me. I am young. I can wait.
Still, there were too many people around. Too many people who came into the office every day and gossiped among themselves about what they had done the night before—Masseria bookies they had robbed, Masseria trucks they had hijacked. Finally, Nilo lost his patience and reminded everyone how he was Don Salvatore’s favorite boy and wanted to know everything—where they were going, what they were doing—and he slowly insinuated himself into every piece of Maranzano’s operation.
He did not try to lead. He was content to follow until he learned how it was all done—about the gambling, the prostitutes, the speakeasies, the merchant shakedowns—and then slowly, without anyone’s clear approval, he put his hand in more and more.
The gangs of toughs who hung around Maranzano’s real estate offices, the other thugs who worked in garages and stills and whorehouses and gambling parlors, all soon came to realize that Nilo was someone especially close to Don Salvatore, and after a while they knew that he had Maranzano’s ear and felt that his word could be accepted as Don Salvatore’s word.
For himself, Don Salvatore had not given Nilo approval for what he was doing, but neither had he told him to stop. And, in the tightly knit organization, there was no doubt that he knew what Nilo was up to. So in the absence of orders to the contrary, Nilo decided he would keep on until told otherwise.
Instead of criticism, though, within a year he had been promoted officially. It became Nilo’s responsibility every Tuesday to make the rounds of all the speakeasies in the city that bought liquor and beer from Maranzano and to collect for the previous week’s shipments. This was considered one of the most sought-after jobs because record keeping was careless and a man with sticky fingers could make an awful lot of money.
But Nilo was meticulous in his duties. He kept careful records of who owed and who paid, and he delivered the cash to Maranzano each Tuesday evening, and even though the collections regularly totaled well over one hundred thousand dollars, never a penny was missing.
Maranzano was very pleased with his protégé’s performance. When he had put Nilo in charge of all bootlegging, he had worried that the young man would run into trouble with other gang members who resented his promotion over other, older men. But Nilo had never reported any trouble, and the operation was working more smoothly than it ever had before. Early in the period of Prohibition, speakeasy owners had been known to complain because Maranzano’s strong-arm men were more efficient than his liquor suppliers, and often the gin mills could not get all the liquor they needed. But since Nilo’s promotion, those complaints had died out.
Having enough sources of supply was a continuing problem, and until it was solved it would always hinder the growth of the Maranzano crime family. In the number of speakeasies that bought liquor from him, Don Salvatore was still Number Two in the city behind Masseria’s gang, but he was a closer Number Two now. Nilo had done well and Maranzano was satisfied. And while he knew about Nilo’s liking for the violent life, he chose to look the other way. He expected that Nilo would grow up one day. In the meantime, his loyalty was unquestionable.
So Maranzano would have been surprised to know that on a cold February Tuesday, Nilo had left his office and instantly turned over the job of making collections to another young member of the g
ang. Then Nilo had gone downtown to an abandoned commercial garage on the edge of Chinatown, where three other young men waited for him.
Nilo had specially recruited these three. They were all Castellammarese, all lived in New Jersey, where they had relatives, and all were unknown to the New York mob. Around Nilo’s age, they were, like him, unafraid of violence. He paid them well, probably better than he had to, but Nilo thought it a wise investment because if anyone were to reveal that Nilo was Kid Trouble his life would not be worth a nickel.
“Any word?” Nilo asked, as he entered the shabby garage.
“We just got it,” one of the young men said. “My sister’s boyfriend was told to get ready to bring in a big shipment tonight. Two trucks. All imported Scotch whisky sent down from Canada. He’ll take over the driving when it gets to Jersey.”
“Where’s it going?”
“To the Masseria warehouse over near Twelfth Avenue,” the young man said.
“That’s where we’ll hit the shipment then,” Nilo said.
One of the other men looked surprised. “You don’t want to take it in Jersey?”
Nilo shook his head. “No. Let Masseria go to all the trouble of driving it through Jersey, past the cops, get it over the river. He can do the work and take the risks. Then we’ll just nail the two trucks and bring them over here.” He looked back at the first young man. “Good work,” Nilo said, then smiled. “How close is your sister to this truck driver?”
“He’s a roll in the hay, is all.”
“No wedding plans?”
The man shook his head. “Good,” Nilo said. “I wouldn’t want to be making her a widow before her time. There’s a thousand dollars in it for her. Tell her to give him a little nookie and spend the day with him. Find out when and where he picks up the truck. Then we’ll be ready. Any questions?”
No one spoke.
“All right,” Nilo said. “Hang around. Go to a movie or something. We’ll meet back here at five o’clock. And—”
The three men laughed at once. “We know, Kid. Keep our mouths shut.”
* * *
TOMMY HAD WOUND UP in the bed of Mabel Fay because of his simple good manners. One of his call boxes was on the corner near the all-night diner on Cornelia Street, and one evening in 1920 he had been reporting in to the precinct when he saw the waitress leave the restaurant at the end of her shift.
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