No gangster ever turns down a wedding invitation from an enemy. It is a safe gesture, since a reception is considered off-limits for violence. It gives the two rivals a chance to size one another up in a secure environment and try to assess when and where the next move will be made. “It gets to the point where you almost need a wedding to figure out who’s on whose side,” Pudge liked to say. “You can tell that by seeing where a particular guy sits, who he talks to and, sometimes, who he doesn’t talk to and even goes out of his way to avoid. That tells you that they may have made a pact and they don’t want anybody to know. It’s really crazy. Some weddings you go to there are more people there looking to kill you than shake your hand. You spend most of your time trying to figure out which way a guy’s going to swing. The bride and groom are the last two people on your mind. But that’s this business. What are simple things to civilians are always life and death to us.”
• • •
THE NIGHT OF May 15, 1928, was filled with music. Isabella, in a white veil and hand-sewn gown, mingled with ease among the hundred and twenty guests, the content smile of the new bride never off her lips. She greeted strangers and familiar faces with equal degrees of warmth, giving the large hall the intimate feel of a small dining room. The hardest of men at the reception were enchanted by her beauty, while their more suspicious wives were won over by her innocent nature. Her friends and family were swallowed up by the emotions of the night, thrilled to have the happiness of another bride to celebrate. They all looked at Angelo as a suitable but dangerous husband. He had their respect, but it grew more out of fear than affection.
Angus McQueen brought a six-piece band down from the Cotton Club and the soulful rhythms of their blues melodies filled the hall and ruled the dance floor. Ida the Goose, down for the weekend from her upstate farm, moved from one pair of arms to another, spirited and free in the company of men with guns. Pudge sat across from Jerry Ballister during the five-hour meal that was highlighted by a seven-tiered wedding cake. The two gangsters seldom spoke and when they did, the words were forced and veiled.
“You got to give the Italians credit,” Ballister said at one point. “They sure know how to throw a wedding.”
“They’re not bad when it comes to funerals either,” Pudge said.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Ballister said, smiling across the flower arrangement at Pudge.
“Maybe one day you will,” Pudge said, returning the smile.
Sitting next to Angelo, Ida the Goose lit a cigarette and poured herself a foamy glass of beer. She looked over at him, sizing him up in his black tuxedo and slicked back hair, and laughed.
“Do I look that bad?” Angelo asked.
“The first time I saw you, I didn’t know where the blood stopped and you began. Now, here you are, coming at me right off a movie screen.”
Angelo sipped from a glass of water and leaned closer to Ida. “I saw you talking to Jack Wells,” he noted. “You two seemed to hit it off.”
“I kept company with his brother a lot of years ago,” Ida told him. “He was just a kid, then, following the two of us around like a lap puppy.”
“His brother still alive?”
“We broke up about six months before I took over the Café. He pulled an armed heist and got caught. Got a soft judge and was given three years upstate. Should have been an easy stretch, but it wasn’t. At least not for him. He took a dive off the top tier of his cell block.”
“Pushed or jumped?” Angelo asked.
“What difference does it make?” Ida said. “Dead is dead.”
Angelo turned and saw the guests begin to form a line near the front table.
“They’re starting to hand out the gifts,” he said, sliding his chair back. “I should go stand with Isabella.”
“Here’s my gift,” Ida said, keeping a grip on Angelo’s hand. “I’ve been around a lot of men in my time, good ones and bad, and they all need a place and time where they let their guard down, try to forget their troubles, clear their minds, whatever. In most lines of work, you don’t give something like that a second thought. In ours, it could put you on a morgue slab. Jack Wells is no different from any man I ever met.”
“Where does he go to forget his troubles?” Angelo asked.
Ida the Goose stood and dropped the rest of her cigarette into the glass of beer. She wrapped her arms around Angelo and kissed the top of his head. “Dog fights,” she said. “And he never leaves until the last dog dies.”
• • •
THE CROWD PARTED to make room for the new couple and Angelo and Isabella took to the center of the dance floor. They held one another and swayed to the beat of a clarinet solo, Isabella’s head at rest on her husband’s shoulder.
Angelo knew that, whatever roads his life would lead him down, he would never be happier than he was at this moment. This was a day separate and inviolable from a lifetime that was to be packed with violence and death. Here, in a crowded hall, filled with the company of friends, family and enemies, Angelo Vestieri, for one full day, found peace.
“I will always love you,” he told her.
“I wish you were coming to Italy,” she whispered.
“There will be a day for that,” Angelo whispered back. “I promise you.”
As he spoke he looked over at Pudge’s table to see Jack Wells, James Garrett and Jerry Ballister staring over at him. Angelo knew from their hard looks and confident demeanor that if they had their way, the promise he had just made to Isabella would be one he would not live to keep.
• • •
ANGELO STOOD ON the closed deck of the tugboat, watching the ocean liner veer to its left and out of New York Harbor. He drank a cup of black coffee as Pudge steered the boat clear of the high waves.
“At least you look like you know what you’re doing,” Angelo said, still staring at the dark hull of the ship that was taking Isabella back to Italy.
“It’s the only thing I ever picked up from my old man,” Pudge said. “Before he split for who the hell knows where, and when he wasn’t drunk and pounding me around, he drove one of these for money. Sometimes he’d take me along for the ride and I paid attention.”
“You think she’ll be all right?” Angelo asked.
“She’s not the one about to get shot at by a full crew,” Pudge said. “That would be you and me. She’s gonna get a tan and have lots to eat. She might be a little fatter when she gets back, but my hunch is you’re still going to love her.”
“You think anybody saw me get off the ship?”
“They can’t see what they’re not looking for,” Pudge decided.
“Spider is parked inside the pier hold.”
“Then let’s start the honeymoon,” Pudge said.
• • •
JAMES GARRETT SAT in the third row of St. Matthew’s Church, kneeling down, his hands crossed, his eyes closed. It was late on a Saturday afternoon and the long line of people waiting to have their confessions heard had dwindled down to a handful. Garrett made the sign of the cross and sat back down, waiting for the last sinner to leave. He stared up at the altar with an ear-to-ear grin on his face and ten thousand in cash stuffed inside an envelope in his jacket pocket. He turned to his right and watched a dark-haired woman in high heels part the curtains of the confessional and make her way down the center aisle, her head bowed in deep prayer. Garrett wondered what sins such a woman would commit and how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers had been doled out by the senile priest hearing the five o’clock confessions to ease the burden of forgiveness. He looked to his left, saw the last person on line, an elderly woman with a black shawl over her shoulders and a black scarf bobby-pinned to her head, exit the booth. Garrett slid across the pew, stood and genuflected before the main altar, then walked casually toward the purple curtains to clear his soul of sin.
He leaned down in the dark cubicle and waited for the small window to slide open. When it did, he looked through the mesh screen and saw the shadow of the priest sittin
g with his back to the wall and his hand to his face. He crossed himself and began his litany. “Bless me Father for I have sinned,” Garrett said. “It has been two weeks since my last confession.”
The priest coughed into a handkerchief and nodded. “That’s not so long,” he said. “What sins did you commit in that time?”
Garrett took a deep breath and shrugged. “I lied a few times and cursed a lot more than I should. But it’s hard not to when you’re a cop and deal with the kind of people I do every day.”
“I see,” the priest said. “Anything else?”
“That’s pretty much the long and the short of it, Father,” Garrett said. “A couple of foul thoughts here and there, nothing more to it than that.”
“Do you pray every day?”
“Yes,” Garrett said. “Maybe not every day, but most days.”
“Did you pray today? Before you came here to make your peace with God?”
“Just a few minutes ago.” Garrett was curious about the line of questioning. In the darkness of the cubicle, he couldn’t make out the face on the other side. He knew it wasn’t the regular Saturday afternoon priest. “I gave thanks for the good fortune that’s come my way.”
“That gives you a clear soul,” the voice said. “And all that’s left now is for you to receive your penance.”
“Let’s have at it then, Father,” Garrett said, pressing his elbow against the padded envelope inside his jacket.
“Say three Hail Marys,” the voice instructed. “And the Lord’s Prayer. And then, die.”
James Garrett saw the muzzle and the flash pop of a bullet before he felt the sharp burn in his chest. The thick velour curtains that hid Garrett in his cubby parted, letting in shafts of flickering light. The crooked cop, his head resting against the thick wood of the confessional, looked up and saw Angelo Vestieri standing there. The man on the other end of the booth, Pudge Nichols, opened his door and stood behind Angelo.
“You’re too stupid to know the rules, dago,” Garrett said. “A church is supposed to be off-limits.”
Angelo stepped into the booth and put his gun against Garrett’s temple. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said, then pulled the trigger. Garrett jumped off his seat, slid down and slumped over dead in a corner of the booth. Angelo holstered his gun, reached into the cop’s jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope with the ten thousand dollars.
Angelo and Pudge walked to the front of the empty church and knelt down before the main altar, both blessing themselves. Angelo then took the envelope crammed with money and shoved it into the wooden poor box on his right.
“That should buy a few prayers for his soul,” Angelo said.
“Or a year’s worth of booze for the rectory,” Pudge said. “A good cause any way you look at it.”
They turned and walked out of the dark and empty church into the sinking sunrise of a late afternoon day.
• • •
THE MANNER IN which a gangster carries out a hit is just as important as the actual murder. How and where it’s done transmits a variety of signals to a warring rival. If the shooting occurs in a place unofficially declared off-limits, it puts an opponent in the uncomfortable position of not being able to anticipate his rival’s next move, realizing the person he is up against is willing to do anything at any time to achieve victory. Up until the James Garrett shooting, there had never been a mob-sanctioned hit inside a church. It caused turmoil within underworld circles and sent an instant message to Jack Wells and his crew that this war would be different.
“The crime bosses started to pay attention to Angelo right after the hit on Garrett,” Pudge told me. “Before then, I was considered the trigger and he was nothing more than the shadow on my right. With that one move, he changed the rules and put himself front and center. He did it the way he did everything else in his life—very quietly and when you least expect it. One of the reasons hits are so public is to bring more attention to the shooter than to the target. Angelo didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t want the tabloids to know who he was, but he did want his enemies to know what he did. The key to any victory is to pull off the unexpected. When you can do that, it scares people like no street shooting ever can.”
• • •
FRANCIS THE PIMP was asleep on the couch, his head tilted back, his arms hanging by his side. He was dressed in brown slacks, the belt unbuckled around his waist, and a white button-down shirt, his shoes off. The sun was twenty minutes shy of rising and the room was still shrouded in early-morning darkness. The floor around his feet was damp and sticky from spilled beer. Two dirty plates rested in the center of the wooden coffee table, inches from his legs, food remains crusted around the edges.
The man walked around the room, his footsteps unheard by Francis. He carefully placed a chair behind the couch, its back facing the shuttered windows. He stood on the chair and waited out its creaks. He held a thick rope in his hands and flipped one end through the steam pipes that lined the walls of the ceiling. He caught the loose end and curled the edges of the rope into knots and then pulled out enough rope to form a noose. He let it hover just above his head and quietly stepped off the chair.
The man watched the sleeping pimp’s chest heave up and down in a deep sleep. He pulled a roll of packing tape from his jacket pocket, stripped off two thick slices, leaned over and slapped them over Francis’s mouth. The pimp jumped awake at the touch, but was held in place by the man.
“Stay quiet,” the man instructed. “This will only take a few minutes.”
Francis shook his head, his eyes bugged out. He flailed his arms up and down and tried to move the man’s hand off his chest, but it was fear working against muscle and proved futile. The man grabbed Francis by the front end of his trousers and lifted him to his feet. He turned him around and moved him toward the chair, the noose swinging gently above it. Panic ruled Francis as soon as he saw the rope. He kicked and scratched and shoved against the strength of the man, to no avail. A gloved hand came down and slapped Francis across the face twice, the sting calming the tension.
“Get up on the chair,” the man said.
Francis shook his head. Sweat had drenched his face and the collar of his shirt. He was breathing heavily, and the tape was starting to wilt from the wet streams running down his cheeks. The man reared back and slapped him again.
“Get on that chair,” the man said. “You do it right, it’ll be over quick. If you make me shoot you, I’ll make sure to take my time.”
The man shoved Francis closer to the chair. The pimp’s legs were barely moving, each step a painful quiver. He helped lift him onto the chair and stood back, a gun now in his hand, pointing at the rope above Francis’s head.
“Put it around your neck,” the man said. “Nice and tight. That’s all you need to do. I’ll take over from there.”
Francis stared at the gun and lifted his hands above his head, feeling for the rope. He put the noose around his neck, tightened it and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled through his tears and the tape on his mouth. “I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt.”
“But somebody did,” the man said.
“It was Jack Wells,” Francis said in a clearer voice, pushing at the edges of the tape with his tongue. “He made me and Shirley do what we did.”
“You weren’t much of a pimp, Francis,” the man said. “And you’re not much of a man.”
“Please, please don’t,” Francis begged. “I’ll work for you. Do anything you want me to do. Just don’t let me die like this. Please, don’t let me die.”
The man looked up at Francis and holstered his gun. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lit it and took a drag, letting the smoke filter out through his nose.
“Take care of yourself, Francis,” the man said.
He pulled a leg back and kicked the chair out from under Francis the Pimp. The man walked to the couch and leaned against it, smoking his cigarette, watching Francis shake and twirl until his eyes popped
and his neck snapped. He tossed the remains of the cigarette onto the dirty dinner plate and left the apartment as quietly as he had entered.
Pudge Nichols’s mission for the morning was complete.
• • •
ANGELO RINSED OUT the hand towel and pressed it against Ida the Goose’s forehead. She was in her bed, a thick quilt raised up to her neck, fighting the shivers of a high fever. She looked up at Angelo and smiled, smelling the fresh coffee Pudge was brewing in the small kitchen just outside her bedroom.
“I can’t believe you got him making us breakfast,” Ida said. “God only knows what’s gonna end up stacked on a plate with him behind the stove.”
“The doctor said you needed to eat,” Angelo said. “He didn’t say it had to be any good.”
Ida took in a deep breath and Angelo could hear the thick bronchial rasp he knew so well rattling around her lungs. He lifted her into a sitting position, making it easier for her to pass air through a clogged nose and dry mouth. She had been sick for nearly two weeks before she placed a call to a local doctor who diagnosed her with a severe upper respiratory infection. He left behind a large bottle of cough syrup and a crumpled bill for services rendered. Angelo and Pudge arrived two days later to find Ida collapsed on the back porch, the empty bottle of syrup by her side. “There was no label on it,” Ida said in her defense. “And the doctor didn’t say how much I should take or how often. Besides, it had a nice taste and it did quiet down the cough some.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t kill you,” Pudge said. “And quiet your cough permanently.”
“That would only happen if I drank a full bottle of that poor man’s whiskey you boys sell,” she said, dismissing them with a wave of her hand.
“We’ll take care of you from here,” Angelo said. “Stick around till you get well again.”
“I don’t doubt you’re better at it than that sorry excuse calls himself a doctor,” Ida said. “And a lot better company to boot.”
Pudge came in carrying a platter filled with scrambled eggs, crisp bacon and a stack of toast. Three forks and salt and pepper shakers were crammed inside his shirt pocket. He rested the platter at the foot of the bed and nodded toward Angelo. “I left the pot of coffee and three cups over by the stove,” he said. “How about you grab those and I get to feeding Ida.”
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