Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Pudge started to walk toward the double doors leading out of the barn. “We’ll drive him down to that doc that used to take care of Angus’s dog. If anybody can fix him straight, he can.”

  “The dog’s a killer,” Angelo said, following in Pudge’s shadow, turning to give Jack Wells a final look. “Thought I’d mention it, just in case you forgot.”

  “So are we,” Pudge said, stopping and turning to face Angelo. “Just in case you forgot.”

  12

  * * *

  Spring, 1934

  IT WAS THE spring when Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were gunned down on a dirt road fifty miles east of Shreveport, Louisiana, bringing to an end a two-year string of armed robberies that had netted them a top haul of $3,500. Later in the year, John Dillinger would walk out of a Chicago movie theater, his arm wrapped around the woman who had betrayed him to the FBI agents who would soon shoot him dead. His body was found with nothing more than pocket money jammed inside the slit of an old wallet. Later that summer, the U.S. Army turned over Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to the Bureau of Prisons where it would eventually house Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and “the Birdman,” Robert Stroud. All three front-page public enemies would die broken men.

  It was also the spring in which twenty-eight-year-old Angelo Vestieri and thirty-one-year-old Pudge Nichols ruled over the largest and most profitable gang in the New York underworld. It was a distinction that earned them millions in untaxed dollars and two seats on the nine-member National Crime Commission they had helped establish three years earlier. They shared in their power equally, trusting only in one another, allowing no entry into their private domain. They steered clear of publicity and tabloid exposure, fearing that such notoriety would propel Justice Department investigations into their activities. Angelo studied the habits of the industrial and business leaders of the day, and sought to follow their ways. He read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He devoured books on business and banking techniques and read as many biographies of world leaders as time permitted. Pudge loved to work with numbers and had an intuitive knack for investments. He utilized both of these strengths to further swell the gang’s portfolio. They were modern-day gangsters determined to rule their violent world with the unbeatable weapons of fear and finance.

  They were taught the skills of laundering money from Park Avenue realtors and bankers who were allowed to frequent their brothels free of charge. They then quickly turned those lessons into an intricate and well-structured revolving door of cash that transferred the illegal gains of prostitution, gambling and whiskey into the safer havens of real estate and business holdings. “We didn’t want anyone to know how much we had and how much we owned,” Pudge once told me. “That kind of information makes people jealous and, in our line of work, leads to somebody getting shot. So we bailed out a banker in financial trouble, took over a piece of his bank, sealed our records and kept our main holding companies listed under other names. And then, every eighteen months or so, we would switch them all around again, names and all. If anybody came looking, it would take months, even years, before they could track one dollar of the cash back our way. We took over control of the town and nobody even knew it was gone.”

  Their personal lives, as they had been from the very beginning, constituted the only area where Angelo and Pudge chose to travel separate paths. Pudge had an open aversion to marriage but an insatiable passion for women. Such desires left him free to pick from among any of the four hundred call girls working for his crew. He lived in a top-floor suite of the Madison Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street and kept a stockpile of suits and shirts hanging in the closets of a half-dozen brothels throughout the city. This not only allowed him to spend the night anywhere he wanted, it avoided creating any clear pattern to his routine.

  “We were both loners,” Pudge would often say. “But we handled it in different ways. After the war with Wells, I learned to be a little more cautious. I drove my own car and never parked it in the same spot twice. I never let a woman, no matter how much I liked her, spend the whole night with me. I’d been shot once in bed with a broad and I wasn’t gonna let that happen a second time. If I was in a business meeting and got offered a drink, I made sure I wasn’t the only one with a glass in his hand. It’s little things like that that help keep you alive in the rackets. If you can live that way and not let it make you crazy, then chances are you’re gonna be around for a long, long time.”

  • • •

  ANGELO LIVED ALONE in Ida’s old railroad apartment, one floor above the Café Maryland. The walls of each room were lined with framed photos, a still-life tribute to those few whom he loved. The dining room belonged to Angus, usually in bowler hat and flashy tuxedo, strolling in style down the West Side streets he owned for so long. The living room was all Ida, looking down from her perch across the bar of the Café, the flower of her fetching beauty in full bloom. In one photo, taken when she was at the height of her gang power, her eyes glistened against the shaded overhead lights and her wondrous smile was warm enough to keep out the cold. Angelo’s small office in the back of the apartment was lined with ledgers, log books and company portfolios, all of them surrounded by shots of a quick-to-smile Pudge, who was always eager to ham it up whenever he knew a camera was in focus.

  The bedroom was where he kept his photos of Isabella.

  It was the one room he always paused before entering, the weight of her loss still haunting his every action. Except for Pudge, no one was allowed into the apartment, and even he never dared set foot into the bedroom. Angelo’s only company on most of those nights was Grover, the pit bull Pudge had rescued from the Jack Wells shooting. Angelo and Grover would eat their dinner together, both content with the silence, listening to the music from the bar downstairs filter up through the cracks in the hardwood floors. Angelo suffered from insomnia and very seldom slept through the night. Instead, he would walk the dark side streets of the neighborhood around the Café, Grover, scar tissue etched across most of his body, dutifully by his side. When he did attempt to get some rest, he did so sitting in a leather rocking chair next to the bedroom window, book in hand, staring down through tireless eyes at the passing traffic below, his framed wedding photo at rest on his lap, Grover curled up by his feet.

  “He was the most powerful gangster in town,” Pudge said to me. “And hands down the saddest. In a crazy way, I was jealous of him. I would never know what it was like to be that in love with somebody. Angelo had that in his life. Yeah, it was only for a short time, but that’s more than most people manage to get their hands on. Then to lose her the way he did, made what they had between them only that much bigger. But he never wanted to hear talk like that. He just wanted to be allowed to miss her as much as he did. That was the one part he knew nobody could pull away from him. He never talked about her, never mentioned her, kept everything they had together locked inside. All those nights he spent alone up in his room, with that crazy dog we found, I think he looked at it as his time alone with her. Kept her alive that way, at least in his head. Who knows? Maybe kept himself alive, too.”

  • • •

  ANGELO KNELT IN front of the marble tombstone, his warm hands resting on top of the chiseled rock. It was early Sunday morning and the sun was just beginning to cast its glow across the vast expanse of the hilltop cemetery. He had left the city while it was still dark and made the ninety-minute drive alone, stopping only to pick up two bouquets of fresh-cut flowers from an all-night market. Isabella’s grave was close to the shaded comfort of a large, weeping willow, its old, thick branches helping to ward off both the sun and the rain. He had cleared away the dried flowers and brushed aside the brown leaves that covered the front of her grave. He was alone in the gated grounds, the quiet that engulfed him broken only by the heavy whistling of a strong wind.

  He rubbed his hands gently against the sides of the stone and leaned back on his heels, his coat spread out across the dirt and gravel. He picked up the fresh
flowers and put them into the two vases in front of the grave. He folded his hands, holding them down by his waist, and bowed his head, but not in prayer. Angelo never prayed, choosing not to believe in a God cruel enough to allow death to come to a young bride and her unborn child. He raised his head to the sky and felt warmed by Isabella’s silent presence and allowed himself the rare luxury of a smile.

  Angelo leaned forward and, with eyes closed, kissed the two names that were chiseled onto the thick granite. The first belonged to his wife, Isabella Conforti Vestieri. The second was that of the son he would never see, Carlo Vestieri. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a large, round peach, much like the one he had given Isabella the first time they had met. He placed it in the center of the headstone, between the two flower vases.

  Angelo bowed his head and then stood. He turned and walked quietly out of the cemetery, slowly making his way down the hill, back to his waiting car.

  He was a young man in mourning, stripped of a love he would never again be allowed to touch.

  He was a wealthy man, tapping into the millions that were to be had in a hard country so willing to give to those who were so eager to take.

  He was a man of power, controlling the lives and destinies of thousands, many of whom he would never even meet.

  He was an enemy to be feared and a friend who would never betray the strength of that union.

  He was an astute man of business who saw opportunities years before they materialized.

  He was a stone-hearted killer quick to eliminate any enemy who presented the slightest threat to his empire.

  He was Angelo Vestieri.

  A gangster.

  BOOK TWO

  * * *

  Home of the Brave

  some say we are responsible

  for those we love

  others know we are responsible

  for those who love us

  —Nikki Giovanni, “The

  December of My Springs”

  13

  * * *

  Fall, 1964

  ANGELO VESTIERI FIRST came into my life during the seventh game of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals.

  I had just turned ten and was living with my fourth foster family in two years. My new parents were a tight-lipped, middle-aged couple who rented the rear apartment in a second-floor walk-up on Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway. They seemed happy enough to have me around and were even happier when the monthly checks they received from the New York State Department of Social Services to pay for my food, school and boarding arrived in the mail. I never took any of the family transfers personally, having learned to accept them more as the business transactions they were rather than as the long-term parental stability they were publicly perceived to be. I knew their tolerance for me would end as soon as my foster parents came to the realization that the burden of a child didn’t balance out the comfort of a steady check. I was labeled an orphan at birth and was considered a ward of the state, and was soon aware that staying with a family, no matter how indifferent or cruel, was a hands down better option than life inside an institutional home.

  I hadn’t been lucky enough to be picked by an Upper East Side couple eager to bring a son into their deep-pocketed world or by wanna-be parents from a leafy suburb who would thrill at the sight of a young boy at play in their spacious backyard. Every orphan dreams of such good fortune, but then reality takes root and you wake up and know that you are nothing more than the ward of John and Virginia Webster, a railroad conductor with a gambling problem and a housewife who drinks more than she should. And you accept it and live with it as best you can, knowing that one night the phone will ring and you will be sent off to yet another set of parents eager to add to their family. At least for a few months.

  I was walking back home from another new school, my books bundled under my right arm, my feet aching from the tight P. F. Flyer hand-me-down sneakers I had been given that morning. It was early October and the warm winds of summer had long since faded, replaced by the frigid blasts of fall. I was hoping to get to the apartment in time to catch the last few innings of the seventh game on the small radio Virginia Webster had given me for my room. I loved baseball and I especially loved the Yankees and listened to as many games as I could during the season. I had never been to the stadium, but could easily visualize its magnificent scope and dimensions in my mind as I listened to the familiar voice of Mel Allen bring each play to life.

  I turned the corner on Twenty-eighth Street and passed a bar with dark windows and a well-lit sign. I stopped briefly to take a quick look inside and could make out a few figures drinking, smoking and talking, their heads collectively lifted up to a small television perched several feet above the stacks of bottles. I placed my books down by my feet, cupped my hands around the window and peered inside. The World Series was on the TV and even though I could barely make out the moving forms through the thick glass, I stood there mesmerized, watching the players whose names and most minute statistics I had committed so clearly to my memory. Only one of the families I had ever lived with had enough money to have a television of their own, and they would turn it on at night long after they thought I had fallen asleep. The players lived and played their games in my imagination. They were brought to life by the occasional glimpses I got of them in a newspaper photo, or by sneaking looks at the baseball cards of the other boys at school or by the images I could make out from the cold windows of shadowed bars.

  “What’s the score?” the man asked. He stood above me, his height blocking out the late afternoon sun.

  “I only just got here,” I said without turning to look at him. “I can’t make out too much, but I think the Cardinals are up.”

  “Why don’t you go in?” the man asked. “Watch the game from where you can see it?”

  “No point in doing that,” I told him. “I’ll only end up getting tossed out by the guy working the bar.”

  “Maybe this bar will be different,” the man said.

  I saw his hand reach for the doorknob and turn it open toward him, letting out the sounds of the ball game along with the sweet smells of fresh-brewed coffee, grilled burgers and tap beer. I looked up and saw his face for the first time. He was tall, bigger than most men I had seen, muscle-thin, and dressed in creased black slacks, black jacket and a black shirt buttoned up to the collar. His hair was jet dark and was brushed neat and straight back. His eyes were clear and didn’t show much life or movement as they looked back down at me. His face was clean-shaven and unmarked, a young man’s look on a middle-aged body.

  He held the door open and waited. “Am I going in alone?” he asked in a voice that was low and strong, comfortable with giving out commands and not taxed from overuse.

  “Maybe I’ll get to see Mantle hit one out before they toss me,” I said as I picked up my books and walked past him into the bar.

  • • •

  THERE WERE SIX men inside and they all stood when they saw us walk in. The bartender stopped wiping down the wood, bent down and pulled a pitcher of milk and a chilled glass from the small fridge by his legs. I led the way, the man behind me keeping one hand on my shoulder, his right leg dragging slightly as he walked.

  “This kid wants to see the game,” the man said. “Find him a good spot and bring him some food. And only throw him out if he roots for the wrong team.”

  The other men all laughed and smiled. One came over and led me to a table directly across from the television set. “We got fresh lentil soup cooking,” he said. “How about a bowl of that and maybe a cheeseburger and some fries?”

  I sat down, laid my books on the table and nodded. “That’d be great, thanks,” I said. “But I only got a quarter on me.”

  “Then I won’t expect much of a tip,” he said and walked away.

  The man from the street stepped over to my table and looked at me. “Enjoy what’s left of the game,” he said. “You can come in here anytime you want. No one will toss you ou
t unless you give them a reason to.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And don’t worry, if I do come in here, it won’t be to cause you any trouble.”

  “I don’t worry,” the man said.

  He nodded and turned away. He walked slowly toward the bar and grabbed the glass of milk the bartender had just poured for him and then disappeared around the bend and into a back room.

  That was my first meeting with Angelo Vestieri.

  • • •

  WHEN I MET him, Angelo was fifty-eight years old, and was said to be the most powerful gangster in America. The long ago war with Jack Wells had hardened his grip on the New York rackets, and the battles that followed only helped increase his reach. He and Pudge had managed to survive the physical and legal threats. They eluded the government hunts that came to a head during Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised subcommittee hearings in the early 1950s. And they did not bend to the unrelenting pressure placed on organized crime by Robert F. Kennedy during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General.

  The four wars they fought in the years after their battle with Wells had grown in common perception to where they were now a part of mob folklore. But their boldest move came in 1939, four years after the Wells war, and was soon after christened by the tabloid writers as “The Night of the Vespers.” It was, by far, the goriest event in mob history. In one swift and brutal move, Angelo and Pudge orchestrated the murder of thirty-nine of the top-ranking figures in organized crime.

  “Getting rid of that many people in one night was something nobody had ever done before and the odds are pretty stacked against anybody ever doing it again,” Pudge would often tell me as we sat across from each other, eating linguini drenched in a thick and spicy fish sauce. “In less than twelve hours, we got rid of all of the people standing between us and the sky. Nobody saw the move coming, and even the people we needed to let in on it never figured it would pan out. But Angelo, he had it all mapped out in his head. He had worked on the plan for two years, had it measured down to the smallest detail and he only told people what they needed to know. None of the shooters had any idea how big the job was. Each one of them thought they were out on the only hit. It was a pure and brilliant move. Thirty-nine gangsters died, all in one night. And that’s how Angelo Vestieri became a legend.”