by Barry, Mike
Also, things were not going so well for the organization at the time of these conferences. A lot of things had turned sour on them: the Appalachia business in 1957 had put away a lot of people for good, and almost no one who had been nailed at that meeting could be said to have been the same afterwards. A new generation was coming up and taking a look at the organization which in the 1940’s had been so all-powerful and in control that no one except a madman or a leader would want to take an overview … but the organization had gotten soft. Two decades of relative peace between the gang wars and the conference had eaten away at the hard edges and there were a lot of men in control who could hardly speak decent English or whose kids would care to be seen in the same room with them. Definitely some kind of shaking up was needed. It looked like drugs were the coming theme—gambling was holding up but sooner or later the government was going to move in as either a partner or competitor; prostitution what with kids fucking in the streets and a whole older generation who believed in wife, home, family and the secrecy of purely sexual relationships was dying out—and if the organization did not go for them the blacks were going to keep right on pushing and in just a little time, no more than ten years, might be in so deep, might have so much money, power and control over the trade that the organization might never get in … might, in fact, find itself competing with the monstrous organization which the blacks had built, block-by-block for everything. That was not to be faced. The organization in many ways was so soft now, so mindless, so much in the grip of men who had not had an original thought since they decided to try and make peace with Capone that they might very well fall to a clever and sustained attack unless they moved and changed fast. That was the really frightening thing that came out of the meetings about drugs. The drugs were not only important in themselves, they were, when you took the longer, more sociological view of things, possibly the very key to the organization’s survival.
Vinelli had been in the forefront of those arguing for moving into the drug trade. “It doesn’t mean we have to take them, it only means we’ve got to supply. It has nothing to do with moral issues,” had been his line of argument and it was such a simple, obvious line that it became clear soon that he was in the majority. Maybe that was why, come to think of it, he had taken that position in the first place: not because he did not have real convictions on the matter but that this seemed to make the most sense. He had been in a fairly vulnerable position at that time, painfully trying to put together a Kansas City operation, which had been absolutely moribund when he found it, and it was good to know that, if you got into conferences at this level, you had taken a position where a lot of important people would be on your side … and a lot more would then fall into place. Really, he had had almost no business participating above the regional level. Kansas City was a territory that had been completely fucked up and mucked over and being head there was roughly equivalent to being a street man in New York, but what the hell … it had been the senior organization, the Mustache Petes themselves who had set the ground rules providing that each region was to be represented by its top man, and he was the top man in Kansas City, even if there were only about four or five people in the whole fucking place to take orders from him.
But at that he had been lucky. When the decision had been made, had come out of those conferences that it was to be full-speed ahead, although with caution, on the drug business, a lot of the old bastards hadn’t liked it. Some hadn’t swallowed it, and, as the first moves were made to recover lost ground and get into the drug trade, the wars of the sixties began, which in bloodiness, pain and publicity were even larger, although not as mythical, as the stuff of the thirties—which as far as Vinelli was concerned was a pack of crap anyway. He had been twelve years old at that time, reading it in the papers, and it had been a lot of shit, guys killing one another when they could have just sat down and divided up the United States, what was left of it with the depression. The wars had raged on both coasts. They had cut into Chicago and on a less publicized level the south and the northwest had been torn apart, but sitting where he was in Kansas City, where there weren’t even that many drugs to put his finger on, you could go down to the railway terminal and pick up a few kilos on a cross-country switch now and then—but that was practically petty graft, not trade. Vinelli had been in a nice tight spot to watch everything that was going on and to pick up a good deal of incidental seniority without lifting a finger or losing an ear himself. So things had rolled on and around. New York had gone through a whole series of dislocations prefiguring the almost complete organizational collapse that was to come in the seventies; Los Angeles had gone through three separate and warring administrations with bodies falling all over the Hollywood Bowl and to points up north as far as the San Andreas fault line. And all this time Vinelli had hacked it out in Kansas City, armpit of the nation maybe, but the absence of competition meant that it was possible to get what work you could done without being blocked on every end. He started to acquire a reputation. He was a man without much imagination with a foul mouth and a vile temper, but things around him seemed to get done pretty much quickly and the right way which was more than you could say of most of the clowns around the country who were far more interested, it seemed, in killing each other than in putting any kind of organization together.
Also the fact that he was the only one at this level in the country without family ties of any kind counted to his advantage. All of them had wives, children, residences with gates, relatives pressuring them all of the time, mistresses, homosexual connections, the full paraphernalia of the middle-aged, upper-echelon businessman who was in too deep to really have the freedom of action that was necessary, whereas Vinelli had nothing. If he had ever had a family of any sort no one could account for it; certainly there were no wives or mistresses, let alone children. He was simply all business, none of that stuff hooked him in at all. It was possible that he would see a whore of one sex or the other once a month just to get his load off, but there was no way of even accounting for that. The man simply did not appear to function on any personal level at all. This meant that he had mobility; he could live anywhere, go anywhere, do anything. There was no detail so petty that he could not, if necessary, oversee it himself and nothing so large that he would have to dodge it for fear of putting his family in a more exposed position than he could risk. He was a man who could live out of a suitcase or a penthouse, usually both, sometimes neither; it just did not seem to matter to him. And as early as 1966, just when the war was beginning to really move along, millions and millions of dollars of new junk were pouring into the country everyday from this glistening new supply area. Vinelli had gotten himself a reputation in the organization which went entirely beyond his accomplishments. He appeared to be, whether they were right or wrong, a man who could get things done and to whom calculation would never enter into a decision because on the personal level he just did not seem to function at all.
His break came when an enormous load came in from Saigon, straight to the midwest, funnelled in little packages through the service clubs and the USO and then simply disappeared. It was not where it was supposed to be, the men who were committed to delivery vanished, the people waiting for pickup were ambushed and apparently a million dollars, maybe more (no one knew enough about it to put a real price) of the best Asian gold was off the map, all of the payments to the NCO’s to get it through, all of the logistics of the supply apparently down the drain. It represented an enormous loss for the organization. They could absorb it of course, by this time profits were such that they could absorb almost anything … but still it looked bad, if a load like this could slip away from them in the night it might make a lot of people, particularly the dangerous blacks in Harlem who were always thinking about coming downtown and staging a last war for the territory, the idea that the organization was losing its grip. Also, business was business: the fact that you could absorb a loss was no excuse for taking it. Once you began to think that way you went in the direction of Na
sh, Studebaker or the Hudson Hornet.
So Vinelli had been detailed to find the junk if he could and get it back into the supply channels if he did. He had gone at the job utterly without humor and with tremendous cold efficiency, virtually closing down all but the routine operations in his area (because he insisted on overseeing everything) while he went into Chicago to see what he could see. No one, frankly, expected that he would come up with much; it was a hopeless kind of job, a suicide mission at best, but there were a lot of people in the organization by that time who were already becoming a little frightened of Vinelli, and it seemed a pretty good deal, then, to put the man in a spot like this. Let him sweat it out, make a horse’s ass of himself or best of all get killed. He was the kind of man whose death would make thirty or forty others sleep better nights. But Vinelli had not screwed up the job. In fact, he had found the stuff.
He found the stuff and he got it back into the stream. It had been necessary for him in the process to kill eight people, five of whom were buried so deep that they were not even connected with the situation for years, it had been necessary for him to literally remake the relationship between the service clubs and the organization so that the service clubs had to make it on their own and without drug supply—leading to the revelations about them and the complete collapse of the system some years later. It had been necessary for him to coldly and systematically torture to death an important Chicago second-echelon man who turned out to have too much information. That had been very risky, but Vinelli had made a clean breast of everything as soon as he had finished the job. He had taken it right into the council, to prove that he was functioning perfectly above board and was only trying to protect the organization against traitors and he had been forgiven. There was some questioning of his methods but absolutely none as to his work; the man got results. The council had approved. The junk had gotten into the network, turning out to be slightly adulterated and resulting in a lot of sickness and deaths about three months after it began to hit the streets, but that had not been his fault either. Vinelli was on his way at last now. He had been taken out of Kansas City.
Las Vegas was the ideal place to put him. Las Vegas had originally been a diversion for the organization, a place to carry the spare money and wash it clean by burying it in the sand and causing it to sprout. It had sprouted casinos, hotels, nightclubs, vegetation in the desert beyond the wildest hopes of the organization at the time they had started because all that they had really had in mind was finding a way to keep the money occupied and maybe in an attractive way create a setup which would someday be their private property. That had cost them a lot of money, but the state of Nevada went cheaper than most even in the nineteen-fifties and things moved along pretty much according to plan. Then they moved beyond plan. It turned out that Las Vegas, Reno were not merely utilizing money, they were making it. They were making it out of all proportion to what the organization had figured. In fact, thanks to the efforts of some publicity men, contractors, state senators and travel agents who were above and beyond the call of duty, Nevada soon turned from purest silver to gold. The grosses were not all that fantastic, drugs could top them in a good year, but the net was fantastic. Eighty-five percent of the money bet at the casinos, being run through the tables and machines over and over again, would eventually wind up with the house. And the overhead, except for union salaries which was chickenshit, was almost constant. You could graph it out for the year ahead and unlike almost anything else it would hold to ninety-five percent.
It became apparent to the organization or what was evolving from it that in the years ahead Las Vegas might be the foundation of something they had never even considered previously: an international empire. Linking up with the Saigon sources had been the first inkling that not only business but real expansion might be accomplished by going international, now there were people investigating as never before the possibilities in continental Europe which had heretofore been wild territory, absolutely sealed off from the organization. But continental Europe had been facing its own problems through the sixties. There was a new breed of management there who were interested, however tentatively, in some kind of cooperative effort, long-range planning, foresightedness. Las Vegas could be the crown of the international in thirty years if things moved along.
Meanwhile, however, it was necessary to protect the operation as never before. The trouble with Vegas was that it was just too open, too accessible, by definition it was a public place, a gathering point, a spa if you will, into which almost any element could circulate and by definition it was impossible to maintain a tight access, real security. Putting a lid on the place would, for one thing, have shut down eighty percent of the profits. So it was necessary to get a very special kind of man in there, or putting it another way, it was necessary to get two special kinds of men because by definition almost no one was capable of performing both functions. One kind of man would have to be a press-agent’s dream if not a press-agent himself: a legitimate, polished, sophisticated kind of man who without a taint of involvement could manage the property and its interests in a way which would ingratiate almost everyone, satisfy everyone, keep the ball rolling … and behind or under him there would have to be another kind of man, one like Vinelli, someone who could make sure that the first type of man was not looting the place to the ground and that the essential control of the organization would never be challenged. There was nothing worse than a public-relations type who got ahead of himself or began to believe his public image. It was the function of the Vinellis to make sure that the administrators were reminded all the time of exactly who they were and what was sustaining them … and what could push them off a cliff if they should happen to wander cliffside.
For the organization, this was pretty advanced-type thinking: as subtle and far-ranging as anything which might have been thought up in the government of that time. It showed what a truly great distance they had come from the councils of the early 1960’s. Of course most of the people who had been at those councils were now dead or otherwise indisposed.
Vinelli was sent to manage the Paradise Hotel in Vegas. Actually it was far more than the Paradise that he was going to manage. On paper he was going to look like an underling, a hired hand who was taking care of the scub-work while a guy named Walker who was on a first-name basis with everyone in Hollywood would use his ownership of the Paradise as a wedge to explore more and more real estate in Vegas. But behind closed doors Walker called Vinelli “sir” which very few people in his life had ever done and palpably trembled at everything Vinelli said, dreaded to pick up the phone when Vinelli called intercom and always did on the first ring and all in all, blew his nose whenever Vinelli sneezed and quite loudly. Walker should have been glad to have had Vinelli there, it meant that the organization was taking an interest in him and that Walker’s position was secure—if it was not secure they simply would have bounced him, but he was not at all glad. He did not think that way. He was, in fact, terrified.
This did not bother Vinelli. Nothing much bothered him at all; you just did not get to the age of fifty-two after thirty-three years in the organization and allow much but the highly necessary stuff to touch you. The business about shielding the fugitive lieutenant, Stone, had been taken in stride; you did this kind of thing all the time and his contact with Stone went back many years; the guy would come up with the goods sooner or later. Having Stone wandering around the Paradise with play-money was all right too; routine courtesy to a guest. But when the word had come that this lunatic, this Martin Wulff, might well be heading toward Vegas and the Paradise itself … that had bothered Vinelli. It had bothered him a good deal. He knew the organization’s affection for nice, tight operations; he was a nice, tight operation kind of man himself and anytime someone like Wulff headed this way it meant problems and difficulties. He knew that he would have to do something about Stone right away and even then he had kept relatively calm. Wulff was bad news but, all right, it was a tough life; you tried to take this kind o
f stuff in stride, and he was sure he would be able to nail the clown if he ever showed. Vinelli was no Cicchini.
But then, falling into the suspicion that Stone had been full of shit from the beginning, that the New York stories were just bluff and cover and he probably had no line of junk to peddle at all … now that had bothered Vinelli a good deal. Fifty-two years old, thirty-three years in the organization or not, there were certain things that you simply could not tolerate and this was one of them. It was one thing to shelter a potentially valuable fugitive who would eventually show his gratitude by handing over a million dollars tax-free worth of gifts to show good faith. It was another to get taken for a ride by some pig’s-ass lieutenant who was just desperate enough to take advantage and not farseeing enough to know what he could do after the string ran out. And when it tied in with this Wulff and his portable explosives factory closing in on his entrusted territory …
Well, he had really regretted dealing with Stone in the manner that he had. Contrary to all the books on him, Vinelli was a man who held no brief for killings or other rough treatment. He was not a sadist, he got no pleasure out of it. He got no pleasure out of anything except being efficient, that was his secret. That was why no one had ever been able to touch him. But then again Stone had offered him no way out. If the man had nothing to trade for the risks that Vinelli was taking, then he was nothing other than a pure menace, pure minus factor on the balance sheet. So Vinelli had had to do the necessary and the proper.
He would have to do it all the way down the line. There was nothing personal in this—his viewpoint on life was gloomy, no one got out of it alive and essentially it was just a matter of filling in seventy years or so until you went back where you came from so you might as well do it with as few loose ends as possible—but it was not quite impersonal either, it was something between the two. A job had to be done well for its own sake.
