Our Lady Of Greenwich Village

by Dermot McEvoy

  Not that Jackie was without enemies. His career had started in 1968 as a young deputy press secretary for Paul O’Dwyer’s U.S. Senate try. Over the years many had observed that Jackie Swift had come a long way—from working for a great man like Paul O’Dwyer to getting into bed with sleaze-bag like Vito Fopiano. In fact, many Democrats and lefties had never forgiven Swift for what they considered the ultimate betrayal. Even O’Dwyer himself refused to talk to Jackie. Swift had finally cornered O’Dwyer at City Hall one day and asked why the cold shoulder.

  “Jackie,” said O’Dwyer in his soft County Mayo accent, “you don’t understand.” O’Dwyer put his hand on Jackie’s shoulder, “If me own brother had joined the Black and Tans I wouldn’t talk to him either.” Jackie Swift felt as though he had been slapped across the face.

  But now it was now time for Vito Fopiano to fry bigger fish. He was going to run for Congress and his beloved daughter, Madonna-Sue Fopiano, was about to take his seat in the city council. Madonna-Sue was cute. She was photogenic. And she learned quickly. The first time she saw herself on TV she was accompanying her father to the Al Smith Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. She was appalled at the way she looked on the small screen—dark Italian hair, shades of a mustache and a wide, frumpy butt. She went back to running, cut out the pasta, experimented with electrolysis, and bleached her hair blonde. And she was good. She came across as the girl next door. And although her opinions were carbon copies of her father’s, she didn’t frighten people the way Vito did. She always put a happy, perky face on things.

  Perky.

  That was the adjective most used to describe Madonna-Sue Fopiano. She had a perky nose. A perky personality. A perky sense of humor. And, as Jackie Swift would soon realize, she had perky tits.

  But it was all an act. Madonna-Sue Fopiano couldn’t give a fuck about the national debt, drugs, abortion, or the regulations on rent control. She was only doing what her father wanted her to do. Vito Fopiano thought, some said, with Alfonse D’Amato getting on in years, that maybe, just maybe, she would some day make a United States senator.

  Vito was no fool. Before he left the City Council to move on to Congress he got Madonna-Sue a job in the office of his friend, Councilman Menachem Mandelstam of Brooklyn. Mandelstam was a nominal Democrat—he would later change to the Republican Party at Vito’s urging—and his job was to teach Madonna-Sue the ropes, out of the presence and spotlight that Vito Fopiano inevitably had focused on him. Mandelstam was a politician made out of the same mold as Vito Fopiano—divide and conquer. He was a master at using the race card. He could play it better than Fopiano and Johnnie Cochran combined. If things got tough in Crown Heights, he would hiss one word—schwartze—and his problems were over. He told Fopiano and Rudy Giuliani to use it against African-American David Dinkins in the 1989 mayor contest, but Giuliani wouldn’t. By 1993 he had no such qualms. “It’ll look like the second parting of the Red Sea,” said Mandelstam to Fopiano and Giuliani, “with all the Jews rushing to the polls to vote against the schwartze.” It took Giuliani two tries to get it right, but in the end Mandelstam’s theory stood up. Madonna-Sue couldn’t be in better hands. She kept her mouth shut, learned the routine, and was ready when her father did his Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington routine.

  So when Vito went to Washington as a congressman, Madonna-Sue went to the City Council, representing the whole of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. She sat on the Finance, the Environmental, and Zoning committees, just as her father had. And the money, most of it meant for Vito, flowed in. It flowed in in briefcases from landlords and developers disguised as campaign contributions. Wall Street contributed in the form of lucrative preempted stock market IPOs and insider information that had once allowed Vito to make $27,000 in the market in one day. But, of course, Madonna-Sue Fopiano was for campaign finance reform. Vito would write the bills and she would introduce them and more money would flow to the elected representatives of the people of the City of New York, slowly strangling the political process into an absolute plutocracy.

  And while she sat on these committees, her father managed to get three more Republican members elected to the city council. By 1990, forty-four-year-old Smilin’ Jackie Swift was the minority leader and Madonna-Sue was his whip. She would often end the day in Jackie’s office, and they would go out for a drink near City Hall. Then they would work their way to one of the small, discreet restaurants around the Village, where Jackie would regale her with stories of the Irish rogues he grew up with on the East Side. He was so smooth. Soon Madonna-Sue was using Jackie’s cocaine. Then the whip ended up getting spanked.

  Then she missed her period.

  What was she to do? Jackie was terrified. “Maybe an abortion?” Jackie, the anti-abortion candidate, meekly offered.

  “Marriage sounds better,” said Madonna-Sue curtly.

  Marriage it was and Vito pulled the strings—St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Declan Cardinal Sweeney himself presiding. The Cardinal owed Vito big-time for his opposition to abortion and this was a good way to show that the Cardinal would always back his friends to the limit.

  “Lord, bless this marriage,” said Declan Cardinal Sweeney, “like you would sanctify the hands of a great surgeon—or a Hispanic shortstop.” People looked around St. Patrick’s Cathedral at one another and it was the first clue that the Cardinal was beginning to lose his marbles.

  Seven months later a baby girl, Vitoessa, was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. George Drumgoole, Swift’s press secretary, called an impromptu press conference in the lobby of St. Vincent’s to announce the birth. Abe Stein of the New York Post began counting on his fingers. “That’s seven months, Georgie.” Drumgoole looked baffled. The reason Drumgoole looked baffled was that he was drunk. In fact, he was drunk so frequently that he was known as George the Fifth, for the fifth of bourbon he nurtured throughout the day until he could do some real drinking, come cocktail hour. Then he was terrified. Seven months! He could see the foggy Post headline now: GOP BABY WAS IN OVEN! “Seven months,” Abe Stein repeated, a small smile appearing on his face. This was better than covering Al Sharpton, Stein was thinking as he watched Drumgoole in an alcoholic daze try to figure out what to do.

  “The baby’s birth was normal,” Drumgoole muttered, “and Councilman Swift is doing fine.”

  “How’s the mother?” Roche of the News asked pointedly.

  “It would be,” began Drumgoole onerously, “premature of me to comment on Madonna-Sue Fopiano Swift’s condition at this time.”

  Abe Stein was beginning to feel sorry for Georgie Drumgoole. “Did you say the baby was premature, Georgie?”

  The light went on. “Yes, that’s it,” said Drumgoole. “The little bastard was premature!”

  “You owe me one,” said Abe Stein.

  “This is just what the GOP needs!” said Vito Fopiano as he bounced little Vitoessa on his knee for the TV cameras. “We are the party of family values!”

  George H.W. Bush heard the soundbite on CNN and called Vito. “Like that ‘Family Values’ stuff,” the president told him. “Keep it up agin the heathen.” (Even Vito Fopiano wondered why the president of the United States spoke the way he did.)

  But it would pay off big. At the 1992 Republican Convention there were Vito, Jackie, and Madonna-Sue before the crowd waving the kid around—the placard for family values. Abe Stein looked up at the TV in Hogan’s Moat and said, “I bet Madonna-Sue Fopiano can lactate on cue.”

  By 1994, Vito Fopiano and Newt Gingrich were making big plans for New York and their “Contract for America.” They had decided that it was time for Vito to retire from Congress and take his anointed place on the Republican National Committee. (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, grateful for Vito’s benediction, had even named the newest Staten Island ferry after him—the Congressman Vito Fopiano. Jimmy Breslin in his column commented that after a bottle of chianti christened the boat, his eyes were strangely drawn to the bridge where he “expected to see Captain Smith on the lookou
t for the first New York City harbor iceberg.”) Madonna-Sue, naturally, would take his place in Congress. And Vito Fopiano’s eyes immediately went to New York’s 7th Congressional District where Fat Max Weissberg—Vito referred to him as “The Jowly Jew”—was ill and obviously not up to a strenuous defense of his seat. When Vito told Gingrich about his plan to have both his daughter and his son-in-law elected to Congress out of the same congressional delegation, Gingrich started babbling about his own august destiny as Speaker of the House: “I am an arouser of those who form civilization,” Gingrich actually said. Vito didn’t know what Gingrich was yapping about; he only knew he had lots of work to do.

  Smilin’ Jackie Swift was a superb candidate. “Just don’t talk about abortion, prayer in schools, or rent control, and you’re in,” cautioned Vito Fopiano. The 7th C.D., which covered the Upper West Side down to the Battery and part of the East Side, had been in the hands of the Democrats since the days of FDR. In this decidedly left-of-center district, there was only one way for Jackie Swift to win: divide by two.

  Fat Max Weissberg was old and sick. People knew he was sick because he was down to only four double chins.The mounting questions about his health had some saying he should retire. One of these “voices of concern” belonged to Thom Lamè, the gay city councilman whose ambition was legend. “Think of your health, Max,” Lamè said in his patterned lisp.

  “Fuck that professional homo,” said Weissberg, and Vito Fopiano licked his chops. The Democrats were committing suicide again and he was going to help them by making sure that Thom Lamè ended up with the Liberal Party endorsement.

  Divide by two.

  Swift won easily.

  Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution had reached into New York and sent to Washington a married congressional couple. It could happen only in America.

  And they were off and running until Madonna-Sue found Jackie Swift’s diary.

  Jackie, like Garry Moore, had a secret. But only Jackie Swift was stupid enough to write his down in a diary. Only he didn’t exactly “write” it down. He had used a code. Jackie Swift loved movies and mysteries. His fascination with codes had started back in 1958 when he was a kid. Every Sunday, right after mass, Jackie would rush home to watch old Sherlock Holmes movies on Channel 11. These were the old flicks from the 1930s and ’40s starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. One of his favorites was Sherlock Holmes in Washington, where Holmes has to figure out the significance of the “Dancing Men,” little figures on a matchbook cover. Each one stood for something important. Jackie Swift had been mesmerized by the movie, and the Dancing Men had stuck in his mind even into adulthood.

  Then he made a mistake. He invented his own Dancing Men, his own private code. The code stood for sex. No one, Jackie thought, not even Madonna-Sue, if she ever came across it, would know what it meant.

  But Swift had underestimated his wife. Madonna-Sue, like the British in Bletchley Park reading a German enigma machine, knew immediately what it meant. She kept a diary, too. It was full of her most intimate thoughts—and the mating habits of Mr. and Mrs. Jackie Swift. Like good Catholics they both over-estimated the sex act. They were fascinated about doing “it.” Madonna-Sue’s diary even recorded the positions used. It also reported the data on her menstrual cycle. Madonna-Sue suffered from PMS, which made her crampy and cranky. The last thing Madonna-Sue wanted to do when she was suffering from PMS or having her period was to have sex. Any sex. She had informed Jackie Swift in no uncertain terms that during her period her least favorite word was “fuck.” Her second least favorite word was “suck.” Jackie Swift duly noted the situation and went looking for a remedy for one week of every month. It was to be his undoing.

  Madonna-Sue had found the diary, had figured out what the little man that looked like the symbol for Leslie Charteris’ “The Saint” stood for. It meant that Jackie Swift was cheating. Jackie Swift was dead meat. But Madonna-Sue kept her counsel. If there was one thing she had learned from her father it was never to show your cards. She would wait—but she would also cut Jackie off, and soon they would begin to drift apart.

  Jackie Swift had met Peggy Brogan when she worked on Vito Fopiano’s staff at the National Republican Committee. Working for the inventor of the GOP’s “Family Values” campaign could be trying. Vito was a widower, he was lonely, and he was sixty-six. But he still woke up in the morning with a hard-on. Soon, Brogan found herself in hard escape from the roving hand of Vito Fopiano. He was so quick you could hardly feel or see them. The glancing tip of the buttock was a favorite of Vito’s. He also liked to feel for “the good part” of the breast. That’s when he would stand on Brogan’s right and paternally put his hand around her back and get a piece of the “good part” of the left breast, the area where the breast descended from the armpit. To Vito Fopiano it was a test of means; if the “good part” was good, the rest of the tit was tremendous. Showering one morning, Brogan discovered that her ass and tits were black and blue from the reconnoitering of Vito Fopiano’s hands. She wanted out. And Jackie Swift would be her ticket.

  With the Republican Party’s takeover of Congress for the first time in forty-two years, young staffers were scrambling for the best jobs on Capitol Hill. Swift’s chief of staff had left to work on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, and he needed a replacement. He called Vito, and Fopiano, reluctantly, recommended Peggy Brogan. She was smart. She had kept her mouth shut, hadn’t ranted and raved about sexual harassment, and had upped her salary to ninety grand a year. It was incestuous, working for Vito’s son-in-law, but she didn’t care. She was in for the long run, and she knew she was just as tough as Vito Fopiano and his “capos,” as she referred to the people who were loyal to Vito.

  She was immediately surprised by Jackie Swift. He was not a hood like the rest of them. He was a gentleman. He was funny and as he liked to describe himself, he was, indeed, “as affable as an Irish cop.” As chief of staff she was around him constantly. Preparing him for congressional hearings; basically making sure he didn’t make a fool of himself. Brogan soon learned that Jackie was as lazy as he was affable, but he was also lucky.

  Soon she was traveling with him back to New York for his “working weekends.” Working weekends soon meant walking through a neighborhood street fair, pressing the flesh, then retreating to Swift’s West 10th Street ground-floor garden apartment where Swift would press Brogan’s flesh. After the discoveries of the infamous Swift Diaries by Madonna-Sue, the Swifts had surreptitiously separated—they didn’t want to damage either of their political careers—and Peggy Brogan had quietly moved in with Jackie. Peggy ran the man, but was still jealous of Madonna-Sue. Jackie and Madonna Sue still appeared together on the Sunday morning network talk shows, eagerly blasting Bill Clinton’s morals, hugging each other for the cameras. Jackie had savoir faire and Madonna-Sue was perky. Brogan had felt betrayed when Madonna-Sue had become pregnant again at Thanksgiving, 1999. The Swifts, still separated, would be having another baby just in time for the 2000 Republican National Convention.

  Brogan had worked for Swift for five years and had been his lover for nearly four. Without her Swift’s career would be in ashes. She knew it, Vito knew it, and Madonna-Sue especially knew it. Vito and Madonna-Sue had given the two of them space. At this point in their congressional careers, it was paramount to keep this political marriage alive. It wouldn’t look good to have two of Clinton’s biggest moral critics involved in their own little sordid matrimonial mess. This was the hand Brogan had been dealt. She didn’t like it, but that’s how it was. But still, Madonna-Sue’s pregnancy haunted her, tormented her in a way that made her jealous and vengeful at the same time. She could be a dangerous woman and the Fopianos, father and daughter, knew it.

  6.

  For over twenty years the professional lives of Wolfe Tone O’Rourke and Winthrop Pepoon had been intimately intertwined. It was almost impossible to find two men with such diverse backgrounds and personalities. Where O’Rourke was the Village
drinker, the censorious Dublin-born, Greenwich Village-bred Irish Catholic, Pepoon was the eternal preppy, the Ivy Leaguer WASP with a lifestyle and family right out of The Great Gatsby. Pepoon’s playground was the Hamptons, O’Rourke’s the Moat. Where Pepoon wore seventy-five dollar silk ties, O’Rourke—when he remembered to wear one—got his for five bucks at Tie City. O’Rourke was a Democrat, Pepoon a Republican. O’Rourke was abrupt with Pepoon, who was his boss. Pepoon was terrified of O’Rourke, whom he considered the brightest mind in the political consulting business. They should have hated each other, but there was a strange bond and respect between the two of them. They had their corporate ups-and-downs, yet when Pepoon took his accounts elsewhere, Wolfe Tone O’Rourke was sure to follow. They were known best throughout the industry for their great American Express fiasco/success.

  If there was anything O’Rourke liked better than drinking and talking at the Moat, it was hanging out at the original Palm Restaurant on Second Avenue.The Palm was one of those places without pretenses. What you see is what you get. It was the ultimate cholesterol palace featuring succulent food, drinks strong enough to fell a horse, and efficient, no-nonsense service that tended to be brusque.

  It was to the Palm that O’Rourke had gone on his day of infamy. His lunch-mate that day was the CEO of the Ambrosia Winery of Rome. Ambrosia was trying to break into the U.S. market, and O’Rourke was trying to get the account. Their meal went well with lots of spirits and wines flowing around the lobster. At three o’clock, O’Rourke strolled back into the plush Third Avenue offices of his firm and was immediately reminded by his terminally enthusiastic secretary, Bonnie, that there was the big American Express account meeting in thirty minutes. Usually, Winthrop Pepoon made all the presentations, but he had been called away to London on business. It wasn’t that Pepoon didn’t trust O’Rourke to give presentations which, by the way, were O’Rourke’s creations, it was just that Pepoon felt he had a more even temperament than the abrupt O’Rourke and there was less chance of somebody being called an “asshole” around the conference table. But this time fate had intervened and there was no choice. The London business had been an unforeseen emergency and American Express would be put off no longer. They wanted to see how the campaign was progressing and the ball was now in O’Rourke’s court. There was only one problem: O’Rourke was totally unprepared. He immediately drank five cups of coffee and decided to fake it. But O’Rourke’s whiskey lunch and the absence of Pepoon’s smooth tongue would betray him this time.