“Has anything like that ever been done before?” Marty asked.
“No. That’s exactly why we should do it. And listen to this. Day after tomorrow, Duneden will print another exclusive story. He’s going to find out that the mob bosses got together after Mister X testified and put a fifty-thousand-dollar price on his head for breaking the code of silence.”
“Won’t a column like that in some way encourage someone to kill this Mister X?” said Courtnay. “Some nut might take it seriously.”
J.T. smirked and shrugged. “No great loss. This thing is really coming together now. I’ve got to call Duneden and tell him about his story for tomorrow night.” J.T. reached for the phone and dialed.
Courtnay looked at Marty in disbelief. She wasn’t sure whether J.T. was vicious or merely callous. Whichever, she was shocked by his manipulations. Marty was more embarrassed than surprised.
“Probably not at home,” J.T. said, after listening to the phone ring several times. “I’ll call him later.”
The sommelier returned to the table, carrying a bottle of wine in a silver cradle.
“Oh ho,” said J.T., “we’re having the full treatment tonight.”
“I believe I ordered another wine,” Marty said somberly as the sommelier displayed the label before uncorking the bottle.
“If you and your guests will be so kind, Mr. Wright, the manager has selected this wine for you, compliments of the house. It is an excellent wine, very rare, magnifique.”
Courtnay and Marty looked at J.T. Despite their dismay at J.T.’s attitude, the surge of power that had just begun to flow was very heady.
“Thank the manager for me,” said J.T., motioning for the sommelier to uncork the bottle.
The sommelier pulled the cork and sniffed it delicately, his eyes closing with delight. “An excellent wine for you, sir.” He poured a little for J.T. to taste.
“Go ahead, it’s all right,” said J.T.
The sommelier shook his head, urging J.T. to taste his wine.
J.T. sipped and put his glass down. “Terrific. Go ahead.”
The sommelier poured for Courtnay and Marty, then added to J.T.’s glass. They raised their glasses in a toast to success and drank the full-bodied wine.
The captain pushed a flaming serving cart to the edge of their table.
“Tell me,” J.T. said to the captain, “did you see the crime hearings on TV today?”
“My wife had the TV on when I woke up, but I didn’t watch, to tell you the truth. I wasn’t too interested. Was there something special you were interested in, sir? Perhaps I can ask one of the waiters.”
“No, no, never mind,” said J.T.
The captain turned to a customer who signaled from the next table.
Courtnay held back a laugh, her hand to her mouth, as J.T. looked at them with feigned anger. Marty kept a chuckle inside until the captain was out of hearing.
“Marty, if you leave that lunkhead a tip, I’ll cut you out of my will. Wasn’t interested! The very idea,” J.T. said, laughing now. “Here’s to tomorrow.” He picked up his wineglass.
“Tomorrow,” said Marty.
They clinked their glasses together.
November 22, 1960
“Now, Mister X, does this organization you’ve told the committee about have a name?” J.T. asked.
The huge hearing room was tomb-silent, the attention of spectators and legislators alike riveted to the short, squat man who sat alone at the witness table, a black cloth hood over his head. The man’s eyes showed through two holes cut in the hood.
“Yes, the name is La Cosa Nostra. That’s Italian for ‘our thing.’” The man’s voice was rough, guttural, a voice of the slums.
“‘Our thing’?”
“Yeah, that’s what it’s called.”
“And is there some initiation ritual you have to go through in order to become a member of this Cosa Nostra?” J.T. continued, reading from the script before him.
Mister X’s entire testimony had been reduced to a script with both questions and answers when he had testified before a closed session of the committee. After that, another closed session of the committee convened—without Mister X in attendance—so that the committee members could go over the transcript together and refine portions of it, until a final version emerged in the form of the script now on the desk before J.T. and the other committee members. The one detail that was changed at the last minute was Guardaci’s name—to Mister X, so that, together with the hood, J.T.’s dramatic presentation would be complete.
Mister X also had a copy of the transcript before him. In fact, he had had the transcript for several days. J.T. had sent it to the army base where Mister X was being detained; Guardaci no longer had to live in a prison or eat prison food. He would serve the rest of his sentence at such a facility. That was part of the bargain Guardaci made with the government, through J.T., in exchange for his testimony.
J.T. had sent instructions with the transcript. Mister X and his guards—another part of Guardaci’s deal was that special agents were to be with him around the clock—were to read the transcript aloud and rehearse questions and answers until Mister X was able to respond practically verbatim without referring to the transcript. J.T. wanted Mister X’s testimony to look natural, spontaneous.
“Yeah, you have to stand in a room with all the other wise guys—that means guys who are already in ‘our thing.’”
“Yes?”
“Then you all hold hands together, and the boss tells you to repeat an oath.”
“What oath? Do you recall?” asked J.T.
“Well, yeah,” he hesitated.
“What oath, Mister X?” J.T. pressed.
“Well, you take a knife and a gun, and you say things like, ‘I will take up the knife and the gun and I will protect my friends, and die by the knife and the gun before I am disonorata.’”
“What does that mean, that last word? Is it Italian?”
“Yeah, that means a man without honor, a disgrace.”
“Mister X, when did you begin your life of crime?”
“When I was borned was as good a time as any,” Mister X said, looking directly at the little red light on the television camera that was taking a closeup of him.
J.T. watched Mister X, a smirk creasing his thin lips. The son of a bitch, J.T. thought. He had explained the workings of the TV cameras to Guardaci, and now he was playing to the cameras, even with a hood on his head. That’d be all right, J.T. thought, if Guardaci stuck to the script. But he had begun ad-libbing, first words, now little jokes. J.T. thought he might request a recess if Guardaci didn’t get back in line.
“When did you start getting in trouble with the law, Mister X?” the chairman said, more insistently.
Mister X read the transcript before him silently. He nodded, then looked up. “When I was a kid, I was sent to reform school. I was about thirteen years old.”
“What were the charges?”
“I robbed a candy store, got three dollars and change.”
He was back on track now, thought J.T. If only the cretin would stay on it.
“And how long were you in reform school?” the chairman continued.
“A year, maybe, the first time. I was in and out until I was about eighteen.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I got involved with a gang, and after that I became a member of La Cosa Nostra.”
“Was that right after reform school?”
Mister X thought for a moment, his head cocked to one side. “Not exactly,” he said unsurely.
“Can you think hard, Mister X? Try and refresh your recollection,” J.T. interrupted. “Take your time and refresh your recollection.”
Mister X looked down at the script. So did every member of the committee.
“Oh, I joined another gang—the Little Gang, we called it, and we used to go around and stick up stores. One guy would drive, and stay in the car, two others would run in the store, grab the money, an
d run.”
“Is that how you did it, just grabbed the money and ran?” asked the chairman.
“Well, sometimes we had to persuade the people.” Mister X said coyly to the camera.
“What does that mean?” asked the chairman, glancing down at J.T. momentarily. J.T. didn’t look up, but he could feel the chairman’s consternation—and his own annoyance. Guardaci wanted to play games with the television audience, be cute, say things that would bring a laugh. But the laughs weren’t in the script.
“That means we had to use guns.”
“So you didn’t just walk into these stores and the people gave you their money voluntarily. You held the people up with knives or at gunpoint?” the chairman continued.
Now the chairman was ad-libbing, J.T. thought.
“That’s correct,” said Mister X. He had noticed the sour look on J.T.’s face and curbed his answers.
“I’d like at this time to turn over the questioning to my distinguished colleague, the senator from Louisiana,” said the chairman.
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” said Senator Carleton, sitting two seats to the left of the chairman. “This Little Gang, I take it, was not a part of organized crime?”
“That’s correct.”
“So it wasn’t until later, then, that you became involved in organized crime?”
“That’s correct.”
“And did you personally go through this ritual with the knife and gun?”
“That’s correct.”
“As a full-fledged member of La Cosa Nostra, thereafter”—the senator from Louisiana’s accent handled the Italian pronunciation no better than did the chairman’s—“did you share in the proceeds of crimes you didn’t commit yourself? And if you got in trouble, did La Cosa Nostra take care of your lawyer and bondsman, and if you went to jail, did it take care of your family?”
“That’s not correct.”
“What’s not correct?” asked Senator Carleton.
“That I shared in the take from other crimes, or that anybody paid anything for me if I had troubles. I was on my own. I got in trouble, that was my problem. Oh, the guys’d help out, if they could kill a witness or put muscle on someone. But money? Forget it! I had to go for everything myself. The bosses, they shared in the action from guys like me. But not me from them.”
“Can you name some of these bosses? Who are the higher-ups in organized crime?”
Mister X looked down at his script for a minute as he feigned reflection for the TV audience. “Well, like Gentleman Johnny Entrerri. He’s a boss of one of the New York mobs. Not really the top boss. He’s an underboss in the family of Pasquale Berdardo. In New Orleans, where you’re from, Senator,” he read from the script—the hearings were so well orchestrated that these answers were scheduled to be given to questions from the Senator from Louisiana—“there is an organized crime family. The boss there is Carmelo Torino.”
“Carmelo Torino is the boss of organized crime in New Orleans right now as we sit here?”
“That’s right, Senator.”
The senator looked grave for the viewing audience back home.
“Senator,” said the chairman, “I’d like to turn the questioning over to the representative from Arizona, Congressman Cole.”
“Certainly, Mr. Chairman,” said the still somber-looking Senator Carleton. He was going to milk his allotted time dry.
“Mister X,” asked a bushy-haired young man sitting at one end of the podium, “can you name the various cities in which there are organized crime families?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Mister X. “In fact, I prepared, with Mr. Wright, a chart of all those cities.” J.T. had made sure that his name was liberally salted into the script, so that he was either visually or verbally in front of the audience nearly all the time. The camera now swung to J.T., who, with Marty Boxer, produced from under the counsel table a large pasteboard on which was drawn an outline of the United States. The map was dotted with stars representing the territory of crime families, under the stars were the names of the bosses of those families.
A Senate page placed the chart on an easel that could be seen by the committee members, counsel, Mister X, and—most importantly, of course—the television cameras.
“These are the crime families, Mr. Congressman,” said Mister X after a television camera had an adequate opportunity to study the chart.
“How many of those families are there, Mister X?”
“Twenty-eight all together, Mr. Congressman.”
“And I see there’s a star in my home state of Arizona. Is that in Phoenix?”
“That’s right, Mr. Congressman. Philly ‘the Gimp’ Bon Giorno moved there for his health. Actually, he left his family in Brooklyn and set up another family in Arizona. They got all the same rackets like in New York, only smaller.”
“What are those rackets?” asked the congressman, already knowing the answer that would alarm the city fathers back in Phoenix. They could be consoled, however, by the fact that their congressman was right on top of the problem, stemming the catastrophe.
“Loan-sharking, gambling, protection, like that,” Mister X replied.
“The chair recognizes the senator from Connecticut,” said the chairman.
“Thank you, Senator,” Senator Maggiacomo responded. He sat one seat away from the chairman. “Mister X, I see a star in my home state too. That’s in Bridgeport, is it not?”
“That’s correct.”
Senator Maggiacomo was, in addition to a distinguished senator, a former history professor from Harvard and an expert on the Renaissance. He was revered in the Senate for his command of the English language; his oratory had mesmerized the Senate many times. And what most others were unaware of was that he spoke Italian, French, and Spanish with equal distinction.
Senator Maggiacomo had conflicting emotions as he began to question Mister X. Mister X indeed! He had objected vehemently to the circus atmosphere of the hood and the pseudonym. But he had been outvoted overwhelmingly. Guardaci represented everything Senator Maggiacomo despised. Guardaci brought ignominy and shame to Italians in the United States. It was because of him, and others like him, that when people heard an Italian name they thought not of the most glorious period in human history, the Renaissance, which had produced Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Dante, but of Prohibition, which had spawned the likes of Capone, Luciano, and Genovese. When the senator heard Guardaci use Italian words to give some Latin seasoning to the hearings—at the suggestion, there was no doubt in Senator Maggiacomo’s mind, of J.T. Wright—Guardaci spoke the way an illiterate hillbilly would speak English.
While Senator Maggiacomo despised Guardaci and his kind, he equally despised opportunists like Senator Anders and J.T. Wright, who were hungry for cheap publicity; the lazy law-enforcement people who needed a target to blame for their incompetence and impotence; the movie industry which catered to the public’s willingness to buy tickets to their tawdry films. They all pandered to the image of Mister X for their own selfish glory. And Senator Maggiacomo hated participating in the farce.
“How many people—altogether—are in this organization, Mister X?” asked the senator.
“More or less, in the whole country, five thousand.”
“You’re saying that in the entire United States, forty-eight states, there are, altogether, only five thousand people involved in organized crime?” Senator Maggiacomo asked.
J.T. examined his script. He knew that question wasn’t there, but he looked anyway. Senator Maggiacomo was an unknown quantity to J.T. He was not interested in publicity, and he was senior enough in the Senate to be independent, almost untouchable. And J.T. knew from executive hearings that Senator Maggiacomo could be trouble at these public hearings. He alone had bridled at the prepared script. Outvoted, he had had no choice but to accept the script. But now, before the press and the public, he began to depart from it. J.T. drew in his breath, half turning to view Senator Maggiacomo.
“That’s correct, Senator,�
�� Mister X replied.
“That’s less than one-thousandth of one percent of the Italian-Americans in this country, isn’t it, Mr. Witness?”
“I can’t say, Senator,” Guardaci shrugged.
“That makes the Italian-American community purer than Ivory Snow, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t tell you that either, Senator.”
“You can say, can’t you, Mr. Witness, that these five thousand people, whether they’re men or women—”
“All men, Senator,” Mister X volunteered.
“Thank you. You can say that these five thousand men are not responsible for all the murders that took place in the United States last year, can’t you?”
Guardaci shrugged. He didn’t remember that question in the script. “I don’t follow you, Senator,” he finally said, confused.
“You’re not saying these five thousand men are responsible for the twenty thousand rapes in the United States last year, are you?”
“Rape?” Guardaci looked around. He glanced at J.T., who stared straight at the desk before him, his body tensed with helpless anger.
“What’s this rape? They don’t do no rape. That’s—that’s—”
“That’s a crime that takes place without the help of organized crime, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Is organized crime responsible for the one hundred thousand burglaries that took place last year?”
“What are you getting at, Senator?”
“Is this organization you are talking about responsible for every mugging in this country?” the senator sailed on, ignoring Guardaci’s question.
“Mugging? They don’t do no mugging, neither. That’s for bums.”
“Then the rapists and muggers aren’t part of this organization you’re a member of, correct?”
“That’s correct.” Guardaci drifted slowly through a fog, unfamiliar with the questions, where they were leading, or what he should answer.
J.T., however, knew quite clearly where Senator Maggiacomo was heading. What he didn’t know was how far the senator would go. J.T. looked down at a script ripe with unpicked questions and answers.
J.T. Page 9
