I cut his hair too.
Yes indeed. Many times. And Lefty Ruggiero’s just the same. And Sonny Black’s and Tony Rossi’s—he was a fed too, of course. Edgar Robb was his name. He’s still alive, him and Joe Pistone both, which is more than you can say for some of the others. Maybe being on the right side of the law means something.
Holiday, Florida—that’s where the Donnie Brasco story went down. Not Miami, like they pretend in the movie. That’s as made up as anything the newspaper could do. And King’s Court wasn’t this big casino, flashy lights, roulette tables, pretty girls, what have you. No. It was a little building, little bottle club, BYOB, you know, bring your own bottle, I mean—private membership. Small. But big business behind the scenes. Bootlegging, loan sharking, racketeering, you name it—all run out of this one-story building, couple of windows, these glass doors on the front. Inconspicuous, that’s the word. Looked like it might’ve been, what, a repair shop?
It’s a church now, no lie. A church. The building itself making amends, I guess.
I was living and working in Holiday when the Bonanno family made the town their headquarters and when Donnie Brasco was trying to get things going with the Trafficante clan over in Tampa, the bigger boys. “Forge an alliance,” that’s what the papers called it. All of it at the King’s Court Bottle Club, and my barbershop just down the street, a little bit further up US 19. Location being everything, I mean.
I cut hair for all of ’em. Santo Trafficante himself once. Most powerful mobster in the country. Had a hand in every kind of crime. Owned judges, owned politicians—ran Tampa really, sure, but bigger than that. All up and down the East Coast. Nationwide. International even. Killed a lot of people, they say, or had them killed. Tried to assassinate Castro too, worked with the CIA on it, that’s a fact, you could look it up. Look it up someplace reputable, I mean. The world wide web, you can’t trust that either.
They say he may have been behind the Kennedy assassination too, but I don’t believe that.
A nice man, very…gentlemanly he was. Very quiet really. Quiet like you, I guess, that one time I cut his hair.
Not that it was much of a cut, I have to admit. He was mostly balding on top, a little over the ears. More of a trim, a shaping. “Shape you up, sir?” That’s what I told him. And he laughed a little, gentle really.
“I think it would take a little more than a haircut to shape me up,” he said, and he took off those horn-rimmed glasses of his and he folded them very carefully and he laid them on the counter.
Nice man, like I said. To me at least, because this is a man, so they say, who had a man’s hands cut off, had another man’s throat slashed sitting there in the hotel room with him, cut ear to ear with a razor just like the one on my counter there. But I never saw that side of him.
You seem to wear your own hair thicker generally, am I right? And it hasn’t been long since you’ve had it cut, I’m right on that point, too. I can tell by the ends of your hair, by the feel of it.
Business trip, some big business meeting, it’s time for a shape-up of your own, am I right?
I know hair, I know styles. The undercut, the sweepback, the sideswipe, what have you. The Gatsby, that’s a sideswipe—before your time. Today it’s all fades and tapers. Well, not all. What you’ve got here, for example, is basically an update on the fifties’ pompadour—though it dates back a lot longer than that. France in the seventeen hundreds. Madame Pompadour—mistress to one of those French kings, I forget which. But a women’s cut originally, that’s what I’m saying. Then Elvis made it okay for men too. Trendsetter he was, so many ways.
Yours isn’t the classic pompadour, though. Wavy instead of combed-through, and the fade on the sides. An update. A modernization. Times change.
Elvis had mob ties too, they say. I wouldn’t know.
And I’m not saying that because of his hair, though I can see where people might think it. Jet black, slicked back with a swipe of Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya, you know that jingle? Before your time, I imagine.
Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino and The Godfather, it started there, popularized it at least. But truth behind it too. You look at Sonny Black himself. Real straight hair, always combed just so, always a dye job—black as black could get. He liked his sideburns too, long and wide—wise decision given the shape of his face. Square jaw, sure, but a thin face overall, which the wider sideburns complement, enhance really. Thin sideburns on a thin face make your head look longer. That’s simple physics.
And then I’d have people coming in later wanting that gangster look themselves. Wanting to look like Johnny Depp, which, of course, changed movie to movie. Hard to keep up. The Donnie Brasco look was a mid-length cut, combed back on the top and sides, sideburns to the crest of the earlobe—measure it with a comb. No part. Swipe of Brylcreem. Or really any pomade, but I have my preferences. Old school.
That look was very popular, but it wasn’t the real Donnie Brasco. His hair was a mess. Nothing like Johnny Depp’s.
Again, this is the difference between what’s real and what’s not.
I could tell, cutting it, feeling it, that Donnie Brasco—the real Donnie, Joe Pistone, I mean—was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. I’m not sure how he fooled those mobsters, but he didn’t fool me. A barber knows.
Of course, I wouldn’t say anything. Not what I saw or heard, not what I knew.
Barber and bartender, I mentioned—they listen, they know. But there’s discretion. Loose lips sink more than ships, so you watch what you say. I always do.
But watching Donnie Brasco—the movie, I mean, not the man—watching it when it came out…well, I’ll admit, a part of me felt a kind of…connection? Going into the theater, I thought, let’s see how much they get right, because I’d known so much of it. I’d lived so much of it. Not that it was my story up there, I don’t kid myself, but…but a connection, you understand? I’d been close to the story.
Which made one of the scenes hit home.
You’ve seen it? I can’t remember if you said. Either way, early in the movie, there’s a scene in a barbershop. This scene’s not in Florida but up in New York, and Lefty is worried about Donnie—Don the Jeweler, they’re calling him at that point—so Lefty goes into this barbershop to talk with this other guy, this guy named Jilly, about whether Lefty can trust Donnie, whether Donnie is “a stand-up guy,” that’s what he asks Jilly, and at the end of it, Jilly calls Donnie in, Donnie’s been out on the curb, sitting in the car, and Jilly tells Donnie what Lefty’s been asking, and he tells Donnie to watch his step or else one or the other of them is going to whack him.
Now, this whole scene, questions and tensions and…threats, that’s what it is. All this is going on, but what has my attention? I’ll tell you.
My eyes are on the barber.
This barber, he’s standing right behind Al Pacino, where you can’t really see him full-on. Can’t see the barber, I mean. And then there’s another shot and the barber’s head peeks in from the corner of the screen as he leans over Jilly in the chair. And then the barber’s hands spread the shaving cream on Jilly’s face.
This barber, he’s…well, he’s always on the edge or in the background or sometimes he’s just a shadow or a blur, out of focus. But he’s there, and he’s seeing it all, hearing it all—witness to it all, that’s what I’m thinking, and I don’t know why it took me so long—this movie, twenty years after the real story—took me that long to realize it myself, except for this sense of seeing myself up on the screen, seeing myself in a new way. Well, not me, I mean—this was a barber in a film, an actor, I don’t even know his name, a nobody. And even the barber he was playing, he was in Queens and I’m down in Florida, working in Florida, watching the movie in this big multiplex in Florida like I told you and…
What I’m saying.
I’d cut Donnie’s hair. And Lefty’s and Sonny’s. Santo Trafficante’s too. I’d had them in my shop. I’d listened to them when they
talked. I read the news when it turned out Donnie Brasco wasn’t Donnie Brasco, when he sat on the stand and…
After it came out that Donnie was a fed…there was a half million dollars promised to anyone who killed him, did you know that? Whacked him, I should say—like Jilly said.
Donnie—Joe—he wears disguises to this day. I’ve seen him on TV. Letterman. Looking nothing like the man I remembered.
And here I was, that barber on the edges and in the background who saw and heard and…What if someone else watching that movie suddenly thought: Wait a second, remember that barber down in Holiday? Couldn’t he have maybe…? Couldn’t he, same as Donnie Brasco…?
Sometimes you don’t want to get too close to a story.
That’s why I moved up here to Jacksonville—retired up here. For my health. Twenty years after everything that happened in Holiday, but it still felt like the thing to do. Because people might start thinking the way I started thinking. Might come looking for me. Back in Holiday.
But that’s old history. Not sure why I went into all that, except…
Well, you’re my first customer today, did I tell you that?
It’s good to have someone to talk with.
And then everything in that paper…
What I’ve been saying, it wasn’t all about back then, but about now—this story filling up the headlines these days, the Duplass Family. Capital-F family, like what we’ve been talking about, you understand, and the recent “fractures” within the Family, what the newspapers have been calling it. Loyalties cast aside, monies “absconded,” I think that’s the word. A whole trail of bodies, and then a power vacuum and a lot of speculation about who’s going to fill it.
Now our newspaper here—take it when you go, no, no, I’m done. This hack of a reporter has been writing up all this speculation and rumors and more. The Duplass family “matriarch” (always a high-dollar word, shows how smart they are) betrayed by her own daughter, this Melody—who, I’m not sure why, doesn’t have Duplass as her own last name. Maybe a fracture sometime long before? Anyway, this Melody Not-Duplass runs off with a tough guy from the…what did the paper say?…the “lower echelon of the family’s ranks.”
Timmy Milici is the boy’s name—or was.
Why did I say was? Is that what you asked? You’re not falling asleep, are you? You’ve been so quiet.
Well, I’m getting to that—and to the half million or million or two million or whatever that the newspaper speculates could be hidden in some motel room, maybe right down the street, or in the trunk of a car at some motel or “possibly” (they say) somewhere deep in the Okefenokee, like anyone would find it if it was. Not that the locals haven’t fallen for it hook, line, and sinker—my own customers talking about renting skiffs and scuba gear, but that’s just talk, my clientele being a little long in the tooth to be swamp diving.
That makes news too. People going into the swamp, not coming out. And the newspapers, that’s what they want, they’re selling it. Yellow journalism, they used to call it. Fake news now, and one of those in front, number signs we called them, used to, before the world wide web. The newspapers, they’re not making any money otherwise. That’s why they have “sources” who “assert” that “members of the organization” are trying to track Melody and Timmy down and that hitmen have been hired to shoot Timmy—shoot to kill—but miss Melody. Conveniently.
And then the whole second layer of “investigative reporting” trying to uncover the “truth” about Timmy being a federal agent, with rental cars circling through every motel in Jacksonville, federal agents driving half and hardened killers in the others—not much difference between the two possibly, but you understand. Who you work for, it means a lot.
It’ll look good in the movie, I’m sure. Who cares if it’s the truth or not?
Well, this is where the whole thing starts to unravel, I’m here to say: the idea of this Timmy Milici being with the feds.
How do I know?
Because he sat in the same chair where you’re sitting now.
Yes.
It’s the truth.
I mentioned before about Donnie Brasco aka Joe Pistone aka Joseph Pistone of the FB of I. I mentioned being in Holiday and cutting Donnie-slash-Joe-slash-Joseph’s hair and my knowing he was not who he said he was—the Joseph beneath the Donnie coming out. I could feel it in his scalp.
Well, when Timmy came in—which, I should emphasize, I did not know it was him at that moment, not until I saw his picture the very next day in the newspaper, pictures being the one place where they do have to stick to the truth. Photos don’t lie. But even shampooing his hair—oh yes, full shampoo, by request, not just the spray bottle of water like I did with you. As I was shampooing his hair, this nervousness hit me, like I could feel the mobster in his hair, like maybe Holiday had caught up, someone who’d seen Donnie Brasco and that barber scene and…
Well, that razor on the counter there? I moved it a little further out of his reach, I have to tell you.
Other than that, though, I didn’t let it show. I was sure he was organized crime, through and through, but I was not sure he had nefarious motives toward me specifically.
Which…coincidence, that’s all it was. Him walking in, me having my ties to the Bonannos and the Trafficantes and Donnie Brasco. Coincidence, that’s all, but I didn’t know that at the time. Not like I know now.
“You’re new in town?” I ask, trying to figure out if I had something to worry about. “Just passing through?”—same as I said to you, in fact.
“No,” he tells me—a lie, I knew it at once. “Wasn’t happy with my other barber.”
“Well,” I say. “I hope you’ll be happy here”—which I was sincere about. Given my past, my concerns, keeping him happy would be a good thing. “I’ve had a long history of happy customers,” I tell him. “Many years of service, a loyal clientele. Loyal to them as well”—I stressed that word loyal, for reasons I’ve been trying to explain.
Discretion, this is what I was emphasizing. I’m no talker, that’s what I was telling him.
“We’re a full-service establishment.” I add that too. “Not just cutting hair, but shaving too—nice clean shave. And nails, I can do nails too. You don’t think of a barbershop, traditional barber like myself, doing nails, but I see that you’re the kind of man takes pride in his appearance…”
I brought that up for a reason—and not because I was trying to sell him on a manicure, not that he needed one, that’s what I’m saying.
Which is important in two ways. Now you just think about it for a minute.
You don’t actually have to think. I’ll tell you.
First: I was still unsure whether my own past associations had come back to haunt me. Emphasizing his hands reinforces the idea that a man like that, he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty—which I mean both figuratively and literally. Violence, I mean. So part of it was psychological reinforcement.
But second, in retrospect, knowing now that it was this Timmy Milici—run off, stole money, and maybe hid it in a swamp, so they said…well, you see.
Those fingernails? Those fingers? These were not hands that had been shoveling in a swamp, chapping and chafing against the shovel’s handle, scraping through bits of mud and muck.
Now before you ask me, “Couldn’t this Timmy have gotten a manicure before coming to your fine establishment?” I’ll tell you: No.
Remember how I could tell from the ends of your hair last time you had a cut? Same with nails, even at a distance, without touching them.
Timmy’s nails had not been recently given a manicure, but neither did they need one.
And before you ask, “Isn’t it possible he went into the swamp afterward?” I’ll tell you again: No. Because the very next day, the paper ran this picture of him and started talking about the Duplass Family and the absconded money and the treasure maybe hidden in the swamp.
They work on deadlines, these reporters, an
d while Timmy could’ve left this chair and gone directly into the swamp afterward, no reporter could’ve gotten wind of his exact moves so quickly as to have it next morning at my front door, you see what I’m saying?
Fiction writers, that’s what they are, these newspaper reporters. That boy hasn’t seen a swamp.
Truth be told, I question whether there’s any money at all—in the Okefenokee or at the Manchester Inn or anywhere.
You have to read between the lines to get the truth—that’s not just with the story but with everything. Life.
Timmy Milici is lower echelon, yes, but not a federal agent, no—which tells us something about his background and his character.
Melody Duplass, Not Duplass, has renounced her name and maybe renounced her family, and why would someone do that? Because she doesn’t agree with her family on what they’re doing.
Timmy and Melody run off together because they’re in love. They did not take any money—I’ll get to that in a minute—but they’re carrying plenty of baggage in a different way, trying to get out from under the mob and then the differences between them. I’ll get to that in a minute too.
The two of them, they did come to Jacksonville—I know that, I saw him. But I did not see Melody the day he got his haircut. This is worth remembering.
So. Back in Atlanta, Olivia Duplass, “matriarch,” she’s upset. People in this kind of family, they don’t turn their backs on one another, they don’t elope, and they for sure don’t elope with the help. She wants her daughter back and wants this “lower-echelon” Romeo out of the way, make room for someone proper. A Family like this, big-F family, they take their weddings seriously. You’ve seen The Godfather, of course—half the movie is a wedding. And given Atlanta, it double and triples the idea of what’s proper—high society, Southern manners, Southern class. Not only is this big-F Family business, but it’s also small-f family troubles.
A mother and daughter, upper crust, and a lower-class nobody who came between them.
The Swamp Killers Page 25
