by Gene Mustain
The LURPs could do nothing but monitor the carnage on their radio. With the bombing and shelling between them and the battalion, they could not help. With the hill under NVA control, they could not run. They felt like prisoners as friends were tortured in the next cell, but their lives were now on the line too. Even if able to reach Dak To without the NVA eavesdropping on captured radios, Dak To did not have a way to extract them. Choppers still flying would be trying to help the men under fire. The LURPs were stranded and, in all likelihood, also surrounded.
As night fell they moved into a thicket and laid a “killzone” of defensive booby traps. The slaughter below continued several hours. When the explosions stopped, the wind carried the moaning of mangled men up to the LURP hideout. For a while, single gunshots rang out as wounded paratroopers not yet dragged to cover were executed by the NVA. After the shots died down, the wind brought the odor of burning opium, the enemy’s tranquilizer. The LURPs now knew they would have a few hours of peace.
A damp chill settled over Hill 875. When it came Dominick’s turn to try and sleep a couple of hours he curled up and pulled his poncho tightly around. “I am the lion and the fox. I am the lion and the fox. I am the lion and the fox.”
The LURPs stayed in their hideout for two days and used the rest of their food and water. On the morning of the third day, as a ghostly blue haze draped the jungle, they heard muffled voices and clanging noises—the enemy was moving fresh troops out of the caves and down the hill, where the battle still raged.
The 4th Battalion, sent in to rescue the 2d, was also pinned down. Several more helicopters had been shot down, and wounded men were dying for lack of medical help. As enemy bugles signaled the start of more combat, Uncle Ben, the LURP leader, called a meeting to evaluate their predicament. Without food and water, it was useless staying hidden. They had to try to escape while they had the strength to fight.
Transmissions on the team’s radio indicated that a force of many thousand NVA controlled the hill. The NVA could easily spare as much as a company, two hundred men, just to shadow the LURPs and “make sure we don’t get away,” Uncle Ben said.
“They know where we are. They know we have to move. When they hit us, we have to spread out and keep movin’. Move and fire. We ain’t gonna lay down for the motherfuckers.”
The LURPs moved out. Ten minutes down the hillside opposite the battle, they heard movement and dove for cover just as automatic fire erupted in front. Dominick heard bullets whizzing past his ears make a clicking sound as they broke the sound barrier and then a slapping sound as they slammed into bamboo.
The LURPs scattered. One of them began firing the team’s omnipotent M-60 machine gun, which spewed deadly splinters of stalks and branches in all directions. Dominick looked up to another eerie sight: enemy dead dangling upside-down from trees like slaughterhouse steers. They had tied themselves to the branches so mere wounds would not fling them from their perches.
“Spread out!” Uncle Ben shouted. “Move and fire!”
The LURPs raced through the thickets, ducking and spraying fire. Changing directions to confuse the enemy, they ran right into them—pumping his shotgun, Dominick pulverized several at close range. The men took turns saving each other’s lives, picking off NVA who popped up behind. They ran, ducked, and fired for forty minutes—it seemed like hours—until return fire ceased.
Soaked and aching, the LURPs gathered together. The jungle was absolutely still. All the birds and animals had long since left it to the humans. From the radio they learned another battalion was moving up their side of the hill, meaning they would soon be exposed to preparatory bombing and shelling. Uncle Ben then mapped an escape route that snaked through the worst fighting of the last few days. Low on ammo, they moved out again.
Progress was slow. They slithered through an evil-smelling area defoliated by napalm, whose powdery residue penetrated their fatigues. With nightfall, they hid again. Dominick shook from oncoming dehydration; his lips were cracked and bloody; his legs felt napalmed. But his ears hurt the most, because of the nonstop explosions all around the hill. He covered them with his hands as he tried digging a hole in the jungle floor with his elbows. Agonizing hours later, the noise stopped; he rolled on his back and stared at the stars, a body waiting for the coffin to be closed.
At first light, shell-shocked and dying of thirst, the LURPs moved out. Dominick was down to three shotgun shells and a single clip in his .45 caliber handgun. They came under fire immediately; rocket-propelled grenades exploded in the trees. Dominick saw Bones the radio man go down. He saw Uncle Ben run toward Bones, then fall. An NVA soldier popped up out of a bush and aimed at Dominick, but Uncle Ben popped back up and shot him dead. Dominick dove beside a tree, fired at bushes that moved, then stopped, saving his last ammo for when the enemy was upon him. When the ammo was gone, he would unfasten the machete he carried and die hand-to-hand like a Samurai.
When a seeming lull came, he realized his legs were exposed and got up to move just as a grenade exploded five meters behind, knocking him out instantly. Shrapnel tore into his back and legs and a gush of air kicked his legs forward and lifted him several feet into the sky before he crashed to earth like an Airborne Ranger whose parachute never opened. It was November 22, 1967, the day before Thanksgiving.
* * *
There was a military quality to Nino’s life now that would have surprised his point-man nephew. From the beginning, Mafia bosses had organized their families along a rigid chain of command. It started at the bottom with “soldiers” like Nino. They formed squad-like “crews” that reported to “capos” or “captains,” who reported to an “underboss,” who reported to the boss.
To Nino’s benefit, the system was altered when Carlo became general. To appease Albert Anastasia loyalists, Carlo appointed an Anastasia protégé as underboss, but limited his authority to certain crews that in time became known as the “Manhattan faction.” Paul Castellano, Nino’s capo, answered directly to Carlo, and over the years Carlo’s brother-in-law, cousin, and longtime confidant became the de facto underboss of the family’s “Brooklyn faction.”
Nino, of course, was well positioned anyway because he had worked for Carlo and Paul since the early 1950s. He and Paul were close friends now too; Paul, age fifty-two in 1967, was godfather to Nino’s son Frank; his daughter Connie was godmother to Nino’s daughter Regina. Nino had recently purchased a lot on a private island in Florida, near Paul’s getaway condominium in Pompano Beach and was making plans to build a Roy-type home there.
Seemingly, Nino’s special relationship with Paul also boded well for the future. Although the Manhattan faction might disagree, Paul was the logical heir apparent to sixty-seven-year-old Carlo. Because of his proximity to power, Paul had the best overall perspective on the family’s disparate operations. He had also proven himself an able businessman, having spun his father’s pork store into a chain of butcher shops plus a wholesale meat company that supplied most of the chickens on Brooklyn dinner tables. He was a major loanshark too; his book, worth several hundred thousand dollars, rivaled even Carlo’s.
All the while Dominick was in Vietnam the Montiglios continued to visit the Gaggis in Brooklyn on Sundays, particularly after Nino’s sister learned she had Hodgkin’s disease. In between, there were birthdays, holidays, and special events like Nino’s wife Rose giving birth to her fourth and last child, a boy.
Despite the frequency of visits, Anthony Montiglio, an inspector for a Department of Motor Vehicles facility near Levittown, had an arm’s-length relationship with Nino. It was defined soon after Anthony and Marie were married. Nino asked if he could hide some money in a bank account in Anthony’s name, and Anthony refused. Because he had no way to make his brother-in-law’s life miserable, the way he had Anthony Santamaria’s, Nino just grumbled for a while, then forgot about it.
The motor vehicle inspector had developed a better relationship with his warrior stepson, but because he felt destined to lose any competition wit
h Nino in which the reward was Dominick’s undivided loyalty and respect, he never tried to mount one. He also did not think Dominick had the will to refuse Nino a tainted favor the way he had.
“Nino will try to win Dominick over someday,” he was always warning Marie.
Overweight once, Nino was svelte and taut now. He exercised in a gym he had installed in the bunker’s basement. He squeezed his own orange juice, did not eat vegetables out of a can, and still drank only wine. His world was notorious for men who like Roy cheated on their wives, but he was a loyal husband. He doted on his children, three boys and a girl, but demanded good behavior. His Cadillac and his clothes were always immaculate.
His personal dress did fit the gangster stereotype: rakish suits, ties that matched pocket squares, shoes that clicked, and a dazzling collection of watches, rings, and bracelets. With his dark eyeglasses, which changed with each suit, he sparkled. The style was so deliberately slinky that when he strolled with Rose into a status-conscious place like the 21 Club in Manhattan, where Chuck Anderson, the maître d’, was a friend and a loanshark customer, it seemed he wanted people to know he was a gangster.
Though no one in his family knew just how ferocious he was, because they did not know how he had incinerated the killer of Frank Scalise, Nino’s temperament was still a family wonderment. One day, he was in his car on Eighty-sixth Street in Bensonhurst, waiting for his brother Roy’s wife to exit a delicatessen. As she did, some neighborhood teenagers whistled and hooted; she was a dark-haired version of the pretty and blonde Rose Gaggi. One of the raucous teens was Vincent Governara, a former classmate of Dominick’s at Public School 200.
Judging the catcalls a personal insult, Nino waded into the teens with a hammer kept under his front seat; he swung wildly several times before Governara, who was a boxer, flattened him with a nose-breaking right hook. After coming home from the hospital, the prominent vein on the left side of Nino’s neck appeared ready to explode as he vowed to his brother: “I’ll get that punk some day. I’ll kill the little motherfucker.”
Marie shook her head when she heard the story—the offense was so slight, the response so exaggerated. “I don’t want Dominick working for you when I’m gone,” she told Nino during a rare departure from the normal decorum of dinners in Brooklyn. Besides the obvious reasons, she had other grounds. “Dominick is Americanized now. You can’t control him. He won’t go by your rules.”
“All I want is for Dom to survive that silly damn war.”
“He will,” she said.
In another example of family wonderment, Dominick did. Late on the day he was knocked out and severely wounded on Hill 875, four dazed LURPs carrying him and Bones the radio man staggered into a Ranger camp at the base of the hill. Just when the LURPs were on the ropes, the NVA had retreated and let them slip away. Dominick woke up two weeks later in a military hospital and after several more weeks of treatment was awarded another medal. Bones recovered too. They and the others were believed to have killed at least fifty enemy fleeing down the hill.
Early in 1968, still in the Army, he left Vietnam. He was to report to Fort Bragg in North Carolina next, but went home first. His mother hosted a homecoming party in Levittown; Nino, maintaining his policy of never going to Levittown, did not attend.
The next day, Dominick went to Brooklyn to pay his respects. His anger at Nino’s refusal to help his music career had faded in the wake of Army triumphs; he even attributed some of his success to growing up with Nino and living through dramas like the siege in the bunker during the gangland war of 1957. Apart from Nino’s tirades, Dominick had always enjoyed his company. Making people come to him was just the price Nino charged; since Dominick had proven himself right about the Army and Nino wrong, it was easy to pay.
Nino invited him to accompany him, Paul Castellano, and their wives to a stage show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. “Wear your uniform, your beret, and all your medals,” he said.
The hypocrisy was amusing, but Dominick did as ordered, and marveled at the squad of Waldorf waiters who doted on his party’s perfectly positioned table. He got the idea, which was true, that the Gambino family practically ran the hotel workers’ union.
In a few weeks, after a physical examination by an Army doctor in North Carolina, Dominick was told he would not be allowed to parachute again because of knee injuries suffered on the hill. Angrily, he made an abrupt decision later questioned but not retracted: “That’s the end of the Army for me,” he told the doctor.
To his mother’s dismay, he wound up right back in Brooklyn. With only a few months left on his enlistment, the Army assigned him to a military police unit at Fort Hamilton, a small base whose main gate was a mile from Nino’s house in Bath Beach.
He enjoyed his new assignment—tracking down AWOLs, rounding up drunk soldiers in Times Square—and with the bunker so nearby, began taking some of his meals there. Naturally, Nino moaned that having an MP at the dinner table was the same as having a cop—and got even more belligerent when Dominick said he intended to take the New York State Police entrance exam after the Army.
“I’ll be upstate someplace, writing speeding tickets.”
“Bullshit! A cop is a cop!”
Marie Montiglio urged her son to go to college, preferably one far away. “Mom, I know what you’re trying to say, but don’t worry,” he told her. “That life of Nino’s is not for me.”
Recently, Marie’s disease had produced some discolored bumps on her arms, making everyone anxious about how much time she had left. Wanting to please her, Dominick searched for a college that would admit someone with lackluster high school grades and found a junior college in Miami, Florida. He announced plans to enroll there after his discharge.
By appearances, Nino demonstrated only an avuncular interest in Dominick’s life. He never mentioned Gambino family matters in his presence or introduced him to Roy DeMeo or any of the men who worked for him. “Uncles” Carlo and Paul were always presented in a social context, such as when, at another dinner, Nino tried to get Dominick interested in Paul’s handsome daughter Connie.
Dominick liked Connie, but felt no spark. His spark came on another occasion, when he went to Nino’s for a birthday party for a cousin. Nino set the stage by inviting the family babysitter, a neighborhood girl whose father owned a bar in Manhattan. Dominick froze when he saw her sitting crosslegged on a chair in his grandmother’s apartment. She was drop-dead pretty, with Cher-like black hair to her buttocks and skin the color of café au lait; her brown paisley minidress evoked shapely dreams. He felt she belonged in a slick Italian magazine ad, draped over a red Ferrari, and he fled to the floor below, speechless.
Recouping, he asked Nino, “Who is that lady!”
“Our babysitter, Denise Dellisanti. Denise of the saints. A beautiful name, a beautiful girl, why don’t you go talk to her?”
In a while, the former LURP gathered his courage and walked back up the steps where Denise was. He remembered little of their conversation, only that she was seventeen years old, youngest of five daughters and a freshman at St. John’s University in Queens. Apart from beautiful, she was smart, sweet and gentle, and her last name was so apt: Dellisanti. Denise of the saints.
In six weeks, he asked her out. They saw a movie, then went to Nino’s house for coffee. He took her home at half past ten in the evening; she lived with her parents and had an eleven o’clock curfew. They quickly moved from dating to relationship, but did not make love. She was against it outside marriage. Dominick, head over heels, did not try to persuade her otherwise.
The FBI might not know about Nino, but Denise’s parents did. They knew some of his loanshark customers and were therefore neither fond of him nor his nephew. They allowed Denise to babysit only because the Gaggis lived nearby and paid her well. Dominick resented the prejudgment, but did not mention their hostility to his volatile uncle.
Dominick was still in the Army when Nino first asked for a tainted favor, which was cast as a matt
er of honor. A dentist who lived and worked in the neighborhood had made a suggestive remark to one of his patients, Rose Gaggi; Nino interpreted it virtually as attempted rape and informed Dominick he was going to plant a stick of dynamite beneath the dentist’s front porch.
“He insulted my wife and your aunt. This’ll tell the guy he should get the fuck out of the neighborhood before he really gets hurt. We’ll sneak over there tonight. You watch my back.”
Knowing Nino and having heard the Vincent Governara story, Dominick was less surprised by Nino’s over-reaction than his assumption he would help. But because a porch, not a person, was the target, he watched Nino’s back. Some days after the message went off, the dentist did pack his bags and move away.
Dominick never mentioned the incident to Denise and never talked about his uncle’s shadowy life, except obliquely, in a language a neighborhood girl like Denise well understood. “It’s funny about people in that life,” he would say. “You can tell who’s in it just by the way they are, but if that person is friendly and treats you well, they’re just good people.”
Everyone liked Denise. At St. John’s, a fraternity elected her “Miss Mu Gamma Delta.” She invited Dominick to be her date at the installation and the party following. With his close-cropped Army hair, he felt out of place; people his age were adopting hippie looks and attitudes as 1968 wound down.
At the party, he experienced his first Vietnam flashback. He was standing against a wall, drinking a beer, watching everyone dance, when the room exploded and body parts flew everywhere. He sank to the floor and covered his face. Denise kneeled beside him.
“Are you okay? The war?”
“Yeah, no, worse than that.”
She hugged him. “I think I’m just overwhelmed by change,” he finally said. “It was so bad over there, but here I am with you and I’m so happy. It’s like I was in hell, and now I’m in heaven.”
