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The Winter of Frankie Machine

Page 14

by Don Winslow


  “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  “Always is in San Diego,” Frank replied, holding the back door of the car open for him.

  It was a quick drive to the Sur.

  Frank waited in the parking lot with the other drivers as Fitzsimmons made his endorsement speech and the sixteen other board members stood by, beaming. All the board members are here, Frank thought, but the wise guys are nowhere to be seen.

  “Do you believe,” Mike said, looking very spiffy and a little nervous as he stood beside his immaculate car, “that we’re going to the fucking president’s house?”

  After his speech, Fitzsimmons and three other board members got into Frank’s car. The other cars followed them as Frank led them out onto the 5 and drove up to San Clemente, to the Western White House.

  Frank had been there before.

  Well, not exactly to the house, but right below it, under the red bluff. He and some surfing buddies had hiked up from Trestles and found this great right-hand break under the Western White House. For some reason or other, this spot had the name Cottons.

  Maybe I should tell Nixon about it, Frank thought as he pulled up to the gate, where Secret Service agents in their dark suits, sunglasses, and earpieces stopped him and checked the car out. Then again, he thought, it’s a little hard to picture Richard Nixon on a board.

  Waving that V for victory thing he did while hanging ten in the soup.

  Cowabunga, dude.

  The Secret Service guys let the caravan through. Why not, Frank thought. Nixon couldn’t be safer in his mother’s arms than he was with this delegation, although none of them was strapped, having received strict orders to leave the hardware at home. After all, we’re his people. We’re all making money together.

  Another Secret Service agent directed him where to park. He did, then got out to open the doors for Fitzsimmons and his boys and saw the president of the United States walking down to meet them.

  Frank, even with the twenty-something cynicism that was part and parcel of the seventies, had to admit he felt a little awed, maybe even intimidated. This was the president of the United States, the commander in chief, and the former Marine in Frank made him straighten his posture a little bit, and he had to fight the impulse to salute.

  He felt something else—this little stirring of pride at being in on this, even as a chauffeur. It was this feeling of being part of something…so powerful…it could bring them to the home of the president of the United States, and the man would personally walk down from his house to greet them.

  Nixon opened his arms wide as he walked toward Fitzsimmons and said, “I hear you have good news for me, Frank!”

  “Very good news, Mr. President!”

  It must have been, because Nixon was in a very good mood. He embraced Fitzsimmons and then went around and shook everybody’s hand, working the crowd like the career politician he was. He shook all the board members’ hands, then came around and even shook the drivers’ hands.

  “Nice to meet you,” Nixon said to Frank. “Thanks for coming.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say. He was afraid of saying something stupid, like what was in his head, which was, You have a great break here, Mr. President, but Nixon had already moved on well before Frank formed the words.

  That’s the last Frank saw of him that day.

  The Teamsters’ board went up to the house and the drivers waited by their cars. The house staff brought them barbecued chicken and ribs—the same meal the big shots were getting up on the lawn. Later on, some staffer came and gave them each a golf ball with the president’s signature on it.

  “I’m going to keep this for fucking ever,” Mike said. Frank could swear he saw tears in his eyes. Frank wandered down to the edge of the bluff. He had lots of time because the Teamsters were scheduled to play a round on the president’s three-hole golf course, and that was going to take a while.

  So Frank sat by the ocean and watched Cottons break below him. There were no surfers out there, never were when Nixon was in residence. I guess the Secret Service is afraid of some surfing assassin or something, Frank thought, although it would be one hell of a shot from the beach up to the lawn.

  He looked south and, sure enough, could see the westernmost buildings of the Sur glistening white in the sun, and he wondered what Joey the Clown and Tony Pro were doing while everybody else was visiting the president’s house, wondered if they felt bad being left out.

  That was the summer of ’72, the summer of Richard Nixon.

  By the winter of ’75, it had all gone to shit.

  25

  Nicky Locicero died in the fall of ’74. His funeral was pathetic, just immediate family—none of the guys showed up because they didn’t want to give the feds any ammo.

  The feds were pounding the L.A. family. It was like the FBI was living inside the guys’ heads, the prosecutors seemed to know everything, and the feds’ Xerox machines were breaking down, they were cranking out so many indictments.

  And the indictments were rock-solid. Even Sherm Simon advised the guys to plead out, which they did. Peter Martini got popped for four years, Jimmy Regace, who had just taken over as boss, for two. He named old Paul Drina as acting boss.

  Bap thought it should have been him. He was very pissed off.

  “Tom is a lawyer who’s never got his hands wet,” Bap said to Frank. “What’s he ever done other than be Jack’s brother? And they jump him over me? After all I’ve done for them?”

  This was Bap’s constant refrain back in the seventies, the “after all I’ve done for them” mantra. The fact that it was justified didn’t make it any less tedious or futile, though. Fact was, Frank was sick of hearing it.

  There comes a time in a man’s life, he figured, the infamous midlife crisis, when a guy has to face the reality that what he has is all he’s going to get, and he needs to find his peace and his happiness in his life as it is. Most guys managed to get that done, but not Bap—he was always griping about how he’d been screwed, how this guy or that guy had done him dirt in a deal, how there were guys who were “dead wood” and he was sick of carrying them, how L.A. never cut him in for his fair piece of the pie.

  What pie? Frank thought as he heard this litany for maybe the thousandth time. There’s practically no pie to cut up, what with half the guys in the can and New York and Chicago picking the bones like vultures.

  Which was why Frank had taken his meager savings and gone into the fish business. Mike could laugh at him all he wanted, and make jokes about how Frank smelled like a mackerel (which wasn’t true—(a) Frank showered meticulously after work, and (b) there were no mackerel in the Pacific Ocean), but the money was clean and safe. And while he wasn’t raking it in like you could with the rackets when everything was good, everything wasn’t good.

  And they couldn’t expect any help from on high, either, because the guy in the White House had his own problems, and he wasn’t about to reach a hand out to a bunch of mobsters.

  So it was a bad time for things to go haywire at the Sur.

  But they did.

  June, the summer of ’75, Frank got a call from Bap’s phone booth office. “You and Mike, get your asses here quick.”

  Frank heard the urgency in his voice and told him they could be in Pacific Beach in half an hour.

  “Not Pacific Beach,” Bap said. “The Sur. And come heavy.”

  It was Fort Sur Mer.

  Driving up to the main building, Frank spotted half a dozen wise guys, all dressed casually, like guests, but posted to control the avenues of access. And Frank knew that under the polo shirts and the gabardine trousers, or tucked in golf bags or tennis frames, the guys were carrying serious hardware.

  Frank parked in a slot across from Dorner’s condo. Bap must have seen them pull up, because he was walking toward them before Frank even turned the motor off.

  “Come on, come on,” Bap said, opening Frank’s door.

  “What’s up?”

  “Hoffa’s
making his play,” Bap said. “He might be putting a hit out on Dorner.”

  Frank had never seen Bap this worked up. When they got into Dorner’s condo, Frank could see why.

  The heavy drapes were pulled closed against the big glass slider that normally looked out on the golf course. Jimmy Forliano stood at the edge of the curtain, peeking out, a holster with a .45 strapped on his shoulder. Joey Lombardo was in the kitchen, getting a beer out of the fridge.

  Carmine Antonucci sat on the sofa, sipping coffee. Dorner sat next to him, a gin and tonic sweating on the glass-top coffee table at his knees. In a big chair across from them sat Tony Jacks, looking cool and collected in a white linen suit and a royal blue tie.

  Dorner looked up at them as if he’d never seen them before, even though they had hauled him back and forth from his private jet at least a few dozen times. He didn’t look good. He looked pale and tired.

  “Hi, guys,” he said.

  His voice was weak.

  “You stay tighter on Dorner than his own asshole,” Tony Jacks said. “He don’t shit, shave, or shower, he don’t look over his shoulder and not see one of you there. Anything happens to him, it happens to you next.”

  The siege went on for three weeks.

  “Hey,” Mike said about a week in. “If you’re going to go to the mattresses, there are worse places to do it than the Sur.”

  More Godfather jive, Frank thought. If anybody had ever “gone to the mattresses” in San Diego before this, they were air mattresses in swimming pools.

  Dorner started to get cabin fever.

  “I want to get out,” he said. “Play a little golf, just take a fucking walk. Get a little sun.”

  Frank shook his head. “No can do, Mr. Dorner.”

  He had strict orders.

  “I feel like a prisoner in my own home,” Dorner said.

  It’s not far from the truth, Frank thought, beginning to wonder if they were protecting Dorner from Hoffa or for him. He expressed this to Bap one day as he was walking him out of the condo.

  Bap looked at him for a long moment.

  “You’re a smart boy, Frankie,” Bap said. “You’re going to go places.”

  It could go either way, Bap explained. Chicago and Detroit were working it out; all they could do was wait.

  Basically, Tony Jacks was fighting for his boy Hoffa, while the Chicago boys were taking up for Fitzsimmons and Dorner. Bap was betting on Fitzsimmons and Dorner, because they were the better earners, but then again, Hoffa’s Detroit connections were long and strong.

  And Tony Jacks was lobbying hard for both Dorner and Fitzsimmons to get the chop.

  “Don’t let yourself get too close to the guy,” Bap said, meaning Dorner. “You don’t know what you might have to do, huh?”

  So that was it.

  They were guarding Dorner and they were guarding him. They weren’t letting anybody in and they weren’t letting him out. It was weird, sitting there playing rummy with the guy night after night, knowing you might be called on to whack him.

  So it was tense.

  It got a lot more tense when Mike came back from a little walk, took Frank aside and whispered to him, “We gotta talk.”

  He was shook.

  Mike Pella, who was usually ice, looked shaken.

  “It’s Bap,” Mike said.

  “What’s Bap?” Frank asked with this edge to his voice, but he already knew the answer. He felt like he could throw up.

  “Bap’s been talking to the feds,” Mike said. “He’s been wearing a wire.”

  “No,” Frank said, shaking his head. Except he already knew it was true. It made sense—Bap had finally found his way to take out the L.A. leadership—cooperate with the feds and put them in jail. Then, when they’d made Paul Drina boss instead, he decided he needed to finish the job.

  “How do you know this?” Frank whispered. Dorner was asleep in his bedroom, but Frank wasn’t taking any chances he’d overhear.

  “The guys set him up,” Mike said. “They tossed him some bullshit about a porn shakedown and the feds showed up at it.”

  And now, Mike said, L.A. was wondering if all Bap’s guys were in on this coup by cop.

  “Frank,” Mike said, “you gotta figure they’re thinking about clipping all of us.”

  He was freaking out now, paranoia pumping adrenaline. “What if Bap gave us up, too?”

  “He didn’t,” Frank said, still hoping.

  “We don’t know that,” Mike said. “What if he takes the stand? He could put us up for DeSanto, Star….”

  “If he had,” Frank said, “we’d have been arrested by now. The feds don’t sit on murder indictments.”

  No, if this was true, Bap’s strategy was to get rid of L.A. by giving them up to the feds, then basically replace the L.A. guys with his own San Diego crew. Which was why not a single San Diego guy had been named in the sweeping indictments the previous summer. It had always been Bap’s dream to run California from San Diego.

  “We’d be his two captains,” Frank said.

  “The fuck you talking about?”

  Frank laid out his analysis of Bap’s plan and repeated, “Bap is planning to make us the captains in his new family. He kept us out of the indictments; he kept us off the tape.”

  “So, what, we owe him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do we owe him our fucking lives, Frankie?” Mike asked. “Because that’s what we’re talking about here.”

  Mike was right. Frank hated to admit it, but Mike was absolutely right. It was either/or. Either they took Bap out or they jumped in the boat with him.

  And that boat was going down.

  So there it was. The afternoons in Dorner’s luxurious jail cell got real long. Now there were three guys sitting around wondering if they were going to get whacked, trying to keep their minds off it by watching other guys rat on their boss.

  The end of July, they got the word.

  Jimmy Hoffa had disappeared.

  So, Frank thought, I guess Chicago and Detroit worked it out. And, he learned, if it’s a contest between old connections and money, put your money on money.

  Dorner took a big sigh of relief and kicked the two men out of his house.

  They weren’t so glad to go. Nobody was going to clip them in Dorner’s condo. Outside, it might be a different story. Frank went home and got an uneasy night’s sleep.

  Bap called at ten in the morning from his phone booth, telling Frank to come right over, that he had some news. Frank met him on the boardwalk at Pacific Beach. Bap had his easel set up. He was out there painting, and the man was beaming.

  “They made me consigliore,” Bap said.

  The pride in his voice was palpable.

  “Cent’anni,” Frank said. “It’s overdue.”

  “It’s not boss,” Bap said. “It’s not all I wanted, but it’s a significant honor. It’s an acknowledgment, you know what I mean?”

  Frank wanted to cry. Maybe that was all the man had ever wanted: an attaboy, a pat on the back. Not a lot to ask. But Frank knew what it really was. It was poison wrapped in candy, a sleeping pill to lull Bap into a feeling of security.

  It was a death sentence.

  Frank almost told him.

  But he choked the words back.

  “I’m going to take care of you,” Bap said, tranquilly painting his crappy watercolor of the ocean. “Don’t you worry, you and Mike. I’m going to see that you get straightened out.”

  “Thanks, Bap.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Bap said. “You’ve earned it.”

  Marie came out of the house with two tall glasses of iced tea for them. She wasn’t a hot little number anymore, but she still looked good, and it was clear from the way she looked at her husband that she adored him.

  “You’re almost done with this painting, huh?” she said, looking over her husband’s shoulder. “It’s good.”

  It isn’t, Frank thought. Only a loving wife would say it was.

  The
next call came from Mike.

  They met down at Dog Beach, watched golden retrievers fetch Frisbees.

  “It’s a done deal,” Mike said. “L.A., Chicago, and Detroit have all signed off. Chris Panno gets San Diego; we report to Chicago until L.A. gets its act together.”

  “Yeah? When will that be?” Frank asked, avoiding the real topic.

  “We gotta do it,” Mike said.

  “He’s our boss, Mike!”

  “He’s a fucking rat!” Mike said. “He has to go. You want to go with him, that’s your choice, but I’m telling you right now, it ain’t mine.”

  Frank stared out at the ocean, thinking he’d like to get out on a board and just paddle. Maybe get his ass kicked in a big wave and get…cleansed.

  “Look, I’ll do it, that makes you feel better,” Mike said. “You drive this time.”

  “No,” Frank said. “I’ll do it.”

  He went home that afternoon, turned on the television, and watched Nixon walk to a helicopter, then stand there and wave.

  Jimmy Forliano made an appointment for Bap to call him that night. It was raining that night along the coast. Bap was wearing a Windbreaker and one of those old wise-guy fedoras like they used to wear in the movies. He took it off when he got inside the phone booth.

  Frank sat in the car and watched him take the roll of quarters out of his pocket and knock it against the little metal shelf to break the paper open. Then he started feeding quarters into the phone.

  Forliano was up in Murietta.

  A long-distance call.

  Frank couldn’t hear him say “It’s me,” but even through the rain and the glass, he could see his lips move. He waited until Bap was in the middle of the conversation, not worried about it ending early. Forliano was a bullshit artist; if there was anything he could do, it was talk.

  Frank had a .25 pistol for this job, not his usual .22. (“Don’t sign your work,” Bap had told him.) He flipped the hood of his Windbreaker up over his head and stepped outside. The street was empty—people in San Diego don’t come out at night in the rain. Only Bap did that, to come to his office.

  Bap dropped the roll of quarters when he saw Frank. They clattered to the floor, some of them rolling around like they were trying to escape. Bap tried to hold the door shut.

 

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