Charlie Stella - Charlie Opera

Thomas smuggled Cuccia from the Jersey City warehouse to a DEA safe house, where the Vignieri crime family captain was offered a deal that would save him from spending the rest of his life in jail.

Cuccia also was under surveillance by the FBI organized crime task force, as well as a New York City organized crime unit.

Deals were struck between the two federal agencies that permitted the DEA to run the show. Thomas was promoted and reassigned to Cuccia. Part of the deal required Cuccia to sting his uncle, the acting underboss of the Vignieri crime family, with the heroin bust. The hope of the federal organized crime task force was that Uncle Anthony Cuccia would be yet another underboss to turn on the head of a New York crime family. The DEA would take the credit for the operation up to the point of old man Cuccia’s arrest for heroin trafficking.

An underlying hope had been that Nicholas Cuccia would remain unscathed from the drug bust; that somehow he could remain inside the Vignieri crime family as an ongoing informant. Thomas knew that it was a pipe dream to wish for the stars, but so far the nephew seemed to be buying the hard sell of the various federal law enforcement agencies.

Still, Thomas’s direct future within the DEA depended on the government game plan attaining some measure of success, the least of which was keeping Nicholas Cuccia healthy enough to make the case against his uncle the underboss.

The fact that the federal organized crime task force was about to issue indictments against several key people in the Vignieri crime family complicated matters. None of the agencies was sharing significant information. It was a common problem during intensive long-term investigations. Sometimes years of manpower effort and millions of dollars were lost because of animosity between or among the various agencies investigating organized crime.

The pressure was on Thomas and the DEA to make the heroin bust before the organized crime indictments. But the central figure in the government’s game plan was in Las Vegas with two of his crew for reasons totally unknown to Thomas.

He suspected it had something to do with the recent injury Cuccia suffered to his jaw. The mobster’s jaw was broken a full ten days earlier. It was the only night Thomas had taken off in three weeks of surveillance. Cuccia had told Thomas that he fell riding a motorcycle. The agent knew the story was bullshit.

The New York City organized crime unit was the only law enforcement agency that knew what had happened the night Cuccia’s jaw was broken. So far, they weren’t sharing the information.

This was why Thomas was in Las Vegas this weekend instead of home with his wife. He hadn’t spent back-to-back days with his wife in more than a month. Now he was making excuses for following a wiseguy across the country.

“But why?” his wife wanted to know.

“To keep an eye on him. Until this thing comes off, I’m his baby-sitter.”

It was the truth. When he thought about it, Thomas was nothing more than a baby-sitter for a wiseguy.

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” his wife asked. “I never see you anymore. When are you coming home?”

He had managed to get a room directly across the hall from Cuccia at the Bellagio Hotel. He had rigged a minicamera to the bottom of the door and connected it to the television. He was watching the television while his wife interrogated him.

“Hello?” his wife said. “Are you there? Marshall?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thomas told his wife. “I’m busy now. I gotta run.”

He hung up the receiver without saying good-bye. He watched as a man he recognized as Joey Francone accompanied another man inside Cuccia’s room. Thomas sat up in the bed to give the situation his undivided attention.

Detective Gold found Detective Iandolli going through folders in a file cabinet along the back wall of a tiny office. Both men knew each other from working vice together eight years earlier. Both men were originally from New York.

Gold thought organized crime might know something about the assault at the Palermo construction site a few days earlier. Gold waited for Iandolli to shut the drawer of the file cabinet he was looking in before he spoke.

“A couple from New York,” Gold said. “They come here on vacation, but they don’t last three days. She splits with a former boyfriend. Leaves the husband a note while he’s down playing the tables, getting drunk at one of the bars. He goes out later and gets drawn into the construction site at the Palermo, behind the model. He catches a beating from two guys.”

Iandolli nodded.

“Then, the wife is with her boyfriend at some motel off the Strip. Two guys show up there the next day and assault her. Knock one of her teeth out.” He held a finger up for emphasis. “They take a tooth with them. One tooth. One of them leans over and pulls it from her mouth after punching her.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“One of the guys held a gun on him. They left after the other one took the tooth.”

Iandolli squinted.

“Exactly,” Gold said. “I got the call at the motel. I went there and listened to the boyfriend. I figured it was the husband followed them or something. Then I ran the name at the station and found out about the husband. Same last name pops up on a hospital report, how he got jumped the night before but didn’t want to report it. I sent two of my guys to talk to the husband, but he didn’t have anything to say. They tried to poke him a little, but the guy didn’t bite.”

“And the Palermo is Jerry Lercasi’s turf.”

“Public knowledge,” Gold said through a yawn. “And there’s a twenty-four-hour guard posted there. So how did this guy, the husband, wind up behind the model?”

“You look like shit,” Iandolli said. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“Two, three days ago. What do you think?”

“It’s a good question. You don’t get onto the Palermo construction site without a pass.”

Gold popped Chiclets gum into his mouth. “I figure maybe they’re running from somebody in New York. Which is why I came here to see you.”

“The plot thickens.”

“What do you mean?”

Iandolli held out an open hand. “Can I have one of thosee asked.

Gold handed Iandolli the small red box of Chiclets.

“I had a federali here,” Iandolli said after he popped two squares of the gum into his mouth. He chewed as he spoke. “He was dancing around a couple of guys in town from New York. Two guys flew up ahead of their boss.”

“FBI?”

“DEA. Which is the same shit when it comes to the interference they run for each other. Anyway, he came asking about two guys with a New York crew. I called New York. There are two guys here. Three, you count their skipper. They’re with the Vignieris. I don’t know what the DEA wants with them, nor do I care. But I’ll lay eight to one somebody caught a beating at the Palermo, our man in Vegas don’t know about it.”

“Jerry Lercasi.”

“Which means somebody pulled an end run.”

“This bookmaker they found, Benny Bensognio? The one in the news?”

“That was strictly skimming,” Iandolli said. “These assaults were out-of-town shit, somebody working through one of Lercasi’s diplomats. Allen Fein, for one, although I don’t see that little pervert getting into the muscle end of the business.”

“Maybe he wants to feel powerful.”

“Maybe.”

Gold leaned back in his chair. He didn’t like it that a simple assault was quickly blossoming into an organized crime case. “And it could just be coincidence or some other crazy shit,” he said. “Maybe the boyfriend had some friends take care of the husband, and the guy retaliated. A general cluster fuck or something.”