R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

‘Right, Ducane. He’s the lead figure down there right now, he’s the one who has the say on the Teamsters’ contributions, where the money goes, who gets what. Feraud has him in his pocket, and if we don’t keep Ducane happy by doing this then we stand a chance of losing all the southern states’ funding as well. These guys have got their fingers in everyone’s fucking pies, and if we upset them then there’s gonna be some bloodshed and warfare. This is a necessary thing for everyone concerned, and it cannot, it must not , go wrong.’

‘That’s why I want your blessing to send Ernesto,’ Don Calligaris said.

Tony Provenzano looked across at Calligaris and then at me. ‘Right… this is what we gotta talk about. This Ducane has one of his own people, some ex-military guy or something.’ He turned and looked at Joey Giacalone. ‘What the fuck was this guy’s name?’

‘McCahill, something-or-other McCahill.’

‘Right… so Ducane wanted to send this guy down here to do this thing with Hoffa, but we wanna use our own people.’

‘Definitely,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘This is family business and it stays within the family. Like I said, I wanna send Ernesto.’

Tony Pro raised his eyebrows. ‘How so?’

‘Ernesto is from New Orleans originally, he did some work for Feraud and Ducane through Don Ceriano back in the early ’60s. I wanna send him and then I want word to get back to Feraud that we used one of his own on this thing. This fixes any difficulty these boys might have with us not using this McCahill guy, right?’

Tony Provenzano nodded. ‘Makes sense to me. Ernesto?’

I nodded. I said nothing.

Tony Pro smiled. ‘He ever speak?’

Calligaris smiled. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Only when he has to, and only when it’s people he likes, right?’

I smiled.

‘Shit, I better do something nice for him then,’ Tony Pro said. ‘He ain’t the sort of guy I want disliking me.’

They laughed. I felt good inside. It was a feeling I was getting used to. I was someone. I mattered. I thought also of Feraud and Ducane, people whose names recurred time and again in my business dealings, people who seemed to have become more and more significant as time had passed. Where once I had believed this Charles Ducane a small and nervous man in the employ of Antoine Feraud, it now seemed that he had mastered his own territory. He had become someone, just as I had, but in a necessarily different way.

‘So this thing goes down on Wednesday,’ Tony Jacks said. ‘From now on it’s called Gemini. That’s all, just one word. I don’t wanna hear no names or dates or places. I just wanna hear one word when you guys refer to this thing, and that word is Gemini.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Tony Pro asked.

‘It’s a fucking star sign, you dumbass motherfucker. It’s a fucking star sign, like a zodiac thing, and there’s a picture of a guy with two heads or some fucking thing. It’s just a fucking word, okay?’

‘So why that?’ Tony Pro asked.

‘’Cause I said so,’ Tony Jacks said, ‘And because Jimmy fucking Hoffa is a two-faced motherfucker who’s gonna lose them both come Wednesday.’

So I went to Michigan and I met with Jimmy Hoffa on a warm Wednesday afternoon in Bloomfield Township. He was a big guy. Big hands. Big voice. But he was nervous. I think he knew he was going to die. He got in the Mercury when Chuckie O’Brien turned up at the Machus Red Fox, and though I was sat in back he didn’t ask me who I was. He was talking too fast, asking why the meet had been changed, if Provenzano and Giacalone were already there, if Chuckie had heard any rumor about whether or not they would back him in his attempt to be Teamsters president again.

He kicked a lot when I put the wire around his neck from in back of the car. He kicked like Don Ceriano, but I felt nothing at all. Chuckie had to hold his arms in his lap, and it took some doing because he wasn’t no hundred-and-forty-pound sapling. Jimmy Hoffa had some fight in him, right until the end, and there was one fuck of a lot of blood. It was just a business thing this time, and there was very little to say about it. He had pissed my employers off something serious, and that was all there was to it. President of the Teamsters he might once have been, but the look in his eyes in the rearview, the look I saw as he choked up his last breath, was the very same as all of them. Didn’t matter whether they were the Pope or a labor leader or the second coming of Christ, when they saw the light behind their eyes going out they all looked like frightened schoolteachers.

Figured I might look like that one day, but I figured I would jump off that bridge when I got there.

A little more than twenty minutes later I stepped from the car with a bloody piano wire in my coat pocket. Jimmy Hoffa, sixty-two years old, was driven south to a family-owned fat rendering plant and he was blended into soap. I walked back towards the Red Fox. I caught a bus into Bloomfield. From there I took another bus to the train station. I arrived back in Manhattan on Thursday 31 July. Thirteen days later it was my thirty-seventh birthday. Don Fabio Calligaris and Tony Provenzano threw me a party at the Blue Flame, a party I will never forget.

It was Tony Giacalone who asked me, asked me what I wanted for my birthday, told me I could have anything I wanted in the world.

‘Your blessing,’ I told him. ‘The blessing of the family.’

‘Blessing for what, Ernesto?’

‘To marry a girl, Don Giacalone… that’s what I want for my birthday.’

‘Of course, of course… and who do you want to marry?’

‘Angelina Maria Tiacoli.’

They gave me the blessing, reservedly perhaps, but they gave it, and though it would be another four months before I saw her again it was on that day that my life changed irreversibly.

Later many other things would change also. In August Nixon would finally concede defeat and resign, taking with him the spider’s web of connections that ran throughout the families right across the United States. On 15 October the following year Carlo Gambino would die of a heart attack while watching a Yankees game on the TV in his Long Island summer home. He would be succeeded, not by Aniello Dellacroce as everyone believed would be the case, but by Paul Castellano, a man who built a replica of the White House on Todd Hill, Staten Island; a man who negotiated a truce with the Irish-New York Mafia and offered their leaders – Nicky Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan – permission to use the Gambino name in their dealings for a ten percent cut of all their earnings from Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side; a man who would ultimately contribute to the relinquishing of power the Italian crime families held in New York.

Carmine Persico would depose Thomas DiBella as head of the Colombo family in 1978; Carmine Galante would hold sway in the Bonanno family until 1979 when he was murdered at Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant in Brooklyn, and he was replaced by Caesar Bonaventre, the youngest ever capo, merely twenty-four years old. By then my time in New York would be coming to a close; by then I would have long-since graduated from the clip jobs and shootings where I had earned my reputation, and my apprenticeship would have ended.

I believed I came to New York to find something. What it was I was looking for I did not know then, and even now cannot be sure. What I found was something I could never have anticipated, and that is something I will share a little of with you now.

It was close to Thanksgiving, and though Thanksgiving was not a particularly significant event in the Italian calendar, it was nevertheless a reason to eat more, to drink more, have parties at the Blue Flame and make wisecracks about one another.