John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Stefano had watched his own father build a small empire from the family’s modest house in Bensonhurst. In those days Bensonhurst, bordered by Gravesend Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, still had a small-town feel. The scent of deli food mingled with that of wood-burning ovens from the local pizza parlors. People lived in two-family houses with wrought iron gates, and when the sun shone, they would sit out on their porches and watch their kids play in their tiny gardens.

Stefano’s ambition would take him beyond his roots. When his time came to take over the operation, he built a big house on Staten Island; when he stood at his rear-facing windows, he could see the edge of Paul Castellano’s mansion on Todt Hill, the $3.5 million White House, and probably, from his topmost window, the grounds of the Barton estate. If Staten Island was good enough for the head of the Gambino family and a benevolent millionaire, then it was good enough for Stefano. When Castellano died after being shot six times at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan, Stefano was, briefly, the biggest boss on Staten Island.

Stefano married a woman from Bensonhurst named Louisa. She hadn’t married him out of any kind of love familiar from romantic novels: she loved him for his power, his violence, and mainly, his money. Those who marry for money usually end up earning it. Louisa did. She was emotionally brutalized and died shortly after giving birth to her third son. Stefano didn’t remarry. There was no grief there; he just didn’t need the bother of another wife, especially after the first had produced his heirs.

The first child, Vincent, was intelligent and represented the best hope for the family’s future. When he died in a swimming pool from a massive brain hemorrhage at twenty-three, his father didn’t speak for a week. Instead, he shot Vincent’s pair of Labradors and retired to his bedroom. Louisa had been dead for seventeen years.

Niccolo, or Nicky, two years younger than his brother, took his place at his father’s right hand. As a rookie, I watched him roam the city in his huge bullet-proofed Cadillac, surrounded by soldiers, carving himself a reputation as a thug to match his father. By the early 1980s, the family had overcome an initial distaste for the drug trade and was flooding the city with every kind of poison it could lay its hands on. Most people stayed out of the way, and any potential rivals were warned off or ended up as fish chum.

The Yardies were another matter. The Jamaican gangs had no respect for established institutions, for the old ways of doing business. They looked at the Italians and saw dead meat; a shipment of cocaine worth two million dollars was boosted from the Ferreras and two soldiers were left dead. Nicky responded by ordering a cull of the Yardies: their clubs were hit, their apartments, even their women. In a three-day period, twelve of them died, including most of those responsible for the cocaine theft.

Maybe Nicky imagined that would be the end of it and things would return to normal again. He still cruised the streets in his car, still ate in the same restaurants, still acted as if the threat of violence from the Jamaicans had dissipated in the face of this show of force.

His favorite haunt was Da Vincenzo, an upscale mom-and-pop operation in his father’s old Bensonhurst neighborhood that was smart enough not to forget its roots. Maybe Nicky also liked the echoes of his brother in the name, but his paranoia led him to have the glass in the windows and doors replaced with some military-strength panes, the sort used by the president. Nicky could enjoy his fusilli in peace, undisturbed by the imminent threat of assassination.

He had only just ordered one Thursday evening in November when the black van pulled into the side street opposite, its back facing toward the window. Nicky may have glanced at it as it stopped, may have noticed that its wind-shield had been removed and replaced with a black wire grille, may even have frowned as the rear doors sprang open and something white flared briefly in the darkness of its interior, the back blast rattling the grille.

He may even have had time to register the RPG-7 war-head as it powered toward the window at six hundred feet per second, smoke trailing it from behind, its roar penetrating the thick panes before they exploded inward, glass and hot metal fragments and the slug from the missile’s copper liner tearing Nicky Ferrera into so many pieces that his coffin weighed less than sixty pounds when it was carried up the aisle of the church three days later.

The three Jamaicans responsible disappeared into the underworld and the old man vented his fury on his enemies and his friends in an orgy of abuse, of violence, and of death. His business fell apart around him and his rivals closed in, recognizing in his madness the opportunity to rid themselves of him once and for all.

Just as his world seemed about to implode on itself, a figure appeared at the gates of his mansion and asked to speak with the old man. He told the guard he had some news about the Yardies, the guard passed on the message, and after a search, Bobby Sciorra was admitted. The search was not a complete one: Sciorra held a black plastic bag, which he refused to open. Guns were trained on him as he approached the house, and he was told to halt on the lawn, about fifty feet from the steps of the house, where the old man stood in wait.

“If you’re wasting my time, I’ll have you killed,” said the old man. Bobby Sciorra just smiled and tipped the contents of the bag on the illuminated lawn. The three heads rolled and bumped against one another, the dreadlocks coiled like dead snakes, with Bobby Sciorra smiling above them like some obscene Perseus. Thick, fresh blood hung languorously from the edges of the bag before dripping slowly onto the grass.

Bobby Sciorra “made his bones” that night. Within one year he was a made guy, an ascent up the family ladder made doubly unique by its speed and the relative obscurity of Sciorra’s background. The feds had no file on him, and Ferrera appeared able to add little more. I heard rumors that he had crossed the Colombos once, that he had operated out of Florida for a while on a freelance basis, but nothing more than that. Yet the killing of the linchpins of the Jamaican posse was enough to earn him the trust of Stefano Ferrera and a ceremony in the basement of the Staten Island house that resulted in the pricking of Sciorra’s trigger finger over a holy picture and his tie-in to Ferrera and his associates.

From that day on, Bobby Sciorra was the power behind the Ferrera throne. He guided the old man and his family through the trials and tribulations of post-RICO New York, when the FBI’s Racketeer Influenced Corruption Organization statutes allowed the feds to prosecute organizations and conspirators that benefited from crime, instead of just the individuals who committed those crimes. The major New York families-Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese, and Bonanno-numbering maybe four thousand made guys and associates, all took big hits, losing the heads of their families to jail or the Reaper. But not the Ferreras. Bobby Sciorra took care of that, sacrificing some minor players along the way to ensure the survival of the family.

The old man might have preferred to take even more of a backseat in the family operation if it hadn’t been for Sonny. Poor dumb, vicious Sonny, a man without the intelligence of either of his brothers but with at least their combined capacity for violence. Any operations he controlled degenerated into bloodshed, but none of it bothered Sonny. Corpulent and bloated even in his twenties, he enjoyed the mayhem and the killing. The death of the innocent in particular seemed to give him an almost sexual thrill.

Gradually, his father sidelined him and left him to his own devices-steroids, small-time drug deals, prostitution, and occasional violence. Bobby Sciorra tried to keep him under some sort of control, but Sonny was beyond control or reason. Sonny was vicious and evil, and when his father died, a line of men would form to ensure Sonny joined him as soon as possible.