Nelson DeMille - The Gate House

“It was robbery.”

In fact, it was surrender and survival. I recalled what Frank Bellarosa had told me when he was under house arrest, trying to justify his cooperation with the Feds. “The old code of silence is dead. There’re no real men left anymore, no heroes, no stand-up guys, not on either side of the law. We’re all middle-class paper guys, the cops and the crooks, and we make deals when we got to, to protect our asses, our money, and our lives. We rat out everybody, and we’re happy we got the chance to do it.”

Frank Bellarosa had concluded his unsolicited explanation to me by saying, “I was in jail once, Counselor, and it’s not a place for people like us. It’s for the new bad guys, the darker people, the tough guys.”

Anthony glanced at me, hesitated, then said, “Some guys said… you know, my father had enemies… and some guys said he was… selling information to the government.” He glanced at me again, and when I didn’t respond, he said, “Now I see that it was only tax problems. They got him on that once before.”

“Right.”

He smiled. “Like Al Capone. They couldn’t get Capone on bootlegging, so they got him for taxes.”

“Correct.”

“So, bottom line, Counselor, it was you that told him to pay up.”

“Right. That’s better than facing a criminal tax charge.” In fact, it was Frank Bellarosa who had helped me beat a criminal tax charge. Frank had actually engineered the tax charge against me, as I later found out, so the least he could do was get me off the hook. Then I owed him a favor, which I repaid by helping him with his murder charge. Not surprisingly, Frank’s role model was Niccolò Machiavelli, and he could quote whole passages of The Prince , and probably write the sequel.

Anthony asked me, “So, the Feds taking his property had nothing to do with the murder charge against him?”

“No.” And that was partly true. Ironically, Frank the Bishop Bellarosa, probably the biggest non-government criminal in America, hadn’t committed the murder he was charged with. There was undoubtedly little else he hadn’t done in twenty or thirty years of organized criminal activities, but this charge of murdering a Colombian drug lord had been a setup by the U.S. Attorney, Mr. Alphonse Ferragamo, who had a personal vendetta against Mr. Frank Bellarosa.

Anthony said to me, “You were one of his lawyers on that murder rap. Right?”

“Right.” I was actually his only lawyer. The so-called mob lawyers stayed out of sight while John Whitman Sutter of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds stood in Federal criminal court in the unaccustomed role of trying to figure out how to get a Mafia don sprung on bail. Frank really didn’t like jail.

Anthony asked me, “Do you know that the FBI found the guys who clipped the Colombian?”

“I know that.” I’d actually heard this a few years ago from my daughter, who’s an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, and she was happy to tell me that I’d defended an innocent man. The words “innocent” and “Frank Bellarosa” are not usually used in the same sentence, but within the narrow limits of this case, I’d done the right thing, and so I was redeemed. Sort of.

Anthony informed me, “That scumbag, Ferragamo, had a hard-on for my father.”

“True.” Fact was, Mr. Ferragamo, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wanted to bag the biggest trophy in his jungle – Frank Bellarosa. And he didn’t care how he did it. The murder indictment was bogus, but eventually Alphonse Ferragamo, like a jackal nipping away at a great cape buffalo, had brought down his prey.

Anthony continued his eulogy. “Nothing that scumbag charged ever stuck. It was all bullshit. It was personal . It was vendetta .”

“Right.” But it was business, too. Frank’s business and Alphonse’s business. Don Bellarosa was an embarrassment to the U.S. Attorney. Some of it – maybe more than I understood – was the Italian thing. But professionally, Alphonse Ferragamo couldn’t allow the biggest Mafia don in the nation to walk around free, living in a mansion, riding in expensive cars, and eating in restaurants that Alphonse Ferragamo couldn’t afford. Actually, I guess that’s personal.

So Ferragamo, through various means, legal and not so, finally got his teeth on the big buffalo’s balls, and Frank Bellarosa went down and screamed for mercy.

It’s part of our culture to romanticize the outlaw – Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the aforementioned Al Capone, and so forth – and we feel some ambivalence when the outlaw is brought down by the sanctimonious forces of law and order. Dandy Don Bellarosa, a.k.a. the Bishop, was a media darling, a source of endless public entertainment, and a celebrity. So when the word got out that he was under “protective custody” in his Long Island mansion, and cooperating with the Justice Department, many people either didn’t believe it, or felt somehow betrayed. Certainly his close associates felt betrayed and very nervous.

But before Frank Bellarosa could be paraded into a courtroom as a government witness, his reputation had been saved by Susan Sutter, who killed him. And his death at the hands of his married girlfriend, a beautiful red-haired society lady, only added to his posthumous legend and his bad-boy reputation.

The husband of the Mafia don’s girlfriend (me) got pretty good press, too. But not good enough to make it all worthwhile.

Oddly, Susan didn’t come off too well in the tabloids, and there was a public outcry for justice when the State of New York and the U.S. Attorney dropped any contemplated charges against her, which would have been premeditated murder and murdering a Federal witness, and whatever.

I missed a lot of this media fun by sailing off, and Susan missed some of it by moving to Hilton Head. The New York press quickly loses interest in people who are not in the contiguous boroughs or the surrounding suburban counties.

Anyway, to be honest, objective, and fair, the people who suffered the most in this affair – aside from Frank – were the Bellarosa family. They were all innocent civilians at the time of this crime of passion. Anthony may have made his bones since then, but when he lost his father he was a young student in prep school.

So I said to him, “I knew your father well enough to know that he did what he had to… to get the Feds off his back so that he’d be around for his wife and sons.”

Anthony did not reply, and I used that silence to change the subject. He was wearing a wedding ring, so I said, “You’re married.”

“Yeah. Two kids.”

“Good. A man should be married. Keeps him out of trouble.”

He thought that was funny for some reason.

Rather than beat around the bush, I asked him, “What business are you in?”

He replied without hesitation, “I took over my father’s company. Bell Enterprises. We do moving and storage, trash carting, limo service, security service… like that.”

“And who took over your father’s other businesses?”

“There was no other businesses, Mr. Sutter.”

“Right.” I glanced at my watch.

Anthony seemed in no hurry to get up and leave, and he informed me, “My father once said to me that you had the best combination of brains and balls he’d ever seen.” He added, “For a non-Italian.”

I didn’t reply to that, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about hearing it. Aside from the fact that it was a qualified compliment (non-Italian), I needed to consider the source.

Anthony’s visit obviously had a purpose beyond reminiscing about the past and welcoming me to the neighborhood. In fact, I smelled a job offer. The last time I’d worked for a Bellarosa, it had ruined my life, so I wasn’t anxious to try it again.