Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“Professor Marmoset—” I begin. There’s a beep.

Then silence. I wait for a few seconds. Nothing happens.

“Professor Marmoset,” I say. “It just beeped. I don’t know if that means it just started recording or that it stopped recording. It’s Ishmael. I really need to talk to you. Please call me or page me.”

I leave both numbers, even though I have to read the one for my cell phone off the name tag on my stethoscope. I can’t remember the last time I gave it out to anyone.

Then I consider trying to call Sam Freed, who brought me into WITSEC in the first place. Freed’s retired, though, and I have no idea how to reach him. And I am nowhere near ready to talk to whoever’s doing his job now.

When my pager goes off again, I look at it in case it’s Marmoset. But it’s just an alphanumeric reminder that, as bad as things are, they can always get worse:

“WHERE R U? ATTNDG RNDS IF NOT COEM NOW U R FIRED.”

Even on a good day I would prefer talking to an insurance company employee to having to sit through Attending Rounds. Now, when some fuckhead I haven’t even thought about in years has a good shot at getting me either killed or back on the run, it’s galling.

Because, COEM NOW or not, odds are I am FCKD.

Here’s a fun thing to do next time you’re in Sicily: Get the fuck out. Run.

The place has been a shithole since the Romans burned its forests and razed its hills so they could have a wheat farm near the Italian peninsula but too far off shore for the locusts to reach it. Even Garibaldi’s Redshirts, when they liberated Italy, left Sicily in chains. It was too valuable to give up.

The Sicilians themselves, over the centuries, got compacted into three distinct classes. There were the serfs, about whom what can you say, really. There were the landowners, who had mansions on the island but visited as seldom as possible. And there were the overseers—a leech class who, if they kept production up, were allowed to do anything to the serfs they wanted to.

The overseers lived in the owners’ mansions when the owners were away. During the Ottoman years they were called mayvah, which meant “swaggerers.” The word later became mafia .

When Sicilians began to immigrate to the U.S. in the early twentieth century, mostly to work picking paper out of the trash on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the mafia followed to keep sucking their blood. During Prohibition the mob did something arguably socially useful, but when that ended they returned to blackmailing people with the threat of violence full-time. A Roman history fetishist named Sal “Little Caesar” Manzaro even started a private army, using Italianized Roman rank names like capodecini and consiglieri, and life in New York got so bad the Feds finally became interested. The only thing that saved the mafia at that point was the garbage business.

For reasons that remain unclear, but probably have to do with it being easier for private companies than public ones to illegally dump trash across state lines, in 1957 New York City stopped collecting garbage for commercial businesses. Stopped for every commercial business, overnight. For the first time in a hundred years. Suddenly every company in the city was in the export business, with a massive, rotting product that could only be moved with trucks.

The mafia knew trucks from the paper-hauling days, and liked them. Trucks are slow and easy to find, and their crews are small and easy to fuck up. By the mid-1960s the mob routinely had the garbage workers’ unions, which it controlled, go on strike against the garbage companies, which it owned, then watched as the mayor jumped to raise collection rates to stop the resulting rat and disease epidemic.

This happened into the 19 90 s. You hear a lot about Armani suits, and “Dapper Dons,” and respect, and how Ha-ha, Tony Soprano pretends to be in the garbage business and so on, but for years it was garbage that kept the Five Families alive. Drugs, murder, hookers—even gambling, before the Indian thing—were just sidelines.

Eventually, though, Rudy Giuliani decided enough was enough and brought in Waste Management, a multinational corporation so scary it made the mafia look like little girls in those competitions JonBenet Ramsey used to enter. Waste Management’s own crimes were severe enough to ultimately force changes in the SEC, among other things, but its appearance on the New York garbage scene inspired another round of funeral announcements for the mafia.

Once again, though, the actual death was averted by legislation. This time at the state level.

For a number of years the mob had been running a scam where they opened gas stations using dummy owners, then closed them when the state tax bill came due. Since the state tax was over twenty-five cents a gallon, this meant they were able to drive every honest competitor out of business, which was lucrative but involved a lot of downtime, since each gas station had to stay closed for a minimum of three months between bankruptcies. Then the state changed the law, requiring gasoline wholesalers instead of retailers to pay the gas tax.

The idea was to kill the Gas Tax Scam, but the result was the much more lucrative New Gas Tax Scam—which, if you believe it, was invented by Lawrence Iorizzo and the Russian mobster “Little” Igor Roizman simultaneously, like Newton and Leibniz inventing the calculus.

In the New Gas Tax Scam you opened and closed sham wholesalers, and kept the gas stations open all year round, which was a bonanza. It sounds obvious and ridiculous, but by the end of 1995 the Sicilians and the Russians had used it to steal a combined four hundred million dollars from New York and New Jersey alone.

Ultimately, though, for the Sicilians to be in the same business as the Russians was a very bad idea. The Sicilians, after two thousand years of jackal vs. carrion culture, had become as lazy as the British, with the same dreams of living in a castle and being waited on by serfs. The Russians, who had recently had every illusion about organized society stripped from them, may have wanted the same thing, but they were willing to work their asses off for it.

You could see where this was headed. The Russians would eventually own the New Gas Tax Scam, just as they would own Coney Island, another disputed possession. It was only a question of when, how smoothly, and how profitably for the Sicilians.

Those Sicilians who saw things clearly realized that sooner was better, since a negotiated retreat while they still had power left from the garbage years was preferable to a rout.

Those Sicilians who failed to understand this, though, had a harder time saying goodbye, and caused problems. And the Russians had their own share of troublemakers. So as the sale of organized crime in New York worked its way to completion, there were always corners needing to be smoothed.

Smoothing out the corners was David Locano’s job.

I finished out my junior year of high school expecting to be arrested for the murder of the Virzi brothers. That was part of the reason I decided not to go to college, although more of it was just laziness. The way I saw it, I was too old and worldly to sit around a dorm room reading Faulkner while some dipshit played acoustic guitar. And while I knew that stopping my education would have scandalized my grandparents, I was also aware, constantly, that they weren’t around to feel scandalized by anything anymore.

I took a very brief break from the Locanos. I didn’t go with them to Aruba, for example, though I wanted to, and I stayed at my grandparents’ house while they were gone. And I made other brief and weak attempts to examine and justify continuing to spend time with them.