Эд Макбейн - Criminal Conversation

At three thirty on the afternoon of December twenty-eighth, while Sarah and Heather and Mollie splashed in the warm lucid waters off the house on St. Bart’s, Michael sat in a parked car with an ADA named Georgie Giardino, the Rackets Bureau’s most ardent mob-watcher.

Georgie’s grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian -Americans, it made them simply Americans. The two men meeting in the restaurant today had also been born in America, and despite their Italian-sounding names, they too were American. In fact, neither Frankie Palumbo nor Jimmy Angelli felt the slightest allegiance to a country that was as foreign to them as Saudi Arabia. Even their parents, similarly born in the good old U.S. of A., had little concern for what went on in Italy. Most of them would never visit Italy in their lifetime. Italy was a foreign country where, they’d been told, the food wasn’t as good as you could get in any Italian restaurant in New York. This was not like the Irish or the Jews, whose ferocious ties to Northern Ireland and Israel would have been considered seditious in a less tolerant land. The irony was that although these hoods called themselves “Italians,” they were no more Italian than Michael himself was. Or, for that matter, Georgie Giardino.

Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angelli were Americans, take it or leave it, like it or not. And like any other good Americans, they believed in a free society wherein someone who worked hard and played by the rules could prosper and be happy. The rules they played by were not necessarily the same rules most other Americans played by, but they did obey them. And they did prosper. Georgie despised them and their fucking rules. It was, in fact, his firm belief that until every last Mafioso son of a bitch was in jail, any American of Italian descent would suffer through association. That was why he was sitting alongside Michael today, freezing his ass off in a parked car two blocks from the Ristorante Romano, waiting to hear and record the conversation that would take place between two or more American gangsters in an Italian restaurant.

The first of them to arrive was Jimmy Angelli, one of the caporegimi of the Colotti family in Queens.

“Hey, Mr. Angelli, long time no see, what’s the matter you don’t come to the city no more.”

The restaurant owner, they surmised.

The city was Manhattan.

Anyone who lived in New York knew that there was the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island — and the City.

There was another man with Angelli.

They didn’t get his name till Angelli said, “Danny, sit over there.”

This was while the two men were still alone. Angelli was probably indicating that his goon sit with his back to the wall, where he could see anyone coming in the front door. It did not take too many restaurant rubouts before you learned where to sit.

Frank Palumbo and his goon arrived some ten minutes later, fashionably tardy as befitted the offended capo of Manhattan’s Faviola family. After all, some stupid cocksucker thief guaranteed by the Colotti family had shortchanged him five grand after he’d done them a favor. He could afford to play this one like the boss himself instead of one of a hundred lieutenants in the Faviola family.

At the recent trial of Anthony Faviola, convicted and sentenced boss of the notorious Manhattan family, the U.S. Attorney had introduced in evidence the taped conversations that were the result of a yearlong wiretap surveillance. On those tapes, a man identified as Anthony Faviola had, among other things, ordered two hit men to do several murders in New Jersey. The defense called his younger brother, Rudy, as a witness and he was the first to testify that on the night his brother had allegedly made the call from his mother’s house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, he was instead at his own palatial home in Stonington, Connecticut, playing poker with six legitimate businessmen. The six men were each called in turn, and each corroborated the fact that at eight twenty-seven that night — the time at which the incriminating interstate call was allegedly made — Anthony was laying a full house on the table, aces up. The jury didn’t believe any of them.

Anthony was now serving five consecutive lifetime sentences in the maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Four of these sentences were for the murders he’d ordered. The fifth had been tacked on under the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute — familiarly known as the RICO statute — under which murders committed in the furtherance of criminal enterprise were punishable by lifetime sentences.

Anthony was locked in his cell for twenty-three hours every day, and his visiting privileges were severely limited as well because he’d been deliberately sent to a federal prison far from family, friends, and former associates. Some diehard followers insisted that he was still running the mob from inside, but from everything the DA’s Office had been able to learn, his underboss brother, Rudy, next in line and loyal to the end, was now boss — with Anthony’s blessings. Rudy was affectionately known as “the Accountant,” a nickname that had nothing to do with balancing books. When both brothers were coming along as soldiers in the Tortocello family, Rudy had built a reputation as an enforcer, a man to whom you had better account or else.

Sitting in the parked car now, Michael and Georgie were hoping to hear something that would connect Rudy Faviola to the dope deal that had gone down outside a takee-outee restaurant in Chinatown. Six ounces of cocaine was an A-l felony. If they could tie this to an additional felony and a misdemeanor, each committed within the past three years, then under Section 460.20 — defined as the Organized Crime Control Act — they might be able to send the new boss out to Kansas, too, Toto. Well, not quite. Anthony Faviola was serving federal time; an OCCA offender would be sent to a state prison.

“How you doin’, Jim?” Palumbo said. “You been waitin’ long?”

“Just a few minutes,” Angelli said. “You’re lookin’ good, Frank.”

“I could stand to lose a few pounds,” Palumbo said. “Over there, Joey.”

Indicating a chair for his goon, no doubt.

The men ordered wine.

The bug recorded the ritual Mafia foreplay.

The inquiring after one’s health and one’s family, the show of respect, esteem, and admiration.

Ta-da ta-da ta-da, as Jackie Diaz had put it.

The men did not order lunch.

Palumbo got down to brass tacks almost immediately.

“What do you suggest we do with this asshole you sent us?” he asked.

“I never even met the stupid fuck,” Angelli said.

“So that’s who you recommended me? Somebody you never met?”

“I was doing a favor for my cousin.”

“Some favor you done me, he fucks me out of five grand.”

“You’ll get the money back, Frankie.”

“When? How?”

“That’s what I want to work out with you.”

“You work it out with me, you think it’s gonna fly, huh?”

Advertising-agency talk.

“I’m hoping it will.”

“I still ain’t heard what you plan to do. All I know is somebody’s got five thousand bucks of my money. And from what Sal tells me, there’s another fifteen grand kickin’ around out there, plus interest. So who is this jih-drool , you’re goin’ out on a limb for him? We got good relations, this asshole’s gonna fuck them up, we ain’t careful.”