Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Several law enforcement agencies and countless reporters tried for months to solve the mystery of the missing pilot. All failed. Members of the U.S. Senate, capitalizing on the public’s fascination with the case, began to discuss holding hearings on this and other matters related to the growing and perhaps Communist menace of organized crime syndicates in America, variously calling such proceedings “long overdue,” “perhaps inevitable,” and “something we owe to our women and children and, indeed, our way of life.”

The driver’s license wasn’t a forgery, but the birth certificate the State of Nevada had on record actually belonged to an infant buried in a New Hampshire cemetery.

The information the feds had for O’Malley on his pilot’s license led of course to that same New Hampshire cemetery.

(Only God and Tom Hagen knew the rest. The cemetery lay beside a road that, many miles north, became the main drag of the town where Kay Adams Corleone had grown up. Soon after Michael killed his sister’s husband and lied to Kay about it, she left him. She took the kids and went to her parents’ house. Michael called her only once. A week passed. One morning, Hagen showed up in a limousine. Tom and Kay took a long walk in the woods. Mike wanted her to know that she could have anything she wanted and do whatever she wanted as long as she took good care of the kids, but that he loved her and-in a characteristically labored joke-that she was his Don. Hagen relayed this message only after confiding in her about some of the things Mike had done-an act of defiance that might have gotten Hagen killed. But it worked; Kay eventually came home. On Hagen ’s way back to New York, he stopped at a random public library, leafed through an old volume of the local newspaper, and learned of the sad story of Gerald O’Malley, stricken by diphtheria and taken by the Lord at the age of eleven months. Hagen kept the limo idling out of sight and walked to the courthouse. He was a nondescript man who knew how to behave in a library or courthouse so that people would forget him the moment he left. His various travels had allowed him to collect notarized copies of birth certificates from all over the country, never the same courthouse twice. He had a stack as thick as a Sears catalog. When Geraci asked for one with an Irish name, poor O’Malley’s was right on top.)

Once the identities of the dead were confirmed and then made public, anyone who knew or suspected what Vincent Forlenza was and what sort of situation he had on Rattlesnake Island immediately presumed that the plane had spent the afternoon there-this, with no inkling that the pilot was Forlenza’s actual godson. The authorities, of course, could prove nothing. Forlenza, questioned two days after the accident, also in the presence of distinguished legal counsel, wondered if the good men of the law might not be watching too much television. Gangsters? On his beloved island sanctuary? Now he’d heard everything. In any case, he’d been home all weekend, except for Sunday afternoon, when these so-called gangsters supposedly landed on Rattlesnake Island to have some kind of-what? Summit? Powwow? No matter. Forlenza said he’d spent the day in question as a guest at a Labor Day clambake sponsored by one of the union locals, huddled under a big-top tent, sipping ice-cold union-made beer and refusing to let the downpour spoil his celebration of an important national holiday, a story corroborated by any number of office-holding Cleveland Teamsters.

The physical description of O’Malley the police cobbled together from their interviews with rescue and medical personnel held little promise. They’d seen the man’s injuries but not the man. They were more fixated on the patient’s vital signs than the size of his ears, the shape of his (closed) eyes, or the subtleties of the jagged ridge of his much-broken nose, which had at any rate been broken again and was too purple and swollen to look much like the way it had.

No one outside the Corleone and Forlenza organizations could have guessed that Gerald O’Malley was the same guy as Nick Geraci. No one outside those Families knew much about who Geraci was or what he did. His seven years in the ring, even with all the fixed fights, had rearranged his face enough that boyhood friends would be unlikely to recognize him. He’d fought under more fake names than he himself could remember. Boxers become muscle guys every day, and any loyal muscle guy with half a brain can become a button man. But those guys don’t turn into big earners so often, much less into big earners a few courses shy of their law degree. He was known in New York as a guy who’d been under the wing of Sally Tessio, but all the different things he’d done would have made it nearly impossible for anyone to put all the pieces together. The more exceptional a person becomes, the more his place in the world seeks a similar extreme. It becomes more likely that he will be known either by everyone or by no one. He will either stand out, even though most people will never see him in the flesh, or he will vanish, even if he’s sitting right next to you at a lunch counter in Tucson, humming the bridge from that new Johnny Fontane record and tapping a dime on the Formica, waiting to use the pay phone.

It’s a crazy goddamned world. For months, Nick Geraci or what was left of him was out there in it, somewhere. Hardly anyone knew where. Hardly anyone was even looking for him.

Richard “the Ape” Aspromonte, who was asked only once, by a blind woman, how he got that nickname, was buried in Los Angeles, followed by a reception afterward at Gussie Cicero’s supper club. When the time came to make toasts, all four of Aspromonte’s brothers looked to Jackie Ping-Pong, who hardly knew the Ape, but whose words proved eloquent, moving, and a comfort to the dead man’s grieving mother. In San Francisco, Lefty Mancuso’s parents tried to keep his funeral small. The only celebrity there was a lesser DiMaggio brother, a high school classmate of Lefty’s. The only member of the Molinari Family was Tony Molinari’s younger brother Nicodemo. Out of respect, even his bodyguards stayed on the periphery, just in front of the small cadre of the cops and the curious.

Ordinarily, a Don would attend a funeral of such men only if they were close personal friends. But these were not ordinary times. And so it became known beyond their own small circles and throughout the underworld that, as expected, Jackie Ping-Pong and Nicodemo “Butchie” Molinari had each, apparently peacefully, assumed control of his organization.

Aspromonte’s and Mancuso’s bosses, Frank Falcone and Tony Molinari, were buried the next day. They’d had many common friends, but no one could attend both funerals.

A choice had to be made. These choices would be watched.

On a walk back and forth past the unfinished houses on Tom Hagen’s cul-de-sac, with Al Neri and two others in the car, parked so it blocked off the whole street, Michael Corleone, smoking cigarettes, told Hagen, who was smoking a cigar, only that he should start amassing untraceable cash, in case there was a ransom to be paid. Michael wanted to be protected from knowing exactly where the money came from, and otherwise he needed to protect Hagen from this entire matter. Hagen stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac. At the far end of the street, his boy Andrew, the thirteen-year-old, ran out the front door with a football under his arm, then apparently saw Neri’s car, dropped his head in lolling teenaged exasperation, and went back inside. Hagen looked past Michael to some vague spot on the saw-toothed horizon, and for a very long time he said nothing. Michael lit another cigarette and said that was just how it had to be. “You wouldn’t pay the ransom, though, would you?” Hagen asked. Michael looked at him with obvious disappointment but only shrugged. Hagen stayed silent for a while longer, then whipped his half-finished cigar across the bright white cement and said, “Protect me,” in a way that was neither a plea nor an incredulity, just a statement. Michael nodded. Nothing more was said.