Mafioso, page 13
part #1 of The Mafia Chronicles Series
They laughed.
“Now things have changed, you know that. You know or you know something. One thing we all got in common: we’re Italian. You too, Flash. You know the problem, and I’ll tell you how Don Corrasco has solved it. Us wops don’t live here no more, as plain as that. Tonight, the Don tried to set me for a hit. Only it didn’t work. I was to be the goat. Sure, I’m looking out for myself. I can take off and maybe the Don won’t find me. So can the rest of you. Or we can stick around and take over the business ourselves.”
Lanzetta paused to let them adjust to the shock. Even to him, and he was saying it, it was a shock. Don Corrasco had been a power for so long. “It’s been done before,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” he said to Vinnie Pareto. “I know what you’re going to say. That even if we pull it off, the other Families—the Commission—won’t let us keep it. But what can they do, start another war? Not the way things are. They keep talking peace and now they’ll have it. Coakley’s dead; so is Melendez; so is Charlie Esposito.”
He grinned. “So I hear, anyway.”
Frankie Flash liked the joke. “You hear-a good.”
“Don Corrasco remains. Soon he’ll be dead, too,” Lanzetta said. “Not in the street, but quiet. It’ll be a whole new Family. There’s my whole bundle on the table. That’s just a start. Now you got to tell me, are you in or out? Anybody wants to walk out can still do it.”
No one there believed him, not about walking out.
One by one, they nodded.
“Good,” Lanzetta said. “GeeGee is the new capo and does anybody have any objections?
“Okay, then we talk about the job. Me and GeeGee already talked up a kind of a plan, but I want to hear what anybody else has to say.”
They all knew something about Don Corrasco’s house in Southampton Beach, though most of them had never been there. The house was a legend in the Family. Vinnie Pareto said he had gone there once with Uncle Joe. He remembered the double gates, the second one electrified; the guards and the attack dogs. “Maybe run down the gates with heavy trucks and go in shooting.”
“The minute the trucks hit the private road they’d know we were coming,” Lanzetta said. “It would take all day to get into the house. No matter how we work it, there will be some shooting, but it’s got to be quick. We’ve got to be in and out before the police arrive. That’s why the gates stay up. The cops won’t come with explosives, so the gates will slow them up, especially the second one.”
No one had any other ideas.
“We go in by helicopter,” Lanzetta said, grinning at the look on their faces. “By Coast Guard chopper. At least, that’s what it’ll look like. We could go after the real thing, but we don’t want the Coast Guard on our tail. We’re going to do a quick job on a commercial chopper, make it look Coast Guard. How long will that take, GeeGee?”
“Not more than an hour with quick-dry spray paint and stencils,” Pignataro said. “I got a guy out at the field right now. A call from me and he moves in and holds the pilot and his family. The guy runs a private service between the Hamptons and the city. The guy won’t like it, but what can he do.”
Vinnie Pareto was excited. “Christ!” he said. “We just fly in over the fence and start blasting. What a fuckin’ way to do it.”
“No battle if we can help it,” Lanzetta went on. “First, we create a diversion out in the bay. Something to explain the helicopter being there. If we just fly in over the fence the Don will throw the shutters and seal off the house.”
“Then what’s-a the plan?” Frankie Flash asked.
“Simple. Or simple enough, we hope. You’re the sailor, Flash. Think you can sail a cabin cruiser out in front of the Don’s house tomorrow morning—and sink it? Not near the beach—they patrol the beach—but out some distance. Out far, but not so far they won’t spot it. My guess is they watch everything.”
“Why don’t we take the boat and come in by the beach,” Pareto asked.
Lanzetta shook his head. “Be worse than Iwo Jima. The two fences run along the beach. We wouldn’t have a chance.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Frankie Flash announced, getting the idea. “The boat goes-a down, then I swim till you pick-a me up. Hey, Nick, how long is that-a gonna be?”
“Don’t worry frogman. Long enough to make it look good. We pick you up and head in toward Don Corrasco’s house. The Don may wonder why we don’t fly you direct to some hospital, but I’m hoping he won’t. If they try to wave us off I’ll yell on the bullhorn. But I don’t think he’ll try to fuck with the U.S. Coast Guard. Maybe the son of bitch will come out to play padrone.” Lanzetta thought it was time to break out a bottle. While the men were pouring drinks, he asked Pignataro about uniforms. It was well past midnight and the caper had to be ready to fly as soon as it got light.
“The Army-Navy store on Flatbush Avenue,” Pignataro answered. “It’s got everything from sailor to admiral. We drive around to the back, break in and load up. Then we go out to the field and suit up.”
“How long for everything, GeeGee?”
Pignataro said, “From the time we break into the store to when the chopper’s ready to take off. Three, three-and-a-half hours. That would make it.” Pignataro looked at his watch—five thirty in the morning. It gets light at six, full light about six thirty. Flash should be out there getting himself noticed at six thirty. How long should he swim?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Lanzetta said. “They’ll figure he sent a radio message and it took us fifteen minutes to respond. You know the Coast Guard, always on the job.”
After that they briefed Frankie Flash about the boat he was going to use. It belonged to a friend of Pignataro’s out on the Island—no questions asked. The boat would be paid for later, plus a bonus.
“Like they say in the war movies,” Lanzetta told Frankie Flash. “Time to synchronize watches. You sure that’s a good watch, Flash?”
“Best I could-a steal,” the ex-frogman said.
“Time to go,” Lanzetta said.
Nodding in his high-backed leather chair in front of the fire, Corrasco DiSalvo woke up as the standing clock in the library softly chimed four o’clock. He thought about going to bed and decided it was a waste of time. The sleeping pills his doctor had forced upon him stood unused on a shelf in his dressing room upstairs. Americans, it seemed, looked on pills, all kinds of pills, as a remedy for everything.
Instead of ringing for a guard-servant, he stooped to pile fresh logs on the waning fire. An old man’s pleasures, he thought; a soft chair, a fire. Many hours before there had been two brief telephone calls. Pignataro, and then Earl Rizzo in suburban New Orleans. At midnight, as was his custom, he drank a glass of warm skimmed milk and ate a thin sandwich of bread and cheese. The cheese was bland, pasteurized, tasteless, the only kind permitted by Dr. Gallup.
The book he had been reading, a casual biography of the poet-adventurer D’Annunzio, lay on the floor at his feet. That, too, was a waste of time; the book had no substance. Fretful, he picked up the early edition of the New York Times delivered the night before. Stock prices were bearish and had been for many months. The economy, indeed the entire society, had become unstable. A conservative by instinct and tradition, he longed for an ordered world. Business as usual. More of the same.
Soon there would be a meeting with the Negro, Coakley, and the thought was distasteful to him. The savage would come with demands he could not reasonably meet. Acid and hate burned together in his ruined stomach. Perhaps it was time to return to Sicily to spend his remaining years under the orange trees in the sun, yet he was reluctant to go. Though he was, in fact, dying by inches, he felt that he would cling to life as long as he remained in power. It was power for its own sake, or his own sake, since there was nothing else he could enjoy. Power renewed his strength, feeble though it was. Power enabled him to combat or to circumvent the natural dying of his body. Once stripped of power, even by his own choice, he knew he couldn’t survive for long. Then, too, there were so many old enemies, some of them in Sicily, who would begin to circle him like wolves, ready to pull him down.
Therefore, retirement was out of the question.
He would stay, endure the insult of the black man’s presence in the Family—and he would wait. Quick to act in ruthless fashion when necessary, he had also disciplined himself over many years in the habit of patience. Inevitably, he knew, the national union of Families would come to realize the rightness of his resistance to the Esposito-Coakley revolt. Inevitably, they would see the new arrangement was unworkable. They would be compelled to see it. The Negroes and their non-Italian allies would grow more powerful, more threatening in their attitudes toward the Commission, more insistent in their demands for majority control. Then they would have to fight the bloody war they now hoped to forestall. They would have to fight or go under; and, of course, they would fight. Knowing that such a fight had to come, he would make careful preparations. Others would die, but because he was prepared, he would survive. Not only survive but emerge as the leader who had tried to warn them. Like it or not, they would have to acknowledge his wisdom.
So for the moment he would wait. The burning in his stomach subsided and, pleased with his thoughts, Don Corrasco felt better. Now there was the problem of Lieutenant Corrigan to consider. Because he was frightened at the moment, the policeman was respectful and cooperative. But later ... ? Don Corrasco had known many men like Corrigan; it would not do to live in jeopardy because of such a man. In the end, no policeman was to be trusted. The thing that drove them to become policemen, some sort of strange compulsion to punish their fellow men for wrongdoing, was always there waiting to be reawakened no matter how “crooked” they had become. In a moment of crisis, the death of wife or child, or at the onset of some serious illness, men like Corrigan frequently felt the compulsion to punish themselves, to cleanse their conscience—to confess.
Corrigan would have to die. Not immediately and not in New York. Perhaps a vacation, a bonus, in Mexico could be arranged. Don Corrasco smiled. Two weeks, all expenses paid in Acapulco. Something a policeman with a wife in Sheepshead Bay could not resist. Stevie D’Amico would handle that end. A fall from a cliff. A “mugging” in a darkened street. A taxi out of control. NYPD hero dies in Mexico, the Daily News would bleat.
And that would be that.
Don Corrasco picked up the book on D’Annunzio and looked for his page. The book was by an Englishman and no Englishman could hope to understand The Bald Eagle. But Don Corrasco disliked leaving any project unfinished, even the reading of an unsatisfactory biography.
Soon he dozed again, his massive head nodding forward ...
The guard-servant knocking on the door of the library woke him some time later. Yawning, still tired, he looked at the clock. Six twenty-five. He pressed the button on his desk that rolled back the heavy curtains on the big window facing the sea. Gray morning light came into the room, thinning the light from the table lamps.
The guard who came in when he unlocked the door asked a thousand pardons, but out in the bay there was a motorboat that appeared to be in trouble. The guard handed Don Corrasco a pair of high-powered binoculars and suggested that he look for himself.
Speaking in Italian, the guard asked if perhaps they should notify the authorities. The guard didn’t sound too interested. He was reporting something unusual, nothing more.
Don Corrasco said, “It is none of our business. There would be questions, enquiries. We saw nothing.”
He walked to the window and scanned the sea.
Chapter Fourteen
THE BOAT WAS listing when Frankie Flash dropped the axe and ran from the cover of the wheelhouse. He was about a mile offshore, giving the performance of his life. Dressed in rough boating clothes, Flash was coated from neck to ties with thick, white grease—protection against the early April sea. A wet-suit would have been a dead giveaway, even from a mile away.
It took three minutes for the boat to roll on its side in the oily swell and slide to the bottom of the bay. Though the suction from the sinking boat was slight, Flash, head and shoulders through a life-preserver, swam energetically as if to avoid being pulled under. The water was cold. It had been a long time since the Italian Navy in the tepid Mediterranean. Even when he raised his head, he could no longer see the flat Long Island coastline. The wind was from the land and he allowed himself to drift, moving his arms and legs rapidly like an inexperienced swimmer. Then, as if weakened, he stopped swimming and clung to the life-preserver. He hoped they were watching good, that it wasn’t all a waste of time ...
Now the diver’s watch on his wrist informed him that he had been in the freezing water for ten minutes. “Hurry up you bastards,” he gasped in Italian, tough and muscular, but still feeling his forty-six years. He knew he could make the shore if the helicopter didn’t show up, but Don Corrasco’s property ran along this whole stretch of beach. He could make the shore all right, but when he got there they would be waiting.
Six forty-five, the watch said. Then he heard it, a faint whir of turning rotors high up and far away, a fast-moving speck in the slaty sky. Flash splashed and yelled. The helicopter didn’t seem to see him at first. It lost altitude and swept out low over the sea, but even at that distance he could see the big, black stencil, U.S. Coast Guard, on the gray-painted side of the chopper. It turned away from him and arced toward the southwest, making low swooping passes a hundred feet over the water. Then, spotting him, it came back and an arm waved at him from the open sliding door.
Down it came, the fierce wind from the rotors agitating the surface of the sea. It was directly overhead in seconds, a nylon rope with clip-harness at the end unwinding from an electric winch outside the door. Flash didn’t recognize the uniformed figure yelling at him from the chopper. Jesus, he thought, it all looked so real, maybe it was the Coast Guard. He ditched the life-preserver and pulled the rescue harness under his arms and clicked the fastener shut. He grabbed the rope with one hand and waved with the other. The winch began to reel him up and in like a giant fish. A rough hand grabbed him and pulled him inside the big helicopter.
“You look like hell, Flash,” GeeGee Pignataro said. There were five men in the chopper besides the pilot: Pignataro, Lanzetta, Vinnie Pareto, and two other button men. All were dressed in Coast Guard uniforms and were armed with .45 caliber Thompson submachine guns. The pilot didn’t look at Flash; the man was about forty, his face pale and set. Pignataro slid the door shut.
Pignataro gave Flash a pint bottle and he drank from it. “Mother-a Jesus,” he said, peeling off the stocking cap and the aviator’s glasses tied about his head with an elastic band.
“Go,” Lanzetta told the pilot. “You already know the house. The red-tiled roof. Go in nice and easy—remember the wife and kids.” Lanzetta had a bullhorn in his hand. “If they try to wave us off, I’ll talk. Everybody set. Guns? Grenades?”
They were as ready as they would ever be, and the big helicopter swung away toward the beach. Through field glasses Lanzetta watched the guards at the inner and outer gates. They were out of their gate-houses looking up at the sky, but they hadn’t left their posts. He could see the dogs, the Dobermans, running through the trees inside the electrified fence.
The helicopter began its descent toward the broad white-graveled walk that led up to the terrace. Three guards, their uniform shirts covered by servant’s coats, came out the front door and began to wave. One of the guards had a revolver in his hand. Lanzetta slid open the door of the helicopter and roared through the electric bullhorn. The officer’s cap was pulled low over his eyes and the wrap-around sunglasses blacked out the rest of his face.
“Stand clear,” he bellowed through the horn. “Emergency! Coming in to land. Everyone stand clear.”
The chopper was still descending. Lanzetta repeated the order, but the guards kept waving them off. “Stand clear I said,” Lanzetta roared. “Keep coming,” he told the pilot.
The guard with the gun was pointing it up at the chopper when Don Corrasco came on to the terrace and grabbed the man’s arm. Then he slapped him. He pointed to the guard’s holster and the man put the gun away. Don Corrasco spoke to the other guards. For a moment, Lanzetta thought of trying for a quick burst from the Tommy guns, but the angle and the way they were coming in made him decide against it. “Make it fast,” he told the pilot.
Don Corrasco stood watching until the instant the helicopter touched the ground, scattering gravel. Maybe he sensed danger, maybe his brain suddenly put all the pieces together. He was running for the door before he saw the submachine guns in the hands of the men jumping from both sides of the chopper. Running up to the terrace, Lanzetta squeezed the trigger as the Don went through the open door. The line of bullets chewed up brick and masonry, the ricochets whining wildly. Pignataro swung his gun and dropped the three guards with a single long burst. The guards in the gatehouses were firing back, well hidden by trees and shrubs. The two button men ran to the wall of the terrace, dropped behind it and returned the fire. Pareto fired at the dogs that came up both sides of the terrace in a snarling rush.
Reaching the door of the house, Lanzetta threw himself flat and raked the dimly lit entrance hall with .45 bullets. Inside, a door banged, then another. He ran down the hall shooting at the lock on the first door. With another magazine loaded, he kicked the first door open and ran to the next. It was dark in the house, the air warm and heavy, and the firing outside came through dimly. The last door he came to at the end of a long corridor was to the library. It was slightly ajar.
The shooting outside had stopped and there wasn’t a sound in the huge house. Lanzetta, back flat against the wall, stretched silently and kicked the door open the rest of the way ...
