Mafioso, page 14
part #1 of The Mafia Chronicles Series
Don Corrasco sat behind his magnificent desk, his hands on top of it. No gun in sight. There were three telephones on the desk, but he had made no attempt to use any of them. This was the man Lanzetta had worked for and respected, and now he was going to kill him. It looked as if Don Corrasco wanted to die at his big desk, the center of all his power.
Don Corrasco, the dying wolf, made one last attempt to postpone his death. Lanzetta knew the old man wasn’t afraid to die; he just didn’t want to die. Don Corrasco shrugged and said, “A lot of money wouldn’t work?” he said. “A new deal?” He smiled. “Now that Coakley and Corrigan are dead. They are dead?”
“Yeah,” Lanzetta said, raising the gun. “So are you.” And before he released the trigger Corrasco DiSalvo was dead. The machine gun spat flame and the bullets chopped the Don to pieces. The big chair was heavy and it held him in place while the bullets tore a gaping hole in his chest. None of the bullets struck him in the head, and the gray face looked peaceful as if there had been no pain.
Quickly, Lanzetta looked for the Don’s safe. He found it and unlocked it with a key attached to the dead man’s watch pocket. There was money, stacked and tied and neatly labeled. No way to tell how much. Lanzetta took everything he could find, books, piles of financial records, reels of recording tape. Everything was piled on the dead man’s desk and tied with Lanzetta’s belt. In the desk itself he found nothing but some bottles of pills and a personal telephone directory. He flipped through the book and they were all there, all the unlisted telephone numbers he needed.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said to Pignataro when he ran back to the terrace. One of the button men had been wounded, not badly, and Vinnie Pareto was dragging him to the helicopter. Lanzetta listened for police sirens. Nothing yet. “Come on, come on!” he yelled.
Frankie Flash was sitting behind the pilot, holding a gun. Lanzetta was the last to climb aboard and the rotors were turning when police sirens sounded a long way off.
The chopper rose and swooped out over the sea. Pignataro looked at the pile of money and grinned. Lanzetta shook his head: he didn’t want or need a drink. The chopper ran back along the coast for thirty miles, and after that it headed back for the center of Long Island, back to the private field where the two cars were waiting. Frankie Flash was still dripping salt water and white grease. Vinnie Pareto never knew when to kid and when to not. “You really are a grease-ball, Flash.”
Lanzetta was tired. So much had happened. Maybe, he thought, that’s how a general feels when he finally wins a long war. Tired and kind of dull. “Leave the guy alone, Vinnie,” he said, not mad. “Just shut up.”
Pareto grinned. “Si, Don Nick,” he said. “How does the title grab you?”
“By the balls.”
Only one thing had to be done to wrap up the caper, to kill the pilot and his family. It was a lousy thing to have to do, but business was business. Hey, I’m already thinking like Don Nick, he thought. The Don and the Nick didn’t go together. Maybe he’d stop all this Don bullshit. He sure as hell was going to make a lot of other changes. From now on let GeeGee do the honors, the killing. The pilot, now that he was nearing the field, started to talk, started to beg.
“Take it easy,” Lanzetta said. “For ten thousand you’ll keep your mouth shut. You’re smart, so take it easy. You’ll be all right.”
Pignataro looked at Lanzetta. There was no expression on the new leader’s face; Pignataro knew what had to be done.
They landed and Lanzetta got into the first car, Uncle Joe’s big Lincoln. “See you back at the place,” he told Pignataro.
Richard C. Passalaqua of the FBI was walking up and down in Captain Clifford’s office in Brooklyn. “I’m telling you, I don’t know where Corrigan is,” Clifford said, tired from overwork and irritated by Passalaqua, but no longer displeased with life. “I have no idea where the son of a bitch has run to. California, Canada, Brazil—how the hell should I know? The guy’s disappeared, gone, and that suits me fine.”
“Aren’t you going to look for him?”
Clifford rubbed his wrinkled, red face. “I have looked, we will continue to look.” Clifford had a good idea where Corrigan was; not where he was exactly, but what had happened to him. When a man ran with rats he couldn’t be surprised if some day they turned on him. Other policeman, if they knew, might not see it that way—they had killed a cop, those Mafia bastards—but Clifford was a realist. He was glad to be rid of Corrigan; the Department had been saved from a scandal. Clifford sighed, wanting the next few years to pass without any more trouble. There was a small tourist hotel in County Wexford he wanted to buy ...
“Coakley and Melendez have disappeared and DiSalvo is dead,” Passalaqua said. “I think we have them on the run. It’s only a matter of time ...”
“That’s it,” Clifford said amiably. Thinking about the hotel in Ireland made him feel better. “Just a matter of time. The Mafia can’t last forever. Like you say, it’s cracking at the seams.”
Clifford didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. Passalaqua said, “Look what we’re doing in New Jersey. The same thing is about to happen all over the country. As soon the public learns the facts ...”
Clifford yawned and drank cold, bitter coffee from a cardboard container. “Yeah, sure, the public. You know what the public is, Passalaqua? The public is nothing but a bunch of hypocritical, whining, lamebrained sheep. Not rats, just sheep. All the public knows is greed and panic. The public is a bunch of stale shit.”
Passalaqua was shocked, genuinely shocked. “The public needs to be educated in the realities. When they are, that’s when you’ll see the end of the Mafia.”
“Well, the Mafia is more your department,” Clifford said. “I don’t worry much about the Mafia. Terrible, isn’t it? I worry about the public. You know, all those ordinary, everyday citizens who commit murder, rob stores, molest children, pass bad checks, kill Presidents and also throw litter in the streets. After I get through worrying about them, I worry about the Mafia.”
Passalaqua didn’t want to hear anymore. Clutching his polished briefcase, he paused at the door. “We’re going to smash the Mafia,” he said. “No matter how long it takes.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Captain Clifford said.
While Passalaqua was leaving Clifford’s office, Lanzetta was talking to Earl Rizzo in New Orleans, making no effort to be polite.
“You can drop the bullshit, Rizzo,” Lanzetta said. “I’m the new man and you better get used to it. You want to know why? Because there isn’t anybody else. Seems like everything changed overnight. No more trouble, no more anything—unless you and your friends decide to make it.”
There was enough information in Don Corrasco’s records to blow the union of Families wide-open. Names, dates, figures, old telephone tapes. “Your friend, Harry Belafonte, won’t give you any more trouble—guaranteed—but I can. Bigger than you’d think possible. You start it and I’ll finish it. Think I can’t?”
Rizzo’s softened his voice, tried to lay on the Southern bullshit. “No need for any of that. Not a bit. Now you’ve explained, I’m sure our friends will go along.”
“They better.”
“Aw, sure they will. You just caught me by surprise, that’s all. But everything changes—right? Now, let me make some calls and we’ll talk later. And listen, buddy, you ought to take a vacation soon as things up north are running smooth. Come on down, like that guy says. The Loosiana shrimp—really something ...”
Lanzetta hung up.
Well, there it was. He was in the top spot—nearly in the top spot—and now all he had to do was to hang onto it. All he had to? Getting to the top spot wasn’t so hard. Hanging onto it was everything. There was always some guy, some younger guy with ideas of his own. No matter what Rizzo and the Commission thought, no matter how they tried to make it like an IBM operation, there would always be trouble. Not for a long time maybe, but it would come.
The thing he had to do now was watch himself ...
About the Author
Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. Records also confirm that, in 1958, McCurtin co-edited the short-lived (one issue) New York Review with William Atkins. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there. Additionally, McCurtin and his second wife shared their home in Ogunquit with a dog that also happened to be part wolf.
McCurtin’s first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil’s Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first “Carmody” western, Hangtown.
More on the Author.
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The Soldier of Fortune Series by Peter McCurtin
Massacre at Umtali
The Deadliest Game
Spoils of War
Yellow Rain
Green Hell
Moro
Kalahari
Golden Triangle
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The Assassin Series by Peter McCurtin
Manhattan Massacre
New Orleans Holocaust
Boston Bust-Out
Death Hunt
The Sundance Series by Peter McCurtin
Man Hunt
The Nightriders
Day Of The Halfbreeds
Los Olvidados
The Marauders
Scorpion
Apache War
Buffalo War
The Hunters
Choctaw County War
Texas Empire
The Jim Saddler Series by Peter McCurtin writing as Gene Curry
A Dirty Way to Die
Wildcat Woman
Colorado Crossing
Hot As a Pistol
Wild, Wild Women
Ace in the Hole
Yukon Ride
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