Hostile Witness (29 page)

There was an old man on my left and Jasper got in so that he was on my right. It was a big car, with a wide bench seat in the back, and there would have been plenty of room if Jasper hadn’t jammed himself next to me. The bruiser closed the door and immediately went around the car to the driver’s seat. The bench seat was black leather; the car smelled of Brylcreem. The old man on my left was looking out the window, out into the night. He wore a cream-colored suit, his thick hands were carefully laid one on the other in his lap. There was a diamond in his lapel. Slowly, easily, we pulled out on Arch Street and the bruiser turned up 2nd Street and we drove on for a while, south, toward Society Hill Towers, without anybody saying anything. And then the old man spoke.

“I wanted to meet you, Victor.” His voice was soft and lightly sprinkled with an old world accent. When he turned I saw his face, pitted ugly, his hair gray but pulled back elegantly and heavily greased. “I thought it was time we should talk. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said. The word came out in a gush of breath that I had been holding once I recognized the man. I had seen his face in newspaper photographs, on mug shots flashed on TV, in gory hard-boiled articles in
Philadelphia
magazine. The man sitting next to me, his swollen hands calmly resting on his lap but close enough to my throat so that he could have reached up and strangled me before I let out a yelp, that man was the boss of bosses, Enrico Raffaello.

PHILADELPHIA HAS FIVE
major spectator sports: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and the Mafia wars. Whenever one of the subtle mob hits occurs somewhere in South Philadelphia or in the new ganglands of New Jersey, the papers and the television stations go crazy with coverage. There are photographs of the victim, sprawled in an alley or in his car, puddles of blood leaking from his newly created orifices. There are statements from the victim’s neighbors saying what a stand-up fellow he had been and that no, they hadn’t known, had no idea he was associated with the mob. The necrologies are printed in the papers like an honor roll. Speculation as to who ordered the hit and who performed it is rampant. And the charts come out; the deceased’s name is crossed off the list and everyone below rises a notch. The mobsters have nicknames, just like ballplayers: Chicken Man, Shorty, Weasel, Tippy, Chickie, Toto, Pat the Cat. We root for our favorite as he rises and drink a beer to him when he winds up on the front page of the Daily News, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac, his once handsome and arrogant face disfigured from the force of the bullet that came in the back of the neck at close range and exploded out the front of his face, taking the jaw along for the ride.

For a long time there was peace in the city’s mob and folks followed the Phillies and the Eagles. But one night
Angelo Bruno, the boss of Philly bosses, the man who kept the peace, was sitting in his car when his driver, a Sicilian named Stanfa, powered down Bruno’s window, through which a wiseguy with a shotgun blew apart Bruno’s skull. After the Bruno hit the necrology began to grow. “Johnny Keys” Simone, Bruno’s cousin, shot dead somewhere and dumped in Staten Island; Frank Sindone, Bruno’s loan-sharking capo, found stuffed into two plastic bags in South Philadelphia; Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, blown apart on his porch with such savagery that Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it. And after that, about once every quarter, as regular as 10Qs from a Fortune 500 company, another one fell. Chickie Narducci, gunned down outside his South Philly home; Vincent “Tippy” Panetta, sixty, strangled along with his teenage girlfriend; Rocco Marinucci, found a year to the day from the Chicken Man’s incineration with firecrackers stuffed in his mouth; Frank John Monte, shot to death next to his white Cadillac; “Pat the Cat” Spirito; Sammy Tamburrino; Robert Riccobene; Salvatore Testa, the Chicken Man’s son; “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso. And after each of these unfortunate accidents the charts came out, names were crossed off, one by one the bigger players fell off the list and the smaller players rose. Nicky Scarfo was on top for a while, but the killing continued and soon Scarfo was indicted in federal court for racketeering and in state courts running from Delaware to New Jersey to Pennsylvania on numerous charges of murder. There was quiet during this period of uncertainty, but after Scarfo was shipped to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the high-security jail that replaced Alcatraz, and left there to rot, the battle for power began again.

Enrico Raffaello wasn’t even on the charts at the start of this second war. He had been peripherally involved with the mob, a friend of friends who were cousins to some of the boys, like almost everyone in South Philly. Enrico was a
merchant. He sold pastries in the Italian Market, content, it seemed, to bake cannoli shells and mix the ricotta custard and sprinkle the filled shells with freshly ground cinnamon until he died. It was his son, “Sweet Tooth” Tony they called him, who was the comer. He was one of the guys you saw in the pictures of Scarfo as the boss walked triumphantly into court to pick up another twenty years here or forty years there or a Lucky Strike bonus of life without parole. Sweet Tooth was in the back, carrying the boss’s bag, smiling like a sweet fat kid from the neighborhood who was thrilled to be hanging around the downtown boys. But when it was decided finally that Scarfo was through, decided not by the feds or the DA but by the guys underneath who were sick of waiting, and a new war of succession broke out, bit by bit Sweet Tooth Tony’s name started rising up the charts. First he was just on the list of mob associates, then he was in the group of enforcers, then he was one of the lieutenants, and then he was listed as a possible successor, number four on the charts, but rising fast, number four with a bullet.

That bullet finally came in just below Sweet Tooth’s ear while he was waiting for his driver outside his father’s pastry shop on 9th Street. He had a pig’s ear in his mouth and was reading the sports section of the
Daily News
when a woman with a baby carriage passed behind him and stuck a silenced .45 into his neck just below the ear and pretty much blew Tony Raffaello’s head right off his body. Enrico rushed out of the store and found his son on the ground, his head twisted grotesquely, the blood filling cracks in the sidewalk and falling in a viscous stream into the gutter. The picture of Enrico on his knees, covered in his son’s blood, staring up at the sky and bellowing in agony as Sweet Tooth’s head lay cradled in his apron, made the front page of the
New York Times
and was nominated for a Pulitzer.

About ten days later there began a brutal flurry of
killings. Mob leaders and lieutenants up and down the charts were wiped out in a veritable plague of violence until the charts themselves became obsolete. Businesses closed, people stayed home, every night another picture of a sprawled and bloody corpse made the papers as the city sickened from the spreading pool of blood. And then after a month of horror, after a month in which more mobsters died than in any previous year, after a month that forced the police commissioner to resign and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission to throw up its hands and the United States Attorney General to set up a special task force to investigate, after a month in which even those fans who bet in pools on the next mobster to fall turned away in disgust, after a month that put Philadelphia on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
and
National Detective,
after a month that has gone down in history as the “Thirty-Day Massacre,” after a month there was quiet.

It took the attorney general’s special task force and the newspapers a full year to reconfigure the charts, and it was a year of peace. No more bodies were discovered floating face down in the Delaware, no more bodies found in the trunks of abandoned cars under the bridge in Roosevelt Park, no more corpses sprawled on the cover of the
Daily News.
The government sent out its informants like an infantry of spies and they came back with word that there was a new boss with support from New York and a series of interlocking agreements among the city’s mobsters that kept everything peaceful and profitable. He was a strong man, a respected man, he was called the “Big Cannoli” by the cognoscenti, he was not a man to be trifled with, but he was an honorable man who through his strength would keep the peace. In one short year he had become a legend and his power flowed from Philadelphia through Atlantic City into New York and Pittsburgh and as far away as Las Vegas. He was the most powerful man in the city, in the state, he was the Big Cannoli, and on the first Monday of
every month he visited the grave of Sweet Tooth Tony and left a pig’s ear on the mound of earth rising above the specially ordered oversized coffin.

“I want you to know, Victor,” said the Big Cannoli, sitting next to me in the back seat of that Cadillac, “I want you to know that I am not a violent man by nature.” His voice was soft, genteel even with the accent, a grandfather’s voice, a voice without obvious menace. It was the voice of Geppetto. I would have thought him a harmless old man, ugly but harmless, if I hadn’t known who he was. “I think I would have been happy as an artist, painting flowers on canvases. But such was not my fortune. I tell you this so you should not be frightened of me. The newspapers, they exaggerate so. Now my friend Dominic…You know Dominic, I believe, Victor.”

“Yes.”

“Dominic is a violent man. It’s in his nature, it’s in his blood. Even though he’s retired now, it still takes everything in my power to keep him under control. And Jasper, too. Such a nice man, Jasper, but there is a streak in him that is very hard to restrain. Lenny, my driver, was a boxer for years. You’d think a boxer would be violent, but not Lenny. He’s a sweetheart. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”

“That’s what my grandchildren say, Mr. Raffaello, so long as I treat ’em to taffy.”

“What Lenny did as a profession Dominic and Jasper do for pleasure. Such is the way of mankind. But that’s not my way, Victor. I am more like Lenny.” Suddenly his voice hardened. “It’s a good thing that I have people like Dominic and Jasper because without them, Victor, without them, I tell you, I don’t think I would get any respect in a world such as this.” He was almost shouting now. “Without them, Victor, I’d just as well be baking cookies.”

“You listen to Mr. Raffaello, Sport,” said Jasper.

Raffaello threw up his hands in a kindly shrug and when he spoke, his voice was soft and grandfatherly again. “I had two children, Victor. We wanted more, of course, but two was all we had. A boy and a girl. A millionaire’s family. Anthony and Linda Marie. You might have heard about Anthony,” he said, looking at his nails. “It was in all the papers.”

“I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Raffaello,” I said in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“Yes, well, these things happen. That leaves me with Linda Marie. Linda Marie is a sweet girl, a wonderful girl. I love her totally, believe me. Do you have a daughter, Victor?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, have a daughter and hold her in your arms and then you’ll know how much I love my Linda Marie. So it is with this much love that I say in all honesty my daughter is troubled. She is married to a man who doesn’t love her, a man who’d sooner keep the company of other men than sleep with his wife. Do you know her husband, the councilman?”

“I know of him.”

“Well, he is one of her troubles. And sadly, I am another. She has difficulty accepting my current position. I pay for a psychiatrist for her, an hour a day, five days a week, but it doesn’t seem to help. You see, along with her husband and father she has another problem, the fact that she’s a slut.”

Dominic quickly said, “Enrico, no, don’t say such a thing,” and Jasper started demurring to his boss, but the Big Cannoli lifted up his hand to stop them and they quieted immediately.

“I say this with a heavy heart. It hurts me to call my daughter such a thing. But it is the truth, a truth I can live with. Now, Victor, I can call my daughter a slut.” His voice suddenly deepened. “But don’t you ever.”

“You listening, Sport?”

“You see,” said Raffaello, his voice slowly falling back into calm, “I’m very touchy about my family. What do you think of my daughter, Lenny?”

“A very fine girl, a sensitive, pretty girl,” said Lenny without turning from the road, tilting his head up as if he were talking into a microphone in the ceiling of the car. “A princess, a queen.”

“It is well known among my associates,” said Raffaello, “to only speak well of my family. There were once men who treated my family with disrespect, Victor, and they’re not around anymore. Now there was a poker game not too long ago in which you were involved, along with Dominic and Jasper and certain other friends of mine, and in that game you treated my family with disrespect.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

Raffaello held up his hand and I shut up quick.

“You sound scared, Victor, and that is not what I want. I am not a violent man. I’m more of an artist, like I said. I should have been a poet. Do you read much poetry, Victor?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I’ll be frank with you, I don’t understand it. Seagulls and clouds. But even so I feel, in my heart, that I have the soul of a poet. I should have had an education. There is so much I wanted to do. Now in this poker game you implied that Dominic’s cousin Zachariah…”

“Second cousin twice removed,” said Jasper.

“Yes. You implied that Zachariah was having an affair with my daughter and because of that I killed him. Such a rude comment is unforgivable, really.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I stammered, but before I could go on he quieted me with a soft gesture from his right hand.

“Now one reason for our visit,” said Raffaello, “is for me to tell you that this is not true. There was an affair, yes, and it pains me to say it. Zachariah was like a dog without
any control, but I didn’t have him killed. If I killed all the men Linda Marie slept with over the years the Schuylkill would run red.”

“I understand,” I said into a pause.

“Besides, if I was going to kill Zachariah it would have been for the way he butchered second base.”

Jasper laughed, like a horse with a wheeze.

“You see,” Raffaello continued, “when I was told of the conversation at the poker game I realized you might have mistaken the silence and lack of denial by my associates as agreement that I had ordered the killing. That would have been a mistake. The silence was just that, silence. My associates know not to speak about my family. They have learned that over the years.”

“I believe you, Mr. Raffaello,” I said quickly. “I do.”

“That’s good, Victor. Now you may be wondering who did kill Zachariah. Well, the answer is that we don’t know. The federal prosecutor, as usual, has it wrong. It was not part of Jimmy Moore’s extortion of Ruffing, I am certain.”

“How are you so certain?” I asked.

“Victor, Victor,” said Raffaello, shaking his head. “You have to trust me, Victor. Jimmy is not a stupid man. A passionate man, yes, which he never fails to tell me when we break bread together, but not stupid.”

“If not Jimmy, then who?”

“Dominic, tell Victor what you told me,” said Raffaello.

Dominic twisted around in the front seat so he was facing me. “Zack told me, before he died, that he was in love in a way he had never been in love before. He told me it was dangerous and he had to be careful but that he was going to stop whoring around because this girl was so special.”

“Who is this girl?”

Dominic shrugged. “We don’t know, but when he told me this I could see that he was scared.”