Love or Honor (23 page)

“Me too,” Chris said. “I want this to be a very good year.” He finished his champagne and stood up. “I have to go now,” he said. “I gotta run.”

Liz looked wistful. “Do you really have to?”

“Yeah, I really have to, something came up,” Chris said. He leaned down and kissed her again.

“You look fantastic,” he said. As he got to the door, he heard her singing again. He turned for one more look, then left quickly.

What a time for a guy to walk out on his wife, he thought uneasily, as he pulled out of the parking lot. He told himself that he'd been with her at the most important moment, the stroke of midnight. But he didn't feel good about it, and for a minute, as he waited at a red light, he thought of turning back.

Marty's face lighted up when she saw him. “Oh, I was afraid you weren't coming,” she said. “I've been watching the door.”

“I said I'd come,” he reminded her. “I had a long drive, but I'm here. Happy New Year.”

She led him to her table and introduced him to her friends. It was a private party, no wiseguys, and after a couple of drinks, Chris relaxed. But he wouldn't dance, no matter how much she pleaded.

“Musicians don't know how to dance,” he explained. “I'd step all over your feet. You wouldn't have any toes left.” He smiled. “You look beautiful,” he said, “but I still won't dance.”

She was wearing a bright-yellow dress, high in the front but with no back to it; her hair was piled on top of her head, fastened with a gold clip. She was wearing the Florentine cross.

“Are you sure you won't dance?” she asked again.

“I'm sure,” Chris said. “But I'm fine, you go dance with somebody else.”

She shook her head. “I don't want to dance with somebody else,” she said. “I want to be with you.” She reached out and laid her hand over his on the table.

With his wavy white hair and chubby face, Aniello Dellacroce looked kindly, even benevolent; some of his soldiers called him “Uncle.” He was sometimes called George Rizzo and Timothy O'Neil, among other aliases. A United States Senate Committee had called him “the most powerful boss in New York.” In fact, Dellacroce was not the boss but the underboss, second in command of the Gambino crime family. At Intel, where they had the advantage of closer perspective than the people in Washington, he was called, with terse simplicity, “an extremely powerful individual” in the Gambino group.

Chris called him Neil. He'd been a gunman for Albert Anastasia, in the wild days of “Murder Incorporated.” When Anastasia died—in such dramatic gangland fashion that it qualified as a rub-out—Carlo Gambino took over as boss, for nearly twenty years. When Gambino died in the fall of 1976, Dellacroce was considered the likely successor, until a conference in a Brooklyn kitchen anointed Paul Castellano, Gambino's brother-in-law. But if Dellacroce was always the underboss, he was never underestimated. His name meant “Little Lamb of the Cross.”

Chris was a teenager, hanging around the tranquil streets of Queens, when Anastasia was slaughtered in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel. Now Chris was hanging around clubs and restaurants with Dellacroce and his crew, drinking with them, singing Italian songs. Although Dellacroce seemed to like Chris, the old man was traditionally closemouthed. In the early seventies, he'd been jailed for contempt, when he refused to answer a grand jury's questions about organized crime, even when offered immunity. He'd served time for tax evasion—specifically, for evading taxes on a six-figure stock payment he'd received for arranging labor peace for a Long Island manufacturer. But those were relatively minor convictions, considering.

Not all Dellacroce's crew members were as discreet. One chunky guy with a cigar liked to drink, and the more he drank, the more he talked. One night at a club he draped his arm around Chris and explained the heroin routes from Palermo to Milan to New York. He stopped talking when Dellacroce arrived, but Chris had heard a lot by then.

“What does he look like?” Harry asked Chris, as they set about backgrounding the guy.

“He reminds me of a penguin with a cigar,” Chris said.

Chris turned up at several places the Penguin frequented after that, including a rendezvous with some Colombians in Jackson Heights, but the Penguin was drinking, so he didn't seem suspicious at the sight of Chris, just pleased.

Dellacroce and the Penguin worked out of the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring, where Chris was taken by Solly. The Ravenite was Gambino land, and Solly was Luchese, but Chris found that family lines blurred when there was work to be done, deals to be made. Some endeavors were so lucrative that there was no need for anybody to get possessive or grabby; both families were conspicuous in the garment center. Chris sometimes couldn't tell family members apart, because in fact they were often not apart. If one family tried to move in on another's territory, without negotiating a split, of course there would be trouble, and often there had been. A Luchese couldn't just waltz into Gambino territory and open an after-hours place, but he could get the okay, then give the Gambinos a cut.

In general, it didn't seem to matter so much what family a man belonged to, or was connected with, as what he could accomplish. It was earning power that mattered: manpower. Intel filed Solly's brother as Luchese, yet he'd been given the contract to kill Joe Valachi by Vito Genovese. But it was not just individual crimes that mattered, under the RICO law; it was the activity of a “criminal enterprise,” a group that engaged in racketeering. And so it was the interaction and the associations that mattered. RICO was a kind of web; Chris was a spider. He didn't know who might be caught in the web; he might never know. His job was to keep spinning.

At sixty-three, Neil Dellacroce had a big house on Staten Island—though he spent most of his time at the Ravenite and a nearby apartment—and a flock of young girlfriends. Chris figured it was the power, the money, and the aura that attracted the girls, because in most cases it wasn't the guy's looks. True, Dellacroce was nice-looking, in a craggy way, but most of the others were not. Solly was short, baggy-eyed, kind of cramped-looking, yet he had a
gummare
twenty-five years younger than he. As for Solly's brother, Chris thought he was the scariest-looking SOB he ever hoped to meet. The guy looked as though he'd just stepped out of his coffin. His eyes were small and sunken; his skin was the color of wet cement. And he had a deadly temper to match. One day, shortly after Chris arrived, the guy leaped up from his chair, knocked it over, and screamed that the place was filthy. He grabbed a broom and swept the floor of the Prince Street Social Club with a zest that would have been funny if it hadn't been so terrifying. He had plenty of girlfriends, too.

Chris couldn't figure out why these guys, with all their money, wanted to spend their days sitting backward in a chair, their arms folded, watching and listening. Chris thought that if he had their money, he'd be long gone from Mulberry Street, basking on some beach. He thought it was just that they didn't want to miss anything; they wanted to be part of every score, every decision, every sitdown. They had spent their lives creating an intimidating reputation, and they didn't want to waste it. They encouraged the mystique, the stories that were built up around them.

Some of the stories told about Dellacroce were believable to Chris, some weren't. A
Time
magazine cover story that came out not long before Chris met him reported that Dellacroce had once arranged to have the bodies of two murder victims dumped behind a police station. That was plausible as a kind of sinister prank, Chris thought. But Chris couldn't buy another incident reported in that article, which had Dellacroce discovering cops tapping his phone and then forcing them at gunpoint to chew and swallow the tapes. If anything, Chris felt the guy was extra-nice to cops. One day Chris and a couple of other guys were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Ravenite with Neil and his son Armond, nicknamed Buddy, a hefty, strong, if not overly bright, twenty-three-year-old. A patrol car pulled up, and a uniformed cop got out and began writing summonses for the double-parked cars.

Buddy swaggered over to the cop.

“Whassa matta, you got nothin' better to do?” he jeered. “Why doncha just get the hell outta here?”

The cop put his hands on his hips and glared, but before he could do anything, Neil stepped in. “I'm sorry, Officer,” he said. Then he turned and slapped Buddy across the face, right there in public.

“Don't you ever talk to a police officer that way!” he yelled at his son.

Chris knew that Dellacroce was itchy about phones, though. The first time Chris walked into the Ravenite, he noted the phone on the wall to the right of the door. It was a pay phone. On a subsequent visit, Chris saw that the phone was gone. When he made casual inquiry—“Hey, where's the fucking phone? I gotta make a call”—he was informed that Dellacroce, apparently feeling that even pay phones were tappable, had ripped the phone right off the wall and hurled it out onto Mulberry Street. Eventually a new phone was installed; Chris got the number and called both Solly and the Penguin there.

More often, Chris reached Solly at the Prince Street club, though at first he couldn't even find the phone there.

“There's got to be a phone,” Harry kept insisting.

“I know, I know,” Chris kept saying. “I just can't locate the damned thing.”

Chris kept hearing a phone ring, as he sat playing cards, and finally tracked down an extension phone in the dark alcove behind the bathroom, listed to the pizza parlor next door.

Until he went undercover, Chris had never been inside an OC social club. But he found that in decor, at least, they were not unlike neighborhood clubs he'd known. Social clubs were an honorable European tradition, transplanted from the streets of Naples and Athens to the sidewalks of New York. As a teenager, Chris had joined the Astoria Social Club, where there was a pool table, a refrigerator stocked with beer, and a neat sense of belonging.

As a child, he'd gone to the Democratic Club in East Harlem, where men smoked cigars and discussed politics. His father never missed voting in an election, and he'd insisted that Chris register to vote as soon as he was eligible. George was not an argumentative man, but Chris had heard him raise his voice indignantly when someone said that one person's vote didn't matter. “I tell you, it
does
matter,” George declared. “It's an honor and a privilege to vote. It's the biggest freedom we have in this country.”

Chris grew up thinking his father was the proudest American who ever lived. Once George became a naturalized citizen, he never wanted to set foot out of the country. Franklin D. Roosevelt was his idol; George called him the savior of the people. Chris also remembered vividly the election of 1948, when he went to the club with his father and listened to him preach eloquently on the virtues of Harry Truman. He remembered George's delight, next morning. “We have a wonderful President,” George told the family. “He will be a fine President for all people.” George was so passionate about politics and citizenship that Chris was surprised his mother never became a citizen. But she lived her life through her husband and her children; maybe she thought she was American enough, through them. Certainly George had patriotism to spare, and though Chris didn't always follow his father's political leanings, once he was grown, he'd always voted in every election, local and national, until he went under. Then he didn't vote at all.

Chris never heard politics discussed, at least not in any depth, at the clubs he visited. People still talked occasionally about the assassination of President Kennedy, but national politics didn't seem to interest them nearly as much as politics on the local level, the level on which they lived and operated. They seemed to respect some politicians, and not others, and they seemed to know exactly who was who. Often Chris did too, and he had to be careful not to say too much when they talked of their relationships with certain politicians in the Bronx and in Queens. Some of it was familiar to him, some wasn't; in either case, he passed it along to Harry. The periodic investigations of organized crime, and the accompanying publicity, along with crime in general, seemed of little interest to the men Chris knew. Certain local crimes caught their attention: After a television news report on a child molesting case, Chris heard one guy yell, “That bum should have his nuts cut off!”

Chris didn't hang around for hours at the clubs. He tried to time his visits, in and out, learning their routine. There was always a TV set going, always a card game or two in progress: poker, gin, ziganette. There was an assortment of chairs and tables, mismatched; a couch that had seen better days, a bank calendar tacked to the wall. Chris never saw a kitchen, just a refrigerator; hot food was sometimes delivered from the Taormina or the Luna or another neighborhood restaurant. At the Ravenite, the bar was sometimes tended by Gene Gotti, brother of John Gotti, who paid his respects to Dellacroce faithfully on each visit. Johnny G. was considered a flashy dresser, and seemed to be on his way to becoming a media celebrity. Chris was unimpressed. He thought that anybody who hijacked as consistently as Gotti could be a Dapper Dan, too.

The Gambino family was considered, by the Intelligence Division, to be the strongest of the five crime families in New York, followed by the Luchese and the Genovese clans. Chris was involved, to one degree or another, with all three. His association with Solly gave him the entrée, but as he became known, he was able to bounce on his own. He preferred being taken someplace by a guy who was already known, though, because that made it easier to fit in, and to pick up on ongoing conversations. Sometimes he knew who he would be meeting, and sometimes he didn't. He had a simple rule for himself: Wherever somebody led him, he went.