See No Evil (3 page)

O
f course, as Elliot would come to understand much later, the “special” relationship Jews and Italians shared wasn’t restricted to the Bronx, or New York for that matter. Historically, the symbiosis built around power and money between the two ethnic groups went back at least to the
heyday
of Chicago underworld boss Johnny Torrio and a
hoodlum
genius named Arnold Rothstein.

Torrio, who was nicknamed “the Fox,” was born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1882, but gravitated to Chicago where he went to work for Chicago crime boss “Big Jim” Colosimo running gambling operations, brothels, and
narcotic
distribution. Street smart and ruthless when he had to be, Torrio climbed his way through the ranks of Big Jim’s operations preaching an approach considerably different from his boss and most others working in the business of crime at the time.

Torrio believed that “violence leads only to more
violence
,” though it was he who arranged Colosimo’s assassination by a young hood named Frankie Yale so he could take
over his operation. Afterward, seeing, as many did, that Prohibition was a bonanza for crime lords like himself, he formed distribution alliances in Chicago, Detroit, and Canada, counterfeiting legal U.S. government alcohol certificates,
buying
distilleries in England and Scotland to control supply, and carving up the city of Chicago into inviolable territories to lessen mob tensions and maintain a “permanent” peace.

The old joke goes “Jesus saves, but Moses invests,” and maybe there’s some truth to it because while Johnny Torrio saw a future for the Mafiosi in multinational corporations, it was Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, who articulated a vision of what organized crime could someday become.

Rothstein was nicknamed “the Brain” because it was he who brought La Cosa Nostra to entirely new levels. Active, as were Al Capone and Torrio, in bootlegging, Rothstein expanded the world of crime into Wall Street, counterfeiting stock certificates, selling worthless bonds, making millions per year on the sale of stolen Liberty Bonds issued by the
federal
government during World War I. Not content with
indirect
control of most bootlegging operations in New York, stolen and counterfeit Liberty Bonds began showing up in Cuba, England, Nassau, France, and the Near East to
purchase
liquor and narcotics worldwide.

A great believer in cooperation over violence, Rothstein saw crime as a corporation exercising limited use of force and called for the creation among his gangland counterparts of a multiethnic, multinational federation. Truly the world of Arnold Rothstein was a limitless one uninhibited by morals or prejudice, leaving no stone unturned, no business
opportunity
unexploited.

Significantly, the views of Rothstein and Torrio would influence, and be shared by, New York’s Sicilian born Mafioso Salvatore Maranzano. In 1931, as
capo
di
tutti
capi,
Maranzano created five Mafia “families,” not “gang?” or “mobs” in New
York. A scholarly man who spoke six languages including Greek and Latin, Maranzano structured the American Mafia after Julius Caesar’s military legions calling it Cosa Nostra, “our thing.” Under the fathers of each family, there would be an underboss and under him, would be several lieutenants, called
caporégime
, in charge of an estimated 3,500 soldiers at the time.

Later, after years of a bloody conflict known as the Castellamarese War and Maranzano’s assassination arranged by Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Joseph Bonanno put forward a system to prevent further bloodshed through negotiation of internal disputes. “I suggested it be called the
Commizione
del
Pace,
Sicilian for Commission of Peace,” Bonanno confided to Elliot during a conversation at his home in Tucson, “to which Luciano, a shrewd, but illiterate street thug from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, responded, ‘I don’t even know how to
pronounce
it. Just call it the fucking Commission.”

Little did any of them realize that it was this body, made up of the fathers of New York City’s five families, that years later would provide federal investigators the landscape and
target
for the American Mafia’s unraveling, along with their own.

So, even before Bugsy Siegel, who invented Las Vegas, or Meyer Lansky, who took mob influence in real estate and gambling to its pinnacle, there was Arnold Rothstein, as good a crook as any Italian, who like him, was maybe not so tough as he was liberal in his own personal approach about what was “right” and what was “wrong.”

Like Arnold, too, it was Elliot’s brains that got him more and more entrenched with the Mafia, but there was one major difference. In Rothstein’s case, he was the brains behind all that was going on around him. Like a kid playing his favorite video game—always in control. For Elliot, the
relationships
he maintained with the sons of “made” men like Nick Micelli weren’t because he controlled them, but because he enjoyed them.

In some ways back then, he was not unlike Jerry Lewis as
The
Nutty
Professor.
While his grades were As and his SAT scores approached 1,600, he couldn’t get pretty girls or gamble or gain the respect (and fear) of his peers, but they could. And when he hung out with them, though he never drank, he, too, would be “cool.” That’s when he
did
go to the local nightclubs and
did
get the girls and was viewed with respect and, yes, even fear.
What
a
rush!
And all he had to do was write a few term papers or tutor Joey or Eddy or Sal so they could pass their math exam in high school or whatever community college they might wind up attending.

Not a bad accommodation, and there seemed little wrong with it, Elliot reasoned back then. No one got hurt, after all, and for him, it was like drinking the Nutty Professor’s potion. Miraculously, he was no longer skinny Elliot Litner, Abe and Etta’s son,
schlepping
his way through the Bronx, but Buddy Love, cruisin’ in a Thunderbird convertible, swingin’ with the best lookin’ chicks, and having the time of his life.

If Elliot’s primary school was the classroom, his other school was “the Corner.” This was where, hanging out with Nicky, Joey Ficshetti, Sal, and Little Eddy, he learned what was really going on in the world beyond his uncle’s laundry. There they would meet to discuss anything from baseball, Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle was their hero; to girls, always a topic of interest; and music, largely dominated by Elvis, and their favorite Italo-American recording group, the Four Seasons.

The debate surrounding baseball might have the guys comparing Mantle to Willie Mays, of the long-departed San Francisco Giants, or Whitey Ford to Sandy Koufax, of the long-departed and now-despised Los Angeles Dodgers. But one debate that never lasted long compared the East Coast’s Frankie Valli and the Seasons to the West Coast’s Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.

“Ya know,” Stanley Finelli, lead singer for their own
street-corner
doo-wop group, would begin, “I truly believe the Beach Boys are faggots. Ev-ah see the clothes they wear?” He shook his head just thinking about it.

To which Joey Ficshetti would add, “Did ya see ’em on Ed Sullivan? I swear to Christ, there’s a twinkle in Brian Wilson’s eye. No straight guy could ev-ah look like that!”

Then, if he was allowed by his parents to “hang out,” which was almost never, Elliot might put an intellectual spin on the subject with something like, “Yeah, I agree with both of you. In fact,” he would say, eyes narrowing for effect, “I read somewhere,
National
Geographic
I think, that there are more homosexuals on the beaches of California than
anyplace
in the world except, of course, for Greenwich Village.”

Nodding, convinced, Joey would put a cap on it. “Exactly. That’s the reason there ain’t no fuckin’ way that any-
fuckin’-body
would ev-ah compare the music of a cock nibbler like Brian Wilson to a bona-fide paisan like Frankie Valli, am I right or wrong?”

After graduation from high school, Elliot attended Syracuse University on a full scholarship, but before he left the Bronx and Long Island behind, Nicky’s dad, Salvatore Micelli, asked him to stop by to see him. Nicky was there, of course, with his mom, never known as anything but Mrs. Micelli, and so was Officer Kahler, the local cop, who’d watched him grow up in the neighborhood. Unbelievably, he sat at the Micellis’ kitchen table counting money—cash—and stacking it into piles.

“Elliot, Elliot,” greeted Mr. Micelli. “We’re so proud of you goin’ off to a good school upstate like Syracuse college.”

“And on full scholarship,” Mrs. Micelli added, rushing over to hug him.

Nicky looked on, genuinely happy for him and not
displeased
himself at the opportunity, now that school was over, to do a little of
dis
and
dat
with his father.

“Hi, Elliot,” Officer Kahler called out from the kitchen, continuing his counting.

Elliot waved.

“So, anyway,” Mr. Micelli sighed, “I just wanted to tell you, personal, how we appreciate the help you gave little Nicky gettin’ him through some tough spots and coverin’ for him that time those
scherzi
down there at the high school accused youse of cheatin’.”

“Yeah, Elliot, you remember?” Nicky fondly recalled. “You said we had the same ans-sas because we spent the week studyin’ together! That was a good one, Elliot. A gem of an ans-sa!”

“So, anyway,” Mr. Micelli repeated, like he always did at the start of a new sentence, “Mrs. Micelli and me know, well, we know your dad don’t have a lot, so we decided to give you a little somethin’ so you can buy books or warm clothes for when you go upstate in the cold.”

With that, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of $20 bills and handed it to Elliot. Then, wrapping his two big hands around Elliot’s little one, he looked directly into his eyes, nodding his approval like the proudest of fathers.

“But, but, Mr. Micelli,” Elliot protested in the
high-pitched
, nasal voice he happened to have been born with, “that’s all the money you have in your pocket.”

To which Mr. Micelli replied, very matter of factly, “Yeah, but I got two pockets!”

They all laughed. Nicky, Mr. and Mrs. Micelli, Elliot and even Officer Kahler, sitting at the Micellis’ kitchen table still counting cash and stacking it into neat piles.

Later Elliot learned that Officer Kahler was what was called a “bagman,” collecting “pad” from Mafia
caporégime,
like Salvatore Micelli, and spreading it among his fellow patrolmen.

A
ttending Syracuse University in the fall of 1964 on full scholarship was a source of pride for Litner as he looked back on all that had gone wrong in his life. He’d achieved straight As through high school and 800s on both the verbal and mathematics testing for the SATs. Unlike many students at that time Elliot, was never the type to be distracted by the politics of the day—civil rights, Vietnam, women’s liberation and
student
protests. He was detached from it, uninterested, and that for him, was kind of a blessing since it was learning that came naturally and the acquisition of knowledge that brought him joy.

So far as campus life, he didn’t need or desire anything else; except maybe women, but there would be plenty of time for that later. History, literature and foreign language studies were all important, but his true passion was science. The logic of math, the mysteries of chemistry and biology were, to him, like a portal into a brash new world, different from anything to which he was accustomed.

From a scientific standpoint, it was exciting. But there was
another reason, one that wasn’t, maybe, so noble. He
understood
that the sciences led to medical school, medical school to a medical degree, and a medical degree to the kind of money and status no one in his family had ever seen or lived to enjoy either in the Bronx or Vinograd, Russia from where the Litner family had emigrated.

Close as his family was growing up, it was not uncommon for his father or Uncle Saul, the colorful owner of the laundry that supported them, to tell stories of life in Russia, both tragic and somehow funny at the same time. In some ways Litner believed it may have been this crazy and often futile history that influenced many of the choices, both good and bad, made during his university days and afterward.

Of course, some of these stories were more tragic than amusing, like the one about Saul and Elliot’s father battling their way through Russia to Romania, along with thousands of other Jews, being shot at and beaten by soldiers on their way to escaping to America. No doubt, those tales stay with a man. They toughen him up to the realities of life and sharpen his survival instincts so that when he sees a way out, an
opportunity
, he doesn’t just seize it, he holds on to it for dear life. In a way, it was like that for Litner at Syracuse where he graduated cum laude and went on to Downstate Medical School in Brooklyn, where, at twenty-one years old, he became the youngest
student
ever to graduate.

Through his undergraduate years, Elliot kept in touch with his friends in the old neighborhood despite the fact that his
parents
had by then, like so my other first-generation immigrants, moved to the rapidly expanding suburbs of Long Island. While they were, along with Uncle Saul, now in Hempstead, Elliot was back to his old stomping grounds, serious as ever, attending Downstate, but living it up when Nicky, Sal and the other guys came by to party or just cruise in Brooklyn, Queens or Lower Manhattan in Nicky’s brand-new 1970 Chevy Camaro.

Gone were the days of Elvis, the Beatles and rock ‘n roll. This was a new period entirely—the age of disco, with clubs opening almost as fast as somebody could come up with a name: Ondine’s, Shepherd’s, Cheetah, The Scene, and a place called The Loft, opened by pioneer disco entrepreur, David
Mancuso
, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though only a prelude to the opening of Studio 54 by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, for Elliot it was like Alice stepping through the looking glass, a time that marked the beginning of what some would call his double life—the hopelessly serious medical student “nerd,” Elliot Litner, and the young, hip Mafioso wannabe, Il Dottore.

At the time, it never occurred to him to ask why. Why did they have him around? To be sure, they’d grown up
together
, but aside from being the scrawny Jewish kid who, dressed in black pants, white shirt and brown penny loafers, seemed like more of a mascot for the group than a member, was there something beyond that? More, why did it never occur to him that they, all of them, were treated “special” when they entered these clubs? Maybe Elliot was naïve, and maybe he just didn’t want to know, but the fact, as he would later discern, was that most of these clubs were owned directly or indirectly by the Gambino Family, the largest and most powerful in the nation.

Just how Carlo Gambino had come to accumulate his
fortune
seemed to Litner, at least at that time, unbridled capitalism in its purest form. There were several ways: The first had to do with Don Carlo’s business genius in the Arnold Rothstein sense. Business was business, money was money, so when he surmised that New York’s homosexual population was without bars to
socialize
, he financed and opened dozens of gay clubs where they could drink, listen to music, dance and make love if they chose. Understanding the other side of the coin, Gambino also had no compunctions about blackmailing the more prominent among them, one being longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

A second method of making big bucks, was family loan
sharking operations where sums of money, small and large, would be lent at interest rates of 200 per cent or more to
financially
strapped club owners. If they couldn’t pay, the collateral would be appropriated, usually the establishment itself. Finally, there was the Hotel and Restaurant Employee International, a union the family controlled since the 1940s. This enabled the Gambinos to shake down restaurants, topless bars, nightclubs and hotels in return for granting union peace.

All in all, most of the Bronx, nearly all of Brooklyn, and many of the major industries in Manhattan ranging from
construction
to garbage collection and the garment industry were mobbed up. No wonder they were treated so well.

It was in June 1971 that Litner began interning as a
general
surgical resident in the Department of Surgery at Jewish Hospital and Medical Center in Brooklyn. The work was
exhausting
, but each day he learned something new. Whether it was a routine tonsillectomy or something as dangerous as a
debridement
and excision for a bullet wound carried out during life-threatening surgery, he realized that he loved not only the satisfaction of a well executed procedure, but the excitement of a life-and-death situation, particularly when the stakes were high and the surgery he was performing became a true gamble.

One procedure, illegal prior to the Supreme Court’s
Roe
v.
Wade
decision, was abortion. It was to discuss this subject that Sal DiGregorio, at the behest of Nicky’s Dad, Sal, invited Elliot to a dinner at a restaurant called Tommaso’s in the Bay Ridge
section
of Brooklyn to meet with a man referred to only as “Neil.” It wasn’t a tough sell. “Are you kidding?” Elliot asked. “I make $100 a month as an intern at this slave hospital. Tomasso’s is a class place. Where else am I going to get a meal like that for free?”

When he got to Tommaso’s, a smallish, gray-pallored man with icy blue eyes sat at a table alone. The place was already buzzing with conversation and the clanking of silverware, pots
and pans from the nearby kitchen. The maitre’d was waiting and brought him to the booth.

The man, probably in his late fifties, and dressed in a
nondescript
gray suit, half-rose, then extended his hand, “My name is Neil. Sal Micelli, you know him?”

Elliot nodded, a little self-conscious. “Yes, Mr. Micelli, sure.”

“Well, he told me you’re a bright young kid, just outta
medical
school who could probably use a little extra cash.”

He looked into Elliot’s eyes, and again Elliot was struck by the starkness of his stare. Neil was a tough cookie, there was no question about that, but despite his language, which was laced almost every other word with a “fuck” or a “goddamn,” he had his own brand of charm, his own kind of sincerity.

From there, while he ate a plate of pasta and Elliot wolfed down a seafood dish called cioppono, Neil proceeded to talk about a type of arrangement that would be a “win-win” for everybody. Young girls were getting pregnant, many out of wedlock, some married, who for whatever reason—emotional, financial—didn’t want to carry the fetus to term. Forget that the law for the moment prohibited abortion, this was a matter of convention, a way of thinking that changed with the times. What about the girl? Neil asked. Because of these conventions, young girls were performing abortions on themselves, or
going
to quacks and untrained practitioners who were oftentimes little more than butchers.

What if, Neil proposed, he and his business partners were to find sterile, hospital-grade conditions where young women could quietly have their problem taken care of without putting their lives in jeopardy? What if Elliot helped to recruit young underpaid surgeons like himself to perform this service and got a fee for every doctor he recruited and on each of the
procedures
they performed? Wouldn’t that be a win-win? Wouldn’t he be helping these distraught young women, maybe saving
their lives, while helping to fund the careers of young resident physicians at the same time?

Elliot thought about what he said and then considered the two lives he’d already begun living. On the one hand, he was working his fingers to the bone while barely sustaining himself. On the other, he was driving in red Corvettes, partying in the best discos with the prettiest women and living like a movie star. The choice, for him, was not difficult. He decided that between surviving like the Nutty Professor and living it up like Buddy Love, he would choose: both. Why, after all, should he have to lead just one life or the other? Why should he stand like his grandfather with egg dripping down his face holding his money with one hand and his dick with the other making
bubkis
while others thrived? If not him, somebody would do it.

So Elliot agreed and shook hands that night with Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce, future underboss to Paul Castellano and mentor to John Gotti, on what would be his first step out of normal everyday society and his first step into the world of La Cosa Nostra.