The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (7 page)

"You are," they said. They displayed FBI cards. Nick the Boss went off the beach in handcuffs and then to court, where nobody wins. He is back on the street now but is a loud target.

The family named after Joe Profaci, an old-time Mafia boss, was shot up by an insurgency group, the Gallos, in the 1960s. Crazy Joe Gallo was shot dead at Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry Street. The news business loved the story. Joe Colombo took over. He believed he was a legitimate citizen. He invented the Italian American Civil Rights League and ran a rally at Madison Square Garden during which his crowd shouted "Uno, uno, uno," the old Roman cheer for Benito Mussolini. New York Post columnist Murray Kempton observed, "The entertainment was provided by Diahann Carroll and Sammy Davis Jr., two striking illustrations of pre-Norman Sicilians."

Colombo then ran an outdoor rally at Columbus Circle during which he was shot, later dying from his injuries. The killing gave the Mafia a bad name. The next boss was Carmine Persico Jr., known as Junior. He is in federal prison in Lompoc, California, for about the rest of his life. During a succession disagreement, one Vic Orena, pronounced "Vicarena," was convicted of mayhem and sentenced to two lifetimes and one eighty-year sentence.

"Which one should I do first?" he asked Judge Jack Weinstein, who nodded to his clerk. "You name it," the clerk said.

"Put me down for the eighty years first," Orena said.

He went to Atlanta, and his lawyers entered a motion to throw everything out and let him come home. He was certain his motion would prevail over the whole government. He called Gina, his girl on Long Island, and told her,"Get my suits and have the tailor take them in. I've lost weight down here. Then go and get me some new shirts. I'm going to win this motion and make bail. We're going to Europe on the first day."

Orena was brought up by prison bus from Atlanta. His motion, a foot-high stack of paper, was on Weinstein's desk.The judge had studied it for some days.

Gina was in the courtroom with a suit for her now-slim love. The clerk called out "All rise," and Weinstein entered the courtroom. The door to the detention pens opened and a slim Vic Orena came in, his eyes glistening with hope.

"What is he doing here?" Weinstein asked. "He belongs in prison."

"He is here on his motion," the lawyer said. "Motion denied," Weinstein said. "Marshal, take this man back to prison."

Vic Orena, his one and a half minutes of hope over, went through the door and onto a prison bus that would stop five or six times at dingy county jails on the way to Atlanta.

His love, Gina, with his suit folded neatly over her arms, went back to Long Island.

Vic Orena is still doing the eighty-years part of his sentence; then all that remains for him to do is the two lifetimes.

There is now no real Colombo family boss whose name is worth typing.

The largest, fiercest, and busiest family, the Genovese, had Vincent "the Chin" Gigante as boss-the boss in a bathrobe. Babbling in pajamas, robe, and truck driver's cap, he staggered through the night on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and entered the black-painted private club at number 206, where the guys played cards all night. The Chin, suddenly alert, sat down at the game.The cards were dealt. He picked up his hand and without looking at it called "Gin!" Money was pushed to him. Next he tired of picking up the cards.While they were being dealt, he called "Gin!" Always he got paid.

When in front of Judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn, he flopped around in his chair and mumbled for hours without stopping. My guess, and it is well educated, is that he was saying the Hail Mary, a lovely prayer that is short and can be repeated without end. Lawyers presented results of new tests they said showed the Chin had Alzheimer's. Weinstein, who reads science periodicals every morning, was greatly interested in the new test, the PET scan. "Congratulations.You are on the cutting edge of science," he told the lawyers. "But you omitted one important part of your test. In order to show that it is Alzheimer's, you need an autopsy."

Gigante shook and went to prison. The outfit was left with nothing.

Now there were five families in name and no bosses.At the start of 2005, in the midst of all the squalling over the Christmas money that went to Joe Massino's wife, federal agents came through Brooklyn like armed locusts and arrested twenty-seven members of the Bonanno family.

It followed that one morning when Tony Cafe was at home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his eighty-year-old sister, the last of four sisters, the first three dead of cancer, he heard knocking on the door downstairs. He looked out. He could see two agents, each holding up identification.

Tony Cafe sighed. "I'll be right down," he called. He threw his wallet to his sister.

When he got downstairs there were three agents, one of them a little Irish woman who did the talking.

"Are you going to lock me up?"Tony asked.

"No, but you're number one."

She made it official. A week before, an article by Jerry Capeci appeared in New York magazine and was first to mention that Tony Cafe-proper name Anthony Rabito-was suddenly an important figure. Capeci, whose Gangland News is on the Internet, is the authority on the Mafia to the extent that all those left in crime know that on Thursday, when Capeci's work comes out on the Net and in the afternoon's New York Sun, they will find out where they stand, if anybody is left to stand. Now on Tony's stoop, the FBI confirmed that Tony was number one in the Bonanno family. He was in shock as the agent, Kim something, told him, "We don't want any bodies in the street, we don't want witnesses bothered, and we don't want agents threatened."

"I live upstairs with my sister. I don't have any money or guns in the house," he said.

The agents sniffed and left.

And now Tony Cafe, who is allegedly the boss replacing the last boss of the Bonanno family, was sitting alone at the bar of Bamonte's Restaurant on Withers Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, his hair short and turning white, his voice like gravel pouring from a truck, and his build entirely too wide.

Bamonte's appears to be an out-of-the-way place, but it is on Broadway in the world of New York people who know what they eat. It is a short drive across the Williamsburg Bridge. At lunchtime half the city seems to walk past the bar and into the dining room.

Here was police commissioner Ray Kelly coming in and shaking hands with everybody. At the bar Tony Cafe held out his hand, and Kelly grabbed it and then moved on. Later, in the gloaming, Tony Cafe sat in the empty restaurant and said, "The police commissioner shook my hand. How do you like it? He didn't know who I was. Nobody knows who I am. I don't know anybody else. They're all in jail. Once the top of the family turns like Joe did, nobody from the other families will talk to you."

"What was the worst thing to happen to the outfit?" he was asked.

"Gotti," he said slowly,"when he had the case against him with a woman prosecutor and he fixed the jury. That got the government mad. Nobody was safe after that. They got Gotti and then they came after everybody else. Because of him, all of a sudden I'm standing out here alone."

Jimmy Breslin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1986. His nationally syndicated columns have appeared in Newsday and various other New York City newspapers. He is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez and, most recently, The Church That Forgot Christ. He lives in New York City.

from New York magazine

Jason Itzler, the self-anointed world's greatest escort-agency owner, prepared to get down on his knees. When a man was about to ask for the hand of a woman in holy matrimony, especially the hand of the fabulous Natalia,America's No. 1 escort, he should get down on his knees.

This was how Jason, who has always considered himself nothing if not "ultraromantic," saw it. However, as he slid from his grade school-style red plastic seat in preparation to kneel, the harsh voice of a female Corrections officer broke the mood, ringing throughout the dank visitors' room.

"Sit back down," said the large uniformed woman. "You know the rules."

Such are the obstacles to true love when one is incarcerated at Rikers Island, where Jason Itzler, thirty-eight and still boyishly handsome in his gray Department of Corrections jumpsuit, has resided since the cops shut down his megaposh NY Confidential agency in January.

There was also the matter of the ring. During the glorious summer and fall of 2004, when NY Confidential was grossing an average of $25,000 a night at its five-thousand-square-foot loft at Seventy-nine Worth Street, spitting distance from the municipal courts and Bloomberg's priggish City Hall, Jason would have purchased a diamond with enough carats to blow the eye loupe off a Forty-seventh Street Hasid.

That was when Itzler filled his days with errands like stopping by Soho Gem on West Broadway to drop $6,500 on little trinkets for Natalia and his other top escorts. This might be followed by a visit to Manolo Blahnik to buy a dozen pairs of $500 footwear. By evening, Itzler could be found at Cipriani, washing down plates of crushed lobster with yet another bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue label and making sure everyone got one of his signature titanium business cards engraved with NY Confidential's singular motto: rocket fuel for winners.

But now Jason was charged with various counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, money laundering, and promoting prostitution. His arrest was part of a large effort by the NYPD and the D.A.'s office against New York 's burgeoning Internet-based escort agencies. In three months, police had shut down American Beauties, Julie's, and the far-flung New York Elites, a concern the cops said was flying porn stars all over the country for dates. Reeling, pros were declaring the business "holocausted" as girls took down their Web sites and worried johns stayed home.

Many blamed Itzler for the heat. In a business where discretion is supposed to be key, Jason was more than a loose cannon. Loose A-bomb was more like it. He took out giant NY Confidential ads in mainstream magazines (the one you're holding included). In restaurants, he'd get loud and identify himself, Howard Stern-style, as "the King of All Pimps." Probably most fatally, Itzler was quoted in the Post as bragging that he didn't worry about the police because "I have cops on my side." After that, one vice guy said, "it was like he was daring us."

Only days before, Itzler, attired in a $5,700 full-length fox coat from Jeffrey, bought himself a Mercedes S600. Now the car, along with much of the furniture at Jason's lair, including the $50,000 sound system on which he blared, 24/7, the music of his Rat Pack idol, Frank Sinatra, had been confiscated by the cops. His assets frozen, unable to make his $250,000 bail, Jason couldn't even buy a phone card, much less get Natalia a ring.

"Where am I going to get a ring in here?" Jason said to Natalia on the phone the other night. He suggested perhaps Natalia might get the ring herself and then slip it to him when she came to visit.

"That's good, Jason," returned Natalia. "I buy the ring, give it to you, you kiss it, give it back to me, and I pretend to be surprised."

"Something like that," Jason replied, sheepishly. "You know I love you."

That much seemed true. As Jason doesn't mind telling you, he has known many women since he lost his virginity not too long after his bar mitzvah at the Fort Lee Community Jewish Center, doing the deed with the captain of the Tenafly High School cheerleader squad. Since then, Jason, slight and five foot nine, says he's slept with "over seven hundred women," a figure he admits pales before the twenty thousand women basketball star Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain claimed to have bedded. But, as Jason says,"you could say I am a little pickier than him."

Of these seven hundred women, Jason has been engaged to nine, two of whom he married. "It was really only one and a half," Itzler reports, saying that while living in Miami 's South Beach he married "this hot Greek girl. She was gorgeous.The first thing I did was buy her this great boob job, which immediately transformed her from a tremendous A/B look to an out-of-sight C/D look. But her parents totally freaked out. So I got the marriage annulled."

This aside, not counting his sainted late mother, Jason says Natalia, twenty-five, about five foot three and perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, reigns as the love of his life.

Without Natalia, she of the smoldering brown eyes that have excited who knows how many hedge-fund managers, billionaire trust-fund babies, and NFL quarterbacks, Jason would never have been able to build NY Confidential into the sub rosa superhotness it became. It was Natalia who got top dollar, as much as $2,000 an hour, with a two-hour minimum. In the history of Internet escorting, no one ever matched Natalia's ratings on TheEroticReview. com, the Zagat's of the escort-for-hire industry. On TER, "hobbyists," as those with the "hobby" of frequenting escorts are called- men with screen names like Clint Dickwood, Smelly Smegma, and William Jefferson Clinton-can write reviews of the "providers" they see, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10 for both "appearance" and "performance."

In 2004 Natalia recorded an unprecedented seventeen straight 10/10s. On the TER ratings scale, a 10 was defined as "one in a lifetime." Natalia was the Perfect 10, the queen of the escort world.

"Yo! Pimp Juice!… that her?"

It was Psycho, a large tattooed Dominican (psycho was stenciled on his neck in Gothic lettering) who was referring to Jason by his jailhouse nickname. Itzler nodded. There was no need to gloat. Moments before, Jason scanned the grim visiting room. "Just making sure I've got the hottest chick in the room." Like it was any contest, Natalia sitting there, in her little calfskin jacket and leather miniskirt, thick auburn hair flowing over her narrow shoulders.