West 47th (11 page)

Such unfortunates were some of Russo's best customers.

Russo was also the man a dealer went to for fast money. When an opportunity came along that had to be jumped on right away or be lost. A packet of emeralds, for instance, nice Muzos that some coke mule from Columbia showed up with and was willing to let go at only slightly more than half what they were worth. Or a lot of nice-quality diamond rough that a black had carried in a white handkerchief all the way from Sierra Leone.

They came up, such chances, when going to the bank for a loan was out of the question. The bank would want to know all and require a week or so to process its forms.

Russo, on the other hand, wasn't interested in knowing anyone's reason for borrowing and there were never any papers. Ask for the money at eleven, it was there by noon, or sooner, politely delivered in a brown paper bag or a shoe box.

With the first week's interest of ten percent taken out in advance.

No matter, it was fast money, and also no matter that it was black money, the proceeds from pornography, extortion, numbers, bust-out bars, hijacking and the like. The important thing was it was there when needed, available with no more than a phone call. Forgive the usury. Whoever gave that illegal aspect much of a thought?

Thus Russo was a fixture on the street. In his criminal way a benefactor. Without him most of 47th wouldn't have been able to conduct business and many of those that could wouldn't have profited nearly as much.

That was especially true of the fences, guys on the first level of swag who worked teams of swifts. Russo was always there for them. He was the next level, a fence for the fences. He bought from established fences only, those that he knew, the dozen or so. He never bought from an unconnected swift or slick-looking jewelry crook.

“Someone told me you might be interested in something.”

“Someone was wrong,” Russo would say
.

“Let me show you.”

“Keep it in your pants.”

However what the fences brought usually got bought. Russo was wise in the ways they did business and invariably he got the best of them. They were, he knew, like two-hundred-dollar whores who could be negotiated to lie down for fifty.

Swag.

Regarding it, Russo set some smart rules for himself. Like never keeping a piece of stolen jewelry intact for any unreasonable length of time, which to Russo meant no longer than an hour or two. Normally, a major piece that he'd acquired, say, a diamond necklace, would be broken up within minutes. It made no difference to him that the necklace was exceptional, made by Cartier or Van Cleef or whoever, he was merciless. Out came the stones, the gold and platinum tossed into the smelting crucible.

He had no appreciation for beauty.

And it was said of him that he could pop stones from their mountings by merely looking coldly at them.

Joseph Riccio was one of Russo's favorite have-arounds. One of.

Furio Visconti was just as much a favorite.

Russo played them against one another. Probably he figured that way he got more out of them. Eventually, when Riccio was made Russo's right hand, there was Visconti just as close on the left.

For years that's how it was. Russo telling Riccio he was number one in line and, practically in the same breath, telling Visconti the same. So, it followed that when Russo didn't have the heart to wake up one morning and forever, both Riccio and Visconti felt eligible to be allowed to take over the street.

It wasn't something they could settle amicably. They went at each other as early as during Russo's wake at the Scalise Funeral Home up on 188th Street, and again at the funeral. Scuffled and threatened around grave markers and consecrated ground and had to be restrained.

The suggestion was made that the way to settle the matter was the old way.

A sit-down.

On a sweltering Thursday afternoon in August Riccio and Visconti were transported in separate cars by guys they didn't know to the house of a man they'd only heard of. An unremarkable house on the Connecticut blacktop road between New Fairfield and New Milford. With a mailbox bearing the family name right on the road, as though that name didn't deserve to be self-conscious. House with aluminum siding and a screened-in rear porch overlooking a garden of zucchini and peppers.

They, Riccio and Visconti, sat on the porch in yellow canvas director chairs across from the old guy years past his days, who hooded his creamy eyes and did a great many nods and made a protruding lower lip so they would believe he was listening to their claims.

Riccio was in mob heaven. The only thing missing was an invisible orchestra playing O
Soave Fancinella
. Being in the presence of this fabled consigliere awed him, caused his little voice to go tremulous.

“I knew your uncle,” the old guy said at Riccio, which made Riccio feel that he had an edge, until the old guy added: “Your uncle was a
spuce
.

“As for you,” the old guy said at Visconti, “you probably think
bris-cola
is a soft drink.”

Visconti knew it was a Sicilian card game but figured it best to let the old guy have his opinion.

The old guy announced that he had to take a leak. He went into the house, leaving Riccio and Visconti to ignore one another. Riccio craned up to get a better view of the garden. He would have stood but thought that might not be proper once one had sat at a sit-down. He considered complimenting the old guy on the garden and maybe make a point, but then he didn't know shit about gardens except that old guys like this one enjoyed fucking around in them and that was where he'd seen Don Corleone die six or seven times.

The old guy returned with the decision in his mouth. He'd had it in his head all along, even before they'd arrived, could have said it right off but knew some mob theater was expected of him.

He remained standing because to sit would probably give the impression that he intended to prolong this matter. He wanted to go down to Danbury and have the tires on his Lincoln rotated and get some fresh batteries for his flashlight so he could watch the raccoons try to beat the electrified fence he'd had put around his peppers and zucchinis.

He didn't say his say directly at either Riccio or Visconti. He aimed his words between and over their heads, focused on the screen where there was a blotch of bird shit. In a monotone that made it sound more like an indisputable decree he told them they were both good boys, they both deserved. Told them Russo had spoken equally well of them numerous times. (Actually, he'd only met Russo once about twelve years back when he needed a new stolen wristwatch.) Therefore, he concluded, it was fair that they both be promoted to caporegime and both have the territory.

Half each.

Riccio was to have everything from address number 39 to Avenue of the Americas and around that end of 47th.

Visconti would have everything the other way, from address number 38 to Fifth Avenue and around that end of 47th.

Shake hands.

Embrace left and right.

And the thing was done.

Except for the tribute, the cost of the sit-down, so to speak.

A hundred thousand was the figure mentioned, and to mention was like presenting an already overdue tab that would, if not promptly paid, be put into collection, so to speak.

Riccio and Visconti had to hustle around to come up with their parts of the hundred. The old consigliere got sixty of it. The two guys in the Bronx who'd arranged the thing split the rest.

Grazie
.

Had Russo not died so soon this sit-down might never have taken place. The dispute between Riccio and Visconti over West 47th very likely would have fallen through the cracks of the old mob, because it was right about then that the old mob bosses—Persico, Salerno, Corallo, Rostelli and Castellano—as well as many of their minions, their underbosses, capos and soldiers, were being hit with federal grand jury indictments.

Unlike those times before when they'd been rounded up and brought in merely to rub them the wrong way or just for election headlines, this time what was at stake was serious time and there was a new thing called RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, to make the charges stick.

What a barrage of charges!

One hundred thirty-five counts against the top Genovese guys alone. One hundred twenty against the Lucchese leaders. Altogether, over five-hundred counts. Which, when translated into sentences, would mean consecutive lifetimes of time inside, would mean dying in the joint, getting out only after rigor mortis had set in.

Their mouths had brought them to this, their old-mob arrogance and their spillways mouths.

“How much he come up with?”

“Sixty-five, an extra five for being late.”

“The piece of shit saying he was strapped.”

“You smacked him pretty good. His fucking ear was bleeding. Fat Tony don't want him dead. He couldn't pay if he was dead.”

“I hate poor-mouth late payers, that's all.”

“Yeah. Listen, stop someplace when you see a place. I want to get a paper. You hear any more about Angelo?”

“Just that he's got to be done.”

“I mean when.”

“When Fat Tony says.”

“You give a shit what happens to Angie?”

“No.”

“You used to hang out with him a lot.”

“What happens, happens.”

“Makes no difference who it was that straightened him out. For what he did the cocksucker's got to get done, him and maybe his whole fucking family.”

“Whatever Fat Tony says.”

Mouthing, while all around was infested with bugs. The government had them. The old mob on over a hundred hours of tape. (What should they have done, become mutes and taken up singing?) They shouldn't have trusted the dashboard of their cars or the water tanks of their toilets, not even the heels of their shoes.

Worse, they shouldn't have trusted one another.

Soldiers and have-arounds who'd been theirs and in on all sorts of moves for years shed their covers and revealed themselves as having been federal good guys all along. Not only that. Guys they should have been able to be positively sure of, properly initiated guys they'd known since childhood whose legacy from made fathers and made grandfathers was to uphold that old-mob honor, old-mob respect, old-mob everything, were turning out to have been turned sometime along the way, were, behind their
goombah
faces, informers.

Cacchio!
Shit! What was this world of theirs coming to? The silence that had been the code and, in so many instances, been painfully, sacrificially kept, had given way to giving up. Giving up people, places, amounts, killings, anything to the federal District Attorneys in exchange for not having to do all their remaining years in joints where the brightest prospects of any tomorrow would be a game of boccie.

Even the underbosses, counted on to be the most stand-up of stand-ups, decided they'd rather kneel and offer to plea-bargain. It got to be a matter of who had the most on who. Three of the older guys conveniently developed chest pains, were unable to get a deep breath.

Good riddance bad guys.

Arrivederci old mob.

Never to be the same.

Riccio and Visconti weren't among those held accountable. They got looked at and then were overlooked. None of their transgressions, terrible as they might have been, were mentioned on the taped conversations. They weren't notorious enough for anyone to use in plea bargaining and they hadn't been tight enough with the up-top mob guys for the government prosecutors to press out of them anything that might be helpful in those prominent cases.

Ironically, just as much a reason for the government not including Riccio and Visconti in the thick of it was the street.

The prosecutors regarded West 47 as a rather separate community with distinctive, shadowy ways. If they went digging and charging into it they'd be opening too complex a side issue, something, with its glittering appeal, that would surely distract from their main performances. They decided to leave 47th, including Riccio and Visconti, as it was and perhaps they'd take it on at some future time when their plate wasn't so full.

They never did.

Riccio loathed the transformation of the mob. The self-image he'd promoted all along refused to make room for any such change. He vowed that no matter what, even if he had to go it alone, he'd keep on keeping on, being loyal to the ways of his forebears. One day he suddenly claimed he was related on his mother's side to Albert Anastasia of Murder, Incorporated. He'd considered making it Meyer Lansky but that would have been contrary to the qualifying, pure Sicilian line and, besides, he favored Anastasia's legendary ruthlessness.

Riccio also enlisted only have-around guys with mentalities similar to his own.

Such as the fat one that Mitch had just moments ago shoved down the stairs twice. Mitch wasn't paying attention to him now, was hesitating there on the landing halfway up to Riccio, indecisive about those next fifteen steps. Thinking Riccio might want to again show off his new electronic money-counting machine, insist on demonstrating it, and Mitch would have to stand there and watch while in mere seconds the thing counted out a hundred thousand or two. “Just like they got in the big banks,” Riccio would boast, which would cause Mitch to perhaps or perhaps not hold back cutting across Riccio's old-mob grain with a remark that the money counter was a
new
thing, a big improvement from the
old
days when it took all night for guys to count the take.

Mitch made up his mind.

Instead of going up he wrote on the face of one of the gray envelopes that contained a set of the Kalali photographs:

“Joe
—
take a look at these and call me.”

He included his business card, tossed the envelope onto the daybed, gave the summoning button of the intercom a sure, long press. Went down where the fat have-around was expecting a kick, so sure of it he had his hands over his groin like a cup-jock.