Inherit the Mob (36 page)

Shulman spent the next two hours huddled with Gordon and Flanagan in the basement cafeteria, fleshing out a battle plan. Finally, exhausted, the old man asked to be taken back to the apartment. When they arrived, he found the men of the Mishpocha waiting nervously in the living room. He asked Gordon and Flanagan to wait in the bedroom while he said good-bye.

“I wish I could stay longer, but I’ve got to get back to Miami,” he told them.

“And leave us here?” demanded Sleepout Louie. “Jerry, we only stayed because we knew you were coming.”

“Velvel and Flanagan know what to do,” said Shulman. “We’ve worked out a plan.”

“No way,” protested Kasha Weintraub. “You go, we go. I’m not taking orders from these kids.”

“I want you all to stay here,” said Shulman in the same icy tone of command that he had used at the hospital. “And I want you to do exactly what Velvel and Flanagan say. They have my confidence. If you trust me, then you can trust them.”

“Velvel’s a nice boy, Jerry, but he’s a reporter. And this Flanagan guy’s a nut,” protested Zuckie.

“That’s exactly right,” said Shulman. “And that’s what’s going to win this war. Look, give them two days. Do exactly what they tell you, no matter how strange it seems. If you’re not convinced by then, you can come home. Will you do that for me?”

“Two days,” said Sleepout, looking at his watch. “Forty-eight hours, and then, good-bye Manhattan.”

After Shulman left, Flanagan called Kasha Weintraub into the bedroom. “Kasha, what do you know about credit cards?” he asked.

“What does Willie Shoemaker know about horses?”

“Do you think you could get me the American Express and Visa numbers for a guy named Carlo Sesti?”

“Visa I can get you right now,” he said. “I got a friend at the company. American Express will take me until tomorrow.”

In the meantime, Gordon dialed a Brooklyn phone number. It answered on the third ring and he heard a familiar voice.

“Jacob Gurashvili?”

“Is speaking in person.”

“This is William Gordon. I, ah, purchased something from you the other day?”

“Ah, Tiflis!” the cabbie exclaimed happily. “You need another merchandise?”

“I might,” said Gordon. “I was wondering, do you ever do any private driving?”

“You mean free?” asked Gurashvili cautiously.

“No, private. I want to hire you and your cab privately for a week. I’ll pay you one thousand dollars.”

“Where you want to go? California?”

“No, right here in the city. Is it a deal?”

“A deal,” said Gurashvili happily. “Good deal. Business is business.”

Gordon hung up and winked at Flanagan. “I got us a driver, chief,” he said.

“Yeah, and Kasha’s going to get Carlo’s card numbers. Looks like we’re ready to roll. Let’s go in and tell the troops.”

Flanagan and Gordon strode into the living room. “Let it be noted that the great war between the Spadafore Family and the Mishpocha began today, December eleventh, at six-forty-five
P.M
.,” Flanagan intoned, looking dramatically at his watch. “Now, with your permission, Don Velvel here will put you in the picture.”

Briefly, Gordon outlined the plan, based on Shulman’s original premise, with embellishments by Flanagan. When he was finished, seven pairs of watery old eyes gleamed with admiration. “I been in this racket all my life, and I ain’t never heard nothing like this,” said Pupik Feinsilver, speaking for everyone else.

The next morning, armed with Carlo Sesti’s credit card numbers, the members of the Mishpocha fanned out to public phones all over the neighborhood. Each had a copy of the yellow pages and thirty dollars in quarters. Between eleven in the morning and two-thirty in the afternoon, they ordered 419 large pepperoni pizzas from 281 pizza parlors throughout the city. The address and time of delivery were all the same—Luigi Spadafore’s mansion at 4:00
P.M
.

Flanagan himself scanned the yellow pages for businesses that advertised same-day service. He ordered sixteen collections of doowop records, twenty-one bouquets of flowers, three male strippers and a complete set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. All were sent to Luigi Spadafore and charged to Carlo Sesti.

Next, Flanagan called a friend at the
Daily News
. “Mike, this is John Flanagan. Yeah, you heard right. I left the
Trib
. The cheap bastards wouldn’t take care of my hospitalization. Listen, I got a great story for you. You know Luigi Spadafore? Yeah, that’s right, the Mafia guy. Well, he’s holding a New York championship pizza-eating contest out at his house today in Brooklyn.… I don’t know why, maybe it’s like Columbo, when he did that Italian Anti-Defamation thing, you know, for the PR … Yeah, I know, it is an incredible story. The address? Yeah, I got it right here.…”

At four o’clock, when the first of the delivery vans began pulling up alongside Luigi Spadafore’s mansion, they were greeted by five TV news crews, a dozen press photographers and reporters from every newspaper and wire service in the city. Jacob Gurashvili was there too, equipped with a speaker system that blared the Dean Martin rendition of “That’s Amore” over and over.

Spadafore’s guards tried to move the cameras away from the
mansion, and scuffles broke out between the reporters and the hoods. Enraged delivery men, their vans caught in a colossal traffic jam, joined the fray, and within a few minutes, half a dozen squad cars, sirens screaming, arrived to restore order. The camera crews turned their attention to the melee, forcing the hoods to flee, hats over their faces, into the large brownstone.

Luigi Spadafore sat in his heavy armchair and looked out the window with uncomprehending eyes at the chaos in front of his house. The phone rang, and his private secretary buzzed.

“Someone named Mad Dog Flanagan,” he said.

Spadafore picked up the phone. “Hi, Luigi,” said a voice he recognized instantly. “What’s new?”

“I should have known you were behind this,” he muttered.

“Yeah, Flanagan’s back. Tell that to your consigliere. Flanagan’s back and you’re going down. I’m coming out there and burn your mansion to the ground. I’m gonna rape your women and slaughter your cattle. I’m gonna crucify you on a telephone poll, you disgusting greaseball. I’m gonna—” Flanagan heard the click and smiled to himself. “Temper, temper, Luigi,” he said.

At six, Flanagan gathered the Mishpocha in front of the TV set in the living room. Gordon remained closeted in one of the bedrooms, where he had spent the entire day. The aroma of Morgan Threkeld’s fried chicken and biscuits wafted out from the kitchen.

“This afternoon, a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood became the scene of what police are calling the Bensonhurst Pizza Riot,” intoned anchorman Jack LeDuff. “The riot broke out when an angry mob of pizza delivery persons gathered in front of the mansion of reputed crime lord Luigi Spadafore, who, they say, ordered more than four hundred pies and then refused delivery.” A picture of Spadafore flashed on the screen. “Police believe that the mass order may have been a hoax, but investigators are not ruling out the possibility that Spadafore himself ordered the pizzas to create a diversion in front of his home. No motive is yet known, and Spadafore refused to comment. Maybe tomorrow, Luigi will order a few hundred cases of beer, to wash down the pizza. Over to you, Linda …”

A cheer went up, and Flanagan smiled happily. “We’re on the scoreboard,” he said. “Wait till you see what we got planned for tomorrow.”

Around seven, Gordon emerged with half a dozen sheets of paper in his hand. “Tell Jacob to run these down to the
Trib,
” he told Flanagan

“How did it go?” Flanagan asked.

“A masterpiece of disinformation and innuendo, if I do say so myself. Walter Lippmann is spinning in his grave.”

Flanagan glanced at the first sheet. “My War with the Mob,” by William Gordon. “For the past several weeks, some of New York’s most vicious mobsters have been waging war against this reporter and his family,” it began. “Apparently under the mistaken impression that my uncle, Max Grossman, left me valuable papers, the Brooklyn-based Spadafore Family has sworn to kill me, my relatives and friends—”

“Hell of a lead,” said Flanagan. He scanned the article with an editor’s practiced eye, pausing here and there for an appreciative chuckle. “I love the part where you accuse Sesti of being behind Mario’s murder,” he said. “Luigi will love it too. I just hope the paper has the balls to run it.”

“Piece of cake,” said Gordon. “You’ll see.”

An hour later the phone rang. It was Morrie Birnkrant, the editor in chief of the
Tribune
. “You don’t expect us to run this thing, do you?” he shouted into the receiver.

“Why not?” asked Gordon. “It’s an eyewitness account of the Spadafore Family. I’d say there’s another Pulitzer in it.”

“Pulitzer, my ass,” said Birnkrant. “There’s a lawsuit in it.”

“Morrie, give me a break. You know what kind of disclosure you have to make in a libel suit. We’re talking about the Mafia here, not Mobil Oil.”

“Sorry, William,” said the editor. “We can’t use it.”

“Fine,” said Gordon. “In that case, I quit. By the way, do you happen to have the phone number of
The New York Times
?”

There was a long pause. “You think you have me over a barrel,” squawked Birnkrant. “Well, goddammit, you do have me over a barrel. But I’m warning you, Gordon, you better be right. If they sue, Pulitzers or no, you’ll be lucky to get a job on the
Ankara Gazette
.”

“Morrie, don’t worry, it’ll be sensational,” said Gordon. “And
that’s not all. I have another one for tomorrow—Carlo Sesti, mob lawyer.”

“Lawyer? Christ almighty, I must be crazy.”

Gordon put his hand over the receiver and smiled at Flanagan.

“We got him, chief,” he said. “I can’t wait for the early-bird edition.”

Flanagan called Boatnay Threkeld. “Got any leads on the Grossman case?”

“Not much,” said Threkeld. “Couple of winos saw the hit, and they think it was a tall white man with long hair. That could be a whole lot of people. It could even be you.”

“Bet you a dollar I can pick him out of your book,” said Flanagan. “How’d you like that?”

“You think he’s the same guy that knifed you?”

“Sounds like it.”

“How come you couldn’t pick him out last time I showed you the book?” asked Boatnay suspiciously.

“Boatnay, you’re my best friend and I’m not going to jive you,” said Flanagan. Threkeld waited, but there was only silence on the other end of the line.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he finally asked.

“It means I’m not going to tell you a lie, and I’m not going to tell you the truth, either. You want me to pick this guy out for you, OK. No explanations.”

Threkeld sighed. “Man, you are the most difficult mother fucker I ever met in my entire life,” he said. “All right, come down here and finger this guy. No, on second thought, I’ll come over there. Could be dangerous for you to be cruising around town right about now. And give me the real address this time.”

Flanagan went into the kitchen, where Morgan was teaching Pupik Feinsilver and Bad Abe to play tonk. He noted that there was a large pile of dollars in front of Boatnay’s father. When it came to stereotypes, he thought, these Jews are definitely antis. “Boatnay’s gonna be here in a little while,” he said. “Maybe you fellas ought to make yourselves scarce. And make sure the guard downstairs wears a Hasidic outfit. I don’t want this to look too much like a scene from
The Untouchables
.”