Bloodline (52 page)

• On October 16, 1927, Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, who ran the labor rackets for Masseria, finished dinner at a restaurant on Norfolk Street in Little Italy, then walked outside to get a cab. When the cab pulled up, waiting in the backseat was Orgen’s right-hand man, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. He cut down Orgen with a spray of .45 caliber bullets. Also wounded was Orgen’s bodyguard, Jack “Legs” Diamond, who told police he never saw the killer. Lepke took over the labor rackets; in a month, he controlled the cutters’ union, whose nineteen hundred members cut all the garments being sewn in New York. Without them, more than fifty thousand workers who sewed garments would be out of work. The manufacturers paid up for labor peace. Luciano said of his good friend, “Lepke loves to hurt people.” He suggested that Lepke pool his talents with those of another good friend, Albert Anastasia. Murder Incorporated became Luciano’s personal army.

• As more and more thugs moved from Masseria’s mob to Maranzano’s, Nilo found out that Joe Adonis’s driver had been the one who had ratted him out to the police, after the killing of the young boy in Italian Harlem. One night, as the driver, Ric-Rac Greenwald, a loud, obnoxious thug, left a Broadway speakeasy on an errand for his boss, his car was pulled over to the curb by another car. Ric-Rac pulled his gun and was so intent on the people in the other car that he never noticed Nilo step from a building behind him, open the rear door, and put four bullets into his head. Adonis was outraged. He demanded that Luciano retaliate against Maranzano just to teach them a lesson. Luciano met with Meyer Lansky and Albert Anastasia. “Maybe it’s time that we let these two Mustache Petes kill each other off,” Luciano said. “And if they don’t, I will,” Anastasia proclaimed, and hugged Luciano. “I been waiting for this for years,” Anastasia said. Two nights later, the Maranzano driver known as Rock was shot to death. The Castellammarese Wars, which pitted Maranzano’s forces against those of Joe the Boss Masseria, had begun.

• Right after Thanksgiving, Tommy and Rachel were married in a small family ceremony, conducted by Father Mario and a rabbi. Only the immediate families attended.

• In Hollywood, a young man named Walt Disney made his first animated film about a mouse named Mickey. On Broadway, Helen Kane was singing “boop-boop-a-doop.”

• Beer cost three dollars a barrel to make in New Jersey. Speakeasy operators in New York paid fifty dollars a barrel.

• In living rooms, people played with Ouija boards, and everybody dreamed of owning a Duesenberg automobile, just like actor Douglas Fairbanks did.

CHAPTER
9

Fall and Winter 1928: The War Years

In Dannemora, Nilo had spent many hours thinking of Maranzano’s crime family and how it should be restructured. He had convinced himself that Don Salvatore was too willing to talk even when talk was useless, too slow to act even when action was the only possible course.

He vowed that when and if he got out of jail, he would not make those mistakes. The only way to fight Masseria would be to fight him every step of the way. No victory should be conceded to Joe the Boss. Maranzano’s men should fight not just for the bootlegging, but for control of the drug trade, prostitution, the unions, gambling. Every time a Masseria underling turned around, he should find a Maranzano man coming after him.

I want them all to be scared to death—Luciano, Adonis, Siegel, even Masseria. When they are terrified, we will have won.

When he rejoined the gang, Nilo had the chance to put his ideas to the test. He still paid lip service to Maranzano’s idea of his being Danny Neill, the next-generation lawful tycoon who would run the family, but in practice he became the hammer behind all Maranzano’s operations. His natural cruel streak had also been honed while he was in prison. The lives of others meant nothing to him now, and some of the Maranzano henchmen feared going out on jobs with him because Nilo was too quick to start shooting, too ready to get everyone, including himself, killed.

The first big operation he masterminded was an attempt to smuggle in aboard a cargo ship a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. When it was cut and packaged, it would sell for more than 5 million dollars on the street.

Maranzano had been reluctant at first, but Nilo told him that Luciano was making millions in drug trafficking and the money was on the streets, just waiting to be picked up.

Nilo carefully selected a three-man team to get the drugs when they arrived at the Thirteenth Street pier. But one of the team liked to drink too much and, one night, in his cups, he told his brother-in-law about the big drug deal, and the brother-in-law—who drank too much, too—wound up in a speakeasy the next night bragging about his mob connections to an affable young man named Vito.

When Nilo’s team went to the dock four nights later to pick up the drugs, they ran into a city police task force that had the area staked out. They escaped through a hail of bullets when Nilo drove their getaway car straight though a chain-link fence and vanished into a Maranzano-owned garage six blocks away.

They had escaped, but the drugs would be confiscated and Maranzano would be out the hundred-thousand-dollar cost. In a fury, Nilo lined the three men up against the getaway car at gunpoint. But facing death, each one denied having told anyone about the drug shipment.

Nilo considered killing the three as an object lesson, but he was able to restrain himself.

“I’m gonna let you three live. For now. But every one of you better start looking around. We got a rat somewhere in our family, and you better get me some names.”

A week later, the brother-in-law cracked, and before being buried in a pit across the river in Kearny, New Jersey, he told of how he had been pumped by a young man named Vito. Nilo offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would lead him to the informer.

Nilo fared better with his plan to make Maranzano a force in the city’s giant garment district. But again, Maranzano seemed reluctant to move.

“This Masseria man, Lepke, has the cutters’ union. Should we risk a fight with him?” the don asked.

“If we fight them here, we can win. If we don’t, we may have to fight them somewhere else where we’ve got no chance of winning,” Nilo said.

Maranzano thought for a long time, concealing his face behind his steepled fingers. “All right, Nilo,” he finally said. “You do it.”

Still his voice was hesitant, and when Nilo left the office he thought that Don Salvatore might be getting too old to run the family.

*   *   *

R
ACHEL WONDERED
if Tommy was keeping something from her. He went out frequently at night, ostensibly to the law-school library, but when he returned home after she was already in bed, she sometimes smelled beer on his breath. And she wondered where he got the money to pay their household bills. But she never asked about it. She had faith in her husband.

*   *   *

O
N ONE OF THE RARE NIGHTS
that he stayed home, Nilo got out of bed quietly and went into the next room to look at his three-year-old son, Stephen. As he looked at the sleeping boy’s smooth, handsome face, his nose that would one day be long and aquiline, he thought,
He looks like me.

Since his return from prison, Sofia had insisted the baby was his. He had not, at first, believed her. But she never changed her story, and the truth was that since he returned, she had been a good wife to him, obedient and solicitous. He did not love her, but the idea of loving a wife, or any woman for that matter, seemed strange to him. A wife was meant to run the house and bear and raise children. Nothing else. It was only important that a wife love her husband, and in that regard Sofia had given him no reason to complain.

He reached out and touched the face of the small boy who stirred in his sleep.
Well, at least I know I am the father of the next one to be born.

He went back into his own bedroom and lay next to Sofia again. He reached out and touched her big pregnant belly.
This baby is mine.

He had wanted Sofia to become pregnant with his child as soon as he returned home from Dannemora, but month after month passed and she did not conceive. He was beginning to worry that perhaps there might be something wrong with him when Maranzano brought the subject up at a meeting one day in his office near Grand Central Station.

“Sofia? Is she not pregnant?”

Nilo shook his head. “We are trying.”

“How old is your boy?”

“Two and a half,” Nilo said.

“And Sofia is still nursing?”

Nilo nodded.

“It is time to put the boy on a bottle,” Maranzano said. When Nilo looked up, puzzled, the older man said, “It is well known that women do not conceive while they are still nursing. The breasts must dry before the womb will accept another child. Trust me. Do it.”

It had sounded like nonsense, an old wives’ tale, to Nilo, but he had insisted to Sofia that the breast-feeding time had to end. She had finally given in. Nilo did his husbandly duty. He and Sofia had sex almost every other night, and while she was not an enthusiastic partner, she was willing and pliable.

Two months after she stopped nursing, she was pregnant. If she had thought that pregnancy would stop Nilo from insisting on sex with her, she was mistaken. He wanted it known, without doubt, that he and he alone was the father of this new child, who would be a boy and who would be named Salvatore, in honor of the don.

He took his hand off her belly and rolled back onto his side of the big bed. He thought of Tina Falcone and was unable not to think of the pictures he had of her. He kept the pictures and the original movie film in a locked box atop a shelf in his clothes closet, but often he took the pictures out, just to look at.

He liked looking at the pictures, feeling them, knowing that they were his and that if they were ever made public there would be no hole deep enough for her to crawl into and hide. And all the rest of the Falcones, too. It was a hammer to be used when the time was right.

Tina had never gone back to work at Luciano’s speakeasy. The big plywood figure of her was taken away from outside Ross’s Club, almost as if she had never existed, and the club was closed and soon sold. Tina was working in an office in the village, a job that Mario had gotten for her.

Nilo thought,
It is time for her to work for me. She will be famous again, and the more important and famous she becomes, the more lustrous her star, the easier she will be to control with that film and those pictures. Soon I will let her know what her job will be.

Thinking of Tina’s pictures had aroused him. He rolled back toward his wife, put his hands on her pregnant belly, and roughly entered her. Sofia moaned, then tried to pretend she was still asleep.

It doesn’t matter,
he thought.
You are here to be used by me.

He released himself into her and, still wordless, rolled away, onto his back, and closed his eyes for sleep.

The doorbell rang.

He became instantly alert. Sofia did, too. He slipped from bed, pulled on a robe, and took his gun from the bedside table. Sofia was sitting up, wide awake—she had not been asleep at all, he knew—and was putting on her own robe.

“Let me answer the door,” she said. “I will be safe.”

“So will I,” he said. “I have this.” He raised his gun in front of his face, then went outside.

When he looked through the peephole before opening the door, he saw two of Maranzano’s bodyguards in the hall, waiting for him.

“Don Salvatore wants you,” one of them said.

“So late? What time is it?”

“Almost midnight. He told us to bring you.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs. Give me a few minutes to dress.”

The men nodded and walked away.

Although Sofia looked at him, her face filled with unspoken questions, Nilo offered her no explanation. He dressed quickly, then went downstairs, where the men were parked in front in a large black sedan.

Nilo got in the backseat, alone, feeling secure with the weight of his gun in his jacket pocket. They drove east out of the city for what seemed an endless time but was only little more than an hour.

Nilo recognized the direction and knew the destination: Maranzano’s estate out near Bellmore, Long Island. While the don spent most of his time at his New York apartment, he maintained a big country house for his childless wife and assorted hanger-on relatives. But it was rare for him to do any business there, so Nilo was in the dark on what the meeting would be about. But he knew something had been planned, because the don had been away from the office for the past few days.

Maranzano’s home was a white colonial-style mansion in the middle of vast lawns and thick woods. The two bodyguards walked inside with Nilo and left him in a small waiting room. Two other men—both a little older than Nilo and dressed in ill-fitting pinstripe suits—were also there.

Somebody’s bodyguards,
Nilo thought. He had never seen either of them before, and no one spoke.

After a long time, a tuxedo-clad man of middle years opened one of the doors and said, “Danny Neill?”

Nilo stood up.

“This way, please.”

Nilo followed the man into an immense formal dining room. Down its middle was a table forty feet long and ten feet wide. It had been set for supper in the finest china and silver. Men were seated all around the table and Nilo made a quick head count of forty men. He had seen many of them around Maranzano’s real estate office before, but others were complete strangers.

His escort led Nilo to the head of the table where Maranzano himself sat. He rose to greet Nilo, and when he stood, all the others at the table rose, too.

Maranzano nodded at Nilo in recognition and gestured him to a vacant seat near his right hand. The old man turned back to the others.

“For the few of you who do not know him, this is my close advisor and associate, Danilo Sesta, who is joining with us tonight. He is sometimes known as Danny Neill. He is young, but he has already suffered much in our cause. And now he is putting terror in the hearts of our enemies.”