“No, I don’t.”
“Hmmph. Word was enforcer Tony Spilotro out of Chicago liked to get a guy alone in the desert and put his head in vice and crank until his eyeballs popped out.”
Matt suddenly knew what a face going “a whiter shade of pale” felt like.
Old-time mobsters were as bloodthirsty as Genghis Khan and Dracul the Impaler, and yet such torture had happened in the last century. So Jack the Hammer hadn’t been a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale ogre, but the real thing, a thug of his time.
And someone was now taking that jackhammer of his out of cold storage in the desert.
There was only one reason for the storied violence of the mob. To threaten and intimidate to get money.
“Hey, kid. Suck a little Compari. From the old country. Put some blood back in your face.”
Matt snapped out of his nightmarish speculations and did as he was told. One sip told him that Compari was a bitters, nothing sweet about it. Just like Matt’s situation.
However, Uncle Mario was getting a little glow. “Arriving here just as the fifties were starting, Binion was a braggart, always buying up this property or that to get something going, whether the party wanted to sell or not.”
Matt nodded. “I just heard of a case like that, um, today, involving a building my landlady inherited.”
“Nothing evil’s new.” The old man leaned forward and Matt strained toward him to hear as his thin voice got lower. “Benny got more careful as he got more established, but I know for sure one unsolved murder he got away with. Ever hear about a jazz joint named the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo?”
Way too eerie to be a coincidence. Matt tossed off his Compari in one gulp while Mario winked approval at him.
“Ah…” Matt coughed. He tried to sound naive. “Wasn’t that an all-black nightclub that got started in the fifties across the tracks from the Strip?”
“You’re thinking of the Moulin Rouge. That was the first integrated hotel-casino, big-time operation. Chorus girls, acts, gambling. The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo was a low-rent joint, for kooks and the hip cats back then. Independent. Not mob. But the Strip was already clawing outward for land, and a crook like Binion always had his big ears to the ground.”
Macho Mario’s eyes lost themselves in rumpled bags of flesh as he searched his memory. “Black guy named Jumpin’ Jack Robinson owned the place and starred there like he was Cab Callaway on a budget. Maybe he wasn’t black, maybe Mexican, hell, maybe Giacco from southern Italy who had Americanized his name like a lot of them performers did then. Perry Como, Dean Martin.”
Mario leaned closer, prompting Matt to perch on the edge of his squeaky, squishy “whoopee chair” seat so the old man didn’t fall face-first on the floor. His breath smelled of garlic, false teeth adhesive and Compari. The name Giacco, pronounced “Jacko”, shivered down Matt’s spine.
“Yeah, the murder method harked back to Spilotro style,” Mario whispered, going hoarse and a little “Marlon Brando” as The Godfather. “They were zoot suit wearers. You know, baggy pants, long jacket, pancake hat with a feather in it and a ‘cat chain’, an overgrown watch chain down to their ankles. Real clowns. I can’t believe some of the dumb stuff I lived through. Some of those chains were twenty-four carat gold, and worth stealing. Some were steel toilet chains, you know, when the tanks were way up on the walls and you needed a pull chain as long as your you-know-what.”
Matt almost choked again.
“Naw, a kid like you wouldn’t know. Anyway, that’s how Jumpin’ Jack was found dead, hanging from his cat chain on an onstage light pole. Zoot Suit dancing king and Sin City wild card. Nineteen fifty-six. Never solved.”
“And no suspects?” Matt had heard this story before and glanced over his shoulder to glimpse Aldo’s pale suit, his undrunk glass of Compari blood red against it and positioned like a crimson pocket handkerchief. Aldo had told this story before, only days before.
Mario chuckled. “Cops wanted to finger a rogue mobster for it. A guy they called ‘Jack the Hammer’. He was famous for taking guys out into the desert and using a jackhammer to encourage them to talk, or keep quiet forever. A real paisano, not a nobody out of Dallas. Name of Giaccomo Petrocelli. Giaccomo. Italian for ‘James’, but in English it shortens to just plain ‘Jack’. Giacco the Hammer.”
“What happened to this monster?”
“Somebody offed him back in the nineties. Most of his power was gone. He never adapted to Vegas going corporate. You had to be smoother than a jackhammer then. But I never made him for the Robinson killing. I think it was Benny Binion having a last run at being the knee-jerk Cowboy killer he was before settling down to make real money from his enterprises.
“So. Talk about Binion in the seventies, nineteen-seventy-one, is when the really ugly action started. As far back as forty-nine Binion arranged a head-to-head poker tournament between Johnny Moss and ‘Nick the Greek’, who dropped two mill. Two mill in nineteen forty-nine! So twenty-one years later, Binion held a tournament for six high-rollers and Johnny Moss won again. Binion made it annual and anyone could buy in with ten thousand bucks. Benny hoped it would get as big as fifty players. Now there are thousands.”
“So when did Binion’s reign end? What did he die of?” Matt asked.
“Get this,” Mario said with a ho-ho-ho chuckle. “Heart failure did in the ‘Cowboy’ killer from Dallas. I’ll never forget the date because it was December 25, 1989. A Christmas present to Vegas as one of the most ruthless founders went down. He gave the rest of us a bad name. And he was immediately put into the Poker Hall of Fame in the New Year. And that’s when the family fun began, when son Lonnie ‘Ted’ Binion began running things after Benny’s death.
“Ted! A hopeless alki and drug-addict. Fifty-five the guy was. You’d think he’d make something of himself, like my sister’s boys. Nicky, the youngest, owns the Crystal Phoenix, which is in a class of its own. Aldo here and his brothers run this hotel and their custom limo service and some other little things we won’t mention.” Wink.
“Ted had millions stashed all over Vegas, in his house and hotel and out there in the desert in Spilotro and Petrocelli country, including a huge underground vault holding a hoard of silver bullion and coins. The asshole only shared the location with the one guy he should have offed on completion of the job. Get this: the one who built the vault. Seriously stupid. And the guy was pronging his young stripper girlfriend at the time. Beyond stupid.
“Guess what?”
“Someone killed Ted for the money.”
“Tried to make it look like a drug overdose, but it was faked. Nasty kinda death, drugged and then overdosed and then smothered.”
“I remember news about excavating that huge desert vault,” Matt said. “Who got the money?”
“Crazy. The scheming couple was convicted of murder, but went to a retrial on a technicality, where they were acquitted of murder, but convicted of burglary! Binion had changed his will two days before his death to exclude his girlfriend, but she got it all anyway, the house and the millions in its safe. There were millions in the hotel safe too, and still four or so million unaccounted for, and it has never been found. Presumed to be buried out on the Mojave.”
Mario finished his Compari with a lip smack. “Fitting end for a bad outfit over six decades from Dallas to Chicago to Vegas. I love it when the legal system screws itself royally. Benny Binion was dumb not to have a bigger family. My nephews would never try to off me for my money, because there are too many of them. They can watch each other.”
“They’re also savvy businessmen who can make their own money, unlike what you say of the Binion clan.”
Aldo came over and clapped Matt on the shoulders, raising him from the sinkhole of the potty chair at the same time. “Thanks for the great reference, Uncle, but I think our time has passed.”