BT: You should shot the cocksucker.
LN: Did he shut up? I’ll be he didn’t.
RF: No, he didn’t, they got not fuckin’ manners. This is good sauce, Anth.
AF: Thank you.
RF: I mean it. This is superb sauce.
BT: You shoulda shot the cocksucker.
And then back to business again.
AF: We can’t relate this to what they do in Harlem. That’s a whole different family there in Harlem, and they’ve got their own way of dealing with the spics.
PB: I’m only suggesting we discuss it with them...
RF: They’re fuckin’ hardheads in Harlem. We go in there to talk there’s gonna be war.
AF: Discuss what with them, Petey?
PB: A proper piece of action.
RF: You’re not talkin’ nigger Harlem, are you?
PB: No, no.
RF: ’Cause that’s entirely out of the question. Fuckin’ niggers won’t listen to shit.
PB: I’m talkin about East Harlem.
AF: East Harlem, Rudy.
RF: ’Cause the niggers are out of the question.
AF: I still don’t know what you have in mind, Petey.
PB: The Colombians run the coffee up through Mexico...
A transparent code word for cocaine. Never knew who might be listening. In this case, an absolutely correct assumption, but little did they really know...
PB:... and a lot of it ends up in East Harlem. So we’re supposed to have an agreement with them, am I right? But we’re not getting a piece on the coffee goes in there.
AF: I have something more important in mind down the line, Petey. I don’t want to rock the boat just now.
PB: This wouldn’t be boosting the Colombians, you understand...
AF: I know that. But the balance is pretty shaky right now, and I don’t want anything upsetting it further.
RF: You want my opinion, the fuckin’ spics are gonna do away with the people in Harlem entirely. Who the fuck needs a middleman? They got their own distribution setup, the Harlem people are like a fuckin’ fifth wheel.
AF: I think so, yes. That’s all part of it.
Michael kept reading the transcript.
On another day, in another month, there was a philosophical discussion about the very real services these noble gangsters provided. Present at this lofty seminar were Anthony Faviola and his laureate brother, Rudy, “Fat Nickie” Nicoletta, who never went to the movies anymore, Peter Bardo, the consigliere, and Felix Danielli, who had the gorgeous wife Rudy would have loved to boff.
AF: When you think of it, what are we doing that’s so terrible?
RF: What are we doing, right?
AF: Why is gambling against the law? Is it such a sin to gamble?
LN: They gambled in the Bible, even. I saw a movie, they were gambling for Jesus’s robe.
PB: You’re right, Anthony, gambling should be legal.
AF: It should. But meanwhile, it’s against the law. So what do we do? We provide what the people want. They want to gamble, we give them the means to gamble.
LN: His robe they were shooting dice for. The robe he was wearing.
AF: What’s the lottery, if not legal gambling?
RF: What’s OTB?
AF: It’s all legal gambling. But when we run it, it’s against the law. Why? We’re giving the same odds, no? We’re not rigging anything, we run a fair game. We take our vig, sure, but doesn’t the state take a vig?
The vigorish, or the percentage, or the house cut, the edge that made any gambling a winning proposition for the mob. Even when they lost; they won. Bet a hundred bucks on a football game, the bookie paid you the hundred if you won, but if you lost he collected a hundred and ten.
PB: How about lending money? You know what the banks are getting legally now? The interest rate on a legal loan?
RF: Through the fuckin’ roof, I bet.
PB: Close to what we’re asking, that’s for sure.
AF: But what’s a man supposed to do when a bank turns him down? Is it a sin to have bad credit?
RF: Make a guy feel like a fuckin’ scumbag, the banks.
LN: Turn you down no reason at all.
AF: They come to us, their credit is always good.
At three to five percent a week, compounded, Michael thought. Put that on your calculator, see what the interest on a ten-thousand-dollar loan comes to after a few months of five-percent interest.
RF: It’s a service, plain and simple. Like you said, Anth.
AF: Sure, but they make it illegal.
LN: A service we provide!
RF: Where else can a guy needs money go? Temporary.
LN: Who’s gonna lend it to him?
RF: Also, they say we bust a guy’s head he don’t pay. So what does a bank do? A bank takes the fuckin’ guy’s house away, is what the bank does.
AF: One way or another, they’re out to get us.
RF: Make our fuckin’ lives miserable.
LN: The cocksuckers.
Michael almost missed the first mention. It came during the second week in June. It was in a monitored two-way telephone conversation between Anthony and his brother. Michael’s eyes passed right over the word because it wasn’t an exact match. The transcript read:
AF: What bothers me, Rude, is they may really have something this time. They’re acting as if they’ve got something.
RF: It’s the same old shit, Anth. They always come in blowin’ wind, they ain’t got a fuckin’ thing on you and they know it.
AF: All those indictments.
RF: They ain’t got shit.
AF: Murder, Rudy. That’s heavy.
RF: You never murdered anybody your whole life.
AF: Never let up.
RF: Cocksuckers.
AF: Mick-a-lino’s worried, too.
RF: I’ll go talk to him.
AF: Calm him down, tell him I’ll be okay. He’s worried.
RF: Sure he is. But don’t you worry, huh, Anth? Nobody’s gonna hurt you.
AF: Yeah.
RF: You hear me?
AF: Yeah, thanks, Rudy.
RF: I’ll go talk t’ Lino.
There it was again. Mick-a-lino the first time around, just plain Lino, with the L capitalized, the second time. The capitalization was the typist’s choice, Michael guessed, guided by the detective who’d actually listened to the conversations as they were being recorded. Listening to the sitdown talk between Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angels in the Ristorante Romano, Michael and Georgie had thought they’d heard the name Lena. The typist who’d transferred the Faviola tapes to the computer disk had spelled the name L-E-N-O when the matter of the Christmas gift had been mentioned in December of 1991. And now the typist doing the transcript had spelled it L–I-N-O, as in Mick-a-lino and Lino. How had this been pronounced on the original tapes? As in “wino”? If so, this couldn’t possibly be related to Lena. Michael debated consulting the tapes themselves at this point. Instead, he kept reading the transcript.
The next time the letters L–I-N-O came up in sequence was during another telephone conversation, this time between Anthony Faviola and his wife, Tessie, during the month of August, shortly before the start of Faviola’s trial. Faviola was calling from Club Sorrento, where several bugs had been planted, and to which he referred simply as “the club.” Tessie was on the bug-free house phone in Stonington. Before the investigating detectives tuned out on this privileged husband-wife communication, they’d recorded: