“What new venture is this?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how you feel about dope, Sarah, I’m sure there are people who would like to lock up anybody caught smoking even a joint. But there are millions of people all over the world who smoke marijuana on a daily basis, and there are millions of others — I’m not talking about hopheads or junkies now, I’m talking about legislators and lawyers and criminologists and judges and social workers, people like that — these people believe that the best thing that could happen is for narcotics to be legalized. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other. I’m only saying there are millions of people who depend upon drug use to get themselves through the day, and it might be a bigger crime to deny these people the support they need to live their lives in some kind of peace. I’m not even talking about marijuana. I’m talking about hard drugs like cocaine or heroin, yes, there are people who believe these drugs are less dangerous in the long view than either alcohol or cigarettes. I never heard of a cocaine addict dying of cirrhosis of the liver or lung cancer, did you? And, by the way, I’m not even sure there’s any proof that crack cocaine is addictive. Cocaine you can smoke, you know? Crack cocaine. Or even heroin you can smoke, which is this new thing we’re bringing in, a combination of cocaine and heroin, what’s called ‘moon rock.’ Do you remember when I went down to Florida with my uncle?”
“Yes?”
“It was to talk to this man named Luis Hidalgo, who took over the Putumayo Cartel after Alonso Moreno met with a terrible, ahem, accident. What we’re doing... Do you remember when I asked you to go to Italy with me? That was to meet with the man who’s handling distribution on the Continent. It’s a three-way setup, you see, what you might call a triangle. Hidalgo provides the Colombian product, which we ship to various ports in Italy. Meanwhile, Manfredi is taking delivery of the Chinese product. We process it right there in Italy, and turn it around as moon rock...”
On and on he went, the words gushing from his mouth, trapped too long, pouring forth excitedly now, directed toward Sarah where she sat cross-legged on the four-poster bed, listening intently, and then moving past her to where her bag sat on the dresser near the bed.
A reel-to-reel NAGRA tape recorder was hidden under a Velcro flap at the bottom of that bag. A wire from the recorder had been sewn into the lining and fed up into the bag’s strap, where the microphone showed only as what appeared to be one of a pair of black rivets fastening strap to bag. Sarah had turned on the machine while she was in the bathroom. It was now capable of recording four hours of conversation before the tape ran out.
“... Stonington some Sunday,” Andrew was saying. “I’ll ask my mother to invite Ida and the kids, you’ll love Ida, she’s my cousin, we’ve been best friends from the day she was born. I used to call her Pinocchio, because she has my uncle Rudy’s nose, and she used to call me Mickey Mouse, because I had big ears when I was a kid. I was nicknamed ‘Topolino,’ in fact, which means Mickey Mouse in Italian, because of the ears. Well, ‘Lino,’ it got abbreviated to. My mother still calls me Lino every now and then, can you imagine? Lino? The house in Stonington...”
The two men met on Memorial Day in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Redemption on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where a priest named Father Daniel frequently extended hospitality and privacy to men of their persuasion in exchange for contributions to his perpetual building fund. In the cloistered silence of the rectory, with sunlight streaming through the leaded windows, and music floating from the church outside where someone practiced in the organ loft, Bobby Triani and Petey Bardo discussed this serious problem they now seemed to have.
“You think he’s gonna take care of this?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t think so,” Petey said.
“So what do we do? This is a complicated thing.”
“Not that complicated.”
“Should we talk to some of the others?”
“I don’t think so. I’d rather line up some people. Move ahead on this before it gets out of hand.”
“I worry about doing that,” Bobby said. “Some of these old wops who knew his father... I don’t know, Petey.”
“You got a better suggestion?”
“I’m saying there’s still these old guys around who knew him when he was a kid with big ears.”
“Yeah, and now he’s a kid with a big mouth.”
“Petey, let’s be fair. We don’t know for sure he told her anything.”
“If he’s fuckin’ her, he’s tellin’ her,” Petey said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, and sighed heavily. “Still. To the older guys, he’s still Lino, you know what I mean? I think we oughta ask them first. Don’t you?”
Petey was thinking the first mistake Andrew had made was appointing this jackass his underboss.
“Petey? Don’t you think we should call a meeting, get their advice?”
“No.”
“At least ask Fat Nickie what he thinks.”
“No.”
“Because...”
“What I see here,” Petey said, “is a pussy-whipped snot-nose who couldn’t keep it zipped and who’s gonna get us all in trouble, that’s what I see. I won’t go over your head on this, Bobby, you know I won’t...”
“I appreciate that.”
“But I’d like t’line up some people.”
“They won’t like it, the older ones.”
“Fuck them and him,” Petey said.
Lino, Michael thought.
What goes around comes around.
It was now a quarter to midnight on the hot Tuesday night immediately following the holiday, and he was sitting in a car opposite Andrew Faviola’s house in Great Neck, waiting for him to come home. Resting on the seat beside him was a tape player containing a copy of the reel-to-reel Sarah had recorded last Wednesday. Despite a waterfall and a river in the background, the fidelity of the tape was exceptionally high. Michael now had close to three hours of conversation that linked Faviola and his goombahs to enough criminal activity to bring racketeering charges against almost all of them. In a breathless, virtually nonstop monologue, Faviola had attested to the family’s involvement in virtually every crime defined in the section on criminal enterprise. You named it, the family was involved in it — from A to Z.
Arson, Assault, Bribery, Burglary, Coercion, Criminal Contempt, Criminal Mischief, Criminal Possession of Stolen Property, False Written Statements, Forgery, Gambling...
He told Sarah he’d administered and enforced his father’s gambling operation in Las Vegas throughout the two and a half years he’d attended UCLA, and that he’d personally transmitted orders from his father to two contract hitters who’d cursorily eliminated a heavy gambler who was “into the family for a hundred thousand and change...”
Grand Larceny, Hindering Prosecution, Homicide...
The way he’d casually admitted to ordering the murder of the Queens gambler who’d set this whole thing in motion was typical of the abandon he’d felt while talking to Sarah: “I told Frankie Palumbo to take care of him... so it wouldn’t happen again. Frankie’s the capo this jerk stole the money from. It was supposed to be a cash pickup, he stole five grand from the bundle.”
As offhandedly as that.
Insurance Fraud, Kidnapping, Narcotics...
And here he went into vast detail about a three-way Colombian-Italian-Chinese operation that would imminently flood the streets of New York with moon rock. “The ships are already on their way from Italy,” he’d said. “We’ll be offloading and distributing sometime in June...”