After parking his pearl-gray Corvette in an almost empty lot on this pleasantly cool April morning, Michael walked across the gravel and then through pine and rock to the edge of the bluff.
To him, this job, in this location, was about as close to paradise as he could hope to find, in the life he’d chosen. Las Vegas was just a neon stain on the desert, a loud metal-and-plastic purgatory; but Tahoe was a heaven of clear sweet mountain air, the vast royal-blue lake sparkling with sunshine set against snowcapped peaks. Birds flashed colorfully as they darted between giant pines, while the stripes of speedboats on the water made abstract patterns, and a seaplane tilted a nonspecific salute against a sky almost as blue as the lake.
Back in ’64, Michael and his family had relocated to Crystal Bay (on the California side), whose year-round population was just over seven thousand which took some adjusting for the Satarianos, who had lived in Chicago (or that is, Oak Park) forever. Also, since Cal-Neva was seasonal, open Memorial Day through Labor Day, Michael would periodically help out back at the Sands and at Miami’s Fountainbleu, covering vacation time for other casino execs. This had taken him away from his family for several months a year, which he had not relished.
He’d been pushing for years to open Cal-Neva year-round; the Lake Tahoe area was rife with winter sports, and only January, February, and March — when admittedly the snowfall could be severe, up to thirty feet — were problematic. Tahoe often had warm weather from May to December, and the fall months were the nicest. As of several years ago he’d been allowed to expand his season from May first to the Thanksgiving weekend — but that still left Cal-Neva dark for four months.
They would be opening in less than two weeks, and the maintenance people were inside sprucing up the place. In fact, when he entered the A-frame lobby, the sound of vacuum cleaners echoed through the building’s high, open-beam ceilings, as did the clip-clop of his footsteps on the stone floor.
He took a quick walk-through, glancing around, checking the status of the cleaning job, the resort’s knotty-pine ambience second nature to him, the eyes of mounted bear and deer and moose heads staring at him as he passed through chambers whose walls were studded with granite boulders.
The rustic hunting-lodge atmosphere of the facility, from the hanging Native American blankets and art to the Indian Lounge with its massive stone fireplace, had always pleased him. The space-age architecture of Las Vegas was cold, Sin City a windowless world with no clocks and endless noise. At Cal-Neva, even the casino room had gaping windows onto the green of pines and the purple of mountains and the blue of lake and sky, and you always knew whether it was day or night.
At Cal-Neva you could do more than just lose your shirt — you could sit by the warmth of a forty-foot granite fireplace, you could sip cocktails and listen to Frank Sinatra, Jr., in the Indian Lounge (couldn’t afford Senior anymore, not that he’d ever set foot here again), you could laugh yourself silly at Martin and Rossi (“Hello dere!”) in the Celebrity Showroom, you could swim in pool or lake, ski on snow or water, fish for salmon or trout or mackinaw, or ride horseback on mountain trails.
And you could still lose your shirt.
Michael prided himself on providing his patrons with a memorable getaway, giving them more for the money they left behind. But he had no illusions about the nature of this beast — a casino was the ideal business, wasn’t it? A business where the customer was anxious to trade you his money for nothing more than a dream and a drink.
Michael did not lay back, as some managers did; he personally kept track of the count from drop boxes at the gambling tables. He would prowl the casino, a presence who might pop up at any moment. In Vegas he’d learned from the best how to spot every scam, every weakness — from a dealer who lifted his hole card too high (Michael would stroll by and casually whisper, “Nice lookin’ ace of spades”) — to crapshooters palming loaded dice (he especially watched the little old ladies). From contrived diversions — asking a dealer for a cigarette, conveniently spilled drinks — to dealers with “sub” pockets sewn in their clothes to slide in chips on the sly.
On the other hand, while he was paid to keep the professional cheats and the crooked staffers from stealing, part of Michael’s job was to look the other way where Chicago’s larceny was concerned. Though Tahoe was preferable to Vegas — that city of endless kickbacks — the ultimate kickback remained.
A casino could be skimmed any number of ways, but the time-honored one was in the count room. Once a month a little man from Chicago would collect a suitcase from the count-room safe, and never the IRS the wiser. Michael’s role in this was merely to look the other way, but it made him no less a thief, did it?
As a mob-connected casino manager, he accepted this as a standard business practice, however bad a taste might linger, whatever possible criminal consequence could one day rise up out of his comfortable life and threaten everything he and his family enjoyed.
He had not intended to go down this road.
His father had gone down a similar path, and had hoped his son would not follow. But circumstances had led Michael into the Outfit life, and so the Outfit life was his.
Still, he’d been luckier than many. Than most. His godfather, Paul Ricca, had warned him long ago that going down the more legitimate mob avenues would not preclude him from certain duties.
“You can be in a passive part of our business,” the dignified gray-haired patriarch had said, so many years ago, “and still be called upon. With your talents — this will happen. This... will... happen.”
For the sake of protecting Michael’s ability to serve as a squeaky-clean front man, however, the war hero had been largely protected from the violent side of things.
Now the Outfit, as he had known it — as his father had known it — was entering its twilight years. Capone and Nitti were long gone; the mob’s corpulent treasurer, Guzik, had (not surprisingly) died eating, and even the Outfit’s fixer and diplomat, Murray “the Hump” Humphries, had succumbed to a heart attack. Gone, too, for that matter, was gangbuster Eliot Ness — dead at his kitchen table, passed out beside a bottle of whiskey over the galley proofs of The Untouchables, the autobiography that made him a posthumous household word.
For many years Ricca and Accardo had ruled quietly from the sidelines, reining in Mooney Giancana’s more impulsive tendencies while letting Mooney take the heat. Some considered Giancana a mere straw man, shoved forward by Ricca and Accardo into a prominence they abhorred. Finally, after such ill-advised endeavors as flaunting his presence at Cal-Neva and suing the FBI for harassment, Giancana had been removed from leadership and banished to Mexico, where he’d flourished for some years now, running casinos and gambling boats.
A few months ago, a fatal heart attack had taken Paul Ricca out, and the Capone era seemed finally truly over. Michael had a certain fondness for Ricca, the dignified ganglord who’d protected the Medal of Honor winner for so many years. But Michael had never felt about Ricca in the way he had Frank Nitti; for Nitti there had been a sense of sadness, even a tear or two. The death of Ricca brought only relief, as the last living link to his O’Sullivan past disappeared.
Michael didn’t even really know who was in charge these days — Accardo, certainly, alternating between Chicago and Palm Springs, oversaw things. (Michael had worked directly under Accardo for a few years, and their relationship remained friendly and mutually respectful.) Back in Chicago, day-to-day operations were supposedly in the hands of Joey Aiuppa, who with his underboss, Jackie Cerone, was a throwback to Giancana’s 42 gang roughneck style. But their influence was mostly on the streets of Chicago, where they terrorized bookies and juice men who welshed on the street tax.