James Thayer
White Star
To my daughter
Annemarie Patricia Thayer
Thanks to Peter Crow, C. James Frush, Sally A. Martin, John D. Reagh III, Jay McM. Thayer, John L. Thayer, M.D., Laurie Dinnison Thayer, Dexter A. Washburn, Mark A. Washburn, Robert O. Wells, Jr., and my wonderful and remarkable wife, Patricia Wallace Thayer.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it never care for anything else thereafter.
PART ONE
LIVING SAPPHIRES
If you fear the wolves, don't go near the forest.
CHAPTER ONE
The star appeared in the void where none had been before, flickering as it struggled to life, sending forth delicate tendrils of light that lanced the eternal darkness. Then the star burst to full radiance, filling the vault of heaven with opalescent rays.
"Are you kidding me?" Anna Renthal whispered. "Origami?"
Owen Gray looked down at his hand. The star rested in his palm. Startled, he flicked his fingers and it fell to the table where it lay lifeless and tiny.
She leaned slightly along the prosecutors' table toward him, looking at the jury as it filed into the courtroom. "It's a pissant hobby for a grown man, if you ask me." She spoke almost without moving her lips, her eyes following the jurors as they took their seats.
"Goddamnit." Pete Coates was also whispering. "None of the jurors is looking at us. We've lost."
"Number eight just smiled at Owen," Anna Renthal insisted.
Coates said out of the side of his mouth, "Number eight sat there for sixteen weeks and wet her pants every time Owen took the stand. She's in love with him. Sure she's going to grin."
Anna Renthal asked, "You okay, Owen?"
Gray looked again at the paper star. He had no recollection of folding it. The star often appeared at times of stress, emerging from whatever piece of paper was in front of him.
Gray shook his head. "Three years' work on the Chinaman all boils down to whether a juror smiles at me."
He ran a finger along his nose. Even this small motion required an effort. Eighty-hour weeks had worn him shiny. He had caught himself in a mirror that morning. He seemed to have aged five years during the trial. The new lines around his eyes looked permanent. His black hair still had the tight waves, only there was less above his temples. He had seen so little sun during the trial that his skin had faded to a prison pallor. Gray had a thin dagger of a nose and slate-gray eyes. A grin would have softened the sharp angles of his face, but in front of a jury his expression was always carefully deadpan.
The jurors moved more slowly than in days and months past, taking their time, enjoying their portentous arrival. Gray glanced over his shoulder at the courtroom's gallery.
There was not a seat to be had, not a square foot of the back aisle unoccupied, and there was not one sound or movement from the spectators. All the throat clearing, fingernail clipping, tooth sucking, knuckle cracking, and butt scratching were at last quelled. Even the pencil hands of the media sketch artists were motionless.
Carmine "Chinaman" De Sallo had been charged with thirty-eight counts, everything from money laundering to hijacking to racketeering to conspiracy. The jury had deliberated eight days. De Sallo faced eighty-eight years in prison. "He deserves life in the electric chair," Anna Renthal had said.
The spectators were arranged as if at a wedding. Wiseguys were shoulder to shoulder in the gallery on the defendant's side of the courtroom. Federal agents and New York City police sat on the other side, behind the prosecutors' table.
De Sallo had packed the courtroom day after day with his soldiers. They were referred to as "our friends" and "nice guys" on the three hundred hours of tapes Owen Gray had listened to preparing for the trial. Pete Coates had once said that if a computer could eliminate the profanity from the tapes, there'd only be six hours left.
Detective Coates was the NYPD case officer, allowed to sit at the prosecutors' table. He had tiny features — pinprick eyes and a splinter of a nose, so small that his head appeared to have swollen around his face. His hair was a dun color and was as short as a drill instructor's. His chest had the dimensions of an oil drum, and his coat sleeves were two inches too short. He wore a sagging gray suit. His blue-rimmed spectacles were surprisingly stylish, given the sprung and faded look to the rest of him.
Also at the table, for the first time since the trial began, was Gray's boss, Frank Luca, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He had said nothing since the judge had reconvened the court to hear the verdict. Newspaper columnists judged that Luca's senatorial ambitions depended on De Sallo's fate.
But this was Owen Gray's case. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney and the chief prosecutor, the mastermind of the government's massive effort to put Carmine De Sallo into prison. Anna Renthal was his able co-prosecutor. She had postponed her wedding and honeymoon because of this trial. Her walnut-colored hair was pulled back in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a gray suit with a white cotton blouse buttoned to the neck. Her lip gloss was neutral, no color. At the beginning of the trial Gray had told her, "You want this guy to do time, don't let the jury see you looking like a Bergdorf mannequin."
As the last of the jurors filed into the box, Gray said in a low voice, "I'm going to indict Pots next. Jesus, that guy sets me off."
Joseph "Pots" Asperanti was in his usual position directly behind De Sallo. He wore glasses with amber lenses and a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. Once a month he hosted a poker game, and when he had lost everything in his wallet he would put his wife into the pot. The winner disappeared into the bedroom for twenty minutes, collecting the wager from Pots's wife. At trial, every time he found Owen Gray looking in his direction Pots mouthed a kiss.
Next to Pots was Danny Garbanto, known as the Boatman because it was thought he piloted the De Sallo runabout that dumped bodies into Jamaica Bay off Howard Beach. FBI agents called the bay the Jamaica Cemetery. Also in the room were Luigi Massarli, a De Sallo soldier said to have a collection of four thousand handguns, and Dominick "Four Nines" Rompuni, a spallone (a money mover, from the Italian for smuggler), who performed countless transactions involving $9,999, one dollar less than the amount federal law required banks to report.
A dozen other wiseguys had visited the gallery every day, but the star was Chinaman De Sallo, and he never let the limelight drift from him. Each day his measured gait, imperious nod, and sanguine smile told his audience and jury that he fully expected an acquittal. He would not be inconvenienced, as Vito Genovese and Anthony Salerno had been, forced to run their organizations from prisons.
The source of De Sallo's nickname had been a matter of endless speculation among the prosecutors, police, and agents. Finally, informer BQ 6675-TE (BQ for the FBI's Brooklyn-Queens office, and TE for top echelon, the highest rank the FBI assigned an informer) revealed the solution. The informer was now almost eighty years old and had made his bones the same year as De Sallo's father. In 1966, the father and the informer visited Carmine at St. Luke's Hospital, where Carmine had just had a cancerous testicle removed. The first words out of his father's mouth on seeing Carmine were "Well, kid, we'll just have to call you the Chinaman. Won Hung Lo. Get it? One hung low." The name stuck.