The Gate House
Page 4
Apparently, he had neither of these things, and he continued, “The fucking Feds stole the property and put my family out on the street.”
Against my better judgment, I informed Anthony, “Your father gave Alhambra to the government.”
“Yeah. They put a gun to his head, and he gave it to them.”
I should have just ended his unannounced visit, but he had a few more points to make, and I was . . . well, maybe worried about Susan. I mean, she was still the mother of my children. I looked closely at Anthony. He didn’t look like a killer, but neither did his father. Neither did Susan for that matter. I’ll bet Frank was surprised when she pulled the gun and popped off three rounds.
Anthony was expanding on his subject and said, “They used the fucking RICO law and grabbed everything they could get their hands on after he . . . died.” Anthony then gave me a historical parallel. “Like the Roman emperors did when a nobleman died. They accused him of something and grabbed his land.”
I never actually thought of Frank Bellarosa as a Roman nobleman, but I could see the Justice Department and the IRS in the role of a greedy and powerful emperor. Nevertheless, I lost my patience and informed him, “The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act is tough, and not always fairly applied, but—”
“It sucks. What happened to due process?”
“Do you have a law degree, Mr. Bellarosa?”
“No. But—”
“Well, I do. But let’s forget the law here. I happen to know, firsthand, that your father agreed to hand over certain assets to the Justice Department in exchange for . . .” I could see that Anthony Bellarosa knew where this was going, and he did not want to hear that his father had broken the only law that counted—the law of omertà—silence.
So, under the category of speaking only well of the dead, I said to Anthony, “Your father owed some back taxes . . . I was his tax advisor . . . and he settled for turning over some assets to the Treasury Department, including, unfortunately, Alhambra.” Frank had also forfeited this property, Stanhope Hall, which he’d purchased, I think at Susan’s urging, from my idiot father-in-law William. But I wasn’t sure Anthony knew about that, and I didn’t want to get him more worked up, so I just said, “It wasn’t a bad deal.”
“It was robbery.”
In fact, it was surrender and survival. I recalled what Frank Bellarosa had told me when he was under house arrest, trying to justify his cooperation with the Feds. “The old code of silence is dead. There’re no real men left anymore, no heroes, no stand-up guys, not on either side of the law. We’re all middle-class paper guys, the cops and the crooks, and we make deals when we got to, to protect our asses, our money, and our lives. We rat out everybody, and we’re happy we got the chance to do it.”
Frank Bellarosa had concluded his unsolicited explanation to me by saying, “I was in jail once, Counselor, and it’s not a place for people like us. It’s for the new bad guys, the darker people, the tough guys.”
Anthony glanced at me, hesitated, then said, “Some guys said . . . you know, my father had enemies . . . and some guys said he was . . . selling information to the government.” He glanced at me again, and when I didn’t respond, he said, “Now I see that it was only tax problems. They got him on that once before.”
“Right.”
He smiled. “Like Al Capone. They couldn’t get Capone on bootlegging, so they got him for taxes.”
“Correct.”
“So, bottom line, Counselor, it was you that told him to pay up.”
“Right. That’s better than facing a criminal tax charge.” In fact, it was Frank Bellarosa who had helped me beat a criminal tax charge. Frank had actually engineered the tax charge against me, as I later found out, so the least he could do was get me off the hook. Then I owed him a favor, which I repaid by helping him with his murder charge. Not surprisingly, Frank’s role model was Niccolò Machiavelli, and he could quote whole passages of The Prince, and probably write the sequel.
Anthony asked me, “So, the Feds taking his property had nothing to do with the murder charge against him?”
“No.” And that was partly true. Ironically, Frank the Bishop Bellarosa, probably the biggest non-government criminal in America, hadn’t committed the murder he was charged with. There was undoubtedly little else he hadn’t done in twenty or thirty years of organized criminal activities, but this charge of murdering a Colombian drug lord had been a setup by the U.S. Attorney, Mr. Alphonse Ferragamo, who had a personal vendetta against Mr. Frank Bellarosa.
Anthony said to me, “You were one of his lawyers on that murder rap. Right?”
“Right.” I was actually his only lawyer. The so-called mob lawyers stayed out of sight while John Whitman Sutter of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds stood in Federal criminal court in the unaccustomed role of trying to figure out how to get a Mafia don sprung on bail. Frank really didn’t like jail.
Anthony asked me, “Do you know that the FBI found the guys who clipped the Colombian?”
“I know that.” I’d actually heard this a few years ago from my daughter, who’s an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, and she was happy to tell me that I’d defended an innocent man. The words “innocent” and “Frank Bellarosa” are not usually used in the same sentence, but within the narrow limits of this case, I’d done the right thing, and so I was redeemed. Sort of.
Anthony informed me, “That scumbag, Ferragamo, had a hard-on for my father.”
“True.” Fact was, Mr. Ferragamo, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wanted to bag the biggest trophy in his jungle—Frank Bellarosa. And he didn’t care how he did it. The murder indictment was bogus, but eventually Alphonse Ferragamo, like a jackal nipping away at a great cape buffalo, had brought down his prey.
Anthony continued his eulogy. “Nothing that scumbag charged ever stuck. It was all bullshit. It was personal. It was vendetta.”
“Right.” But it was business, too. Frank’s business and Alphonse’s business. Don Bellarosa was an embarrassment to the U.S. Attorney. Some of it—maybe more than I understood—was the Italian thing. But professionally, Alphonse Ferragamo couldn’t allow the biggest Mafia don in the nation to walk around free, living in a mansion, riding in expensive cars, and eating in restaurants that Alphonse Ferragamo couldn’t afford. Actually, I guess that’s personal.
So Ferragamo, through various means, legal and not so, finally got his teeth on the big buffalo’s balls, and Frank Bellarosa went down and screamed for mercy.
It’s part of our culture to romanticize the outlaw—Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the aforementioned Al Capone, and so forth—and we feel some ambivalence when the outlaw is brought down by the sanctimonious forces of law and order. Dandy Don Bellarosa, a.k.a. the Bishop, was a media darling, a source of endless public entertainment, and a celebrity. So when the word got out that he was under “protective custody” in his Long Island mansion, and cooperating with the Justice Department, many people either didn’t believe it, or felt somehow betrayed. Certainly his close associates felt betrayed and very nervous.
But before Frank Bellarosa could be paraded into a courtroom as a government witness, his reputation had been saved by Susan Sutter, who killed him. And his death at the hands of his married girlfriend, a beautiful red-haired society lady, only added to his posthumous legend and his bad-boy reputation.
The husband of the Mafia don’s girlfriend (me) got pretty good press, too. But not good enough to make it all worthwhile.
Oddly, Susan didn’t come off too well in the tabloids, and there was a public outcry for justice when the State of New York and the U.S. Attorney dropped any contemplated charges against her, which would have been premeditated murder and murdering a Federal witness, and whatever.
I missed a lot of this media fun by sailing off, and Susan missed some of it by moving to Hilton Head. The New York press quickly loses interest in people who are not in the contiguous boroughs or the surrounding suburban cou
nties.
Anyway, to be honest, objective, and fair, the people who suffered the most in this affair—aside from Frank—were the Bellarosa family. They were all innocent civilians at the time of this crime of passion. Anthony may have made his bones since then, but when he lost his father he was a young student in prep school.
So I said to him, “I knew your father well enough to know that he did what he had to . . . to get the Feds off his back so that he’d be around for his wife and sons.”
Anthony did not reply, and I used that silence to change the subject. He was wearing a wedding ring, so I said, “You’re married.”
“Yeah. Two kids.”
“Good. A man should be married. Keeps him out of trouble.”
He thought that was funny for some reason.
Rather than beat around the bush, I asked him, “What business are you in?”
He replied without hesitation, “I took over my father’s company. Bell Enterprises. We do moving and storage, trash carting, limo service, security service . . . like that.”
“And who took over your father’s other businesses?”
“There was no other businesses, Mr. Sutter.”
“Right.” I glanced at my watch.
Anthony seemed in no hurry to get up and leave, and he informed me, “My father once said to me that you had the best combination of brains and balls he’d ever seen.” He added, “For a non-Italian.”
I didn’t reply to that, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about hearing it. Aside from the fact that it was a qualified compliment (non-Italian), I needed to consider the source.
Anthony’s visit obviously had a purpose beyond reminiscing about the past and welcoming me to the neighborhood. In fact, I smelled a job offer. The last time I’d worked for a Bellarosa, it had ruined my life, so I wasn’t anxious to try it again.
I started to rise, and Anthony said, “I just need a few more minutes of your time.”
I sat back in the wingback chair and said to him, “Please get to the point of your visit.”
Anthony Bellarosa seemed lost in thought, and I watched him. He had none of the commanding presence of his father, but neither was he a weenie trying to fill Pop’s handmade shoes; Anthony was the real thing, but not yet a finished product of his environment. Also, I had the impression he was toning down his inner thugishness for my benefit. And that meant he wanted something.
Finally, he said, “I ask around a lot about my father, from his friends and the family, and they all have these great things to say about him, but I thought since he really respected you . . . maybe you could give me some . . . like, something about him that his paesanos didn’t understand. You know?”
I know that people want to hear good things about their dearly departed from those who knew them, and clearly the boy idolized his father, so the alleged purpose of Anthony’s visit was to hear John Whitman Sutter—Ivy League WASP—say something nice and grammatical for the record. Then why did I think I was on a job interview? I replied, “I knew him for only about . . . oh, six months.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay. And maybe think about how I can repay you for what you did.”
“What did I do?”
“You saved his life.”
I didn’t reply.
“The night at Giulio’s. When someone shot him. You stopped the bleeding.”
What in the world was I thinking when I did that? I mean, by that time, I was sure that he was screwing my wife. Not only that, it’s not a good idea to interfere with a Mafia hit. I mean, someone—in this case Salvatore D’Alessio—paid good money to have Frank Bellarosa clipped, and I screwed it up. So under the category of “no good deed goes unpunished,” Frank, after he recovered, hinted to me that his brother-in-law, Mr. D’Alessio, was not happy with me. I wondered if Uncle Sal was still annoyed. Or maybe, since my wife killed Frank afterwards, all was forgiven. Maybe I should ask Anthony to ask his uncle about that. Maybe not.
“Mr. Sutter? You saved his life.”
I replied, “I did what anyone who was trained in first aid would have done.” I added, “You don’t owe me anything.”
“It would make me feel good if I could return that favor.”
I clearly recalled Frank’s favors to me, which were not helpful, and I was certain that Anthony’s favors also came with a few strings attached. So, to nip this in the bud, and make myself perfectly clear, I said, “As it turned out, all I did was save your father’s life so my wife could kill him later.”
This sort of caught Anthony by surprise; he probably thought I wasn’t going to bring up the actual cause of his father’s death. I mean, Frank Bellarosa did not die from natural causes, unless getting shot by a pissed-off girlfriend was a natural cause in his universe.
To make my point more clear, I said, “Your father was fucking my wife. But I guess you know that.”
He didn’t reply for a few seconds, then said, “Yeah . . . I mean, it was in the papers.”
“And do you know that she’s back?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“How do you feel about that?”
He looked me right in the eye and replied, “I think she should have stayed away.”
“Me, too. But she didn’t.” We locked eyeballs and I said to him, “I assume there will not be a problem, Anthony.”
He held eye contact and said, “If we were going to have that kind of problem, Mr. Sutter, it wouldn’t matter if she was living on the moon. Capisce?”
I was sure now that I was speaking to the young don, and I said, “That is the favor you can do for me.”
He thought a moment, then said, “I don’t know what happened between them, but it was personal. So, when it’s personal between a man and a woman, then . . . we let it go.” He added, “There’s no problem.”
I recalled that when Frank Bellarosa said there was no problem, there was a problem. But I let it go for now, making a mental note to follow up with Anthony Bellarosa on the subject of not whacking my ex-wife. I mean, she hadn’t done me any favors lately, but as I said, she’s the mother of my children. I would point this out to Anthony, but then he’d remind me that Susan had left him without a father. It’s incredible, if you think about it, how much trouble is caused by putting Tab A into Slot B.
In any case, I’d really had enough strolling down memory lane, and I’d made my point, so I stood and said, “Thanks for stopping by.”
He stood also, and we moved into the foyer. I put my hand on the doorknob, but he stood away from the door. He asked me, “You seen your wife yet?”
“My ex-wife. No, I have not.”
“Well, you will. You can tell her everything’s okay.”
I didn’t reply, but I thought that Susan Stanhope Sutter had probably not given a single thought to the fact that she’d moved back into the neighborhood where she murdered a Mafia don. And by now, she must have heard that Anthony lived on the old Alhambra estate. Maybe she planned to pay a belated condolence call on Anthony since she hadn’t attended her lover’s funeral. I’m not being entirely facetious; Susan has this upper-class belief that just because you shoot a man, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be polite to his friends and family.
Anthony suggested, “Maybe we can go to dinner some night.”
“Who?”
“Us.”
“Why?”
“Like, just to talk.”
“About?”
“My father. He really respected you.”
I wasn’t sure I felt the same about don Bellarosa. I mean, he wasn’t pure evil. In fact, he was a good husband and good father, except for the extramarital affairs and getting his youngest son into organized crime. And he could be a good friend, except for the lying and manipulating, not to mention fucking my wife. He also had a sense of humor, and he laughed at my jokes, which showed good intellect. But did I respect him? No. But I liked him.
Anthony said, “My father trusted you.”
Anthony saw that I was vacillating, so he said, “I’d consider it a favor.”
I recalled that these people put a high value on favors, whether they were offered or received, so I should not take the word lightly. On the other hand, one favor needed to be repaid with another, as I found out the hard way ten years ago. Therefore, absolutely no good could come of me having anything further to do with Anthony Bellarosa.
But . . . to blow him off might not be a good idea in regard to my concern about Susan. And if I was very paranoid, I’d also consider my own concern about Salvatore D’Alessio. As Frank once explained to me, “Italian Alzheimer’s is when you forget everything except who pissed you off.”
Anyway, there were still some blasts from the past that perhaps needed discussion, and with those thoughts in mind I made my second mistake of the evening and said, “All right. Dinner.”
“Good.” He smiled and asked, “How about Giulio’s?”
I really didn’t want to return to the restaurant in Little Italy where Frank took three shotgun blasts. Bad memories aside, I didn’t think the owner or staff would be happy to see me show up with Junior. I said, “Let’s try Chinese.”
“Okay. How about tomorrow night?”
It was Monday, and I needed about forty-eight hours to come to my senses, so I said, “Wednesday. There’s a place in Glen Cove called Wong Lee. Let’s say eight.”
“I can pick you up.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Okay. It’ll just be us.” Anthony reminded me, “You don’t want to mention the time and place to anybody.”
I looked at him, and our eyes met. I nodded, and he said, “Good.”