Pop had been working on the SSA people for four months and now everything was ready to go. The don wanted Charley to talk to the people and hose the fear all over them so that they understood in their hearts that if they fucked up now that they had made a deal, they were the ones who were going to have go down.
They had the meeting at the John Arundell Hotel in Baltimore, and for the first time in his life Charley ate turtle soup. The SSA guys were tickled that he liked it so much. They said it was native American cooking. Charley was amazed; he thought hamburgers were native American cooking. “What is the TV dinner,” he asked them, “if turtle soup is native American cooking?”
In the meeting Religio’s man worked with two of the SSA technicians while Charley set up the delivery arrangements with the third for the 19,556 Social Security checks for an average of approximately $530 a check, to be collated by state and city and street of destination as they came off the presses. The computer would blank out while they were coming off, then wake up again when the series was finished. When the beefs started to come in from the SSA recipients who hadn’t gotten that month’s check and the government backtracked on it, all they would find out was that somehow the computer had spun its wheels and had not printed that particular run of 19,556 checks, out of millions of checks. With any luck, they would decide the checks had never been printed at all. So they’d print them up again and send them out.
The franchisees would have to move fast to turn the checks into cash before anybody figured out that the government had been ripped off when the canceled checks started to come back. The three SSA guys would have to sweat out what they called mass loss procedure, but the way it turned out, nobody caught on.
The checks were shipped out at government expense, marked as paper stock, to the distribution point Pop had set up in New Jersey. From there the checks went out to the Prizzi franchise cities around the country, where they were cashed in 819 banks. The Prizzis made a gross of $10,335,000 on the deal, a good score when it was considered that they had to pay out only $337,843 for the cooperation of the three SSA people, but it really was a pittance compared to the taxes they had avoided and the money they had pocketed on six or seven hundred billion dollars’ worth of tax-free business they had done over the years because they had trained the politicians to pretend it would be dishonorable to collect taxes on illegal money earned by the citizens. Charley was beside himself with admiration. It was the don’s own dodge.
When he got back to the Laundry, Charley told Vincent and the Plumber about the turtle soup, but they didn’t believe him.
20
Three weeks after Charley met Mardell at the Latino, the regular show change rolled around and she was booked with the other five showgirls and the headliners into one of the three Prizzi hotels in Vegas. She was almost hysterical when she told him the news because she found that the best way to handle the Mardell situations was to fall deeply into Stanislavsky’s teachings and let the Method carry her reaction to new and threatening situations.
“What are we going to do, Charley?” she asked him, swinging on the lapels of his jacket, rounding out her performance as Mardell La Tour even though, during the two days he had spent away from her in Baltimore, she had had a wonderful time in New York, lunching with Freddie, ardent Freddie, going over her notes on Charley excitedly with Hattie Blacker, and dissuading Edwina from moving in with a large colored man on Washington Heights.
“I can get out there every weekend,” Charley said tentatively.
“No!”
“I work in New York, Mardell. You know that. The weekend is the only time.”
“Then I’ll die.”
“Come on!” Jesus, Charley thought, at first it may be very satisfying to have two beautiful women so crazy about you, but after a while it gets to be a real pain in the ass.
“From Vegas they send us to Miami, then to Kentucky, then to Atlantic City. It will be twelve weeks before I get back here. I can’t live through that.” She had no intention of leaving New York to go to that awful Las Vegas. The season was about to start in New York. Everyone who was anyone would be there: Freddie especially.
She immersed herself in the Method, thought hard about her beloved dachshund, Pepper, who died at age fourteen, and tears filled her eyes. “This is why I never went with anybody, Charley. No one until you. Never. We should never have gone to lunch that first time. I thought you would be safe company because I thought you were a gangster—how could I ever have thought you were a gangster?—but you became so dear to me, so sweet, that before I knew it I let my guard down and I was in love with you for the rest of my life. I’ll never survive it, Charley, if I have to go to Las Vegas and you have to stay in New York.”
“Ah—what the hell, Mardell—why should you work? I got enough. You can stay right here in New York and everything will be the same except you won’t needa go to work every night.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’d be a kept woman.”
“So? It’s better than working.”
“I simply couldn’t. I’m going to start tomorrow morning and find myself a job in New York.”
“What can you do, except in show business?”
“I could be a model.”
“You might be a little big to be a model. Lissen, lemme work on it. Lemme get back to you. I’ll figure something out.”
The next morning Charley asked Pop who they knew in show business. Pop said, “Name it, you got it. Whatta you need it for?”
Charley told him a slightly revised story of how the Latino was going to transfer Mardell to Vegas but how he had decided he would rather not have her leave New York so he wanted to find an agent who could get her some local work.
“I’ll tell Juley to hold her over in the new show until you can get something set, but while all this is going on, are you thinking about Vincent and how he looks at his daughter’s honor?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“He is a maniaco, Vincent. You don’t know.”
Mardell refused to be held over. “Absolutely not, Charley. Every girl on the circuit would say that I am a dyed-in-the-wool gangster’s moll, that my torpedo—or whatever it is they call people like that—just told the management that I had to stay in New York and they had to do it.”
“You’re making it very hard, Mardell.”
“Anyway, how is it you are able to do that?”
“My Uncle Harold works in the agency that books the shows into the Latino. It’s really a little favor for him. Don’t take it so big.”
The Caltanissettas, a New York family that operated out of East Harlem and had brought extortion, arson, and faked malpractice litigation to a fine art, were franchisees of the Prizzis in the counterfeit credit card action. They owned a large theatrical booking agency and they sent Charley to Marty Pomerantz, a small independent agent.
Pomerantz was a mild, little guy who parted his hair in the back and who brought his vegetarian dog to his office on the third floor of the old General Motors Building at Fifty-seventh and Broadway. He had a sixty-six-year-old secretary who wore elastic stockings. Pomerantz had been around the business for a long time. Charley laid out the proposition to him.
“She is a beautiful girl with showgirl experience at the Latino and with Miss Bluebell in Europe, all over Europe.”
“Miss Bluebell is very classy.”
“The idea I got, I don’t want her to work outta town. She strips down great and she could score big as a novelty act.”
“It costs to build an act.”
“Whatever. Also, she’ll pay you the regular ten percent plus—just between you and me—I’ll pay you ten percent more.”
“I just keep booking her in the metropolitan area?”
“Just so she can get home every night.”
“Burlesque is okay?”
“Why not?”
“All right. Lemme look at her. Then we’ll find somebody who can desi
gn an act.”
It all worked out, and even including musical arrangements, costumes, the two piano players, transportation, and the extra ten to Pomerantz, it only cost Charley six hundred dollars a week and some change.
But he knew he hadn’t solved the real problem. Now that she had decided they were engaged, Maerose showed up at his apartment about three nights a week and he had to work Mardell in around her on the other nights. He must have been doing something right. Both women seemed to be very happy, but the day was going to come when he was going to have to have the cake or not eat it.
There were three weeks until Election Day.
21
George F. Mallon knew he was running behind the mayor in the election race. The media reported it that way; the polls proved it. Every sampling his public opinion people took showed that he was doing absolutely the opposite of what the voters of the City of New York wanted when he campaigned against corruption, gambling, narcotics, high-rent luxury housing, and racism. He soft-pedaled his antiabortion and school prayer messages until they were almost nonexistent. He gradually persuaded his backers in the Electronic Evangelical Church to go silent in his support. He knew that somehow he had to effect an about-face. There had been a time when he had wanted to wipe the hoodlum element from the city entirely, but he was beginning to understand how much New Yorkers depended upon them for their comforts and conveniences, and he was starting to see that maybe a large dollar could be made there.
The wanton murder of Vito Daspisa, while the New York Police Department and the mayor of the City of New York simply looked on, seemed to have something to do with the way money was made in high office. But as a religious leader, Mallon could not believe that anyone would really seek to profit from such a brutal killing.
Surely, George F. Mallon asked his closest counselors, even the people of New York would not endorse something like that when they went to the polls on Election Day. His aides, recruited from tabernacles in North Carolina and Georgia, agreed with that. The conclusion was that the voters would admire the mayor for protecting his assets, but they most certainly would not condone the outright murder.
It was agreed that, if they could build an airtight case against the Charles Partanna whom Willie Daspisa had identified as his brother’s killer on behalf of organized crime in New York and on behalf of its partners—the mayor and the police—and if this were sprung on the public in the week immediately prior to the election, they would have created George F. Mallon’s single and best chance to win the mayoralty.
Trusted U.S. Marshalls would have to make the Partanna arrest in the company of several hundred media people and their television cameras at dawn of the Monday eight days before Election Day, to electrify the voters of the city by exposing the mayor, George F. Mallon’s opponent, as being a part of the organized crime that was was inflicting murder, gambling, and narcotics on the City of New York. If, on the other hand, they were to demand the arrest of Charles Partanna before they had built an absolutely airtight case against him, then the mayor, the police, civic leaders, and the media would all accuse George F. Mallon of attempting to deceive the voters by exploiting their fears in making wild charges out of desperation to get attention for his cause.
“We have five, possibly six, witnesses who can establish the case for us,” Mallon said to his staff at a secret meeting in the Disrobing Room of the Church of the Immaculate Recorder, an evangelical holding company which was preparing to go public in an offering of shares and debentures on behalf of the combined electronic churches of America, in whose stock issue George F. Mallon was a founder-partner. “We have Lieutenant Hanly and Sergeant Munger of the Police Department. Former Detective Sergeant George Fearons, and that NBC television camera crew. They’ll break under questioning, so I say, let’s bring them in.”
“These people should be secretly photographed, and their voice recorded, while you are interrogating them, Chief,” said Clarette Hines, Mallon’s shadow Secretary of State. “We can cut that into a terrific little fifteen-minute documentary and into a series of two- and three-minute spots for flashing on the morning talk shows.”
Mallon cross-examined police Lieutenant David Hanly first. The mayor and the Department had to allow Hanly to talk to Mallon. If they refused, it could be more embarrassing in the end. Nobody was worried about how Hanly would handle himself, and Pop made sure of that by seeing that a golden envelope was passed to Hanly. When it came around to Munger, Hanly coached him until he was cross-eyed, and the mayor passed the word down that if he did right his captaincy would be restored.
Under Mallon’s questioning, Hanly readily admitted that he had been on the scene before the actual murder of Vito Daspisa had happened.
“Why were you there, Lieutenant? Surely your duties as head of the Borough Squad did not require that you attend the stakeout of a fugitive?”
“I was on my way home. My radio unit picked up the action. One of the policemen murdered by Vito Daspisa was a coworker of mine and a good friend. I wanted to be part of bringing in Daspisa.”
“But of all the police officers there, as soon as you arrived on the scene, you, rather than any other police officer, went to the apartment in that building where Daspisa was holed up, and you spoke to him.”
“Vito sent down a written message. The TV cameras caught it as it came down from his window. He specifically asked for me.”
“There is television footage showing you entering the building alone, describing what you were going to do, and showing you as you came down to the street after talking to Daspisa.”
“I tried to speak to him. I didn’t have any luck.”
“I put it to you that you and Daspisa talked about the narcotics business.”
“You couldn’t be more mistaken, Mr. Mallon.”
“Then what did you talk about?”
“He said he wanted to talk to his brother Willie.”
“But when you came down after—as you say—trying to speak to him, you reported immediately to the mayor, did you not?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The meeting was recorded by the network TV cameras, Lieutenant.”
“He was in charge on the scene. I told him the suspect had refused to talk to me.”
“But he refused to talk to you and Detective Sergeant George Fearons was sent in.”
“That’s right.”
“You knew Detective Fearons?”
“Not personally, no.”
“But you and Sergeant Munger, who was in charge of the task force, did brief him in the lobby of Daspisa’s building and issue an assault rifle to him?”
“No.”
“You didn’t brief him?”
“We didn’t issue him any assault rifle. Fearons was a psychology major. He went up to apply psychology on Daspisa.”
“He identified himself as Detective George Fearons?”
“Why would that be necessary? He was a police detective. He was known in the Department as a psychologist.”
“I put it to you, Lieutenant, that George Fearons retired from the New York Police Department three years ago and is now a professional eater in Montreal.”
“A professional eater?”
“He eats enormous continual meals in the windows of Montreal restaurants for a living.”
“That’s impossible. He is too young to retire and he is too thin to ever have eaten like that.”
“I put it to you that the man you briefed was not George Fearons but Charles Partanna, a Mafia hit man who, following your briefing, went upstairs to Vito Daspisa’s apartment and shot him dead.”
“It was Detective Fearons that we briefed. And after Detective Fearons came back down from the Daspisa apartment, Sergeant Munger and his task force went up and, after forcing entry to the Daspisa apartment, shot him in self-defense after he had opened fire on them.”
“Do you intend to stick to that story, Lieutenant?”
“That is what happened.”
“If you
intend to stick to that story, you are going to have to tell it again in a court of law under oath. That is all, Lieutenant.”
The cross-examination of Ueli Munger supported Hanly’s statement.
Chester Singleton, the NBC cameraman who followed the task force into the apartment, told Mallon’s examining team that it was his impression that the task force had not had to force entry into the Daspisa apartment but that the door was wide open. Also, he said, he had a clear memory of seeing Daspisa in several pieces on the floor, walls, and ceiling of the living room of the apartment, before the task force began to shoot at him as he lay on the floor.
After Singleton left the examining room, Mallon and his aides came to their unanimous decision: there was no doubt in their minds that Hanly and Munger had been lying. The fact that Fearons was in Montreal and could be brought to New York to testify that he had not left Montreal for three years would be damning evidence, which would permit the District Attorney to move in on Hanly and Munger and crack them wide open. Singleton’s testimony would establish that Daspisa had been shot to death by someone who the New York Police Department claimed was George Fearons but who could not be. The lawyers on the staff agreed that there was enough evidence to seek a sealed Grand Jury indictment of Charles Partanna and that the facts of this indictment should be made public on the Monday eight days before the election. At that time George F. Mallon and his team of U.S. Marshalls and the accompanying media would move in to arrest him.
22
Vincent called a meeting with Angelo and Charley Partanna. He was reading a newspaper when they came into the office and sat down. “Listen to this shit they hand out,” he said indignantly. He read aloud, “‘The Presidential Commission said today that Asian organized crime groups threaten to become a fixture in America’s mainstream economy.’ We are taking out five hundred billions a year and all of a sudden this nickel-and-dime buncha Chinks are a threat. Lissena this, fahcrissake—‘The Bamboo Gang came to the United States from Taiwan because of the pressure being placed upon them by Taiwanese law enforcement.’ Did you ever hear such shit? The entire Taiwan government is a hunnert percent hoodlum. It was founded by the Green Gang outta Shanghai. The Taiwan president is a top Green Gang hoodlum, Chiang Kai-shek. So why do they hand out shit like this?”
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