Eight thousand feet above sea level, ringed by the peaks of the High Sierras, accessed by one long winding narrow mountain road, the Cal-Neva—a.k.a. the Castle in the Sky—perched high over the northern tip of the lake, ideally positioned to take in Tahoe’s deep, clear azure sunshine-dappled waters, against the surrounding forest’s plush dark green. The sprawling lodge itself was a sort of barnwood wigwam castle, with a commanding A-frame stone porch. In addition to a motel-like row of cabins, small wooden bungalows, and a few larger chalets on stilts clustered on the slope below the lodge, between granite outcroppings, the pine bluff dropping sharply to Crystal Bay.
The Cal-Neva, like so many Nevada casinos, was owned by a syndicate of investors, which often involved silent partners, including over the years various bootleggers and gangsters (Joe Kennedy, for instance), and thus it was that this magnificently situated rustic resort came to be “owned” largely by a certain Italian American singer. That the singer’s half-share of Cal-Neva represented Chicago investments in general—and Sam Giancana in particular—was a fairly open secret.
But Sinatra and Giancana had been arrogant, even for them, and a series of misadventures culminated in disaster.
A cocktail waitress Sinatra had dallied with was the wife of a local sheriff, who got tough with Frank, and when said sheriff was run off the road and killed a few weeks later, the Nevada Gaming Commission arched an eyebrow. They would soon run out of eyebrows, as a statewide prostitution ring began operating from the front desk, a guest was murdered on the resort’s doorstep, and Sam Giancana himself cavorted openly, even beating up one of the customers.
The latter infraction drew more heat than murders and hookers. Whenever the singing McGuire Sisters played Sinatra’s acoustically perfect, seven-hundred-seat Celebrity Showroom, Giancana would shack up with his favorite sister (Phyllis); he would also play golf and dine with Sinatra, even though both knew Mooney was under FBI surveillance.
Giancana was, after all, prominent in the Gaming Commission’s “List of Excluded Persons”—colloquially, its Black Book—at the top of the list of criminals forbidden even to set foot on a Nevada casino floor. (That half the joint was in California became Giancana’s excuse.) When the commission had the temerity to point this out, Sinatra got so indignant and abusive, he had to surrender his license, and sell out.
Everybody, including the FBI, assumed that when Sinatra left Cal-Neva, so did Giancana; after all, the place closed down upon the Voice’s departure, and stayed that way for some months. But the truth was, Giancana still held a considerable interest, and although former Outfit rep Skinny D’Amato had exited when Sinatra did, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner from Chicago had stepped in, to continue looking after Giancana’s silent partnership.
Though it had been almost ten years since Sinatra’s fall from grace, the singer’s presence was still felt at Cal-Neva—the Vegas-like showroom he’d built, the secret system of tunnels and passageways that connected the lodge with select chalets, even the orange, beige, and brown color scheme within the lodge. This was not a bad thing for business, and pictures of the famous crooner remained on display in both the Indian Lounge and (as it was now known) the Sinatra Celebrity Showroom.
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.
And Michael had even heard disturbing rumblings that Giancana was contemplating a return stateside, to resume his throne.
As for the children of the Capone-era crew, they had largely pleased their parents by going into legitimate pursuits—stockbrokers, Realtors, attorneys, small-business owners. And so many of the Outfit businesses these days were legit—hotels, restaurants, car dealerships, real estate tracts.…
In Vegas, the Outfit had sold out to Howard Hughes, Wall Street, and the corporations—Sheraton, MGM, and Hilton—though there would always be a place in gaming for experienced guys like Michael. Somebody “connected” like Michael, however, even somebody with as spotless a record as his, usually could only manage a work permit; a gaming license required the kind of rigorous background check—net worth, stock holdings, loans, bank accounts—that would have made the Singing Nun nervous.
That was why, officially, Michael remained entertainment director at Cal-Neva, and made only thirty grand per annum. Of course his bonuses took him up to over one hundred grand, but what the Gaming Control Board didn’t know wouldn’t hurt it.
He would soon be in a position to take an early retirement—fifty-five, he and Pat had agreed to—and all of this would be behind him. He had enjoyed managing the Cal-Neva, was considered a good, tough but fair, nice if somewhat remote, boss; he had restored the resort’s reputation and made it a consistent earner. And he had ducked, for decades, the bullet of being asked by the Outfit to do something…unpleasant.
Satisfied his cleaning staff was on top of things, Michael entered his office, which did not reflect the rustic nature of the rest of the facility.
This was an executive’s inner sanctum—dark woodwork, a large neat mahogany desk with matching wooden file cabinets—whose windows provided a striking view of the lake. The fireplace did retain the rough boulder-like look of the lodge, and above the fireplace—other than a few framed family portraits on the desk—was the only personal touch in the room.
Over the mantel a World War II–vintage Garand rifle rested on two prongs, underneath it a small, simply framed document bearing a watercolor American flag and calligraphic lettering: “To Michael P. Satariano, Corporal United States Army, for saving my life in a strafing attack by a Japanese Zero fight on Bataan March 10, 1942,” signed “General Jonathan M. Wainwright.”
Once a month Michael cleaned the weapon and polished its stock. Other than his father’s .45—stowed away in a safe-deposit box, with various cash—it was the only gun he owned.
He settled into his swivel chair—black leather, comfortably padded—and flipped open a file of receipts, picking up where he’d left off yesterday. He worked on this, and then typed some correspondence—he had no secretary, and used an Olympia on a stand beside the desk—and after a little over an hour, he took a break to wander out into the lodge and find himself a soft drink.
He stopped for a few minutes to chat with two members of the Mexican cleaning staff in the Indian Lounge, and compliment them on their work—they were waxing the dance floor—then walked into the cocktail lounge, with its colorful stained-glass dome of Austrian crystal. He ducked behind the circular bar and got himself a bottle of Coca-Cola from the small refrigerator tucked beneath. No ice, but the Coke sweated with cold. He did not take a glass with him, just using a bottle opener and helping himself to a Cal-Neva cocktail napkin.
When he returned to his office, he almost dropped the Coke, because seated in the visitor’s chair across from Michael’s desk was Sam “Mooney” Giancana.
“Nothing for me, thanks,” Giancana said.
The diminutive, deeply tanned gangster—looking like a golfer in his straw orange-banded fedora, avocado sport jacket, burnt-orange Polo shirt, and lime slacks—leaned back casually, arms folded, legs crossed, ankle on a knee; his shoes were light-brown tasseled loafers, and he wore no socks.
“Make yourself at home,” Michael said, and he and his Coke went behind the desk.
“In a way, this still is my home.” Giancana’s face was an oval with a lumpy nose and a sideways slash of a smile stuck on haphazardly; his eyes lurked behind gray-lensed sunglasses.
“Well, you do still know your way around,” Michael said, with a nod toward the fireplace.
Giancana smiled. “I checked myself into Chalet Fifty. For old times’ sake. Hope you don’t mind.”
What this meant was, Giancana had entered the chalet and used the underground passage to come up through the secret doorway that was built into one side of the stone fireplace.
Seated now, Michael said, carefully, “Is this your place? I’ve never been sure how you and the Boys were splitting things up, after you left.”
Giancana shrugged. “Accardo gets his piece of my Mexican interests. I still get my piece of Chicago’s interests. Nothing’s changed—’cept that hothead Aiuppa is sitting where I should.”
Michael managed not to smile; the idea of Giancana considering someone a hothead was…amusing.
On the other hand, Michael had never really seen Giancana lose his temper. He’d watched the little gangster stab a fork into a guy’s hand once, a
nd slap an occasional underling, but always with a cool calculation that was in its way far more frightening.
“I didn’t know you were back in the country,” Michael said.
“No one does.”
“Not even the feds?”
“I’m not wanted for anything. I left the States of my own free will.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “But I don’t need to advertise, neither. That’s why I slipped over the border, like a goddamn wetback. And I’ll slip back over the same way. The family?”
It took a beat for Michael to figure out what Giancana meant.
Then he said, “My family’s fine, thanks—Pat’s busy with her pet projects and charities. Anna’s in high school now. And Mike’s over in Vietnam—should be home soon.”
Giancana nodded. “Finally the fuck winding down. Them kids’ll all be back ’fore you know it—that’s good. You must be proud of the boy.”
“I am. But mostly I’ll be glad to have him home safe, again.… And your girls?”
“Grown up. Two married, one divorced. That’s about par.” Giancana made a disparaging click in one cheek. “No values, these days.”
Michael leaned on an elbow. “Sam—surely you didn’t come all this way just to make small talk.”
Giancana shrugged with both shoulders this time, then put his hands on his knees. “Seeing you’s a big part of it, Saint.”
“Really.”
“Oh yeah. See, I’ve let you sit on the sidelines, all these years, ’cause it’s been useful to our thing, having a guy like you, all wrapped up in the flag, fronting for us.”
The back of Michael’s neck was tingling.
Road to Paradise Page 3