Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  As much as he wanted to get next to Solly and his crew, Chris was dismayed at the prospect because, beside the gambling operation, there was a prostitute section. He took a chance, and told Solly of his qualms. “I don’t want you to be a pimp,” Solly assured him. “I just want you to manage the place.”

  Chris recruited a guy from Astoria to oversee the pross operation and, altogether, it wasn’t so bad. The old loft building was clean and well-kept, with a directory in the small lobby that listed the place as The Daily Planet. The girls were mostly young and pretty, recruited from ads for “Hostess” in the Village Voice; many of them were college students. And the customers were mostly clean-cut, upright citizens; businessmen with briefcases, making a quick detour between their offices and the nearby Port Authority Bus Terminal, where they caught buses home to the suburbs. Still, Chris felt cheap as he worked on the bookkeeping: thirty-five dollars a pop, with twenty-five for the house, eight for the girl, two for towels.

  By 8 P.M. the pross business had died out, and Chris could concentrate on the gambling side, which he enjoyed. He decided to set up a barbouti game. He thought he could pick up the cups for rolling the dice at any store, maybe even Woolworth’s. When he couldn’t find them anywhere, he had to ask a guy at the Grotto. “You’re still a Greek greenhorn,” the guy jeered. “There’s only one place you can get them, and they have to be hand-stitched, with a special kind of leather.” When he wouldn’t tell Chris where that one place was, Chris turned to Kostos, who sent him to a cobbler in Astoria. Chris had to pay two hundred fifty dollars for the pair of cups. Harry hit the ceiling when Chris showed him that item on his expenses, but he calmed down when Chris handed over a large bundle of bills. On a good night, The Daily Planet grossed eight to ten thousand dollars. Even on a slow night, two to four thousand. The place in Astoria wasn’t doing so well—Chris suspected that Gene was skimming, to pay the shys—but it didn’t seem to matter so much. Even after Chris turned over Solly’s share—sometimes to Solly himself, sometimes to Big Lou—Chris had a lot of cash to turn over to Harry, while still keeping several thousand in his pocket for day-to-day expenses. He couldn’t help thinking, hey, maybe crime does pay!

  “See that guy?” a club owner said to Chris one night at the Skyway, a joint near LaGuardia. “He’s one of the youngest captains in the police department. He pulls yellow sheets for me.”

  Chris didn’t know the guy, but he felt a little sick. He still felt bad when he learned that cops, even captains, had their price. As a child, he’d been walking with his mother along a street in East Harlem, when he’d caught a glimpse of a scene that, even now, all these years later, stood out in his mind in a dreadful freeze-frame.

  They’d been passing a tenement building, Chris clinging to his mother’s hand, when he’d turned his head slightly and had seen, in the doorway of a building, a man beating up a cop in uniform. The man was hitting the policeman hard, holding him up against the wall with one hand and punching him in the stomach with the other hand.

  Katrina hadn’t seen it, and in a moment they’d passed by. It had bothered Chris then, though he hadn’t said anything about it; he wouldn’t have known what to say. Later, he realized he’d seen a cop on the take being beaten up by a guy he’d doublecrossed, or hadn’t paid off sufficiently, or whatever.

  Even when he became a cop, Chris had had only one encounter that illustrated to him the relationship of some cops with some OC people. He and Phil had never worked with the public morals unit, whose job it was to keep tabs on after-hours places, the KG’s—known gamblers—and the clubs in their South Bronx neighborhood. But one day, about eleven o’clock in the morning, they’d spotted a guy on a street corner who seemed to them to be making all the right wrong moves. When they parked their car around the corner and got out, intending to talk to him, the guy took off. They ran him down at Emilio’s, where he was sitting at the bar with a drink in his hand.

  “Why were you running away from us?” Phil demanded.

  “Who, me?” the man mumbled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” While Phil was getting the guy to his feet, patting him down, Chris noticed a tiny slip of white sticking out from the thick vinyl padding along the bartop. When Chris pulled on it, other bits of paper came up, too.

  “Digits,” Chris told Phil. “Numbers. The guy’s a bookie.”

  He jabbed a finger at him. “We’re taking you in for gambling,” he said, as a voice called softly, from the semi-darkness at the end of the bar. “Officer, can I talk to you?”

  Phil stayed with the numbers runner while Chris walked the length of the bar, to the man who’d spoken. He was older, with gray hair, well-dressed. “Can we work this out?” he asked Chris.

  Chris stared at him.

  “Let my guy go,” the man repeated, “and you and I can adjudicate this right here.”

  Chris felt as though he had been smacked in the face. “If you are offering me a bribe,” he said loudly, “this is what I am going to do. First: I am going to kick you in the balls. Second: I am then going to lock you up also.”

  The man just smiled and shrugged, a small, half-sad, half-sanguine smile that said, have it your way, but you’re wrong.

  Chris put the slips in his helmet bag—they always carried helmets in the car, for riot situations—and they drove with their prisoner back to the station. Chris was astonished to find that they were not congratulated on making the bookmaker collar; in fact, they got a lot of flak. They were criticized for having overstepped their role and some cops suggested they just drop it, even though it was felony weight. When they went ahead with the procedures, vouchered all the evidence, they were given the silent treatment, made to feel like outcasts. When the court date came, all the evidence—the betting slips—had mysteriously disappeared. Chris thought again of the man’s quiet arrogance, the smug sense of power reflected in that look on his face.

  Now he was seeing that same look on the faces around him. In their world of rules and power plays and respect, these men—at least the older men—spoke quietly. Solly had an especially slow, deliberate way of speaking, as though nothing in the world could upset him.

  The deeper Chris got with the Italians, the more he felt that this route was more productive. He had pretty much concluded that there was no organized crime structure among the Greeks. Obviously they had connections, roots within the Italian families, but as far as the Greek crime community went, it was not organized. Only Kostos and a guy from Canada seemed to have real influence; below them, the mob was on the loose. The Greeks were so unstructured, in fact, that Gene suggested to Chris that they set up a crime family.

  Chris knew that Gene and most of the others felt he was more intelligent than they. He didn’t necessarily think so; he felt a novice in their world, while they knew all the angles. Still, they were coming to him for advice. Chris was fascinated by one guy who made about ten grand a month in fraudulent insurance claims, who came to Chris for advice in filling out the forms. Chris was fascinated by his MO: He would buy cars in various states, change the VIN—the Vehicle Identification Number—get a duplicate car, stage a wreck, and eventually collect. The operation was so complicated that it went over Chris’s head, and he was impressed. The scheme was so profitable that the man moved from Astoria to a luxury building on the east side of Manhattan, where he organized a tenant’s association. When he collected a five-hundred-dollar membership fee from most of the sixty tenants, he moved out.

  “Why don’t we start our own thing, and you be the top guy?” Gene asked Chris, who thought it was an excellent suggestion, as he explained to Harry. “I’ll draw more attention, I’ll get more information.”

  Harry turned purple. “Are you nuts? Are you bananas? Have you gone totally berserk?” Harry yelled. “Do you have any idea what could happen to you? Forget it! I am telling you, forget it!” So Chris had to explain to Gene regretfully that it was too bad, he just didn’t have time to be a godfather.

  It was true that his time wa
s limited in Queens, now that he was paying so much attention to Solly and the Italians. When Solly invited him to a christening party one Sunday in late spring, Chris was glad to go. He was always on the lookout for new names and faces.

  The house was big and rambling—not a mansion, but a house that spoke of money and all the consolations money could buy. More than the house, it was the wide sweep of lawn that impressed Chris. He knew the price of acreage on Long Island. A circular driveway led to the main entrance, where Doric columns—a little too grand for the house—flanked the doorway.

  Chris didn’t go inside that day. The party was outdoors, on the expanse of freshly trimmed lawn, where a blue-and-yellow-striped tent had been set up. A long table was laden with food: watermelons scooped out holding melon balls, strawberries, gleaming black grapes. A chef in a tall white hat carved slices of baked ham; there were enormous bowls of pasta and seafood. White-jacketed waiters walked around, pouring what seemed to be oceans of champagne. An accordion player and a violinist strolled among the guests.

  Chris waited until he was sure he was being observed before he approached the gift table. Some of the women had brought crib blankets and booties, but the gift of choice was cash. He took a new hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and dropped it into the crystal bowl in the center of the table, with bouquets of blue-tinged carnations on either side of the bowl.

  He turned and almost bumped into her. She was slim and lovely, wearing a pretty summer dress, silky and kind of floating, with a beautiful Florentine cross, blue enamel overlaid with gold, around her neck. Chris’s first thought was that she looked more Irish than Italian. She reminded him of the actress, Katharine Ross.

  Smiling, she moved past him. Chris found Solly and pointed her out. Solly nodded. “A nice girl,” he said solemnly. “And that’s her papa, over there on the side. Know him?”

  In fact, Chris did. He hadn’t yet heard the name, but he’d heard Harry: “You’ll know him when you see him.”

  5

  She was a tool, a device. It was a lucky break that she was so pretty and so much fun to be with, but Chris viewed Marty only as a means of gaining access to her father.

  John had been a killer. He’d handled a shotgun on trucks that were ambushed, in the violent days of Prohibition. Then, Harry told Chris, John had come up through the ranks. Chris didn’t like that phrase applied to OC people. He thought it was too clean, too wholesome, and should be reserved for the military, and for paramilitary outfits such as the NYPD. But he knew what Harry meant. John had moved up from armed robberies into a form of white-collar work, dealing with labor unions, settling problems. By the early 1960s, he was a mediator, and had helped settle the Gallo-Profaci gang war. Now John seemed safely detached from the bloodshed. He was involved in legitimate and some semilegitimate businesses, including a real estate firm. He was as successful as he was elusive.

  It was precisely because of his status as an experienced, knowledgeable elder that he was so significant a target. A man like John knew more—and could tell more—about the workings of organized crime than a dozen wiseguys whose names splashed across the newspapers regularly. He had layered so many buffers between himself and the soldiers on the street that he’d managed to stay out of the reach of the law.

  Now he was just one beautiful arm’s-length away.

  Chris didn’t talk long with her at the christening party. As a hostess that day, along with her mother, she had to circulate. But he got her phone number at work, and when he called, they made a dinner date. He met her in the lobby of the building where she worked, in Manhattan, in the graphics department of an advertising agency. Chris took her to Tre Scalini, which he’d learned was a place her father liked; being seen there with her would bolster his reputation.

  He felt they were noticed when they walked in, though that may have been, at least in part, because she was such a good-looking girl. While the stereotype mob daughter wore thick makeup, raccoon eyes, and spike heels, Marty didn’t even look Italian, Chris thought. She had fair skin, not olive, and her brown eyes were lighter than his. She was fairly tall, about five seven, with a great figure—not big in the bosom; wiseguys who judged women by their measurements might have called her skinny. Chris thought she was elegant—lean and graceful. She wore a pale-blue dress with a darker-blue jacket, and the Florentine cross she’d been wearing on the day of the party, blue enamel with a thin gold overlay. It occurred to him that they made a nice-looking couple.

  Marty was easy to talk to, though Chris was careful not to talk much at first. He said he was a jazz drummer, realizing as he said it that jazz drummers were a dime a dozen; because he wanted her to think well of him, he added that he was a vibes player, too. He’d done some cruises, and was just back from a long time in Vegas, not sure what he’d be doing next. Maybe another cruise. Marty said she loved music, any and all kinds, so Chris picked up on that. They discovered they shared a love for opera—a real passion, and they thought they’d go to the opera sometime soon. “I hope it’s not Aida,” Chris said. “I don’t care much for that one. Rigoletto’s my favorite. But even if it’s Aida, I’ll go.”

  “How did you come to like opera so much?” Marty asked. Chris talked about a neighbor who was an opera fanatic, an old man who used to call Chris, across their backyards in Queens, to come over and listen to the radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoons from the old Met. Even before that, Chris said, his parents had encouraged his interest in music, from the time he was a kid. Then he stopped, not wanting to go too much into his background. “Well, I guess mostly because my father liked it,” he said lamely.

  “Mine too,” Marty said. “I guess all Italian fathers like opera.”

  Chris was annoyed. It wasn’t her fault, but he didn’t like hearing her father linked with his, even in the most innocent way. “My father isn’t Italian,” he said, more sharply than necessary. “I mean, he wasn’t Italian, he was Greek. He passed away.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Marty said. She looked embarrassed, and Chris was a little ashamed at the way he’d spoken. “But my mother is Italian, sort of,” he went on. “She was born in Greece, but she lived in Italy for a while. So maybe she’s half-and-half.”

  Marty’s full name was Martina, but the only person who’d called her that was her grandmother, for whom she was named. The Florentine cross had belonged to her grandmother, who’d been a very special person, and Marty treasured the cross. “When I was little, everybody called me Tina,” she said. “But as soon as I was old enough to have something to say about it, I changed it.” She looked curiously at him. “Christian is a beautiful name. Do you have a nickname?”

  So much for the jazz drummer story, Chris thought; most mob guys had nicknames. He wanted to say no, but he also wanted her father to consider him someone he could do business with. “Well, sometimes,” he said. “Some people call me ‘Curley.’”

  She nodded. “I won’t call you that. I’ll call you Christy.”

  The evening was pleasant, with casual small talk. Marty was an only child, though she had lots of cousins; the christening party was for the son of her cousin Rosemarie. She lived at home with her parents on Long Island. Chris mumbled that he lived with his aunt out in Valley Stream, and she wasn’t at all well. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Marty said again.

  Chris offered to drive her home, but she said she had her own car in a garage near her office. They walked over to Park Avenue, then down, enjoying the warm spring evening. Chris waited until the garage attendant drove her car up the ramp, then waved a casual good-bye.

  He called her the next day. “I had a really good time last night,” he said. “When can I see you again?”

  “I had a good time, too,” Marty said. She sounded as though she really had had a good time. They made another dinner date. “Let’s not go to Tre Scalini again,” Marty said quickly. “I’ll show you a little place I love.”

  The restaurant was on the far east side, near the river, almost under the bridge—a tiny place, onl
y nine tables, run by a Frenchwoman and her two grown children. “I thought Italian girls only liked spaghetti,” Chris teased, as they settled at a table. Marty smiled. “Maybe you’re not such an expert on Italian girls, then.”

  Chris frowned at the small menu, hand-written in a curly script. “All I ever learned to say in French was ‘Ouvrez la porte’ and ‘Fermez la porte,’” he admitted. Marty laughed, and read through the menu, translating as she read. Chris was impressed. “Where did you learn such good French?” he asked.

  “In Paris,” Marty said. “I studied art there for a year.” Chris liked the way she said it, in a simple, matter-of-fact way, without sounding snobbish.

  He was dubious about French food, though, and ordered a lamb chop, the most familiar item on the menu. The sauce was unusual, but he liked it, and he felt comfortable in this little place. It was so far off the beaten track that he didn’t worry about being seen by somebody he knew, or by somebody who knew Liz.

  He didn’t press Marty with questions about her father, because he didn’t want to make her suspicious. Take it easy, he told himself; slow and easy. The luxury of working in intelligence was that he had no deadline. Some cops spent years infiltrating various groups—the Black Panthers, the FALN. Considering that the Mafia had been around for at least half a century in the United States, and in Italy a lot longer, what was the rush?