Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  At sixty-three, Neil Dellacroce had a big house on Staten Island—though he spent most of his time at the Ravenite and a nearby apartment—and a flock of young girlfriends. Chris figured it was the power, the money, and the aura that attracted the girls, because in most cases it wasn’t the guy’s looks. True, Dellacroce was nice-looking, in a craggy way, but most of the others were not. Solly was short, baggy-eyed, kind of cramped-looking, yet he had a gummare twenty-five years younger than he. As for Solly’s brother, Chris thought he was the scariest-looking SOB he ever hoped to meet. The guy looked as though he’d just stepped out of his coffin. His eyes were small and sunken; his skin was the color of wet cement. And he had a deadly temper to match. One day, shortly after Chris arrived, the guy leaped up from his chair, knocked it over, and screamed that the place was filthy. He grabbed a broom and swept the floor of the Prince Street Social Club with a zest that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so terrifying. He had plenty of girlfriends, too.

  Chris couldn’t figure out why these guys, with all their money, wanted to spend their days sitting backward in a chair, their arms folded, watching and listening. Chris thought that if he had their money, he’d be long gone from Mulberry Street, basking on some beach. He thought it was just that they didn’t want to miss anything; they wanted to be part of every score, every decision, every sitdown. They had spent their lives creating an intimidating reputation, and they didn’t want to waste it. They encouraged the mystique, the stories that were built up around them.

  Some of the stories told about Dellacroce were believable to Chris, some weren’t. A Time magazine cover story that came out not long before Chris met him reported that Dellacroce had once arranged to have the bodies of two murder victims dumped behind a police station. That was plausible as a kind of sinister prank, Chris thought. But Chris couldn’t buy another incident reported in that article, which had Dellacroce discovering cops tapping his phone and then forcing them at gunpoint to chew and swallow the tapes. If anything, Chris felt the guy was extra-nice to cops. One day Chris and a couple of other guys were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Ravenite with Neil and his son Armond, nicknamed Buddy, a hefty, strong, if not overly bright, twenty-three-year-old. A patrol car pulled up, and a uniformed cop got out and began writing summonses for the double-parked cars.

  Buddy swaggered over to the cop.

  “Whassa matta, you got nothin’ better to do?” he jeered. “Why doncha just get the hell outta here?”

  The cop put his hands on his hips and glared, but before he could do anything, Neil stepped in. “I’m sorry, Officer,” he said. Then he turned and slapped Buddy across the face, right there in public.

  “Don’t you ever talk to a police officer that way!” he yelled at his son.

  Chris knew that Dellacroce was itchy about phones, though. The first time Chris walked into the Ravenite, he noted the phone on the wall to the right of the door. It was a pay phone. On a subsequent visit, Chris saw that the phone was gone. When he made casual inquiry—“Hey, where’s the fucking phone? I gotta make a call”—he was informed that Dellacroce, apparently feeling that even pay phones were tappable, had ripped the phone right off the wall and hurled it out onto Mulberry Street. Eventually a new phone was installed; Chris got the number and called both Solly and the Penguin there.

  More often, Chris reached Solly at the Prince Street club, though at first he couldn’t even find the phone there.

  “There’s got to be a phone,” Harry kept insisting.

  “I know, I know,” Chris kept saying. “I just can’t locate the damned thing.”

  Chris kept hearing a phone ring, as he sat playing cards, and finally tracked down an extension phone in the dark alcove behind the bathroom, listed to the pizza parlor next door.

  Until he went undercover, Chris had never been inside an OC social club. But he found that in decor, at least, they were not unlike neighborhood clubs he’d known. Social clubs were an honorable European tradition, transplanted from the streets of Naples and Athens to the sidewalks of New York. As a teenager, Chris had joined the Astoria Social Club, where there was a pool table, a refrigerator stocked with beer, and a neat sense of belonging.

  As a child, he’d gone to the Democratic Club in East Harlem, where men smoked cigars and discussed politics. His father never missed voting in an election, and he’d insisted that Chris register to vote as soon as he was eligible. George was not an argumentative man, but Chris had heard him raise his voice indignantly when someone said that one person’s vote didn’t matter. “I tell you, it does matter,” George declared. “It’s an honor and a privilege to vote. It’s the biggest freedom we have in this country.”

  Chris grew up thinking his father was the proudest American who ever lived. Once George became a naturalized citizen, he never wanted to set foot out of the country. Franklin D. Roosevelt was his idol; George called him the savior of the people. Chris also remembered vividly the election of 1948, when he went to the club with his father and listened to him preach eloquently on the virtues of Harry Truman. He remembered George’s delight, next morning. “We have a wonderful President,” George told the family. “He will be a fine President for all people.” George was so passionate about politics and citizenship that Chris was surprised his mother never became a citizen. But she lived her life through her husband and her children; maybe she thought she was American enough, through them. Certainly George had patriotism to spare, and though Chris didn’t always follow his father’s political leanings, once he was grown, he’d always voted in every election, local and national, until he went under. Then he didn’t vote at all.

  Chris never heard politics discussed, at least not in any depth, at the clubs he visited. People still talked occasionally about the assassination of President Kennedy, but national politics didn’t seem to interest them nearly as much as politics on the local level, the level on which they lived and operated. They seemed to respect some politicians, and not others, and they seemed to know exactly who was who. Often Chris did too, and he had to be careful not to say too much when they talked of their relationships with certain politicians in the Bronx and in Queens. Some of it was familiar to him, some wasn’t; in either case, he passed it along to Harry. The periodic investigations of organized crime, and the accompanying publicity, along with crime in general, seemed of little interest to the men Chris knew. Certain local crimes caught their attention: After a television news report on a child molesting case, Chris heard one guy yell, “That bum should have his nuts cut off!”

  Chris didn’t hang around for hours at the clubs. He tried to time his visits, in and out, learning their routine. There was always a TV set going, always a card game or two in progress: poker, gin, ziganette. There was an assortment of chairs and tables, mismatched; a couch that had seen better days, a bank calendar tacked to the wall. Chris never saw a kitchen, just a refrigerator; hot food was sometimes delivered from the Taormina or the Luna or another neighborhood restaurant. At the Ravenite, the bar was sometimes tended by Gene Gotti, brother of John Gotti, who paid his respects to Dellacroce faithfully on each visit. Johnny G. was considered a flashy dresser, and seemed to be on his way to becoming a media celebrity. Chris was unimpressed. He thought that anybody who hijacked as consistently as Gotti could be a Dapper Dan, too.

  The Gambino family was considered, by the Intelligence Division, to be the strongest of the five crime families in New York, followed by the Luchese and the Genovese clans. Chris was involved, to one degree or another, with all three. His association with Solly gave him the entrée, but as he became known, he was able to bounce on his own. He preferred being taken someplace by a guy who was already known, though, because that made it easier to fit in, and to pick up on ongoing conversations. Sometimes he knew who he would be meeting, and sometimes he didn’t. He had a simple rule for himself: Wherever somebody led him, he went.

  He felt he was accepted by everybody without being completely trusted by anybody, except, probab
ly, Solly and Frankie. But that was not surprising. In this world, trust was elusive at best, terminal folly at worst. Carlo Gambino, stoop-shouldered and mousy-looking, had helped plan the barbershop slaying of his boss, Anastasia. Two decades later, when Gambinos gathered in that Brooklyn kitchen to choose Don Carlo’s successor, one of them took the precaution of taping an automatic under the table.

  Chris could never be a “made” guy, because he wasn’t Italian, but he could be connected, as long as he was an earner. Chris was proving himself a strong earner, if not as productive as another non-Italian, Jimmy Burke. Chris met Burke at Robert’s Lounge, one of the many Queens joints Chris was led to. Under the leadership of Paul Vario, a Luchese capo, Burke handled the day-to-day operations at Kennedy Airport, where a six-million-dollar robbery was carried out at Lufthansa Airlines in December, 1978. Chris was always aggravated that the heist was probably being planned at Robert’s and other places, earlier that year, without him catching on.

  He knew guns were moving, though, and he bought a couple from a big guy named Rudy, once at Chris’s own club and once at a topless bar Rudy had just opened in Astoria. Rudy didn’t seem to like Chris when they first met, but as Chris moved up, some of the respect given to Solly, John, and other men Chris knew rubbed off on him. When Rudy offered to sell him a couple of guns, Chris was a willing customer. He wasn’t interested, at that point, in making a bust for illegal arms dealing; that was no more a priority than making a drug buy. If he knew beforehand of a crime going down—a hijacking, a killing—of course he couldn’t just sit on that information. But in case of a routine gun deal, it was just something that might be useful. Harry would have the documentation, names, dates, and serial numbers, and it might even turn out to be some kind of leverage, someday.

  Chris just wanted to buy the weapon, while Rudy insisted on telling him more than he really wished to know. What Chris mostly knew about guns was that he didn’t like them. Thanks to movies and TV, people thought cops pulled their guns several times a day, and shot somebody once or twice a week. In fact, even in his early days in the NYPD, when the rules on the use of deadly force were not as stringent as they later became, Chris had been reluctant to wield the weapon. He’d seen a woman who was leaning out a window get shot in the head, from a cop’s gun, during a riot in the 4-oh neighborhood, and although he knew it had been an accident, he’d also known there were too many such accidents. That’s why cops were not allowed to cock their guns: The trigger on a cocked gun needed to be pulled very slightly, only about one eighth of an inch, with very little pressure.

  In the old days, a cop could shoot at a guy in a stolen car: “A fleeing felon.” But why would you want to shoot at a stolen car? There might be kids in that car. Besides, using the gun led to a lot of headaches. You were questioned by the duty captain, who evaluated the situation and filled out stacks of forms. Then they kept you inside, doing desk work, until the whole episode had been investigated. There was the psychological effect, too: Some guys, once they shot somebody, got trigger-happy, others got trigger-shy. Either way, it was traumatic.

  Chris wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t had to carry a weapon at all, but of course he’d had no choice. He’d even had to buy his gun. His original gun, the blue-black service revolver, had cost him fifty-five dollars. He’d had his choice of the Smith & Wesson or the Colt. Both were .38 caliber, about the same size, but the mechanisms were different.

  To open up the cylinder of a Smith & Wesson, you had to press forward, and you loaded the cylinder by turning it counterclockwise. On a Colt, it was reversed: You pushed the cylinder backward, and rotated it clockwise for loading. The difference was small but significant: If a cop had to reload while somebody was shooting at him, it was helpful to know which way to turn the cylinder.

  Rudy, on the other hand, was a gun collector and connoisseur, knowledgeable about capability, velocity, and the intricate mechanism of the 9 mm. Walther PPK that he sold to Chris for a hundred and fifty dollars, about half-price. Rudy threw in a box of ammo, too. He was one of Big Lou’s sidekicks; Lou had known Chris since Chris first met Solly, and Lou told Chris that both he and Rudy had taken care of a lot of people with machine guns. Although Chris could not pin Lou down to specifics, and could not even be sure if Lou was telling the truth—after all, Chris could have said that about himself, too—he knew from other sources that Rudy was a dangerous guy. So when Lou told Chris, “Rudy’s good with a gun,” Chris thought he might just as well believe him.

  Some of the men Chris met were just casual acquaintances, no more than an introduction: Anthony Corallo, nicknamed “Ducks” for his skill at ducking indictments, and Paul Castellano—“This is Chris. This is Paul C.” Some he came to know much better, including another of Lou’s cronies, Nick Gregoris. Nick lived in Howard Beach, not far from the Bergin, the Gambino satellite club supervised by John Gotti. Nick bragged a lot to Chris, too—“I put away a lot of people in Brooklyn”—and while Chris couldn’t be sure of that, either, he knew that Gregoris had done time and that he had indeed been active in Brooklyn until something went wrong. “They chased him out of Brooklyn and gave him to me,” Solly told Chris mournfully. Nick had been involved in the bloody Gallo-Profaci feud. He was the only man Chris knew who carried a stiletto—a push-button knife with an eight-inch blade. Nick showed it to Chris one night at the Kew.

  The Kew came to seem like a second home to Chris. He got phone calls there; he was a regular at the corner table, which was always reserved, whether anybody showed up or not. The Kew was an especially secure place for Chris to be, after the night he went with Frankie to a new place Frankie knew.

  Only it didn’t look new to Chris, as Frankie pulled into the parking lot. It looked vaguely familiar. Chris remembered the bowling alley connected to the cocktail lounge, and when Frankie introduced Chris to the owner, who then called to his wife to come over and meet these people, Chris remembered everything only too well.

  The ten years since he’d been here telescoped; as Josie smiled at him now, it felt like yesterday. He and his buddy, both of them in partial uniform, raincoats over uniform pants and shirts … jumping out the window, feeling like Errol Flynn. Here was Josie smiling, holding out her hand, looking at him with an unmistakable look that told him she remembered, too.

  Chris hoped he wasn’t swaying on his feet as he took her hand. She can’t say anything, he told himself. There’s no way she can say anything! She would implicate herself with her husband. She wouldn’t take that chance, would she? How can she possibly say anything?

  Josie said hello. She said it was nice to meet him. She said he should sit down and have a drink. But she didn’t say anything.

  Marty felt good about what was happening between them, Chris knew. She was warm and receptive and loving. Chris was vaguely uneasy when they were at Waterside; he always had a lurking feeling that there was some kind of device in the place that he didn’t know about, and that Harry might have been picking up more than Chris thought. Harry had a key to the place, too. Then he told himself he was just being overly nervous, a little paranoid. Still, he felt better when he and Marty went away. She got a few days off from work, and they met at the Eastern Shuttle gate, at LaGuardia, for a flight to Boston. Chris was so anxious to get away that he didn’t even mind it, though he disliked flying. Before they knew it, they were settled in at an elegant old hotel, downtown.

  Chris was in absolute heaven. He felt liberated. No grid search when he walked into a restaurant; no mumbling to Marty at the sight of a long ticket line, “I don’t feel like going here.” No dark glasses, although he was so accustomed to wearing them by now that he wore them anyway.

  They spent an entire day at the Museum of Fine Arts, and when they felt their feet were about to drop off, they went back to the hotel and kicked off their shoes and ordered from room service.

  They went to a concert and had a long, late supper afterward, as they analyzed the music they’d heard. Chris talked so enthusiastically about music
that Marty suddenly smiled brightly, as though she’d just thought of something.

  “Did you ever think about opening a music store?” she asked. “You like music so much—you’d be so good at it.”

  “Well, no,” Chris said truthfully. “I never did.”

  “Or an art shop,” she continued. “Maybe you should go back to school—or art school—and develop that. Have you thought about that?”

  “Well, no,” Chris said, again truthfully.

  She put her hand over his on the table, as she had a habit of doing.

  “Look at me, Christy,” she commanded.

  Chris looked.

  “You’re not like the other men who know my father,” she said quietly. “You can do better.”

  On the flight back to New York, Chris was as tense as he’d been lighthearted on the way up. He was withdrawn, so silent that Marty noticed it. “You’re a different person when you’re out of New York,” she said. Liz had noticed that, too, only Liz had added, “You’re more like yourself.”

  Except for Zero’s, there was no place he could take Marty that was connected with his work, to maintain the notion that even when he was with her, he was doing his job. He didn’t even like taking her to Zero’s, because guys kept coming over to talk to him, and he had to act at least somewhat like Solly’s man. He could tell Marty didn’t like it, either.

  Every other place was out of the question, either because there was too much going on, as at the Kew, or because they were such dumps. One place on the lower east side, The Still, was a hole. Solly’s brother owned a piece of the place, so when Solly asked Chris to drop by and pick up some money, Chris felt he had to go. A cop who’d gone bad hung out in there, Chris heard; he didn’t know whether that cop would recognize him, and he hated to take the chance. He made the stop quickly, taking the envelope from behind the bar and scooting out without having the drink he was offered. He didn’t look at any of the guys huddled at the bar, though he did admire the old painting of Rudolph Valentino over the bar. He was thinking he’d have to come up with a good reason for Solly why he couldn’t make stops for him there, when the problem was solved. The FBI rolled in with vacuum cleaners and hit the basement, where a man had been murdered. They were looking for evidence—hairs and the like—and after they vacuumed, they shut the place down.