The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “Of course,” Michael said. “We only want you to be comfortable.”

  “I can tell it bothers you,” Russo said, taking a seat at the table, “that I turned all the lights off and closed the curtains without sayin’ nothin’. Right? So now you know how it feels.”

  “How what feels?” Hagen said.

  “C’mon, Irish. You know what I mean, and your boss does, too. You New Yorkers are all alike. You people made a deal. Everything west of Chicago is Chicago. Soon as you realize there is anything west of Chicago, you backpedal. Capone gets what’s coming to him, and you think that syphilitic Neapolitan shitweasel is Chicago. The rest of us? We’re nothing. You put together that Commission, and are we a part of it? No. Moe Greene takes all that New York money and builds up Las Vegas. We’re not consulted. You just up and call this an open city. Which you know what I think? I think great. Open works in Miami. Works in Havana, and I hope to God it stays that way. And it’s workin’ maybe best of all here. But why does it have to be so disrespectful? We weren’t so much as asked. That’s my point. Yet we went along with it. We weren’t in no position to argue. We had a few years where, forget about it, nothin’ was organized good. What happened was-I don’t want to say you took advantage, but we lost out. Fine. Vegas is working out perfect as is. In Chicago, everything’s under control. In New York, for a while you had blood running in the streets and all that bit, but from what I hear you got peace again. I pray that’s true. My point is this. During your troubles, did I think, Hey, time to take advantage of my friends in New York ? No. I stayed out of it. I don’t want you to hold a parade for me or nothin’, but Christ. What do I get for the respect I gave you during your hour of need? You move the headquarters of your whole thing here. Here! Which is supposed to be open and, if you want to be technical about it, is rightly ours. I’m not stupid, all right? But I’m not a lawyer like Irish here, and I didn’t go to no fucking Ivy League school neither. So help me out. Tell me why I should stand for this.”

  Louie Russo supposedly had an IQ of 90, but he was a genius at reading people. The glasses made it difficult to read him in return.

  “I appreciate your candor, Don Russo,” Michael said. “There’s nothing I appreciate more than an honest man.”

  Russo grunted.

  “I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” Michael said, “but it’s not true. We have no plans to run Las Vegas. We’re only here temporarily. I have land on Lake Tahoe, and once we complete some construction there, that’s where we’ll go, permanently.”

  “Last I checked,” Russo said, “Tahoe’s west of Chicago, too.”

  Michael shrugged. “When the time comes, that won’t be of any concern to you.”

  “It’s of concern to me now.”

  “It doesn’t need to be,” Michael said. “In the future, we won’t be initiating any more members. I’m gradually splitting off from everything we had in New York. The businesses I’ll be running here will be legal. I look forward to your cooperation-or at least your lack of interference-as we get things to that point. As you know-you mention my time at Dartmouth -I never planned to take part in my father’s business. It’s not what he wanted either. As I say, it’s only temporary. We’ll be opening a new casino in Lake Tahoe, and we’re planning on running it so clean that an army of cops, IRS agents, and Gaming Commission men could live there night and day.”

  Russo laughed. “Good fucking luck!”

  “I’ll have to take that as sincerity,” Michael said, standing, “because we need to go. My apologies. It’s our pleasure to have you as our guests. We look forward to seeing you tonight.”

  Tom Hagen opened the door to the basement office of Enzo Aguello, an old friend of the Corleone Family and now the casino’s head pastry chef. All three men inside-the two established capos, Rocco Lampone and Pete Clemenza, as well as the head of protection, Al Neri-had been together yesterday in Detroit, at Pete’s son’s wedding. Every eye in the room was bloodshot. Lampone was only thirty but looked ten years older. He’d used a cane ever since he’d been shipped home from North Africa with a Purple Heart and no left kneecap. Clemenza gasped from the effort of getting out of his chair. Hagen always thought of him as one of those ageless fat men, but now he just looked old. He must have been about seventy.

  They could have met in a suite upstairs, but Enzo’s office had the advantages of being humble, close to the food, and one hundred percent secure-a cinder-block bunker that, with the best equipment money could buy, Neri had swept for bugs. Neri took his place in the hall, closing the door behind him.

  “Where’s Fredo?” Clemenza said.

  Mike shook his head.

  “He’s fine,” Hagen said. “His plane’s late. Storms in Detroit. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

  Clemenza and Lampone looked at each other. They sat down on hard metal folding chairs around Enzo’s gunmetal gray desk.

  “I wasn’t gonna say nothin’,” Clemenza said, “but I hear weird fucking things about Fredo, I hate to say.” Fredo’s new bodyguards had come from Clemenza’s regime.

  “What do you mean?” Mike said.

  Clemenza waved him off. “Believe me, it’s too flaky and ridiculous to talk about, and from what I hear it comes from junkies and niggers, so you can ignore ninety-nine percent of it right there. But the thing is, we all know he’s-” Clemenza grimaced, as if he were enduring a gas pang. “Well, I ain’t one to preach the abstemious life, but he’s got a problem with the juice.”

  “Abstemious?” Mike arched his eyebrows. “Where’d you learn that word?”

  “I sent my fucking kid to that same fancy school you went to, Mike, that was how I heard about it.” He winked. “Only unlike you he finished it up.”

  “He says abstemious? Out loud?”

  “How else you say things? You know what else I learned about that word? It’s one of just two words in the whole English language that uses all five vowels and in order.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  “How the fuck should I know what the other one is? A minute ago, you thought I was too fucking dumb to know how to use even one of them.”

  Everyone laughed, and the men got to work.

  The little time Hagen had spent as a corporate lawyer, for a meeting half this important and ten percent as detailed, there would have been a squadron of secretaries, scribbling like mad, and still half of what was said would have been lost or distorted. These men of course wrote down nothing and, as tired as they were, could be counted upon to remember everything. They spent three hours chewing through old business, new business, grilled calamari, and pasta e fagioli.

  They discussed the toll the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias had taken on the Family’s business interests. They discussed the accommodations made for the wife and family of Tessio, that saddest and unlikeliest of traitors, friend and partner of Vito Corleone since their youth, and the medical, funeral, and family financial needs of the organization’s other casualties. They discussed the triumph of the erroneous but widely held opinion-among the NYPD and the newspapers, among other crime families, among nearly everyone outside the Corleone Family-that both Tessio and the wife-beating brute Carlo, Mike’s brother-in-law and the de facto murderer of his brother Sonny, had been killed by men dispatched by Barzini or Tattaglia. On top of this, the Corleone Family’s man in the New York D.A.’s office (a classmate of Mike’s at Dartmouth) planned to bring a series of indictments this week charging members of the Tattaglia Family with the murder of Emilio Barzini and charging members of the Barzini Family with the murder of Phillip Tattaglia. Even if, as was likely, these arrests didn’t result in convictions, the FBI would consider the matter closed and stay out of it. Local cops-hundreds of whom had suffered from the lost income as much as any shylock-were happiest with business as usual. The short attention span of the public would soon swerve back, as it reliably does, to bread and circuses. All in all, the current cease-fire stood to be a genuine peace.

  “Ev
ery ten years,” Clemenza said, shrugging. “We have these things and then we get back to work.” He’d found a whole box of toothpicks in Enzo’s desk and was chewing up a new one every couple minutes. The other men all had cigars or cigarettes going. Clemenza’s doctor had told him to stop smoking. He was trying. “Like clockwork. This one’s my fourth.”

  Everyone had, over the years, heard this theory of Clemenza’s. No one said anything.

  “So,” Clemenza said. “You think that’s what we got, Mike? Peace?” He even brandished the toothpick like a cigar. “Do we need to call for a meeting of the Commission?”

  Michael nodded, more in concentration than assertion. Hagen knew that Michael had failed to present the Commission with a list of the men being initiated tonight. Probably the last thing he’d have wanted was for the Commission to meet. But his face registered nothing. “Rocco?” he said, bowing his head, extending his palm: after you.

  That long pause- Hagen noted, impressed-made it look as if Michael were giving the question serious thought and then consulting with a trusted aide. If Sonny had lived and been in charge now, he’d have just blurted out what he thought and been proud of his decisiveness. Michael had inherited and honed his father’s ability to create consensus.

  Rocco Lampone took a long puff on his cigar. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain’t it? How do we know the war’s over unless someone comes out and says it, huh?”

  Michael knitted his fingers together and said nothing, his face utterly blank. The Commission functioned as an executive committee for America ’s twenty-four crime families, with the heads of the top seven or eight Families approving the names of new members, new capos, and new bosses (these were nearly always approved) and arbitrating only the most intractable conflicts. It met as infrequently as possible.

  “I’d say yeah,” Lampone finally said, “we got a peace. We got the word of, what? Joe Zaluchi, that’s a given. Molinari, Leo the Milkman, Black Tony Stracci. All but Molinari are on the Commission, right? Forlenza’s leaning our way, right? Any word yet from the Ace?”

  “Not yet,” Hagen said. “Geraci’s supposed to call in after they get to that fight.”

  “That’s a sure thing,” Rocco said. “Geraci, not the fight. The fight, I like that half-breed nigger lefty, what a sweet cross he’s got. Ain’t even human how fast and smooth it is.”

  Clemenza slapped the top of the metal desk four times and arched his eyebrows.

  “Anyway, Forlenza makes five,” Rocco said. “We still think Paulie Fortunato’s the new Don of the Barzinis?”

  “We do,” Hagen said.

  “Then six. He’s a reasonable man, and in addition to that he’s closer to Cleveland than Barzini was. In other words, he’ll do what the Jew does. So that just leaves the other ones.” In lieu of pronouncing the name Tattaglia, Rocco made a filthy Sicilian gesture. His differences with the Tattaglias were personal, visceral, complicated, and many. He’d been the one who burst in on Phillip Tattaglia, surprising him in a bungalow off Sunrise Highway, out on Long Island. Tattaglia was standing there naked except for his gartered silk socks, a hairy man in his seventies, with this teenage prostitute spread out on the bed in front of him, squeezing back tears while he tried to jack off into her open mouth. Lampone put four rounds into the man’s soft gut. The Tattaglias’ organization was in shambles, and the man who’d taken over, Phillip Tattaglia’s brother Rico, had come out of a comfortable retirement in Miami. It seemed unlikely a man like that would have the stomach for more vendettas, but a Tattaglia was still a Tattaglia.

  When Mike said nothing, Lampone frowned like a determined schoolkid working to please the teacher. Mike was the youngest man in the room, the youngest Don in America, yet all the others were straining to prove themselves to him. He stood and walked to the place on the wall where a window would have been if there had been a window. “What do you think, Tom?”

  “No Commission meeting,” Hagen said, “not if we can avoid it.” Hagen, as Vito’s consigliere, was the only one of them ever to attend such a meeting. He was also the only one ever to attend an even more rare meeting of all the Families, which is what a call for a meeting of the Commission would snowball into. “Reason being, three Commission members have died this year. With that many new men, if they meet, they’ll have to figure out whether to add Louie Russo. No matter what anyone thinks of him personally, with Chicago what it is, they have to say yes. They don’t meet, they can keep him on the hook and say they’ll get to it next time they do meet. Once they meet, Russo’s got to be a part of it, which means a lot of different things could happen. Unpredictable things.”

  “Older that guy gets,” Clemenza said, “the more his nose looks like a pecker.”

  This made Mike smile. Clemenza had had the same knack with Vito, though, truth be told, it had been a hell of a lot easier to get a smile out of Vito than it was Mike.

  “When he got the nickname, his nose was just big,” Clemenza said, inserting toothpick number nine into his little round mouth. “Now the end’s red and shaped exactly like a dickhead. And those eyebrows? Pubic hair. Am I right? All he needs is a vein to stand out on the side of his nose, and Fuckface’ll get thrown in the joint for indecent exposure. Shit, they got Capone for tax evasion.” He shook his head. “Pantywaist arrests”-and here Clemenza grabbed his balls and put on a good Chicago accent-“it’s da Chiacahgo way.”

  Everyone laughed, even Hagen, though he privately believed that the reason Irish and Jewish gangsters had managed to move from most-wanted lists to ambassadorships was that they (like Hagen himself) paid their taxes, to a point anyway. It was understandable that many Sicilians, whose distrust of a central government had run through their veins for centuries, did not. And it was also true that theirs was a cash business with nothing of importance written down. A hundred IRS agents working around the clock for a hundred years couldn’t figure out one percent of what went on. Still: Governments were no different from anyone or anything wielding great power. They wanted what was theirs. You had to wet their beak. Or kill them.

  They discussed a host of practical matters that had to be addressed so that the Family and its interests could again become fully operational. Only near the end did Michael discuss the ambitious long-term plans that he and his father, in the months Vito had spent as Michael’s consigliere, had envisioned. Hagen let everyone know about his discussions with the Ambassador and the Family’s role in James Kavanaugh Shea’s plan for the White House in 1960. They already knew about Hagen ’s own, not-unrelated plan: to run for the Senate next year and lose (that senator was in the Corleones’ pocket anyway), then use the legitimacy garnered by a respectable loss to make it easy for the governor to appoint him to a cabinet position. By 1960, Hagen could run for governor and win. Which brought Michael to the last order of business.

  “Before we take care of our shorthandedness in other areas, we need to fix it at the top. First, there’s the matter of Tessio’s old regime. Any thoughts before I make my choice?”

  They shook their heads. The choice was obvious: Geraci would be a popular pick, especially among those who resented what had happened with Tessio. True, there had been grumbling about him from some of the older men in New York. He was Tessio’s protégé, but Tessio had betrayed the Family. There was the issue of a narcotics operation Geraci had been allowed to have (though it was still only a rumor). There was his age (though he was older than Michael). He was from Cleveland. He had a college degree and a few law school classes. Hagen had first heard of him when Paulie Gatto had him beat up the punks who’d assaulted Amerigo Bonasera’s daughter. Three years later, after Gatto was killed, Geraci had been Pete’s second choice to take over as top button man, after Rocco. Rocco had made the most of that opportunity and was now a capo, but Geraci was Michael’s type of guy. He was also one of the best earners the family had ever had. There were other options, older guys like the Di-Miceli brothers, or maybe Eddie Paradise. Solid, loyal men, but not in the same
league with the Ace.

  “My only words of wisdom on this subject,” Pete said, “are that if Christ himself was ready to get promoted to capo, you’d hear complaints. I been around a long time, and I never seen a guy who can earn like this Geraci. Kid can swallow a nickel and shit a banded stack of Clevelands. I don’t know him in and out, but what I do know is good. He’s impressed me.”

  Michael nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Quick thing on Eddie Paradise,” Rocco said.

  “Yes?” Michael said.

  Rocco shrugged. “He’s a good man. Paid his dues. People know him.”

  “All right,” Michael said. “Any other words on the subject?”

  “Eddie’s my wife’s cousin is all,” Rocco said. “When she asks me if I vouched for him, well-you’re all married, you all got families. Nah, no other words.”

  “Vouching duly noted,” Michael said. “All right. My choice is Fausto Geraci.”

  This was greeted with hearty approval. Hagen had never heard anyone else call Geraci Fausto, but Michael rarely called anyone by his street name, a quirk he’d picked up from the old man. Sonny had been the opposite. He’d know someone for years, pull jobs with him, eat dinner in his home, and most of the time he didn’t know the guy’s last name until he saw it printed in the bulletin at a wedding or a funeral.

  “Which brings me to you, Tom,” Michael said. “Your job, that is.”

  Hagen nodded.

  Michael looked to Pete and Rocco. “With Tom involved more in politics, we need to move him out of certain things. Since stepping down as consigliere-”

  Hagen had not been consulted and had not sought change.

  “-Tom has remained a trusted adviser, as anyone’s legal counsel should be. That’s how it’s going to stay. But it leaves a void as consigliere. Tom has done an excellent job, and my father-” Michael turned up the palm of his hand. Words couldn’t do justice to the late Don’s greatness. “I don’t see a clear successor. For the next year or so, I’ll be spreading the responsibilities of consigliere to all the capos and also you, Tom, when it’s appropriate.”