The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  “You all right?” Tom Hagen asked.

  Michael kept peeling the orange. Down in the courtyard, Connie rushed after Johnny like a common puttana. “With Johnny? Frankly, it doesn’t matter all that much if—”

  “I don’t mean about Johnny. Or, for that matter, our Hollywood interests.” Hagen said Hollywood interests with a tinge of contempt so faint it would have registered only on a family member.

  “What do you mean?” Michael asked.

  “I mean, are you all right? I’ve known you since you were seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Something’s bothering you. Something’s been bothering you. And I don’t mean Tommy Scootch’s problems down Mexico way, either.”

  That was Tom to a T: he got the dig in and didn’t even mention Joe Lucadello.

  Michael shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

  “Rough night last night, I hear.”

  “Al told you that?”

  Hagen smiled. “No,” he lied. “You just did.”

  “Touché, counselor.” He finished peeling the orange and began to eat it.

  “So you just couldn’t sleep or what?”

  Michael turned to face him. For a moment, he thought about telling Tom about the series of dreams he’d been having. I have dreams about Fredo. A series of dreams. They feel real. In the most recent one, we had a fistfight. In all of them, he is bleeding. In all of them, he mentions a warning but won’t tell me what it is. But no. Michael Corleone was a man of reason, of logic. There were logical explanations: the diabetes, the medicine for that, stress. Maybe the dreams had to do with Rita. She never appeared in the dreams and was rarely mentioned, but she was always a presence in them somehow—just as Fredo was a presence in Michael and Rita’s waking moments, even though they never talked about him. (Why should they? She’d been with Fredo only once.) The dreams had begun after Michael had a sugar imbalance; now they were happening when he slept. It was ridiculous for Michael to think he’d seen Fredo’s ghost. Crazy. It was just a dream. What, among men, was less worthy of discussion than dreams?

  “Forget it,” Michael said, turning back to the window. “It was a night, OK?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “I keep telling you,” Tom said, “when that happens, the insomnia, you can’t just stay in bed. You need to get up and go do something, maybe take a walk.”

  Michael smirked, then paused for effect. He knew about Tom Hagen’s mistress, and Tom clearly knew he knew, though they’d rarely spoken about her, and never by name. She’d been a blackjack dealer in Vegas, a renowned beauty, married to a man who used to beat her, a situation Tom helped remedy. She also had a grown son in some kind of hospital, the cost of which Tom paid for entirely. She and Tom had been together for longer than Michael and Kay’s marriage had lasted. The whole matter struck Michael as the most characteristic thing Tom had ever done. He wasn’t Sicilian but was always trying to be, so leave it to him to have not just a comare but a steady one. Better yet, he found one he could feel noble about. He’d helped her, stayed loyal to her: it was perfect. He even used her as one of the Family’s fronts (real estate holdings, parking lots, movie theaters) and as a courier, delivering money to various people throughout the country. She lived in Las Vegas most of the time, but she was in New York now, too, staying in the apartment Tom kept for her here, a walk-up over a flower shop.

  “A walk, huh?” Michael said.

  “I mean a real walk,” Hagen said. “It’d do you good.”

  Michael gave him a look. If there was ever a perfect way for a boss to ensure his own demise, it was to become such an insomniac that he got in the habit of taking walks at three a.m.

  Michael watched Johnny Fontane, downstairs, waiting for the elevator. Connie was hanging on his arm. Francesca, arms folded, was watching them, shaking her head in obvious and—to Michael’s eye—overcompensating disapproval.

  “Think she’ll ever get him to take her out?” Tom asked.

  “Who, Francesca?”

  “Francesca?” Tom frowned. Fontane was the same age as he was. “Jesus. No. Connie.”

  “Never,” Michael said. “Didn’t you hear? Johnny’s distancing himself from our family.”

  “Sure,” Tom said. With his index and middle fingers, he gently jabbed Michael in the chest. “But with the human heart, who the hell knows?”

  Michael and Hagen discussed a few petty logistical matters and agreed to meet at the elevator in two hours for the car ride out to the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club.

  “Plenty of time for a walk,” Michael said. Tom ignored him.

  ONCE TOM LEFT, MICHAEL WENT OUT ONTO A SMALL balcony facing the river, where he kept the telescope his children had given him for Christmas. Mary had made a bittersweet joke about using it to watch over them up in Maine.

  Now, in the twilight—magic hour, Hollywood people apparently called it, a term he’d learned from Fredo—Michael sat on a stool and looked through the telescope in that same general direction. His eye came to rest on what he could see of Randall’s Island, where Robert Moses lived and did business in a mansion there, hidden in plain sight beneath a tollbooth complex. A castle, practically. Michael knew more than a few things about Moses, that supposedly visionary builder of roads and parks, the de facto designer of the modern New York City, and practically a sainted figure in political circles and in the press. A native Clevelander, just like Nick Geraci, Moses had never been elected to any office, yet he was the most powerful politician in New York—city and state, both. He was also the most extravagantly corrupt. This would have surprised most people, but not anyone in Michael Corleone’s world. The dimmest cugin’ sitting on the stoop outside his social club could have told you that Robert Moses’s enormous power had an inevitable chicken/egg relationship to the epic scale of his sleaze and greed.

  Somewhere on that island was a man who had thrown half a million New Yorkers out of their homes, most of them Negroes and poor immigrants, many of then Italian. Half a million people. More than the population of Kansas City. Moses tore their homes down and built buildings the evicted could never afford or—more often, more diabolically—housing projects that, even new, were more grim than the worst slums. All built with taxpayer money. Robert Moses built roads that cut the heart out of neighborhoods, creating crime-ridden ghost streets where families had once thrived, all to make life easy for the rich people from the suburbs, all to make Moses himself rich beyond Michael Corleone’s wildest imaginings. Moses had three yachts, each fully staffed, ready day and night. He had a hundred waiters and a dozen chefs on call around the clock as well. As gifts, he gave his friends skyscrapers and stadiums. Moses’s island was its own nation—a secret nation, one the American public did not know existed and yet paid for. And kept paying for it. Anyone who wanted to pass over the bridges their taxes had already funded had to pay a silver tribute to the Don, Robert Moses. He had his own seal, his own license plates, his own intelligence agency, his own military force, his own constitution and laws, even his own flag. Once, the mayor of New York took Michael aside and, friend to friend, whispered this warning: “Never let Bob Moses do you a favor. If you do, rest assured that one day he’ll use it to destroy you.”

  Yet despite all this, there Moses was, out on his island, presumably cooking up new schemes to ruin the greatest city on earth and line his own pockets in the bargain, while in the eyes of the public and the eyes of the law, he was a pillar of the community.

  A hero.

  Robert Moses was not under constant threat of indictment or assassination. He wasn’t even under occasional threat of indictment or assassination.

  His association with various crimes and atrocities had not caused him to lose two brothers to violent death.

  It had not caused his children to come home from school crying because of what the other kids said about him. It had not caused his children to be fired upon with machine guns.

  Robert Moses’s accomplishments were studied in university classes in poli
tical science and urban planning. Not criminology or criminal law. Robert Moses was a behind-the-scenes character known to everyone, and everything most people knew about him was good.

  And most of it was bullshit.

  Michael pushed himself away from the telescope.

  Robert Moses probably possessed enough pure evil that he could sleep well. He probably woke up every morning refreshed and without the slightest anxiety about who might try to defame him today, who might try to throw him in jail, who might try to blow up his car or put a bullet in his heart. Robert Moses was probably never once tempted to go to the window of his mansion at dusk and stare through a telescope at the top of this building, wondering why he’d been so lucky, wondering, just for a moment, what it was like to be a man like Michael Corleone.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ever since the raid on the farmhouse in upstate New York—a meeting of all the Families, bigger than a Commission meeting, and an event that made many Americans aware for the first time of the word “Mafia”—the Commission had met as rarely as possible. Tonight’s meeting would be the first since Michael Corleone returned to New York.

  Like the meetings in any large organization, its success depended on settling everything of any importance long before anyone took a seat at the table. Michael served on the boards of several corporations and charitable organizations and was always amused to hear otherwise sensible people champion open debate—a fine notion, for fools more concerned with being self-righteous than effective. The only unresolved matter Michael could foresee concerned Carlo Tramonti. Tramonti’s deportation had not held up in court, although his ongoing citizenship woes were making a battalion of lawyers rich. He had refused to discuss his grievance in any other forum but before the Commission. But no matter what Tramonti proposed, Michael had enough votes in his pocket—Altobello, Zaluchi, Cuneo, Stracci, probably Greco—to block anything. And Tramonti had, via intermediaries, agreed not to say nothing about the Cuban assassination plot.

  The security precautions for the Commission meeting were intricate—though, for the first time in decades it did not involve the Bocchicchio clan. Cesare Indelicato, the Sicilian capo di tutti capi and Carmine Marino’s godfather, had put a stop to it. There were too few of them left.

  The restaurant chosen for the meeting was tucked in a corner of Carroll Gardens that had been cut off from the rest of the neighborhood by the construction of the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a walled concrete canyon that whined with constant traffic.

  The buildings closest to the restaurant were empty, save for the apartments loaned to appreciative friends of the Corleone Family, who were using them for both lodging and security. The nearby street fair and upcoming fireworks display in Red Hook would draw most people in the area down by the East River for the evening.

  Down the block from the restaurant, an open fire hydrant spewed water into the darkening street. A nicely compensated crew from the water department cheerfully pretended to be fixing a water-main break. As promised, the precinct sergeant had dispatched uniformed cops to close off the street and keep the curious at bay. The cops at the scene had no idea what was going on inside the restaurant. They were clock-punchers—men handpicked for their purposeful lack of curiosity.

  At seven sharp, five men gathered at the back door of the restaurant, five more at the front, so each door had a trusted soldier from each of New York’s Families: the Barzinis, the Tattaglias, the Straccis, the Cuneos, and the Corleones, whose turn it was to provide the security detail—a job that Eddie Paradise had overseen. Men grunted hellos to each other but otherwise milled around and smoked and did not talk. Paradise came by and shook hands and thanked everybody for their efforts, then hovered around the periphery.

  The arrivals of the Dons were staggered between seven-thirty and eight. Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen were already inside.

  First to arrive was Carlo Tramonti. His seat on the Commission was a complicated formality. He did not always attend, but when he did, he was allowed to take his seat first, one of several courtesies granted to him because of the nature of his organization, by far the nation’s oldest. Behind him trailed a bodyguard and his little brother Agostino. Augie the Midget’s promotion to consigliere was recent; this would be his first Commission meeting.

  The embrace that Carlo Tramonti and Michael Corleone shared betrayed nothing of the differences these men had had over the years. The men exchanged pleasantries about their families. A casual observer would have mistaken them for friends.

  Tom Hagen, whose shoes were new and squeaking, showed the Tramontis to their seats at one of the two long, facing tables in the back banquet room. Each was covered with a white tablecloth, bottles of red wine, baskets of bread, and plates of antipasti. Hagen plucked an olive from one of the plates. He used to feel like a sideshow attraction at these meetings; when Vito first tabbed him as consigliere, Tom was the youngest man in the room and the only one who wasn’t Italian. Now, almost twenty years later, Hagen felt entirely in his element.

  “The shoes, they start doing that there,” said Augie the Midget, pointing as he sat, “squeak like that, got to throw ’em out, eh? And start over.” Only with his strange accent—a cross between Brooklynese and Southern Negro—it sounded like, De shoes dey start doin’ dat dere, squeak like dat, gotta trow ’em out, eh? And start ovah.

  Hagen smiled and nodded and told them to make themselves at home.

  “What shoes?” asked Carlo, who was a little hard of hearing.

  “Forget it,” Augie said. “Just shoes, all right?”

  BY NOW, TWO OF THE OLD LIONS HAD ARRIVED, ANTHONY Stracci from New Jersey and Joe Zaluchi of Detroit. As was customary, each brought his consigliere and a preapproved bodyguard. Zaluchi and Stracci were the Corleones’ oldest friends and strongest allies. Zaluchi was a moon-faced, grandfatherly man in his seventies. He’d married one daughter off to the scion of an automobile company and another to Ray Clemenza, son of the late Corleone capo Pete Clemenza. Joe Z had taken over in Detroit after the chaos of the Purple Gang and built up an empire known for being one of the most peaceful in the country. Lately, though, there were rumblings that the Negroes were taking over in Detroit, and that the auto unions were getting their marching orders from the Chicago outfit. Many of the Dons believed Zaluchi was going senile. When he greeted Michael by calling him “Vito,” Michael chose not to correct him.

  Black Tony Stracci, also in his seventies, doggedly maintained that he did not dye his thinning ink-black hair, which seemed to get blacker every year. He’d always been so loyal to the Corleones that some outsiders wrongly believed the Stracci Family was merely a Corleone regime. The Corleones’ narcotics operation used Stracci-controlled docks and warehouses (an alliance cemented by Nick Geraci, but not a part of Geraci’s conspiracy). Black Tony had also—in one of the most bitter arguments the Commission had ever known—joined with Michael Corleone to overcome the opposition of several other Dons (particularly Tramonti and Silent Sam Drago) to secure the backing of the Commission for New Jersey governor James K. Shea’s bid for the presidency. The Straccis had dealings in New York, but their power base was in New Jersey, which was less prestigious and lucrative, thus relegating them to their perpetual status as the least of the New York Families.

  Next to arrive were the two newest members, both in flashy suits and loud ties: Frank Greco from Philadelphia, who’d replaced the late Vincent Forlenza (leaving Cleveland without a seat at the table), and John Villone, who’d returned from Vegas to take over in Chicago from the late Louie “Fuckface” Russo. When Michael greeted Frank the Greek by saying he looked good, Greco scoffed. “When I was a young man, I looked like a Greek god. Now I just look like a goddamned Greek.” Michael smiled. He’d heard Greco make this joke before. In fact, at fifty, Greco still was a young man, compared to most of the Dons. Philadelphia was another outfit that was losing ground to the Negroes, but Frank the Greek remained strong in South Jersey, which had given him connections to several men in t
he Shea administration.

  John Villone had overseen the Chicago outfit’s interests in Nevada, which was how Michael first met him. He was a “man with a belly” from the old Sicilian tradition, connoting both power and courage as well as literal corpulence. Unlike such men, however, he wore shiny, clownish clothes, tailored, oddly, to make himself look even fatter. Still, Villone was the kind of man everybody liked and wanted to be around, and Michael envied him for it. John Villone had been close to Louie Russo and remained so even after Russo froze him out of important Family business over some dispute concerning a woman. Villone walked to his seat in the back room with his meaty arm around Tom Hagen, unaware that Hagen had used the very belt he now wore to strangle the fat man’s dear friend Louie Russo.

  The deeply tanned boss of the Tampa syndicate, Salvatore “Silent Sam” Drago, was next to come through the door. On his shoulder he bore a webbed bag of oranges, as was his custom. Smiling, without a word, he deposited them on the bar. He and Michael embraced. Al Neri checked the oranges for anything concealed there. Drago must have expected this and took no offense. Despite their differences, Michael and Sam Drago had much in common. Drago, like Michael, was the youngest son of a boss, and, like Michael, he’d set out in life hoping to avoid the family business. Drago’s father was the late Sicilian boss Vittorio Drago, a close friend and ally of Lucky Luciano’s. When Mussolini seized power and threw Vittorio and all the other bosses in prison on the island of Ustica, young Sammy Drago—who was in Florence, studying to become a painter—fled to America and settled in Florida. He’d tried to make a go of it as a commercial fisherman, but he lost everything. He was in danger of being deported. Back in Sicily, his mother got Lucky Luciano himself to pull a few strings, though Sam Drago did not know this until he was already beholden to the exiled American. He told himself he was helping run some of Luciano’s interests in Florida only to provide support for his sainted mother while his father was in prison. But soon the War started, and the years dragged on, and Sam Drago, who’d been a promising painter, seemed to find his true calling as a racketeer and leader of men.