The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  The most famous example was Carlo Tramonti. A week after he was subpoenaed and a week before he was scheduled to fly to Washington, Carlo the Whale turned up dead in the middle of Highway 61 in New Orleans, thrown from a moving car right outside the Pelican Motor Lodge. The cause of death was two shots to the back of the head, a classic gangland hit, and not the meat cleaver that had been rammed into his heart, which came after the shooting but which the authorities could never explain.

  A less commonly known example was Carlo’s brother Agostino—Augie the Midget, who took over from his late brother. He was not called to testify before that first investigation, but a few years later, a maverick U.S. attorney in New Orleans sought to reopen the case. The night before Augie Tramonti was supposed to appear in court, he died in his country home—a newly renovated antebellum mansion, once part of a sugar and timber plantation west of New Orleans. The coroner attributed the death to “natural causes” and was no more specific than that. The police report, however, mentioned a suicide note. It did not say what the note said. The note, along with several other pieces of evidence related to the case, disappeared from the evidence room. It might have been stolen. It might have merely been misplaced. Either way, it was gone.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER SHE BURIED HER HUSBAND, Charlotte Geraci boxed up the carbon copy of Nick’s manuscript and went into Manhattan to meet with her old boss, at the publishing house where she’d worked before she and Nick got married. How much of it she wrote or rewrote herself is debatable. Her claim would always be that Nick had given it to her to retype the day before he was killed. She did at least that much. Her daughters came home to help her. Charlotte claimed to have put the original in a safe-deposit box and the pages Nick gave her in a different one. To this day, Charlotte and her daughters (Barbara Kennedy, now a Maryland attorney, and Moonflower®, now a San Francisco performance artist) have never released more than a Xeroxed copy of a brief excerpt of Nick Geraci’s original.

  The publisher, initially skeptical, agreed to read it. He was amazed by the manuscript’s raw power, dismayed by its crude craftsmanship. But that, he thought, could be fixed.

  He called up a struggling novelist he’d published and invited him to lunch. Sergio Lupo was then best known for An Immigrant’s Tale, based on the life of his mother, which had been a New York Times Notable Book. It had also sold about a thousand copies. Lupo’s next novel, the autobiographical Trimalchio Rex, had done even worse. Since then, he’d been trying to make a go of it in Hollywood, with little success. He was back in New York, visiting his family. He was not in a position to turn down a free lunch.

  Neither was he in a position to turn down the rewriting of Fausto’s Bargain.

  At first, though, he did. Lucrative as the offer was, it seemed like work that was beneath him. “It’s a sellout,” he said.

  “I say this as a friend,” the publisher said, “but don’t you think maybe it’s time to grow up?”

  “Fuck off,” Lupo said. He was forty-one years old.

  “It’s only a sellout,” the publisher said, “if you write it that way.”

  Lupo thought about this for a few moments and then shrugged.

  “Do me two favors,” the publisher said. “One—read the thing.” He slid the manuscript across the table. “Two—let me read you this.”

  He pulled out a copy of Trimalchio Rex and flipped to the last page.

  “‘I would love to be evil,’” the publisher read, “‘to rob banks, commit murder and mayhem, have everyone fear me because I’m a tough guy. I’d love to be unfaithful to my wife, shoot kangaroos, the works. But I can’t. And you know why? Because I’m timid. I’m shy. I’m afraid I’d hurt somebody’s feelings.’”

  “That’s a goddamned novel,” Lupo said. “That’s a fictional character talking.”

  “Sure it is,” the publisher said. He rapped his knuckles on the manuscript. “Just read it, OK?”

  Two years later, Lupo’s reworking of the book was finished. Fausto’s Bargain hit the bestseller list the first week out and stayed there for three years. It would go on to sell more than twenty million copies worldwide. The three films it inspired neither used the word “Mafia” nor mentioned any real member of the Corleone Family by name (other than Nick Geraci). The first one earned Johnny Fontane his second Academy Award. The first two—often credited with putting Woltz International Pictures back in the black for the first time since The Discovery of America debacle—are considered classics.

  THE WEDDING OF JOHNNY FONTANE AND FRANCESCA Corleone Van Arsdale was a quiet affair, right on the beach in the Bahamas, under a makeshift arch of palm fronds. The Discovery of America had wrapped a week earlier, and they’d stayed on Grand Bahama Island, making plans for the festivities, executing an elaborate (and ultimately successful) ruse to keep the press away, and waiting for their closest family members to arrive.

  Johnny wore a white tux. Francesca wore a pink, batik dress made right on the island. The weather was idyllic: a cloudless blue sky and a breeze.

  As Michael Corleone walked his niece down the boardwalk that functioned as an aisle, he was unashamed to find himself in tears.

  He and Johnny made eye contact.

  Johnny winked.

  Michael tried to smile. He truly was happy for them both.

  After the ceremony, Michael Corleone and his sister Connie went for a walk on the beach.

  Connie reached out her hand to him, and he took it. They had not walked this way since they were little kids, since he was walking her to school.

  “What a great couple,” Connie said. The breeze whipped her hair away from her face. She looked like a woman in a heroic painting. “You wouldn’t think so, but look at what a success the Nino Valenti Fund is already, so obviously they work together well. That’s important. And look how happy they look. Their kids get along. Everything looks…” Connie shook her head. “What a great couple,” she repeated, more softly this time.

  “I know this must be difficult for you,” Michael said.

  “Difficult?” she said. “Why would this be difficult?”

  Michael just squeezed her hand, and they kept walking.

  Finally Connie gave a dry little laugh. “Believe me,” she said. “I’m over it. I had a crush on him, sure, but so did a million girls. I’m a grown woman. I know what love is worth. I’m happy for them.”

  Michael nodded.

  “Speaking of love,” she said, “I was sorry to hear about you and Rita.”

  “Don’t be,” Michael said. “I’m over that, too.”

  They walked for a long time in silence. At the next hotel up the beach, they stopped at the bar for a drink. Connie got a piña colada, and Michael got ice water. They took their drinks and sat under an umbrella beside the pool. The only people swimming were children.

  “So,” Connie said. “Did she ever tell you?”

  “Did who ever tell me what?”

  “Did Rita ever tell you she had a baby?” Connie said. “A son. It was Fredo’s. She was still a dancer out in Las Vegas then, and she went away to have the baby, to a convent out in California. Fredo paid for everything. Usually, the girls he got in trouble had it…taken care of. But Rita…well, of course, Rita wasn’t like that. She couldn’t do that. She had it put up for adoption. I’ve tried everything I can imagine to find out who the boy is, where he is, but it’s the Church I’m up against, and I’m pretty sure it’s hopeless. I thought she might have told you. I’m sorry.”

  “She told you all that?”

  Connie shook her head. “Fredo did.”

  “When?”

  “At the time,” Connie said. “You know, I can keep secrets as well as any of the men in this family.” She turned to face him. “Are you OK? Maybe you should get something to eat.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You look like you…” she said. “I don’t know. You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Michael said again. His sugar was fine, he was sure. He went back to
the bar and got something stronger to drink.

  He sat back down beside his sister.

  They looked out at the swimming children and, beyond them, the white sand and the ocean.

  Connie reached over and put an arm around him. “He’d be eight years old,” she said. “He’s out there, somewhere. Think of it as a comfort.”

  IT WAS PROBABLY THANKS TO MICHAEL CORLEONE that Carlo Tramonti did not—as Michael had once asserted to the other members of the Commission—ruin them all. President Payton discontinued the so-called War on the Mafia. The director of the FBI reassigned most of the agents who’d been on that detail. After his election to the Senate in 1966, Daniel Brendan Shea pursued other weighty matters.

  In the long run, though, tremendous damage had been done. Younger FBI agents who’d been on the case didn’t forget what they’d learned. Younger U.S. attorneys reassigned to other matters or elected to office themselves didn’t forget what they’d learned, either. President Shea himself had proven much easier to kill than the public’s suspicion that “the Mafia” had the president “whacked.” All of these sentiments paved the way for the passage of the RICO statutes, which gave prosecutors powerful new ways to send gangsters to jail. It would be another ten years, however, before these complicated laws sent a Mafia boss to prison. But the threat loomed, and nothing would ever be the same. By the 1980s, both Michael Corleone and the Corleone Family often seemed like they’d been reduced to parodies of their former selves.

  Yet the years that immediately followed the deaths of Tom Hagen, Jimmy Shea, and Nick Geraci might have been the most peaceful that Michael Corleone and the Corleone Family had ever known: one of the rare stretches of his life in which Michael would have considered himself almost happy.

  During those years, he would often think back to that night in Staten Island, savoring the memory of the drive back home.

  Michael and Richie Nobilio came out the front of Jerry’s Chop House into a pouring rainstorm. The bodyguard they’d brought handed them an umbrella, and they hurried into the back of a waiting black Lincoln. The bodyguard got in the front. Michael nodded to the driver, Donnie Bags, and they sped away.

  By now, the mess across the street had been cleaned up. Fat Paulie Fortunato owned the bar and, for all intents and purposes, the neighborhood and the police that patrolled it, and, in exchange for other favors from Michael Corleone, he’d offered it up as a safe place to conduct that sad and ultimately grim showdown. Al Neri and Cato Tomaselli, the Corleone associate who’d posed as Greco’s bodyguard, were now under the care of a first-rate surgeon on Staten Island, a man Don Fortunato had actually moved here to address inconvenient situations such as this. Tomaselli’s wounds were minor. As for Neri, the bullet had gone through him cleanly, grazing and puncturing a lung but nothing worse than that. His recovery was expected to be lengthy but full.

  Eddie Paradise had supervised the removal of the dead. Geraci’s body was on the boat Eddie had sold Momo. The earthly remains of Cosimo Barone and Italo Bocchicchio had been hauled off to the Fresh Kills Landfill, Robert Moses’s presumably unintentional gift to both kinds of Staten Island wiseguys. The slightly higher big hill next to it, where Fortunato and the top Barzini men had homes, was called Todt Hill; todt being the Dutch word for death. Staten Island gave Michael Corleone the creeps.

  Michael Corleone and his men drove a few miles down dark, leafy residential streets until Donnie turned left, toward the waterfront. They pulled into a filling station, closed now, beside a panel truck with FLATBUSH NOVELTIES painted on the side. Through the rain, the towers of the new bridge loomed in the distance. The bodyguard got out of the front seat of the Lincoln. Eddie Paradise got out of the panel truck. The portly little man’s suit was torn and filthy. Eddie walked through the rain, unhurried and with no umbrella. He took the bodyguard’s place in the front seat and closed the car door.

  “How was dinner?” Eddie said, running a hand through his wet hair. “I heard it’s good, Jerry’s Chop House. The chops, especially.”

  The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable, understandable, and forgivable. Tonight would have been tough on anybody. Barone was Eddie’s best friend, and Geraci had shown him the ropes, yet Eddie had handled the whole business like a champ.

  Michael patted the weary caporegime on his damp, tattered shoulder.

  “You’ve rewarded my confidence in you, Ed. You have my gratitude.”

  Eddie Paradise mumbled his thanks. Michael signaled to Donnie Bags to go. The Lincoln and the panel truck pulled out of the filling station in different directions.

  Richie Two-Guns shook his head. “I take my hat off to you, Eddie,” he said. That same night, the man he’d started to groom as his own lieutenant, Renzo Sacripante—who, from all outward appearances, had done a fine job running the zip-laden Knickerbocker Avenue crew—had been garroted in a men’s room on Mott Street and was now a part of a different garbage heap, on a barge at the refuse station in Yorkville, courtesy of a city sanitation official for whom the day had come when it was necessary for him to perform a service for Michael Corleone.

  “Not that you got a hat to take off,” Eddie said.

  “On account of it’s already off to you,” Nobilio said, patting Eddie’s shoulder now, too.

  Michael had heard that Eddie was also put out that—as the Corleones settled all Family business—two traitors from his crew had been fed to his beloved lion in the basement of the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club. Eddie said he’d heard that once lions got a taste for human flesh, they’ll never again be happy eating four-footed mammals. Al Neri had assured him that was a myth, but what the fuck did Al Neri know about lions? Still, Al had reported to Michael, Eddie had gone along with it with a minimum of complaint.

  Now Eddie let out a deep breath, then turned on the radio, to a rock-and-roll station, and slumped down in his seat, clearly exhausted. Out of respect, no one asked him to change it.

  The men were all talked out.

  Donnie Bags—another of Geraci’s men who’d proven himself loyal to the Family—was a terrifically skilled driver, weaving through traffic, hitting lights perfectly, negotiating the wet roads without ever fishtailing or hydroplaning, all without calling attention to the many laws he bent to his own will. In no time they were crossing the Bayonne Bridge into New Jersey. Nobilio fell asleep. Eddie tapped a pinkie ring lightly against the glass, perfectly in rhythm with the beat of the song.

  For too long, Michael Corleone had taken for granted the skills of men like Donnie Bags, Richie Two-Guns, and Eddie Paradise.

  It had been after Michael’s sit-down with Eddie, the lecture about the traditions at the core of the organization Michael’s father had built, that the nightmares—or whatever they’d been—had stopped. Michael’s doctor attributed it—and the corresponding lack of any significant diabetic episodes—to better diet and less stress. But to Michael’s mind, it was because he’d figured out Fredo’s warning: to connect with the old ways, the old traditions, to remember that the source of their father’s greatness had been the relationships he built with people, relationships in which money and power were but by-products of fear and love.

  The car carrying Michael Corleone now sped into the darkness of the Holland Tunnel. The radio went to static. It startled Nobilio awake.

  “Don’t worry,” said Eddie Paradise. “We’re just underground.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For support in the writing of this book,

  the author would like to thank

  the Corporation of Yaddo,

  Florida State University,

  Dan Conaway, Neil Olson, and Amy Williams,

  and the incomparable Tom Bligh.

 

 

 
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