The chatter-gun tracked onto Iron Mike Cappolini and shredded the elbow of his gun arm just as his revolver was clearing leather. The .38 kept moving, flying from the grasp of suddenly nerveless fingers to shatter the painted glass wall of the office. Meanwhile the firetrack of death swept on, seeking and finding vital matter. Iron Mike’s throat exploded in twin crimson geysers; the big guy twisted to his knees and flopped face down into his own blood.
Jack the Bartender Avanti managed to jerk off two panicky shots toward that furiously blazing muzzle of death as he sprinted for the rear door. Then Death overtook him and pummeled him into a twisting, sliding heap at the back wall.
Collectors John Brunelli and Ham Magliocci, noted and feared throughout South Philly for their uninhibited pursuit of payday loan “vigorish,” received their final collections as they scampered for cover behind the wooden desk stacked with the fruits of their toil. Brunelli’s outflung arm raked the desk clean as he oozed across it; the collectors and the collected shared a common heap within the pool of blood that quickly marked the end of vigorish.
Death had “come fearful quick” to Cappy’s Liberty Garage—so quickly, in fact, that a mechanic and a customer standing just beyond that shattered glass wall were still frozen into shocked statues when the chattering knell ceased and quiet descended.
Gawking at the carnage through the broken wall, both men reacted with swiftly raising hands as the tall figure in executioner black turned calm attention upon them.
These two would later aver that the sight of Death Alive and Looking was even more unnerving than the sudden presence of Death Eternal Still. It was clad in black tight-fitting combat garb—belts crisscrossing the chest, another encircling the waist, “guns and stuff hanging from them,” the machine pistol suspended from a cord about the shoulders, eyes of bluest ice regarding them from an expressionless face of chiseled steel.
The muzzle of the chatter-gun dropped. The tall man’s hand moved in an almost imperceptible flick of motion. A small metallic object flew through the shattered wall and clattered to the cement floor at the men’s feet.
“That’s for Don Stefano,” a cool voice informed them. “Tell him. It’s over. Tell him.”
And then the tall apparition in black was gone, fading quickly into the shadows at the rear wall.
Perhaps ten seconds had elapsed since the first rattling burst of automatic weapons fire.
The two spectators to the awesome event did not move until they heard the door open and close; then the customer took a staggering step backwards and exclaimed in an awed whisper, “Christ—did you see that guy!”
The mechanic knelt to extend a shaking hand toward the metallic object on the floor. He picked it up, examined it, and released a hissing sigh.
“Yeah. That’s what it is,” he declared with a quiet rush of breath.
“What? What is it?”
“A marksman’s medal. The Brotherly Love Outfit is in for it now.”
“You saying that was Mack Bolan, the guy they call the Executioner?” the other man said, awed. He bent forward for a closer look at the medal. “You saying this place is a Mafia front?”
“It was,” the mechanic replied quietly, peering toward Death in the next room. “But … like the guy said … it’s over now.”
Not quite.
Mack Bolan knew better.
The Panic in Philly had only just begun.
Chapter 2/ Gradigghia
In a western Massachusetts city several hundred miles removed from the developments at Philadelphia, the number two man in that city’s local Mafia arm paced restlessly about his modest headquarters in a downtown office building.
He was a handsome man in his early thirties, medium height and build, with darkly glinting eyes which could switch in a flash from affable warmth to frosty speculation.
His name was Turrin; sometimes he was referred to but never directly addressed as Leo the Pussy.
Leo Turrin was a blood nephew of the late Sergio Frenchi, the boss of Western Massachusetts until his organization committed the blunder of the century—it was the Frenchi “family” which had figured in the birth of Mack Bolan’s home-front war against the mob.
Uncle Sergio had died during that initial skirmish and his family had fallen into almost total disarray. Leo the Pussy had proved a strong rallying point for the reconstitution of that vital Mafia arm and he had risen considerably in stature in the new organization.
Like Bolan, Turrin was a Vietnam veteran. Prior to his army service, he had resisted the tantalizing pull of Uncle Sergio and his assurances of easy money and practically unlimited power. Though he had grown up in its shadow, Leo had forever despised the Mafia and all that it stood for. With Vietnam behind him, however—and a resultant new maturity—Turrin “came in” with the Frenchi family, but he brought the entire federal government in with him.
That “penetration” had developed into the most successful undercover police operation ever attempted against the mob. With his favored position as blood relative to the aging Capo, Turrin’s rise to importance in the Pittsfield arm was almost automatic. He had balanced upon the edge of that knife for more than five years, had become a Caporegime under Frenchi, and was beginning to attain national stature when Bolan the Bold came along.
The blitz artist had hit Uncle Sergio’s little kingdom with thunder and lightning, damn near dislodging Turrin himself in the process. Only the last-minute revelation of Turrin’s true role had saved him from Bolan’s vengeance. From the rubble, though, the undercover cop had built for himself an even stronger position and considerable prestige in the national reaches of the syndicate.
He had also salvaged from those ruins the beginning of a great, if terribly hazardous, friendship with Mack Bolan.
Turrin personally considered himself as neither fish nor fowl. His active friendship with Bolan presented no conflict of duties in his own mind. He was a cop … but not really. He was a Mafioso … but not really. The only real thing he had found during five years of carefully manufactured deceit was the continuing relationship with the man whom both the law and the mob considered public enemy number one. To Turrin’s mind, Mack Bolan was the greatest human being alive. He wasn’t perfect, no—not even infallible—but still the by God greatest human being Turrin had ever encountered.
A man like Bolan did not happen to the world every day, nor even in every age or epoch. The Bolans of the world came few and far between. You could count them on humanity’s ten fingers, all the ones who had ever been.
And Leo Turrin worried a lot about Mack Bolan.
Perhaps no one, not Bolan himself, understood better than Leo Turrin the staggering array of forces pitted against the guy’s survival. Turrin was in a position to view both sides of the guy’s personal gauntlet, the cops as well as the mob … and yeah, he had good reason for worry. He’d done a lot of pacing the past few days, waiting, wondering when the claws of the pincers would close around the world’s best answer to La Cosa Nostra.
And so it was on that brooding Spring afternoon when the call finally came.
Turrin’s personal shadow, a goon called Hot Stuff Ribiello, scooped up the phone and muttered into it. “Yeah. I dunno, just a minute.” He caught Turrin’s expressionless eye and announced, “Long distance, collect. For you, boss. Guy named LaMancha. You wanta accept?”
The underboss of Pittsfield coolly replied, “I don’t know no LaMancha.”
“He don’t know no LaMancha,” Ribiello relayed to the operator. “Tell the guy to get lost.”
“Tell him to spend his own damn nickle,” Turrin instructed boredly.
“He should spend his own nickles,” the goon dutifully relayed. He laughed and hung up. “Some of these boys really got their nerve. I never made a collect call in my whole life even.”
“Good for you,” Turrin growled. He rubbed the back of his neck, then moved the hand around to massage the throat. “Hell,” he told the bodyguard, “I got to get some air. I’m going out t
o smell some sunshine.”
Turrin started for the door. Rubiello trudged along behind.
“Not you,” Turrin growled. “Stay put. I’m expecting Jake to call. Get the number where he’s at and I’ll call ’im back.”
“Don’t stand on no street corners,” the bodyguard suggested, as he gladly returned to the comfort of his chair.
Turrin grunted and ambled into the hallway. He lit a cigarette and displayed outward patience as he waited for the elevator. In the lobby he chatted for a moment with the girl at the newsstand, then drifted out the back way and across the parking lot, pausing now and then to sniff the air and flex his shoulders at the sun.
Precisely five minutes after rejection of the collect call from LaMancha, Turrin stepped into a public phone booth a block and a half from his office building, just in time to answer the first ring.
“Yeah, dammit, what’s been keeping you?” he asked without preamble.
A cool chuckle drifted through the instrument and a pleasantly modulated voice informed him, “Just got your broadcast twenty minutes ago. What’s the flap?”
“The flap, buddy, is your bloody ass,” Turrin growled. “Everybody wants it, and in that condition. I was hoping you’d call before—”
“Too late,” reported the real live Man from LaMancha, Mack Bolan.
“Yeah, I know, I heard it,” Turrin said gloomily. “Of all places, Sarge, why Philly? Why not Kansas City or Hot Springs, why not Dallas or Phoenix or—hell, even St. Louis or Detroit? Philly is where the big guns are mobbing up, Philly’s the place—”
“You know why I’m here, Leo.”
“Yeah, yeah. I guess it figures.”
“Did you have something specific in mind, Mother, or did you just want to say good-bye?”
“Specific, yeah,” Turrin growled. “I’d say that. Message from your buddy in Washington. He suggests quote take a vacation unquote.”
“Brognola, eh?”
“Yeh. He’s walking a tightrope, you know. Officially he’s running the entire national Get Bolan show. Unofficially his guts turn over every time he thinks about it. But you know Hal. The job is the job.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Bolan murmured. He sighed. Turrin heard the click of a cigarette lighter and a slow, hissing exhalation. “Sounds like I’m back in season.”
“Worse yet. The heat is on—very. Some congressional subcommittee is stoking the boiler. Hal thinks it’d be a good time for you to catch some R&R. He says Argentina is beautiful this time of year.”
The chuckle from the other end of the connection was downright icy. “Lousy hunting down there, Leo.”
“Yeah.” The number two man of Pittsfield shook away a spinal shiver. “Well, listen …”
A moment later, Bolan replied, “I’m listening.”
“I wouldn’t try Philly right now. Don Stefano has been expecting you. The word I hear, he’s imported a private army just to wait for your head to show. I think—”
“Imported from where?”
“The old country. Sicily. Very mean—”
“Gradigghia,” Bolan muttered.
“That’s the word. And I’ll give you another, buddy. Malacarni. It means a very bold dude, capable of anything. These old-country gradigghia, the Sicilian Mafia gangs, are composed entirely of people like that. They are very mean boys.”
“So I hear,” Bolan commented. “How are they getting them in?”
“Canada’s the usual route. The New York bosses started it. I hear now that Augie Marinello is running a regular body shop in imported guns. And old Stefano Angeletti isn’t letting any grass grow under his feet. He’s got a—”
“They running out of native talent?”
“You should know,” Turrin replied soberly. “Anyway, Don Stefano has this standing army of imported torpedoes. And they’re not standing there just to shade his tired old head from the sun.”
“Thanks, Leo. I’ll keep that in mind. Well …”
“Hold it, don’t hand up yet. Listen. This isn’t from Brognola. This is from me. Don Stefano’s army isn’t the only one you have to worry about. They’re bringing in cops from all around. City cops, county cops, state cops, federal cops. I’ve been watching the movements. They mean to get your ass this time, buddy.”
Bolan’s voice had gone totally sober and just a shade fainter. “Nobody lives forever, Leo. I have to fight it where it lays.”
“Well, you’ve picked the right lay this time.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Turrin agreed, sighing. “I guess that’s what you’re all about, windmill slayer. Okay. It’s your war. I just wanted you to know what it is you’re walking into this time.”
“Thanks. While you’re here, give me something else.”
“Like what?”
“A weakness.”
“Well …” Turrin was thinking about it. “The kid, I guess. Stefano’s son, Frank Angeletti. The old man has been grooming Frankie for the keys to the kingdom. But nobody really likes the choice.”
“Kid’s not rotten enough, eh?” Bolan said.
Turrin laughed feebly. “He’s not what you’d call a strong man. He’s not Capo material, Sarge.”
Bolan replied, “Okay, I’ll look into that. How about the girl?”
“Sometimes,” Turrin said, “I wonder who is feeding whom in this crazy interchange of ours. I’ll bet you know Stefano Angeletti’s whole family more intimately than he does.”
The cold chuckle sounded again. “What about her, Leo?”
“I’ll just say this, Sarge. If the Mafia outfits were not full of male chauvinist pigs, old Stefano would do a lot better to hand over his keys to his daughter, not his son. She’s everything the old man would like for Frankie to be, which he definitely is not.”
“Okay. That checks with my reading. Thanks, Leo. Uh, just one more item.”
Turrin knew what the “one more item” was. Bolan always sounded a bit embarrassed to inquire about his kid brother, Johnny, and the girl he’d left behind under Leo’s protection, faithful Val.
“They’re fine,” he replied. “They—”
“Okay, great, don’t tell me anything else. Our time is up, anyway. Thanks, Leo. I couldn’t hack it without you.”
“Bullshit,” Turrin replied mildly.
And then there was nothing but the hum of the broken connection.
Turrin sighed, hung up, moved out into the warming sun, and allowed the shivers to play with his backbone.
The guy couldn’t keep it going forever, God knew.
Very probably he would not keep it going even through Philly. Not with those odds—the cops, all those cops—the gradigghia…
Shit!
Leo the Pussy squared his shoulders in a movement of self-reassurance and strode quickly toward his office.
One thing those Angeletti gradigghia had better understand, for damn sure.
Mack Bolan was one hell of a superior malacarni himself.
Chapter 3/ The Challenge
Sure, Bolan had known about the importation of old-country gradigghia to bolster the U.S. Mafia’s sagging hard-arms.
It had been an inevitable development.
Guys like Capone, Luciano, and Anastasia had been products of their times—the hard old days of the American boom-and-bust era when the Italian-Americans, as an ethnic group, were in the cellar of American society—when a hungry, angry young man had to simply grab what he wanted and to hell with the consequences.
Times had changed.
Big city ghettoes were now peopled by Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and a general hodgepodge of have-nots of all races and national origins.
The Irish gangs were gone.
The Italian gangs were all but gone.
The Jew boys were gone.
The Blacks and those others who were left could not put it together—not like the Lucianos and the Lanskys and the Schulzes, the Legs Diamonds and the Mad Dog Colls. One reason they couldn’t pu
t it together was because the American crime scene had become so institutionalized—incorporated, almost—finely organized. The guys at the top of the pyramid were the survivors and the heirs of those hard, early days when “welfare” meant a pick and shovel and the Italians were the meanest, the quickest, and the most utterly determined to escape those selfsame picks and shovels and push-brooms.
Those same guys continued to dominate the organized crime territories of America.
But they were getting old.
And those who were coming up behind them were products of far different times. They didn’t have the hunger, the desperation, the sheer driving determination to survive and excel in a dog-eat-dog world.
The American Mafia had grown “soft”—in comparison with the old days, at any rate.
Success had spoiled Johnny Matthew.
He wanted it safe, now. He wanted it comfortable. He wanted to have without risking, to keep without struggling, to succeed without trying.
So he hired Blacks and Puerto Ricans and other hungry young men to do his dirty work.
And it simply wasn’t working out. The mob was losing its sense of solidarity in brotherhood—and with that loss went the teeth, the muscle, and the heart of the organization. Nickle-and-dime guys simply didn’t give a shit about omertà, family fealty, discipline.
The thing that had made Johnny Matthew the lord of his jungle was his ferocity of spirit, his unwatered orneriness, his instinctive leap to violence.
And those “attributes” were disappearing from the latter-day American Mafioso.
A man did not become a Capo because he was loved by those he ruled. He was Capo because he was the meanest and the most feared. It was as simple as that.
Of course, there were still plenty of the mean ones around. Bolan could certainly attest to that. But he himself had removed quite a few of those from circulation. The federal strike forces had put away a few more. These actions, coupled with the normal attrition through aging and interfamily violence, were combining to put the handwriting on the wall for all who had eyes to see. So, sure, it was no surprise to Bolan to learn that “the organization” was trekking to the old country for an infusion of hot new blood into their declining empire.
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