Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Why is that?” the Attorney General said.

  “Well, we do have several agents who could pass for Italian, but each time one of them gets close he is asked for the names of all his cousins,” the assistant director said.

  Hoover knows better than anybody that stool pigeons, not electronic eavesdropping, are the backbone of law-enforcement. Hoover himself would be merely another retired cop at the racetrack if a girl hadn’t once called him up and told him what movie John Dillinger was at. Yet for decades Hoover had no contacts around or within the Mafia, and the Mafia grew into a part of American life. Of course, even with a clear field, the Italians in the Mafia never have come close to the magnitude of larceny committed here by English Protestants, but they have been formidable, given the limits of education and intelligence.

  And now, here, in Brooklyn, the Mafia was starting to stretch out and wrap its tentacles, as the newspapers write it, around another part of American life. The Six-Day Bike Race. And Joseph DeLauria was presenting himself around town as a bike-race promoter. He rented an armory, put his name on letterheads, contacted a booking agent in Rome, and awaited other ceremonial duties. The real job of putting on the show, getting the track built, and organizing the gambling was left to Kid Sally Palumbo and his people.

  Chapter 2

  THE COLD WIND FROM the mountains ran through the stone streets that have no trees. When Mario Trantino came out of the house into the early-morning emptiness, the air forced his eyes to widen. The street was an alley built on a sharp hill, which started in the center of town and ended in the rocks and mud where the hill became the start of a mountain. The alley ran between attached two-story stone houses which were pastel-colored but tiny and dirty inside and with running water only in the daylight hours. The narrow sidewalks were lined with cars parked half on the sidewalk. A new gray Fiat was in front of Mario’s door. The auto-rental agency where he worked had given him its best car, at an employee’s rate, for his trip. It was a fine car, but all Mario cared was that the machine knew enough to move. He despised cars. His job was apprentice mechanic and handyman at the auto-rental agency, but he really considered himself a young artist.

  Mario always went around town with his shoelaces untied. He did not care for this, because he always tripped on the laces. And then his arches ached constantly because he had to walk in a way that would both get him where he was going and keep the loose shoes from falling off his feet. Mario told everybody that he did not like shoelaces because this is the first way that society ties up the human personality. When people in town said he was crazy, Mario beamed. He did not need glasses, but he would take his uncle’s, thick, silver-rimmed things, and walk with the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. When Mario had to see, at a streetcorner, he looked over the tops of the glasses. Otherwise, he kept his eyes looking down. The thick glasses hurt his eyes, so he would close them and pretend he was a blind man and concentrate on visualizing things. Mario said this kept the world from distracting him. It also kept the people in town shaking their heads and clucking. This made Mario feel it was the only way he could make people regard him as artistic.

  In his town, the town of Catanzia, in Calabria, in southern Italy, there was no way for an artist to subsist or to be recognized, and his chances of developing his talent were limited. So Mario Trantino had to walk around town with his arches aching and his shoes flopping and his eyes closed, tripping over his shoelaces quite often, but his real suffering began when he had to go to work on his job. Every wipe of a cloth and every turn of a wrench at the auto-rental garage went against Mario. Near the end of a day a pain would shoot through the palm of Mario’s right hand. The pain was caused by the nail being driven through his hand and into the cross.

  A woman came through the doorway curtain of the next house and smiled good morning to Mario in the cold morning air. A nannygoat with straggly hair, black-tipped with dirt, followed her. The woman put a brazier, black from fire, on the sidewalk. The brazier was filled with tree branches broken into small sticks. She stuffed a fistful of balled-up paper into the sticks and put a match to the paper. The nannygoat sniffed at the brazier and then backed up from the flames and went through the curtain and into the house. The woman was starting the morning fire to warm the house. When the paper burns and the sticks first catch, the flames are too high and wavery to bring into the house. The woman stepped away from the brazier to wait for the flames to become low. Using her skirt as a potholder, she brought the brazier upstairs in the house and put a little pocket of warmth into the morning dampness. The goats and chickens lived downstairs in the house. Mario’s house had a striped curtain, more like a bathtowel, on the door. Behind the curtain a cow stood in straw that was wet with urine. The woman stood and watched the flames. She smiled at Mario again and walked over to the gray Fiat and began polishing the fender with her wool skirt. Southern Italy is the same as the rest of the world. People stroke and polish machines while goats urinate in their houses.

  In a few minutes Mario would be using this car to leave Catanzia forever. He was driving to Reggio Calabria and the 9:35 a.m. plane to Rome. At Rome he would transfer to the International Terminal and get on the 1:45 p.m. Alitalia flight to America; to Kennedy Airport in New York, to Manhattan, and to Brooklyn, and to all the great things that everybody said that he, Mario Trantino, surprise third-place finisher in the Milan-San Remo amateur bike race, was sure to receive for placing very high in, or winning, the World Championship Six-Day Bike Race in New York. If Mario failed and had to come home, he would sit down backward on the railroad tracks at Reggio Calabria and eat his sandwich and let the Naples express come from behind and do the rest.

  When the letter inviting Mario to the bike race had come six weeks ago, it put a flash of brightness in his chest. The letter was from a booking agent in Rome named Rinaldi, who said he was representing an organization of American-Italian men who were anxious to bring back bike-racing to its rightful place in American sports.

  In Europe only a few athletes make more than a champion bike-racer. With bike-racing in America unknown in the last twenty-five years, Rinaldi had to produce contestants at a price American promoters could afford. Rather than contact professionals chasing big fees and endorsements on the European circuit, Rinaldi went for reasonably good amateurs and pointed out to them that nobody would notice they were being paid in America. Besides, there was the free trip to America. Any dreams Mario had of becoming a great rich bike-rider were minute compared to his desire to get to America. Rinaldi wanted Mario to team with another fairly good Italian amateur, Carlo Rafetto of Milano. In his letter he said Mario had a fine chance to win. As the sponsors in America had made it plain that they were not about to turn over much money to some oily Turk, Rinaldi was booking only people learning how to ride a two-wheeler, or advanced tuberculars, from countries other than Italy. He was an expert at doing this. Once, for Rossi, the popular but slightly weak Italian lightweight, Rinaldi brought in a German with a broken hand. Rinaldi told the German that if he punched very fast with the broken hand, he would not notice the pain.

  For his trip, Mario was guaranteed all expenses plus $1000 American. If his team won the race, the letter said, prizes could run to as much as $2500. There was even a chance the bike race would go on tour throughout America. When Mario took the letter to the bank to look up the money-exchange tables, the teller hung over his shoulder. The teller began shaking when he saw the amounts Mario was inspecting. The teller blessed himself and kissed his fingers. He leaned over the top of the counter and kissed Mario.

  Mario took a deep breath of the cold morning air and started walking down the hill. He took long strides. At twenty-three, Mario Trantino was probably the most striking male in Catanzia. If he had grown up in a freer atmosphere than the vacantness of Catanzia, he would have been on the preferred invitation list of every party that had the chance of becoming an orgy. Mario had a proud body that was a little bit over six feet and was contained in 165 pounds. Black hai
r clung to his head in waves. Sideburns dropped to a point that was a full inch lower than they were on the picture of Garibaldi in Mario’s house. His face was clear and had a tone and life to it that comes from the constant breaking of sweat during some form of athletics. His dark brown eyes gleamed with excitement. His nose, just prominent enough to get into trouble with a fast-closing door, put a measure of Roman history onto his face. He wore his only suit, a tight-fitting pepper-and-salt with double vents.

  On his job at the auto-rental agency, Mario took interest only at lunchtime when Savona, the fat manager, would sit at his desk and sip chocolata and play cards with Mario. Savona wore eyeglasses that were as thick as windshields. The eyeglasses would steam up in the noon heat; Catanzia was very cold at night and on both edges of night and very hot at midday, and at noon Savona would take the glasses off and wipe them. With his glasses off, Savona was technically blind. It is extremely helpful to play cards for money with somebody who is not too good at seeing.

  Mario’s other small pleasure on the job was to stretch out underneath a car he was working on and pretend he was a gynecologist tinkering with Sophia Loren. When he would get tuckered out from this, he would fall asleep. His head would be on the cement that was covered with oil and grease, but this wouldn’t matter to him.

  Mario had been putting things on paper since he was eight. Each morning that summer he had bicycled two miles down a twisting road to the small resort hotel on the cliff over the sea. The hotel allowed kids to put out deck chairs and run other small errands for tips. The hotel was out of the way, and the only foreign tourists ever to stay there were a childless couple from Manchester, England. The man was a schoolteacher who liked to paint. He liked vacationing on the Calabrian coast because nobody came up to him and insisted he needed a drink when all he really wanted to do was paint. At first, the kids from Catanzia formed a circle behind the man and watched him paint. They would lose interest and leave. All except Mario. When the schoolteacher came for the second summer, he had a paintbox for Mario. The little boy spent some of his afternoons sitting on the cliffs and putting colors on paper while the man painted. Once in a while he looked at what Mario was doing and made suggestions. The schoolteacher spoke fair Italian and was able to make himself understood. And by the middle of the third summer Mario was starting to pick up enough English for the beginnings of conversation. In the summer of Mario’s twelfth year the schoolteacher and his wife did not come, and the hotel never heard from them again. But the man had left his impression on Mario. The boy loved to draw and paint. In school, Mario leaped ahead of the class in English and because it was so easy he worked even harder on the subject. When somebody’s relatives from America came to Catanzia for a visit, Mario would show off and talk to them in English that was a couple of shades better than that used by the relatives.

  Mario also showed off his art work. He brought a pencil sketch of Christ on the cross to the rectory, and it still hangs in the front room of the rectory. Another of Mario’s sketches was far more famous in Catanzia. Mario made the sketch when he was sixteen, and he did it carefully and slowly over several weeks of peeking at his uncle and aunt on Sunday afternoons in order to obtain an immensely detailed sketch of the two of them steaming through knockout sex. When Mario showed it around the street for the first time, so many kids collected around him and made so much noise that a fight started. A stumpy old man named Doto got up from a cane chair in front of his house and waved a stick at the boys and chased them. When Doto saw Mario’s sketch, he pretended to go into a rage. He grabbed it from Mario and told him to go to confession. Doto took the sketch and tottered down to the pasticceria and passed it around to the old men having coffee, and the old men choked and doubled up and coffee ran down their chins. Doto brought the sketch home, and he keeps it in the top drawer of his bureau. He looks at it every Sunday afternoon in hopes of being stimulated.

  There was no impetus at home for Mario to do anything but work at a job. His mother had died when he was six. His father was a name on a birth certificate, put there for form. He was raised, with four cousins, by his uncle and aunt. The seven people lived on one large bed, and on three cots, in three rooms in the tiny house. Whenever Mario drew anything around the house and showed them his work, the uncle would say, “That’s nice, but come with me today and do something good. Pick up almonds with me today.” Then Mario had to go out with a burlap sack and long sweepers made of sticks and scratch almonds from the ground and into the burlap, while his uncle walked around hunting chipmunks with a .22 rifle. The family ate the animals and sold the almonds.

  There was a girl in town named Carmela and she worked at the dry-goods store, and Mario asked her to go to the movies one night and Carmela’s aunt, who was called Zia Nicolina, showed up as chaperon. Zia Nicolina did not look like a chaperon. She looked, from neck to midsection, like a cow. Her stomach looked like a steam boiler wrapped in black cloth. Zia Nicolina was unmarried. During the war, when there had been Italian and then German and then American troops in the town, Zia Nicolina had been able to take care of entire regiments. The Germans used to send a command car to pick her up. As a chaperon, Zia Nicolina was a large bulldog. At the movies she sat directly behind Carmela, with her fat hands draped over the seats between Carmela and Mario. Every time Mario shifted his weight, Zia Nicolina’s hands dug into his shoulder. “Stay on your side,” Zia Nicolina rasped. The walk home was excruciating because Zia Nicolina got between them, one hand tightly gripping Mario’s arm, and she complained of arthritis until they reached the door; then she shooed Carmela inside and told Mario to go away.

  Mario endured it because Carmela was the only girl in town who seemed to find any amusement in his untied shoelaces and his eyeglass habits. One night, when he had a date to take Carmela to see a picture billed as Gangster Story, Mario arrived to find Zia Nicolina standing outside the house.

  “Carmela’s sick,” Zia Nicolina said.

  “Oh,” Mario said.

  “You can’t see her, she sleeps,” Zia Nicolina said.

  “Well, tell her I was here and that I hope she is better,” he said.

  He turned to go.

  “Hey!” Zia Nicolina said.

  “Yes?”

  “You take Zia Nicolina to the movie instead?”

  A vise closed around Mario’s throat and he nodded yes, and Zia Nicolina grabbed his arm and he walked her down to the movie house. She sat next to him all night, her fat legs brushing up against his, her hand grabbing his arm when anything happened. Her face, which needed a shave, was shiny with sweat. Carmela and her family lived in a house at the top of the hill, on the edge of town. On the way home Zia Nicolina made Mario go a block out of the way because she wanted to find a hoe she said she had left in the field her family tilled. Zia Nicolina stepped into the field, and Mario, one hand on her elbow, followed her. Zia Nicolina went a couple of steps and then backed into Mario like a truck. Mario was off balance when Zia Nicolina twisted around and put her hands on the back of his neck. She fell backward, and Mario came down on top of her.

  Mario despised the night with Zia Nicolina. He had a great love for the earth and the colors and shadings of ground in the sunlight, and he loved the symmetry of a girl, not just her body, but her hair and her eyes and her mouth and the depth that her face could show, and he loved his mornings up on the hills, with the sounds of his work, the tinkling of water running through the brushes when he rinsed them, the tiny sound of a pencil biting into good paper. Every morning he rode up the road winding along the mountain, pushing his legs until they were on fire and then became numb. When he could go up no more, he stopped and drew. When it was time to leave, he turned and came flying down the mountain and onto the hill at the foot of the mountain and down through the town, and he always headed for the start of the road which led out of town and while he was racing on his bike through the town he imagined he was leaving it forever. At the last corner he would turn and slow down and pedal sullenly to his job at the a
uto-rental agency.

  Riding through the hills made him the best bike-rider in Catanzia by the time he was sixteen, and he entered and won several small races sponsored by the church societies. He entered a townwide race and won that too. Savona, from the auto-rental agency, was a bike-racing fan. The day before Mario stumbled out of high school, Savona offered him a job. Mario took the job and continued bike-racing on weekends. He began entering amateur races all over Italy. He received expenses and also placed in the first twenty finishers often enough to earn silent bonuses. He earned $200 for his first major victory, the 25-kilometer race.

  He spent most of this money on expensive art paper. Mario’s drawing was put to uses of sorts around Catanzia. At a charity carnival for one of the churches he sketched faces and took in more money for the church than the weight-guesser did. Once Mario did a poster for a local bike race and a man from the race committee in Naples liked it so much he gave it to a sporting newspaper in Naples. The sketch ran in the paper, and when Mario got the clipping in the mail he walked around looking at it so much that the newsprint began to disintegrate.

  For one big championship race Mario went to Rome, and he took a guided tour of the Cinecittà film studios. In one building dozens of people were sitting in an air-conditioned room and working at drawing boards. They were animating comic strips that ran on television. One of the artists, about twenty-five, had long straggly hair and wore a flowered shirt, tight chino pants, and cowboy boots. He was whistling while he cut out little strips of gray-speckled cellophane and carefully glued them over parts of the comic strip. The tour conductor was talking about the hard, precise work going on in the room. Mario jumped when he heard the word “work.” When he got back to Catanzia and was polishing his cars, he kept hearing the tour conductor say the artists were working.

  When he was in Rome, Mario took a walk on the Via Veneto and dawdled in the light from the kiosks on a big corner newsstand across the street from the Hotel Excelsior. Mario’s eyes jumped when he saw an entire rack of magazines with titles: Il Giornale di Artista, The Artist, and Studio International of Modern Art. Mario liked the American magazines best. In one of them the first article was titled, “A Basic Approach to Composition.” It was written by Grant Monroe. A picture of Grant Monroe, with great bushy hair and in a T-shirt, ran with the article. The caption read: “Grant Monroe at his studio on 10th Street in New York’s East Village.” Mario read the article, which was difficult because it referred to a thing called the “Golden Section,” which is a triangular way of arranging scenes so that people look into them, rather than see a flat, straight-up-and-down arrangement. He read the magazines for months, always returning to the picture of Grant Monroe and his bushy hair, and he dreamed of meeting him one day. Then the letter from Rinaldi came, and Mario walked around with the magazine under his arm. He would go to America and see Grant Monroe and become an artist and never leave America and never see Catanzia again.