Now, in the cold air of his last morning in Catanzia, Mario walked down the hill from his house as quickly as he could and he came around a corner and went down the block toward the church, which stood facing a square.
Father Marsalano was pacing up and down with the chickens in the cobblestone piazza in front of the church. He carried a prayer book and a Polaroid camera. When Father Marsalano saw Mario turn the corner and come into the square, he brought his hand to his mouth and let out a yell. The chickens flapped up and hung around Father Marsalano’s ankles. If he could ever get them to go higher and begin flying in circles around him, he would claim he was Saint Francis of Assisi.
Eleven heads poked from doorways. Father Marsalano pointed to a boy of about seven, who was standing in his bare feet. The boy had short pants and a thin white shirt ripped at the elbows. Black uncombed hair fell onto his face. The boy came running across the square and followed the priest and Mario to the back of the church. A muddy lot covered with rocks and tin cans ran up the hill behind the church.
Father Marsalano held the camera out to Mario. The priest stepped into the lot, and the boy came through the cold mud after him. Father Marsalano grabbed Giovanni’s thin shirt and ripped the front of it. Giovanni made a face. Father Marsalano ran a hand through the mud. He wiped his hand on the front of Giovanni’s shirt and smeared the mud across Giovanni’s face. The kid’s mouth almost formed a word.
“All right,” Father Marsalano said to Mario, “take the picture.”
Father Marsalano stood with the prayer book in his left hand and his right hand on top of Giovanni’s head. Father Marsalano’s face became somber. Giovanni stuck his tongue out at the camera. Father Marsalano’s hand lifted from the top of Giovanni’s head. Then it came down hard enough to cause a concussion. Giovanni winced. Mario took the picture.
While Mario was flipping and pulling and peeling to get at the picture, Father Marsalano was on him like a blanket. The priest started saying, “Good! Good!” when he saw the picture. It was nearly as good as a Dr. Tom Dooley poster. Father Marsalano’s face was pleading. Giovanni looked only like early death.
Father Marsalano took Mario by the arm and started walking him to the back door of the church. Giovanni stood in the cold mud and made a fist with his right hand and brought his arm up and bent it at the elbow. Giovanni’s left hand slapped the inside of his right elbow. This is the classic expression of true Italian regard for the clergy, which first began to appear when Innocent IV was Pope.
Inside, Father Marsalano began writing in pen on the back of the picture:
Dear Friends Who Left Catanzia to Go to America and Become Rich, the Mother of God is watching always. So is Saint Angelo, who is the patron of Catanzia and everybody who ever lived in our town. This picture on the opposite side shows the place where your beloved church is going to erect a new orphanage. This poor little boy standing with me has no place to sleep or eat. He is very hungry now. Also very cold. Someday when we have the new orphanage which we will build this little boy will be warm and fed.
It is good to hear from you. Send me some good news in the mail. Then I will have good news for the homeless little children of Catanzia.
Yours in the Lord,
Father Giuseppe Marsalano
The priest put the picture into a manila envelope. The envelope was already stuffed with addresses of people who had gone to America directly from Catanzia, or who were members of families started by people who had gone to America from Catanzia and were now dead.
“All right, you go now?” the priest asked Mario.
“Yes, Father.”
“You know what to do in New York?”
“Go to the mailbox with them to make sure they send the money.”
“Good.” The priest cleared his throat. “Now, I tell you something. You be a good boy.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Don’t steal.”
“No, Father.”
“Respect womanhood. Remember. Every woman you meet will be the mother of somebody some day. You respect that. Just remember, the Virgin Mary watches when you’re near a woman who will become a mother.”
At the airport Mario checked his baggage through to New York. He sat in the little waiting room with his ticket in his hand and looked out the window. The whitecapped, very blue waters of the Strait of Messina ran against the edge of the airport. Across the water the dark mountains of Sicily climbed straight up. Mount Etna, dark at the bottom, misty and snow-covered at the top, had gray smoke billowing from its crater.
Mario looked at Sicily. He had been there once, for a bike race at Palermo. The night before the race he had gone into a pasticceria on a little street near the hotel and he stood at a table and played brischola with a priest. The priest was cheating, but when Mario complained a man said he would cut off Mario’s ears if he complained again. Mario turned white, but he stayed and kept playing with the priest until there was a power failure. Palermo has three or four of them a night. While the owner was getting out his hurricane lamps, Mario’s hands swept the table. He scooped up all the money and ran out of the place. The next day, when the bike race started through the streets of Palermo, Mario put his head down in case the man who had threatened him was in the crowd. He did not lift it up until he was out in the hills of the countryside. Sicilians were strange people.
As Mario looked at the water he heard the noise of the plane. A twin-engined Convair was coming out of the sky. It was the plane which goes from Messina to Reggio Calabria to Rome. The date was January 23. In airports all over Europe, in Belgrade and Turin and Warsaw and Copenhagen, there were bike-riders waiting for planes to America and the many thousands of dollars which the six-day bike race would bring.
Chapter 3
BACCALA, THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCER of the six-day bike race, was at home asleep in his $175,000 brick house in Beachhaven, Long Island. Baccala is 5-foot-5. He was in bed on his back with his arms flung out and his mouth open. He looked like a rolled stuffed pork. His wife, Mrs. Baccala, was asleep on her side next to him. Baccala had his toes stuck between the calves of Mrs. Baccala’s legs so he would be warm all night. Mr. and Mrs. Baccala were the only people in the nineteen-room house. They had raised three children: Anthony Jr., who attended Georgetown and became a lawyer in Maryland; Vera, who attended Mt. Carmel College in New Hampshire, and now teaches in San Leandro, California: and Joseph, also known as Zu Zu, who dropped out of high school at the behest of a judge who sentenced him to six months in the reformatory. Zu Zu, twenty-six, is a very promising young shylock in Miami.
Of his three children, Baccala is proudest of Zu Zu. “He’s a good nice boy,” Baccala always says. All Mafia people succumb to an insidious urge to make their children respectable. But they are never comfortable with it. When the dons sit down for coffee and discuss their children, there are many baffled gestures made with the palms up.
“What do I know what he do?” Baccala said to Louis the Chink one day when asked about his decent son. “All the time he read a book. What do I know? He goes to the school.”
But when Zu Zu was fifteen and he had just stood his first pinch, felonious assault with a tire iron on his continuation-school teacher, Baccala came bounding into a restaurant and ordered everybody to drink up.
“What do you think-a my kid does today?” he said. “That little rat-a basset. What do you think-a he does? He breaks his teacher’s head!”
“A salut!” somebody called out.
“Aha!” Baccala said. He threw down a straight scotch.
With the children gone, Baccala’s house, with its bowling alleys in the basement, stereophonic-fitted bar and study, and square foot after square foot of Italian marble floors, was silent and empty. Outside, floodlights glared on the fenced-in grounds. Two tawny German shepherds loped around the grounds, ready to chew on anybody coming over the fence. Baccala does not rely on the dogs to wake him up if trespassers arrive. He has every inch of his windows and doors wired. The central alar
m system is on the floor under Baccala’s bed. Its major component is an air-raid alarm. Next to it are two loaded shotguns.
At eight a.m. Baccala was out of bed and ready to leave for the day. He was standing just inside the kitchen door while his wife, Mrs. Baccala, went out into the driveway in her housecoat. Mrs. Baccala slid behind the wheel of a black Cadillac. Baccala sat down on the kitchen floor and closed his eyes and folded his arms over his face. Mrs. Baccala started the car. When the car did not blow up from a bomb, Baccala got up from the kitchen floor and walked out into the driveway, patted Mrs. Baccala on the head as she came out of the car, got in, and backed down the driveway and went off to start another day.
Baccala was beautiful in his big black car. Covered with pressed black Italian silk, he looked stumpy, rather than dumpy. His head was stuck inside a tiny black fedora. The next size after Baccala’s hat is a college beanie. He sat on two overstuffed pillows. Without the pillows, Baccala would be so low in the seat that he would have to peer through the steering wheel. Even with the pillows, Baccala has a big wooden block strapped to the gas pedal.
Baccala pressed a $125 black alligator tasseled loafer onto the gas pedal. The shoes were, after Baccala’s heart, the most important part of his make-up. New shoes are the badge of the Mafia. Gangsters come from families who went barefoot in southern Italy and Sicily. The children were raised in America in worn sneakers, summer and winter. The first dollar they steal, on growing up, goes to a shoe store. Even old Mafiosos, the ones who have lived to pile up fortunes from narcotics and shylocking, cannot pass a shoe store without going in and buying a new pair. The danger in this is considerable, and many good law-enforcement people feel the way to break up the Mafia is to hit them in the shoes. This was borne out when a joint venture of Baccala’s and the Philadelphia mob’s turned into real trouble. Representatives from the two mobs shot four major welshers. Three men from each mob were assigned to a burial detail. The graveyard was a field in Rockland County. The six gravediggers who showed up with the bodies all wore $110 pebble-grained Bronzini customs. They walked on their toes through the mud. When they began digging, they tried to push the shovels down only with their toes. They kept stopping to rub their shoes on the backs of their trousers.
“Dig deep down,” one of them said.
“I got a fresh shoeshine,” somebody muttered.
“Mud gets in the lines around the dots,” one of them said, referring to the pebble grain.
The body never did get down very far. A good rainstorm a week later uncovered the bodies, and the FBI moved two mobile laboratories into the field.
As Baccala drove to work, the hopes of three personal families and of his whole Mafia family rested on him. He has the three personal families because he has two other wives, aside from Mrs. Baccala. One of the other wives is a twenty-nine-year-old cocktail waitress who is in a split-level house which Baccala bought for her in Teaneck, New Jersey. The other is twenty-four and redheaded and she wears fur coats and lives in an apartment on East 56th Street. He also has a sixteen-year-old high-school senior as a friend. The wives are absolutely legal wives as far as the government is concerned. Baccala files joint income-tax returns for all three families. Local authorities might require a divorce in here some place, but nobody has ever complained.
Baccala got married three times to solve a great problem which came to a head one night in 1955. The cocktail waitress he was to marry was sixteen. Baccala had her at the bar of a Chinese restaurant. They were sitting on stools and facing each other. The girl rubbed her young knees against Baccala’s. His body started to glow. He swallowed his vodka. It created a stirring in his loins. He waited until the Chinaman behind the bar was busy, and he slipped out of the place with the girl. Baccala would stiff a bishop. They walked up to Seventh Avenue, to the Park West Hotel. Baccala went into the cigar store on the corner. He stuffed a handful of twenty-five-cent cigars in his pocket. He took one from the fifteen-cent box and held it out to the clerk. He gave the clerk a dollar for the cigar. While the clerk made change, Baccala hit the candy stand and came off with six rolls of butterscotch Life Savers. He got the change and grabbed a Daily News on the way out.
He took the girl into the hotel lobby. The clerk pushed the registry pad at him. Baccala picked up the pen. He shot his cuffs and held the pen way out. He arranged his feet so his weight would be evenly distributed. Then he bent over the registry pad and brought the pen to it.
Make-a two sticks and put a little v between them, and that’s a big M.
He began drawing a capital M, the first letter of “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.”
Baccala’s knuckles whitened as he pushed the pen. After he had the capital S in Smith he broke into freehand.
Make a couple of mountains.
He made two mountains for the small m in Smith. It didn’t seem right. He went back to make another mountain, and his hand was tired and it slipped and made a mess of the card. Baccala could feel the reservation clerk’s eyes boring into him. Baccala dropped the pen and shook his hand. He was angry and too embarrassed to look at the clerk. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll three inches thick, with hundreds on the top, and snapped a five dollar bill off the roll.
“I got arthrite. You write in for me.”
The clerk looked at him haughtily. Baccala was crushed. For his pride, he wanted to bite the clerk on the nose. When he got upstairs with the girl he didn’t want to take his clothes off.
After that, Baccala wanted permanent lodgings for his romancing. So he married his two girl friends. Baccala stays home with Mrs. Baccala three nights. The other four are divided among his two other wives and the sixteen-year-old coed.
Baccala is in complete command of his business life. He never touches anything that is illegal. Every year, on Christmas Day, his chief shylock, Moe Fein, arrives with an envelope containing $50,000 in cash. The $50,000 is Baccala’s interest for the year on the $250,000 he gave the shylocks a year ago to put on the street for him. The shylocks loan it out for whatever interest they can get. But the first $50,000 must go to Baccala. And the $250,000 can be recalled at any time. Baccala passes on narcotics importing, but is never in the same room with narcotics. It takes large amounts of cash in small bills to pay for a shipment of heroin or cocaine which could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Baccala feels a shipment is worth it, he sends Moe Fein on a plane to Lucerne, Switzerland, to withdraw the money from Baccala’s numbered accounts. The accounts total over eleven million dollars. In Switzerland, Fein meets somebody from the Corsican drug-factory organization. Fein and the Corsican are bonded with their lives. Fein flies home, the Corsican disappears, and the narcotics shipment comes into New York from Montreal by car. The narcotics seep down to the street, where Negroes do the selling and much of the using. “We don’t hurt-a nobody, we only sell to-a niggers,” Baccala reasons. The money rises to Baccala. He is silent about it. But as nobody sees anything wrong with gambling, Baccala openly admits he runs all bookmaking and policy numbers in Brooklyn.
Baccala is one of the many Mafia bosses who generally are depicted as controlling sprawling businesses. He has been involved in a number of legitimate enterprises. At one time he was one of the city’s largest dress-manufacturers. He used threats, acid, and non-union help. People in the garment industry referred to a Baccala dress as “the buy or die line.” The chief assistant in the dress factory, Seymour Lipman, had a brother-in-law named Dave, who also was in the garment business. Dave sold Seymour material. It took four sets of books to do it, but Seymour Lipman and his brother-in-law Dave wound up with houses in Miami. Baccala was losing eighty cents each time he sold a dress. At the first-anniversary party for his dress business, Baccala arrived at the factory with a can of gasoline in each hand.
In another business venture, Baccala and the chief of the East Harlem mob, Gigi off of 116th Street, entered into what they felt would be a gigantic stock-swindling operation. They were doing business with, they were assured, co
mplete suckers. “High-class Protestant people, what could they know?” Gigi off of 116th Street said. Then the high-class Protestants went to Nassau for a week. Baccala and Gigi suddenly lost $140,000 each in the market and were indicted for illegal trading in potato futures.
After being arraigned, Baccala growled, “I shoot-a somebody, but first I gotta find out-a who I shoot-a and what for I shoot-a him.”
It cost him another $35,000 in legal fees before the indictment was dismissed.
But as money makes geniuses of all men, Baccala is known as an immensely successful real-estate holder in Brooklyn. The first thing a Sicilian in America seeks is property. This is a reaction to centuries of peasantry. Baccala’s first money went for a small house with a back yard in Canarsie. He planted fig trees in the back yard and when it got cold he covered them with tar paper and put paint cans on the tops of the trees. This, along with religious statues and flamingos on the front lawns, is the most familiar sight in an Italian neighborhood. Baccala bought all his property through Joseph DeLauria. In New York State it costs $100 to form a corporation. Shareholders in the corporation do not have to reveal themselves. They can nominate a person to represent them in a realty corporation. In buying realty, DeLauria forms a new corporation specifically to purchase one parcel. He then nominates his secretary to be the name of record for the new corporation. Anybody attempting to check a realty deal runs into a secretary. She traces back to another corporation. Baccala’s name is nowhere, and he owns land worth millions. Many business people understand the connection but don’t mind doing business. Money is money.
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