See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  Then they drove off in a black Cadillac leaving him wondering if anything had happened at all, but knowing that it must have. “Where else would a dead body come from?” he asked himself. Moments later, his brother returned complaining loudly about his lack of enthusiasm for Cowboys and Indians when he noticed Elliot’s stunned expression.

  “Hey,” he said. “You peed in your pants!”

  Once he could bring himself to speak, Elliot showed his brother the body.

  “Jesus,” Steven muttered. “It really is a dead body—and you saw who did it, Elliot.”

  “No. No, I didn’t,” he stammered remembering his pledge. “I didn’t see nothin’. I didn’t see no one.”

  From there, Steve, who immediately saw star status in the murder, took credit for finding the body since his little brother was too frightened to care and offered no objection. Together they made a beeline for their Uncle Lou’s luncheonette on Webster Avenue.

  “I found a dead body! I found a dead body!” Steve proclaimed.

  “Shut up,” his Uncle Lou shouted back. “You’re going to make people lose their appetites!”

  Undeterred, Steve left for their Uncle Saul’s laundry, just down the block on 174th Street, with Elliot in tow.

  “I found a dead man. He was shot. I found him. Now we’ve got to call the police!”

  Saul, who owned the laundry where their father worked as a driver, couldn’t fathom what they were trying to tell him.

  “Marty,” he said turning to their eighteen-year-old cousin, “go back to the lot with them, and see what they’re talking about.”

  The three went to the deserted lot, filled with garbage and debris, and Marty couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “My God, Steve,” he managed to utter, “you really did find a dead body! You’re like,” he thought for a minute, “like a movie star!”

  They were not movie stars, and in truth, though the term “nerd” had yet to be coined, if you were to look up nerd in the dictionary, a photo of him, Elliot Litner, scrawny and bookish, with thick, black-rimmed glasses, would undoubtedly be staring back at you. Still, finding a dead body and witnessing a murder in those days was front-page news, and though the police, who later arrived, came to learn the truth of what happened, Elliot kept his vow of silence even after intense questioning. It was this stance that earned him notoriety and an odd kind of respect in the neighborhood as a kid who could be trusted and wouldn’t “rat.”

  The next morning, headlines in papers ranging from the New York Mirror to the Daily News carried the headline BRONX BOY DISCOVERS BODY. Then below, GANGLAND VICTIM MURDERED IN GUN DEAL GONE BAD. But if notoriety would get him free penny candies at Moe Greenberg’s corner candy store, it was obviously something his mother, Etta, could do without.

  “Abe, I tell you these gangsters are going to come and kill my lil’ Ellie,” she wailed to his father. “I know it, I know it as sure as God is in ’eaven!”

  The gangsters didn’t come. They didn’t have to. They were already there. This was the Bronx, stomping grounds for such notorious mob figures as Dutch Schultz and Abner “Longy” Zwillman; chosen location for the coronation of capo di tutti capi Salvatore Maranzano as “boss of bosses” attended by Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, Tom Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Joseph Bonanno—in other words, anyone that was anyone in the Italian underworld. The mob’s infiltration of New York had started long before that.

  The Sicilian Mafiosi, symbolized by the “Black Hand,” had been well-known in the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx since the turn of the century extorting immigrant shopkeepers, hijacking goods, and kidnapping wealthy businessmen for ransom. Even the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, became a victim when during an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, shortly before World War I, he received a Black Hand letter demanding $2,000. He paid without resistance. Then a second demand, this time for $15,000 arrived, compelling him to meet with the police, who captured two prominent Italian businessmen as they attempted to retrieve the money from beneath the steps of a deserted factory. It was one of the few successes by law enforcement against the early New York Mafia, but Caruso, despite his fame, required police and private protection for years to come.

  Still, while Elliot was doing his best to survive in the Bronx, working with his brother at Uncle Saul’s laundry and reading biographies about Pasteur, Curie, and Einstein, there were two other kids whose lives would later become entwined with his living just a few miles away. One was John Gotti born, like him, in a rented tenement apartment in the Bronx. The other was Rudy Giuliani, living in a modest two-family brick house in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Interestingly, even then, both were admiring historical icons placed at poles exactly opposite one another. Gotti’s hero was Chicago crime lord, Al Capone, and Giuliani’s, the ambitious and cunning New York prosecutor-turned-governor, Thomas E. Dewey.

  In days to come, of necessity, Elliot would become an expert on Rudolph Giuliani. Born in New York, the son of Harold and Helen, Giuliani’s family had by the early 1950s relocated to a two-bedroom Cape Cod house in Garden City, Long Island. Rudy was enrolled at St. Anne’s, a Catholic school run by the Sacred Heart of Mary nuns, where students were required to wear uniforms consisting of navy blue pants, a white shirt, and blue tie. There he learned the value of discipline above most everything else. Along with teaching discipline during the Cold War era, the sisters’ secondary agenda was imbuing the ability to isolate an enemy, Communism in this case, and despise it to the core.

  In those early days, and through his adolescent years at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School where he was taught by Christian Brothers, Rudy, much as his hero Thomas Dewey, developed a love of opera even while his father pushed him toward more “manly” endeavors such as boxing and baseball. Encouragement to compete was hardly needed, however, as the academic requirements at Bishop Loughlin were rigorous and unforgiving. The walls of the classrooms bore just two symbols, a crucifix and an American flag.

  John Gotti’s childhood was ultimately “different,” but intrinsically the “same,” as if a chemical formulation of identical constituents had been mixed at dissimilar proportions creating an alternate version of the same amalgam.

  Described at the zenith of his career as ‘Al Capone in an $1,800 suit,” John “Johnny Boy” Gotti was anything but dapper while growing up in the Bronx with twelve brothers and sisters. His father was a low-earning man of Neapolitan origin, barely able to provide for the thirteen children he’d fathered in less than sixteen years. “The guy never worked a fuckin’ day in his life. He was a rolling stone. He never provided for the family,” Gotti once complained in an FBI-taped conversation with underboss Sammy Gravano. “He never did nothin’. He never earned nothin’. And he never had nothin’!”

  When he was ten, the Gotti family moved, not to Long Island like Giuliani’s, but to a rented Brooklyn house in East New York where La Cosa Nostra was as intertwined with its citizens as the Catholic Church. Gotti’s parents cared little about his education, and by the time he was fourteen, he was committing petty crimes and sporting a tattoo of a serpent on his right shoulder. At sixteen, he quit Franklin Lane High School to run full-time with a gang called the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. They stole cars, dealt in stolen merchandise, ripped off stores, and rolled drunks stepping out of gambling parlors.

  Other members included guys who would become lifelong criminal associates like Angelo Ruggiero, known as “Quack-Quack” because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, a sometimes professional boxer, who would loom large in the life of both John Gotti and Elliot Litner as Il Dottore, the Mafia doctor.

  3

  INITIATION

  “You’re a guy who can be trusted, and that makes you one of us.”

  As a young boy, Elliot lived an extremely sheltered life, and if there was a line drawn that sequestered him, his aunts, uncles, and parents from the rest of society, it was the parameters of the Bronx itself. Rarely did his father
or mother, both Jews who had emigrated from the Kiev province of Russia, venture outside the borough. Why should they? His dad worked eighty hours a week at Uncle Saul’s laundry. His mother, a genius when it came to cooking, spent her time filling their tiny kitchen with the intoxicating aromas of her specialties: noodle kugel, a pudding of noodles and eggs; matzobrei, matzo fried with eggs into a pancake; and rosca, Elliot’s favorite, big round sweet rolls with sesame seeds.

  His world, and that of his brother, Steven, five years older than he, was also self-contained: P.S. 28, two blocks from the six-story apartment house where they lived on Anthony Avenue; Saul’s laundry; Uncle Lou’s luncheonette; 174th Street where they played stickball; and the “backies,” their word for the mountainous garbage dumps they sledded down on cardboard boxes for fun after school. That was the extent of their universe, all separated by Tremont Avenue, the main thoroughfare before the coming of the Cross Bronx Expressway, where, if they valued life and limb, all forms of motion stopped. It was verboten. They were forbidden from crossing such a dangerously trafficked street.

  The neighborhood itself was made up predominantly of Jewish merchants. There were very few blue-collar types among the Jews. For those services, there was the next largest population, the Italians, who just as the Irish became cops, seemed to prefer employment as masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and on occasion, something else.

  Exactly what “something else” meant didn’t occur to Elliot until much later, but among the Italian kids and their families, there was one occupation that seemed ineffable.

  “My dad works at the laundry. Where does your dad work?”

  Silence. Shuffling of feet. “He don’t really work nowhere. He does a little of this and a little of that.”

  “Oh,” Elliot would say, as if some secret understanding had passed between them, thinking that maybe he was what? A Catholic priest?

  That was the way it was in many respects between Italians and Jews in the Bronx at that time. No question, there were differences in culture and religion, but there were also many values they shared. Their parents, for one, had brought with them the European experience along with the monumental decision to move to America. And while they were Americanized, they had both acquired century-old habits from the Old Country that bonded Jews and Italians into a respect for family values that they felt all around them on a daily basis.

  No better example of the symbiosis that existed between them was the fact that for the Orthodox Jews, during the High Holy Days and bar mitzvahs, Italians would often act as Shabbes goys who turned the lights on and off on the Sabbath for those whose orthodoxy forbade it.

  But the cooperation didn’t end there—at least not for Elliot. While he was a totally subpar athlete and about as tough as tofu when it came to fighting, he was always an extraordinary student and would get 100 percent and A+ for nearly every subject, except gym, on his report card. Phrases like quid pro quo meant nothing to him then, but the basic arrangement went something like this. At their next-door neighbor, Mr. Micelli’s request, Elliot would tutor his son, Nicky, and others to help get them through exams. In turn, they’d protect him from neighborhood tough guys who viewed him as an easy mark for lunch and spending money.

  It was at about that time that Elliot discovered the opposite sex, and for a fourteen-year-old, it was quite a discovery. Her name was Helga Schmidt, and if a name like Helga stirs visions of a large, redhead with horned helmet and loud singing voice, this was not a Helga of the Teutonic-Amazon variety. Far from it, for she was, to him, like a goddess. Her hair was long and golden, her face radiant, and when she smiled, paradise opened up to him.

  As important, Helga was what adults at the time called “mature.” This meant that she had breasts, two of them, that swelled from her chest like the choicest fruit on the vine. Simply outstanding. And, one day, Elliot actually touched one, or at least, brushed up against it during a study hall when she reached across a tabletop to get a mathematics book. Elliot looked at her. She looked at him. And, miraculously, Helga smiled. It was a sweet, vaguely coquettish glance that immediately evaporated when everyone at the table who’d seen their encounter laughed and teased until she rushed away, embarrassed.

  Unfortunately, Helga’s brother, Max, who was captain of the football team and a bully in the Goebbels tradition, was not so amused. After school that day, he waited for Elliot, along with four or five members of the team, mostly Irish. The football players circled Elliot in the schoolyard while Max, who was with him in the center, began shoving.

  “You Jew purr-vert! You like to touch the tits of the girls, huh?”

  Shove—no response.

  “So, you tink you can get a feee-1 from my little sistah, Jew boy, is that it?”

  Shove—no response.

  Well, not only did Max talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was built like him and seeing that his friends were getting restless, finally rolled up his huge fist and hit Elliot hard in the stomach. That, of course, doubled him up. Then, Max clasped his two hands together in the shape of one gigantic fist and slammed it down onto the back of Elliot’s head. At that point, totally nauseous and gasping for air, Elliot was down, but not so incapacitated that he couldn’t see Nick Micelli, Joey Ficshetti, Sal DiGregorio, and Little Eddy Sabella charging up the concrete hill where P.S. 28 stood to descend upon the varsity bullies.

  One by one, the German and Irish guys were handled or fled as Nicky, who was shorter than Max, but broader and strong as a bull, broke through, throwing Max to the ground like a rag doll.

  Slowly Elliot got to his feet, horrified by Nicky’s ferocity as he beat Max’s face with his rock-hard fists, then got up and kicked him, joined by the others once Max’s fair-weather friends had been vanquished.

  Rolled into a ball, Max was surrounded as they wailed into his body, taking full-scale kicks into his arms, back, and ribs once they were exposed.

  “Hey! Nicky!!” Elliot screamed. “Enough! This guy’s balls are coming out of his eye sockets for Jesus’s sake! Stop it! Stop it already!”

  And they did, but not before Nicky grabbed Max by the front of his shirt and lifted him so that Max’s face was no more than two inches from his. “Listen, you Nazi bastard,” he seethed. “If you or any of your fucking friends ever lay a hand on Elliot Litner again, you’re dead, understand? This kid is ‘protected.’ He’s one of us, capisci?”

  Max nodded, licking blood away from the side of his mouth as Nicky shook him. “Copisci?” he demanded.

  “Yah. Yah, capisci” Max finally uttered.

  Then Nicky lowered him down to the ground, and once he collected himself, Max left to the shoves, smacks, and jeers of the others who had now formed a circle around him.

  “Elliot,” Nicky said, then turning to him with the care and sincerity of a zayde, blood brother, “are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

  “No, no, Nicky,” he said, so shy that he was embarrassed to even look up at him.

  “Nothing like this will ever happen to you again, Elliot. You have my word on that. You’re a good kid—solid. You help us, and you never tell anyone, even when they ask. You’re a guy who can be trusted, and that makes you one of us.”

  Elliot nodded, then looked into Nicky’s eyes understanding that he genuinely meant it. For whatever reason, Nicky had feelings for him. And, in an odd way, he was proud not only of the friendship, but that given Nicky and the group’s prominence in the school, he didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Not of Max. Or one dozen Max’s. For Elliot, this was a kind of epiphany.

  4

  BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN MAFIA

  “It was only later that Elliot learned Officer Kahler was a ‘bag’ man, and Salvatore Micelli a caporégime.”

  Of course, as Elliot would come to understand much later, the “special” relationship Jews and Italians shared wasn’t restricted to the Bronx, or New York for that matter. Historically, the symbiosis built around power and money between the two ethnic groups went back at least to the hey
day of Chicago underworld boss Johnny Torrio and a hoodlum genius named Arnold Rothstein.

  Torrio, who was nicknamed “the Fox,” was born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1882, but gravitated to Chicago where he went to work for Chicago crime boss “Big Jim” Colosimo running gambling operations, brothels, and narcotic distribution. Street smart and ruthless when he had to be, Torrio climbed his way through the ranks of Big Jim’s operations preaching an approach considerably different from his boss and most others working in the business of crime at the time.

  Torrio believed that “violence leads only to more violence,” though it was he who arranged Colosimo’s assassination by a young hood named Frankie Yale so he could take over his operation. Afterward, seeing, as many did, that Prohibition was a bonanza for crime lords like himself, he formed distribution alliances in Chicago, Detroit, and Canada, counterfeiting legal U.S. government alcohol certificates, buying distilleries in England and Scotland to control supply, and carving up the city of Chicago into inviolable territories to lessen mob tensions and maintain a “permanent” peace.

  The old joke goes “Jesus saves, but Moses invests,” and maybe there’s some truth to it because while Johnny Torrio saw a future for the Mafiosi in multinational corporations, it was Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, who articulated a vision of what organized crime could someday become.

  Rothstein was nicknamed “the Brain” because it was he who brought La Cosa Nostra to entirely new levels. Active, as were Al Capone and Torrio, in bootlegging, Rothstein expanded the world of crime into Wall Street, counterfeiting stock certificates, selling worthless bonds, making millions per year on the sale of stolen Liberty Bonds issued by the federal government during World War I. Not content with indirect control of most bootlegging operations in New York, stolen and counterfeit Liberty Bonds began showing up in Cuba, England, Nassau, France, and the Near East to purchase liquor and narcotics worldwide.