by Ron Felber
“No, Doc, no!” the bodyguard moaned.
Lou turned away, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket. But before he could light it, Carlo Gambino’s frail, clawlike hand tugged at his arm. The old man simply nodded as it seemed he always did rather than speak, either in Sicilian or English. It was then that it dawned on Elliot. The reason Don Carlo never spoke, but had others address him by physical signals, Sicilian, or coded phrases, was his fear of FBI surveillance: bugs, wiretaps, parabolic microphones. None of them did any good if you never spoke, using other forms of communication instead.
Elliot rolled the old man over, pulled down his loosened pajama bottoms, and then did the unthinkable. He put his finger up Carlo Gambino’s rectum while a room full of his bodyguards and protectors watched. The old man let out a low moan, then cursed in Sicilian as Elliot felt the bulging arterial walls confirming what he feared. There was a real possibility that Gambino’s aorta would rupture before he could do anything.
“I can help, but we have to get him to the medical center fast. If I call ahead, we can have everything waiting. They’ll take him to an emergency operating room where I can catheterize him and relieve his pain. Then he’ll go to the operating room to have his aneurysm repaired. He’ll be in the hospital for a while.”
Lou shook his huge head from side to side with absolute resolve. “He can’t stay.”
“What?”
“Nobody can know he’s sick, Doc. He already had problems with his heart last year. Before that, too. He can’t be sick again, see what I’m saying? It would not be a good thing for us. Or for you.”
“For me? Wha-what are you? Are you threatening me?”
“No, Doc. We’re trusting you. If he does stay, there can’t be no paper on it, capesci?”
“Okay. There won’t be. No record of admittance. No medical record. For tonight and until he leaves the hospital, your boss will be like the Invisible Man.”
“Thank you, Doc,” said Lou clasping Elliot’s hand with a sincerity that seemed to pour from his heart. “The things they say about you, they’re all true.”
It was then that Don Carlo whispered a phrase to his aide just loud enough for Elliot to hear. “We like Elliot Litner,” the old man uttered to the others as he was being helped up off the sofa before leaving the house for the waiting Lincoln.
Those words were, to Elliot and in the world of La Cosa Nostra, the highest compliment you could pay anyone. To say, “I” like you, means that you are liked by an individual. To say, “We” like you, is to say that the family respects you, that you are one of them.
It was a gesture Elliot remembered truly appreciating as he followed through on his solemn promise. The boss of bosses was admitted to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital under an alias that night. All records pertaining to his treatment and surgical procedures were destroyed as soon as they were written.
7
SURGEON 1
“It was like being a fucking rock star!”
Carlo Gambino died about eighteen months after Elliot’s first encounter with him, not from the aortic aneurysm, but from a heart attack on October 15, 1975, at his summer home in Massapequa, Long Island. During that time, Elliot would tend to his routine medical problems as best he could while a team of heart specialists from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan attempted to sustain the Mafia boss’ deteriorating heart. Nevertheless, that night was the beginning of Elliot’s initiation into the Gambino Family. “We like Elliot Litner.” The words stuck in his mind and gave him a kind of comfort, like he truly belonged to something secretive and unique.
Obviously, being Jewish, he could never be a made man, but that didn’t matter to Elliot. It was odd, but somehow, for some reason kept secret even from him, Elliot really loved these guys. He loved the excitement and the daring associated with standing outside of society, breaking all the rules, prospering, partying, doing whatever sex or drugs or anything that a man felt like. It was called living “the life.” Yet even though Carlo Gambino was one of its superstars, men like him, Maranzano, Bonanno, Vito Genovese, and others of the Sicilian tradition, kept to themselves, never showing off their wealth, rarely displaying their power, living humbly outside the parameters of the federal government, its laws and restrictions, quietly ruling their world, the secret society called the Mafia.
As time went on, Elliot got to know more about the old man to whose medical needs he tended. A man of incredible entrepreneurial energy, even the greasers that accompanied him to his home in Sheepshead Bay that first time were some of the dozens Gambino kept around as near-slaves, called “Zips,” all part of a multimillion-dollar illegal immigration network he had conceived and operated since the mid-1930s. In retrospect, nothing should have surprised Elliot.
Carlo had grown up in an area of Palermo so dominated by the “Men of Honor” that it was considered off limits to police and military. Since boyhood, he had heard of the exploits of Sicilian crime bosses in America, their rapid rise and fabulous wealth. Then, in November 1921, after already having been initiated into the Mafia, Gambino was smuggled aboard the S.S. Vincenzo Florio bound for New York to join his mother’s Castellano relatives. Almost immediately, Carlo, living near the Brooklyn Navy Yard where Luciano and Capone got their start, was introduced to Tommy “Three Fingers” Lucchese and the world of basement stills, protection rackets, speakeasies, and a path to power.
By the mid-1920s, Gambino’s business acumen had ingratiated him to Joe Masseria, a major player in New York’s burgeoning illegal liquor trade. Joe the Boss, a gruff man noted for his poor hygiene and sloppy appearance, was the exact opposite of archrival Salvatore Maranzano. It was no secret they despised one another, and soon a turf war over liquor jurisdictions was elevated to the bloodiest of battles.
The Castellamarese War, so named because of the coastal town of Sicily where they were born, was fast becoming a stalemate, until Maranzano, hearing of Gambino’s superior abilities, cut a secret deal: Join forces with the Maranzano side and from the inside, arrange Masseria’s assassination. Gambino agreed, offering to twist Luciano and Genovese, supporters of Masseria at that time, but only if Maranzano would give them protection and “respect” in return for their treachery. Maranzano agreed, and in April 1931, Masseria was lured by Luciano to the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island where the ambush was planned. Sedated with massive quantities of food and wine, the gluttonous Masseria was still eating when Luciano excused himself for the men’s room and four assailants burst inside, guns blazing, killing Joe the Boss in front of dozens of stunned customers. Minutes later, Luciano returned to the table feigning shock at what had happened.
Gambino’s chief quality may have been his cleverness or fuberia, supreme craftiness in Sicilian, a characteristic he claimed to have gleaned from his reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince. “You have to be like a lion and a fox,” Elliot once heard him advise a group of young Mafiosi. “The lion scares away the wolves. The fox recognizes traps. If you are a lion and a fox, nothing will stop you.” Few things did, and the engineering of Albert Anastasia’s assassination, which gained him a place on the Commission, was vintage Gambino, allowing Vito Genovese’s ambition to elevate him much as Luciano had done twenty-five years earlier.
Carlo pondered Genovese’s resolve to overtake the “Mad Hatter” as Anastasia had been dubbed for his escapades with Murder, Inc., a virtual killing machine at the time. Gambino recognized that Anastasia, while shrewd, was pathologically violent and not long on strategy as Genovese was. Soon, he devised an assassination plan that would insulate him and Genovese from the murder. He approached the godfather of another family, Joe Profaci, who detested Anastasia, and through him recruited three of his most brutal killers, the Gallo brothers: Crazy Joe, Louie, and Kid Blast.
On October 25, 1957, while Anastasia was being shaved at the Central Hotel (now the Park Sheraton) barbershop with a hot towel over his face, two of the Gallo brothers entered, blowing Anastasia out of his chair with five shots to his
head and back. Miraculously still alive, Anastasia got up and lunged at his killers’ reflection in the mirror, then collapsed in a pool of blood, taking a final coup de grâce from Crazy Joe Gallo to the back of his head. Once again, Carlo Gambino was nowhere to be seen, his fingerprints nowhere to be uncovered, though it was he who pulled the strings.
Gambino’s empire was built block by block from that time, not only within the families, but in the awesome financial network he created afterward. One of Carlo’s spectacular coups involved a ration stamp racket during World War II. He dispatched a team of safecrackers to the Office of Price Administration. They stole millions of dollars worth of stamps necessary for consumers to purchase gasoline, meat, even tires for cars. Once OPA administrators learned that the mob was an eager buyer of stolen stamps, contacts were cultivated for a steady supply sold ultimately on the black market. With the huge profits he made selling bootlegged liquor and ration stamps, Carlo then invested in meat markets, restaurants, nightclubs, trucking companies, and construction firms. It was Gambino Family activities in that same New York City construction arena that one day would put Elliot’s career and those of Rudolph Giuliani and John Gotti on a collision course.
Back then, however, those problems were beyond the ken of the frantic, and pleasurable, pace that Elliot was keeping. With the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, the need for illegal abortion clinics ended, but that and even the death of Carlo Gambino had a negligible effect on the young doctor’s lifestyle.
The family’s faith in Elliot had widened to include a large circle of “under the table” patients while the new godfather, Paul Castellano, seemed no less fond of his talents than Don Carlo. Beyond that, Elliot’s legitimate medical career was no less exciting. His articles on cutting-edge innovations in cardiac surgery appearing in Contemporary Surgeon and Clinical Perspectives. On the basis of that work and the reputation he’d made for himself at Jewish Hospital, Elliot was named a thoracic surgical resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
Life was good. Though he was still putting in his twelve to fifteen hours in surgery, at night, with the disco scene in full bloom and the opening of Studio 54, Elliot was living the wanton lifestyle of a young Mafioso prince. Nothing was out of bounds. There were no restrictions. Cruising in his own 1976 red Corvette with a vanity plate that read SURGEON 1, the midseventies were one giant party, continuous and uninterrupted, to him. He still saw some of his gumbas from his Bronx-Brooklyn connection. But once in Manhattan, he began traveling in different circles.
One of the men who took an immediate liking to him at Mount Sinai was Dr. Francis Silvio, a member of the team of thoracic surgeons working at the hospital. Frank had emigrated from Palermo, Italy, and looked like a man who should be named Silvio, with a combed-back mane of white hair, a short, compact build, and a Martin Scorsese face. Beyond that, Frank Silvio was a madman. He had a home in Westchester County where his wife, Dorothy, and two daughters, Theresa and Marie, lived, as well as a Park Avenue apartment. He spent much of his time performing nonstop cardiac surgeries and an equal amount partying.
The other, a more staid relationship, almost like father and son, was with Al Rosengarten, who was a garment district mogul and Mount Sinai board member. From the first moment Elliot was introduced to him by Dr. Simon Dak, director of cardiology, Mr. Rosengarten seemed to take a personal interest in his progress within the hospital. It was a relationship that would eventually help elevate Elliot to the post of associate director of the department, a position that would have him socializing with Manhattan’s crème de la crème at American Heart Foundation and New York Surgical Society fundraisers held at New York’s most prestigious hotels including the Plaza, Waldorf-Astoria, and Sherry-Netherland.
Still, it didn’t take long to realize that his friendship and “underworld” life with Frank Silvio was one hell of a lot more exciting than boring banquet speeches from the likes of then up-and-coming New York prosecutor Rudy Giuliani and certainly more fun. Silvio and he were like Batman and Robin back then, inseparable and clearly the dynamic duo when it came to uninhibited sex, drugs, and gambling at places like the Sands in Las Vegas and Resorts in Atlantic City where Frank, who was also connected, and he would play craps at $1,000 a throw, hopping from casino to casino, dropping as much as $20,000 in a single night. But, really, who cared? They were on a fast track with no end in sight, already making upward of $500,000 annually with Silvio in his midfifties and Elliot having just turned thirty! More, Elliot truly loved gambling, the thrill of it, and to both of them, he supposed, who gambled with human life in surgeries six, maybe eight times a day, what was so important about money?
The only thing Elliot loved more than gambling was sex—and there was plenty of that, too, because it was at around that time that a new sex club opened called Plato’s Retreat. The club’s main room comprised a huge oblong of cojoined mattresses, a Jacuzzi, and a pool where a guy could have whole groups of women attack, then throw him in the middle of a swarming multipartner sexual encounter. “Group Grope,” they called it, and if a man was a little patient, everyone had their turn being licked, sucked, and fucked by absolute strangers, many of them among Manhattan’s hippest, most beautiful people with the music of Donna Summer blaring, strobe lights flashing, and lines of cocaine served on mirrored trays with straws as if they were shot glasses full of Jose Cuervo.
Of course, Elliot realized even then, that many would say, “Hey, what’s this guy about anyway? Has he no morals whatsoever?” To which, he would have answered, “No, I don’t!” He had no “morals” in the conventional sense. He was amoral. Unlike Silvio, who used methamphetamines the way most people used sugar, Elliot didn’t take drugs. He worked his ass off inside and outside the hospital after spending his youth playing with his brother and friends in a garbage dump. He passionately strived to teach and learn everything he could about his chosen profession while spending two-thirds of each working day performing surgeries, knowing that any misjudgment on his part was potentially life threatening. Now that was stress.
Yes, Elliot liked sex, hot and uninhibited. Yes, he loved gambling whether it was cards, craps, roulette, or two cockroaches racing across a tabletop. It gave him a thrill to risk this easy-come, easy-go commodity called money on something yet to be determined, something he couldn’t control, and yes, which if he did with reckless abandon would probably destroy him. But that was exactly what he loved about it. It was the jeopardy that it put him in, and he wondered at times if the reason he so relished that high had something to do with an atavistic feeling because of what his family had endured during their struggle for survival in Russia.
He could write about the postrevolution horrors they experienced once Lenin and Trotsky had defeated the tsar, who also was not so fond of Jews; of the promises of a “chicken in every pot”; or the rampant anti-Semitism that followed with the slogan “Kill the Jews and Save Russia” plastered on posters that lined storefronts. He could also write about how his father as a young boy was beaten to a bloody pulp in Vinograd and driven by Cossack soldiers on horses into the town’s synagogue which was set afire with hundreds of Jews still inside and how he miraculously escaped. But he’d prefer to put down on paper anecdotes that were told many times more often because they illustrated how these incredibly resilient people survived, constantly finding the humor in impossible situations.
Okay, Elliot realized, none of these stories about simple peasants and slapstick were “Saturday Night Live” material, and perhaps even juvenile to some, but to their humble family in the Bronx, it was hilarious and the lesson was learned that fortune, family, and even life were fleeting. It could end at any time, often for no discernible reason, so why take it so seriously? Do your best, work hard, and help people if you can, but for God’s sake, have a little fun. And though circumstances and maybe life itself, had changed Elliot’s perspective since his days in the Bronx, it was he and Silvio were after at that time, and there was no crazier place to find it than Studio 54.
8
STUDIO 54
“What a world! What a society! How could anyone take it seriously?”
It was Silvio who introduced Elliot to Steve Rubell about six months after the club opened, and it was already the place to be. Almost from the beginning, there were long lines at the entrance. Elliot remembered someone saying that even real celebrities like Burt Reynolds were having trouble getting in that night. But Frank knew a guy named Dominick Montiglio, a Gambino enforcer until he went into the witness protection program, and when he appeared with them, all obstacles parted like the Red Sea. They were inside Studio 54 with no trouble getting past the cadre of bouncers and wannabes ever again.
These were the golden days for Rubell, disco, and arguably New York’s night scene, unless you were willing to go back to the 1920s. On a given night, you could find Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, Liz Smith, you name the celebrity, some of them so out of it, or caught up in the fervor of pulsating music and strobe-light-madness, that they acted as if they were anonymous. Suddenly, they felt free to make out or have sex with strangers in the grungy VIP basement or on the balconies that hovered over the dance floor where tubes studded with crackling light bulbs were rising and descending, and just above that, a giant spoon made its rhythmic journey up into the insatiable nose of the Man-In-The-Moon stage prop towering in the background.
It was an incredible place where anything could happen and often did. It was, at least to Elliot’s knowledge, the first broadly accepted club where being openly gay not only wasn’t frowned upon, but was encouraged. Studio employees, waiters, and busboys bounced around bare chested in sneakers and gym shorts. A Jewish couple was made up to be Nazi vampires, she sporting a swastika on her panties. A man danced beside her in a Spider Man outfit with HERPES VIRUS inscribed on his chest as singer-actress Cher, wearing a see-through wedding dress, slow-danced with a sumptuous blonde, a single breast exposed. No wonder known gay men like Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, Elton John, and not the least among them, Mafia attorney Roy Cohn, although publicly gay, felt so at home.