See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he soothed with steely determination. “I’ll take care of this. In my own way and in my own time.”

  Hanna stared at him in disbelief and horror. “You’re not telling me you know who these men are?”

  “No, but I’m going to find out,” he vowed, marching from the kitchen and out the front door toward their neighbor’s house as she followed behind him. “We’ll spend tonight in a hotel. By the end of the day tomorrow, this will all be cleaned up, I promise.”

  That night Elliot did something he’d never done before. He called Al Rosengarten and told him all that had happened. “Why that’s dreadful, Elliot, just dreadful, and, I tell you, I feel responsible. Hanna, is she all right, physically?” “Yes,” Elliot assured him, but there were two reasons he’d called. The first was to make certain that Rosengarten was aware that the theft had taken place. The second was to ask him directly that the men responsible be punished.

  Less than one month later, while watching the ten o’clock news on television, Gabe Pressman reported, “In Westchester, New York, the bodies of four men associated with mobster William ‘Sonny’ Montella, who turned state’s witness last fall, were found shot through the head ‘execution style’ this morning….”

  Hanna glanced up at the screen. “My… God….”

  “What is it?”

  “Those men. The photographs of those four men. They’re the men who stole the safe from our house.”

  Elliot barely looked up from the magazine he was reading. “Yes, it looks like them, doesn’t it.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  Elliot shook his head in the negative. “I never met them, but obviously they’re ‘bad’ men. They broke into our house and threatened to harm you. If they are dead, if somebody killed them, I say ‘good.’ They are the kind of men who deserve to be killed.”

  Hanna stared at him, her innocent inquisitiveness replaced by a stare that was withering. “I know that you live a complicated life, Elliot. You’re a doctor and an intricate man, but once the babies are born, you’ve got to promise me that all of this will end, or so help me God, I will take those babies and leave you forever.”

  After that night, the name of Sonny Montella and the incident involving his safe in the basement were never spoken about again. Not by Hanna. Not by Elliot. Not by Al Rosengarten.

  13

  MOB COURIER

  “It’s there, stock certificates—IBM, AT&T, Campbell’s motherfucking Soup!”

  Of course, Elliot understood who and what Al Rosengarten was even before the incident with Sonny Montella’s house. Working closely with Tommy Gambino, eldest son of Carlo, who owned four trucking companies, the two men virtually monopolized the trucking business in Manhattan’s garment district. In fact, 90 percent of all finished garments picked up from the cutters and sewing contractors and then delivered to showrooms and retailers were done in Gambino trucks. Out of fear of Gambino reprisals, the clothing manufacturers went along with exorbitant prices, which were from 40 to 70 percent higher than that charged by independent truckers. This meant that for every $100 garment shipped in New York, the mob pocketed from $3.50 to $7, and that after everyone including Tommy and Al had gotten their cut, they were still able to send $2 million in tribute up to their godfather living on Todt Hill.

  These days, after a lot of lessons had been learned, Elliot has adjusted to a more normal existence. But that wasn’t the way he looked at life back then. All that seemed important was having fun and to him, that meant gambling and women. More, he knew he had to get into a situation that presented real danger to him. It was as if his hand was being forced, not by a need for money, but by a crazy uncontrollable desire to be part of the Gambino Family. Back home, where he rarely spent more than a couple of nights per week, Hanna had given birth to two gorgeous twin girls, whom they named Samantha and Rachel. From his side, however, he’d become an obsessive gambler losing as much as $15,000 on a bad night at the tables in Atlantic City and sometimes more than that.

  He parried in Atlantic City with Silvio and his mob pals and even managed to hook up one night after a binge of gambling to catch a show with his old Bronx pals, Nicky Micelli and Joey Fischetti, to see their teenage favorites, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, perform some of their hit songs like “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Grease,” and so many others. Afterward, Valli invited them backstage where Nick and Joey drank Heinekens while Elliot chugged diet cola reminiscing with the falsetto singer about his growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and they in the Bronx. Not coincidentally, Nicky, through his dad, knew many of the same people as Frankie.

  “D’ya ever meet Pete Rodino?” Nicky asked the singer, referring to the New Jersey congressman of Watergate fame.

  “Know him? He helped get us started, working tiny clubs down the Jersey shore, standing on floats during the Columbus Day parade through downtown Newark. Yeah, sure, Congressman Rodino, a wonderful guy, just super!”

  “How ’bout Tony Boy and his old man Ruggiero—the Boiardos—tell me that estate where they lived in Livingston wasn’t a trip, huh?”

  Frankie took a swig of Heineken, then just laughed. “I’m going to tell you something, Nick. I did go to that place. Me and the guys played a wedding reception for the family at the old Terrace Ballroom in Newark back in the midsixties. I went to the estate, passed through these big iron gates with a goddamned sign that says, NO TRESPASSING! THIS MEANS YOU! Well, the gates are open, and we think they’re expecting us when just for fun, the old man unleashes a pack of the meanest Dobermans I’ve ever seen! Bob Gaudio was with me at the time, and I tell you, we both almost had heart attacks, these dogs clawing at our Jaguar while we pass statues along the one-way road that leads to the main house: statues of his son, Tony Boy, of his grandson, Richie, his father, and wife, and then one of him, riding like some kind of Sicilian prince on a white stallion!”

  “Yeah,” Joey Fischetti chimed in, “and how ’bout the crematorium? Elliot,” he said turning to him, “the old man’s got a fucking crematorium and a cemetery built right on his estate! The old man, he don’t want nobody to miss the point, I guess. These guys were really bad asses. According to my dad, there were a lot a guys went through those gates and never came out again.”

  “How ’bout you, Frankie?” Nick asked. “What are you and the Seasons up to these days?”

  “Touring a little, but to tell you the truth, Bob, who writes our songs, thinks he’s got a couple of winners. This year we’re gonna do a little target practice, try to shoot for a few top-ten records. It’s been a while, you know. Maybe ten years, but that’s the way life is. Good things happen to guys who don’t give up, you know what I’m saying?”

  Of course, Elliot understood what he was saying; maybe not at that moment, but certainly later, when it seemed like all he could do was give up. But for now, he and the others took solace in the fact that their teenage singing idol was back, singing, touring, and recording a new string of tunes like “Who Loves You” and “Oh, What A Night!” that would go on to sell something like ten million copies.

  They left to hit the casinos one last time once Valli’s girlfriend showed up, a knockout, long-legged blonde named Marianne. But meeting Frankie, after all of those years, was no disappointment, a real player, they agreed, reminiscing on the drive back home about those simpler days growing up with Abe, Etta, and Uncle Saul in the Bronx.

  About two months later, Elliot performed open-heart surgery on the nephew of another Frank, this time Frank Sinatra. The procedure was one that he did routinely, but afterward it was thrilling to hear that Sinatra had come into the hospital with his entourage of half a dozen bodyguards asking to meet him. He’d just gotten out of surgery, with the patient taken to the intensive care unit, when he noticed a commotion and a knot of people nearing reception. Judy Harrow, one of the surgical nurses, ran up to him.

  “He wants to meet you,” she blurted. “He asked for you specifically, Dr. Litner!”


  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Frank Sinatra. That’s him,” she said pointing toward the commotion. “He’s here to thank you for saving his nephew.”

  Elliot could only shake his head at the thought of it because thoracic surgery and medicine generally was not like that, but if Sinatra wanted to say “thanks,” who was he to deny him his pleasure?

  As Elliot approached, the glut of nurses, doctors, and visitors parted, until he was standing in front of him.

  “You Dr. Litner?” the singer asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Well, I wanted to shake your hand. My nephew, Jerry, is a very special young man, and his parents are very close to me. So I appreciate what you did for him.”

  “It’s my job, Mr. Sinatra.”

  Sinatra took a half step back as if to get a better look at a guy like Elliot who he must have thought had just stepped out of a UFO, then he chortled, “Yeah, well, I wanted to thank you anyway.”

  Then he left, simple as that, leaving Elliot to wonder if this, like so many of the other patients that had been sent his way, had come through a family referral. He never asked and never knew, but about a week later, an entire wardrobe of Oleg Cassini suits showed up at the hospital with a handwritten note:

  Dottore,

  Many thanks for your healing touch!

  Best Always,

  Frank Sinatra.

  Working fifteen hours a day, performing five to seven cardiac surgeries, often on as little as three or four hours of sleep, staying out with Silvio gambling and having sex with women they’d picked up that night until they could barely stand up to take a limousine to Elliot’s apartment near the hospital, the pace was withering. No question there was some element of self-destructiveness in all of this, but who cared? He was having fun, or so he thought.

  Problematic, however, was Hanna. Given the fact that they were still relatively new to their marriage, one would think that she’d go apoplectic over his behavior, but she didn’t. Instead, she chose to ignore it and him, for the most part, shopping nonstop at Sak’s, Bergdorf’s, and Tiffany’s, assuaging the loneliness Elliot thought she’d be feeling with month-long vacations to Paris, Barcelona, and London, often taking the twins and their nanny with her for the duration.

  Between his gambling losses, mounting these days into something substantially more than six figures, and Hanna’s gift for diverting her potential depression by spending huge quantities of their income, there was not much left in the way of money to sustain their extravagant lifestyle. True, another man might have held a family meeting to discuss finances and ways to better budget the almost one-million-dollar annual income they were spending as if it was Monopoly money, but Elliot was not that man. Instead, yet another “coincidence” happened in his life and career when Dr. Dak called him to his office to discuss the possibility of his doing out-of-the-country lectures, no doubt at the suggestion of board member and major hospital contributor Al Rosengarten.

  At around that time, and all through his career, Elliot had been prolific in writing technical papers for some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. Some involved innovations such as “Human Umbilical Cord Vein Fistula: A Novel Approach for Hemodialysis,” published in the American Heart Journal, or the basic blocking-and-tackling kind of pragmatism found in “Factors Predisposing to Intraoperative Myocardial Infarction during Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery” appearing in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

  The idea was for Elliot to make the circuit, attending professional seminars held worldwide under the aegis of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the American College of Cardiology, and scores of others, on behalf of Mount Sinai, spreading not only his ideas but adding to the international reputation of the institution.

  Of course, he agreed and why not? When a man of Dr. Dak’s professional standing asked a young physician to do something so important, he didn’t ask questions, he simply did it. So Elliot found himself traveling to various locations, as nearby as Los Angeles, and as far flung as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Geneva, Switzerland.

  It was shortly into this new assignment, done in conjunction with his normal workload, that Rosengarten contacted him by phone to suggest they have dinner to explore some ideas that might be mutually beneficial. They met at the board member’s favorite restaurant in Manhattan, the Palm, where over a steak and a martini, Rosengarten mentioned that he’d heard Elliot was struggling financially and also that he liked to gamble, a vice to which Al, “Thank God!” had never fallen victim.

  “I make no judgments about how a man lives. We leave that to the ‘born agains,’” he quipped, “but maybe a friend of ours can help you with your high-interest loan. He has asked if you could occasionally carry a briefcase or parcel for him on some of your trips overseas. He will explain to you how this is done, who to meet, even which customs agent you should look for when reentering the United States. No drugs. Nothing like that. As you know, Mr. Castellano doesn’t believe in any of that.”

  “I don’t understand. Why me?”

  “You’re a doctor with an international reputation. Doctors received only cursory custom’s inspections. So we make you a kind of courier carrying family documents of a confidential nature, maybe some uncut gems that some of the fellas like to give as presents to their girlfriends. No sweat, Elliot. Not for you, not for anyone.”

  Given the fact that Elliot was broke and without a foreseeable way to pay back the $75,000 he owed one of Silvio’s loan-shark pals, it seemed more than possible, it was necessary.

  “I think that would be okay with me, Al, but how does that help my finances?”

  “Simple,” he answered. “You carry the goods, we wipe your debt off the books.” Then, he clicked his martini glass against Elliot’s glass of diet cola. “Mazel tov!” he proclaimed in a toast to good fortune.

  As promised, Elliot was contacted shortly before his next trip, this time to Brazil, by one of Castellano’s twenty-three capos, a large, heavy-set man who Elliot knew only by his first name, Carmine. The deal from his end was easy, he explained. Elliot’s itinerary was to be passed on to him via telephone. While out of his room giving a lecture, a parcel would be left for him to carry back in his luggage, then pass along to the capo once he made it through customs. On each trip, Elliot would be given the custom’s inspection line number at Kennedy Airport to pass through along with a description of the agent. In advance, it would be arranged with the agent that Elliot was not to be inspected, so there was no chance of a slip-up.

  The system seemed foolproof, and on his first two trips, all went well. The parcel was waiting in his hotel room. The custom’s line and agent were designated and described in advance. Carmine was outside the baggage claim area, his Lincoln Town Car warmed and ready to receive the package and take Elliot home. But on his next trip, this time on his way back from Geneva, the unexpected happened.

  The American 747 landed on time. In his briefcase, Elliot carried notes for his lecture presented to the International Academy of Chest Physicians and Surgeons, a Robert Ludlum spy novel, and a thick accordion folder that he had purposely chosen not to open, hence could not venture a guess as to what it might contain. The customs reentry line that had been designated by Carmine was number twelve. The agent was to be a thin and balding, twenty-seven-year-old man with a mustache.

  Elliot studied the terrain. All seemed as it should. Except the agent. He had a mustache, as many of them did. He was, in a manner of speaking, balding, but not really. He was not thin, but slightly overweight. His age? Maybe late twenties, but more like midthirties, and the uncertainty caused the palms of Elliot’s hands to suddenly moisten. Anyway, it was close enough to try, he thought, and so Elliot waited in line until the agent waved him forward.

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “I-I’m Dr. Litner,” Elliot answered trying to make eye contact. “I just arrived from a medical conference in Geneva.”


  Then, the agent asked a question that made Elliot’s heart sink. “What’s in the briefcase?”

  “Papers. Technical papers that I used during my lecture.”

  “Would you mind opening it up for me to have a look?”

  It was at that moment that Elliot heard a click in some atavistic area of his frontal lobe that caused him, wisely, to immediately fall into his best Jerry Lewis impersonation. “Wh-wh-what are you saying? Wh-wh-what are you suggesting?” he blustered, stalling for time enough so that Carmine or someone would see him. “I, sir, am a medical doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital and will not have you or anyone else going through my personal papers!”

  The agent was more puzzled than angered or even shocked. “I don’t care if you’re a doctor or the Wizard of Oz, you will open that bag!”

  From that moment on, Elliot was making something a lot closer to sounds than words. But behind the agent, off to his right, he saw another drinking coffee and scarfing down a Dunkin’ Donut, obviously on break. He looked to be about twenty-seven. He was thin, and he was balding, no question about that.

  “Officer! Officer!” Elliot called out to him in a loud voice. “My name is Dr. Litner, and this man is harassing me!”

  The young agent turned with alarm. Recognizing what had happened, he slammed his Styrofoam coffee cup down so hard on the folding table that it smashed and made his way toward the inspection line.

  “Hey, Dennis! Maybe you better let me handle this one, huh? I don’t think Dr. Litner would mind if I looked through his briefcase, would you, Doctor?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Elliot huffed. “I just don’t like this man’s attitude.”

  Elliot passed through customs five minutes later and hooked up with Carmine, who thought the whole episode was hilarious even before Elliot told him he was so scared, he’d nearly pissed in his pants. Of course, this made Carmine roar all the more. As they left Kennedy for the Long Island Expressway headed toward Manhattan, Carmine lifted up the accordion folder.