by Ron Felber
The drug of choice was cocaine, and though Elliot never used stimulants himself, guys like Nicky Micelli, who he suspected was dealing, and Joey Fischetti and Sal DiGregorio, who’d become wild men when it came to sex and coke, were using a drug called amyl nitrite, which spurred the sex drive in both men and women to the point of nonstop ecstasy. With the Rolling Stones blaring “Miss You” in the background, Elliot remembered having oral sex performed on him while on a poolside lounge chair by one of the “nymphets” Nicky and Sal had brought by along with twenty other “friends,” swimming, dancing, or doing the same as he, when Hanna returned from a trip to Boston, trailed by a chauffeur carrying luggage and the twins by her side.
She looked at Elliot. He looked at her. Neither of them said a word. Utterly astounded at finding him there, unabashed, in so compromising a position, with Samantha and Rachel looking on, she left. Simply walked away in disgust, going into the house with the two girls, where she found, to her horror, Nicky screwing the brains out of a long-legged, red-headed casino showgirl in their bed.
Blame it on the amyl nitrite, or just call it terrible luck, but Nicky didn’t even look up from his pleasure as Hanna stormed out of the room with twins in tow, out to the pool area where she confronted Elliot. Now, being no fool, he had already put his private part back into his Speedo, gotten rid of Nicky’s nymphet, and was sipping a diet cola fifty yards away at the other side of the pool by the time she arrived.
“I want these people out of my house now! Do you understand?” she raged in one of the very few times Elliot had ever seen her livid.
“Now Hanna,” he soothed getting up out of the lounge chair, touching his hand to her shoulder, “I realize that you’re upset, and you have every right to be …”
“Upset? I’m not upset. I’m fucking pissed! Now you get these animals, off our property or I’m never going to speak to you again!”
“O-okay,” he stammered, understanding that his marriage was on the line, but stupidly incoherent both in language and logic. “I’ll tell them t-to leave, but I’m going with Nicky and the others if you make me do that. We’re, all of us,” he said getting braver as a group of his whacked-out acquaintances gathered to listen, “g-going to Atlantic City to finish the party.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care what you do anymore,” Hanna announced, “just get them out and if you want to go with them, go ahead!”
Hanna left for the main house with the twins as Elliot collected the chauffeur, Nicky, Sal, and Joey for a gambling foray into Atlantic City, making the rounds that night. Finally, they piled back into the limousine, Nicky, Sal, and Joey to kill a bottle of Champagne and polish off a last spoon of coke; Elliot to have his own custom version of a group grope involving simultaneous sex with two hookers he’d picked up playing craps at the tables before making the return trek on the Jersey Turnpike to Bergen County.
Elliot got back to Englewood early the next morning. It was already daylight with the sun bright and shining in a clear, blue sky. He sent the driver home and was feeling every imaginable downside effect of the night before when he entered their house to find it emptier than he’d ever remembered seeing it. Packed, inside and out, and literally crawling with people only hours before, it felt like a mausoleum now, stinking of stale booze, with empty bottles and pizza boxes, furnishings toppled and scattered all over the place.
It was then, walking into the carnage and emptiness of their oversized, newly tiled kitchen that he saw his father-in-law, Mort Shapiro, sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee and smoking a Marlboro, looking like the loneliest man on the planet.
“Mort?” he asked.
Shapiro looked up from his cup, a trail of white smoke swirling from his cigarette angled on an ashtray.
“Hanna is leaving you, and she’s taking the twins with her‚” he said sadly and with a sense of finality that made Elliot wonder how much longer he could go on living his life as two people, Dr. Elliot Litner, thoracic surgeon and lecturer, and Il Dottore, the Mafia doctor.
17
THE SPEED OF SOUND
“This girl is Sicilian, Dr. Tick. If her father thought this was anything but appendicitis, her life would be ruined.”
One of the nice things about living on two separate planes of existence was that when certain aspects of his Mafia life were worrisome, others concerning his medical career would be soaring. His marriage was falling apart, but under the watchful eye of Al Rosengarten, Elliot’s career continued to flourish. His articles continued to be published in the most prestigious journals and highly praised by his peers. When it came to Mount Sinai Hospital, most saw him as eccentric, no one dared question his skills as a surgeon, and since he was avidly nonpolitical, few viewed him as a threat to their progress even though he was seen by most everyone that mattered as the heir apparent to Dr. Dak, director of cardiac surgery.
Occasionally, however, Elliot’s two worlds would meld together into something pleasant and important to him in other, more personal, ways than money or good times, ways that Uncle Saul would have talked about if he’d been alive to see it. One moment like that happened around the time of Hanna’s leaving him and involved a seventeen-year-old girl whose family had been sent to see him at the suggestion of Tommy Bilotti, Paul Castellano’s driver and bodyguard, who he’d met a couple of times while tending to his boss.
It was late afternoon when Elliot was called to his office to find an immigrant Sicilian family crowded into his examining room. The father was a taciturn, hard-working bricklayer who spoke no English; the mother, a strong, loving woman, alarmed by her daughter’s rapidly declining health. Then there was the girl lying on the exam table, beautiful with gentle doelike eyes, a flawless complexion, and long black hair, shy and frightened, suffering for more than a week now with severe abdominal pain, nausea, and dizziness.
“Dottore,” the mother began, “Mr. Bilotti, he tell me you can help my daughter, Antonia. She been very sick with terrible pain in the stomach.”
Elliot nodded, speaking gently to the girl as her father fell into the background, hat in hand, body taut as a piano wire, carrying himself with the square, flat-footed strength of a strict, by-the-rules Sicilian father. “Is this where you have pain,” Elliot asked pressing the flat of his hand against her lower abdomen while she nodded tearfully.
“Aside from the stomach pain, what other problems does your daughter have?”
“She dizzy,” the mother said stepping toward him. “She fall down two days ago with the fainting. And now she start with the food, no stay in the stomach!”
“Okay, I’m sorry but now I have to ask one personal question to your daughter,” he said watching as the mother nodded, almost knowingly, and the father turned away from him. Elliot whispered, “Are you bleeding from down here,” gesturing discreetly. Too embarrassed, the girl nodded, and now he understood—everything.
“Sir,” he called to the father, who turned back toward him while his terrified wife hung on his every word. “Your daughter has a damaged appendix,” Elliot said drawing a small, imaginary line with his index finger onto the right side of his lower abdominal region. “This is an emergency. We need to operate now, and I need your permission.”
Instinctively, the mother swiveled around to her suspicious husband translating Elliot’s words to Sicilian with particular emphasis on “apendicite” and “emergenza,” until he understood, reluctantly nodding his consent to whatever procedure would save his only daughter.
For better or for worse, the procedure that Elliot knew was necessary had nothing to do with appendix and everything to do with a life-threatening condition known as ectopic pregnancy. Taken from the Greek word meaning “away from the place,” an ectopic pregnancy occurs when the fetus forms outside, rather than inside, the womb. The reason it was so serious was that the growth of the fetus eventually ruptures the fallopian tube causing hemorrhaging that leads to shock and death. Discerning that this young woman’s life would be ruined if her devout Ca
tholic father found out she was pregnant out of wedlock, and believing that her mother already knew, led Elliot to be creative with the diagnosis. But there were pressing medical issues, he realized, calling the greenest and most easily intimidated young intern he could think of to assist in the surgery.
The first problem was keeping the real surgery he’d be performing “quiet” while at least trying to make it look like an appendectomy to the intern. The second was that in these cases, the fetus had actually implanted itself in one of the fallopian tubes so that there were a number of surgical challenges, among them internal bleeding and infinitely more subtle, removing the fetus without precluding the patient’s ability to later bear children. Given the fact that Antonia was just seventeen with practically her entire life before her, Elliot was hoping to spare her tube and preserve her ability to become pregnant. The bigger problem was explaining why he was involved in a routine appendectomy, but that’s when he turned to Silvio’s political expertise.
Within hours, Frank Silvio had assembled a surgical team, including Robert Tick, an Irish-Catholic, Georgetown University cum laude, now interning at the hospital, who’d be assisting Elliot in the procedure. Together they observed as the patient’s abdomen was washed with soap and antiseptic, her body draped so that only the area of the incision would be exposed.
Elliot began the procedure making a bikini-line incision so the abdomen could be entered. Almost immediately, it became obvious that the fallopian tube had a large hemorrhagic mass in it—the ectopic pregnancy. The key, he knew, would be to remove it without causing uncontrollable bleeding and then reconstruct the tube. Although he hadn’t worked on an ectopic pregnancy in years, he took comfort in the fact that the concept of reconstructing arteries in the heart was no different and even more technically demanding.
During the course of the intensive, forty-five minute procedure, Elliot was able to remove the ectopic pregnancy, preserve the ovary, and successfully reconstruct the tube. The internal wound was then cauterized with bleeding controlled and the most dangerous element of young Antonia’s surgery completed.
Finally, the remaining phase of their surgery happened when Elliot turned his attention to a small tube of tissue about three inches long, dangling just below the point where the small intestine joins the large one, on the right side of the girl’s frail body. It was her appendix. Conjectured to have somehow prevented intestinal infection eons ago, it served no known functional purpose at present, except that day for him, he thought, as he severed the useless appendage from her colon and removed it.
“There it is‚” he proclaimed, turning to Tick and displaying it. “The source of all this young woman’s problems.”
The intern looked at him incredulously. “What do you mean?” he asked. “That’s the pinkest, healthiest appendix I’ve ever seen.”
“No‚” Elliot answered, placing the tissue on the surgical table and striking it several times with the blunt end of his laser. “This appendix is obviously infected. Look at the shape and size, swollen and inflamed. Lucky we removed it before it burst.”
“Dr. Litner, I don’t understand.”
“This girl is Sicilian, Dr. Tick If her father ever thought this was anything but appendicitis, her life would be ruined. That’s why, if you want to have a future at this hospital, your report will blame this infected tissue as the cause of her problems.”
Tick, who was smart enough to know that he meant what he’d said, looked into Elliot’s eyes, then nodded. “May I see that appendix again, Doctor?” he asked.
Afterward, Elliot spoke with the young girl’s parents together, taking great pains to show them the damaged appendage, explaining to them what he believed had caused their daughter’s ailment. The father listening intently, the mother wisely nodding her understanding of all that he was saying and not saying. His most gratifying moment, however, did not arrive until almost four years later when he received an invitation to Antonia’s wedding, delivered in person to the hospital by her appreciative mother. He attended the traditional Catholic wedding ceremony a couple of months later, watching as Antonia’s proud father gave her away to her handsome groom. The radiant bride, of course, was wearing a flowing gown of pure white.
This was one of the most gratifying experiences of Elliot’s double life, but like the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song says, “traveling twice the speed of sound, it’s easy to get burned.” And on the whole, the things that mattered most to him were falling apart before his eyes. Though his relationship with his father-in-law stayed cordial, Hanna wouldn’t speak to him for months or let him see the twins unless she was in the room with them. Worse, though on a normal basis, he slept only five hours a night, now Elliot was suffering from bouts of insomnia so that even that was getting trimmed to something like three.
Why this sudden mental agitation? Maybe it went all the way back to those early days in the Bronx. The laughing and good-natured kidding that surrounded him there seemed to have evaporated. Instead of thinking about his father or Saul or even Sal, Nicky, and the guys, it was the murder scene that so dramatically changed his life, the one involving the hit and those two men shooting, then smashing the skull of their helpless victim, that seemed to haunt him. In retrospect, this poor man had done, what? Forget to pay a gambling debt? Sleep with the girlfriend of a made man? Elliot would never know, but suddenly, he was asking questions of himself that had never seemed important like what about that man and what about him?
18
THE MAFIA AND HOOVER’S FBI
“More recent photos, held by Cohn were even more explicit depicting Hoover having sex with top FBI man Clyde Tolson.”
Suddenly and unexpectedly the pressure surrounding Elliot’s double life caught up with him, both physically and psychologically. While at the hospital, he was experiencing mind-numbing migraines that could only be sated by strong painkilling drugs like Darvon and Percocet, medications he would never in the past have considered taking. Worse, he was experiencing nightmares, odd and unsettling. In one, he was a child being pursued through his old Bronx neighborhood by implacable gangs of street thugs. In another, more subtle, and haunting, he felt as if he had spent an entire night locked in a room where objects kept shifting their positions, sometimes by no more than an inch or two, but nothing remained exactly in place.
There was no mistaking the meaning of these developments. Into Elliot’s life came a general sense that the foundations of the underworld were deteriorating, and that all he’d known before, even within the Gambino Family, was moving irreconcilably toward calamity He worried about his friends, Nick and Sal and Joey Ficshetti, who seemed to be riding an express train headed straight to hell so far as he could see. For one thing, they were doing cocaine as if it was going out of style. But worse, though Elliot never asked, he knew that Nicky had been secretly buying large quantities of raw cocaine and heroin with family funds then selling it through street contacts in the so-called “Black” or “Cuban Mafia” in Manhattan’s West Side and in Harlem.
It was one thing to do hard-core drugs as associates of any of the five families, which was a career-limiting decision, but the sale and distribution of hard-core drugs? That was a life-limiting decision because even though a blind eye was turned to massive deals occasionally made even by traditionalist godfathers like Carlo Gambino when the risk was small and profits incredible, the ironclad rule for capos, soldiers, and associates was that the dollars from junk weren’t worth the risk to the family, and breaches of that rule might well result in execution.
As early as 1947, during a full Commission meeting held on a yacht off the coast of Florida, the subject of narcotics was hotly debated between the traditionalist Sicilian members led by Joseph Bonanno and the Americanized liberal faction led by Lucky Luciano. Bonanno argued that like counterfeiting, drugs risked the possibility of federal intervention. Beyond that, as a traditionalist, he believed along with Vincent Mangano and Joe Profaci that the true Mafioso distanced himself from crimes
like narcotics and prostitution while newer players like Luciano, influenced by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, saw La Cosa Nostra mostly as a business enterprise where the huge profits in drug trafficking far outweighed the lingering attraction of worn-out Sicilian traditions.
In the end, it was the traditionalist who won out, and at that meeting, three key decisions were made. First, with Lucky in permanent exile, Frank Costello was formally named head of the Luciano Family. Second, Bugsy Siegel would be hit because he’d gone too far in trying to monopolize Las Vegas gambling interests for himself. Third, a specific resolution forever forbidding drug trafficking by the families was enacted. All three of these agenda items were voted upon and decided, but it was the third that resurfaced at Commission meetings held in 1951 and then again in 1956, where against the rising tide of Americanized Mafia voices, the edict to ban narcotics trafficking under the penalty of death was upheld.
Then, in 1956, with the assassination of Albert Anastasia, another hastily scheduled Commission meeting was called by Buffalo boss Stefano Magadinno. Convened at Apalachin in upstate New York, the agenda, which included yet another examination of the Commission narcotics policy, never happened because state trooper Edgar Croswell, sensing a change in the normally quiet atmosphere of the town, investigated the list of guests invited to host Joseph Barbara’s estate. They included mob heavyweights Sam Giancana from Chicago; Santos Trafficante, Tampa; Gerry Catena and Frank Majuri from New Jersey; Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese, and Vito Genovese from New York; and even Paul Castellano, a driver for Genovese at this stage of his young career. Soon afterward, Croswell organized a wholesale roundup, arresting dozens of Mafiosi for criminal conspiracy, a charge which—pre-RICO—could not stand up in court. The arrest did cause a furor in the newspapers, proving, once and for all, that the “Mafia” really did exist and that there truly was something called “organized crime.”