“I owe you my life. I will do anything my don wishes.”
“Many say that, but few perform. Tonight. Perhaps you can do a small favor for me. And then, afterward, we shall consider your future.”
* * *
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT and Nilo was cold and scared. He stood in a darkened doorway, watching a tenement on the other side of White Street. The drizzle of the afternoon had turned into a sleety kind of rain, and Nilo pulled his big navy peacoat tighter around him. He felt the cold metallic touch against his thigh of the shotgun that was jammed down into his trouser leg. He had been here now for more than an hour, and in that time not one person had walked down the street. The weather was on his side, for often the streets teemed with people, even late at night. But it was too cold tonight for the Mediterranean blood. We are not made for this weather, Nilo thought.
He had felt elated after the morning’s interview with Salvatore Maranzano and had gone back to the Falcones’ apartment. Neither Tommy nor his father was there, but Mrs. Falcone had been cooking in the kitchen.
“Don’t you look like a million dollars?” she said.
“Tommy’s suit, Aunt Anna.”
“Yes, he said he lent it to you. So did your job hunting go well?”
“I think so, Aunt Anna. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
After Nilo changed his clothes, his aunt insisted upon feeding him.
Then she seemed to want to talk. “Do you miss your family?” she asked.
Nilo shrugged. “In a new country, I have not really had much time to miss them.” The truth was that Nilo hardly ever thought of his parents; America was bewildering enough to consume all his time.
Anna nodded agreement. “We cannot replace your family,” she said. “But we are always here for you.”
Nilo nodded, kept eating, and left quickly. He did not want to have to talk to Tommy or Uncle Tony about where he had been, what he had been told. Especially not Uncle Tony.
Now he was standing in the doorway in the cold and sleet. Time passed slowly, but finally all the lights in the basement—the place Nilo was watching—went out. Nilo waited another fifteen minutes, but no one came out of the building.
Good, he thought. They’ve gone to bed the way they’re supposed to.
He crossed the street. Taking a small glass cutter from his pocket, he sliced a half circle of glass from the panel in the door above the lock, the way Maranzano had shown him, carefully opened the door, and stepped inside.
He instantly smelled the distinctive yeasty aroma of fermentation. In a bakery or in his mother’s kitchen in Sicily, that aroma meant bread was baking; but here, in this basement, it meant that a still was busy cooking bootleg liquor—a still owned by the two Valenti brothers who had somehow offended Maranzano. Nilo guessed it meant that they were trying to cut in on his business.
Nilo’s job was to destroy the still. He hesitated inside the hallway. He knew that he was now at a crossroads in his life and the path he took would irrevocably dictate his future. He had no illusions. Back home, Don Salvatore Maranzano might be as respected as a nobleman, but here in America, he was a criminal. A successful criminal but a criminal nonetheless. If Nilo continued with this mission tonight, he would be a criminal, too. He would have cast his lot with Maranzano and whatever future that might bring. Nilo had spoken boldly to Maranzano, but those were only words, the words of a bragging child. Now he was being called on for deeds—the deeds of a man.
Could he do it? Did he want to do it? He thought of Maranzano and his palazzo with the beautiful woman and his fancy offices with the sluttish secretary and men ready to murder at his bidding. Then he thought of the others in America whom he knew—the Falcones. Uncle Tony working his whole life and just barely able to support his family. Tina with no money for music lessons. Tommy with no money to go to law school, even though he had almost died in the service of the United States. They all obeyed the stupid laws, and what had it gotten them?
And me? Is my life to be one ditchdigger job after another? One foreman after another regarding me as a stupid wop? I cannot accept that as my future. I am made for better things. Perhaps the Falcones will settle for scraps, but not Nilo Sesta.
He walked softly down the hall. The smell was heaviest outside one door. He pushed it open and stepped inside. There, in the dim light from an outside window, he saw the overhead brass and copper tubing that carried the sour grain mix around until it distilled into alcohol for drinking.
It had been left to him to decide how to shut down the still, and now Nilo looked around the room for something that would burn. A fire would do the job nicely, he thought.
He found some old newspapers bundled in a corner and began spreading them around under the still. He guessed it would not take much of a fire to ignite the alcohol cooker. He also found some broken wood slats stacked in a corner, like a small lumber pile for a home workshop. Moving as quietly as he could, he spread those out in small pyramids over the piles of newspaper.
Then he lit a match and ignited the paper, first at one corner of the still, then at the other. In just a few moments, the paper was blazing and the long-dried wood had also caught fire.
Time to leave. This will burn like a bonfire.
Nilo turned to go but was caught up short when he saw an old lady standing in the open doorway of the room. She was all dressed in black and she seemed to be staring at him, as if trying to memorize his features so that she would be able to identify him later on.
Nilo felt panic rising. This is a real mess now. No one told me about any woman. The Valentis I could handle, but this woman? She is probably their mother. And now what do I do with her?
But he already knew the answer.
The woman began to open her mouth, but before she could speak or call out, Nilo ran to the doorway and clubbed her alongside the head with the stock of the shotgun. She fell heavily onto the floor.
He waited in the hallway until he was sure the fire was fully burning. Still unsure of the right thing to do, he turned toward the front door to leave.
“Hey!” A voice called from behind him.
“There’s a fire.” Another voice called.
He spun around and saw two burly men running down the stairs from an upstairs bedroom. These must be the Valenti brothers.
“Who the hell are you?” one called. Even as he shouted, he was raising a pistol he held in his hand.
Without thinking, without hesitating, without even lifting the shotgun to his shoulder, Nilo squeezed the triggers of the double-barrel from his waist.
The two brothers stopped on the stairs as if they had run face-first into an invisible wall, then both tumbled down into a pile at the bottom landing.
Nilo ran over to them, pulling the shells from the shotgun as he ran, stuffing in new shells. The face of one of the brothers had been blown away. He was gone. But the one with the pistol still groaned and tried to move. Nilo put a shotgun blast into the man’s face at point-blank range.
He turned to leave, but as he passed the old lady and looked down at her, her eyes opened, so he leaned over, pulled the trigger, and watched her chest explode. For an instant, he felt regret and nausea. Without waiting for it to pass, he ran from the building, crossed the street, and stepped back into the doorway to make sure no one was following him. As he waited, he reloaded the gun again. No one followed.
It was then that he noted the tongue of flame curling up out of a basement window. In shock, he realized that there might be six more families asleep in the building. He thought of running back, trying to rouse them, but that was too dangerous.
The fire department. I can call the fire department.
It was too risky. He did not know how American police worked, but common sense said that if he called them he would be the first person they would suspect.
So he stood silently, watching the flames for a moment longer, feeling sorry for those about to die, then put his weapon back into his trouser leg and walked stiffly away.
> He hoped Don Salvatore would be impressed with his new man.
• The deaths of six people in the tenement fire Nilo set were big news that winter day in early 1920, but Salvatore Lucania was too busy to read about it in the papers.
In the morning, he had been summoned to a meeting with Joe the Boss Masseria, and he had gone to the small restaurant on Mulberry Street with some trepidation because Masseria’s reputation as a cold-blooded murderer was well known to him. Lucania had two of his associates, a pair of young thugs named Vito Genovese and Joseph Doto, waiting outside the restaurant with orders to come in and get him out alive if they noticed anything wrong.
But the meeting with Masseria had been smooth as silk. “Don’t be nervous,” Joe the Boss had said. “I just want to do business.” He went on to explain: “Every time I find a new whorehouse in town, I find out that you own it.”
“I put up my own money for every one of them,” Lucania said.
“Don’t get hot,” Masseria answered with a sour smile. “I don’t want your whorehouses. I don’t even want a cut. I just want you to sell liquor in them. And buy the booze from me.”
Without hesitation, Lucania got to his feet, extended his hand, and said, “You got a deal.” Then they ate lunch and played cards, and when Lucania left the restaurant two hours later he gave the thumbs-up sign to his two men who were waiting in a car parked two doors down from the restaurant.
• In a Brooklyn courtroom that night, Maier Suchowljansky, the onetime tool and die apprentice, was fined another two dollars for disorderly conduct for his part in the beating of three of Joe Masseria’s men who had tried to cut themselves in on the profits from a crap game Suchowljansky had been running. When he paid his fine and left the courtroom, Suchowljansky was surprised to be met by Salvatore Lucania, the man he had once hit on the head with a wrench. Moving up on the two men was Benjamin Siegel, still in his teens, but already Suchowljansky’s bodyguard. He scowled at Lucania, who saw him coming and told Suchowljansky, “I don’t want no trouble. I just want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About how we get rich.”
“Why are you so kind to me?” Suchowljansky asked.
“Because I been watching you and I think you’re the only guy in this city besides me who’s got any brains.”
• With Siegel standing guard outside the door, the two young men met until 5:00 A.M. in Lucania’s apartment at 365 East Tenth Street. Twice Lucania offered to have prostitutes sent over to entertain them, but both times Suchowljansky declined. “If a man can’t control his pecker, he can control nothing,” he said.
By the time the meeting was done, the two had worked out a plan to one day take over all mob activity in New York City. Lucania was twenty-two years old; Suchowljansky was seventeen. Benjamin Siegel, still waiting out in the hall, a gun in each of his jacket pockets, was not yet fifteen.
When the meeting ended, the two men shared a celebratory bottle of wine and made one final decision. They would both change their names, in order to seem more American. Maier Suchowljansky would henceforth be named Meyer Lansky. Salvatore Lucania took for himself the name Charlie Luciano.
As a good host, Charlie Luciano insisted on walking the two men downstairs to their parked car. No sooner had they driven away when Luciano saw a man running down the street toward him. He turned to flee back into the apartment when the man called his name.
“Alphonse,” Luciano said, “what is it?”
“I didn’t know you was home. I been waiting for you all night.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The cops is after me. A cop got beat up and died, and they want me for it. I got to get out of town.”
Luciano said nothing.
“I could use some money,” the other man said. “I didn’t get no chance to go home.”
Luciano reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills that he knew contained almost a thousand dollars.
“Here, Al. You take this and get going before anybody sees you.”
The other man grabbed the money. “Thanks,” he said. “Someday I’ll do you a big favor back.”
“Where you gonna go?” Luciano asked.
“Chicago. My uncle will give me a job. I’ll pay you back.”
Suddenly the bigger man threw his arms around Luciano in a giant bear hug of gratitude. Then he turned and loped away down the silent street.
From the front stoop of his apartment, Luciano watched until Al Capone turned the corner and vanished onto West Street. He was glad to see him go. Capone was a hothead, bound to kill many people. Best to let him do it in Chicago, where he would not mess up Luciano’s plans.
Then he went upstairs to go to bed. All in all, it had been a good day. A very good day.
CHAPTER 3
Summer 1920
Down Leroy to Seventh, left one block to Carmine, up Carmine to Bleecker, then right to Downing, and down that to Seventh again, and then the whole thing backward, over and over again, until it was time to go home.
It was enough, most nights, to make Tommy Falcone wish he had never become a cop. He could have dealt with danger, with excitement, but the insufferable dullness of walking a beat pushed him to the edge.
In the months since he had returned home, he had come to realize what a medical marvel had been performed on his right hip and leg to enable him to walk again. But the doctors had probably never counted on his walking a ten-hour beat, night after night, in a heavy, sweat-soaked police uniform. It was little comfort to realize that his father, before being promoted to sergeant, had done just the same kind of stultifyingly boring patrol work, just to be able to feed his family. He remembered being little and seeing his father coming home from work and soaking his feet in the big white-speckled blue pan in which Mama roasted holiday turkeys. And he remembered thinking at the time that his father must be old, very old.
He began whistling a melody from a Verdi opera. He could never remember its name—music was Tina’s specialty, not his—but he had grown up hearing Caruso sing it over the family’s treasured phonograph and the music was deeply imprinted on his brain. Up ahead, he saw the call box. The clock on a nearby bank read 1:30 A.M.
He opened the box with a key and reported in. The dispatcher cleared him for a thirty-minute supper break. For a moment, he considered crossing over to St. Luke’s Place, finding a bench under a streetlight, and just spending the time reading. But he gave the idea up quickly. Every time he had gone over there, no matter how late it was, the benches were all taken up by ardent young lovers. Tommy was pretty sure they would not appreciate a cop sitting among them for a half hour, even if he was just reading.
Instead, he backtracked and crossed over to an all-night restaurant two doors up on Cornelia, so small an eatery that it had no name on its flyspecked front window.
A buxom blond waitress whom he had never seen before took his order and soon delivered Tommy a hamburger, a coffee, a slice of apple pie, and a smile that she seemed to have been saving up for years. By then, though, Tommy had already propped his copy of Dickens’s American Notes up against the sugar container and was reading. The waitress shook his book from side to side to draw his attention to his food. Tommy thanked her mechanically and went back to reading.
Let us go on again; and … plunge into the Five Points.… This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays … all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
While Tommy had been reading, he had been picking absentmindedly at his food. Now he put the book away. It was his neighborhood Dickens was writing about, the way it had bee
n when his father, Tony, had first come to America.
As he sipped his coffee, he became vaguely aware of two female shapes, one on either side of him, talking back and forth over his head. He considered offering to move but peevishly decided that there were enough empty seats in the restaurant for them to find their own without bothering him.
He heard one of the girls say something about his being cute, and he wanted to tell her to go away and leave him alone. He was annoyed at all the would-be Bohemians in Greenwich Village who thought it was their obligation to crawl into bed with everyone they met.
It was only when he felt one of the girls kiss him on the cheek that he looked up, and it took him the briefest split second to realize that the girl, strikingly pretty in a Mediterranean sort of way, with piled-up black hair and a figure that was just too voluptuous for her chic flapper dress, was his sister, Tina.
When the other girl giggled, Tommy turned to her and saw Sofia Mangini, done up in the same fashion, over–made-up and overdressed.
“What are you two up to?” he said in a disgusted voice.
Tina giggled and Tommy saw that she was slightly drunk.
“Oh, Tommy, don’t be a fuddy-duddy. We’re just out having fun. That’s all.”
“At two o’clock in the morning? Do Mama and Papa know? You’re supposed to be home in bed. What about school tomorrow?”
“Graduation tomorrow,” Tina said. “Then we’re done with that dumb old school forever. Right, Sofia?”
“Right,” the other girl answered.
“And Mama and Papa don’t know anything. We sneaked out, down the fire escape. Both of us. Then we went to a graduation party.”
“You must have been a big hit. Both of you made up that way.”
“Oh, we were,” Tina said. “We met the cutest boys. Except one of them thought our bosoms were too big.” Sofia giggled in embarrassment and Tommy realized she was drunk, too. Tina stood very straight, thrusting her bosom forward. “Do you think that, Tommy?”
“What I think is that you’ve had too much to drink. And now you’re both going to come with me and walk this off, or I’ll have to call the paddy wagon and have you hauled off to the drunk tank.”
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