The first big operation he masterminded was an attempt to smuggle in aboard a cargo ship a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. When it was cut and packaged, it would sell for more than 5 million dollars on the street.
Maranzano had been reluctant at first, but Nilo told him that Luciano was making millions in drug trafficking and the money was on the streets, just waiting to be picked up.
Nilo carefully selected a three-man team to get the drugs when they arrived at the Thirteenth Street pier. But one of the team liked to drink too much and, one night, in his cups, he told his brother-in-law about the big drug deal, and the brother-in-law—who drank too much, too—wound up in a speakeasy the next night bragging about his mob connections to an affable young man named Vito.
When Nilo’s team went to the dock four nights later to pick up the drugs, they ran into a city police task force that had the area staked out. They escaped through a hail of bullets when Nilo drove their getaway car straight though a chain-link fence and vanished into a Maranzano-owned garage six blocks away.
They had escaped, but the drugs would be confiscated and Maranzano would be out the hundred-thousand-dollar cost. In a fury, Nilo lined the three men up against the getaway car at gunpoint. But facing death, each one denied having told anyone about the drug shipment.
Nilo considered killing the three as an object lesson, but he was able to restrain himself.
“I’m gonna let you three live. For now. But every one of you better start looking around. We got a rat somewhere in our family, and you better get me some names.”
A week later, the brother-in-law cracked, and before being buried in a pit across the river in Kearny, New Jersey, he told of how he had been pumped by a young man named Vito. Nilo offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would lead him to the informer.
Nilo fared better with his plan to make Maranzano a force in the city’s giant garment district. But again, Maranzano seemed reluctant to move.
“This Masseria man, Lepke, has the cutters’ union. Should we risk a fight with him?” the don asked.
“If we fight them here, we can win. If we don’t, we may have to fight them somewhere else where we’ve got no chance of winning,” Nilo said.
Maranzano thought for a long time, concealing his face behind his steepled fingers. “All right, Nilo,” he finally said. “You do it.”
Still his voice was hesitant, and when Nilo left the office he thought that Don Salvatore might be getting too old to run the family.
* * *
RACHEL WONDERED if Tommy was keeping something from her. He went out frequently at night, ostensibly to the law-school library, but when he returned home after she was already in bed, she sometimes smelled beer on his breath. And she wondered where he got the money to pay their household bills. But she never asked about it. She had faith in her husband.
* * *
ON ONE OF THE RARE NIGHTS that he stayed home, Nilo got out of bed quietly and went into the next room to look at his three-year-old son, Stephen. As he looked at the sleeping boy’s smooth, handsome face, his nose that would one day be long and aquiline, he thought, He looks like me.
Since his return from prison, Sofia had insisted the baby was his. He had not, at first, believed her. But she never changed her story, and the truth was that since he returned, she had been a good wife to him, obedient and solicitous. He did not love her, but the idea of loving a wife, or any woman for that matter, seemed strange to him. A wife was meant to run the house and bear and raise children. Nothing else. It was only important that a wife love her husband, and in that regard Sofia had given him no reason to complain.
He reached out and touched the face of the small boy who stirred in his sleep. Well, at least I know I am the father of the next one to be born.
He went back into his own bedroom and lay next to Sofia again. He reached out and touched her big pregnant belly. This baby is mine.
He had wanted Sofia to become pregnant with his child as soon as he returned home from Dannemora, but month after month passed and she did not conceive. He was beginning to worry that perhaps there might be something wrong with him when Maranzano brought the subject up at a meeting one day in his office near Grand Central Station.
“Sofia? Is she not pregnant?”
Nilo shook his head. “We are trying.”
“How old is your boy?”
“Two and a half,” Nilo said.
“And Sofia is still nursing?”
Nilo nodded.
“It is time to put the boy on a bottle,” Maranzano said. When Nilo looked up, puzzled, the older man said, “It is well known that women do not conceive while they are still nursing. The breasts must dry before the womb will accept another child. Trust me. Do it.”
It had sounded like nonsense, an old wives’ tale, to Nilo, but he had insisted to Sofia that the breast-feeding time had to end. She had finally given in. Nilo did his husbandly duty. He and Sofia had sex almost every other night, and while she was not an enthusiastic partner, she was willing and pliable.
Two months after she stopped nursing, she was pregnant. If she had thought that pregnancy would stop Nilo from insisting on sex with her, she was mistaken. He wanted it known, without doubt, that he and he alone was the father of this new child, who would be a boy and who would be named Salvatore, in honor of the don.
He took his hand off her belly and rolled back onto his side of the big bed. He thought of Tina Falcone and was unable not to think of the pictures he had of her. He kept the pictures and the original movie film in a locked box atop a shelf in his clothes closet, but often he took the pictures out, just to look at.
He liked looking at the pictures, feeling them, knowing that they were his and that if they were ever made public there would be no hole deep enough for her to crawl into and hide. And all the rest of the Falcones, too. It was a hammer to be used when the time was right.
Tina had never gone back to work at Luciano’s speakeasy. The big plywood figure of her was taken away from outside Ross’s Club, almost as if she had never existed, and the club was closed and soon sold. Tina was working in an office in the village, a job that Mario had gotten for her.
Nilo thought, It is time for her to work for me. She will be famous again, and the more important and famous she becomes, the more lustrous her star, the easier she will be to control with that film and those pictures. Soon I will let her know what her job will be.
Thinking of Tina’s pictures had aroused him. He rolled back toward his wife, put his hands on her pregnant belly, and roughly entered her. Sofia moaned, then tried to pretend she was still asleep.
It doesn’t matter, he thought. You are here to be used by me.
He released himself into her and, still wordless, rolled away, onto his back, and closed his eyes for sleep.
The doorbell rang.
He became instantly alert. Sofia did, too. He slipped from bed, pulled on a robe, and took his gun from the bedside table. Sofia was sitting up, wide awake—she had not been asleep at all, he knew—and was putting on her own robe.
“Let me answer the door,” she said. “I will be safe.”
“So will I,” he said. “I have this.” He raised his gun in front of his face, then went outside.
When he looked through the peephole before opening the door, he saw two of Maranzano’s bodyguards in the hall, waiting for him.
“Don Salvatore wants you,” one of them said.
“So late? What time is it?”
“Almost midnight. He told us to bring you.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs. Give me a few minutes to dress.”
The men nodded and walked away.
Although Sofia looked at him, her face filled with unspoken questions, Nilo offered her no explanation. He dressed quickly, then went downstairs, where the men were parked in front in a large black sedan.
Nilo got in the backseat, alone, feeling secure with the weight of his gun in his jacket pocket. They drove east out of the
city for what seemed an endless time but was only little more than an hour.
Nilo recognized the direction and knew the destination: Maranzano’s estate out near Bellmore, Long Island. While the don spent most of his time at his New York apartment, he maintained a big country house for his childless wife and assorted hanger-on relatives. But it was rare for him to do any business there, so Nilo was in the dark on what the meeting would be about. But he knew something had been planned, because the don had been away from the office for the past few days.
Maranzano’s home was a white colonial-style mansion in the middle of vast lawns and thick woods. The two bodyguards walked inside with Nilo and left him in a small waiting room. Two other men—both a little older than Nilo and dressed in ill-fitting pinstripe suits—were also there.
Somebody’s bodyguards, Nilo thought. He had never seen either of them before, and no one spoke.
After a long time, a tuxedo-clad man of middle years opened one of the doors and said, “Danny Neill?”
Nilo stood up.
“This way, please.”
Nilo followed the man into an immense formal dining room. Down its middle was a table forty feet long and ten feet wide. It had been set for supper in the finest china and silver. Men were seated all around the table and Nilo made a quick head count of forty men. He had seen many of them around Maranzano’s real estate office before, but others were complete strangers.
His escort led Nilo to the head of the table where Maranzano himself sat. He rose to greet Nilo, and when he stood, all the others at the table rose, too.
Maranzano nodded at Nilo in recognition and gestured him to a vacant seat near his right hand. The old man turned back to the others.
“For the few of you who do not know him, this is my close advisor and associate, Danilo Sesta, who is joining with us tonight. He is sometimes known as Danny Neill. He is young, but he has already suffered much in our cause. And now he is putting terror in the hearts of our enemies.”
The others all mumbled something more or less in unison, which Nilo took as a greeting. He found his heart beating wildly with excitement. This was what he had been hoping for for a very long time. It would be Maranzano’s formal acknowledgment of Nilo’s importance, delivered in front of all these top lieutenants.
Maranzano motioned for the others to stay seated, then surveyed the rest of the room with ponderous dignity.
“We are all the children of Castellammare del Golfo,” he began. “We are a family and we live by our honor and our word.”
Despite himself, Nilo was awed. He had longed to become a member of the Mafia brotherhood, but he had always half-sneered at the ritualistic ceremonies he had heard about. Now he found it impressive and dignified.
“Now a new one, Danilo Sesta, comes to our family to stand with us against our enemies.”
Maranzano reached into the pocket of his black formal suit and removed a .38 revolver and a deadly looking dagger and set them in front of Nilo.
“These are what we live by. If necessary, these are what we die by.”
He nodded to Nilo. “Rise, child of Castellammare del Golfo.”
When Nilo stood, Maranzano said “Make a cup with your hands.”
Nilo did as he was told, and Maranzano took a piece of paper and set it in his cupped hands.
“Now repeat after me,” he said, lighting a match to the paper. “This is the way I will burn if I betray the secrets of this family.”
Fighting to control the pain of the burning paper without showing it, Nilo repeated the words.
When the fire had gone out, Maranzano reached across and carefully parted Nilo’s hands, letting the ash drift down to the table.
“There are three rules,” Maranzano said. “Break any of them and the penalty is automatically death.
“The first is complete obedience to your superiors.
“The second is silence, omerta, complete and utter about our activities to outsiders.
“The third is to never touch the wives or female relatives of members of this family of the Castellammarese.”
Nilo nodded.
“Extend your right hand.” When Nilo did, Maranzano picked up the dagger and stuck it into the tip of Nilo’s index finger until blood came. Nilo looked at his bleeding fingertip and remembered that it was the same one with which he had once shared blood with Tommy Falcone.
“This blood means you are now one of us. You have deserved this honor for a long time.” He paused. “But I thought it best to wait until the fuzz on your cheeks had turned to whiskers and all here would recognize you as brother.”
He smiled at Nilo, then looked around, and the entire table broke into applause for Nilo, along with laughs and shouts of congratulations. It lasted a long time, only subsiding when waiters poured into the room carrying large trays of food of all kinds and bottles of wine and liquor.
Nilo leaned over and took Don Maranzano’s right hand in his and kissed it.
“This is more honor than I deserve, Don Salvatore,” he said. “But you will never regret your decision here tonight.”
“I know that, Nilo. You are truly my son.” He leaned close. “Do not drink. We have business yet to do.”
Throughout the after-dinner drinks, individually and in small clusters men seated at the table came up to congratulate Nilo and welcome him. Finally, the conversation died down and Maranzano rose in his place and lifted his glass.
“To all in our family … salute.”
Around the table men raised their own wineglasses, and Nilo did the same. Although excited, he was now getting tired; he hoped this ceremony would end soon. But to his dismay, Maranzano seemed ready to talk on.
“The Mafia is an old organization,” Maranzano said, “but this is a new country. And old things must change or else they will become weak and irrelevant. But you cannot talk change to some of those in other families. You know who they are. They see the world and cannot understand it and think nothing will ever change. But everything changes. The only thing unchanging is the permanence of the grave.
“We too will change as time goes on. Right now, we are a family of Castellammarese, and that is the way it must be, because we are brothers and we must treat each other as brothers. And we are brothers under attack. The people aligned with Joe Masseria…” Maranzano stopped and spat on the floor at his feet.
“The people aligned with Masseria have watched our growing power, our growing strength, and now have vowed that they will destroy our family. Separately, individually, they have begun to strike out at members of our family. They believe that they can quietly pick us off one by one until there are none left who will stand together. But as your leader I tell you now that will not happen. Even this very night, we strike back against them. It will be but another early battle in a long war. But I know, if we hold true to our beliefs and faith in each other, we will be victorious.
“Still I warn you, it will be dangerous out there now. It is not a time to relax one’s guard. Be alert and be careful. The war has begun. You are my chosen lieutenants, each and every one of you. If you do not let yourselves become victims, you will be the victors. You have my word on it.”
The men seated at the table cheered and applauded again at the declaration of war. Maranzano let the commotion die down before he spoke again.
Nilo stifled a sigh. He was growing weary with Maranzano’s endless bombast.
“The great poet Florio talked of the nine pains of death,” Maranzano said. “And the last and worst was to have a friend who would betray you. Let us resolve, each of us, to avoid that pain of death.” The don sat down, again to applause.
Nilo realized everyone must have been as exhausted by the hour as he was because almost immediately men got up from the table and began, trying to disguise their haste, to bid Maranzano good night and to head for the door.
Nilo stayed in his seat and watched the men—the backbone of Maranzano’s family—come up to the old Sicilian and pledge their undying loyalty.
Yeah. Until someone makes you a better offer, he thought.
Maranzano seemed to linger a long time in conversation with one man, who finally nodded and turned to Nilo.
Maranzano said, “Nilo, Brother Gentile has graciously agreed to drive you back to the city.”
Nilo rose. “Thank you,” he said to the man, who nodded again and said, “My driver and I will be out front.”
As he left, Nilo was hugged by Maranzano in a warm embrace. The old man also whispered in his ear, and the words chilled Nilo more than any words ever had in his life.
He went outside and saw Gentile sitting in the backseat of a waiting limousine. Nilo got in, expressed his thanks very strongly, and said, “I’m tired. I’m not used to these late hours.” He sat back in a corner of the seat and closed his eyes.
About twenty miles toward New York City, on one of the lightly traveled highways that were under construction all over Long Island, the driver stopped at a traffic light.
Nilo sat up and glanced around. There were no cars visible at the intersection. He drew his gun from his pocket and shot Gentile in the head, then turned his gun on the driver and shot him too. He reached over the seat and turned off the key, then shot both men again at close range to make sure they were dead.
He got out of the car and a moment later was picked up by another car, which had been trailing them without headlights since they left Maranzano’s estate. A man got out of the car and drove Gentile’s auto away.
The driver, the only other person in the car, told Nilo, “I’ll take you home now.”
“Yes,” Nilo said.
“Did everything go all right?” the man asked.
“As the don wished,” Nilo said. He thought of Maranzano’s chilling words at the house when he had ordered Nilo to kill Gentile. He chose to serve Masseria.
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