Tragic

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Greg grinned and nodded. “Until you tell me different, Jackie,” he said, “I’m here to stay.”

  Jackie shook his head. “You’re too good to be true. I don’t deserve you.”

  Greg walked over and gave him a hug. “You’re too hard on yourself, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re a good man. Now you be safe out there.”

  Jackie patted Greg on the shoulder. “I will,” he said and left the apartment before he broke down and started crying.

  A taxi waited for him at the curb and took him to a warehouse on the Hudson waterfront that Vitteli sometimes used to meet at when he didn’t want to be seen. He was waiting with Barros when Jackie arrived, their breath coming out in clouds of condensation inside the unheated building.

  “Ah, here’s the prodigal son now.” Vitteli grinned. “How’s Jackie today?”

  Ignoring the stare from Barros, Jackie shrugged. “I’m okay,” he said. “Just a little tired.”

  Vitteli nodded. “Good, good,” he said. “You know, Jackie, I wish things could have been different with Vince. But it had to be done, or all of us would have been neighbors at Sing Sing.”

  “We might still be,” Jackie pointed out.

  “Not if everybody keeps his damned mouth shut,” Barros growled, but left it at that after a look from Vitteli.

  An uncomfortable silence fell, but only for a moment before Sal Amaya poked his head in the door and said that their guest was arriving. A minute later, a fat, bald man entered the warehouse, followed by two large bodyguards.

  “Marat Lvov,” Vitteli said with a smile, extending his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Always a pleasure, my old friend,” Lvov replied as they shook hands. He looked around and shivered. “Perhaps there is a warmer place to have this conversation.”

  “I apologize, but I’d rather no one saw us together, and I won’t keep you long,” Vitteli said.

  “Yes, of course. You said there was something urgent?”

  “Maybe,” Vitteli said. “It’s come to my attention that the man you hired for our little project has been overheard boasting in a bar over on your side of the East River. One of my associates over there heard him and while he wasn’t giving any details, you know how these things go. Too many shots of vodka and he lets something slip.”

  Lvov scowled. “If there’s a problem, I will take care of it.”

  Vitteli shook his head. “I want your guy to take care of his pals, if you know what I mean. Then Joey will deal with your problem after they’ve had a little talk.”

  Lvov thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t give shit about him. He is nothing.”

  “Good, then you’ll let me know how to find this fucker after he’s put his two pals in the ground.”

  “His name is Alexei Bebnev. I will get back to you with how to locate him. He moves around a lot.” Lvov held out his hands. “My apologies. It was not part of plan to have so many involved.”

  Vitteli looked hard at the Russian for a moment. “No, it wasn’t. You told me it would be one guy, a guy who knew how to keep his mouth shut. I gave you fifty thou to get it done. You go cheap on me, get some numbskull?”

  Lvov’s fat face darkened. “Of course not,” he said, scowling as he looked at his bodyguards, which seemed to give him nerve. “Do not be angry with me. You know who my friends are in Little Odessa.”

  “Fuck your friends, we have friends, too,” Barros said, keeping his eyes on the bodyguards. “Get us what we need.”

  Lvov glared at Barros but then smiled. “Look at us,” he said to Vitteli, “fighting like a couple of dollar whores over a customer. I will be happy to get you information; then we can share a friendly drink someday when it is all over, no?”

  Vitteli looked like he was going to say something, but then smiled back. “You’re right. We’ll take care of this mouthy bastard and his friends and drink a toast again like old friends.”

  A few minutes later, after Lvov and his bodyguards had left the warehouse, Jackie turned to his fellow conspirators. “When does it end?”

  “What’s that, Jackie?” Vitteli asked. “Did you say something?”

  “I said, when will the killing end? First it was Vince. If he actually was the first,” Jackie said, looking at Barros. “But Vince for sure, and now these guys?”

  “What do you care about ‘these guys,’ Jackie?” Vitteli said, gesturing the sign for quotes around “these guys.” “They’re punks. They’ll put a gun to your head for a few thousand bucks and pull the trigger. The world will be better off without them.”

  “It’s still murder.”

  “Uh-oh, someone developed a conscience,” Barros sneered.

  “They’re loose ends, Jackie,” Vitteli said. “Something happens and one of them gets popped for some small-time beef and suddenly they want to talk and make deals. The mouthy Russian is one thing. Joey will take care of him. I don’t know what the other two punks have been told—not much, probably, but still, I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Jackie’s head dropped. I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. “Yeah, we don’t really have a choice,” he said at last. “Even if we wanted to, there’s no undoing the past.”

  8

  THE DISEMBODIED VOICE OF KARP’S receptionist, Darla Milquetost, suddenly crackled over the intercom sitting on his desk. “Mr. Karp, Mr. Gorman called to say he’s running a couple of minutes late, but he’s downstairs and will be right up.”

  “Thank you, Darla, send him in when he arrives,” Karp replied into the intercom and then sat back as he looked across his big mahogany desk. Guma was sitting in his cushy club chair; Fulton was standing at the window behind Guma looking east, watching the foot traffic eight floors below in the park that separated Chinatown from the Criminal Courts Building.

  As the lead men for his office in the Carlotta murder case, Karp had asked Guma and Fulton to the meeting with Mahlon Gorman, who’d identified himself as the victim’s attorney when he called the day before. “It wasn’t an armed robbery,” he’d said at the time. “It was an assassination, and Charlie Vitteli was behind it.”

  “Do you have any proof of that?” Karp had asked without saying anything about his own suspicions.

  “Not yet,” Mahlon said. “But maybe I can add to what you know and talk a little about motive. But I’d rather do it in person if you can spare the time.”

  Karp had agreed, and an hour before the meeting, he’d asked Guma and Fulton to come to his office so they could go over the case before Gorman arrived, including the rumors on the streets about Vitteli’s involvement.

  “It’s not hard to believe,” Fulton said as he stepped back from the window. “Vitteli’s dirty and everybody knows it. The problem is that nobody’s got any hard proof, but everybody knows somebody who knows something.”

  “Typical,” Karp said with a shake of the head. “If Vitteli’s behind this, we’ll have to find the killers and then pyramid the case from the bottom up.”

  “Could be tough if he brought in somebody from the outside,” Fulton said.

  “That’s the way the old-time Mafia would have done it,” Guma agreed. “Fly a couple of guys over from Sicily, and then after the job gets done, send them home on the next plane.”

  The truth was, there were few real leads. Vitteli, Barros, and Corcione were all sticking to their story that two unknown masked gunmen had jumped out of the alley and demanded their wallets; Carlotta tried to pull a gun but the other guy was quicker. Carlotta’s driver had been sent ahead to get the car and only arrived back in time to see the getaway car drive off—a late-model sedan with gray primer and New York plates. A waiter had witnessed what appeared to be a minor altercation inside Marlon’s, but the men had appeared to patch things up by the time they left.

  “Or that’s their story, anyway,” Fulton said. “We don’t have any good descriptions of the shooter or his buddies. No solid links to Vittel
i, either, other than we know they didn’t like each other. Rumors are flying on the streets, but I don’t have to tell you that conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen in Gotham.”

  “What about the widow? Antonia Carlotta?” Karp asked.

  “She’s convinced that Vitteli’s behind it,” Fulton replied. “She says that her husband thought Vitteli stole the election for union president and that Vitteli asked for the meeting to discuss stepping down. But she doesn’t have anything to prove it was a setup.”

  “Anything new from Dirty Warren?” Guma asked.

  Karp shook his head. “Not much. He says that according to the grapevine, there was another witness to the shooting who can finger Vitteli. He’s got feelers out, but so far this alleged witness isn’t coming forward.”

  A knock on the door stopped the conversation. Darla Milquetost opened the door and then gestured for the visitor to walk through.

  As he stood to greet him, Karp was surprised when he saw Mahlon Gorman. He’d been expecting an older man, not the boyish-looking attorney who strode up to shake his hand.

  “Mr. Karp, a pleasure to meet you. I’m a longtime admirer,” Gorman said.

  “Thank you,” Karp replied and then introduced the others. “The gentleman in front of the desk is Special Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma, who’s been involved in the case from the beginning, and the big guy over by the bookshelf is Detective Sergeant Clay Fulton of the NYPD, currently assigned to my office. He also went to the scene that night and has been the liaison between the NYPD homicide division and this office regarding Mr. Carlotta’s murder.”

  The introductions over, Karp pointed to the seat next to Guma and invited Gorman to sit down. “We’re all ears,” he said, flipping to a new page on his yellow legal pad.

  Gorman nodded. “Thanks, I appreciate your time. As I said on the phone, this so-called robbery was a ruse. There’s a reason that Vince Carlotta was singled out and shot, and that reason is Charlie Vitteli. As I said, I can’t prove that yet, and you’re better equipped to do it anyway, so let me just begin with a little history.”

  With that, Gorman launched into how the North American Brotherhood of Stevedores was formed by Leo Corcione as an alternative to the International Longshoremen’s Association for local unions who either didn’t like the tactics or the impersonal size of the best known of the dockworker unions. As the size of NABS grew, so did interest in absorbing it from the International, as well as attempts by the mob to control it. Tough and smart, Corcione had fought to keep his union free, “sometimes in court, but, when occasion called for it, with bats and fists, too.

  “And starting some twenty years ago, wherever the old man made a stand, Vince would be there at his side, and in fairness, so would Vitteli,” Gorman added.

  Although both of the younger men were dedicated to the union, they were different as wine and whiskey. “Vince was always about the workers and identified with them first, never forgetting his roots. Charlie liked the power the union represented. He also liked the trappings of power, too—the nice cars, the silk shirts, the big house, the expensive vacations. But where they were really different, at least to me and I’ve known them both for about ten years, was that Vince was comfortable in his own skin. If Leo had never put him in management, he would have been fine working on the docks. But Charlie, he’s always looking over his shoulder, wondering who’s talking behind his back. Oh, he comes off as the tough, confident guy, but he’s paranoid as hell and needs to feel important. I think that’s part of what eventually led to all of this.”

  “How do you mean?” Karp asked.

  “I think he knew that Leo was going to name Vince as his heir apparent,” Gorman said. “And I don’t think he could handle the thought of playing number two to Vince. When the old man died first, events played right into his hands. It meant an election, but Charlie wasn’t going to win it—the men, most of them anyway, identify with Vince—so he cheated and we caught him.”

  Gorman explained how he and Carlotta had taken their complaint to the U.S. Department of Labor only to be rebuffed. “Applicable federal law says we had to exhaust all of our remedies through the union management first, which meant we had to tip our hand to Vitteli. Of course, Vitteli and his guys rejected the complaint, so we were preparing to go back to the Labor Department, and if that didn’t work, we were going to seek redress in federal court here in the Southern District.”

  “So you think Vitteli had Carlotta killed because you uncovered election fraud?” Guma asked.

  “That’s part of it,” Gorman replied. “But as I said, Charlie liked power and everything that went with it. He and his cronies live a pretty high lifestyle that’s hard to justify with their salaries, which are good but not that good. But it would be hard to prove—Leo’s son, Jackie, is in Vitteli’s back pocket and he’s the CFO—unless we could get our own auditors in there, and that wasn’t going to happen unless Vitteli was out and Vince was in. That’s why Charlie had to win that election.”

  “So Vitteli wins but you guys figure out he cheated,” Fulton said.

  “Right,” Gorman agreed. “We think he had a guy at the Labor Department filling him in on what we were up to, and of course we had to file that formal complaint with the union. So while he didn’t have all of our cards on the table, he knew he was in trouble. That’s why I believe he called Vince and wanted to meet so that they could ‘work things out,’ his words.”

  “Did Vince believe him?”

  “No. In fact, he was pretty sure that Vitteli sent some guys out to his house to try to intimidate him a few days earlier.”

  “Really? I hadn’t heard about this,” Fulton interjected.

  “Yeah, three guys showed up at the house acting like they were looking for work,” Gorman said. “Vince wasn’t convinced. He took down their license plate number on a notepad and showed it to me.”

  Karp leaned forward. “Do you have the note?”

  Gorman shook his head. “No. Vince was pretty ticked off about those guys coming to his house. He was going to confront Vitteli about it.”

  “There were three guys at the scene,” Fulton pointed out.

  “I’ve thought about that,” Gorman said. “And I wish I’d asked Vince more about them. I know he said one of them spoke with an accent, Russian or something like that. But I should have asked him for a description.”

  “Was Vince worried?” Guma asked.

  Gorman thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “Maybe for his wife and son,” he said. “But he was a tough guy, and confident—always sure he could handle whatever came his way. I knew he was carrying a gun that night. But then he called and said Vitteli had agreed to step down; it seemed like it was all going to work out.”

  “How do you know that?” Karp asked.

  “I was in Washington, D.C., talking to a law firm about our problem with the Labor Department and Vince called from the bar. He said Vitteli knew his goose was cooked and was going to announce that for ‘medical reasons’ he was going to step down and there’d be another election,” Gorman said. “He wanted some concessions; essentially that Vince would drop the Labor Department stuff and work out the ‘financials,’ which probably meant walking away from any theft charges and arranging for a golden parachute. Vitteli wanted to stay on in a reduced role, along with his pal Joey Barros. . . . You know Joey Barros, don’t you? A real piece of work and dangerous . . . But anyway, Vince said they had to go. He was going to let Jackie Corcione stay on, mostly because of his loyalty to Leo, but I was going to take over as lead counsel for the union, and Jackie would have been on a tight leash with me.”

  “But Vitteli had supposedly accepted these conditions?” Karp asked.

  “That’s what Vince said. Of course, now I think it was all just to get him off guard.”

  “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Vitteli hasn’t said a thing about stepping down in the press,” Guma said, “though he’s certainly been quoted enough talking about what a gre
at guy Vince was. He called him ‘my brother,’ if I remember right.”

  “ ‘To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy,’ ” Karp replied as he tapped his pencil on the legal pad.

  The others looked confused. “What?” said Guma.

  “Nothing . . . just a quote from Macbeth,” Karp said. He looked at Gorman. “Thanks for coming in and talking about all of this. Frankly, we’ve had our own suspicions about Vitteli’s role. Is there anything else?”

  Gorman shook his head. “No. Sorry, I wish there was. But if I hear anything I’ll let you know. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the players and what they had to lose. Vince was a good man. I hope justice will prevail.”

  “So do we,” Karp said. “Rest assured we’ll do everything we can to see that it does.”

  Several hours later, Karp was still thinking about the conversation with Gorman when he arrived home at his loft on Crosby Street. However, his senses were momentarily overwhelmed by the smell of roasted garlic and herbs emanating from the kitchen, where Marlene stood with her back to him at the stove.

  “The famous Ciampi marinara?” he asked as he walked up behind and wrapped his arms around her. “What’s the occasion?”

  Marlene laughed and turned, reaching up to place her hands around the back of his neck and pulling him down for a kiss. “No occasion in particular,” she said. “But it’s Friday night, the boys are off to a friend’s for an overnighter, and I know how amorous Italian cooking with a glass or two of red wine makes you.”

  Karp feigned a yawn and shook his head. “Geez, that all sounds great, but I’m wiped,” he said. “I think I’ll just have a bowl of cereal and turn in early . . . OW!”

  “Oh, pardon me,” Marlene replied, having just squeezed his cheek, “I didn’t mean to pinch your cheek. Now, would you repeat what you just said, please?”

  Laughing as he rubbed his face, Karp bent down to kiss her again before saying, “Boy, that smells great and watching you cook turns me on.” His hands started to roam.