[2010] The Ghost of Blackwood Lane

by Greg Enslen

  But Vincent knew there were still old-fashioned mob guys out there—he only had to look at the sudden and extremely profitable resurgence of legalized gambling across the nation to realize that they were out there, working behind the scenes, “lobbying” lawmakers to bend the rules and legalize activities that used to be contained in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Those bastions of mob rule were still clicking along and turning a healthier profit every year, but now groups in Louisiana and Arizona and Florida had managed to convince their local officials to let them have a little taste of that pie.

  And Vincent respected those groups for it. He thought his brother was on to something with his latest idea.

  Tony owned two gambling riverboats permanently docked in East St. Louis, Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis proper. Actually, Tony owned one and a half—one was turning a good profit, but the other was months away from opening and months behind schedule. Tony had staked all the money he could get his hands on to build the spectacular new riverboat from the keel up, but it had cost more than he’d expected. Now it was delayed, and the business was in real financial stress.

  Tony was planning on buying two more riverboats in St. Charles, just ten miles west of St. Louis, but that was down the road—he needed to get the second riverboat open and running first. He had people looking into floating one of the East St. Louis boats down to Louisville on a twice-monthly basis, where gambling was still illegal but riverboat gambling was judiciously overlooked. If his boat could get down there, it would be all the money they could scoop up and bring home.

  But these were all “legit” businesses—at least, they were operating inside the law.

  Jack Fremonti finally broke the long, painful silence. “Well, Tony, I don’t know if that’s the way we should approach this situation. They want out of our contract with their drivers and deliverymen, and I’m sure there’s some way we can negotiate with them and come to a peaceful solution that’s still in our favor. To burn them out,” he said, glancing at the others around the table, “well, that seems a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  The other suits were nodding along with him.

  Vincent Luciano frowned and wondered what his brother would say. He’d coached Tony for weeks leading up to this meeting, but Vincent still didn’t know if his brother would have the stones to move forward. He was sure that if his grandmother was still alive and sitting in on this meeting, she’d be laughing at them.

  “Mama Leo”—Leonita Luciano—had been the real thing. Only two generations back from her was the one name that had been most responsible for establishing the New York Mob’s power base.

  Her grandfather had been Lucky Luciano. She’d learned much from her grandfather and visited him many times while he was in prison at Dannemora and later at the minimum-security prison at Great Meadow.

  The man had started the organization of competing Italian and Sicilian families into cooperating ventures instead of competing businesses. It had been Lucky that had instituted the “Padrino,” or godfather, concept, where the oldest man in each family had the last and final word on the policies and businesses of each ‘familia.’ He had established the cooperative spirit and divided up the city of New York into areas for each family to oversee, organizing them and at the same time reducing the likelihood of violent confrontations by clearly defining each’s area of responsibility.

  Leonita’s father had been the head of the Luciano family during the sixties, but he’d gone down in the 1967 wave of police actions and arrests following the establishment of the now-defunct Italian Defense League. The League, established by an ex-capo by the name of Joey Paloma, had been borne out of the need for Italian Americans to feel better about the public’s opinion of them. In effect, it had been a civil rights movement for Italian Americans. It had ended up also being a very public embarrassment to the Mob.

  The police backlash had jailed her father and three other capos. Senior men in each organization had stepped in and kept the businesses going, and each of the jailed capos had been out of prison within a couple of months, but for Leonita’s father, it had signaled the beginning of the end. He had felt that the organizations would never be breached, but his informants in the police force and mayor’s offices had evaporated, and no word had come to any of his men that there was a move planned against the Lucianos by the cops. He’d been taken completely by surprise and arrested right out on 53rd Street, handcuffed and taken off in a police car like a little kid stealing apples off a fruit cart.

  That, more than anything, had angered and saddened the elder Luciano. He was the head of the Luciano family and one of the most powerful men in the city. The public embarrassment had sickened him. The lack of respect that his organization and his money should have earned made him angrier than even his own arrest, because they were harbingers of things—and times—to come.

  Leonita was his eldest child, a daughter, and she had been smart and ruthless. And she’d learned well from her father and made good use of her knowledge and connections. And those connections had been important: because of her name, she enjoyed a free ride in the business for a few years. And instead of sitting back on her laurels and just taking, as many of the younger generation had done, she’d worked her connections and established herself as a powerful leader of her own small group on the Lower East Side.

  But “Mama Leo” had also seen the writing on the wall—she had always been very good at picking up on little details. She was a sponge for knowledge. She’d had success in building her organization, and when her father had come to her on the last day in August of 1968 and told her to leave town, she hadn’t taken it personally. In fact, she’d already considered the idea herself, rejecting it out of respect for her family.

  He’d come to her, given her a sizeable sum of money and a warning—bad times were coming and she should leave town for her own protection. When she’d asked him where, he’d said, “I don’t know. Just someplace away from here, someplace where you’ll be safe. Your mother and I will visit as soon as we can.”

  With a heavy heart, Leonita Luciano had come west, bringing her smarts and her money and some of her organization with her. Her parents and friends had been sad, but anyone in the family with a sense of what was to come saw the move as an intelligent one—for the family to survive and grow, it would have to branch out.

  She made it to the Mississippi before she found what she was looking for—virgin territory. A place where they had never known her type of criminal. Of course, the mob had been and was still very powerful two hundred miles north, in Chicago, but St. Louis and the areas around it were open for the taking, and that was where she settled down and started her own “business.”

  “Mama Leo” Luciano and her soldiers arrived in St. Louis in 1946 and settled in a small bedroom community east of town named O’Fallon, Illinois. The town was just starting to grow, and there was some talk that “Mama Leo” used her growing influence in the local and state governments to get the new Scott Air Force Base located near O’Fallon, overnight doubling the family’s lucrative real estate investments.

  It had all started out as a typical mob operation, with “Mama Leo” setting herself up as the boss and making four or five of her top soldiers into capos and allowing them to recruit soldiers from the local population. There was already a small Italian population in the St. Louis area, and they recruited from these men, growing the organization up to almost a hundred members, fifteen or twenty of them “made” men. They got into real estate, money laundering, and loan sharking and began influencing the local unions, especially those involved in the booming downtown construction business. “Mama Leo” began the idea of hijacking shipments of cargo at Lambert Field, the big airport north of St. Louis, an idea that was adopted back in New York City by the Gambino family at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens.

  By 1971, when “Mama Leo” officially retired and her son Ginovese took over, the business had grown to rival that of the Chicago mob. There had even be
en official negotiations between the St. Louis and Chicago mobs as to the agreed-upon extent of their influences.

  She would be laughing at them right now, if she were here. Laughing at Tony and his bunch of suits. They looked like city council members, not a group of men to be feared or respected.

  “No, I don’t want to do it the normal way,” Tony began, tentatively. “If other ‘clients’ see us negotiating with the St. Louis Beverage Company, they might feel encouraged to do the same.”

  The others sat, listening. They hung on his words, wondering where Tony was going. To Vincent, it looked like they were scared.

  “I know we’ve been a lot more civilized in the past few years,” Tony continued, “but maybe we’ve gotten too civilized. The ‘90s have not been kind to us or our business. We’re barely hanging in there. And we need cash to finish the Princess Margaret. None of these other enterprises,” he paused and glanced at Vincent. “None of these other things will earn us enough money to finish the casino boat, and without that, we’re finished. I’m tired of waiting for this organization—this familia—to be successful.”

  There was no response from the others. No reaction to the use of the old name for their now-defunct organization, except for a few quick glances at Jack Fremonti. He was the most senior of them, and they were following his lead. If anyone was going to argue this point, it would be him.

  Vincent liked the use of the Italian term for family—it added a Sicilian tone, something that had been sorely lacking for years. But they were too entrenched in the way things had been done for so long—they would never see the direction Tony needed to go, much less go along with it.

  Such auspicious beginnings, Vincent thought. Such honored roots. Didn’t these men understand what flowed through his and his brother’s veins? Didn’t they want to remember what it felt like to have control and power and to wield it to some end?

  The Mafia in the United States had grown from desperate roots to such power because they had wanted it more than anyone else. They had taken all the opportunities, and made a few of their own. They had started out protecting their own, and it had grown naturally, organically, from a mutual aid society to an organization that wielded real, tangible power.

  And never, not once in the entire proud history of the Mafia that Vincent had spent the past few years carefully studying, had a group of men sat around a table like this in fancy suits and tried to ‘negotiate’ with someone who wouldn’t give them the respect they deserved.

  It didn’t work that way.

  The old ways had been better, when a neighborhood respected its leader, when the padrino would set up his office in the local tavern every few weeks and the citizens of the community would line up to ask for his advice or his assistance in their welfare. The padrino would quietly sip his drink and listen as each man or woman was led in to tell their stories, each asking for assistance. Sometimes it was for a loan, or a job for their oldest boy. Sometimes it was for a little protection from toughs, or maybe it was for a kind word in the right ear that would allow their youngest daughter to attend the school of her choice. Or maybe it was a plea for help because the police could or would not intervene.

  Each a favor, asked with grace and humility, and granted or denied by the padrino with a simple nod or shake of his head. Assistants would take notes and take each person away to get pertinent details. After a moment, the next story would begin.

  But it wasn’t just a chance for them to speak to the most powerful man in their neighborhood—it also served to remind the citizens that the padrino was their godfather. He ran the neighborhood and everything in it, and if you needed something straightened out or you needed someone spoken to, he was the man you came to. First. You didn’t go to the cops—how could they care as much about you as your padrino did? There was no need to involve ‘outsiders’—your padrino was all you needed to rely on, and it would only take a humble, honorable request for assistance to solve the problem.

  Of course, that meant that if your padrino ever needed something of you, hesitation or reluctance would not be tolerated. And in most cases, the citizens would not flinch to help.

  Such is how neighborhoods were supposed to run. And cities, and towns, for that matter. What people needed was a strong, caring family to watch over them. It had worked for a long time back in the old country, and it had worked even better in the United States until the government had stepped in and tried to stop the families from caring for their neighbors.

  These men had long ago forgotten the traditions of his family and its proud history—more importantly, they would fight his brother every step of the way.

  Every night on television, it seemed Vincent saw another story about another senseless killing somewhere: some kid walks into his junior high school with a rifle and blows three or four classmates away, or some nut-case kills his family and tries to blame it on mysterious intruders burglarizing his house, miraculously leaving him with only minor scratches while the rest of the family is mercilessly killed.

  Or that story he’d seen on the news not too recently about the mass murderer guy the police had finally caught after he had spent years wandering the nation in his dirty white van, killing people indiscriminately and even taking small parts of them with him. And they’d only caught that guy on some kind of fluke, from what he remembered. What was going on with these people? What kind of country was this, anyway? Was no one in control? Someone needed to step up, to take charge.

  Jack finally spoke. “No, Tony,” he said. “There is no way that I can sign off on this—the organization cannot proceed in this manner. Your heavy-handed tactics won’t work, just as they didn’t work for your father. He was a great man, but the days of that type of practice are long dead.” Fremonti shook his head. The other men around the table nodded in agreement.

  Vincent watched his brother closely.

  Tony nodded slowly, formulating his answer.

  “I’m sorry that’s the way you feel, Jack. But I’ve spent a long time thinking about it, and I’ve decided to scale back on our legal activities and take this family back to its proud roots. If that means ‘heavy-handed tactics,’ so be it. Can you get on board with that?”

  Jack Fremonti glanced down at Vincent, then around at the others. After a long moment, he finally shook his head.

  “I know you’ve been talking to your brother—I don’t know what he’s been filling your head with,” Fremonti said, “but taking the family back into criminal activities will only bring the cops down on us. It’ll bring us back to the 1950s. And I doubt even that could save your casino, Tony.”

  Tony glanced at Vincent. Vincent knew what was going through his mind, but there was nothing he could do to help him. And he wouldn’t have helped him, even if he could. His brother had to do this on his own, had to get his fire back.

  “My brother and I have been talking, that is true,” Tony said, leaning back in his chair. “We’ve decided that the riverboat is the future of our family here in St. Louis—if we play our cards right, we could control all legalized gambling up and down the Mississippi from here. But with the gambling comes a whole host of less-than-legal activities, and we need to control those too, from the start. And we need an infusion of cash to finish the Margaret.”

  His brother, Vincent thought, though finally showing some backbone, was defending his position. He needed to remember he was the padrino—he didn’t need to explain anything to anyone.

  Vincent moved his hands slowly under the table. He watched, but none of them reacted. Too bad—anyone from his crew would have known better.

  “Well, Tony,” Fremonti said, “if that’s your course of action, I must insist on leaving and staying out of it. I’m not going to be a party to that kind of thing. Pressure applied correctly, yes. But nothing violent, and nothing illegal.”

  Tony nodded carefully. “Are you sure, my friend?”

  Jack nodded and stood.

  “I’m afraid so. Gentlemen, please excuse me.”

/>   Tony glanced at Vincent, nodding.

  Vincent pulled the Beretta automatic out of his snakeskin boot and raised the gun from beneath the table, pointing it at Fremonti.

  There were looks, gasps.

  “Will you reconsider, my friend?” Tony said quietly.

  All the eyes in the room were on the gun, but Fremonti’s eyes moved from the gun to look at Tony, his eyes narrowing. After a moment, he shook his head and strode quickly for the door.

  Vincent pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession, practiced, calm. Fremonti slumped to the floor.

  Silence in the room.

  Vincent stood and walked around the table and he shot Jack once more, just to be sure.

  A cloud of gunpowder hung in the air, and one of the men coughed awkwardly. It broke the silence and, as Vincent sat back down, placing the gun on the table in front of him, the other men all started talking at the same time, suggesting ways to turn the family around, ways to make money and complete the riverboat.

  Vincent picked the gun up again after a moment and the table went quiet again. He pulled the slide free and checked the gun, then looked at Tony.

  “Anyone else unhappy with the situation?” Tony said to the men at the table, his voice low but clear.

  Their eyes met Tony’s, inevitably glancing at the body on the floor, blocking the exit. They shook their heads.

  “Good,” Tony said. “Let’s make a new start of it then.”

  Vincent stood, walking to door in the conference room that led into Tony’s office.

  “Meeting adjourned,” Tony said. “Please leave through my office.”

  The others stood and fled, let out the second door by Vincent. As each filed past, they looked at him like frightened sheep, leaving Tony and Vincent alone.

  Vincent smiled at his brother. “So, we’re really going to do this, then?”