The Mezzogiorno Social Club

by Ercole Gaudioso

  But the connection to Patsy Stellato, father-in-law or not, broke in a lot of places, and no matter how broke it got, it still kept him safe from stickups and shakedowns, made him feel protected, got him walking like a rooster to Nicky’s house once or twice a week, slap an envelope on Antoinette’s kitchen table, try to get laid, and slam the door on his way out when he didn’t.

  One night, Stellato up in Saratoga with his wife and the racetrack, Antoinette turned down Sonny and this time he didn’t slam the door.

  She wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t scare Little Benny or baby Bobbi, both asleep in their rooms, but she got slapped and tossed around like she was a dishrag. She went for the phone, he ripped it from the wall. She went for the door, he spun her, slapped and punched her face as if she were a man, and ran down the stairs.

  Nicky out in the hall. “Hey. What the hell’s going on up there? Why you gotta slam that fucking door like that? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Ah, I get pissed off, you know.”

  “Give me the key to the house.”

  “I live here, my kid, my wife.”

  “You don’t live here. Give me the key. When your father-in-law tells me to give it back, you’ll get it.”

  Sonny gave up the key and beat it out the front door.

  Nicky called up the stairs: “Antoinette, you all right?”

  She opened her door and stepped back, out of the light. “Yeah, Nicky, I’m okay. Thanks.”

  “We gotta get rid of that son of a bitch. The kids are okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Nicky didn’t know Antoinette had caught a beating until next morning. Black eyes, bruises, puffed lips. No phone call to her father, but something better. The kind of better that made a neighborhood legend they still talk about.

  Nazis End the Problem of Sonny

  Nicky Coco’s face goes wide and bright when he tells the story:

  Yeah, so, Tulio Pastina, the guy with the bad legs — German shrapnel, 32nd Division, Alsace — one of the guys who brought us the piano from the speakeasy uptown, worked for me before and after the war, during and after Prohibition, whenever I needed him. The guy is a master with finished work. Cabinets, moldings, staircases, like that, like magic.

  His legs aren’t his only problem. He’s got this wife that needs doctors — special doctors — all the time, and he goes for his lungs with bills. When he has no work with carpentry, or even when he does, he drives a cab for extra cash. Gotta have a lot of respect for the guy, working the way he does, with legs in the pains all the time, reminding him to hate krauts.

  One day he calls me, and a half hour later he wheels a cab into one of my Bronx jobs. I’m in the shanty looking out the window. He gets out of the cab, he’s wearing the cabdriver cap, old army boots, and a peacoat. He looks old, but he’s younger than me. His face says he’s hurting, but he’s stepping pretty quick.

  “Come in, Tuli, I got us sandwiches,” I tell him.

  “I ate at my mother’s just now. But I’ll take it to my wife later.”

  “How’s your legs?”

  “Same.”

  “What’s up that you can’t talk on the phone?” I ask him.

  “First Avenue, Eighty-ninth,” he says.

  “Germantown,” I say.

  “This kraut gets in the cab, I take him up the Bronx, White Plains Road. He gives me a fin and an envelope. He don’t know me, but I know him. The piano we brought to your house?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It came from a joint on Eighty-fifth, a kraut joint that got torched before we got you that piano. I took fares there a few times. Cheap fucks. That’s how I seen this guy, either I took him there in the cab, or maybe I seen him on the street up there.”

  “And?”

  “He tells me bring something up to Decatur Avenue. Okay, I take the fin and the envelope.” Tulio turns, shuts the shanty door. “Fifty grand.”

  “In the envelope?”

  “I wish. Then I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Then what?”

  “Before I go to Decatur with the envelope, I go to my mother’s house, steam open the envelope, maybe there’s some spy shit in there.”

  I’m laughing at him. “Spy shit.”

  “Why, it can’t be?”

  “Keep going.”

  “It’s in English, a shakedown. Fifty fucking grand getting delivered.”

  Tulio waits, watching me like making sure I’m paying attention. He always does that.

  “Yeah, and?”

  “So I go to Decatur. I don’t know if this guy’s the pigeon or what, but I give him the envelope. ‘What’s your name?’ he wants to know. I tell him Angelo. He says, ‘Italian.’ I says ‘yeah,’ and he says, ‘come in.’”

  “I go in, he opens the envelope, reads the letter, and gives me another five spot. Old guy, seventy, seventy-five. A little patso. Says he needs somebody with him when he gives something to some guy, that it’s worth a deuce.”

  “Anybody else know this?”

  “Who’s gonna know?”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “I don’t know. He’s acting like in the movies, you know, spy shit. He gives me his phone number, I should ask for Jafsie and he’ll know who I am.”

  “Daffy.”

  “No. Jafsie, but daffy too.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. What you think?”

  “When you gotta get back to him?”

  “I figure right away, no?”

  Even though I’m not in a crew, my father-in-law is Pat Stellato, boss of the neighborhood crews. So, I gotta stay on the level, be careful for him. To do things right, I need his okay, maybe not for the two hundred, but for whatever was going on with the fifty grand. And with him up in Saratoga, and because things can’t wait, I figured I’m near enough to being legit, plus he knows I keep my mouth shut.

  “Want me to call now?” Tulio asks.

  I slide the phone to him and get half the conversation.

  “Yeah, Jafsie? Me, the cab driver.”

  Tulio writes on a pad on the desk. “Tomorrow, yeah. Call you. What? Angelo. I told you. They call me Angelo.” Tulio looks at me, makes a funny face.

  “Okay, I’ ll call tomorrow,” Tulio says, hangs up, and he’s nodding and grinning like a kid. “He wants for us to hook up with him and this other guy.”

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I don’t know, Tuli ...”

  “If we don’t do this, we’ll never know what we threw away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got something?” Tulio asks.

  “Yeah, but I don’t wanna shoot nobody. You got something?”

  Tulio smiles. “Remember that Luger I showed you?”

  “I remember.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Tulio says.

  “And don’t forget the sandwich for your wife.”

  ***

  I meet up with Tulio, he’s got the cab, we drive to one of the quiet streets around Westchester Square in the Bronx, nobody around. We wait till a beat up Ford with a rumble seat shows up, passes by a few times, then parks.

  A tall guy, white shirt, tie, dark fedora and overcoat, comes out of nowhere.

  “That’s him,” Tulio says.

  “Jafsie?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jafsie gives Tulio a nod and gets in the Ford. We get a quick gander at the guy driving, he pulls out, we follow. Over to the westside, down Riverside Drive in Manhattan, they stop. Jafsie makes a call on a street phone, gets back in the car. They stop and call, two, three more times.

  “They’re being careful,” Tulio tells me, as if I don’t know. “Looking for a set up or something.”

  I say: “This looks like bullshit.”

  “No, Nicky. No.”

  We stay with the Ford back up to the Bronx, Tremont Avenue. The cemetery, Saint Raymond’s. The Ford parks, shuts the lights, near a guy on a bench in a shadow. Jafsie gets out
of the Ford, talks with the guy, goes back to the car, opens the rumble seat, takes a toolbox. He brings it to the guy on the bench and that guy gets in a gray Plymouth with the box, some other guy driving. I don’t know where the Ford goes.

  The Plymouth pulls out and now it don’t look like bullshit. Jafsie starts walking to Tulio and I tell him: “Forget the two hundred, Tulio. Don’t lose that box.”

  Tulio’s calm, a real pleasant look on his face that fills the car with a caper so thick that you could taste it. I’m getting scared, I never did this kind of thing, but it would take more balls to call it off than to snatch fifty grand from scumbag krauts.

  We stay with the Plymouth and they’re moving slow, then fast, then slow. Tulio hangs loose. The Plymouth moves up White Plains Road, turns into 222nd Street. Tulio turns, pulls over, waits for the Plymouth to get through the block, but it pulls into a driveway.

  “Now, Tuli,” I say and he’s already flooring it up the street, into the driveway, the krauts getting out. We get out. Tuli goes into a crouch, his luger gleaming and pointed like Action Comics. I’m so scared, I’m like a dimwit, but the guys in the Plymouth freeze.

  “Put the box on the ground,” Tulio says. He’s sharp and quick, and I’m getting that way too.

  The guy puts the box down.

  “Put your hands on your head and back off,” Tulio says.

  The guys back off.

  “How much is in there?”

  “I don’t know.” The guy’s got the accent, and I’m hoping Tulio don’t shoot, he’s a wacky guy right now, with this hate look in his eyes, his finger on that fucking trigger — that if these krauts could know what this guy’s been through, and what’s on his mind — forget about it.

  Anyway, he stays ready for anything, the way he musta been in a foxhole or something. And he says: “I think there’s ten thousand in there.”

  “Yes, ten thousand,” the kraut says.

  “That’s good. The ten is yours, the rest is ours. We don’t talk about you and you don’t talk about us. Or we take the whole fucking thing.”

  “We take ten.”

  ***

  I stash the money. And it’s a good thing, because my father-in-law wants to know if the forty grand that’s left is in gold certificates.

  “Some, yeah,” I say.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the toolbox, in the garage.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yeah, we waited for you before we did anything.”

  “The money’s hot, the toolbox probably is too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ransom money.”

  “Lindbergh?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Find Sonny, call me when you got him.”

  ***

  Jersey cops found the baby in the woods near the Lindbergh house, figured his head was bashed in right after the snatch. Bronx cops found the toolbox in the trunk of Sonny’s car out by the Orchard Beach camp tents. Found Sonny in the trunk too, stinking up the camp, one behind the ear.

  Police Commissioner Mulrooney tied a ribbon around the story. He told the papers that the toolbox had held the ransom money, had been marked for ID by Lindbergh and a Doctor John Condon — called himself Jafsie — and the murder was a message that the mob executed one of its own for being in on “the kind of atrocity unacceptable, even to the Italians.”

  ***

  Sonny’s spirit whisked through Nicky’s house in a few minutes of gasps and moans, tears of shock and few of sorrow. Then three days in one of the Patarama parlors, only Rose looked beat up, and that was because Grandma Lucia broke out of a stare and into a grief howl each time she recognized her son in the coffin.

  Antoinette kept from smiling, but that’s about all. Suspicions that her father had something to do with the kill must have breezed through her mind, making her feel like she had ordered the hit and wondered, along with Emma and Josephine, what happened to the box with the money.

  Indictments

  When detectives snatched Nicky Coco on his way to a job, he figured the krauts made a beef. But the story that spread through the neighborhood and across three or four newspaper pages had nothing to do with krauts.

  Pictures in later editions showed guys from crews all over the city cuffed and herded through brass and glass doors of 100 Centre Street. From a holding cell in the basement, detectives brought them up to the District Attorney’s Office, then fed them, one at a time, into a long room bright with tall windows, and two dozen Grand Jurors who watched them dumb up at questions about “Montovano Zito, head of the Zito Family”; “Pasquale Stellato, head of the Morello Family”; “Carmine Tonno, his Consiglieri,”; and “Dominic Tonno, in line to replace the aging Pasquale Stellato.”

  They put Nicky Coco on first, threw questions at him about guys and things he didn’t know, and about the Mezzogiorno Social Club and bookmaking, loansharking, boxing and racetrack fixes, bid rigs for city construction jobs. Things Nicky knew some answers to and said he didn’t.

  About union dues, pension money and faked books, he knew nothing. He knew nothing about hits and strong arms, guns and missing persons. Still he trembled under his old and frayed blue and black checkered jacket, thinking the DA must have figured he did. But he looked square at the grand jury and answered questions, his face open and sinless.

  “Do you know Cesare Strachi?”

  “Knew him. Everybody knew him.”

  “And he was killed?”

  “That’s what the papers said. Years ago.”

  “Do you know who killed him, or who saw to it that he was killed?”

  “I couldn’t know that.”

  “You know that his body was found in a milk truck abandoned in front of Police Headquarters?”

  “I was a kid.”

  “Answer the question please.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know Tomasso Petto?”

  “No.”

  “Known as The Ox?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard the name.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I heard you guys got him this morning.”

  “So you do know him.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Just seen him around.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He used to be with Strachi, drove Strachi, but I don’t know what he’s doing now.”

  “Do you know Giorgio Pugliese?”

  “Georgie Nuts?”

  “You know him?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Peanuts. I mean he sells them.”

  “Was it he or Petto who left Strachi’s body at Police Headquarters?”

  “How could I know that?”

  “Answer the question please.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Dominic Tonno kill Cesare Strachi?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Carmine Tonno kill Cesare Strachi?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does Mr. Pugliese do anything besides sell peanuts?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “Have you ever placed a bet with Mr. Pugliese or anyone in the gambling operation that he controls?”

  “I don’t gamble.”

  “You never played the lottery? Policy? Numbers?”

  “Once. I didn’t hit and I never played again.”

  “With George Pugliese?”

  “No, some guy at a job. A mason, I think he was.”

  “Who else have you placed bets with?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Have you known Mr. Pugliese to oversee the gambling interests of Pasquale Stellato, Benito Carlucco, Carmine Tonno and Dominic Tonno?”

  “Carmine’s dead now. I don’t know those other guys.”

  “You don’t know Patsy Stellato?”

  “My father-in-law, yeah. Sorry, I’m nervous.”

  “Are you a member of a union?”

  “I
’m a contractor. They say I don’t have to be.”

  “Who runs the union to which you don’t belong? Strike that. To what union would you be a member?”

  “You mean the local?”

  “Very well, the local.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are your employees union members?”

  “That’s not my business. They’re all their own contractors.”

  “Do you know Mr. Vito San Martino, Vito Red?”

  “Real old guy. He’s a boss or something with the unions. He negotiates pay. But I don’t know him.”

  “Do you know Mr. Benito Carlucco?”

  “No.”

  “Benny Bats?”

  “No.”

  “Has Mr. Carlucco ever secured building contracts for you?”

  “I make my own contracts.”

  “Has Mr. Carlucco, Mr. Pugliese, or Mr. San Martino visited your construction sites?”

  “No.”

  “Thomas Petto?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “A lot of people visit.”

  “Do you know that lying to a grand jury could cost you a year or more in prison?”

  “I don’t know any of that.”

  “Do you wish to change any of your answers?”

  “No.”

  “Request that the witness be remanded.”

  ***

  Weeks on Riker’s Island, Nicky Coco lay in a cell he shared with a guy from Brooklyn, and photos taped on the wall not as vivid as the photos taped on his memory.

  There was the one of Little Benny, eight years old, skinny and wiry and sharp, running around Emma’s kitchen the night Nicky came in with boxes of Chinese food and bottles of somebody’s home made wine for the celebration. Emma was pregnant, and had been for three months.

  “We still got six months to go and this place sounds like a nursery already,” Nicky joked, happy all over his face.

  Then the picture of Emma hugging Little Benny, Antoinette holding Bobbi’s little girl in her arms, wailing for whatever she was needing. Then pictures from weddings, Christmases, the beach.

  Nicky had about ten months left to do for the Contempt of Court and wasn’t the only guy doing it. Georgie Nuts was with him. They all had the same lawyer, they all stayed clammed. Patsy Stellato had okayed plenty of grease for the system to smooth the way to take-it-easy. He copped Nicky and Georgie to year long misdemeanors and entered a notguilty for Vito, Dominic and Benny. They made bail, got adjournment dates for a motion, and would, the lawyer said, cop them out in front of a right judge after the beef got too stale for the newspapers.