The Pierre Hotel Affair

by Daniel Simone

  The security officers, another class of citizen whose monthly take-home pay was $960.00, were not as appreciative as the elevator operator. This breed of people was inclined to mistrust anyone and everybody. They detested the likes of Comfort & Company—who tended not to earn “an honest livelihood”—and vowed to work with the authorities in apprehending and bringing in those “blood-sucking maggots.” In actuality, the guards’ dislike for the Pierre raiders was the product of envy. The more verbal of the four garbled under his breath, “I’m gonna make sure we get you bastards.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Sacco severed the telephone lines in the lobby and those in the adjoining corridors. Nalo and Germaine were struggling to carry the four bursting suitcases overstuffed with the loot. “By the weight of these, we’ve done pretty good,” Germaine mused, the veins in his neck enlarged from the heavy lugging.

  “It looks that way,” Nalo said indifferently.

  Visconti and Ali-Ben packed the miscellany of burglary tools and other paraphernalia in a green metal box on rollers and wheeled it out onto the sidewalk. Working in unison, Germaine and Nalo stacked the luggage into the trunk of the limo. Comfort lagged behind, guarding the victims, and Frankos the Greek stayed at the 61st Street entrance to thwart any newcomers to come into the hotel. Sure enough, just as he and Comfort were about to exit the Pierre, two policemen, who had been walking the beat, buzzed the intercom, seeking refuge from this frosty night. Sacco, Nalo, Ali-Ben, Germaine, and Visconti had piled into the unusual getaway vehicle seconds before the pair of patrolmen had appeared. “Holy shit!” Sacco groused, his reflexes going for the pistol grip in his pocket. A tremor of panic rippled through the robbers’ guts, as they watched helplessly from inside the limo.

  The Greek mouthed to Comfort that two NYPD cops wanted to come in. Comfort thought about this for two or three seconds. “Let them in.”

  Frankos put on a quizzical look. “Did I hear you right? Did you say let them in?”

  “Well, what should you tell them? Come back later? We’re not done robbing this place yet. If we turn those cops away, they’ll think something isn’t right. So let them in.”

  Frankos braced for the worst, opened the door, and waved in the two officers, striving to be hospitable. “C’mon in fellows. C’mon on in. It’s nice and warm in here.”

  Shifting from one leg to the other, and necks withdrawn into the collars of the uniform overcoats, one of the officers griped, “Uh, cold as a bitch tonight.” He rubbed his gloved hands together, teeth chattering.

  As this was playing out, the gunmen in the limo thought for sure that in a matter of seconds Frankos would be shooting these two flatfoots at point-blank range. And that would’ve been a shame; they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The line of sight from inside the limo, though, did not open to a full view of where Frankos and the policemen were talking. Several moments passed, and relieved that they didn’t hear any deafening gunfire, wondered in suspense what had gone down. Did the cops overpower and subdue Frankos? Or had Comfort and Frankos taken the unwitting interlopers at gunpoint? Neither. Frankos’s sharp wit had saved the day, in this case the night. He suggested to the two half-frozen officers to go to the lower level stairway. “In the basement you’ll find a coffee pot and hot chocolate. That’ll warm your innards.”

  “Thanks, thanks. We’ll help ourselves.” As the two cops were stomping down the stairs to the subterranean floor, the Greek locked the door, and he and Comfort went out, ducking into the limo, essentially imprisoning the two policemen inside the Pierre. “Those two flatfoots had to show up at the last damn minute. Incredible!” Frankos grumbled.

  “No harm done, Greek,” Comfort said. “Right now, those two guys are having a free cup of coffee and anything else they can steal in the food pantry down there.” Comfort shooed at the air with a palm. “By the time they figure out they’ve been had, we’ll be off the streets.”

  Nerves began slackening in the limo, Nalo, though, wasn’t totally at ease. “What if in the next couple of minutes these two Keystone Cops figure out what just happened and radio for help?”

  Comfort, already upset with Nalo over the likelihood he had taken a handful of gems back in the vault room, glowered at him. “Don’t jinx us, man.” He loathed to dwell on that thought, and said to Al Green, “Step on it. Let’s go before the devil makes something else go wrong.”

  Sacco swiveled to look beyond the limo’s rear window, sparse snowflakes dancing in the darkness. All was quiet.

  Green accelerated for roughly six hundred feet on 61st Street and turned left at the corner of Fifth Avenue, the eastern border of Central Park that at this hour was as dark as a desert on a moonless night. One block south, and the limo swung left again on 60th Street, which is one-way going east. In the middle of that block, Green could see the Ford Torino and the Chevy Impala where they had parked them earlier, the densely overcast sky low and whitish with falling snow.

  He slowed the limo and maneuvered it toward the curb behind the Torino. The Impala was a hundred yards up ahead. His parking was sloppy, and the passenger side front wheel scraped the curb, the hubcap screeching loudly. Nalo pounded the back of Green’s headrest. “What’re you tryin’ to do, man, attract attention? Watch where you’re goin’.”

  “Sorry. Shit happens,” Green answered offhandedly, riling Nalo.

  The Pierre hit squad cleared the smoke-filled limousine, and Green was to drive it to an auto wrecking yard in Canarsie, Brooklyn. There the manager of that facility was to crush and bale it. Comfort, Nalo, Germaine, and Visconti hoisted the Louis Vuitton luggage from the trunk of the limo, and transferred that highly valuable cargo to the Torino and the Impala. Everyone shed their facial disguises and hid them under the rear seat of the limousine. And Green sped off to Brooklyn.

  The others had to drive to Nalo’s safe house as stealthily as possible. Nalo said, “It’s startin’ to get light, and it’s freakin’ me out. Let’s get in the cars and get out of here.” But in the scope of reality, Murphy’s Law is ever consistent; one of the backup cars didn’t start. The extreme low temperatures had frozen the battery. “Fuck!” yelped Visconti, banging the steering wheel. He was the designated driver of the Chevy Impala, and Ali-Ben was to be at the helm of the Ford Torino.

  “What’s the matter?” Nalo asked.

  “Battery’s dead as a doornail. Hope we got booster cables in this darn car.”

  Nalo pummeled his left palm with the right fist. “Damn it!”

  CHAPTER 25

  At 6:43 A.M., the early January dawn was gaining daylight, a faint violet-tinted sky. The traffic, though sporadic, was on the rise, sounds of car horns and swishing tires breaching the silence of the night.

  Germaine opened the trunk of the Impala. “I found a pair of jumper cables.” He untangled the jumpers from under a pile of trash, empty liquor bottles rattling and reeking of alcohol, Sacco and Nalo nervously standing by.

  Comfort, Ali-Ben, and Frankos, who were about to get into the Torino, saw the hood of the Impala open, and hastened toward the disabled car. “What’s wrong?” Comfort asked.

  Visconti didn’t go into details but said, “Tell Ali-Ben to turn the Ford around and nose it right up to the Impala here.” He buttoned his jacket and raised the collar, the shearing winds increasingly stronger. “We gotta jump-start the engine off the Ford’s battery.”

  “Shit, this is gonna make a scene. I can’t believe this,” Comfort bitched bitterly, slapping the fender of the Impala. He rushed back to the Ford Torino, pointed at the aged Chevy Impala, and said to Ali-Ben and Frankos, “The goddamn Impala won’t start. Battery’s dead. Or maybe frozen.”

  “Damn,” cried out Frankos. “We got suitcases full of swag in the trunk of these cars. If a cop shows up and starts . . .”

  “Right now, let’s not worry about that,” Comfort said dismissingly.

  “Yeah, let’s just do what we gotta do to get that piece of shit started,” Ali-Ben said.


  Sacco said, “Let’s not stand around like a bunch of ducks stranded in the pond. We look too conspicuous in these tuxes. The rest of us should get in the cars.”

  “Good idea.” Comfort waved his index finger in circles, and said to Ali-Ben, “Make a U-turn and nose the Ford up to the Impala. The booster cables are not that long, so pull up close to that goddamn clunker.” He backed away from the Torino, and Ali-Ben began the illegal U-turn, a traffic infraction.

  As the Ford Torino reversed direction on the one-way 60th Street, to Ali-Ben’s consternation a police cruiser traveling in the opposite course was on a collision path with the Torino. Ali-Ben, though aghast, deftly evaded the cruiser and aligned the Ford parallel to the curb grill-to-grill with the Impala. The harrowing near-miss scared the burglars; they thought this was the beginning of the end. Surely the driver of that police cruiser wouldn’t overlook Ali-Ben’s illegal U-turn that had just about caused a head-on collision; and what could happen next?

  An option was to shoot it out with the lone officer, and the odds of outshooting him were high; after all, it was seven against one. Frankos, a sharpshooter, was capable of aiming a bullet to only wound and not kill the cop. But what if the Greek missed and murdered the policeman? No, that was not an option Comfort would approve. As an alternative, they could all jam into the Torino and make a run for it before the policeman came face-to-face with the Pierre stickup men. But the cop would radio for assistance and a reckless chase might ensue, a dragnet, roadblocks, and helicopters pursuing the runaways until they’d be trapped. This, too, was not a viable choice. Comfort and Nalo’s Pierre plot had underscored not to hurt anybody, even if it meant surrendering. But the heavens would stop the rains before Nalo and Frankos would succumb peacefully.

  The cruiser skidded to a halt, the emergency lights atop the roof now flashing, strobes of red beacons bouncing off the pavement and the neighboring buildings. The wintry, early morning daylight was suddenly ablaze, highlighting the Ford and the Chevy as if they were under a brightly lit circus tent.

  “Keep your cool, you guys. Keep your cool,” Comfort said in a hush as the policeman, hand on his sidearm, started making his way in the direction of the Torino. Pretending not to be in fear of the certainty of an arrest, he told Germaine, “Hook the booster cables to the Impala’s battery terminals.”

  Ali-Ben picked up the other end of the boosters from Germaine, and tightened the clamps onto the Torino’s battery. He signaled to Visconti, who was behind the wheel of the Impala, to turn the ignition key. He did, and the engine rumbled to life as the cop, guarded and unsure of what he was in for, saw Comfort making eye contact as he accosted him. “I know my friend shouldn’t have made that U-turn, but we have an emergency of sorts,” Comfort said forthrightly.

  His placid demeanor unknotted the patrolman’s tension. “What’s the emergency?”

  “It’s a little embarrassing, Officer,” Comfort said in a contrived shyness, scratching his earlobe. He gazed at the Ford Torino and the Chevy Impala. “Eh . . . three of us in those two cars are due to be at a breakfast speech engagement at NYU.” Smilingly, he ran a hand over his jacket and pants. “That’s why we’re in these monkey suits.” Comfort meant the tuxedos.

  “So,” the cop remarked rudely.

  “Well, Professor Dupree—he’s the one sitting in the back of the black Impala—oh, by the way, I’m Professor Hagan. Anyway, Professor Dupree,” Comfort covered his mouth as if to be discreet, “he . . . he’s got a severe case of diarrhea. Must’ve been some shellfish he ate a few hours ago. And we have to get him to a clinic before he goes all over the car seat.”

  The policeman’s reddish eyebrows drew together, his brow pleating. “But why did your pal in that Torino have to make a U-turn?”

  “The Chevy wouldn’t start, and we had to boost it. But if we don’t rush Professor Dupree to a doctor, we’re going to have a hell of a mess in that car.” Comfort laughed lightly so not to let the cop think he was lying.

  They were twenty feet from the two vehicles, and though Nalo couldn’t hear their conversation, knowing Comfort’s acting skills and his ability to improvise, felt heartened that they’d skate away from this hair-raising mishap. His accomplices weren’t too sure; they could feel their own bowels liquefying. “What the fuck is Bobby doin’ with this cop?” Sacco asked, his head shaking at the thought of a SWAT team storming in.

  “Relax, man. Relax,” Nalo said. “Bobby’s done this a thousand times. He knows what he’s doin’.”

  “It’s not easy to relax right now, Sammy,” Frankos countered, his right hand on the gun in the jacket pocket.

  “Look, all of you shut the fuck up and keep your cool. Damn it!” Nalo whispered angrily.

  The patrolman studied Comfort, the flashing lights of his cruiser luring onlookers. “All right, tell your buddy, the jerk who made the U-turn, I’ll let it go this time. And get Professor whatever his name is to a clinic where they can plug his asshole.” And the police officer returned to his green and black cruiser.

  “Thank you, Officer. Thank you,” Comfort said reverently. He wiped his forehead of humidity and rejoined his collaborators. “Let’s get in the cars and go.” The two-car convoy rolled west to Nalo’s Tenth Avenue apartment. In those same moments, Al Green, driving the limousine, was in the westbound lanes of the Belt Parkway entering the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. He wasn’t far from the auto-wrecking yard owned by a “friend” of Lucchese consigliere Christie Furnari. There the owner of the scrap yard was readying the compactor to crush and bale the limo. By now, the light of day was in full bloom, and Green, not to chance that the highway patrol might stop him, resisted speeding, though a minute wasn’t too soon to be inside the fenced property of the scrap yard. Within a half hour, at 7:30, he saw the twenty-foot-long, red and yellow sign advertising Ralph’s Auto Wrecking. Green turned into the greasy, frozen-muddy driveway of this obscure establishment. The proprietor, Ralph Milano, in coarse brown coveralls and a black leather hat with furry earmuffs, directed Green in, pointing to where he should park the condemned automobile. “Shut off the engine and leave the keys in the ignition,” Milano said in a gravelly, hostile voice, a wet, spent cigar bobbing on his chapped lips.

  Green removed his chauffeur’s hat, bow tie, and jacket, tossing the garments on the floor of the limo. He took a navy-blue parka coat from the trunk and put it on. In one of the pockets he felt folded sheets of paper, his customers’ numbers bets he had forgotten to leave behind at his bar in Harlem. Milano, a brusque type, edgy with impatience, watched Green switch clothes, and kicked the left front tire, mud shaking off his oversize black rubber boot. He pointed to a younger man, also in coveralls and boots, and hollered to Green, “Mikey here will bring you back to the city.” Ralph Milano, short, his back curved, the chin jutting and looking like a shovel, a fur of hair in his ears, could’ve passed for a troll. He said to his worker, Mikey, “Drive this mouleenian to the Westside in midtown.”

  This mouleenia! That was an Italian slang for eggplant, a derogatory calling to African Americans, and Green was offended. That greasy guinea.

  “Midtown where, Ralph?” Mikey asked as if he’d been told to go to Mars.

  Milano, his skin as leathery as a reptile’s, took the cigar out of his mouth and spat brownish phlegm on the grimy ground. “How many midtowns do you know of, you yo-yo? You want me to guess for you! Manhattan, where else?” Head shaking, he walked into his office, a junked school bus without wheels that over time had sunk a foot into the muddy soil.

  Mikey, long, unruly blond hair sprouting from under his baseball cap, was stout and paunch-bellied. He twirled a toothpick in his mouth, and his face seemed as though it were darkened with a coating of black soot. He opened the driver’s door of a blue Pontiac Grand Prix. “Get in this car.” And Al Green was on his way to Nalo’s safe house, but was still brooding about the scrap yard operator’s slanderous remark. He couldn’t believe this Milano character, a junkyard dog, a white trash of a caricatu
re, had the nerve to call him a mouleenian. I goin’ make him pay for that. In so far as the limousine, well, the cigar-chomping Milano was to crush it into a bale of scrap metal not much larger than a bale of hay.

  Mickey calculated that the best route to drive to Manhattan from Brooklyn was by way of the Belt Parkway westbound to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, leading to I-495, and ultimately to the Midtown Tunnel. But Mickey’s fast, erratic driving and weaving through the morning rush-hour traffic was spiking Green’s afro. He was holding on to the armrest of the passenger’s door so tight that his brown knuckles were whitening. “Hey man, slow down before you get us killed.” No sooner Green had made that prediction, Mickey swerved from the center lane to the left one. He had failed to first look in the side view mirror, and bumped into a white Buick Skylark barreling at seventy-five miles per hour, sideswiping and shoving his car into the right lane, where another oncoming vehicle broadsided it. Mikey’s Pontiac flipped, rolling over, sheet metal sparking on the asphalt, then sliding on its roof, and clanging to a gradual halt. It settled at rest upside-down, the rear wheels spinning wobbly. And the crunching and crashing ceased to a silent stillness. The stream of traffic in all three lanes stopped, and the motorists, who had been driving immediately behind the out-of-control Pontiac at the moment of impact, could not see signs of survivors.