The Pierre Hotel Affair

by Daniel Simone

  Nalo couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night; he was too wired from the news that had soothed him three hours earlier. Immediately, if not sooner, he had to speak to Comfort, who was in Rochester, relishing his second honeymoon. Not having had Millie’s affection for nine months, and loving her more than ever, in moments of intimacy Comfort experienced the sensation as if she and he were fusing into one being bound by one spirit and one heart.

  At 8:00 that morning, Nalo phoned Comfort, and they followed the usual routine: Comfort would go to a pay phone and call Nalo at a phone booth on 116th Street and Broadway across the street from Columbia University.

  “Sammy, it’s me, Bobby. What’s up?”

  “You won’t believe this.”

  “So tell me, maybe I will. What’s going on?”

  “Bobby, I got a call from someone I know, ‘One-Ear’ Willie. He saw Al Green and Ali-Ben. These guys are in town, man!”

  “Why would this Willie tell you that and put his ass out in the wind?”

  “Because he’s got it in for Green and Ali-Ben,” Nalo answered.

  One-Ear Willie, a black man, had been Al Green’s trusted numbers runner. When playing the numbers, a bettor must guess any combination of the last three digits of a racetrack’s handle, the total cash receipts of the daily nine horse races. Because of the long-standing relationship he had with Willie, Green dropped his guard and became lax in enforcing the post time for Willie to turn in the numbers sheets, the bettors’ picks. Willie saw that as a hole in the fence; a safe opportunity to cheat Green by not delivering the sheets until the racetrack announced the final tally, the handle. Willie could then bet on behalf of a fictitious customer, and thus his wins were guaranteed. At some point, Green scented something was amiss, and sent Ali-Ben to shake down Willie. But the numbers runner did not fess up to his scam, and Ali-Ben sliced off his right ear, hence the nickname One-Ear Willie, and his grudge for Green and his henchman.

  A thought budded in Comfort’s mind. “Sammy, I’m gonna come down to the city and hook up with Frankos. He should be able to get our stuff back from those bastards.”

  “Yeah, and we gotta make Frankos happy before that crazy Greek whacks me,” Nalo said, fear in his wobbly voice.

  But Comfort was struck with the flu, and had to delay his rendezvous with Frankos.

  Nalo was in turmoil over Comfort’s illness, and his inability to come to Manhattan and sit down with Frankos. But Nalo, maintaining a low profile, curbed his wanderings into topless bars and Middle Eastern clubs, and stayed off the streets. On Sunday mornings, though, he was in the habit of eating breakfast at the Market Diner on Manhattan’s West Side. Driving there in his Volvo on the Sunday before Christmas, a misty day, Nalo was in the company of informant Bill Comas, who as of late had become his shadow. Still without an inkling of Comas’s undercover alter ego, Nalo snuggled the Volvo into a parking spot behind the restaurant. He switched off the engine, and he and Comas started walking toward the front steps of the diner. To his dread, Frankos was fast-stepping in his direction. The Greek, in sweat pants, a green parka, and a black wool cap, stuffed his hand inside the jacket inner pocket, and drew a .22 caliber snub-nose revolver. In what seemed a fraction of a moment, Nalo saw the point-blank blue flash of gunfire, though not registering the loud explosion, and felt a burning jolt in the left temple.

  “And this is just a love tap, Sammy,” Frankos said. “That’s why this time I only used a .22.”

  Comas, terrified, expecting a second bullet intended for him, thought these were the last seconds of his life. Instead, as if he had died and resurrected in the span of an instant, he was watching the Greek, who could’ve been presumed to be a jogger, trotting away nonchalantly.

  Nalo staggered backwards, arms flailing, and slumped over his car’s fender. Confused, he pressed a palm against the bleeding wound on his left temple, ears ringing from the detonated gun blast. But he soon realized he had also a bullet hole in the right temple. How could this be? Frankos had fired one shot, not two.

  Comas bewildered, his heart pounding as though it were about to break through his chest cavity, looked around him for anyone who might’ve seen the shooting. Thanks to the rain, no one in sight. He slid both arms under Nalo’s armpits, and dragged the limp, traumatized man inside the automobile and onto the rear seat. He picked up the car keys off the ground, got in the driver’s seat, and hit the accelerator, gravel and dust rising in the wake of the Volvo.

  Comas sped south on Seventh Avenue en route to New York Presbyterian Hospital on William Street in lower Manhattan. Weaving through traffic—typically scarce on a Sunday morning, and glancing frequently back at the moaning Nalo, his face sopping with blood—Comas was getting nauseous. His stomach was sensitive to goriness, and he was fighting a surge of regurgitation in his throat, the speeding over bumps and potholes aggravating the nausea.

  The hospital came into view, and Comas coasted to a halt in front of the entrance to the emergency room. He pulled Nalo off the car seat, and staggering and lurching, walked him into the receiving area of the ER. No one paid attention to Comas and the wounded Nalo, blood streaking on the sides of his face, and dripping onto the tan vinyl floor. The doctors, nurses, and the supporting staff were bustling hectically, gurneys everywhere, and patients in green gowns lingering to be examined. Pungent odors of antiseptic in the air, Comas propped Nalo in an armchair near a receptionist, who had two phones in her ears. Without speaking to anyone, the informant hastily hightailed it through the swinging doors of the emergency room, hid the keys to Nalo’s Volvo above the sun visor, and flagged down a taxi.

  Inside the ER, where Comas had sat him, now unconscious, mouth slackened, Nalo’s head rested on the back of the chair, arms dangling over the sides.

  CHAPTER 76

  Incredibly, Nalo’s point-blank gunshot injury to the head required two Band-aids. The bullet had entered the left temple, spun around his head under the skin, and faintly grazed the side of the cranium, exiting through the right temple. An unfathomable stroke of luck.

  In a room at the hospital, three NYPD detectives at his sides, Sammy Nalo swore he had never before seen the shooter and did not know him. The cops doubted his story.

  “You can think what you want, but I told you the truth,” Nalo said to the investigators.

  The doctors discharged him, and he tottered out to the parking lot on his own power. Groggy, Nalo found the ignition key above the visor, and drove home to the Bronx, his temples and cheeks smeared with the brownish tint of iodine, and covered with gauze pads.

  On learning of his partner’s miraculous survival, Comfort thought of an irony: Sammy “the Arab” Nalo cheated everyone he came in contact with—even death.

  Cured from the flu, and time running out before he had to begin his prison bid, Comfort returned to New York City. He and Frankos had set up a tryst. “Greek, you’re blaming Sammy for not giving you what you’re due . . . and maybe you think I’m screwing you as well. But it’s Al Green and Ali-Ben that you gotta go after. They took off with . . . oh, I’d say around eleven million in stones and gold. Those fuckers took everything Sammy and I had.” Comfort, unaware Frankos knew that Sacco and Furnari had recovered the jewels Piccarreto had copped from him, added to his woes, “Another thing, Greek, this wiseguy from Rochester, Rene Piccarreto, fucked me out of another four-and-a-half mil in jewelry. Diamond bracelets, necklaces, you name it. He got it all.”

  The Greek was straining to keep a straight face.

  Though Comfort had been forthright, Frankos wasn’t buying that he and Nalo had lost all of the Pierre riches. “So, what’re you sayin’, Bobby? You can’t pay me? I’m tellin’ you right now, I’m gonna get my end in three possible ways. Either in cash, or in diamonds, or in blood. I know that mouleenian Green and that low-life Turk Ali-Ben may not be in the country, and nobody knows where they are.”

  “Wrong, Greek. They’re back, and I know where you can find those two sons of a bitches,” Comfort said, smirking.
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  Frankos slapped Comfort’s shoulder. “You know where those two crooks are?”

  Comfort nodded. “I’ll make a deal with you. You get back what is mine and Sammy’s, and we’ll split fifty-fifty anything you come up with. How’s that?”

  “That’s fine, but I ain’t givin’ Sammy a penny. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

  “That’s another thing, Greek. You gotta lay off Sammy. Just leave him alone. I’ll give him something from my cut.”

  “Bobby, I don’t know why you’re covering up for that lowlife. I bet he’d rob his own mother.”

  “He did,” Comfort said, chuckling. “Look, let’s just say he can’t help himself. All right. Now do we have a deal?”

  Frankos held out his hand for a shake, as did Comfort. “Bobby, where do I find those rat bastards?”

  Comfort told Frankos the whereabouts of Green and Ali-Ben. “Oh, Greek. You did not get this from me.”

  “You don’t gotta worry about that. I work alone and nobody knows my business.”

  Frankos put on his contract killer hat and launched a pursuit for the black man and the Turk. Comfort’s tip as to where they were roosting had served Frankos well, and in thirty-six hours, he zeroed in on his prey.

  Although Green and Ali-Ben had, so far, skirted Frankos, and averting Comfort and Nalo, they thought it best to leave New York and fade away in a remote region of the country, or the world. Ali-Ben, who had been married to Green’s sister, decided to repatriate to his native land, Turkey; Green was set on relocating to Atlanta and merge into one of the black quarters of that city. And even though in Europe the reckless tourists had frittered away a king’s ransom, they managed to conserve a sizable portion of the satchel—sufficient assets to live happily ever after elsewhere, far from Donald Frankos.

  But Ali-Ben had a new toy. He’d been courting one of the shameless cocktail waitresses at a Turkish restaurant–night club, the Sahara Sunset. His designs were to whisk her off to Turkey and desert his wife, Green’s sister, a numbers runner. And so Ali-Ben and his scandalously dressed girlfriend were in his rooming house, a decrepit tenement in Astoria, Queens, where they had been packing suitcases, and of far greater value, strapping and sealing the priceless duffel bag with half of the jewels. Green was in possession of the second half. Ali-Ben and his paramour had reservations on a Turkish Airlines flight to Ataturk Airport in Istanbul. In haste, they abandoned the roach-infested room and scrammed to a pay phone in the unheated lobby of the tenement. Ali-Ben phoned for a car service to take him and his babe to Kennedy Airport, a twenty-five minute ride.

  Inside of fifteen minutes, the taxicab was in front of the entrance of the rooming house, and the driver beeped the horn.

  “That must be the taxi. Let’s go,” Ali-Ben said to his girlfriend. They stepped outdoors onto the sidewalk, a drizzle wetting the ground, and the driver opened the rear door. He assisted the girl into the automobile, and helped Ali-Ben load the luggage and his duffel bag into the trunk. When Ali-Ben bent his waist to get into the cab, he saw someone wearing a red beret in the front passenger seat. Why do we have another passenger riding with us?

  CHAPTER 77

  Ali-Ben got into the car, and in a boorish manner asked the driver, “Who’s this guy with you?”

  The answer came as the taxi sped off. The man in the front passenger seat spun to face the rear of the taxi, pointing a silencer-equipped .44 Bulldog revolver. Ali-Ben’s mouth fluttered, and he pleaded, “No, Greek don’t . . . we can work it out.”

  Composed, Frankos said, “You’re damn right, we are gonna work it out, right now.”

  The cocktail waitress belted a shrill, her hands out at chest level.

  “NOOOOO!” Ali-Ben yelled, waving his palms in hopelessness.

  “Which one of you wants to go first?” the Greek asked sardonically. No answer, but more hysterical pleading from the trapped elopers as Ali-Ben fought to unlock the door to his right, a futile try.

  Frankos chided, “Since you two have no preference, I guess it’s ladies first.” And he shot the woman in her cleavage, the loud explosion quaking inside the car. A splatter of blood splotched her beige blouse and face, and the head blasted back onto the backrest, eyes rolling into the lids.

  Frankos blew on the smoking end of his gun barrel, and bore a second bullet into Ali-Ben’s forehead, skull fragments and red pulp spraying the rear window. A haze of gunpowder reeking of an asphyxiating gaseous stench clouded the air in the taxicab.

  The second casualty slumped forward, slowly tumbling onto the floor of the car, greenish fluids seeping from his mouth.

  On the Belt Parkway, below the speed limit, the taxi was on a due west course advancing toward Brooklyn. There the operator of an auto wrecking yard—the one who had destroyed the limo used in the Pierre—would crush-compact the cab. And the corpses of Ali-Ben and the waitress were to be laid in the trunk, their final resting place.

  As for Al Green, his relocating to Atlanta was not in the cards. Ali-Ben’s body wasn’t cold yet when Green met a similar fate at Frankos’s hands.

  His goal fulfilled, the Greek telephoned Sacco. On seeing each other in person, he told the Cat, “Those two deadbeats are gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Al Green and Ali-Ben,” Frankos said matter-of-factly. “Nobody’s lower than a thief who steals from another thief.”

  “Don’t tell me anything else, Greek.”

  Frankos waved away Sacco’s concerns. “I just wanna tell you I got the satchel back. That’s all,” he said as if exterminating three humans was no different than swatting three flies.

  “You got Comfort and Nalo’s jewels back?”

  “Oh, yeah! My deal with Comfort is that we’re splittin’ what I got back from Green and Ali-Ben right down the middle. But I don’t know where to go with this swag. So I thought if I give you some of the jewels you can help me unload mine.”

  Stealing from the rich was a harmless misdeed, but killing for profit . . . well, that was one of a different order. And Nick “the Cat” Sacco didn’t subscribe to it. “Nah, nah.” Sacco raised his hands and shook his head. “I got enough from the Pierre, Greek. You keep it. And if you want, I can give you the names of a couple o’ fences that’ll be fair with you. But I don’t want none o’ that.”

  Besides, Sacco was financially comfortable. Plus, he had benefited from the bundle of gems he and Furnari reclaimed from Rene Piccarreto.

  “All right, Nick.” Frankos nodded and winked smilingly. “You’re all right in my book. Look, tomorrow I’m gonna hook up with Comfort and square away with him.”

  Frankos, a man of his word, did divide the repossessed goods with Comfort, though the Greek spared him of the gory details.

  January 2, 1973, the anniversary of the Pierre Hotel robbery, was the first day of Bobby Comfort’s imprisonment in a New York State penitentiary, Attica Correctional Facility.

  Nalo even though the probabilities were ninety-nine percent that the seven-year sentence would be overturned on appeal, it didn’t sit well with him, and rather than accept the inevitability of his incarceration, he delayed the commencement of his sentence. He remained free on bail, equivocating whether to withdraw his guilty plea and apply to the court to set a trial date. But despite this seesawing period, and the recent fatal near-miss with Frankos, Sammy Nalo’s moral fiber couldn’t be rid of his vices and tendencies to be deceitful. An ancient European proverb accurately touches on Nalo’s incorrigible mindset: The wolf’s fur changes seasonally, but its color is always the same.

  And not far into the future, his debts to a bookmaker had surmounted $200,000, and Nalo found himself again staring at the deadly end of a weapon. The bookmaker’s collector, Bill Arico, a callous bank robber, spied Nalo’s routines and daily schedules. Nalo received his phone calls in a pay booth stationed on the sidewalk near the entrance of a bar, the University Pub, on Broadway three blocks north of Columbia University. Habitually, in the afternoons Nalo lunched at this watering hole, and
there he also consorted with his associates. On March 11, 1973, a turbulent day of lightning and torrential downpours, Nalo was in that booth, rainwater dousing the glass panes of the stall.

  Arico and a second man drove past the phone booth. “That’s him!” Arico said to his driver. “That’s him, all right. Turn the car around and make a slow pass as close as you can get to the phone booth.” Arico rolled down the car window partway, the wind-swept rain whipping his face. He rested the muzzle of an AK-47 on the top edge of the window and peered through the barrel sights with one eye, his forefinger on the trigger.

  CHAPTER 78

  The car crept past the booth at two to three miles per hour. Nalo was absorbed by his phone call. Arico took aim, and in a deafening rat-ta-ta-ta emptied the AK-47 magazine, a shower of glass shards flying in every direction, spent shells ejecting from the assault weapon. In a spontaneous panic of jerky motions, Nalo kicked open the sliding double-doors of the booth and buckled onto the sidewalk, writhing spastically, his overcoat and pants dotted with red holes. According to a bystander, the fracas lasted less than six seconds, ending in a sudden silence. Nalo lay supine on the drenched ground, one foot shoeless, arms and legs outstretched, raindrops landing on his cheeks and brow.

  The booth was reduced to smithereens, and the shooter and his driver raced off south on Broadway and swung east on 110th Street.

  Onlookers who had watched or heard the ambush huddled over Nalo. At least seven or eight bullets had penetrated his torso, stomach, and legs. And it seemed likely that Sammy Nalo no longer had to sweat out whether his seven-year sentence would be commuted on appeal. Actually, today all his troubles might’ve been over as he lay on the sidewalk, straining for gulps of air.

  APRIL 1973

  The Pierre Revue had been bumped to the sidelines. Bobby Comfort had gone to prison, Sammy Nalo barely clung to life, his bullet-perforated body resembling a pasta strainer, and the whirlwind began fizzling.