by Howie Carr
Except for Castle Island here, Sally hasn’t been to any of my areas lately, or if he has, he hasn’t been paying enough attention. The whole world is turning into Greater Chelsea. Revere is tottering. Shirley Avenue looks like Dot Ave, which looks like Saigon.
“Here’s what I wanna do,” he said. “I’m gonna tell everybody to come back from Florida. We’re gonna start taking these people down. They wanna war, they’re gonna get a war.”
Yeah, and I knew who was going to be the one to fight it. To quote Sally himself, his guys couldn’t find their way off Hanover Street. Steroids, cocaine, cannolis—they were as worthless as tits on a bull. A war was just what I didn’t need. There were too many conspicuous spics, and only one of me.
“Sally, let me explain it to you again. These people that killed your nephew, that killed Hole in the Head and Vito, that have tried twice now to kill me—these guys want a war. You start one with them and they win.”
“Hey pal, I got news for you. They kill us, they win too.” He took a cigar and a small cutter out of his topcoat. He tried to cut off the top of the cigar, but his hands were shaking. He looked up at me in embarrassment, pocketed the cigar and cutter and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He lit one, and after a couple of puffs, he started talking again. “Besides, I been thinking, if this ‘war’ so-called kills the casino legislation, maybe we can cut ourselves in next year.”
“Sally,” I said. “Are you fuckin’ nuts? I thought we agreed on this. This isn’t Vegas 1965. The Rat Pack ain’t walkin’ through that door. We can get some short-money shit, but nobody’s cutting us in on a counting-room skim, and you know it. These are publicly traded corporations. They got security, they got surveillance cameras, they got lawyers, this ain’t like shaking down a bookie. We’d have better odds going back to robbing banks.”
“That was your thing,” he pointed out. “You were the stick-up guy.”
“And you know why I quit—’cause everything had changed. Cops can scramble too fast. Takes big balls to walk into a bank, always did. Now it takes big balls and small brains—it ain’t worth it. Twenty-five, thirty grand, and they hit you with thirty years on and after just for the machine gun.”
“We ain’t talking about robbing banks, we’re talking about being shot at,” he said. “They’re using us as, whattayacallit, props, in their own fucking movie. We gotta fight back.”
I shook my head.
“Sally, you’re not listening to me. Somebody put these people up to this. Me and this kid from City Hall, we seen Denis Donahue, the senator, he’s gonna be the president next year, we seen him over on Bennington Street in Santo’s there.”
“So we hit him too.”
“Are you crazy?”
Sally sighed and threw his cigarette over the seawall onto the beach. He sagged, then walked over and slumped onto a bench. I followed and sat down beside him.
“I just got so much on my mind.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. Something had to be wrong, because he wasn’t screaming at me, telling me to tell myself to go fuck myself. I knew better than to ask him anything. Whatever he wanted to say, he’d get around to it, in his own way. Finally he did.
“It’s Liz,” he said. “She’s been coming ’round the Dog House yellin’ at me—in front of the boys. You can’t slap a broad around no more. Look how many State Police get busted these days. If a statie can’t slap a broad around, who can? I just have to sit there, taking it, and she fuckin’ yells.”
He tries to use me to set her up, I can’t make it because I almost buy the farm, and now he’s singing the blues, to me of all people. But I had to keep up my end of the conversation.
“What’s she yell about?”
“How the hell do I know? It’s shit that don’t mean nothing. She thinks I was talking to some other broad, I forgot her birthday, one of the boys didn’t take her car in for a tune-up, before her car got repo’ed that is. Who the fuck knows? It’s a different thing every day, all married-type shit. You think I need two wives? One is too many. Way too many. And since when do you have to remember your girlfriend’s birthday? They must have fuckin’ changed the rules on that one too.”
I thought about Patty. Someday she was going to put the full-court press on me.
“Anything I can do?” I asked, then realized I didn’t mean that. “You know, talk to her, something like that.”
“Nah,” he said, finally looking up at me. “This here’s something I gotta handle on my own.”
I told him I’d make my rounds and report back.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight at the Café Ravenna. Eight o’clock. I still owe you dinner.”
Jesus, I’d thought I was past that land mine. Sally was giving Blinky a pass, but he still wanted to whack Liz. I wondered how I could get out of the dinner tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night after that.
28
A BUG AT B.B. BENNIGAN’S
I was in the waiting room in Caulfield’s office on Park Street. The old man was meeting with another group of clients, this time Chinese. Finally they left, bowing all the way out the door, and I was ushered in.
“Global economy’s working out for you?” I asked him.
“They pay more than my … traditional clients, let’s put it that way, young man,” he said sourly. “The problem with my American clients is, they actually expect me to deliver.”
I filled him in on what I’d learned. I told him about Bench McCarthy, and about the probation commissioner, and their trip to the Python in East Boston.
“You actually went to East Boston,” he said. “I’m impressed, Mr. Reilly. That’s what I call legwork.”
“I can’t remember that going to East Boston was ever a box of chocolates, Mr. Caulfield. But it looks pretty shady, the next president of the Senate, in that barroom.”
Against my better judgment, I mentioned the grand jury. There’s always a grand jury sitting, somewhere. So if you act like you’re passing on some inside information, you just sound stupid.
We used to make jokes at the State House about grand juries being empaneled “on spec,” but they really aren’t. Whatever grand juries are currently in session just handle anything that comes along. I’m talking federal of course. The state attorney general doesn’t do grand juries, unless he’s going after a tree warden somewhere in Franklin County, or maybe a car dealer suspected of trying to turn back odometers, which is impossible now anyway. I think it’s in the state constitution—the state A.G. never goes after anybody who can fight back—i.e., the legislators who control his budget.
Not that I cared—these days, the A.G. was my very good friend. He was my candidate for governor, at least until somebody else came along with more money.
“I’m not sure what this grand jury is doing, or even how many there are,” I said to Caulfield, already regretting my decision to mention it. “Maybe two—one going after the Mafia, the other going after the State House.”
Mr. Caulfield looked bored. The only thing in East Boston he cared about was the airport. “Do you have anything for me to report back to my clients?” he asked.
“Stall ’em,” I said. “I can’t put it together yet.” I thought for a while. “You think I could get a bug in Donahue’s office?”
“A bug?” he said with a smile. “In Denis Donahue’s office? He has the place swept every weekend by the State Police. He’s so paranoid he’s installed motion detectors in his office. That’s off the record, by the way. But the point is, forget about it.”
“Help me out here, Mr. Caulfield. I don’t know this guy. He’s gotta have some habits. There must be some places he likes to hang. How about the Twenty-First Amendment?”
“You mean the Golden Dome?” he said, using the Bowdoin Street bar’s old name. “I’m sure he hasn’t been in the Golden Dome since Keverian was speaker.” He paused. “Okay, I just thought of something. He has a table at B.B. Bennigan’s, goes there every afternoon around five, meets people.”
; B.B. Bennigan’s was a lunch-trade pub on Tremont Street near where Dini’s Sea Grill used to be, with food that was just about as forgettable. It also attracted a pretty good cocktail-hour crowd, but was closed by nine at the latest. Who the hell would want to be walking around that part of Tremont Street after dark, given the sort of riffraff that hangs out on the Common and in Downtown Crossing?
I asked Caulfield, “What kind of people does he meet there?”
“Bagman people. Connected people.”
“Have you been there with him, Mr. Caulfield?”
“Certainly,” he said. “If I hadn’t, what sort of a ‘connected’ person would I be? Do you really think you could drop a bug in there?”
“Have you got any better ideas?” I asked.
He said nothing but leaned across his one-acre mahogany desk and sighed, which I took as a nonverbal, deniable-if-need-be-later acknowledgement that he was in for a penny, in for a pound, sort of, at least as long as I didn’t get caught.
He told me that as you walked in the front door of B.B. Bennigan’s, there was a bar on the right, and on the left, maybe ten to twelve booths. In the middle were tables, foursomes. Denis Donahue had the last booth in the back, and they always kept the second-to-last booth vacant, to prevent eavesdropping. Donuts always sat facing out, toward the door and Tremont Street.
“Regular bartender?” I asked.
He nodded. “One anyway, two at the most. Suffolk Law students, the usual.”
I stood up.
“Are you going to make a run at him?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Be careful,” he said. “If you’re caught—”
“I know, I know. The secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions.”
29
SANTA’S LITTLE HELPER
There are places so down-and-out, or corrupt, or most often both, that even wiseguys can’t make money out of them anymore. Chelsea is one such place—the old Winter Hill gang pulled out back in the eighties because so many people had their hands out that even Whitey and Stevie couldn’t turn a profit. East Boston is getting to be almost as bad.
Now I was back in Eastie for the second time in two days. I’m used to people delivering money to me. In Eastie, I’m the one making the deliveries, this time to the family of another one of my guys who’s doing a bit, in Allenwood. His name is Ricky, and he made the mistake of taking a machine gun on his last armored car robbery. I tried to warn him, I try to warn them all, but what do 213,091 inmates of the Bureau of Prisons have in common?
They didn’t fucking listen.
I still called Ricky occasionally, for information, because he might be rubbing elbows with a different crowd down there than Bobby Bones. The problem was, if I didn’t want to drive down there again, and I didn’t, I always had to go to his mother’s house to talk to him. She was on the BOP’s approved list of callers, and I wasn’t.
The drawback with using the relative of some jailbird to make the calls for you is that they expect something in return. I told you about Bobby Bones’ sister in Charlestown. That’s like going to the Cotillion at the Myopia Hunt Club compared to visiting Ricky’s family.
Their hands were always out, they were lucky they weren’t charged with impersonating the illegal aliens who’d taken over Ward 1. Not that I blame the cons’ families—usually the guy in the can was the family earner, for better or for worse, and don’t believe any of that bullshit about wiseguys’ families being taken care of by the benevolent Godfather while they’re away. If there are any flies on Sally, they’re paying rent. I have to take care of some of the families of the In Town guys who ran with me out on the street, not because I particularly want to, but because somebody’s got to do it, and it sure as hell ain’t going to be Sally.
With these eighty-five percent federal sentences, sometimes I feel like I’m paying child support, or alimony. They lock guys up now and throw away the key. Career criminals, they call us at sentencing. Which we are, but nobody’s perfect. Used to be, I’d be taking care of Ricky’s family for maybe seven years. Now it’s twenty.
Believe me, I didn’t run for the job of Santa Claus. It’s just one of my chores, a very expensive chore at that. I hadn’t even been looking to talk to Ricky, but one of his cousins sent me word that he was desperate. What could I do? So now I was in East Boston, making a delivery.
I parked my car two spaces down from another low-rider with the hood open and two fresh-off-the-boat illegals peering into the motor. Drug lookouts, just like the ones outside the Python. This is what passes for Neighborhood Watch in Eastie. God, I felt like an asshole. I’d had to hook up with Peppa again to pick up methadone for Ricky’s junkie brother so he’d have some for his trip to Florida, and here he was, living in a neighborhood where you would literally trip over drug dealers if you walked out your front door. I’m sure his excuse was, he didn’t comprende español. Bet he’d learn to habla pretty fast if he didn’t have me as his gringo mule.
And by the way, Ricky’s brother ain’t worked since the Johnson administration—Andrew Johnson. Where the hell does he get the money to fly off to Florida on “vacation”? Vacation from what?
Plus, I’d been buying so much shit off Peppa lately, I figured he was starting to wonder about me. I wouldn’t be the first boss to start dipping into his own wares.
I walked up the steps and almost broke my ankle when one of the rotted wooden steps gave way under my left foot. The buzzer didn’t work, so I rapped on the door. About a minute later, Ricky’s mother limped to the door and let me in. It took about ten minutes for her to gimp her way back into the kitchen with me following behind her. She let out a long sigh as she collapsed into a chair covered in plastic, which someone seemed to have used for a little knife-stabbing practice.
I sat down on the other side of the ancient kitchen table and removed an envelope from my coat pocket. It contained $3,000 in $100 bills, what she claimed her junkie son had stolen from her. I know that’s a lot of dough, but this wasn’t strictly charity. Ricky and I had done a lot of work together—wet work, during the Charlestown thing—and in addition to being charitable, it was only prudent to try to keep him as happy as possible, and quiet.
Maybe the cops wouldn’t have any witnesses, and it would be his word against mine, but why roll the dice? An indictment is always a disappointment.
“You a good boy, Bench,” Ricky’s mother said in a thick Italian accent. “You always take-a care of Ricky. You didn’t have-a to go In Town for this, did you?”
“Nah, Ma, I’m doing okay.” Better than Henry Sheldon, that’s for sure. That was the silver lining. At least I wasn’t parting with my own money. Easy come, easy go.
“Matty, he stole-a my jewelry, even my wedding ring from Santoro—you remember Santoro, don’t you, Bench?”
Ricky’s father. Yes indeed I remembered him. He gave me my first pinky ring as a bonus after I hijacked a truck carrying TVs for him. He was a miserable fucking human being, pinky ring notwithstanding. The way Ricky told the story, Santoro had been a prizefighter as a kid, the cham-peen of East Boston. But apparently the only times he ever successfully defended his crown were outside the ring, against Ma. I wondered how much Ma remembered of the real Santoro. She’d been as soft as a grape for a while now, which I’m sure was why her junkie son Matty figured he could steal her valuables.
Anyway, she was babbling on about her wedding ring. Knowing Santoro, I figured she was lucky the ring didn’t leave third-degree burns on her finger when he slipped it on.
“It was bee-you-ti-full, four carats. Oh sure, he heisted it, he never told me, but I always knew. You know how you can always tell things like that, Bench.”
“I certainly do, Ma.”
“But you know, what’s it matter? I always say, it’sa the thought that counts.”
“It certainly is.”
“Matty, he stole-a all my Hummels too, and my Lladros. Santoro give me them too. Most of ’em he gotta from a house he kno
cka over in Concord. I had a couple hundred of them. First I noticed a few of them missing, then I went to my sistah’s in Providence two weeks ago, and when I come back, they was all gone. Them and my jewelry.”
“Ricky told me,” I said, looking across the table at the envelope full of hundreds. “If I were you, Ma, I wouldn’t keep the cash here. Not as long as Matty’s around.”
She quickly reached across the table, grabbed the cash and shoved it into her apron.
“You a good boy, Bench,” she said again. “I always told Ricky, stick with Bench, he knows how to handle himself, he can straighten a thing out.”
“He’ll be out soon enough,” I lied.
“Bench,” she said, “about that other thing, for Matty.”
I nodded and pulled out the ten packs of methadone I’d gotten from Peppa at $25 apiece. I don’t like putting myself in needless jeopardy, and yet here I’d been driving around all morning with a Class A controlled substance, a narcotic. It was insanity. We don’t even sell this shit, as a matter of policy, so Peppa had to get some as a favor to me. I’m his boss, but it was still a favor, a favor for an asshole named Matty, and I hate to waste favors, especially on ungrateful assholes. I pushed the packets across the table, but these she didn’t immediately pocket.
Instead, she reached for her cane. “I wana Matty should thank you.” She slowly stood up, gripped the table with one hand for support and tapped on the ceiling with the cane. “Matty,” she yelled. “Come down here, Matty. I want-a you should say thanks to a friend-a your brother’s what done you a favor.”
I shook my head. “No need for that, Ma.” I leaned across the table and took the cane and tapped on the ceiling again. “You can stay up there, Matty.” There was no response. He’d probably nodded off. I didn’t want to see him, because if I did, I’d most likely slap him around. And that was Ricky’s job, not mine.