The Don Con

by Richard Armstrong

  Dennis was a bit of a clothes horse, and I could tell the accident had annoyed him. But he was gracious and said, “Don’t worry about it, kid.” The waiter, however, broke down in tears. He got down on his hands and knees and begged for forgiveness. He thought Dennis was going to whack him. I had to call him over and reassure him that Dennis Farina was just an actor. I said, “The worst thing he can do to you is stiff you on the tip.”

  Then I turned to Rosetti and said, “I think we should call it a night.”

  “D’accordo.”

  “Don’t worry about the bill,” I said. “I already paid it from the Gangster-Con account.”

  “What did I tell you about keeping the expenses down, Joey?”

  “What do you want me to do, Mr. Rosetti? Ask the waiter to write separate checks for twenty-five actors and twenty-five Mafiosi?”

  “We didn’t even need to have dinner at such a fancy place. We coulda took them all to McDonald's.”

  “It’s expected, Mr. Rosetti. It’s one of the perks. It’s one of the ways you get actors to come to these conventions. They’ll do anything for a free meal.”

  “Alora,” said Rosetti, which was the Italian equivalent of whatever.

  Then he said, “Andiamo. I want you to show me the ballroom, remember?”

  “Don’t you want to say anything to our guests before we go?”

  “Hell no. No more speeches. When they run out of wine they’ll go up to their rooms. We’re going to see them in the morning anyway. Let’s go.”

  The ballroom was located on the other side of the casino. Which was typical of every hotel in Las Vegas. No matter where you wanted to go, it was always on the other side of the casino. If you got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, you had to go through the casino to get to your toilet.

  In the case of the Mirage, however, the meeting rooms all the way at the other end of the resort, perhaps a quarter mile away. After getting up from the dinner table and saying a few quick goodbyes, Rosetti and I began the long journey on foot—a journey I wanted to make as slowly as possible.

  “You see what I mean when I say most of these gangster fans wear cargo pants and golf shirts?” I said, as we sauntered through the vast casino with its tropical jungle theme.

  “You’re telling me all of these assholes in golf shirts are coming to the convention tomorrow?”

  “Most of them, yes, I’m sure.”

  “Charlie says we’re sold out?”

  “Well, not exactly sold out, because there’s no limit on attendance when it comes to something like this. You can always squeeze in a few more fans. But he’s thrilled with the results, let me put it that way. We’ve exceeded all of our goals.”

  “So we’re going to make money?”

  “No question about it. Exactly how much money will depend on how much foot traffic we see this weekend.”

  “Foot traffic?”

  “Folks who drop in for the day without making a reservation. Charlie’s optimistic about that, too. The Facebook page and Twitter feeds have been buzzing like crazy.”

  “So when am I going to see some of it?”

  “Some of what?”

  “Some of the money.”

  “I’m glad you asked that question, Mr. Rosetti. Mr. Beason has a suitcase full of cash he wants to give you tomorrow morning. It’s just the first installment. But it’s a bundle.”

  Rosetti smiled.

  By this time we were passing the Terry Fator Theater and on our way to the small complex of meeting rooms named after tropical islands. I walked Rosetti by each one of them and we poked our noses in to take a look.

  “This is the Martinique Room,” I said. “This is where we’re going to have our Godfather panel discussion.”

  “With the guy who fingered Sonny?”

  “Yes, Gianni Russo will be there. We tried to get Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, but they were busy making movies.”

  “So who did you wind up getting?”

  “You wouldn’t know their names, but you’ll recognize their faces. Over here is the Barbados Room. That’s where we’re going to have our panel discussion of writers. Nicholas Pileggi. Gay Talese. A few others.”

  “Where’s the ballroom?”

  “We’re getting there.”

  I was hoping I could stall him long enough for him to grow tired and decide to go up to his room. So far it wasn’t working.

  “Here’s the St. Croix Room.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “That’s where we’re going to have our Sopranos panel. We got Frank Pellegrino, the FBI agent. We got Robert Loggia, who played Feech LaManna. Remember the guy who got out of prison on parole and caused Tony all sorts of problems? We got—”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I never watched the show? Now show me the goddamn ballroom.”

  “Just one more, Mr. Rosetti. This is St. Kitts Room, where we’ll be having the Button Men panel. I’ll be doing that one myself with some of my friends from the show.”

  “Well, goodie-goodie for you. Which way is the ballroom?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to call it a night, Mr. Rosetti? It’s getting late and we’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

  “No, I want to see it now.”

  “Remember, this is a work in progress. The construction crews and volunteers are going to stay up all night working on this.”

  “I know. But let’s take a peek and see how it looks now.”

  “Okay,” I said. I walked toward the main doors of the grand ballroom like a prisoner on his way to the death chamber. I held my breath and opened the door to the ballroom. And what I saw was …

  Not bad. Not bad at all. Better than I expected, in fact.

  “Where is everybody?” said Rosetti.

  “I guess they’re finished already.”

  As I looked around the room, the little booths and pavilions were set up and ready to go. There was a booth with Jeremiah Pennington’s name on it. One for Gianni Russo. There were autograph tables set up for Robert Loggia, Frank Pellegrino, and even Joey Volpe. The witness protection program guys had their own section. It was set up so the fans could meet and talk with the mobsters without seeing their faces. Ingenious. That must’ve been Beason’s idea. There were tables for the “retired” Mafiosi that Rosetti had invited to attend. Everywhere you looked were giant posters—murals, really—showing famous scenes from mobster movies and television shows. One showed Marlon Brando with the orange peel in his mouth, frightening his little grandson in the garden. One had James Gandolfini strangling Michael Imperioli to death in the car. Speaking of cars, there were three antique cars from the 1930s parked around the room—a 1932 Duesenberg, a big Buick sedan like the one in The Untouchables, and a 1931 Studebaker President like the one from the classic Edward G. Robinson film, Little Caesar. Everything looked fabulous.

  The room impressed the hell out of me. Rosetti not so much. “It ain’t no Comic-Con.”

  “We told you this wasn’t going to be anything like Comic-Con. This convention is going to be one-tenth the size of Comic-Con. But that doesn’t mean it won’t make money.”

  “Where are all the big movie studio companies and videogame companies? How come they don’t have pavilions here like at Comic-Con?”

  “It’s not appropriate in this case, Mr. Rosetti. The studios aren’t making gangster movies anymore. This convention is all about nostalgia. Besides, you told me to keep the expenses down. Hell, you’ve told me twice tonight to keep the expenses down. This is what you get when you keep the expenses down.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Rosetti. Wait ’til tomorrow. It’s going to be a big success. This room is going to be packed with fans. You’re going to be rolling in money.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Remember the time you skimmed all that cash from the casino count room and took it down to the crap table? Remember the champagne bath with the hot-and-cold runni
ng hookers?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, multiply that by a hundred and that’s how you’re going to be feeling tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll bring the hookers and champagne up to your room myself.”

  He smiled.

  “Let’s meet down here tomorrow at eight o’clock sharp,” I said. “That’s one hour before the doors open to the fans at nine. Mr. Beason wants to give you your first suitcase stuffed with cash. Sound good?”

  “Yeah, sounds good.”

  “Let’s go up to our rooms now and get some sleep. What do you say?”

  “No, you go up. I want to stay down here and look around a bit.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Buona notte.”

  “Buona notte.”

  I began the long journey back to the hotel elevators. Along the way, one thought kept going through my head:

  Tomorrow I’m going to be a wealthy man … or a dead one.

  37

  When we met in the grand ballroom at eight the next morning, the place was buzzing. All the actors had taken their places in the booths and were getting ready to sign autographs. The guys from the witness protection program settled into their special booths where they could talk to the fans without revealing their identities. Even Rosetti’s senior-citizen mobsters were eager to get the convention started. Rosetti took a moment to introduce me to the ones I hadn’t met the night before.

  “Joey, I’d like you to meet Frank ‘The Maytag Repairman’ Bruno. He’s retired now, but he was one of the greats. You didn’t want to cross this guy back in the day, right, Frank?”

  “Don’t believe anything he says, kid, I was a pussycat. Nice to meet you. What did you say your name was again?”

  “Joey Volpe.”

  “Well, thanks for inviting me to this shindig. It looks like it’s going to be fun.”

  “Mr. Bruno, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you get your … er, unusual nickname?”

  “The Maytag Repairman? Oh, that goes back a million years. We had a guy who wasn’t giving us the information we needed from him, if you know what I mean. He was just a little guy, and one of the legitimate businesses I owned at the time was an industrial laundry. We had these giant washing machines and dryers in our plant. So I says to him, I says, ‘Look, Tommy, if you don’t tell us what we want to know, I’m going to stuff you in this washing machine and set the dial on heavy load.’”

  “Did he give you the information?”

  “Not at first, no.”

  “So did you put him in the washing machine?” “Yeah, but just for one or two cycles. The rinse cycle and the spin cycle.”

  “Did he drown?”

  “No, he was okay. We knew he was alive because we could hear him screaming in there. After the spin cycle was over, we pulled him out and asked him again for the information we wanted. He’s choking and puking and bleeding from his nose. His face is all black and blue. But he still won’t spill the beans.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “We put him in the dryer. We set it on permanent press. Five minutes and he still won’t talk. So we turned it up to durable fabrics. Gave him about ten minutes of that. It must’ve been hot as hell in there. He’s going round and round, screaming the whole time, and finally we hear him yelling ‘I’ll talk! I’ll talk!’”

  “So did he talk?”

  “Oh, yeah, he sang like a canary.”

  “Then what did you do with him?”

  “You don’t want to know. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “Well, thanks for coming to Gangster-Con,” I said in a quavering voice. Listening to this horrifying tale made me feel dizzy and sweaty. “We’re glad to have you here.”

  “My pleasure, Joey, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.”

  As we walked away, Rosetti said to me, “What a sweet old guy. I never get tired of hearing that story.”

  Rosetti and I walked through the entire ballroom and stopped to chat with each of the special guests. Wherever we went, Rosetti’s gaggle of investors followed. Spags … Fat Bernie … Little Angel … The Killer … Alfonso “No Nickname” Mancini. Plus three or four others whose names and monikers escape me at the moment. There were ten of them altogether. I wondered how much their shares in Gangster-Con would add up to. Three hundred percent? Five hundred? Rosetti was playing a dangerous game with that investment scheme, especially if Gangster-Con wound up losing money.

  Speaking of losing money, Rosetti popped a question I wasn’t expecting. “Where’s the line?”

  “What line?”

  “What do you mean what line? The line of customers waiting to get in.” He looked at his watch. “We’re only thirty minutes away from opening. There should be a long line of fans out there.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “No, I didn’t. Where is it?”

  “I saw the line,” I said. “It’s huge. It almost goes all the way out the building. I can’t believe you missed it. Where were you looking?”

  “Outside the main doors to the ballroom, of course, where else?”

  “Oh, well, that explains it,” I said. “We couldn’t put them right up against the main doors to the ballroom. Hotel security told us it was too dangerous to make people line up there. They said if we did that, they could break down the doors and cause a stampede. People could get trampled. We set the line up along the northeast wall of the casino. Didn’t you see it? There were thousands of people in line.”

  “I thought that was the line for the breakfast buffet.”

  “No, that was our line.”

  Rosetti was right, of course. It was the line for the breakfast buffet.

  “It really looked to me like it was the line for the breakfast—”

  Fortunately, at that moment, Mr. Beason came up to rescue me from this conversation.

  “Gentlemen, we need to go upstairs to the business office for a moment. I need Mr. Rosetti to sign some papers. And I want to give him his suitcase”—Beason looked to make sure no one could hear him—“the first cut of the cash from this morning’s ticket sales. It turns out Charlie Scott was right. The walk-in traffic is huge. Better than we expected. Gangster-Con is a big success, gentlemen, and it hasn’t even started yet.”

  At the mention of the word cash, Rosetti forgot his concern with the line of fans. Fortunately, the buffet line was still there as the three of us walked through casino. I pointed it out to Rosetti.

  “Do you see the line now, Mr. Rosetti? See how long it is?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. It’s pretty long.”

  “The plan is that when the doors open at nine, the hotel’s security guards are going to let a hundred people come into the ballroom every five minutes. That way there won’t be a stampede.”

  “Good idea. We don’t want anybody to get hurt. Liability issues.”

  I wondered what the liability issues were when it came to stuffing a human being inside a washing machine and turning on the rinse cycle.

  We took the elevator up to the seventh floor. Like last night when I showed Rosetti the ballroom, I wasn’t sure what to expect when we opened the door to the offices. Beason had been in charge of everything at the Mirage except for the VIP dinner. I assumed it would look like the phony suite of offices Beason had set up at Hyatt in San Diego for Comic-Con. So I was as surprised as Rosetti when Beason opened the door to reveal …

  An ordinary hotel room.

  Two double beds. Twin nightstands. A desk. An easy chair and coffee table. Just a standard Las Vegas hotel room.

  “Where is everybody?” said Rosetti.

  “Where is who?” said Beason.

  “The secretaries. The clerks. The telephones. The fax machines. Where’s all the stuff you had in your offices in San Diego?”

  Beason sighed. “If we’ve told you once, Tony, we’ve told you a thousand times. This is a much smaller operation than Comic-Con. But that doesn’t mean you’re not going t
o make a lot of money. In fact, come with me and I’ll show you.”

  “But this is just a plain old hotel room.”

  “No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, it’s a suite.” He pointed to an open door that led to the adjoining hotel room. “Come into the other room with me and I’ll show you.”

  So we walked through the door and found another hotel room exactly like the first one. Two twin beds. Nightstands. Desk. Chair.

  “This is just another fucking hotel room like the first one.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Tony,” said Beason. “Because this room has a suitcase on the bed. And I’ve filled that suitcase with cash.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Rosetti, mollified by this. “Can I take a look at the cash now?”

  “Absolutely,” said Beason. “Why don’t you take a moment to count it. I think you’ll find it comes to four hundred thousand dollars. You’ve already made a nice profit, and that’s just the first installment. Joey and I have to run downstairs to take care of some last-minute details. We’ll meet you down there in twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Rosetti as he sat down on the bed and unzipped the suitcase.

  Beason and I started to back out of the room. I wanted to leave as fast as possible, but Beason held me back for a moment. “Hold on just a second, Joey. I want to see the look on Mr. Rosetti’s face when he sees the money.”

  The look on Rosetti’s face was priceless.

  The suitcase was stuffed with Monopoly money.

  38

  “What the fuck is this?” said Rosetti. “What the FUCK is this? This is fake. Fake money. You motherfuckers. Do you know who the fuck you’re dealing with?”

  Nigel and I had backed out the door and into the adjoining room. Nigel took out a key and locked the door from the outside. Immediately, Rosetti started banging on the door, but we were safe for the time being.

  “What if he starts shooting, Nigel?”

  “He doesn’t have a gun.”

  “How do you know he doesn’t have a gun?”