Lust, Money & Murder (29 page)

Giorgio saw the movie a total of 16 times, until the manager caught him and threatened to turn him in to the police. He became obsessed with Americans and all things American. He began reading everything he could get his hands on about the United States, and he soon fully grasped the concept of the ubiquitous American Dream. It seemed that anyone could go to “the land of the free”—anyone of any race, creed, or culture—and become anything he or she wanted to be. There were no limits.

This prompted him to apply himself at school, particularly to his English language classes, with the fuzzy idea of somehow moving to the USA when he finished and making the big time.

He began to imitate Americans, to dress like Americans, to mimic their various regional accents—Texas, New York, Midwest. He watched American movies and TV shows, even the soap operas, paying fine attention to every detail. He soaked it up like a sponge—he told himself that everything he learned might be useful in the future, when he went to the USA.

Giorgio
took any part-time job he could get and began to save his money in order to achieve his ambition. He mainly washed dishes, delivered groceries, swept floors. Every now and then he was lucky enough to get a job as an extra in a movie that was shooting an exterior scene in Cinecittà. One was a Fellini film, and he actually met Frederico Fellini himself, for a fleeting instant. A stack of movie posters was nearby, and Giorgio grabbed one and got the director to sign it for him. It became Cattoretti’s most prized possession.

The only thing he spent any money on was clothes.
He saw himself as a younger version of Michael Corleone—he actually favored Al Pacino, his friends said, with his trim build and swarthy good looks.

“You dress like a gangster,” his mother often said.

“I dress like an American, mama.”

“American, American, American,” she muttered, her hands on her broad hips. “Would you explain to me what’s wrong with being Italian?”

Giorgio would look at her helplessly. She
simply didn’t understand.

* * *

Whenever he could afford it, he would take the bus over to the ultra-chic Via Veneto area to watch all the beautiful, well-dressed women. He would find a prime seat at the Gran Caffe Doney or the Caffe Busse and order a single Negroni, sipping it as slowly as possible, taking in the action until one of the waiters would finally shoo him off.

The women he saw there were incredible. Dressed in the latest fashions out of Milan, they would sashay up and down the street, chatting with each other in reserved tones, window shopping, or sitting at the outdoor tables for cappuccinos, their long, well-pampered legs crossed demurely—women from all over the world, the most beautiful and richest and well-educated dames one could imagine. He loved to inhale their combined fragrance.

The heady, sweet aroma of
class
...

Giorgio knew he was nothing to these exquisite female specimens, just a scruffy teenage boy with a square jaw, dark eyes, and a pleasant face. He would often catch their gaze, and sometimes there would be a fleeting instant of provocative eye contact, but the next second they would notice the rest of him, his cheap double-breasted jacket and pointed, two-tone shoes, and they would look away as if he were lower than dirt itself.

He assured himself that one day, after he moved to America and built his empire, he would have scores of such women. He would marry one and have children with her, and then keep three or four more as mistresses, like Michael Corleone. He would be so rich and so handsome and so worldly that such women would be almost disposable to him, like cigarettes. Smoke it and toss the butt aside.

* * *

When Giorgio was 17, his dream finally began to materialize.

An uncle who had immigrated to the USA returned to
Cinecittà
for a short visit. Silvio Lombardi was a ferret-faced, pot-bellied man who had grown up in a village near Pescara. Giorgio only knew him as Uncle Silvio. He had entered the USA illegally and owned some sort of import business in Manhattan. Giorgio was sure that the business was a cover, and that Uncle Silvio was a Mafioso as big as Don Corleone. He wore pinstripe suits with gold cufflinks and smoked thick cigars. He had to be Mafia.

Silvio immediately took a liking to Giorgio, who would only address him in English.

“So, you like-a America, Giorgio?” he said one day, puffing on a cigar.

“Of course I do. I’d give anything to go there!”

“You speak-a English almost good as me. How you speak-a English so fine?”

Giorgio shrugged. “Cinema.”

Silvio sized him up. “You find your way to America yourself, I help-a you when you-a get there. I give you a job.” He produced a slim silver box from his sport coat and handed Giorgio a business card.

Silvio never expected to see his restless young nephew again.

He had grossly underestimated Giorgio Cattoretti.

* * *

Three months later, Giorgio was standing at the door of his family’s squalid little
Cinecittà
apartment, a scuffed up suitcase in his hand. His mother and father were both slumped on the couch, watching TV.

Imitating Michael Corleone, he said in English, “Uncle Silvio made me an offer I can’t refuse.”

His mother and father looked blankly at each other.

Neither one understood a word of English.

* * *

The cargo ship, called
Bianca
, was docked in Trieste. Cattoretti not only had to pay the captain the equivalent of $1,000 in lire for the privilege of being a stowaway, but was expected to work alongside the other deck crew aboard the aging vessel while it was out on the open seas.

The ship cast off early in the morning. With dry eyes, Giorgio watched the Italian shoreline slide by as the huge container vessel chugged its way south through the Adriatic Sea, around the tip of the “boot” of Southern Italy.

“Good riddance,” he muttered to himself, as the last glimpse of his motherland sank into the sparkling blue-green waters of the Mediterranean.

* * *

The
Bianca
carried an international crew of merchant marines, and to Cattoretti’s delight, everyone communicated in English. The captain assigned a young, brawny blonde-haired Swede named Anders to show Cattoretti the ropes. Which Anders did, literally.

The first day he taught his young apprentice how to make several of the most common seaman’s knots—the reef, timber hitch, bowline, the sheet bend. Cattoretti found the deck work was exhausting—painting, splicing broken lines, mopping—but he loved every minute of it.

Cattoretti found the container ship and all the equipment fascinating. He asked Anders endless questions about it. The Swede was enthusiastic about his vocation and only too happy to oblige—he was an Ordinary Seaman diligently working towards his Able Seaman certificate and hoped to be a ship captain someday.

“How big is this ship compared to other container ships?” Giorgio asked.

“Relatively small. The
Bianca
has a length of one hundred sixty-two meters, a breadth of twenty-three meters, and a TEU of eleven hundred—”

“What is TEU?”

“Ton equivalent unit. A standard forty-foot container equals two TEUs. Which means this ship can hold about five hundred fifty containers.”

By the end of the week-long trip, Cattoretti’s brain was overflowing with detailed information about the ship and its operation. He filed it all away in his head—it might be useful later.

One night, while they were gazing out across the dark water, Anders said, “So, Giorgio, someday are you planning to work aboard a container ship?”

“No,” Cattoretti said. “I’m planning on owning a whole fleet of them.”

* * *

As they neared the Eastern coast of the USA, they encountered a terrible squall. The
Bianca
was tossed about like a cork all night long. Cattoretti was deathly sick, and threw up over and over again into a steel pail.

The storm finally broke at dawn, and the waters were mercifully calm at last.

Giorgio took the pail up to deck to empty overboard. When he wandered around to the stern of the ship, he noticed that a couple of steel cables were running from the top of the rearmost container stack out into the water. The cables were taut, vibrating every now and then.

Cattoretti looked up and saw that there was a gap in the stack of containers—one of them was missing.

He scrambled back up to the bow and told Anders.

“Container overboard!” Anders shouted, “Container overboard!”

The captain brought the great ship to a halt. Using the crane, it took the crew over an hour to get the rectangular iron box back onboard and strapped into place.

“It’s a good thing you noticed,” Anders said, when they were underway again. “We might have hauled that damn thing through the water all the way to New York.”

“Nobody would have felt the drag on the ship?” Cattoretti said.

“Are you kidding? The engine on this vessel is so powerful the drag would be negligible.”

* * *

As the
Bianca
entered the New York Harbor, Giorgio climbed into his cramped hiding place, behind a false wall in an anchor storage compartment.

When they passed Governor’s Island, Giorgio managed to peek out a porthole and glimpse the Statue of Liberty.

The sight of the monument he’d seen so many times in pictures gave him goose bumps
. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...

Giorgio may have been poor, but he wasn’t tired, nor was he part of any “huddled masses.” He was destined for great things. The United States of America—the land of opportunity—was going to give them to him.

Soon, he would step off the ship and set foot in America.

Soon, he would be an American.

CHAPTER 3.4

Uncle Silvio was shocked when Cattoretti showed up on his doorstop, but kept his promise and took his nephew in. He let Giorgio sleep on the sofa in the living room of his cluttered apartment. He arranged for a fake birth certificate and driver’s license for his surprisingly resourceful young relative.

Cattoretti soon learned that his pot-bellied uncle was hardly Don Corleone, just a two-bit criminal among thousands in the sprawling metropolis of New York City. Silvio was into “a little of this, a little of that.” He sold fake Rolex watches, operated a small escort service out of the apartment, supplied “actresses and actors” for a small-time porno movie producer, dealt a little cocaine, and, of late, had “diversified” into making fake documents, such as college diplomas and Social Security cards.

There was always a girl staying in the apartment. When Cattoretti arrived, it was a bleach-bottle blonde who called herself “Fantasia.” She was in one of the films Silvio was producing. She had a large tattoo on her lower back, needle tracks on her arms, and silicon breasts the size of basketballs.

One night Cattoretti woke up with her kneeling beside the couch, groping under the blanket for his cock. When she touched it he gasped, and despite his best efforts, he found himself erect. The next thing he knew the girl was squatting in front of him, giving him a blowjob.

In the middle of all this, Silvio opened the bedroom door and walked by in his ratty bathrobe and slippers. He merely glanced at them and continued to the kitchen.

A moment later, he returned, eating a pastrami sandwich. He paused, watching as if distracted by something mildly interesting on television. After a moment he went back into the bedroom and shut the door.

Cattoretti tossed and turned on the sofa all night, wondering what his uncle would do to him the next morning.

To his surprise, when he went into the kitchen for breakfast, Silvio set a cup of coffee in front of him and chuckled. “You’re hung like a horse, Giorgio. You wanna be in one of my porno movies?”

* * *

Giorgio Cattoretti was not interested in being a porno star. He wanted to become a rich and powerful Mafioso, like the characters in
The Godfather
.

He started by selling fake watches for his uncle. Silvio had carved out a humble slice of the counterfeit Rolex business in lower Manhattan, but the Mafia was getting into the same market. Things were beginning to heat up. Silvio had spent several years developing his own source for the product, two nervous Taiwanese importers who received the fake watches directly from the Far East.

Giorgio was very good at recruiting new salesmen and training them to sell the watches on the street.

Their problem was that they could not bring in large enough quantities to compete with the Mafia. The Mafia controlled all the docks in the New York area. At the moment, Silvio and his Taiwanese partners were paying people to smuggle the watches into the country on commercial flights, inside suitcases.

One night when they were all having dinner at an Italian restaurant, Cattoretti said, “Why don’t you just bring a whole damn container of them over?”