The Big Scam (4 page)

The agents in the office referred to his squad as the Opera House. When Hansen first arrived, he asked why it was called that. One articulate supervisor, who had a deeper understanding of the art form than most agents would care to admit, said, “Everyone who is sent out there has this long, sad, emotional song. It's a place where subplots of anguish and recrimination go to exhaust themselves. You know, just like an opera.”

But the SAC was well aware of the gallows humor of agents and suspected this wasn't the real reason for the squad's nickname. When he discovered that Vanko's face had been disfigured, he understood. That he had never heard the word
phantom
connected to the phrase was an unusual tribute to Vanko's reputation. “I understand, Nick. And again, thanks for the work last night. You'll let your people know?”

“They already do.”

MANNY “THE LAG” BALDOVINO SAT IN HIS CAR
trying not to think, especially about bridges. Ever since developing gephydrophobia a year earlier, his thoughts always raced back to his fear of the overwhelming structures that delicately laced the five boroughs of New York City together. The phobia was bad enough—only being able to use tunnels and the ferry to get around—but it invariably dead-ended at the same inescapable taunt: a fear of bridges had cost him the only chance he would ever have to become a made member. He was just thankful that his father, who had died five years before, did not have to endure the disgrace of a son's weakness.

Joseph “Joey Stones” Baldovino, so named for his courage during the gang wars of the seventies, had been a captain in the Galante crime family and held the unusual distinction of being both feared and respected. During his eulogy, his best friend had said that he died of a heart attack because his heart was too big. Contrarily, with the malicious wit of children, Manny had been designated “the Lag” because he was never able to keep up on any level. As a child he had looked forward to the day he would outgrow the name, but it had clung to him. Not only did it remind him of the disappointments of his youth, but now it slandered his father's memory. Most of all he hated the nickname because he suspected it was accurate.

Joseph Baldovino had been handsome, tall, squarely built, and powerful. His hair was thick and imperial, its forward edge extending low onto his forehead, giving him a black-and-white movie star quality, while Manny's, even though he was only in his thirties, was disappearing both in density and expanse. Like his mother, he was short, and as a child he had possessed her slender frame, but with the advent of middle age and an impulsive diet, he had become round-bodied. He had a reputation for being nonconfrontational no matter how harshly provoked, hardly an asset among men whose primary industry was intimidation. These impairments led him to suspect that the bridge phobia—or at least its pre-existing conditions—had seeped into his psychological undercarriage through the maternal half of his DNA. All of Manny Baldovino's shortcomings as a gangster found their way to the surface the night he was sent to kill Rocco Gaggi.

An associate of the Galante family, Gaggi had been spotted coming out of the Federal Building in Manhattan. Normally such a sighting would have aroused mild curiosity, but coupled with his arrest forty-five days earlier for receiving and concealing, the risk of his being flipped rose considerably. The family underboss, Danny DeMiglia, had only one rule of thumb when it came to security: settle all close calls with murder. Manny was given the job with Tommy Capps as backup.

One night, they followed Gaggi around Brooklyn, waiting for an opportunity to end his life. As Gaggi started to cross the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, the two would-be killers quickly decided that once he reached the other side, they would drive up alongside and shotgun him. But without warning, Baldovino started feeling faint. His heart raced and his breathing became labored. Sweat coursed down the middle of his back. At first, he assumed it was just the anxiety of his first murder. As they approached the bridge, fear of his own imminent death closed in around Baldovino. He was seized by an urgent need to flee, to turn around, to do anything to avoid the bridge. When he pulled over, Capps stared at him in confusion. “Didn't you see them!” Baldovino demanded with as much false anger as he could muster. “The undercover car. Might have been Feds. We can catch up with Rocco tomorrow.”

“Manny, you don't look so good. You okay?”

“Don't know. Maybe it was that risotto I had for dinner. Fucking clams.” But he knew it wasn't. A wildfire was sweeping through his central nervous system, and he looked over his shoulder to make certain that he could no longer see the bridge.

“Want I should take you to the hospital?”

“Naw, I probably just need a Alka-Seltzer or something. How about I drop you off at the club? My nephew's got a thing at school tonight.”

He lay awake all night, his mind unable to erase the overscaled steel and concrete geometry of the Williamsburg Bridge. Eventually he drifted into a light sleep and found himself driving through the concrete portals of the Brooklyn Bridge, which, despite thousands of crossings, he had never noticed before. The tented stone arches and thick steel cables suddenly seemed tenuous, unsafe, death-defying. Without further warning or explanation, he felt himself free-falling from its height. As his feet started kicking the accelerating air, he awoke.

The next day he went to his doctor. The receptionist, a heavily built woman in her sixties who was normally a heartless enforcer of the waiting list, saw the urgency in his eyes and sent him right in.

“Doc, you're like a fucking lawyer, right? Anything I tell you has to stay right here.”

“Just like a fucking lawyer,” the doctor answered with just enough sarcasm not to be detected. Without revealing the previous night's mission, Baldovino told him about his symptoms and their apparent cause.

“Sounds like either an anxiety attack or some type of phobia.”

“Phobia? You mean like scared of something?”

“I'm not a psychiatrist, but yes.”

“How in the fuck can you be scared of a bridge?”

“People are afraid of a lot of things: grapefruit, cotton balls, wind chimes. It can be anything.” The doctor pulled a book from the shelf behind him and flipped through some pages. “Since last night have you had any more thoughts about bridges?”

“That's all I've been thinking about. I'm really dreading the next time I have to go across one of them. In fact, I've been planning these alternate routes. Or maybe just staying in Brooklyn.”

“Well, Manny, this really isn't my field of knowledge. You need to see a specialist.”

“You mean like a shrink? I ain't going to no fucking shrink.”

“There are some behavior modification treatments now that can help you overcome these kinds of problems.”

“Ain't you got some kind of pill I can take when I feel this start?”

“I can give you something, but wouldn't you rather eliminate the problem?”

“Doc, I think you know what I'm about. If I was built for self-improvement, I'd be hustling time-shares in Arizona or something. Please just give me the pills.”

Later that day he found himself alone with Tiny Russo, his
capo,
trying to explain what had gone wrong the night before. Baldovino gave him the same excuse: that he had spotted cops, or maybe the FBI.

Russo didn't answer right away. “Tommy said you got sick or something.”

“I think I had some bad clams at Little Rocky's.”

“You okay now?” Russo put his hand on Manny's shoulder, but it felt insincere.

“Yeah, I went to the doc. He gave me some pills; I should be fine.”

“How about that guy?”

“The guy from last night?”

“Yeah, what other fucking guy would I be talking about?”

“I'll grab Tommy and we'll go try to find him right now.”

“You sure you're okay?”

“Fine, I'm fine.”

But as soon as Baldovino and Capps got in the car, Manny's heart started to race. He had Capps drive him home and promise not to say anything to anyone. A week later, while Manny was home “sick,” Capps caught Gaggi coming out of his girlfriend's house one morning and cut him in two with a shotgun. Three months later, Tommy Capps was made.

Contract killings had as their primary purpose the elimination of impending financial and legal problems, but they were also considered a relatively reliable evaluation tool. During the Cosa Nostra induction ceremony only one question was asked: Would you kill for the family? Apparently Manny wouldn't. When allowing himself to think about it, he could only conclude that some things were just not meant to be.

Sitting in his car, he reconsidered, for the hundredth time, his being chosen for the Gaggi contract in the first place. Recently promoted to underboss, DeMiglia had openly opposed the old ways. Tradition had failed, he argued. While their family had far fewer problems than the others, too many of their members were either dead or in prison. That was their
real
tradition. Things had to change if their organization was to survive and prosper. They had to quit sitting around trying to relive the good old days.

While not naming Baldovino specifically, DeMiglia stated that certain individuals needed to be thinned from their ranks, not only because of their inability to conduct the everyday business of organized crime, but also because of their links to the past. Enough of a tactician not to offend the old mustaches, DeMiglia gave the Gaggi hit to Manny, probably figuring that he would fail and eliminate himself from the family's rolls. It was an expedient DeMiglia had used in the past. And Manny had to hand it to him—it worked.

But being kept on Cosa Nostra's lower rungs was not all bad. Shortly after the failed murder attempt, Manny was sent over to another crew and now answered to Mike Parisi, who had been made a captain when he married the niece of the family boss, Anthony Carrera. Because the don had been close to Baldovino's father, he had asked Parisi to take Manny in as a personal favor even though DeMiglia had wanted Manny severed from all family interests.

Since leaving Russo's crew, life had become much easier for Baldovino. Almost defying the underboss's edicts, Parisi did not pressure his men to make money. He ran the family's gambling and loansharking operations with unusual efficiency. At the present time, Parisi had almost two million dollars on the street in shylock loans, which brought in close to twenty thousand a week in interest. That was a million a year. Gambling, stronger during football, usually averaged twelve to fifteen thousand a week. So, without looking for new opportunities, the crew brought the family about $1.75 million a year, not spectacular numbers by organized crime standards, but steady and dependable enough to allow the don to take risks in new areas without running into cash-flow problems. Some of the other
capos
felt that Parisi's crew was the spoiled stepchild of the family and, when given an opportunity, would voice their displeasure to the boss. He responded by telling them if they all ran their regimes as successfully as his nephew did, everybody would be a little richer with a lot less looking over the shoulder, an argument that usually put only a temporary halt to the grousing.

All in all, everything had worked out for the best for Manny. He even had to admit that it was only right that if somebody was afraid of bridges, they couldn't expect to be a big-time gangster.

Still, he had to take care of himself, and that meant hustling a buck. He wasn't married and not a gambler—at least not a degenerate gambler—so his needs were modest. He picked small enterprises and loyally tithed the proscribed tribute to his
capo
without bothering him with details. To that end, he had come upon a new opportunity three weeks earlier when he struck up a conversation in a bar with a guy named Jake Tanager who had done time with someone Manny knew. While in prison, Tanager learned how to operate a stamping press. After being paroled, he went to work at a plant in New Jersey. Not really caring, but enjoying the conversation, Baldovino asked, “What do you make there?”

Tanager had an unequivocally warm smile, but the question put a tinge of embarrassment in his quick eyes. “You know, stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“You're not going to laugh?”

Baldovino smiled. “I'm sorry, even that question makes me laugh.”

Tanager laughed and the embarrassment disappeared. “Believe it or not, license plates. Made them on the inside, now I'm making them on the outside.” After a few more drinks, Tanager explained that he was in charge of the production line that punched out New York plates. And some of their runs were handicap plates.

“Man, you don't know how many times I wish I had one of those. Fuckin' New York. There's eight million people and one parking space in the whole city.”

“You want one, Manny? It's as good as done. How about your family, they need any?”

Baldovino thought about the rest of his crew. He could be a hero for a while, but it probably would be seen as another one of his harebrained schemes. He could hear Mike Parisi now. “Manny, think about it. As often as the FBI comes through here running plates, what are they going to think when there's nothing but handicaps registered to everyone?” This was good, Manny decided; for once he was thinking ahead. But this was too big an opportunity to pass up. “Jake, maybe we could make some money on this. How many of those plates could you get?”

“Hey, Manny, I was trying to offer you a courtesy because we have a mutual friend. I don't need any more trouble than I already got. My parole officer is a real prick.”

“There's millions of license plates issued every year in this state. Is someone going to notice a few extra handicaps? And if they do, I'm the one selling them. It'll come back on me. You can check with our friend, I don't give people up.”

“That all sounds good, but the joint is full of guys who thought something sounded good.”