The Godfather Returns (36 page)

Nick and Charlotte Geraci took a seat in the pew directly behind Laughing Sal Narducci, his wife, and Narducci’s son Buddy, who was in the shopping center business along with Ray Clemenza—like the Castle in the Sand, a wholly legitimate, privately held enterprise in which elements of the Corleone and Forlenza organizations were legal investors. (That is, irrespective of where that money had come from in the first place, although where does
any
money come from in the first place? How would one define “first place”?) Sal turned and reached over the back of the pew to give Geraci an enormous, lengthy embrace. Throughout the homily and several eulogies, at every pause, Laughing Sal, characteristically, muttered the speaker’s last few words, and not in a whisper, either. Charlotte had barely known Clemenza, but it got her goat.

After the service, Laughing Sal turned to face the Geracis, tears streaming down his face. “So young,” he said. “Such a tragedy.”

Nick Geraci nodded grimly, as anyone at a funeral would do. Narducci and Clemenza were about the same age.

As a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera sang “Ave Maria,” Charlotte crossed her arms and turned to face the back of the church. The huge oak double doors were open. The pallbearers started down the steps. Clemenza’s rosewood casket disappeared into the falling snow.

Chapter 20

E
XPERTS CITE MANY
factors that led from the heyday of La Cosa Nostra in the fifties and sixties to the mannered, treasonous shadow of itself it is today. Various Senate and congressional hearings. The FBI’s shift in focus from the Red Menace to the Mob. The tendency in all businesses created by first-generation immigrants to be destabilized by the second generation and ruined by the third. The widespread supposition on the part of average Americans (brought into mainstream thought by the Mafia and hammered home by the Watergate scandal) that laws and regulations are for other people, i.e., the suckers. The greater profits to be had by running “legal” corporations that get no-bid contracts from their powerful friends in the government. Most of all, the Mob was kneecapped by the RICO statutes, which gave the weapon of racketeering charges to federal prosecutors everywhere, which resulted in lengthy jail terms for mobsters and the feeling in many dark corners of the American underworld that
omertà
was becoming a law observed mostly in the breach.

These things were all hugely important, of course, but they flowed from a common source, the single most devastating blow ever dealt to organized crime in America: the order, placed less than a month before that first meeting of all the Families in a white clapboard farmhouse in upstate New York, for two dozen custom-built maple tables.

If, say, they’d just bought or stolen or even rented tables, the stain wouldn’t have been so fresh. The vapors wouldn’t have forced the men to open the windows. The aroma of the roasting pig wouldn’t have had all afternoon to waft inside and work its succulent magic. The Dons and their
consigliere
s wouldn’t have lingered. They might never have scheduled further meetings of the heads of all the Families.

Even if the tables
had
been custom-made at the last minute but the head carpenter had been anyone other than a Mr. Floyd Kirby, we might all be living in a very different America. This was not only because another carpenter might have favored a less noxious brand of stain but also because Mr. Kirby was married to a cousin of a New York State trooper. That Christmas, the trooper had heard about all those tables and what kind of people he thought they might have been for. The trooper knew that the brewing company owner who lived in the house was suspected of having the local police in his pocket. The trooper and his partner talked to several residents in the area, but no one had seen anything unusual, or so they said.

The trooper made a note to keep an eye on things there, but who knows if he’d have followed through on it if he hadn’t been recently divorced and if the woman who lived in the rusty trailer near the road that led to the farmhouse hadn’t been so friendly. They began dating. By the time the Families met the second time, they were married. She’d moved out of the trailer, but they kept it because she owned the land. They planned to build something nice on it someday. They happened to be there, in fact, making love in the trailer for old times’ sake, when the parade of Cadillacs and Lincolns came thundering down the gravel road, past the trailer.

Again: to build power, sometimes one must control the least powerful. The trooper slipped tenners to motel desk clerks in the area, with instructions to let him know if they had a flurry of reservations by out-of-state people with Italian names (he was also an instinctive racial profiler). The next year he had enough advance notice to get an operation going.

It nearly didn’t happen. His own commander didn’t see enough merit in the investigation to allocate anyone to it other than the trooper and his partner. No one at the FBI would return his phone calls. In a last-ditch effort, he contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The man he talked to was young and gung ho. The trooper also took it on himself to make a few calls to reporters. The next day, he and his partner were sitting in his wife’s old trailer with binoculars. Twenty ATF agents were poised in their gray government Chevrolets at a truck stop out on the main highway, waiting for a call. In rented cars behind the Chevys were the press, a platoon of shooters and scribes, and even a radio guy from Albany.

What happened next made the front page of every major newspaper in America and the cover of
Life
magazine. Even these many years later, most readers will be familiar with it: the raid on that white farmhouse and the seventy-odd men who saw them coming and scattered.

The pictures are famous: heavy men in silk suits and white fedoras hauling ass through the woods. Fat Rico Tattaglia and even fatter Paulie Fortunato being handcuffed as a half-carved hog turns on a spit behind them. ATF agents crouched beside sawhorses at a roadblock on that tree-lined road, guns drawn, as the Dons of Detroit, Tampa, and Kansas City emerge from their respective vehicles (armored, a fascinated public learned). The state trooper, grinning like he’s just caught the biggest walleye in the lake, while the man next to him—Ignazio Pignatelli, aka Jackie Ping-Pong (those nicknames! God, how the public loved the nicknames!)—covers his big round face with both hands.

The men were taken to the nearest state police barracks and charged with—what? That turned out to be a problem. It looked bad, all those men in that farmhouse together, but looking bad was in itself no crime. “It’s safe to say,” an ATF agent told a New York newspaper, “that all those Italians in fancy suits didn’t come from all over the country just to roast a pig.” Maybe. But what
had
they come there to do? No one but the men themselves had any idea, and they weren’t talking.

Eminent lawyers swooped in (including a former assistant attorney general of the United States, the senior partner of what was then the largest law firm in Philadelphia, and onetime U.S. congressman Thomas F. Hagen of Nevada). They were good enough to point out that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to free assembly.

Those detained invoked their constitutionally guaranteed right not to testify against themselves. As a consequence, a few were charged with obstruction of justice—charges that were later literally laughed out of court. Despite the efforts of countless state and federal attorneys, the only direct result of the raid was the deportation of three of the detainees to Sicily, including one, Salvatore Narducci of Cleveland, who’d lived in America since he was a baby, more than sixty years. He claimed he was unaware that he’d never become a citizen.

The indirect results, however, were legion. When the newspapers with the stories about the raid hit the front stoops up and down Main Street, USA, it was the first time many people heard the words
Mafia
and
La Cosa Nostra.
The stories speculated about the heretofore undreamt of existence of an international crime syndicate. Many headlines used that word:
syndicate.
It is not a word that soothes the American ear. It sounds vaguely mathematical, and America is not a mathematical country.

A public outcry went up:
Who are these men?

Before the raid, beat cops and precinct captains, beholden politicians, and writers for magazines like
Manhunt
and
Thrilling Detective
all knew more about the men in that white farmhouse—and about the
uomini rispettati
who worked for those men, and about the legion lesser street toughs who worked for
those
men—than did the FBI.

That time was about to end.

Today, twenty-three of those lovely, almost indestructible maple tables are crated and stacked in a warehouse at an undisclosed location in or near the District of Columbia. By rights, the twenty-fourth should be on permanent display in the Smithsonian.
This table,
the plaque would read,
helped deliver the single most devastating blow ever dealt to organized crime in America.
With a pig skull on top, alongside a scale model of the rusted house trailer.

Instead, the table was sent from one white house to another. Since 1961, it has been in constant use in or near the Oval Office.

Tom Hagen didn’t swoop in, of course. It only looked that way. When detectives asked how someone who lived in Nevada had gotten there so fast, Hagen said that he had already been in New York, that he often was, which was true.

Hagen was among the younger men there. He made it to the bottom of the hill and followed a rocky stream until he got to a town. He walked into a diner. No one was looking for anyone who looked like Tom Hagen, and the car he’d driven there, now parked behind the farmhouse, was registered to a ghost. He sat in a booth and calmly had lunch. Then he went to Woolworth’s, bought a suitcase, and got directions to the county court-house. It was in the next town over. He walked back to the diner and called a cab. Luggage in hand like any ordinary, unremarkable traveler, Hagen checked into a hotel in the county seat. He walked to the barbershop closest to the courthouse. By the time he paid the barber, Hagen had learned the broad outlines of what had happened. He called in to the phone service in Las Vegas. He went back to the hotel and took a nap. A few hours later, the phone woke him. It was Rocco Lampone, calling from Tahoe. Hagen took a taxi to the nearest state police barracks. Michael had not been among those arrested, but, as a goodwill gesture, Hagen provided legal assistance to a few friends of the Family.

In 1959, under oath and before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, Michael Corleone testified that he had not been in that farmhouse. He denied having been among those who had escaped what was undoubtedly an illegal police action.

Strictly speaking, Michael Corleone was telling the truth.

He and Hagen had driven there separately, for various business and security reasons (though they did have the archaic and, in the face of a police raid, worthless insurance policy provided by holding a Bocchicchio hostage at a whorehouse in the desert). Had Michael been as punctual as his father, he’d surely have been among those who, dignity be damned, went scrambling down the hill. Yes, he had escaped from more harrowing situations, with the air full of bullets and bombs and Jap Zeros heading his way on a divine tailwind. But that was a dozen years and a hundred thousand cigarettes ago. Who knows if he’d have been able to run fast enough and far enough to elude capture?

He did not have to find out—only because, as per usual, he was late: so egregiously late, in fact, that they’d started their business without him. A split second before Michael flicked on his turn signal to go down the gravel drive, he glimpsed something yellow in the bushes, not far from that rusted trailer. He put his hand back on the wheel and kept going. He passed the drive and began to round a bend. In his rearview mirror, he saw two men—cops of some kind—dragging yellow sawhorses from those bushes.

The car he was using was a blue Dodge, a few years old, equipped with a police scanner (Al Neri had been a cop; both the bland car and the scanner were his idea). Michael found the frequency the ATF agents were using.

He pounded the steering wheel as hard as he could and let out an anguished roar.

This was supposed to have been Michael’s last appearance at a meeting of the Commission or of all the Families. He’d planned to negotiate his retirement. After today, after he nailed down the deal in Cuba, he’d have been a completely legitimate businessman. He hit the wheel once more.

Calm down,
he thought.
Think.

He lit a cigarette. He sat back in his seat, forcing himself to take long and even breaths, listening to the raid he had so narrowly escaped. It was the sound of a world coming to an end. He’d heard about Pearl Harbor on a radio, too.

Michael Corleone had no idea where this narrow, winding road would lead. The sun was straight overhead, and he couldn’t even tell what direction he was going. Still he kept driving, scrupulously observing the traffic laws and looking for signs. What choice did he have? He sure as hell couldn’t turn around and go back the way he came.

Fredo Corleone did not wake up thinking,
This is the day that I betray my brother.
He did not set out to do it, and, as Nick Geraci had predicted, Fredo didn’t know what he’d done even after he’d sealed his fate by doing it. His day began, instead, when, in the suite at the Château Marmont, Deanna Dunn got out of the shower and, still smelling of last night’s gin, slipped into bed beside her sleeping husband.

“C’mon, lover,” she purred, starting to tie his wrist to the bedpost with a hand towel.

Fredo jerked his arm free. “What are you doing?”

“Be a sport,” she said.

“What time is it? I had an hour’s sleep, tops.”

She frowned and tossed the towel aside. “You don’t want me to be hungry for love on my first day of work with a new costar, do you?”

He had it on good authority—Wally Morgan, who’d know—that Deanna’s costar was hardly the sort of man who’d want to lay a hand on her.

Fredo nonetheless gave her what she wanted.

“Try doing more than up-down, up-down,” she said.

He was on top. “That ain’t exactly music to a guy’s ears.” He tried giving her a little side-to-side, or whatever it was she wanted. “Not in the middle of things.”

“Want me to roll over?” Before he could answer, she’d already done it. That was how she was about everything. “Not in the ass, though.” She was on all fours. “Not first thing in the morning.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Jesus.” Why did she keep bringing that up? Even with Wally Morgan, all Fredo usually did was get his dick sucked. Last night, for example, that was all he’d done. Fredo lost his erection. He threw himself down on the mattress, disgusted.

“Don’t be like that,” she said, reaching for his prick. “It’s nothing.”

Fredo slapped her hand away. “It’s something to me.”

“You’re just drinking too much,” she said.

“You should know,” he said.

They lay side by side, staring at themselves in the mirror she’d paid the hotel to install on the bedroom ceiling. After a while, Deanna took matters into her own hands. She was rough with herself. Fredo lit a cigarette and watched. The idea of it was dirty and excited him. He tried to keep his eyes off the round-bellied balding man in the mirror, whose limp prick lolled uselessly against his thigh. Deanna planted her feet on the bed, raised up her ass, and made a big show of bucking her hips and coming. It was like looking at a nature program on TV. Afterward, she kissed him. He rolled away. They lay there and rode out another long silence.