The Godfather's Revenge (3 page)

T
hree black Chevy Biscaynes—each carrying two armed men, squinting into the harsh sunlight, clench-jawed—rocketed single file toward New Orleans on U.S. Highway 61, that queen of American long roads. Highway 61 ran the length of the country, right through its engorged and corn-fed heart. Its terminus lay dead ahead. Alongside this highway, men of God have both sinned against us and died for our sins. At its crossroads, genius has been bought for the bargain price of a human soul. On nearby backstreets and dusty roads, the misfit children of shopkeepers, of ex-slaves, of unappreciated schoolteachers, have seen fit to assume aliases. Buddy, Fats, Jelly Roll, T.S., and Satchmo. Bix, Pretty Boy, Tennessee, Kingfish, and Lightnin’. Muddy, Dizzy, and Bo; Son, Sonny, and Sonny Boy. B.B., Longhair, Yogi, Gorgeous, and Dylan. Thus disguised, they left home on this very highway and unleashed America’s strange, true voice on an unsuspecting world. At least one lowly truck driver traveled this road to his improbable destiny as king, at least one prostitute to hers as queen. Both died young, as the royals along Highway 61 reliably do—the king on his gilded throne and the queen on the road itself, her blood soaking into the blacktop. Along this highway, a nation’s idea of itself died and was born again. And again. Over and over.

It was 1963. A Sunday, unseasonably hot for January. The men in the three black Biscaynes drove with the windows down and did not appear to be sweating or nervous. The New Orleans skyline loomed. The speed limit changed, and the drivers slowed down.

Ahead, on the left, a few miles shy of the end of the highway, was the Pelican Motor Lodge, where Carlo Tramonti kept his office. No out-of-towner would have guessed that the nondescript cinder-block restaurant next door, Nicastro’s (closed Sundays), served the best Italian food in the city. The best that money could buy.

The best food, period, was available every Sunday, a few blocks away, at Tramonti’s plantation-style home, where Nicastro’s gifted young proprietor/chef—along with nearly every other man related by marriage or blood to Carlo Tramonti—was on this day sipping red wine and taking his leisure under a massive live oak that obscured any view of the house from the street. The house was white, lovely, in scale with the rest of the neighborhood. The backyard overlooked a swampy, magnolia-lush corner of one of the finest country clubs in New Orleans. Tramonti was the first Italian the club admitted; he’d been sponsored by the governor himself.

Children of all ages swarmed the yard.

A game of
bocce
had sprung up and become an excuse for good-natured taunting among the men. As usual, Agostino Tramonti—the smartest and shortest of Carlo’s five younger brothers—came in for the worst of it. He had a talent for sports and games but took them too seriously.

From inside the house came the sharply barked Italian commands of Gaetana Tramonti, wafting into the midday haze along with the aroma of baking chicken, roasting sausages, and various simple sauces her chef son-in-law could imitate but never perfect. Gaetana was a stout Neapolitan matriarch, Carlo’s wife of forty-one years. An army of bickering daughters and daughters-in-law did her bidding, exasperated in a way everyone here understood as love.

Carlo Tramonti strolled among his guests with a walking stick, kissing his grandchildren and tousling their hair, listening to the problems of his nephews and cousins. He looked like a Mediterranean shipping magnate, from his sun-bleached, perfectly trimmed white hair and double-breasted navy blazer right down to his sockless, loafered feet. He was five-eleven, the tallest man here. He wore enormous black sunglasses. His aristocratic air had come gradually. He’d started out as a shrimp-boat hand and part-time bookie and risen through the ranks. In those days, the city’s underworld was run by two warring factions, families who’d come from the same little town on the west coast of Sicily and whose grievances went back for centuries. Tramonti had negotiated peace and united the survivors of that negotiation into the clan he’d run for almost thirty years. No Family ever enjoyed better political protection or such a complete monopoly over its territory. No Family was ever less violent. The fear the Tramonti clan inspired was akin to the fear that the devout have of their God: a subservience to power and a form of love. To most people in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, the Tramontis were the big black king snake that lived quietly under the house, dining on water moccasins, pygmy rattlesnakes, and disease-laden rats.

Carlo finally joined the
bocce
game. There was a gracefulness to his every fluid motion. His presence calmed his brother down. Augie Tramonti was a foot-shorter version of Carlo—same haircut, same tan, same custom-made clothes from the same tailor—except that he walked on the balls of his feet, bouncing, a man with too much to prove.

The pasta course was set out on long tables on the wraparound porch. The women called out to the men and the children to come eat.

It would of course be difficult to exaggerate the significance in most Italian homes of good food and big family meals, especially in New Orleans—the oldest Italian community in the New World, where the vigilante murder of innocent Sicilian immigrants was once ordered by the city’s mayor and publicly condoned by the president of the United States, and yet where that Italian creation, the muffuletta, was the city’s true Communion host. The Tramontis were a family, a New Orleans family, and meals like this kept them that way. No outsider could hope to understand how much the bounty now set before the Tramonti clan was both taken for granted and cherished. Carlo Tramonti made his usual toast, just a warm and simple “
La famiglia
.”

His family echoed him and drank.

The Tramontis set down their glasses. “
Mangiamo
!” Gaetana called out.

As she did, the men from the black cars appeared on the lawn, guns drawn.

Women and children screamed.

Carlo Tramonti got to his feet. He made no attempt to flee. Absurdly, he grabbed a steak knife and held it aloft. These men could not be cops. Tramonti owned the cops. Several shades of color had drained from his face. He looked down at his plate, at his wife’s spaghetti puttanesca. He could not have expected anything like this would happen to him, in front of his family, on a Sunday afternoon, as he was about to eat.

“INS!” the lead agent shouted. “Immigration!”

Carlo Tramonti cocked his head, obviously confused. He’d been in New Orleans for almost sixty years, about as long as jazz and—certainly in the eyes of his family, at least—just as American. Even the Tramonti grandchildren must have imagined that the badges were fake.

Augie Tramonti—who, after the recent death of a trusted old uncle, had been promoted from head of the Family’s drug-trafficking operation to
consigliere
—asked if he could look at the badges. The agents politely complied. He bit his lip, looked at his brother, and shrugged. Who’d ever seen an immigration agent’s badge?

If they really
were
from the INS, it did explain quite a bit. They weren’t cops or even FBI, and they probably weren’t there to kill him. It explained how they got past the associates Tramonti had stationed out front. It explained why they stormed the place, rather than the more subtle approach the CIA would probably have used on him.

Carlo Tramonti slowly set his steak knife down.

In fact, he had never quite managed to become an American citizen. By the time he was old enough to apply for citizenship himself, he was up to his sleepy-lidded eyeballs in various rackets that might have made the process difficult. But those same involvements had given him the means to avoid the issue altogether. Four years earlier, Carlo Tramonti had even testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate—taking the Fifth Amendment sixty-one times—without the question of his citizenship ever coming to light.

The lead agent first asked him if he was
Señor Carlos Tramonti, from Santa Rosa, Colombia.
Tramonti stared at him.

Another agent said “
La Ballena.”
Spanish for “the Whale.” Other agents chuckled.

Nicastro, the chef, perhaps from years of hearing customers mispronounce Italian words, and surely also from the stress of the situation, blurted a correction: “
La Balena
.”

Other members of the Tramonti clan glared at him. No one called Carlo Tramonti by that nickname, not to his face.

Carlo looked only at Gaetana, at the other end of the table, standing now, hair damp with sweat, tears streaming down her round cheeks.

“I’d like to have my lawyer present,” Carlo Tramonti said.

“That won’t be necessary,” said the head agent.

Tramonti shrugged. Who can say what’s necessary?

“We just have a few questions for you,” the agent continued. “A minor matter. We’ll be finished in no time.”

“A minor matter can wait,” Carlo Tramonti said, “until Monday.”

“I’m afraid not.” The agent asked Tramonti to go get his passport and come with them.

“It’s at my office.”

One of the other agents produced a pair of handcuffs.

“There’s no need for that,” Carlo Tramonti said.

The agents handcuffed him anyway. “Procedure,” they insisted. They cuffed his ankles, too.

In Italian, Carlo Tramonti asked Gaetana to go get him some cash.

The agent in charge smirked. “No need for that, either.”

“My toothbrush, then,” Carlo said to his wife, still in Italian.

“No,” the agent said.

The agent’s colleagues seemed to enjoy marching Carlo Tramonti from the table, past a din of protest from his alarmed family, past the terrified faces of his grandchildren.

Carlo looked back over his shoulder at Gaetana and told her to, please, eat without him.

“We’ll be back in time for dessert,” Augie said, scrambling to his feet and following.

Augie told the agents that he’d meet them at the office. He nodded to another brother, one who ran several of their legitimate businesses—warehouses, parking lots, dog tracks, strip clubs—and who’d know the right lawyers to call.

Gaetana ordered her family to eat, as sternly as she would on any given Sunday.

“Your
procedures
?” Carlo Tramonti hissed as he was shoved into the backseat of one of the black Biscaynes. “Spite and humiliation, these are
procedures
?”

“I’m afraid,” the head agent said, “that in cases like yours, that’s an affirmative.”

THE PELICAN MOTOR LODGE WAS A CLEAN, WHITE
cement rectangle of rooms surrounding a landscaped courtyard and a drained kidney-shaped swimming pool. The pool had a stockade fence around it. Tramonti kept his offices in a suite of four gutted, remodeled rooms in the far back corner, largely obscured by an artfully trimmed thicket of nandina.

The agents frog-marched Tramonti into the suite’s reception area, where, weekdays, his sister-in-law Filomena answered the phone and screened visitors.

Carlo Tramonti’s name did not appear on the thick door to his office. Instead, painted right onto it in large, flowing gold script, was an epigram:
Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.
The lettering had been a birthday gift from his brother Joe—a painter of local renown, whose canvases (jazz scenes, Negro funerals, gators) sold briskly in the French Quarter and who was represented by a gallery there (which Joe also owned). He was also the man in charge of the Family’s jukebox and vending-machine interests.

Inside, the paneled office walls sported several framed newspapers, yellowing and biased accounts of that
infamia,
the mob that had claimed the life of Tramonti’s grandfather, among many others. The rest of the walls were all but covered with more than a hundred carefully arranged family photographs. The mahogany desk gleamed. The carpeting smelled new. Tramonti replaced it every year. There were no ashtrays here and, famously, no trash can. Carlo Tramonti supposedly found it distracting to conduct business in any room that was not perfectly neat, a compulsion that extended to trash cans, even empty ones.

The agent in charge of this charade asked Tramonti for his passport.

Tramonti sat down heavily in his leather desk chair. “I wish to have my lawyer present.”

In the reception area, Augie Tramonti arrived, out of breath. Agents grabbed him by the shoulder and restrained him just outside the open door. Before he’d gone on to bigger things, Augie “the Midget” Tramonti, small as he was, had enjoyed a long, sadistic run as an enforcer. If dead men could tell tales, many would say they’d seen Augie look at them with the same cold contempt he now showed these agents.

“My brother’s not going to talk to you people without a lawyer.” Augie’s voice was raised but even. “So forget it. And he don’t like that, the smoking there. The lawyer’s coming.” When Augie Tramonti mentioned the lawyer’s name—a distinguished one in Louisiana for more than a century—it seemed to mean nothing to the agents, who continued to smoke.

The agent in charge took out a letter from Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea and read it aloud. It accused Tramonti of being a citizen of Colombia, not Italy, as his work visa claimed. As evidence, the letter cited several trips to Cuba for which Tramonti was alleged to have used his Colombian passport. It cited the fact that Tramonti apparently had no Italian birth certificate (he was hardly the only person born in the Sicilian countryside in the nineteenth century who did not). It cited his lack of an Italian passport (it had expired under the reign of the hated Mussolini; Augie used his connections in Colombia to get a passport there for his brother). It alleged that Tramonti had used a “pattern of bribes and coercion” to keep his work visa current. “Because of this pattern of falsification,” the letter went on, it was “incumbent” on the INS to deport Tramonti to his “native Colombia.” Carlo Tramonti had never set foot in Colombia, but of course everyone here knew that. The cost of “said transportation” would be recovered by placing a tax lien on Tramonti’s home.