Prizzi's Honor
Prizzi’s Honor
Richard Condon
Copyright
Prizzi’s Honor
Copyright © 1982, 2013 by Richard Condon
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by Terrence Tymon
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795335020
For the Memory of
Benn Reyes
“But dreadful is the mysterious
power of fate; there is no
deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by
fenced city, or dark, sea-
beaten ships.”
Chorus,
Antigone
Contents
Chapter One
Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter was being married before the baroque altar of Santa Grazia di Traghetto, the lucky church of the Prizzi family. The bride shimmered in the exalting sounds of the choir and the chanting bishop. The groom, shorter but more intense than the bride, was her cousin, Patsy Garrone, a member of the inner Prizzi family.
The church was dressed with sensual shafts of light and the fur of holy music. Don Corrado Prizzi, eighty-four, sat on the aisle in the front pew, right side of the church. He was asleep, but even in repose his face was as subtly distorted and burnished as that of a giant crown of thorns starfish predator. Every few moments both small, sharp eyes, as merry as ice cubes, would open, make a reading, then close again.
Beside Don Corrado sat his eldest son, Vincent, father of the bride, a cubically heavy man. He clutched his kneecaps with both hands, frowning and humming, very softly, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Beside Vincent was his brother, Eduardo, and his third “natural” wife, Baby. Eduardo called his wives Baby, not to sound colloquially American, as he had once explained to his mother, but because Cristoforo Colombo had named his first ship of discovery the Niña which means Baby. “They are all little women,” his
mother had said. “How come you don’t call them Pinta?” One thing was for sure, the family wisdom went, no one would ever call any of them Santa Maria. Eduardo wore the only elegance of the family: silver hair in high, teased waves, tailoring by Cifonelli (Roma), and money by Gucci.
Directly behind Don Corrado sat Angelo Partanna, his oldest friend and the family’s counselor. He was a tall, scrawny, bald and relentlessly dapper man in his early seventies.
Behind the first two rows on the right side of the church, captured like pheromones in the thickening smell of hundreds of burning beeswax candles, in serried ranks, row upon row, were lesser Prizzis, one more Partanna, and many, many Sesteros and Garrones. Heavily larded among them were relatives from most of the principal families of the
fratellanza
in the United States. Sal Prizzi had married Virgie Licamarito, sister of Augie “Angles” Licamarito, Boss of the Detroit family. Two of the Garrone daughters had married the sons of Gennaro Fustino, head of the New Orleans family that controlled the entire southern rim of the United States. Don Corrado’s niece, Caterina, was married to the son of Religio Carramazza, head of the Chicago family, and Don Corrado was second cousin to Sam Benefice, head of the New England family, and Carlo “Gastank” Viggone, Boss of the Cleveland combination.
Together, all sides of the
fratellanza
enterprises formed a loose conglomerate that was only able to operate as long as it could neutralize law enforcement on the one hand while sustaining cordial, continuing relations with its customer-victims on the other. The Prizzi family business depended entirely, in a way that no other business organization needed to, on strong relationships with the noncriminal sections of society. These relationships were kept in profitable repair by both sides. It would be a mistake to think of the Prizzi
family as being “different” from “legitimate” society—continuing profits and mutual conveniences were established and encouraged by both sides. The Prizzis weren’t “wrong-side” players making deals with strictly differentiated “right-side” players. Both sides had in fact evolved together in the long night of the money-tilted culture, helped each other, and were, combined, the most important part of the political and economic system of the society.
On the left side of the church, seated expressionlessly in the last half of the pews, were the working troops of the Prizzis and their
capiregimes
, an honor guard of about seven hundred men, a third of the available
soldati
. In front of them were the bag men from the chief inspector’s squad, the borough squads, and the PC’s squad of the New York Police Department, all in plain clothes. Alongside them sat the chief operating officer of one of the multinational conglomerates, the Papal Nuncio, the national union leaders, and the superstars of screen, opera, theater, TV, and the great world of sports. The groom’s best man was the current light-heavyweight champion of the world. The bride’s maid of honor was the reigning Miss America, who she had met that morning. In the first three pews, senators and congressmen sat side by side with high police officials, network anchormen, and the best and the brightest minds of the media, the district attorney’s office, the attorney general’s office, and the White House staff.
In the church choir lofts network TV cameras had been installed side by side with the Prizzis’ own cassette taping units. Radio coverage was dense from this vantage point and the hum of their steady reportage joined the glorious song of the choir, the chanting of the bishop, the responses of the altar boys, and the clicking of plain, old-fashioned news cameras. A granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi was being married.
Charley Partanna sat in the eleventh row, right side, next to his cousin, movie executive Paulie Sestero. Charley was a large, lithe man of forty-two who resembled the late Phar Lap, with strong facial bones and a jutting chin, chrome eyes and brows like awnings. He had been a “made man” in the honored society since he was seventeen, the age at which his father had been made before him.
Charley Partanna was Angelo’s son, Vincent’s
sottocapo
, and the Prizzis’ enforcer. When he was thirteen he had made his bones on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, where he had never been before that afternoon. His father had been unable to figure out any other way to ice Little Phil Terrone, the heaviest shit and boo dealer in the north Bronx, who always seemed to be at the center of a crowd of people. Charley was a kid in short pants. There were a lot of other kids, maybe thirty of them, milling around to get some of the silver money Terrone always threw around on them, and Charley just stepped out from behind a car and blew Terrone’s head off. Then he dropped the gun and lost himself in the mob of other kids.
Charley was solid. Nothing shook him up. He made his plan then he walked through it deliberately, missing nothing. One time the police staked out an apartment. They had searchlights and bullhorns and snipers on roofs and in windows, the whole movie drill, to get at a hoodlum named Dimples Tancredi, who not only worked for the Prizzis but had killed two cops. Tancredi got a message out to the Prizzis saying that he was sorry but that he was going to have to make a deal to blow the entire Prizzi shit business on the East Coast to buy himself some time instead of being knocked off by the brooding cops. At least enough time so that his lawyer could get some things settled and the crazy cops cooled down. Don Corrado was stunned by Tancredi’s intentions. He talked it over
with Angelo Partanna and Pop said, “Why, my Charley will go in there and blast holes in that little prick.” Charley was twenty. It was his fourth hit.
Eduardo Prizzi made a deal for a sit-down meet with the Brooklyn police brass and reassurances were passed around until everybody understood that all anybody wanted was for this fucking cop-killer to be dead while the Department got the media credit for it but wouldn’t have to risk any more cops’ lives.
Temporarily, the cops gave Charley a different name. In the newspapers the next day he became, without any pictures, First-Grade Detective George Fearons, complete with a police heavy rifle. He went up in the service elevator to the back door of the apartment Tancredi was trapped in and got him to move close enough to the door so that Tancredi could hear him explain the deal that the Prizzis wanted to make for him. That didn’t get the door open, but it got Tancredi close enough so he could hear the proposition and Charley burned him through the door. Then he went down in the service elevator, handed in the riot gun, and told the cops how things were upstairs; four of them went up to the apartment, kicked down the front and back door for friendly TV crews, and blew eleven holes in Tancredi’s dying body.
***
“There are even people here from Agrigento, Charley,” Paulie said. He was a very short man when he was standing, but massively tall when he was sitting down. “See that turtle-faced guy over there? Four rows up? That’s Pietro Spina. Now we are talking real old-country
fratellanza
.”
“Never mind that,” Charley said, “who is the great-looking head across the aisle, two rows up?”
They stared at the woman. “Great-looking?” Paulie said. She was okay. He would rate her about a 7.
“Jesus, Paulie, she’s gorgeous!” Charley stared fixedly at the woman. She was handsome from some angles,
but to Charley she was a classic, like the Truman win over Dewey. She was dark and she sat as reposefully as a swan.
“The name I don’t know,” Paulie said, “but she’s gotta be a big friend of the family or else heavy media.”
“If she’s a friend of the family she’s on the wrong side of the church.”
The choir ran down for a few beats and Charley became aware of the sound of the taping cameras. Four camera set-ups! he marveled. Paulie had told him that the whole wedding was going to be made into a one-hour feature with music, titles, and special effects by Scott Miller; with Toni Muto, who had three records in the top fifty, singing “It Had to Be You” in the Sicilian dialect of her choice. The movie was going to be put on videocassettes and everybody at the wedding was going to get one so they could enjoy it in the years to come.
“Listen, Paulie,” Charley said, “I want something.”
“What?”
“As soon as the mass is over I want you to tell the head guy on the cameras to shoot stuff on that girl for me.”
“Why not? You want it, you got it. Here,” he took a card out of his side pocket and scribbled on it. “Give him this. He’ll get whatever you say.”
Amalia Sestero, in the row ahead of them, turned around and smiled. “Hey, Paulie,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Shut up and watch the wedding.”
***
While the crowd was working its way out of the church, Charley moved fast and grabbed the head camera guy. He put a hundred-dollar bill in the man’s hand, figuring it would work better than Paulie’s card. “I am only trying to help the movie,” he said. “See that girl over there? The beauty in the green-and-yellow dress?”