“Pop, Irene and me have been over that, we know all that, so what are we supposed to do now?”
“The absolutely first thing is that she’s got to give back the three sixty. And if the don wants a fifty percent premium she’s got to pay that, too. That is for openers.”
“All right. I already got that straight in my head,” Irene said, “then what?”
“First hand over the money. We ain’t going anywhere until Don Corrado has that money. He can’t believe anything unless you give back that money. We won’t have any way to argue unless you do what you said and give him back his money. You and Charley are going to be taking big chances in the next couple of days and the only way you are going to come through is if you keep these deals separate and give him back his money so that he can see that you are serious when you lay out the deal that is going to keep you alive.”
“What deal?” Charley said.
“You have to take away the only thing Don Corrado wants. Filargi, the golden Filargi he needs to get back his bank for ten cents on the dollar and win sixty million, maybe seventy million dollars. You have to snatch Filargi again, this time from the Prizzis. You understand me?”
Charley nodded. “I was thinking of something like that,” he said. Angelo looked at Irene. She nodded sadly and turned away from him. She walked to the hall closet, took a small overnight bag from it and brought it out to stand it at Angelo Partanna’s feet.
“There’s the five hundred and forty,” she said. “Give it to him for a little while, but before we give him Filargi, I want that money back.”
“This is the story on Filargi,” Angelo said, sitting down in the nearest chair. “Almost a year ago Don Corrado and Ed Prizzi had a meet with Filargi and they laid out for him Ed’s scheme to milk the bank with the crooked foreign currency deals. They told Filargi they would even take only a fifty-fifty split on everything he could steal from the bank. He refused them. He called them bad names and he told them if they ever came near him again that he would see that they were put in prison. He told them he was going to write down the whole conversation just in case they decided to send some people after him and that it would go to the DA’s office if he was hit. Now, anybody else except Corrado Prizzi would have let it go at that and moved along to some other scam, but Corrado buys himself an inside man at the bank—that fellow Gomsky—and talks him into going through with the ripoff for only twenty-five percent, a nice saving. Corrado tells me that this way not only is the pot that much sweeter, but that he can set up Filargi to get much worse than just getting buried—he will be ruined as a witness against the Prizzis. You got to hand it to him. There is nobody like him in this business.”
“Jesus, I’m quitting,” Irene said.
“What do we do with Filargi?” Charley said.
“First you get him. How many people they got out there holding him down?”
“Two, but they’re my people. They do what I tell them.”
“You think the don trusts anybody?” Angelo asked him amiably. “Where have you been? We use our suspicions instead of our brains in this business. Vincent told every man on that job that he is responsible for
getting Filargi into court. They are all paid extra for watching each other.”
“Then—too bad,” Charley said. “They got to go, then.”
“What do we do with Filargi when we have him someplace else?” Irene asked Pop.
“You negotiate. You send the letter to the don saying that you got Filargi and that you want to talk but only through an acceptable third party. Corrado will ask me who the third party should be and I will tell him that I am the best man for the job because you aren’t going to trust anybody else.”
“Then we have to trust you,” Irene said.
“Yeah,” Angelo said, smiling broadly at her. “That’s right. But it’s easier than running for the rest of your life then getting iced anyway, right?”
She stared at him. Then she grinned. “Yeah, right,” she said.
“Filargi is worth sixty-seventy million to the Prizzis plus total control of what is maybe about the eighteenth-biggest bank in the United States, because they have to win if they get Filargi, and the biggest win is planting him in the joint here and in Italy for the rest of his life while they buy back the bank from the Italians at ten cents on the dollar. What are you next to seventy million dollars? Nothing.”
“Yeah,” Irene said, “but they’re Sicilians so—present company excepted—they are basically dopes who think with their balls. They are, man for man, the biggest dummies I have ever gotten rich off so what if they turn us down?”
“How can they turn you down?” Angelo said blandly, spreading his open-palmed hands out in front of him. “If they turn you down, Filargi goes in to testify against them. You and Charley will turn and go into the government’s Witness Protection Program and testify against them. The don, Eddie, Vincent and all the rest will be in the slammer for complicity to
defraud, for murder, for—ah, shit! you name it—and not only will they never survive the prison terms they get but it will be the end of the Prizzi family.” He walked to the window and stared out at the bay. “I think maybe I can make the cops lean even heavier on the street people. That ought to take the Prizzis’ minds off thinking how they can blow you two away.”
“How?” Charley asked.
“It could turn out to be a good thing that Irene zipped the broad who pressed the wrong floor.”
Chapter Thirty-two
After he had straightened out some basketball betting patterns for the following week, and made the arrangements for the delivery of edges on the national professional tennis circuit, Angelo called Davey Hanly at the chief inspector’s office. He said he was Chester Feinstein calling and Hanly said he would call him right back. It took Hanly twenty minutes to get to a pay phone on Broome Street that should have had a tap on it for the past thirty years, but didn’t.
“Angelo? This is the call-back.”
“Hey, great. Look—lemme pick you up in front of the usual place at twelve o’clock, okay?”
“I’ll be there,” Hanly said and hung up.
They drove slowly around Prospect Park in Angelo’s six-year-old Ford. Angelo said, “I got a lead on the Calhane hit. It ain’t concrete. But this much I know, if you guys can double your pressure on every joint operating in the five boroughs, I think it’s possible that somebody might give you the hitter.”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Ange. We’re limping along on like half pay now. Shutting down half the action is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.”
“It was just an idea, Davey. Some people are sick and tired of being hassled and I think they could talk to certain other people. The Prizzis are only interested
in one thing—getting the Department what it wants, the hitter, and getting back to business as usual for both sides.”
“Lemme talk it over with my people. You got to be operating on information and you never had bad information. My people can go on the shorts if that will turn up the prick who shot that fine woman.”
“It could speed things up for all of us, Davey.”
***
Four days later, the police arrests clogged up every precinct house in the city, including Staten Island. The police redoubled their raids on handbooks and gambling houses. The hookers were driven off the streets and herded out of joints that had been protected by the pad for thirty years. What Dewey did to the prostitution business in the thirties, the NYPD was doing in spades to every moneymaker that the cousins had. The squads lifted sixteen million dollars in street price worth of narcotics. They came down so hard on book-making, on the street and on the phones, that nobody could figure the losses. The war affected seventeen separate national sports, which had created millionaire jockeys and tennis players, tens of thousands of golf courses, hockey rinks, and stadia, and a billion-dollar dependence on all of their stars by an army of barking media men and advertisers. Race tracks, ball parks, jai alai frontons, basketball courts, dashes, jumps, passes, throws, toboggan runs, yacht races, space shots, thoroughbred horses, shuffling fighters, and doped greyhounds generated sales of billions of dollars’ worth of television sets, hundreds of millions of gallons of beer. Each week, in bets alone, cost the citizens more than any foreign war. When the New York police shut all of this down it cost the media, the equipment manufacturers, and the air-conditioning industry—plus the team owners, and the thousands of players of the hundreds of industrialized games—the attention and patronage of the New York trading
area, because if the games could not be bet upon they didn’t exist for the people. But most of all it cost the direct recipients of all of that betting cash—the New York Police Department and the Mafia families and Syndicate affiliates.
Chapter Thirty-three
All police leaves were canceled. Rich hoodlums were arrested on sight and held for twenty-four hours before being booked, then arrested again as fast as the lawyers could get them out. The heat was heaviest on the Prizzis. The police had quickly made the connection between Filargi and the family’s bank, which had been sold to Filargi’s group, and Hanly tipped Angelo off, saying that every Prizzi phone had been bugged. All telephone contact with the house in Brentwood was broken. If such calls had to be made, they would be placed by either Vincent or Angelo from different public telephone booths.
Vincent was arrested twice; and his three
capi
and about two hundred of his button men, as if they were moving through a revolving turnstile.
“What is this?” he asked a sergeant named Keifetz from the borough squad. “This is the third time I been here in two days on the same thing.”
“Who did the job on Mrs. Calhane, Vincent?” Keifetz asked him.
“Who’s that?”
“The woman who was wasted when Finlay got snatched.”
“How do I know? Everybody asks me! I don’t know nothing!”
“Vincent, let me tell you something which is strictly inside, you dig? Your family owns twenty-five percent of Finlay’s bank. That’s the connection. Nobody else has any direct connection. Your people took Finlay and on the way out they murdered Mrs. Calhane.”
“Keifetz, lissena me. What do I know about kidnaping? Am I crazy? I got a business. What do I need cowboy stuff for?”
The police weren’t only tossing people in Brooklyn. They were just as grim about it in New York and the Bronx. Every time they broke up a mob score or bounced soldiers and workers around, they planted that the Prizzis had once sold their bank to Robert Finlay.
After eight days of being hassled the Bocca family called a meeting of the five New York families at a rented meeting room on the third floor of a straight bank on Fifty-first Street. The bosses attended with their
consiglieri
. The meeting was opened by Quarico Bocca, who controlled, among other things, about sixty-eight percent of the prostitution in the country.
“They ain’t kidding around,” he said. “They are costing us all money and they are going to keep leaning on us until we give them whoever hit that cop’s wife. All I know is one thing here. The cops keep telling my people that the guy who was snatched the day the broad got it also did big business with the Prizzi family which everybody knows about anyway, including the Prizzis. Now I want to make this a short meeting. I want to put it to a vote that Vincent Prizzi and his
consigliere
take a break and talk it over then come back in the meeting and tell us what they’re going to do about it. All right? Raise your hand if you are in favor.” He sat down.
“Hold the hands. We don’t need no hands yet,” Vincent said, getting to his feet. “Angelo and me are going home now, we ain’t going outside to have a meeting. Who do you think you are talking to? I am
Vincent Prizzi. When most of you people had holes in the ass of your pants or you was sticking up gas stations we was the biggest family in this country and now that some of you have learned how to run broads and roll drunks we can still buy and sell you. We lose more when the cops are in an uproar than any of you. We don’t like it. But you ain’t going to tell us how we run our business whatever it is and I ain’t saying that what you are talking about is a part of it. We’ll decide what can be done. If something can be done then we’ll do it. Anybody here doesn’t like it, you come and get us. We ain’t taking any shit from any outsiders about family business. If you want a war, we’ll get one for you. Otherwise do the best you can. Don’t tell Prizzis how to run their business, and I mean most of all a scummy little pimp like you, Signore Fatalone,” he said directly to Bocca.
He stood up. Angelo Partanna rose with him. They moved out of the meeting room, slowly and quietly, while the eight men around the table looked at their cigars.
They rode back to Brooklyn in Angelo’s little Dodge. “You would think they would figure it out,” Vincent said as they rode through the Midtown Tunnel. “Who has more to fall back on, us or the cops? We own the pad. They get their main juice from it. So they go ahead and bounce the guys around on the street for a couple of weeks. How much more? You think they’re gonna go back living on their salaries after eighty-five years on the pad? Every dime they cost us, it costs them thirty cents. Sure, their heart bleeds for the dumb broad who pushed the wrong floor. They got to do that. It’s a family thing. But all the time they are thinking of the business thing. They bounce us around, we don’t pay them. They don’t get paid, they hurt. Everybody understands they got to forget so we can get back to business. What I’m saying is, Angelo, is that Bocca lost his head in that meeting.
He wants to be a hero with cops he runs? He wants to insult Prizzi honor so it gets back to all the cops on his pad? You noticed nobody else wanted to push us around today, only Bocca. Well, whatta you think, Angelo?”
“Bocca has done so much time that he gets a little hysterical,” Angelo said. “He is like a person who has a lot of accidents, they finally figure out that he don’t know it, but he wants to have accidents. That is how Bocca is about spending time in a federal joint. His own people are beginning to figure him out and they don’t like it.”