The Godfather's Revenge (19 page)

Yet despite all this, there Moses was, out on his island, presumably cooking up new schemes to ruin the greatest city on earth and line his own pockets in the bargain, while in the eyes of the public and the eyes of the law, he was a pillar of the community.

A hero.

Robert Moses was not under constant threat of indictment or assassination. He wasn’t even under
occasional
threat of indictment or assassination.

His association with various crimes and atrocities had not caused him to lose two brothers to violent death.

It had not caused his children to come home from school crying because of what the other kids said about him. It had not caused his children to be fired upon with machine guns.

Robert Moses’s accomplishments were studied in university classes in political science and urban planning. Not criminology or criminal law. Robert Moses was a behind-the-scenes character known to everyone, and everything most people knew about him was good.

And most of it was bullshit.

Michael pushed himself away from the telescope.

Robert Moses probably possessed enough pure evil that he could sleep well. He probably woke up every morning refreshed and without the slightest anxiety about who might try to defame him today, who might try to throw him in jail, who might try to blow up his car or put a bullet in his heart. Robert Moses was probably never once tempted to go to the window of his mansion at dusk and stare through a telescope at the top of this building, wondering why he’d been so lucky, wondering, just for a moment, what it was like to be a man like Michael Corleone.

E
ver since the raid on the farmhouse in upstate New York—a meeting of all the Families, bigger than a Commission meeting, and an event that made many Americans aware for the first time of the word “Mafia”—the Commission had met as rarely as possible. Tonight’s meeting would be the first since Michael Corleone returned to New York.

Like the meetings in any large organization, its success depended on settling everything of any importance long before anyone took a seat at the table. Michael served on the boards of several corporations and charitable organizations and was always amused to hear otherwise sensible people champion open debate—a fine notion, for fools more concerned with being self-righteous than effective. The only unresolved matter Michael could foresee concerned Carlo Tramonti. Tramonti’s deportation had not held up in court, although his ongoing citizenship woes were making a battalion of lawyers rich. He had refused to discuss his grievance in any other forum but before the Commission. But no matter what Tramonti proposed, Michael had enough votes in his pocket—Altobello, Zaluchi, Cuneo, Stracci, probably Greco—to block anything. And Tramonti had, via intermediaries, agreed not to say nothing about the Cuban assassination plot.

The security precautions for the Commission meeting were intricate—though, for the first time in decades it did not involve the Bocchicchio clan. Cesare Indelicato, the Sicilian
capo di tutti capi
and Carmine Marino’s godfather, had put a stop to it. There were too few of them left.

The restaurant chosen for the meeting was tucked in a corner of Carroll Gardens that had been cut off from the rest of the neighborhood by the construction of the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a walled concrete canyon that whined with constant traffic.

The buildings closest to the restaurant were empty, save for the apartments loaned to appreciative friends of the Corleone Family, who were using them for both lodging and security. The nearby street fair and upcoming fireworks display in Red Hook would draw most people in the area down by the East River for the evening.

Down the block from the restaurant, an open fire hydrant spewed water into the darkening street. A nicely compensated crew from the water department cheerfully pretended to be fixing a water-main break. As promised, the precinct sergeant had dispatched uniformed cops to close off the street and keep the curious at bay. The cops at the scene had no idea what was going on inside the restaurant. They were clock-punchers—men handpicked for their purposeful lack of curiosity.

At seven sharp, five men gathered at the back door of the restaurant, five more at the front, so each door had a trusted soldier from each of New York’s Families: the Barzinis, the Tattaglias, the Straccis, the Cuneos, and the Corleones, whose turn it was to provide the security detail—a job that Eddie Paradise had overseen. Men grunted hellos to each other but otherwise milled around and smoked and did not talk. Paradise came by and shook hands and thanked everybody for their efforts, then hovered around the periphery.

The arrivals of the Dons were staggered between seven-thirty and eight. Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen were already inside.

First to arrive was Carlo Tramonti. His seat on the Commission was a complicated formality. He did not always attend, but when he did, he was allowed to take his seat first, one of several courtesies granted to him because of the nature of his organization, by far the nation’s oldest. Behind him trailed a bodyguard and his little brother Agostino. Augie the Midget’s promotion to
consigliere
was recent; this would be his first Commission meeting.

The embrace that Carlo Tramonti and Michael Corleone shared betrayed nothing of the differences these men had had over the years. The men exchanged pleasantries about their families. A casual observer would have mistaken them for friends.

Tom Hagen, whose shoes were new and squeaking, showed the Tramontis to their seats at one of the two long, facing tables in the back banquet room. Each was covered with a white tablecloth, bottles of red wine, baskets of bread, and plates of antipasti. Hagen plucked an olive from one of the plates. He used to feel like a sideshow attraction at these meetings; when Vito first tabbed him as
consigliere,
Tom was the youngest man in the room and the only one who wasn’t Italian. Now, almost twenty years later, Hagen felt entirely in his element.

“The shoes, they start doing that there,” said Augie the Midget, pointing as he sat, “squeak like that, got to throw ’em out, eh? And start over.” Only with his strange accent—a cross between Brooklynese and Southern Negro—it sounded like,
De shoes dey start doin’ dat dere, squeak like dat, gotta trow ’em out, eh? And start ovah.

Hagen smiled and nodded and told them to make themselves at home.

“What shoes?” asked Carlo, who was a little hard of hearing.

“Forget it,” Augie said. “Just shoes, all right?”

BY NOW, TWO OF THE OLD LIONS HAD ARRIVED, ANTHONY
Stracci from New Jersey and Joe Zaluchi of Detroit. As was customary, each brought his
consigliere
and a preapproved bodyguard. Zaluchi and Stracci were the Corleones’ oldest friends and strongest allies. Zaluchi was a moon-faced, grandfatherly man in his seventies. He’d married one daughter off to the scion of an automobile company and another to Ray Clemenza, son of the late Corleone
capo
Pete Clemenza. Joe Z had taken over in Detroit after the chaos of the Purple Gang and built up an empire known for being one of the most peaceful in the country. Lately, though, there were rumblings that the Negroes were taking over in Detroit, and that the auto unions were getting their marching orders from the Chicago outfit. Many of the Dons believed Zaluchi was going senile. When he greeted Michael by calling him “Vito,” Michael chose not to correct him.

Black Tony Stracci, also in his seventies, doggedly maintained that he did not dye his thinning ink-black hair, which seemed to get blacker every year. He’d always been so loyal to the Corleones that some outsiders wrongly believed the Stracci Family was merely a Corleone
regime.
The Corleones’ narcotics operation used Stracci-controlled docks and warehouses (an alliance cemented by Nick Geraci, but not a part of Geraci’s conspiracy). Black Tony had also—in one of the most bitter arguments the Commission had ever known—joined with Michael Corleone to overcome the opposition of several other Dons (particularly Tramonti and Silent Sam Drago) to secure the backing of the Commission for New Jersey governor James K. Shea’s bid for the presidency. The Straccis had dealings in New York, but their power base was in New Jersey, which was less prestigious and lucrative, thus relegating them to their perpetual status as the least of the New York Families.

Next to arrive were the two newest members, both in flashy suits and loud ties: Frank Greco from Philadelphia, who’d replaced the late Vincent Forlenza (leaving Cleveland without a seat at the table), and John Villone, who’d returned from Vegas to take over in Chicago from the late Louie “Fuckface” Russo. When Michael greeted Frank the Greek by saying he looked good, Greco scoffed. “When I was a young man, I looked like a Greek god. Now I just look like a goddamned Greek.” Michael smiled. He’d heard Greco make this joke before. In fact, at fifty, Greco still
was
a young man, compared to most of the Dons. Philadelphia was another outfit that was losing ground to the Negroes, but Frank the Greek remained strong in South Jersey, which had given him connections to several men in the Shea administration.

John Villone had overseen the Chicago outfit’s interests in Nevada, which was how Michael first met him. He was a “man with a belly” from the old Sicilian tradition, connoting both power and courage as well as literal corpulence. Unlike such men, however, he wore shiny, clownish clothes, tailored, oddly, to make himself look even fatter. Still, Villone was the kind of man everybody liked and wanted to be around, and Michael envied him for it. John Villone had been close to Louie Russo and remained so even after Russo froze him out of important Family business over some dispute concerning a woman. Villone walked to his seat in the back room with his meaty arm around Tom Hagen, unaware that Hagen had used the very belt he now wore to strangle the fat man’s dear friend Louie Russo.

The deeply tanned boss of the Tampa syndicate, Salvatore “Silent Sam” Drago, was next to come through the door. On his shoulder he bore a webbed bag of oranges, as was his custom. Smiling, without a word, he deposited them on the bar. He and Michael embraced. Al Neri checked the oranges for anything concealed there. Drago must have expected this and took no offense. Despite their differences, Michael and Sam Drago had much in common. Drago, like Michael, was the youngest son of a boss, and, like Michael, he’d set out in life hoping to avoid the family business. Drago’s father was the late Sicilian boss Vittorio Drago, a close friend and ally of Lucky Luciano’s. When Mussolini seized power and threw Vittorio and all the other bosses in prison on the island of Ustica, young Sammy Drago—who was in Florence, studying to become a painter—fled to America and settled in Florida. He’d tried to make a go of it as a commercial fisherman, but he lost everything. He was in danger of being deported. Back in Sicily, his mother got Lucky Luciano himself to pull a few strings, though Sam Drago did not know this until he was already beholden to the exiled American. He told himself he was helping run some of Luciano’s interests in Florida only to provide support for his sainted mother while his father was in prison. But soon the War started, and the years dragged on, and Sam Drago, who’d been a promising painter, seemed to find his true calling as a racketeer and leader of men.

Al Neri shook his head. Nothing in the bag except oranges. He began to peel one. Hagen showed Drago and his men to the back room.

The last to arrive were the three remaining New York Dons—Ottilio Cuneo, Paul Fortunato, and Osvaldo Altobello.

Altobello held the door for the other two Dons and their men. He’d been on the Commission for a year, but it had not met in that time. This gesture of humility drew approving nods from the wheezing Fortunato and the jolly-looking Cuneo.

Sweating and breathless from the strain of the ten-foot walk from the curb to the restaurant door, Fat Paulie Fortunato, Don of the Barzini Family, sat heavily on a chair just inside the door and exchanged embraces with Michael and Tom Hagen from there. Fortunato looked fat enough to have eaten John Villone for breakfast. His eyes were slits in his doughy face, and his leonine head was perpetually bowed, as if his neck muscles couldn’t hold it up. Fortunato was the closest thing the Corleones had to an enemy among the Five Families. He’d been a devoted
capo
to Emilio Barzini, whose murder had never been pinned on the Corleones (or on Al Neri, who’d donned his old cop uniform to do the shooting), and he’d been close to Vince Forlenza in Cleveland, who—to be technical—had disappeared and was only presumed dead. Fortunato’s personal power base was the Garment District. He’d also been one of the Barzini men pushing to expand into narcotics, which, on Fat Paulie’s watch, the Family had done. He resented what he called the hypocrisy of the Corleones, who’d withheld their political support for the drug business while Vito was still running things, and then, under Michael’s reign, created a covert
regime
that seized a piece of the action. Despite these differences, Fortunato was not, by nature, a man who took offense or took the offensive. He’d been boss for eight peaceful years, ruling Staten Island the way the Barzinis had for decades.

There might have been no greater testament to Michael Corleone’s power than Ozzie Altobello’s elevation to Don of what was still known as the Tattaglia Family. Once the Corleones’ bitter rivals, the Tattaglias were now headed by Connie Corleone’s literal godfather, a loyal friend of Vito Corleone’s since Prohibition. The Tattaglias—less diverse than most Families—specialized in prostitution, strip clubs, and pornography. This empire was built by Philip Tattaglia, who enjoyed its fruits with epic gluttony. After he was killed in 1955, his brother Rico came out of retirement to succeed him. The organization started falling apart. It was undercapitalized and increasingly vulnerable to police raids and the crusades of the self-righteous. When Rico died last year of natural causes, most expected the new Don to be one of the Family’s glorified pimps or, failing that, one of its young warriors. Instead, the courtly Altobello, a born
consigliere,
found himself thrust into the role of Don. Most saw him as a human olive branch extended toward the Corleones.

Leo “the Milkman” Cuneo was a small old man who somehow had the presence of a large one, the way a skilled but tiny actor might. He wore a plain, sensible suit. He’d been given the honor of arriving last not in deference to his power but as a gesture of respect, now that, with Forlenza’s disappearance, Cuneo had become the senior member of the Commission.

Michael Corleone, briefly, took Cuneo’s hat and coat himself, until a horrified waiter swooped in and relieved Michael of that imagined indignity. “On the contrary, it was my honor,” Michael said in Italian, “to touch the hem of Don Cuneo’s garment.”

Michael forced a smile so that Cuneo would not think he was being sarcastic.

Cuneo mumbled a few bars of a Sicilian song Michael didn’t know and didn’t understand. “Am I right?” he said in English, patting Michael on the cheek.

“As rain,” Michael said, showing Cuneo toward the banquet room.