Hooligans (7 page)

getting closer,

entering the room.

Baroomf!

The explosion blew out the mike. Dutch punched the off button.

“That‟s it,” he said.

Charlie One Ear said, “Utterly charming. Too bad about the woman.”

“Too bad about all of them,” Dutch snapped caustically. “They were worth more to us alive than

dead.”

Dutch ran the tape back and played it again. We all leaned forward, hoping to hear something

significant, but there wasn‟t much. I listened to the shots, counting them.

“That one, sounds like a dentist‟s drill I make that some kind of submachine gun,” Zapata said.

Dutch played it again.

It was a chilling tape. Just when you think you‟ve seen it all and heard it all, you run across something

like this, listening to three people die. Mobsters or not, it raised the hair on my arms.

“Definitely two guns,” Charlie One Ear said.

“That‟s pretty good, Charlie. Stinetto‟s gun was still in his belt when we found him,” Dutch said.

“Loaded and clean. The old man was light.”

“Pretty good shooting,” Chino ventured.

“Had to be two of „em,” said Salvatore.

“Or an ambidextrous marksman,” Charlie One Ear said.

“Fuckin‟ nervy one,” Zapata added.

“Any other ideas?” Dutch asked.

I kept mine to myself.

“Okay, now pay attention. We got a man here can maybe shed a little glimmer on the night‟s

proceedings, so everybody just relax a minute. This here‟s Jake Kilmer, Kilmer‟s with the Freeze and

he‟s an expert on this outfit.”

A moan of discontent rippled through the room.

“You wanna listen to him, or stay dumb?” Dutch snapped without a hint of humour in his tone.

The room got quiet.

And colder than an ice cube sandwich.

7

The house was a two-story brick and stone structure nestled against high dunes overlooking the bay.

The backyard was terraced, rising from the swimming pool to a flat that locked like a child‟s dream.

There was a gazebo and an eight-horse carousel and a monkey bar set and a railroad with each car just

large enough to accommodate one child.

Two men smoked quietly in the gazebo.

From high above, on top of the dunes that separated the house from the bay, the sound of the child

laughing could be heard, followed by his grandfather‟s rough laughter. Their joyous chorus was

joined by the sound of a calliope playing “East Side, West Side, All Around the Town.” The child was

on the carousel, his grandfather standing beside him with an arm around the boy. The horses, eyes

gleaming, nostrils flaring, mouths open, jogged up and down in an endless, circular race. Below them,

in the pool, an inner tube floated, forgotten.

The figure, dressed entirely in black, crouched as it moved silently and swiftly through the sea grass

on top of the dune to a point above the house. Only the swimming pool was visible. The figure was

carrying a weapon that had the general conformity of a rifle but was larger.

The figure slid to the ground and eased quietly to the edge of the dune, looking down at the old man

arid the child. He waited.

A woman appeared at the sliding glass door at the back of the house.

“Ricardo, bedtime,” she yelled.

The child protested but the woman persisted.

“Once more around,” the old man yelled back, and the woman agreed and waited.

The figure on the dune also waited.

His last ride finished, the little boy ran gleefully down the terrace and then turned back to the older

man.

“Come kiss me good night, Grandpa,” he called back. The grandfather smiled and waved his hand.

“Uno momento,” he called back, and then motioned to the men in the gazebo to shut down the

carousel.

The child skipped to his grandmother arid they entered the house together.

The figure on the dune fitted what looked like a pineapple onto the end of the weapon and adjusted a

knob on the rear of the barrel. There was the faint sound of metal clinking against metal.

The old man looked around, not sure where the sound had come from.

One of the men in the gazebo stood up, stepped out onto the terrace, and looked up.

“Something?” the other one said.

The first one shrugged and walked back into the gazebo.

There was a muffled explosion—

Pumf!

A sigh in the night air over their heads.

Then the terraced backyard of the house was suddenly bathed in a sickening orange-red glow.

The two men in the gazebo were blown to the ground. The grandfather arced like a diver doing a back

flip as he was blown off the terrace. He landed in the pool. The merry horses were blown to bits.

The night calm was shattered by the explosion, by a crescendo of broken glass, by the screams.

8

THE CINCNNA11 TRIAD

Morehead had pinned seven photographs on a corkboard in the front of the big room, each one

identified with a felt-tip pen. Since we had already made Tagliani and Frank Turner as one and the

same, ditto Stinetto and Nat Sherman, Dutch crossed them out.

Until a couple of hours ago Tagliani had been
capo di tutti capi,
“boss of all bosses” of the Cincinnati

„Tagliani family, known as the Cincinnati Triad.

For fifty years the Taglianis had ruled the mob world in southwest Ohio, operating out of Cincinnati.

The founder of the clan, Giani, its first
capo di tutti capi,
died when he was eighty-three and never

saw the inside of a courtroom, much less did time for his crimes. The empire was passed to his son,

Joe “Skeet” Tagliani. While the old man had a certain Old World charm, Skeet Tagliani was nothing

less than a butcher. Under his regime the Taglianis had formed an alliance with two other gang

leaders. One was Tuna Chevos, who married Skeet Tagliani‟s sister and was also one of the

Midwest‟s most powerful dope czars. Across the Ohio River, in Covington, an old-time
Mafioso

named Johnny Draganata controlled things. When a black Irish hood named Bannion tried to take

over, Skeet threw in with Draganata. The war lasted less than three months. It was a bloodbath and to

my knowledge there isn‟t a Bannion hoodlum left to talk about it.

Thus the Cincinnati Triad was formed: Skeet Tagliani, Tuna Chevos, and Johnny Draganata.

I had put Skeet away for a ten spot, but it had taken three years of my life to do it and I had spent the

better part of the next two trying to prove that his brother, Franco, had taken over as
capo
in Skeet‟s

place. It was a nasty job and costly. Several of our agents and witnesses had died trying to gather

evidence against the Taglianis.

Then Franco had vanished, poof, just like that, no trace— and another year had gone down the drain

while I chased every hokum lead, every sour tip, up and down every dead-end alley in the country.

The Cincinnati Triad had simply disappeared.

A clever move, Tagliani selling out and hauling stakes like that. Clever and frustrating. Now, almost a

year later, he had turned up iii Dunetown—stretched out in the morgue with a name tag on his toe that

said he was Frank Turner. The name change was easy to understand.

What he was doing on ice was not.

The other five faces in Dutch‟s photos were familiar although their names, too, were new. „[hey were

the princes of Tagliani‟s hoodlum empire, the capi who helped rule the kingdom: Rico Stizano, who

was now calling himself Robert Simons; Tony Logeto, who had become Thomas Lanier; Anthony

Bronicata, now known as Alfred Burns; and Johnny Draganata, the old fox, whose nom de plume was

James Dempsey. The subject in the last picture was less familiar to me, although I knew who he was:

Johnny “Jigs” O‟Brian, a nickel-dime hoodlum who had been doing odd jobs for the mob in Phoenix

until he married Tagliani‟s youngest daughter, Dana. At the time the Triad had done its disappearing

act, O‟Brian was doing on—the—job training running prostitution.

Cute, hut not a11 that original. „The new names helped explain initials on suitcases, gold cuff links,

silk shirts, sterling silverware, that kind of thing. The Tagliani bunch was big on monograms.

[hen there were the two missing faces, „Tuna Chevos and his chief executioner and sycophant, Turk

Nance. In the whole mob, Chevos and his henchman, Nance, were the most deadly. The setup here

seemed too perfect for them to be very far away. Besides, Chevos was a dope runner and the coastline

of Georgia from South Carolina to Florida was the Marseilles of America. Dope flowed through there

as easily as ice water flowed through Chevos‟ veins.

“Recognize these people?” Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues‟ gallery.

I nodded. “All of „em. Cutthroats to the man.”

“Okay,” he said, let‟s get on with it”

I decided to play it humble and sat down on the corner of the desk.

“1 don‟t want to sound like I know it all,” I said, “but I‟ve been hound-dogging these bastards for

years. I know a lot about this mob because I‟ve been trying to break up their party ever since I got out

of short pants.”

Not a grin. A tough audience. Salvatore was cleaning his fingernails with a knife that made a machete

look like a safety pin. Charlie One Ear was doing a crossword puzzle.

“Just what is the Freeze?” Charlie One Ear asked without looking up from his puzzle.

They were going to make it tough.

“Well, I‟ll tell you what it‟s not. It‟s not the Feebies or the Leper Colony,” I said. “We have two jobs.

We work with locals on anything where there‟s a hint of an interstate violation. And we go after the

LCN. We‟re not in a league with the Leper Colony. We don‟t kiss ass in Washington by victimizing

some little taxpayer who can‟t protect himself, and we don‟t hold press conferences every five

minutes like the Feebies.”

“What‟s the LCN?” Zapata asked.

“La Cosa Nostra, you fuckin‟ moron,‟ Salvatore taunted.

Zapata looked back over his shoulder t Salvatore. “Big deal. So I never heard it called LCN before.

My old man didn‟t suck ass for some broken-down old Mafioso.”

“That‟s right,” Salvatore said. “Your old man swept floors in a Tijuana whorehouse.”

“You shoulda been brung up in a whorehouse,” Zapata shot back. “Maybe you wouldn‟t wear an

earring, like a fuckin‟ fag.”

“Hey, you‟re talking about my mother‟s wedding ring!” roared Salvatore.

“All right, all right,” Charlie One E2,r said, holding up his hand.

“You keep outta this,” said Salvatore. „At least I got an ear to put it in; some dip didn‟t eat it for

dinner”

I wondered why Dutch didn‟t step in and stop things before they got out of hand. Then Zapata started

snickering and Salvatore broke out in a laugh and Charlie One Ear smiled, and I got a sudden sense of

what was happening. You see it in combat, this kind of barbed-wire humour. It‟s a great equalizer. It

says: I trust you; we‟re buddies; you can say anything about me you want; nobody else has the

privilege. It bonds that unspoken sense of love and trust among men under pressure, a macho

camaraderie in which the insult becomes the ultimate flattery.

I was beginning to understand what Dutch meant. This was a tight little society and they were letting

inc know it in their own way.

They all got into it except Pancho Callahan, who never cracked a smile. He stared at me over a

pyramid of fingers through cold gray eyes, the way you stare at a waiter in a restaurant when he

forgets your order. I got the message. “Screw the buddy-buddy humour, hotshot,” he was saying.

“Show us what you got.”

“You guys can rehearse your act later,” Dutch said, throwing a wet towel in the works. “If we listen,

maybe we can learn something. Did all of you forget that part of our deal was to keep organized crime

out of this town? Look what we ended up with.”

They all eyeballed me.

“Not him,” Dutch growled, “the pfutzluker Taglianis.”

Dutch never swore in English, only German. 1 doubt that any of his gang knew what the hell he meant

most of the time. Nobody ever asked, either.

“Go on,” he said to me. “Keep trying.”

“Look, this gang up here on the wall is no penny-ante outfit and they didn‟t come here for the waters.

They came here to buy this town. I been after these bastards since the day I joined the Freeze.”

“So what d‟you want outta all this?” Cowboy Lewis asked.

“I‟ll tell you what I want,” I said. “The RICO anti-crime laws refer to any monies earned from illegal

sources as ICC,” I said, “which stands for ill-gotten gains.”

That drew a laugh from Charlie One Ear. “Ah,” he said, “the wonders of the government never

cease.”

“What‟s RICO stand for?” Lewis asked, seriously.

“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations—gangland fronts,” I said.

“ICC simply means the kiwash they make from dope, gambling, prostitution, extortion, pornography..

. all the LCN‟s favourite tricks. The LCN has to wash that money, and it isn‟t easy. So they invest in

legitimate businesses—even banks—to clean it up. RICO gives us the power to bust them if we can

prove that any business depends for its support on ICC. If we can prove that, we can confiscate their

money, their businesses, their equipment, their yachts and Rolls-Royces and all the rest of their toys.

And we can also make cases against the racketeers and everybody connected with them. That goes for

legitimate businessmen, politicians, or anybody else that gets in bed with them.”

Zapata piped up: “Do we get credit for this course?”