Saints Of New York (14 page)

'Which
was?'

'Basically,
it meant that a dockworker or a longshoreman didn't have a working contract. It
meant that he had to show up for work at the docks every day, and he had to be
hired newly each day. That kept everyone on their toes. Made people grateful to
work. Made them accept lower wages. A lot of these guys remembered the end of
the Depression, and if they didn't know it personally, they knew it from their
fathers. Within fifty years there were twenty-four different organized crime
families operating in the US. A city usually had one family running it, but
New York was the only city that had more than one. There were five here:
Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Bonnano and Colombo. Back in '83 a guy called
William Webster was the Director of the FBI. He testified before the
President's Commission on Organized Crime that there were approximately
seventeen thousand soldiers and about seventeen hundred made men.'

'Made men?'

'It's
a rank, a status if you like. It's awarded to a guy by the family he works for.
A made man cannot be killed by another family without the express authority of
the head of the made man's family. So say you have a Gambino who wants to kill
a made man in the Colombo family. Well, the rules say that he can't do that
unless a Colombo boss gives the go-ahead.'

'And
the families had complete control over running the unions and the docks?'

'They
ran a great deal more than that. They were into clothing, construction, furs, flower
shops, the entirety of the Fulton Market. They had butchers, funeral parlors,
barbershops, milk delivery companies, box manufacturers, window cleaners, and
an entire network of taxicab firms that spider-webbed across the whole
neighborhood. They ran everything, inside and out, so when someone came along
and said they were going to turn the old Idlewild Golf Course into an airport,
well what better business could they get into? Fifty thousand staff, ten
thousand car-parking spaces, five thousand acres just to begin with. The
payroll
at
Idlewild was
half a billion, and that was in the mid-Nineteen- Fifties. These guys came from
East New York, South Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Maspeth and the Rockaways.
Everyone wanted
a
piece
of the pie, and the truth of the matter was that the pie was so fucking big
they could keep on taking and keep on taking and it would never run out.'

'So
what about the police, the authorities who ran the place?'

'What
about them?'

'Well,
didn't they have security in place? Didn't they have the local police taking
care of security for the airport?'

'The
Port Authority had over a hundred uniformed police on the airport grounds every
day. They had customs inspectors, FBI, additional police from the 103rd
Precinct, but you're talking about five thousand acres of land and buildings.
Take, for example, the US Customs building. I don't remember how many floors it
had - ten, twelve, something like that. Huge place. People in and out. No
security to speak of. And here were the pigeonholes that carried the
consignment notes and bills of lading for every shipment that came though the
airport. In the early Sixties there was thirty billion dollars' worth of stuff
coming through Idlewild. So the airport loses thirty million dollars' worth of
traffic, that's only a tenth of one percent. Even three hundred million is only
one percent. They claim it off the insurance, the insurance pays up, the
insurance company hikes the premium, but all in all it's a hell of a lot less
hassle than hiring more security - managers and stuff - and the cost of it, you
know? As far as the airport was concerned, it was par for the course.'

'And
the police that were there . . . they took bribes as well?'

'Of
course they did. Police, Customs people, even some of the federal guys. Take
airline tickets, for example. Guys would come down with dozens of stolen credit
cards and buy up a bucket-load of tickets. Then they would get cash for them,
sometimes sell them at a discount. Frank Sinatra did a national tour on a wad
of stolen airline tickets.'

'You're
kidding—'

'Absolutely
true. He had a manager called Dante Barzottini. He bought fifty thousand
dollars' worth of airline tickets off of someone that had paid for them with
stolen cards. He used them to transport Frank Sinatra and eight other people
around the country. Barzottini got busted for that and they put him away.'

'And
no-one ever came forward and testified against these people?'

'They
tried to, of course, but people got killed. Informants, witnesses, as many as a
dozen a year. And the thing that made the most money for these guys was the
hijackings. They were kings of hijacking. You remember I mentioned Jimmy Burke?
Well, he was so damned good at hijacking that the Colombo family in Brooklyn
and the Luccheses in Queens shared his services. That was the first and only
time I'm aware of where one guy ended up working for two different families. He
had people in his own crew - people like Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, another
guy called Skinny Bobby Amelia - but the real prize was Jimmy Santos. Santos
was an ex-cop who got busted for armed robbery. He did his time and then he
went over to the bad guys. Well, Jimmy Santos knew everyone. He knew who was
good and who wasn't, and who would take money, or who wouldn't. He knew which
guys had mistresses and which were stretched with alimony payments. He knew
which cops gambled, and out of those who owed the most money. He got word out
through his contacts in the PD, and he got the people he wanted transferred
over to the airport detail. By the time they were through they had maybe half
the police on the airport working for them, and that's how come my father got
involved.'

'He knew
Santos.'

'He
knew of him. My father was already a sergeant in '67. He was here in Brooklyn,
ran the department that processed all the paperwork for inter-precinct
transfers. He had a couple of guys in his own precinct who wanted to move to
the airport, which had become JFK by then. Anyway, he thought this was strange,
two of his best people wanted out to the same detail within two or three months
of each other, so he dug a little and found the connection to Santos. And what
did he do? He went to Santos directly, said he couldn't have the men, not
without paying up. You ask me about my father, you ask me what kind of man he
was? That
's
who he was. A crook. No question about
it. Santos started giving my father a monthly amount, just a couple of hundred
dollars to make the transfers go smooth. My father would get the tip-off on
which transfers were Santos's, and he'd hurry them through. That arrangement
went on until my father moved to Organized Crime Control Bureau in 1972. Then
they had the airport as their territory, and right at the top of their
jurisdictional and operational priorities was cleaning up the scene down
there.'

'But
they didn't, did they?'

'They
cleaned up, that's for sure, and my asshole of a father was right inside of it
all. Just in the ten months from the start of '67 to October, two point two
million dollars' worth of goods went out of JFK. That was the actual value of
goods taken right out of the storage bins and security rooms of the Air Cargo
Center. TWA also lost two and half million dollars' worth of stock, and those
figures don't take into account any of the goods that were hijacked beyond the
airport limits. Believe me, Doctor Marie, the stuff that was stolen out of JFK
was pocket change compared to what they took once the trucks had left the
perimeter.'

'These
were the hijacks and the give-ups?'

'Yes.
Well - one of the difficulties the OCCB and the police had at the time was that
the New York State Legislature hadn't officially codified hijacking as a
felony. Anyone who got busted for hijacking actually had to be charged with
robbery or kidnapping, maybe firearms offences or possession of stolen property
. . . stuff like that. And because hijacking a truck wasn't in the statute
books yet, there was a loophole for these guys. They had the money to buy up
the best lawyers, and they paid off the courts to delay hearings and postpone
arraignments. I heard one time that one case was kept rolling back and forth
between the courts and the DA's Office for eleven years, and by the time it
actually came to court they fined the guy two hundred and fifty dollars.'

'Which
brings us to Lufthansa.'

'Yes,
it does, except—'

'Except
you have to go now.'

'I'm
afraid I do.'

'Well,
if nothing else it's been interesting, Frank.'

'Tomorrow.
We talk about Lufthansa tomorrow.'

'Tomorrow
is Sunday.'

'Monday
then?'

'Monday
it is.'

'You
going to manage without me for a whole day?'

'I'm
sure I'll cope somehow, Frank.'

'Well,
you have my file there, and my phone number's got to be
in there somewhere. You feel like
you need to talk to someone then you give me a call, okay?' 'That's very good
of you.' 'You take care now.' 'You too, Frank, you too.'

As if all the parts had been put
together by a clumsy child, the seams of his life gaped wide and would not
close with time. This was how Parrish felt sometimes.

Other
times he felt driven by a purpose, incandescent and fierce.
Blood on the teeth,
the Scandinavians said. You
caught the scent. The case had a hook and it pulled you. You pulled back and it
started to unravel like a ball of twine. Back in the Forties sometime, at least
from Parrish's perspective, the law and justice seemed to diverge. The law
served its own end, and then it served the lawyers. Justice, once fast and
cheap, was laborious and expensive, as rare as a prize diamond. People read
fiction, they watched movies, they wanted life to be like that, but it was not.
The good guys did not always win out, and the bad guys stayed bad and free.
Frank Parrish believed himself one of a dying breed. Someone who gave a damn.
He did not believe himself an arbiter of justice or a staunch testament to the
law, but there were cases he had pursued in his time that had resolved through
sheer persistence and an indomitable sense of purpose. And it was always
children. As he had so long considered, for the children there could be no
reason, no excuse. And though neither Rebecca nor Karen were children, they
were young enough to be unaware of the snares and pitfalls that lay in wait.
The dark spirits of the city had been out in force, and they had been too
naive, too innocent, to see them. And if Frank Parrish didn't care what had
happened, then who would?

He
carried a notebook in his pocket, and sometimes he wrote down thoughts that
came to mind. Seated in a coffee house three or four blocks south of the
Precinct, somewhere down near Schermerhorn, he scribbled down a line he
remembered from a
Tom
Waits song. The one about how
there wasn't really a Devil, that it was just God when He was drunk.

He
drank his coffee. He waited for Jimmy Radick to come meet him. He thought of
Rebecca, of Karen, and he tried so very hard to believe their deaths were
unrelated. But he was unable to convince himself. It was then that he decided
to go out and see Karen's parents.

Radick
was there just after eleven-thirty. Parrish told him what he wanted to do.

'And
you want to go alone again, right?'

'I
think it's best. This is now crossing precincts—'

'And
what was her name?'

'Karen
Pulaski, P-U-L-A-S-K-I.'

'And
you really think there's a connection between her and the Lange girl?'

Parrish
shook his head. 'Instinctively, yes. In reality? Probably not. But I've got to
check it out. It'll bug the hell out of me until I do.'

'OK.
I'll head back to the squad room. What do I tell Valderas?'

'Say
you don't know where I am. Tell him we're meeting later, that we're starting
the shift late, that you've just come in early to do paperwork or something.'

Radick
got up. 'Call me if you need me, okay?'

'Sure
I will,' Parrish replied.