See No Evil (10 page)

Elliot studied the terrain. All seemed as it should. Except the agent. He had a mustache, as many of them did. He was, in a manner of speaking, balding, but not really. He was not thin, but slightly overweight. His age? Maybe late twenties,
but more like midthirties, and the uncertainty caused the palms of Elliot’s hands to suddenly moisten. Anyway, it was close enough to try, he thought, and so Elliot waited in line until the agent waved him forward.

“Where are you coming from?”

“I-I’m Dr. Litner,” Elliot answered trying to make eye
contact
. “I just arrived from a medical conference in Geneva.”

Then, the agent asked a question that made Elliot’s heart sink. “What’s in the briefcase?”

“Papers. Technical papers that I used during my lecture.”

“Would you mind opening it up for me to have a look?”

It was at that moment that Elliot heard a click in some atavistic area of his frontal lobe that caused him, wisely, to immediately fall into his best Jerry Lewis impersonation. “Wh-wh-what are you saying? Wh-wh-what are you
suggesting
?” he blustered, stalling for time enough so that Carmine or someone would see him. “I, sir, am a medical doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital and will not have you or anyone else going through my personal papers!”

The agent was more puzzled than angered or even shocked. “I don’t care if you’re a doctor or the Wizard of Oz, you will open that bag!”

From that moment on, Elliot was making something a lot closer to sounds than words. But behind the agent, off to his right, he saw another drinking coffee and scarfing down a Dunkin’ Donut, obviously on break. He looked to be about twenty-seven. He was thin, and he was balding, no question about that.

“Officer! Officer!” Elliot called out to him in a loud voice. “My name is Dr. Litner, and this man is harassing me!”

The young agent turned with alarm. Recognizing what had happened, he slammed his Styrofoam coffee cup down so hard on the folding table that it smashed and made his way toward the inspection line.

“Hey, Dennis! Maybe you better let me handle this one, huh? I don’t think Dr. Litner would mind if I looked through his briefcase, would you, Doctor?”

“No, I suppose not,” Elliot huffed. “I just don’t like this man’s attitude.”

Elliot passed through customs five minutes later and hooked up with Carmine, who thought the whole episode was hilarious even before Elliot told him he was so scared, he’d nearly pissed in his pants. Of course, this made Carmine roar all the more. As they left Kennedy for the Long Island Expressway headed toward Manhattan, Carmine lifted up the accordion folder.

“You know what you had in that folder?” Carmine asked.

“No,” Elliot answered, physically drained from the
experience
. “And I don’t want to know, either.”

“It’s these,” Carmine said throwing it open and showing a sheaf of parchment covered with engraved letters. “Stock
certificates
—IBM, AT&T, Campbell’s motherfucking Soup! International bonds, letters of credit from a hundred different banks. These, Il Dottore, are better than money. No strings. Nothing to be laundered. Over $2 million worth of this shit, and it’s all ours. Yours. Mine. The family’s,” he laughed.

Later Elliot would learn that Carmine was Carmine Lombardozzi, a Gambino Family capo who specialized in securities theft, stock market swindles, and sophisticated banking frauds, rackets that earned the family millions
annually
no matter how Wall Street happened to do that quarter or for any other given period.

S
o, what was the Mafia, also called La Cosa Nostra, this “thing of ours”? Where did it start? How much power did it really wield? These were the questions Elliot asked
himself
as he became as entrenched in this underworld society that he’d discovered in the Bronx backies as a boy, as he was in the world of New York society owing to his position at Mount Sinai and the family into which he’d married.

Clearly, there were many stories that related to the first question, but the best he’d heard regarding the formation of the Mafia came during a conversation with Frank Silvio one evening over a glass of Chianti at the “21” Club in Manhattan.

“D’you ever see the movie,
Patton
?” Silvio asked. “When Patton pulls into Palermo standing on that tank with thousands of troops behind him and all the townspeople cheering, he turns to Omar Bradley. ‘Palermo is the most conquered city in the world,’ he says. ‘Sicily was the invasion route of
conquerors
: the Greeks before the time of Christ, the French
during
the Bourbon monarchy, they were all here, and now it’s us, the Third Armored Division of the United States Army.’

“Well, Patton was right, and every one of those
conquerors
tramped across Sicily like Nazi storm troopers with no regard for the people, their culture, or customs. So, why are there still Sicilians? How does a population survive for
centuries
under the boot of foreign conquest? They do it in the way of Machiavelli’s
Prince,
by adjusting to those conquerors, pretending to get along with them during the day, while
resisting
them secretly by subterfuge at night. You see, that peculiar history, and the way the Sicilians dealt with it, was the breeding ground for the Mafioso. But the term means more than just belonging to an organization. It means the qualities someone or something possesses: pride, dignity, guile, and cunning. These are the attributes of a Mafioso.”

“But the word, ‘Mafia,’” Elliot asked, “where did they get that?”

Silvio leaned forward, talking over the din of conversation around them. “In the thirteenth century, the French occupied Sicily,” he explained. “These men were brutal and arrogant, and the population despised them for it. Over the years, the resentment smoldered until one day, a French soldier, who’d lusted over a young girl in Palermo, got drunk. Seeing her on the street with her mother, he tore her away, then dragged her into a dark alley where he raped her with absolutely no fear of consequence. The mother, beside herself with rage, began screaming, ‘Ma fia! Ma fia!’ ‘My daughter! My daughter!’ The townspeople were inconsolable. Rioting broke out in the streets, and the mother’s cries became a mantra as they
chanted
‘Ma fia! Ma fia!’ But more telling was the reaction of the young woman’s suitor, a man named Droetto, who was a true Mafioso. Humiliated and ashamed, he didn’t say a word, but methodically sought the soldier out. He learned his identity, talked his way into the military compound, then without challenging him or even identifying himself, Droetto came up
behind the man and plunged a stiletto into his heart. That is the way of the Mafioso. It was what Hemingway called ‘grace under pressure’ with, maybe, a Sicilian flair.”

Silvio laughed then, but Elliot never forgot his story or its meaning. These goodfellas, these friends of his, they were
different
from other men. There was another side to this
equation
, and it had to do with Droetto and Silvio’s story. With these men, these Mafiosi, there was an unspoken pact that being with them sealed forever, and that was that all of the reverse also applied with equal weight. That is, he could never lie. He had to be loyal. He, too, was expected to be generous so that “what was mine was theirs,” and anything he could do that was within his power needed to be as good as done if they asked for it.

The final factor in the Mafia equation was probably the most chilling, and that had to do with Droetto and the vast Sicilian appetite for revenge. If one didn’t comply with the second side of the calculation, he was reminded of the pact that he’d entered into, knowingly or unknowingly. If, after that reminder, he didn’t quite understand what they were
saying
, he would be reminded again, this time bluntly. If after that, he still had trouble remembering the covenant he’d made, there was no third reminder. Like Droetto, someone very close to him, or maybe someone he had never seen or heard about in his life, would quietly come up behind him, and then he would be dead.

The Mafia, as Elliot was learning, was a club with a
lifelong
membership. When a crew member asked John Gotti about the possibility of being released to another crew, Gotti looked at him in disbelief. “You don’t get released from my crew,” he answered. “You have lived with John Gotti, and you will die with John Gotti.”

That was the way it was, and though it never bothered
Elliot then, a premonition, somewhere on the outer fringes of his consciousness, told him that the cold reality of La Cosa Nostra hung out there for him, and that some day, when everything wasn’t so neat and tightly packaged, he would be faced with an irreconcilable dilemma that at that time seemed beyond his comprehension.

One such time, when he felt a genuine sense of
discomfort
with his role as Mafia doctor, came early Saturday
morning
in the fall of 1980. The hospital was bedlam, when Elliot was called over the PA system to emergency where he found Dr. Silvio waiting.

“I think you better handle this one. A friend has been
asking
for you,” Frank said quietly, taking him behind a privacy curtain where Lou “Cos” Coscarelli, Carlo Gambino’s
former
strong-arm man, stood holding one of the greasers who’d accompanied Elliot to Sheepshead Bay nearly eight years earlier.

“Jesus Christ! What happened to him?” Elliot asked, motioning Coscarelli to lay the wounded soldier on the
examination
table.

“He’s been shot, Dottore. Three times in the back,” Lou answered desperately, placing the limp body before him in a gesture that looked something like a benediction. “Think you can help?”

Elliot removed the wounded man’s black leather jacket. The kid, one of Carlo’s Zips from Sicily, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five-years-old. “I-I don’t know. I’ll need to have a look, but he’s been shot up pretty bad and lost a lot of blood. Frank,” Elliot said turning to Silvio, “we need to get him on oxygen and start a transfusion.”

After the kid’s blood-soaked shirt had been pulled loose from his body, Elliot examined the bullet wounds, one at a time. Best-case scenario, he knew after a cursory exam, was
that if they could stop the internal bleeding, the Zip would live. Best-case scenario also meant that with his spine severed as it had been, he would be a paraplegic, and probably on
life-support
systems, for the rest of his life.

“Doc?” Lou asked.

“It’s not good, Cos,” Elliot told him as Silvio directed a bevy of nurses and orderlies who moved the kid to intensive care. “I’m putting him on oxygen and giving transfusions to stabilize him while I try to figure out the chances of
successful
surgery to remove the bullets.”

“Yeah?” the huge man prodded.

“In either case, your friend’s spine is severed. If I decide to operate, and he survives, he’ll be paralyzed from the neck down.”

Lou was surprisingly shaken. “Christ,” he muttered. “Poor fucking kid. I known him since Carlo had ’im brought here from Castellammere del Golfo. Fucking kid don’t have nobody Just me. I’m the only one, and that’s why you gotta help ’im.”

“I will, Lou. I’m going to do everything in my power …”

Lou stepped forward and put his huge open palm on Elliot’s chest. “No, you don’t understand, Dottore. I know this kid wouldn’t want to live like that, and you need to see that he don’t wake up no paraplegic.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You can, Dottore,” he pressed. “You need to help my friend, and if you do, I’ll never forget you for it. Never.”

“It’s my job to save lives, Lou, not end them!”

“He got no family. The kid got no one ’cept me to look after ’im. Check on him, Dottore. I beg that you let him go with dignity from this world into the next.”

Moral ambiguity. It was his Hippocratic oath to “hold yourself far aloof from wrong, from corruption, from the
tempting of others to vice,” but in truth, as Elliot took the short walk from emergency to the intensive care unit, he wondered what life would mean to an illegal immigrant from a small coastal town in Sicily hopelessly paralyzed or even if he would live through the night.

Once he got to the Zip’s bedside, Elliot glanced down at the unconscious young man. He’d already taken several pints of blood to stabilize him. Silvio had put him on life support realizing that he was too weak for surgery. Elliot looked to the telemetry monitor to check vital signs. They were weak and erratic. How difficult would it be? The nurses had cleared out. Silvio was on to his next Saturday morning emergency patient. What was right, and what was wrong?

The question had just passed through his mind when the shrill beep of the cardiac monitor cut through the room. Elliot’s eyes shot to the monitor. The white line was erratic, then suddenly flat line. Without thinking, Elliot swiveled down toward the patient’s chest and pushed once, twice … and then not at all, as the thought of saving this young man to live his remaining days in what would probably be his own version of hell crossed Elliot’s mind. The flat line held. Elliot straightened up and was standing when two nurses came charging into the chamber. “He’s gone,” he said succinctly and left.

Later that night, Elliot would arrange for the body to be quietly removed to a Gambino-owned funeral home where it could be embalmed, groomed, and dressed for the wake and Catholic funeral the family would, as a matter of tradition, have for him at Lou “Cos” Coscarelli’s request.

Over the weeks to come, Elliot would think back to that moment standing over a man whose name he didn’t even know, wondering whether it was best to let him live or let him die. This was as close as it had come so far in terms of making that kind of decision: having to weigh his allegiance to his
profession against his allegiance to La Cosa Nostra. Tougher, more consequential decisions were soon to come his way because just as he’d learned about the creation of the Mafia from Frank Silvio, so Elliot was learning about the deadly power that the organization wielded both nationally and internationally, this time from Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, son of Joseph, who had, himself, run the Bonanno Family as
con
sigliere
in his father’s absence during the mid-1960s.

“The Mafia is a metaphor for the hypocrisy of America,” Bonanno explained over a dinner at Patsy’s on West Fifty-sixth in Manhattan to a covey of friends including Elliot and a famous former senator. “Like a socially prominent man with a tattooed mistress, he will flirt with her, he will buy her gifts and fuck her, but rarely will he take her out in public. When the government needs the influence of organized crime, they have historically had no difficulty asking for help, usually through the CIA or another of its intelligence agencies. On the other hand, when ambitious prosecutors needed
headlines
to catapult their careers forward, they had no problem harassing and prosecuting those very same individuals, often using illegal tactics themselves.”

An example was Charlie “Lucky” Luciano who, while serving time in Dannemora Prison, was called upon by the Office of Naval Intelligence to help federal agents infiltrate the International Longshoremen’s Association. It seemed that in February 1942, more than a year after Pearl Harbor, the
luxury
ocean liner, S.S.
Normandie,
berthed at a Hudson River pier in Manhattan, had been set ablaze and sunk while it was being converted into an Allied troop ship. Given the rabid fears of a Nazi fifth column already in place in the United States and the fact that German saboteurs had earlier landed by U-boat and were captured on the eastern tip of Long Island, U.S.
intelligence
was convinced that the fire was deliberately set and
prevailed
upon Luciano to use his longstanding New York dock influence to help police the harbor.

Later, as part of what was known as “Operation Husky,” Luciano was called upon again to use his contacts among the five families to help coordinate sabotage efforts against the Nazis using Mafiosi to blow up bridges, radio towers, and roads prior to the Allied invasion of Sicily. In both instances, Luciano agreed, with the promise that he’d gain a pardon from then-Governor Dewey, and in both instances, he
delivered
on his end of the bargain. The New York docks suffered no further attacks or labor unrest for the remainder of the war, and the Allies, aided by the Mafia, swept through Sicily virtually unchallenged. Nevertheless, when the paperwork for Luciano’s petition for clemency arrived on Dewey’s desk, the governor refused to sign and had him deported to Italy.

A second instance of the federal government’s betrayal of the mob was carried out by Bobby Kennedy It wasn’t bad enough that the Kennedy brothers used Chicago boss Sam Giancana and his union influence to win Illinois in the
presidential
election and then have Bobby double-back on him as a key target for prosecution. Even more of a betrayal was the fact that while his brother, President John Kennedy, was recruiting Giancana through the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was mercilessly prosecuting not only Giancana, but Miami boss Santos Trafficante and New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello, both of whom were working in concert with Giancana and the CIA to kill the Cuban leader. Add to this the legendary hatred borne for John and Robert Kennedy by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA chief Allen Dulles and an intriguing scenario develops, but not nearly so interesting as a conversation relayed by Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno that night to Elliot at Patsy’s that dealt with the Mafia’s ultimate payback
for personal betrayal: the assassination of President Kennedy in order to stop his brother’s prosecutions.