See No Evil (12 page)

O
ne of the nice things about living on two separate planes of existence was that when certain aspects of his Mafia life were worrisome, others concerning his medical career would be soaring. His marriage was falling apart, but under the watchful eye of Al Rosengarten, Elliot’s career continued to flourish. His articles continued to be published in the most prestigious journals and highly praised by his peers. When it came to Mount Sinai Hospital, most saw him as eccentric, no one dared question his skills as a surgeon, and since he was avidly nonpolitical, few viewed him as a threat to their progress even though he was seen by most everyone that mattered as the heir apparent to Dr. Dak, director of cardiac surgery.

Occasionally, however, Elliot’s two worlds would meld together into something pleasant and important to him in other, more personal, ways than money or good times, ways that Uncle Saul would have talked about if he’d been alive to see it. One moment like that happened around the time of Hanna’s leaving him and involved a seventeen-year-old girl
whose family had been sent to see him at the suggestion of Tommy Bilotti, Paul Castellano’s driver and bodyguard, who he’d met a couple of times while tending to his boss.

It was late afternoon when Elliot was called to his office to find an immigrant Sicilian family crowded into his
examining
room. The father was a taciturn, hard-working bricklayer who spoke no English; the mother, a strong, loving woman, alarmed by her daughter’s rapidly declining health. Then there was the girl lying on the exam table, beautiful with
gentle
doelike eyes, a flawless complexion, and long black hair, shy and frightened, suffering for more than a week now with severe abdominal pain, nausea, and dizziness.

“Dottore,” the mother began, “Mr. Bilotti, he tell me you can help my daughter, Antonia. She been very sick with
terrible
pain in the stomach.”

Elliot nodded, speaking gently to the girl as her father fell into the background, hat in hand, body taut as a piano wire, carrying himself with the square, flat-footed strength of a strict, by-the-rules Sicilian father. “Is this where you have pain,” Elliot asked pressing the flat of his hand against her lower abdomen while she nodded tearfully.

“Aside from the stomach pain, what other problems does your daughter have?”

“She dizzy,” the mother said stepping toward him. “She fall down two days ago with the fainting. And now she start with the food, no stay in the stomach!”

“Okay, I’m sorry but now I have to ask one personal
question
to your daughter,” he said watching as the mother
nodded
, almost knowingly, and the father turned away from him. Elliot whispered, “Are you bleeding from down here,”
gesturing
discreetly. Too embarrassed, the girl nodded, and now he understood—everything.

“Sir,” he called to the father, who turned back toward him
while his terrified wife hung on his every word. “Your
daughter
has a damaged appendix,” Elliot said drawing a small, imaginary line with his index finger onto the right side of his lower abdominal region. “This is an emergency. We need to operate now, and I need your permission.”

Instinctively, the mother swiveled around to her
suspicious
husband translating Elliot’s words to Sicilian with
particular
emphasis on
“apendicite”
and
“emergenza,”
until he understood, reluctantly nodding his consent to whatever
procedure
would save his only daughter.

For better or for worse, the procedure that Elliot knew was necessary had nothing to do with appendix and
everything
to do with a life-threatening condition known as ectopic pregnancy. Taken from the Greek word meaning “away from the place,” an ectopic pregnancy occurs when the fetus forms outside, rather than inside, the womb. The reason it was so serious was that the growth of the fetus eventually ruptures the fallopian tube causing hemorrhaging that leads to shock and death. Discerning that this young woman’s life would be ruined if her devout Catholic father found out she was
pregnant
out of wedlock, and believing that her mother already knew, led Elliot to be creative with the diagnosis. But there were pressing medical issues, he realized, calling the greenest and most easily intimidated young intern he could think of to assist in the surgery.

The first problem was keeping the real surgery he’d be performing “quiet” while at least trying to make it look like an appendectomy to the intern. The second was that in these cases, the fetus had actually implanted itself in one of the
fallopian
tubes so that there were a number of surgical
challenges
, among them internal bleeding and infinitely more subtle, removing the fetus without precluding the patient’s ability to later bear children. Given the fact that Antonia was
just seventeen with practically her entire life before her, Elliot was hoping to spare her tube and preserve her ability to become pregnant. The bigger problem was explaining why he was involved in a routine appendectomy, but that’s when he turned to Silvio’s political expertise.

Within hours, Frank Silvio had assembled a surgical team, including Robert Tick, an Irish-Catholic, Georgetown University cum laude, now interning at the hospital, who’d be assisting Elliot in the procedure. Together they observed as the patient’s abdomen was washed with soap and antiseptic, her body draped so that only the area of the incision would be exposed.

Elliot began the procedure making a bikini-line incision so the abdomen could be entered. Almost immediately, it became obvious that the fallopian tube had a large
hemorrhagic
mass in it—the ectopic pregnancy. The key, he knew, would be to remove it without causing uncontrollable
bleeding
and then reconstruct the tube. Although he hadn’t worked on an ectopic pregnancy in years, he took comfort in the fact that the concept of reconstructing arteries in the heart was no different and even more technically demanding.

During the course of the intensive, forty-five minute
procedure
, Elliot was able to remove the ectopic pregnancy,
preserve
the ovary, and successfully reconstruct the tube. The internal wound was then cauterized with bleeding controlled and the most dangerous element of young Antonia’s surgery completed.

Finally, the remaining phase of their surgery happened when Elliot turned his attention to a small tube of tissue about three inches long, dangling just below the point where the small intestine joins the large one, on the right side of the girl’s frail body. It was her appendix. Conjectured to have somehow prevented intestinal infection eons ago, it served no
known functional purpose at present, except that day for him, he thought, as he severed the useless appendage from her colon and removed it.

“There it is‚” he proclaimed, turning to Tick and
displaying
it. “The source of all this young woman’s problems.”

The intern looked at him incredulously. “What do you mean?” he asked. “That’s the pinkest, healthiest appendix I’ve ever seen.”

“No‚” Elliot answered, placing the tissue on the surgical table and striking it several times with the blunt end of his laser. “This appendix is obviously infected. Look at the shape and size, swollen and inflamed. Lucky we removed it before it burst.”

“Dr. Litner, I don’t understand.”

“This girl is Sicilian, Dr. Tick If her father ever thought this was anything but appendicitis, her life would be ruined. That’s why, if you want to have a future at this hospital, your report will blame this infected tissue as the cause of her problems.”

Tick, who was smart enough to know that he meant what he’d said, looked into Elliot’s eyes, then nodded. “May I see that appendix again, Doctor?” he asked.

Afterward, Elliot spoke with the young girl’s parents together, taking great pains to show them the damaged appendage, explaining to them what he believed had caused their daughter’s ailment. The father listening intently, the mother wisely nodding her understanding of all that he was saying and not saying. His most gratifying moment, however, did not arrive until almost four years later when he received an invitation to Antonia’s wedding, delivered in person to the hospital by her appreciative mother. He attended the
traditional
Catholic wedding ceremony a couple of months later, watching as Antonia’s proud father gave her away to her handsome groom. The radiant bride, of course, was wearing a flowing gown of pure white.

This was one of the most gratifying experiences of Elliot’s double life, but like the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song says, “traveling twice the speed of sound, it’s easy to get burned.” And on the whole, the things that mattered most to him were falling apart before his eyes. Though his
relationship
with his father-in-law stayed cordial, Hanna wouldn’t speak to him for months or let him see the twins unless she was in the room with them. Worse, though on a normal basis, he slept only five hours a night, now Elliot was suffering from bouts of insomnia so that even that was getting trimmed to something like three.

Why this sudden mental agitation? Maybe it went all the way back to those early days in the Bronx. The laughing and good-natured kidding that surrounded him there seemed to have evaporated. Instead of thinking about his father or Saul or even Sal, Nicky, and the guys, it was the murder scene that so dramatically changed his life, the one involving the hit and those two men shooting, then smashing the skull of their helpless victim, that seemed to haunt him. In retrospect, this poor man had done, what? Forget to pay a gambling debt? Sleep with the girlfriend of a made man? Elliot would never know, but suddenly, he was asking questions of himself that had never seemed important like what about that man
and
what
about
him?

S
uddenly and unexpectedly the pressure surrounding Elliot’s double life caught up with him, both physically and psychologically. While at the hospital, he was experiencing mind-numbing migraines that could only be sated by strong painkilling drugs like Darvon and Percocet, medications he would never in the past have considered taking. Worse, he was experiencing nightmares, odd and unsettling. In one, he was a child being pursued through his old Bronx
neighborhood
by implacable gangs of street thugs. In another, more subtle, and haunting, he felt as if he had spent an entire night locked in a room where objects kept shifting their positions, sometimes by no more than an inch or two, but nothing remained exactly in place.

There was no mistaking the meaning of these
developments
. Into Elliot’s life came a general sense that the
foundations
of the underworld were deteriorating, and that all he’d known before, even within the Gambino Family, was moving irreconcilably toward calamity He worried about his friends, Nick and Sal and Joey Ficshetti, who seemed to be riding an
express train headed straight to hell so far as he could see. For one thing, they were doing cocaine as if it was going out of style. But worse, though Elliot never asked, he knew that Nicky had been secretly buying large quantities of raw cocaine and heroin with family funds then selling it through street contacts in the so-called “Black” or “Cuban Mafia” in Manhattan’s West Side and in Harlem.

It was one thing to do hard-core drugs as associates of any of the five families, which was a career-limiting decision, but the sale and distribution of hard-core drugs? That was a
life-limiting
decision because even though a blind eye was turned to massive deals occasionally made even by traditionalist godfathers like Carlo Gambino when the risk was small and
profits
incredible, the ironclad rule for capos, soldiers, and
associates
was that the dollars from junk weren’t worth the risk to the family, and breaches of that rule might well result in
execution
.

As early as 1947, during a full Commission meeting held on a yacht off the coast of Florida, the subject of narcotics was hotly debated between the traditionalist Sicilian members led by Joseph Bonanno and the Americanized liberal faction led by Lucky Luciano. Bonanno argued that like counterfeiting, drugs risked the possibility of federal intervention. Beyond that, as a traditionalist, he believed along with Vincent Mangano and Joe Profaci that the true Mafioso distanced
himself
from crimes like narcotics and prostitution while newer players like Luciano, influenced by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, saw La Cosa Nostra mostly as a business enterprise where the huge profits in drug trafficking far outweighed the lingering attraction of worn-out Sicilian traditions.

In the end, it was the traditionalist who won out, and at that meeting, three key decisions were made. First, with Lucky in permanent exile, Frank Costello was formally
named head of the Luciano Family. Second, Bugsy Siegel would be hit because he’d gone too far in trying to
monopolize
Las Vegas gambling interests for himself. Third, a specific resolution forever forbidding drug trafficking by the families was enacted. All three of these agenda items were voted upon and decided, but it was the third that resurfaced at Commission meetings held in 1951 and then again in 1956, where against the rising tide of Americanized Mafia voices, the edict to ban narcotics trafficking under the penalty of death was upheld.

Then, in 1956, with the assassination of Albert Anastasia, another hastily scheduled Commission meeting was called by Buffalo boss Stefano Magadinno. Convened at Apalachin in upstate New York, the agenda, which included yet another examination of the Commission narcotics policy, never
happened
because state trooper Edgar Croswell, sensing a change in the normally quiet atmosphere of the town, investigated the list of guests invited to host Joseph Barbara’s estate. They included mob heavyweights Sam Giancana from Chicago; Santos Trafficante, Tampa; Gerry Catena and Frank Majuri from New Jersey; Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese, and Vito Genovese from New York; and even Paul Castellano, a driver for Genovese at this stage of his young career. Soon afterward, Croswell organized a wholesale roundup, arresting dozens of Mafiosi for criminal conspiracy, a charge which—pre-RICO—could not stand up in court. The arrest did cause a furor in the newspapers, proving, once and for all, that the “Mafia” really did exist and that there truly was something called “organized crime.”

Up until that time, thanks to the blackmailing of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by Frank Costello, even the term Mafia was not used by Hoover or anyone else at the bureau. The go-between in the blackmailing of Hoover was, not
surprisingly
,
the ubiquitous attorney, Roy Cohn. According to Cohn, Lewis Rosenstiel, multimillionaire founder of Schenley’s liquor and close ally of Costello, had engaged in bizarre sex orgies with the FBI director for years and had had the presence of mind as early as 1948 to take photographs of Hoover dressed in women’s clothing, face daubed with
lipstick
and makeup, wearing a wig of ringlets while sitting on the laps of unidentified males.

More recent photos, held by Cohn in his office safe at the New York law firm of Saxe, Bacon, were even more explicit depicting Hoover having sex with top FBI man and longtime lover Clyde Tolson. “You know how many FBI agents were assigned to ‘organized crime’ before Apalachin?” Cohn bragged to a group that included Silvio, Ruggiero, Gene Gotti, and Elliot during one of their lost weekends at Studio 54. “Six. In the whole freakin’ country, there were six federal agents investigating the Mafia in the United States, a country of a 170 million. That’s the kind of clout a few photographs and a well-placed comment or two will get you. Rosenstiel was the brains, Costello was the muscle. The old Jew and Italian, one-two punch!”

All of that held true, even through the Kefauver Special Committee investigations into organized crime. But it was Apalachin that instigated the McClellan Committee hearings, an entirely new assault, where Chief Counsel Bobby Kennedy relentlessly pursued the entangled relationships between labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa and the underworld and its leadership. Through all of these changes, betrayals, and power plays, one of the few constants that remained was the ban on drug trafficking. This was the reason that Angelo Ruggiero was so thankful about Elliot’s deep-sixing any
evidence
that might prove his nephew’s involvement in the sale of heroin.

Rules or no rules, by the late 1970s, drugs permeated the five New York families, confirming the wisdom of the Sicilian traditionalists, but there was just no stopping it. The drug train was in full gear throttled by incredible profits, ease of entry, and in the end, the delusions of grandeur that only a nonstop high can bring along with it. The collision of the runaway drug train’s momentum with stark reality happened for Elliot with the closing of Studio 54. It began when owner Steve Rubell, during an interview with Dan Dorfman of
New
York
magazine, let his ego and his addiction get away from him. “Studio 54 is a cash business where profits are astronomical,” he was
quoted
as saying. “Only the Mafia does better!”

Not
smart.
And if that wasn’t enough to whet the appetite of headline-hungry U.S. attorneys, information provided by disgruntled ex-employee Donald Moon was just what the doctor ordered. As part of a witness protection-immunity deal, Moon told federal agents about a secret safe filled with skimmed cash and, worse, about a trove of cocaine and other illegal substances stored in Hefty bags hidden in a gap between the hard and drop ceiling in the club’s basement. Inevitably, on December 14, 1979, fifty agents from the IRS and DEA swarmed all over the place. Of course, they headed straight for the basement where, when demands for the accounting books were made by federal agents, the
drugged-out
ex-model who was running “finance” asked, “Do you want the second set, too?”

Also
not
smart.
So that even when heavyweight attorney Roy Cohn rushed to the scene, comparing the raid to the “wanton acts of the Nazis!” and, ironically, “worse than the McCarthy hearings!” it was too late. According to Rubell, the feds confiscated $900,000 in cash along with a stash of cocaine and amyl nitrite “party favors” he would slip into the palms of celebrity guests, with the street cost of the drugs literally tagged onto them.

But what worried him more, Rubell later confided to Elliot during a late-night sex and drinking binge, was his relationship with Gambino Family loan shark Sam Jacobson, a frequent
visitor
to Studio 54 offices. IRS agents investigating the club’s alternate set of books had discovered a five-column accounting sheet headed “Steve Rubell-Sam Jacobson‚” Rubell told him, with weekly dates and payoffs ranging up from $2,500 to $25,000 kept by Rubell’s co-owner, Ian Schrager. More than the fines and jail time, it was his fear of FBI interrogation about Studio 54’s family connection that scared him to death, Rubell confessed. “What if they think I’ll rat on them, Elliot? You don’t think they’d think that, do you?” he asked, petrified that a
contract
was about to be put out on him.

On January 18, 1980, Steve Rubell was sentenced to
three-and
-one-half years and a $20,000 fine for tax fraud. So what did he do? He threw a gala “going-away-to-prison” party that Nicky Micelli, Frank Silvio, and Elliot attended. Of course, it couldn’t be the same as the unbelievably wild Halloween or New Year’s Eve parties of the past because basically Rubell’s “going away” was nothing to celebrate. Steve’s old buddies like Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and David Geffen were there while something like 1,000 people parried to the sounds of Gloria Gaynor’s “Queen of Disco” and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” Still, somehow, Elliot couldn’t help but feel that everything had changed and that guys like Rubell with their arrogance and drug-throttled egos had fucked up everything, the life that they’d been living.

“So, what’s with you?” Nicky asked, getting Elliot’s
attention
with a shove that half knocked him over. “We got booze—which I know you don’t drink. We got coke—which I know you don’t snort. Better, we got broads—which I know you like two at a time—crawlin’ out the freakin’ woodwork. So what’s with you?”

“The place is different, that’s all.”

“Different? How?”

“Changed—everything,” Elliot said, watching Silvio as he danced with a long-legged twenty-five-year-old wearing a white mask, G-string, and pasties with thigh-high platform boots. “I mean look at Frank over there. He looks ridiculous.”

“Hey, fuckin’ Frank was always ridiculous, you just didn’t notice before.”

“Yeah, well, for me the whole thing’s getting kind of scary. Everybody’s screwed up on drugs all the time. Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing anymore. I mean, Steve’s a friend of mine, but how can anybody be so stupid? Jesus, Nick, if people skim from a cash business, they’ll take 10 percent, maybe 15 percent, 25 percent. But these guys skimmed $5 million in one year! Probably 80 percent of their gross.”

“Okay, they’re assholes. So what?”

“So what? These guys know our people, Nick. They were handing out cocaine and amyl nitrite like candy. They had
animals
like Roy DeMeo in here bragging about heroin deals, chopping people up like they were veal chops. I mean, what did Rubell and Schrager think was going to happen? What are they doing to people like us?”

“Ya know somethin’, Elliot. I know you’re a doctor and real fucking smart and all that shit, but sometimes you think too much,” Nick said tapping his forefinger to his temple. “Now, I’m goin’ to the John to get a taste a some a this Colombian pure I got here in my pocket. And please, when I get back, have yourself a diet soda, and I’ll introduce you to a nice piece of Puerto Rican ass, maybe two, if you’re nice to me. But don’t talk to me no more about this drug shit. I don’t like it, understand?”

As Nick left for the men’s room, Elliot watched Steve Rubell and Diana Ross make their way up to the D.J. booths
where the ex-Supremes lead singer began crooning “My Way” while Rubell gyrated wildly, finally falling backward over the second-floor railing. Fortunately for him, someone caught him by the belt of his pants and pulled him back up, or he might have killed himself. Typical of that night, but untypical of Studio 54, not a soul was laughing and David Geffen
shouted
at him, “Stop with this ‘My Way’ shit, and grow up already!”

To Elliot, the collapse of Studio 54 and Steve Rubell was like a metaphor for the way he was feeling about his own
out-of
-control existence, even Paul Castellano’s and John Gotti’s. Drugs like some kind of virus had crept into their world,
contaminating
it so that they all were infected in one way or another, making poor decisions based on greed, violence, and revenge without considering the long-term consequences for rules that had been in place for generations. The world was changing around La Cosa Nostra just as it had changed around Studio 54, and suddenly they were freaks standing naked in the glaring sun of the outside straight world.

In the case of Castellano, it was revenge involving
wholesale
killer and cokehead Roy DeMeo that would help to bring about his downfall.

According to Silvio, sometime in September 1980 after hearing his son-in-law, Frank Amato, a hijacker and butcher at Dial Poultry, was beating his pregnant daughter, Castellano contacted capo Nino Gaggi, DeMeo’s supervisor, and ordered Amato hit. The reason may have been sound, but Castellano’s reasoning was not, as DeMeo was more than a car-ring crew leader and murderer. He was a serial killer who had literally butchered at least thirty-seven men and women as much for sport as for business. A drug dealer on the side, he would later be indicted for possession with intent to sell 23 tons of
marijuana
, 500,000 Quaalude tablets, and 25 pounds of cocaine.