The Wolf (6 page)

“Not to mention—again—the cost,” Orto said. “If this thing runs as long as we think, both sides could end up fighting for nothing more than pocket change.”

“That happens, we end up working for you,” Big Mike said. “Right next to the other Gypsies, lifting wallets from tourists at train stations.”

“They’re hurting us now and have been for the last two to three years,” I said. “You need to look deep into our budgets to find it, but the losses are there. We let it go the way it is or allow it to escalate, then soon enough you won’t have to look deep to find the drop in profits.”

“Please, let us talk about those costs,” Kodoma asked. “Forget the money for a minute. I’m talking about manpower, disruption of distribution, upsetting the legal end of business. How much of a toll will that hit us with if we get bogged down in a war that will take years to resolve?”

“It will cost twice any number you have in mind,” I said. “But I’m telling you that it will cost us triple that if we don’t do anything to bring a halt to these crews now. All that damage you laid out, that’s going to happen on its own if we let them continue to do business with us acting as if they’re not even out there.”

“You say you can’t talk to them, but have you truly considered making a deal?” Orto asked.

It would be the Albanian to suggest we do business with terrorists and their financial backers. The Albanians were bottom-feeders, and in the past had no trouble brokering deals with groups that would give pause to the other criminal factions in the room. They never drew a line in the sand, not if there was a chance they could profit from those standing farther down the beach. At some point down the road, Orto would need to be handled. I had no doubt he would be the only one in the room who would pass my intentions on to the Russians. I glanced over at Big Mike and knew he was thinking the same thing.

Jannetti, red-faced and angered by the question, jumped in. “We do
not
do business with terrorists,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck if they pay us in barrels of cash. No one in this room deals with those pricks, not if they want to stay in this room.”

“Look,” I said, not wanting tempers to flair at a meeting I called, “if there was another way, a less costly way, I would pursue it. But there isn’t. This is our only exit, not just to keep the businesses we have but to grow new ones. No one handed us a damn thing. We took what we needed, what we wanted, and we built from there. And we stopped anybody, big or small, who stood against us. So, sure, this is going to be a bigger battle than we’ve faced in the past. But we wouldn’t be who we are if that kind of news made our legs tremble.”

“Sounds as if you’ve made up your mind,” Qing said.

I nodded. “If we want to keep what we have, this is what we need to do,” I said.

“What’s a win in this for us?” Big Mike asked. “It’s not like we’re going to do a full-scale wipeout, that’s just not numerically possible. So how will we know if we won or lost?”

“No,” I said, “you’re right. There’s no way we can kill them all. But we can regain our advantage. Put them on the defensive and leave them there.”

“I don’t need to hear any more,” Weiner said. “In fact, I didn’t need to hear any of what I heard. You ask me, this is a fight we should have brought to them ten years ago, when they weren’t as strong, weren’t as mobilized. But we bring it to them now, once and for all.”

“Tell us what you know about our enemies,” Qing said.

“There are 191 terrorist organizations operating around the world, spread across forty-two countries,” I said. “Some are small—150 members, tops. Others have close to 200,000 in their ranks with thousands more offering secondary support. About 25% are kids willing to die for a cause they’ve been told to believe in. The rest have been fighting wars since they were old enough to hold guns. About 45 percent are from the Middle East, 40 percent are from Europe, the rest are USDA homegrown, from militias to neo-Nazis to biker gangs. They got the guns and the money and can move without worry from country to country.”

“In Italy, they are making moves into high-end art,” Zambelli said. “That’s new turf for them. They hit home museums and hire out pros to help move the works out of the houses and into the black market. In less than seventy-two hours the art is turned into cash.”

“In my country as well,” Carbone said. “These terrorists don’t know enough about that world to have gone into it on their own. They were guided there—by the Russians, would be my guess.”

I noted how Carbone took Zambelli’s lead and did his best to follow it. Carbone was an easy buy and I nodded in agreement as he spoke.

“The Russians give them access to the art world, to banks, to credit cards and to high-end weapons,” I said. “The Mexicans buy their drugs and pay off the shipments with stolen guns. That’s your real axis of evil right there.”

“And the Russians and Mexicans, what do they expect to gain from all this?” Big Mike asked. “It’s not like you can trust any of the terrorist cells. So
why,
is my question. Why are they in this with people they know they can never trust? What’s the end-game?”

“Us,” Kodoma said.

Kodoma could sway the room in my direction and had just begun to do so.

He had been the head of the Japanese mob—the Yakuza—for two decades now. He was a direct descendant of Yoshio Kodoma, the Yakuza boss who unified the various factions after World War II and made them a prominent criminal force in Japan and Asia.

Kodoma had fifteen thousand members under his command spread across forty-one gangs, all secretive and impossible to infiltrate. Together, the two of us had invested in dozens of American companies and had holdings in excess of $10 billion in legitimate enterprises. We then took that money, ran it through a series of shell companies, and funneled the profits back into the organization.

Kodoma controlled 2,500 banks worldwide, which made cash and wire transfers simple to complete, especially since money laundering is legal in Japan. He ran over three hundred gambling operations that netted the organization a yearly profit of $460 million. No one runs better gambling dens than the Yakuza. They initially began their operations by sponsoring underground tournaments of Bakuto, a card game similar to blackjack, with one distinct difference—if you lose a game of blackjack, you leave cash on the table; if you lose at Bakuto, you leave behind a finger, giving rise to the name Yakuza, which means hand-cutter. The Yakuza have even published a book called
How to Evade the Law
—which all members of the council are required to read. Kodoma gets a kickback for every book sold.

And if you control the money and the banks, the deck is stacked in your favor. I knew some in the room would balk at my plan, but it would be much more difficult for them to do so with Kodoma at my back. I could freeze any dissenters out of large chunks of my operation, costing them millions each month.

Kodoma could bring them to their knees by refusing to wash their money and oversee their gambling operations. I looked across the table at him and felt certain he was prepared to do just that.

“Close to two million Russians, we don’t know how many terrorists, and have even less of an idea of the number of Mexicans,” Carbone said, sitting rigidly in his chair, hands cupped around a glass of cold water. “That correct?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“So I’m hoping—we’re
all
hoping—you have a plan to go along with your call to war,” Carbone said.

“And it can’t just be any plan,” Jannetti said. “It has got to be one terrific, kick-ass plan. Because I am not eager to get into the trenches with these bastards just to have my ass handed to me.”

“I have a plan,” I said. “It’s risky.”

“Which means what?” Orto asked.

“Which means it’s a great plan,” Qing said. “Only risky plans have any chance to be great.”

Chapter 6

Naples, Italy

Victorio Emanuele Jannetti walked down the center of a crowded street of Spaccanapoli, the very heart of Naples, beside his confidant of more than thirty years, Alfredo Lambretto. Three burly bodyguards walked several feet in front of them and two others followed close behind, all armed, eyes trained on the tourists and locals surrounding them.

“The kid’s instincts are correct,” Lambretto said.

He was a tall, thin man with a head of gray hair and a stylish beard. He had made it out of the hard streets of the most dangerous neighborhood in Italy—Forcella—and had the scars to prove it. He had risen from petty thief to become the Camorra’s main enforcer, commanding a group of over five hundred. “If we are going to move,” he continued, “now’s the time. These terror crews keep growing in number, and with Russian muscle at their backs it’s only going to get worse. Until now I’ve been able to push back and keep them out of our business. But each day passes, it gets harder and harder to do.”

“The all-out war Vincent has asked for comes with all-out risks,” Jannetti said. “We see this through to the end and we’ll be down by half, maybe more. And cash flow could become an issue if the fight lasts more than a few years. That may not be a concern to him, but it is to me.”

“We started with nothing in our pockets but a gun, you and me,” Lambretto said.

“We were a lot younger,” Jannetti said, “and with all to gain and nothing to lose. And these new guys don’t care about turf, running neighborhoods, bringing in cash. They just want to die, get to heaven and start the party.”

“Maybe
they
don’t care,” Lambretto said, “but the Russians and the Mexicans care. And getting to heaven is the last thing on
their
minds.”

Jannetti nodded. “I told Vincent to count us in,” he said. “Not that I had much choice. Not only are we part of the council, we’re part of the same family.”

“You want me to run the operation?” Lambretto asked.

Jannetti shook his head. “I want Angela to take the lead.”

“How you think she’ll feel working with Vincent?” Lambretto asked.

“She’s got Camorra blood in her veins, same as you and me,” Jannetti said. “Vincent fell into this life, but she was born to it. This fight will give her a chance to show the others on the council she belongs at that table. Not just sitting in my seat one day. But sitting at the very head of the table.”

Vittorio Jannetti was in charge of the Camorra, the Neapolitan branch of organized crime and one of the most vicious criminal outfits in the world. The group was established in the thirteenth century by a patriotic handful of citizens who decided they had seen enough abuse heaped onto the working poor by the powerful. They now number 3,500 members in Naples and New York, and are invested in the drug trade, fashion industry, construction, waste management, real estate, and the transport of toxic goods. They also control a wide portion of the European black market, which nets them $200 million per month.

Jannetti had entered the life as a boy, brought to the local Don when he was ten, a chronic truant with no patience for school. Jannetti lived in the heart of the Camorra power center and was delivered to them by his own out-of-work father. It was how the Camorra found their soldiers, taking boys from homes of men who owed them money or had nowhere to turn for help. They then raised the children as their own, placing each with a soldier’s family, putting the child through school. If the boy excelled at math, he went to business school; if his forte was science, he became a doctor. Over time, the Camorra would place thousands of their children in legitimate businesses.

Jannetti seemed always to be in the middle of a street fight. He had a flash temper and went after anyone he considered to be in his way. He had few friends but many silent enemies, and was feared by any who crossed his path. He was also a skilled organizational leader and a master planner. And those abilities were put to good use by the older members of the Camorra. They realized they could always groom someone to be a banker, lawyer, or doctor, but a crew boss was difficult to find and nurture, and Vittorio Jannetti was a natural.

He was sent to New York in his early twenties and partnered with Carlo Marelli. Together, the two wove a violent path through the city’s underworld, and by the time Jannetti was in his thirties, he and Marelli had risen through the ranks to control one of the five New York crime families. Jannetti had earned the respect of the Camorra power brokers and won a nickname that would follow him back to Naples, where he assumed control of his own men. He was called “the Cobra” because of the speed with which he attacked, launching an all-out assault when the enemy least expected, bringing a street war to an end when it had barely begun.

He had been married for a brief time to an American woman from Birmingham, Michigan, who bore him one child, a daughter who lived in the States and made her living as a teacher. He had little time for either woman beyond gifts on birthdays and holidays.

His true love was the daughter he had by a mistress who died in childbirth. Her name was Angela, and Jannetti raised her in the Camorra way, teaching her the practices and traditions she would need to uphold if she were to replace him as the Naples crime boss. She was every inch her father’s daughter and was known among the underworld as “the Strega,” the Italian word for witch. Angela had taken to the name so enthusiastically that she had mastered the centuries-old practices of those women.

“You ready to move?” Jannetti asked Lambretto.

“I put everything in motion while you were in New York,” Lambretto said. “Didn’t think the council would give Vincent a thumbs-down.”

“I gave him my vote, and we’ll stay in this so long as it helps and not hurts us,” Jannetti said. “Vincent lost his family so he’s going to go into this hard. And while I feel bad about what happened, that’s something he’s got to deal with. It’s his fight. Not ours.”

“You think the other crews feel the same as you do?” Lambretto asked.

“Not everybody’s heart is in it, “Jannetti said. “The Gypsy, Orto, will be the first to fold. The Japanese and Chinese, they’re all in, but who knows which way the French will go? The Greek will stick with us till the end. Still, Vincent can’t risk even one bad move. They’ll be on him in a flash.”