A Quiet Vendetta (37 page)

That was business, the kind of business that needed sorting out every once in a while, and me and Slapsie and Johnny the Limpet, all of us who made up the Alcatraz Swimming Team, well, we were there to take care of such things, and take care of them we did.

A couple of years later a ghost of Miami came back to haunt us. Irony itself. June of 1972 five men were arrested at the Watergate Complex in Washington: James McCord, security co-ordinator of the Republican Committee to re-elect Nixon, some other ex-CIA goon, and three Cubans. Remembered the Wofford Hotel, the base for Lansky and Frank Costello in the ’40s, how Costello had possessed strong ties with Nixon. One of those self-same Watergate burglars, a Cuban exile, was vice-president of the Keyes Realty Company, the outfit that mediated between the families and Miami-Dade County officialdom. When the shit hit the fan for the Nixon administration Don Ceriano knew more about what was going down in Washington than most of the Washington insiders. He was the one who told me about the White House informant, the guy that was later referred to as ‘Deep Throat’.

‘Some FBI big-shot,’ he said. ‘He was the one who gave the inside track to those two Washington newspaper hacks. Hell, maybe if they hadn’t made such a mess with Kennedy, they would have whacked Nixon, instead of all this complicated legal bullshit they’ve had to go through.’

Second irony, and one that was much closer to home, was that Nixon’s fall from grace was instrumental in the death of Don Giancarlo Ceriano the better part of two years later.

Nixon held on for dear life throughout that time. He fought the only way he knew how. Guy was as crazy as a bug on a hotplate, but he was a politician so we didn’t expect much else.

Don Ceriano kept his house in good order. He worked hard. He collected dues for the family and made good on their agreements. But there was word from Chicago, always the quiet word from Chicago. History in Chicago went way back to Capone, Don Ceriano told me, and when Capone was jailed for tax evasion his mantle was assumed by Frank Nitti. Nitti ran the business the way the National Commission of
la Cosa Nostra
wanted, quiet yet powerful, and right until the time he and a handful of others were indicted for extortion of the Hollywood studios he was considered one of the best. Rather than face trial, Frank Nitti shot himself in the head and the Chicago mob was taken over by Tony Accardo. Accardo brought affluence to the family down there. They moved into Vegas and Reno. They ran a street tax on everything that went down in Chicago, and then in 1957 Accardo decided to step down in favor of Sam Giancana. Giancana was Frank Nitti’s opposite. He was an extravagant man, with a high-profile lifestyle, and he stayed in power until he was jailed for a year in ’66. When he was released he resumed his position, and despite the ill-favor that was felt towards him by others in the families he stayed there. Ironically, a year or so later, by which time I had long since moved to New York, Sam Giancana was shot eight times. They shot him in the basement of his own house, as if murder wasn’t insult and ignominy enough.

It was New Year 1974. Christmas had been good. Don Ceriano’s three sisters and their families had come out to Vegas to spend time with him. They brought with them eleven children, the smallest no more than eighteen months old, the eldest a pretty girl of nineteen called Amelia. For those two or three weeks, perhaps even as far back as Thanksgiving, things had quietened down. 1973 had been fortuitous for Don Ceriano. He had sent all of eight and a half million dollars in paybacks to the bosses and they were pleased with him. Besides the Flamingo and Caesar’s Palace there were the dozens of smaller casinos and bars, whorehouses and bookmakers that Don Ceriano oversaw. These places provided the vegetables to run alongside the main course. As the New Year crept into the second week of January, as our minds turned back towards the business at hand, there was word from Chicago that Sam Giancana wanted a hand in what Vegas had to offer. Don Ceriano heard it along the grapevine, and when he mentioned it he spoke in words that were condescending and contemptuous.

‘Giancana . . . a fucking playboy,’ he would say. ‘Nothing more than six feet of shit in a five-hundred-dollar suit. Asshole thinks he can come down here and muscle in on this he can take a real long walk off of a short harbor, know what I mean?’

But for all the words, all the bravura, Giancana was a very powerful man. Chicago, everything that Capone and Nitti had established before him, was a major part of the family’s concerns. If Giancana wanted something he usually got it, and it was he who sent his right-hand man, Carlo Evangelisti, and his own cousin, Fabio Calligaris, to speak with Don Ceriano in the third week of that new year.

I remember them coming. I remember the limousine that pulled up on Alvarado Street. I remember the way they looked as they exited the vehicle and made their way towards the house. They had come with someone’s blessing, I knew that much, and whatever Don Ceriano might have wanted, the fact was that when it came to family decisions he was not a general but a lieutenant.

Calligaris and Evangelisti sat with Don Ceriano in the main room of the house. I brought them whiskey sours and ashtrays. I remember the way Fabio Calligaris spoke, his voice like something dead being dragged across the floor of a mortuary, and when he looked at me there was something in his eyes that seemed to command both respect and fear. Perhaps, looking back, there was something in him that reflected an aspect of myself. Perhaps, for the first time in many years, I recognized a little of what I had become, and beside that an understanding that I was nothing to these people. I was not family; I was not blood; I was not even Italian.

They stopped to eat at some point, and as Calligaris rose from his chair he looked at me and smiled. He turned to Don Ceriano and he said, ‘Don Ceriano . . . who is this man?’

Don Ceriano turned to me. He held out his hand and I walked towards him. He placed his arm around my shoulders and hugged me tight.

‘This, Don Calligaris, is Ernesto Cabrera Perez.’

‘Aah,’ Calligaris said. ‘The Cuban.’

He registered my surprise, and then smiled knowingly. ‘We have a mutual friend, Ernesto Perez . . . a man called Antoine Feraud from way down south in Louisiana.’

My surprise was even greater.

Calligaris reached out his hand towards me. I reached back. He gripped my hand and shook it firmly. ‘To know Mr Feraud is to know half the world,’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘He is a force to be reckoned with, certainly as far as the southern States are concerned. He has one or two politicians in his pocket, and to have earned a reputation with him will serve us well . . . perhaps more and more as time goes on.’ Calligaris paused; he looked me up and down for a moment. ‘I understand from what I hear that you are a man of decisive action and few words.’

I didn’t speak.

Calligaris laughed. ‘Evidently this is true, I see,’ he said, and he and Don Ceriano looked at one another and smiled.

Calligaris nodded. ‘Good, so we eat, and then we will talk some more.’

Don Ceriano released me and I went out back to the kitchen. I sat there while people rushed around me carrying food through to the dining room. My mouth was as dry as copper filings. I felt a burning tension in my chest. There were people out there in the world who knew my name, knew of the things I had done, and these were people I would not have recognized had I walked past them in the street, had I sat beside them in a bar. The thought frightened me, and since I had become a stranger to fear it was a moment that I would think of for many years to come. It was a moment that marked a change for me, a change of direction, a change of lifestyle, but only later would I realize how significant it was. For now, for that brief time, I sat silently in the kitchen while Don Ceriano, Fabio Calligaris and Carlo Evangelisti, perhaps the three most powerful men I had ever known, sat and ate antipasta no more than ten feet away.

That night, darkness pressing against the walls of my room, the sound from the street beyond nothing more than a murmur of endless traffic through the city of Las Vegas, I looked back and asked myself what I had become. I thought of my mother, how cruelly and unnecessarily she had died, and also of my father, the Havana Hurricane, and the way he had looked at me in that alleyway when he knew his death had arrived by the hand of his own son. I did not cry for him. I
could
not. But for her, for everything she was before my father, for everything she would have become had she not chosen to marry him . . . for her I shed a tear. It came back to family. Always to family. It came back to blood and loyalty and the strength of a promise. These people, these Italians, were not my family. I was all that existed of my own bloodline, and with my death would come the death of everything that my mother had wanted for me. It was perhaps then that my thoughts turned to a family of my own, and how family was strength and passion and a sense of pride in creating something that was an extension of one’s self. I went to sleep with that thought, and though the next day would augur greater change than ever I could have imagined, nevertheless the seed had been planted. And it would grow; with time it would grow, and the more it grew the less space I had left to allow for any other thoughts. What happened in the coming weeks I allowed to happen for that reason, for never once did I believe that I would find what I was looking for in that house on Alvarado.

Now, in hindsight, I seem to remember the following day with greater and greater clarity, as if such hindsight has given me the advantage of perspective. Sometimes Don Ceriano would say
Ernesto, you say too little and think too much
, but closer to the truth was that I thought rarely, if at all. I was not then, and never have been, an introspective man. Perhaps my life did not permit me the luxury of contemplation, for to consider the things that I had done, the people I had killed, the path I had chosen, would have been too painful. Now – older, perhaps a little wiser – I possibly would have made different choices. Certainly not the killing of my father, for even with older, wiser eyes I can see there was no other way. I could not have stood by and let someone else kill him. That would not have been justice. Guilty of the death of my mother, guilty of torturing her for so many years before, I had to kill him myself. And the others? Well, I was a good soldier, a member of the Italian family, but perhaps no more than some inbred distant cousin who appeared only when there was work to do that no-one else would undertake. I do not know, and now I do not care to know. By the time I was old enough to see these things for what they were I was too old to do anything about them. It was what it was. The past was the past, and there was nothing I could say or do to change it.

That day, the day after the arrival of Fabio Calligaris and Carlo Evangelisti, was a watershed. As I came down to the breakfast table that morning I perceived a presence in the room that I had felt before. It was the presence of death. Death carries a shadow. It waits, it lingers for some certain moment, and then it takes what it has come for swiftly, most often silently, always completely. Don Giancarlo Ceriano, a man who had been my father since February 1960 and the death of Don Pietro Silvino, a man who had schooled me in the ways of the world for the better part of fifteen years, carried about him that shadow of death.

‘Ernesto . . . you slept well?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Yes, Don Ceriano . . . I slept well.’

He smiled. ‘So today is a big day, a day for the future,’ he said. He buttered a crust of ciabatta and proceeded to dip it in a bowl of espresso. Don Ceriano was a man of some urgency perhaps; often he would scan the newspaper while eating, to his right an ashtray with a burning cigarette which he would retrieve and draw from periodically; in front of him the TV would be playing, and in the background someone would be discussing with him the details of some aspect of their work. He could do these things simultaneously, as if he possessed insufficient time to do each of them in turn. As a younger man I believed he had a mind the size of America; in later years I realized that this was the only way he could crowd out the sound of his conscience.

‘My friends Don Carlo and Don Fabio will return shortly. We will once more go over the details of the Chicago family’s interests in our business here in Las Vegas. This will be a fortuitous year for us, I believe, a very fortuitous year indeed.’

I didn’t want to eat; I could not eat. I poured a cup of coffee, I lit a cigarette, I listened patiently while Don Ceriano spoke of how things would be better once Sam Giancana’s people were here to assist in the management of the business. I did not believe a word of it. I cannot explain how, but somehow all of Don Ceriano’s words, words that he had been given by Don Calligaris and Don Evangelisti, seemed transparent. They seemed of a different color to the air in the room, or perhaps they carried beneath them the shadow of death. I did not try to understand why I knew what would happen, but I knew it, knew it with all my heart. I understood, even then, that I would take whatever action I had to in order to preserve my own life. I believed that it was not only for myself that I wished to survive, but for the memory of my mother. If I died, then there would be nothing left of her. Nothing at all. This I could not allow to happen, and so I decided – against all judgement and loyalty, against all conscience and honor – that I would walk from this day regardless of what might happen to Don Ceriano. He was not my family.
I
was my family. Myself and the memory of my mother.

Later, an hour perhaps, Don Calligaris and Don Evangelisti returned. They came with boxes of cigars, with bottles of vintage armagnac, and flowers for Don Ceriano’s house. Soon the place was rich with the aroma of smoke and spirit and summer. I went to the kitchen and attended to nothing but my own sense of unease and anticipation, and it was not long before Don Ceriano came through, already half-drunk before noon, and told me that he would be going out with Fabio and Carlo to see some of the business enterprises and casinos. Calligaris was behind him in a second. He insisted I accompany them, and once again his voice, like something dead being dragged across the floor, and his eyes, that seemed to command both respect and fear, left nothing I could do to refuse his insistence.