The Good Rat (11 page)

• A:
  Yes, tell him that he appreciates it very much.
  
• Q:
  Does there come a time later that Mr. Eppolito brings Mr. Facciola’s name up again?
  
• A:
  Yes. He said there is an arrest coming down, a big investigation in the jewelry district uptown and that Bruno Facciola is an unindicted co-conspirator in this oncoming arrest and that he believes that Bruno is hot.
  
• Q:
  What did you do with respect to that information on Mr. Facciola?
  
• A:
  I brought it to Anthony Casso.
  
• Q:
  What did Casso say?
  
• A:
  You got to be kidding me. I know Bruno a lot of years. He says, Are you sure that your friend isn’t just trying to get even with Bruno based on the fact that he was abusing his friend, the kid with the repair shop? And I said, No, I brought that up to Louie myself, and he says that Bruno is definitely hot. And Casso says, Well, at this point I got to believe him, because they’ve been believable on everything else.
  
• Q:
  Does there come a time that something happens to Facciola?
  
• A:
  He gets killed.
  
• Q:
  After Mr. Facciola was killed, did you get any information from either Mr. Eppolito or Mr. Caracappa regarding some friends or associates of Mr. Facciola?
  
• A:
  Louie Eppolito says there is word going around the precinct that Visconti and Taylor said that whoever did this to Bruno better be careful. They were associates of Bruno Facciola. I told it to Casso. First Casso said, We don’t have to watch out. They’d better watch out. And then within a month they were both dead.
  
• Q:
  Have you ever heard the name Gus Ferace?
  
• A:
  He was an associate, he was a drug dealer, in the Bronx section of the Luccheses, with John Petrocelli and Mike Salerno.
  
• Q:
  Mr. Petrocelli and Mr. Salerno, are they Lucchese members?
  
• A:
  Mr. Salerno was at the time. Mr. Petrocelli was an associate who later became a made member.
  
• Q:
  Have you ever heard the name Everett Hatcher?
  
• A:
  He was a DEA agent. Gus Ferace killed him.
  
• Q:
  Did Casso tell you anything regarding Gus Ferace and Petrocelli?
  
• A:
  He told me that the agents were coming around to every club and every bar and every family and telling them whoever is harboring Ferace is going to have a big problem, and whoever has him should throw him in the street, and Casso told me that Petrocelli was harboring him.
  
• Q:
  What do you mean by “throw him in the street”?
  
• A:
  Just either kill him or put him out for the agents to catch him. What happened was, Casso told Mikey Salerno to tell Petrocelli to throw Gus Ferace out and to cut him loose and not to harbor him.
  
• Q:
  Did you later get information regarding Petrocelli?
  
• A:
  I was given a picture of Mikey Salerno with John Petrocelli. It was taken after Mikey Salerno said that he chased John Petrocelli, who didn’t get rid of Ferace. Petrocelli liked him. Ferace was his friend, and he didn’t want to listen.
  
• Q:
  Where did you get the picture from?
  
• A:
  Louis Eppolito.
  
• Q:
  What did you do with that information?
  
• A:
  I gave it to Anthony Casso. He told me that Mike Salerno told him that he had chased Petrocelli, and he
  didn’t. He would straighten out the problem with Mike Salerno.
  
• Q:
  Did anything happen to Salerno and/or Petrocelli?
  
• A:
  Mike Salerno was killed.
  
• Q:
  Was it after or before you gave the photograph that you had gotten from Mr. Eppolito to Mr. Casso?
  
• A:
  It was definitely after the photograph.
  
• Q:
  Did anything happen to Mr. Petrocelli?
  
• A:
  He was chased.
  

The horse came into the bar after work and had a drink.

I can say that he was a very brave horse, because he had just left half of South Queens destitute. He ran, and not well, in the last race at Aqueduct Racetrack, just up the avenue.

I can’t tell you the exact dates, a thousand bookkeepers couldn’t keep track of all this. But the place was Pep McGuire’s, the greatest bar in the history of the city. I can tell you that Jimmy Burke put an ice bucket of water on the bar, and the sound of the horse slapping his tongue on that water was heard over voices angry at him for busting them out.

Burke was the highly popular commander of the $6 million Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy Airport. He plotted it from his room in a halfway house, the Hotel Breslin, on Broadway in Manhattan. Of course they stole my name.

Riding the horse was the immensely disliked jockey Con Errico, who was known in American sport as “Scamp.” Most in the bar wanted to see Scamp Errico die, and some of them had the pedigree to cause this.

On this night Errico rode the horse into the middle of the dance floor, and the band played, and people clamored for Errico’s head.

When you look back on it, the whole night was nothing but another episode in our insane asylum. Oh, yes, put the word “our” in there.

This all happened at a time when the air rippled with the last freedom to take everything and earn nothing. The old white neighborhoods and factories were looking at changes in the law and in the color of new people now crowding into old neighborhoods. It was in low-density Queens, where people going to work on the subway said, “I’m going to the city,” thus identifying their place as second class.

Today we have no saloons filled with mob guys to make people breathless as they look around and see who’s drinking next to them. Could it be that we have so many of the guys in prison that there aren’t enough left to crowd a bar? When you add up Mafia indictments of twenty and even thirty hoodlums at a time, you suspect that this is the case. It is at least disappointing. You can drink with legitimate people if you want. I come out of the nights where Fat Tony Salerno, the Tip O’Neill of the underworld, looked around in the Copacabana Lounge, where he drank highballs, and scowled at me. “Didn’t you go where I told you to?” he asks. He is bringing up a moment earlier that day in court when he called me over to the defense table and said loudly in front of judge and jury, “You look like a bum. I’m embarrassed you dress like this. Here.” He gave me the business card from a tailor on the East Side. “Tell him you want a suit made right away so you don’t make me ashamed I know
you.” There is none of that anymore. Fat Tony happens to be dead, and he took the style with him. Among the saloons of the city today, there are no notorious places known as mob joints. And there are no more meetings between reporters and gangsters in places known for tough guys and neon and loud fun. News reporters get their information from Jerry Capeci’s Gang Land on the Internet. When their work is done, you find reporters at health clubs or going home to some suburb where they drink wine and the contest is who causes more boredom, the wife or the husband.

I stand on Queens Boulevard in front of what was once Pep McGuire’s, and I recall nights and crimes, and I am certain that I hold memories possessed by virtually no one else alive.

The owners were Norton Peppis—known as Pep, he gambled anything he had or didn’t have—and Johnny McGuire, who appeared to have started life legitimately by going on the police force. He was in the Seventeenth Precinct and was posted at the door to UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. There had been threats. Officer McGuire, all tuckered out from a day at Monmouth Park Racetrack, took a chair in front of the suite’s door and passed out. A flash from a
Daily News
camera woke him up. He tore down the hall after the photographer and begged him to take another picture to preserve his job. The guy gave Johnny a break and let him pose at the door. Beautiful, Johnny said.

In the morning the police commissioner happened to
differ. On his desk was the
Daily News
with a front page featuring Officer Johnny McGuire, uniform collar tugged open, hat and gun on the chair next to him.

The partners opened a barren joint and filled the bar with stewardesses from the nearby airports and lugged in jockeys from Aqueduct, and soon the place was bedlam. Somewhere at the bar was Fat Thomas, drinking and yelling. There was a band, a dance floor, and people tumbling around. You had Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, saxophonist from the Basie band, drinking scotch and milk at the bar.

Into McGuire’s one night walked Bob Price, the deputy mayor of the city, with Abe Rosenthal, the editor of the
New York Times
.

They were here to catch me in what they were sure was fraud. There could be no such place as the one I had been writing so wildly about.

They came brazenly, using a city car and chauffeur.

Fat Thomas was behind the bar as they came in. Roaring. He had tired of waiting for drinks and was taking care of himself.

“Yez want a drink, fellas?” he said.

They ordered. Fat Thomas poured two big scotches and then held them up, one after the other, and swallowed both.

Then he took the two men back into the office, where his friend, a man named Cousin, sat cleaning an automatic weapon used for robbing banks.

“What’s up?” Cousin said.

“They wanted to meet you,” Fat Thomas said.

The two remained silent. They went back to the bar and started swallowing whatever was put in front of them.

Rosenthal was dazzled. “It’s all true,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

He spent some time in the pinwheel of lights and music and tough guys and women from everywhere, including a Lufthansa flight attendant, a German blonde of striking figure. Somewhere in the night, Rosenthal had his head nestled on her large bosom.

“Abe, she wants to put you in an oven,” Fat Thomas said.

“I know,” Rosenthal said. “I love it.”

I am home one Sunday morning when Peppy calls me. “Right away,” he said. “Major.”

I walk down to the bar, which was closed until 6:00
P.M.
Peppy was pouring a big drink for a tired-looking guy who said he was the doorman at the Summit Hotel in Manhattan.

“Tell him,” Peppy said.

“Joe Namath come out in a fur coat five
A.M.
with Jill St. John. He had a bottle.”

“That’s it,” Peppy said. “Don’t tell me what broads and whiskey can do to a guy. We go naked.”

He told the doorman, “Listen to me. Your carfare. Hear me? Bet your carfare. Namath goes home in an ambulance.”

The football game started at 1:00
P.M.
in Shea Stadium, which sat freezing under a darkening winter sky. A wind screamed and spun inside the stadium.

Near the end of the game, Namath went toward the sideline at his own twelve, and he threw the ball. Threw it through the wind and the darkness across the field and hit his end, Don Maynard, right on the hands. It was impossible that moment to think of anyone who was ever better.

Namath finished the day licking salt from his wrist and swallowing tequila on Third Avenue while a roomful of women crowded in.

Peppy sat at his bar in silence, his eyes closed, rubbing his forehead.

Another night I come up the subway steps glad to be home, because I had been working in the office on something for too long and it was almost midnight. I was going to turn to the right and our house when the neon pulled me to the left and into McGuire’s. Only for a minute. I had too much illness at home to permit time for a saloon.

As I walked into the place, Jimmy Grant came over. His wife, Dell, the singer at Pep McGuire’s, was Jimmy Burke’s sister. Grant said, “Jimmy has to talk to you right away. He’s on the phone.” I went into the office and took the call. Jimmy Burke’s voice boomed.

“You got to come down here,” he said. “I got something for the cancer.”

“What is it?”

“Never mind. I got a way to get your wife cured. Come down. I’m at the Villagio.”

That was a restaurant on Rockaway Boulevard that was owned by Dominic Cataldo, who was a nice little guy but had a terrible reputation for doing a lot of work. The expression “work” meant murder. This was a bad thing to say about Dominic, and to make it worse, it was true.

I am faced with meeting Jimmy Burke and Dominic Cataldo alone on an empty sidewalk in the night. But why not? I know Jimmy a long time. He never would hurt me. Sure, I had written a lot about him running the Lufthansa robbery. That was business. How could I not write about a holdup that big, six million? Did I put Burke right in the middle of it? I guess I did. At the same time, he and his crew were insanely shooting anybody who could link them to the heist. The police were going crazy with bodies.

I thought about a lawyer, Mike Coiro, who knew I had somebody sick at home. Maybe he told Jimmy something. And now Burke had something he thought could help me. Something out of the nights of nurses and hospitals and doctors and who knows. Only a week before, I was home watching a news show on Channel 13 where the head of the Red Cross, a doctor from the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and a scientist from Harvard, Dr. Gilbert, were talking about a new treatment for cancer. A clinic in Sweden and another in Germany were reporting big news. The Red Cross man was exultant. “There are exciting things
happening in Sweden,” he said. “Cures, not remissions. It is new, and it is saving lives.”

I knew Gilbert, and so when the program ended, I immediately called the television studio and asked the receptionist to get him for me. When he picked up, I told him I had to see him right away, and he said he was going to a lecture at New York Hospital on York Avenue. I got dressed, said nothing at home, and took a cab to the lecture. On the way I talked myself into putting the house up for sale in the morning, packing the family up, and flying to Sweden.

I walked over to Gilbert, and he said, “I couldn’t talk to you on the phone because of all the people around me. I’m sorry you had to come all the way over here. But if you noticed, I didn’t say anything while the man from the Red Cross made these outlandish claims. He is not even a doctor. He is a fund-raiser, and he wants to excite donors. What he was talking about doesn’t exist. His clinic in Sweden saves nobody. I’m sorry, but this has been almost a hoax tonight.”

Having gone through nights like that, and there were several, it still seemed only sensible to go down to see Burke. Little Dominic might be with him. I knew that lately he had been begging people to find him burial sites. But I could trust his waitress, Doris. She liked me, all right. And if I disappeared from the restaurant on this night, you could trust Doris to answer all police questions succinctly: “Who?”

Nevertheless, we went down to the restaurant by cab.
Oh, yes, I was not alone. I was with my friend Victor Giuliani, who was a detective on the Queens burglary squad. I had asked him to come along with me and bring his gun.

As we were getting out of the cab, there was Jimmy Burke, alone, rumpled, and loud.

“Why is he here?” he yelled, indicating Victor. “I’m not going to kill you.”

Jimmy then walked up to us. “I know Rose when you married her. The doctors know how to cure the disease. They won’t do it unless they get paid. I got thirty-five thousand with me. I’ll give it to you, and you give it to the doctor tomorrow, and he’ll cure her. Don’t worry about getting it back to me. I just want to see her cured. Just pay the doctor and let me know his name.”

I told him thanks but we were involved with a whole hospital full of doctors, and so I’ll pass. “But I got to remember you forever.”

Sometime later Burke was convicted of fixing a Boston College basketball game. The college was the alma mater of the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Ed McDonald, who never stopped until Burke was sent away for a long time. Jimmy had left a mountain of bodies and the Lufthansa robbery, and they buried him on a missed layup. He came down with cancer in prison and died.