The Big Scam Page 7

  Baldovino chuckled and swept a hand elaborately toward Tatorrio.

  “I needed a shylock. But because of what it’s for, it couldn’t be from anyone in our family, so I called this guy with the Parrinos, Joe Chianese. He came over and I had to sneak outside and get ten K off of him. The whole night cost me seventy-five hundred. So I take the twenty-five hundred that’s left over—which a smart person would have put back on the nut—but not me, no, I had it all figured out. I’ll take it and run it up to ten grand at…” Tatorrio’s rising tone invited everyone to respond.

  “The track,” they pronounced in unison.

  “Three races. That’s all it took. And about a year to pay it back. And every time I made a payment, Chianese busted balls. I did finally even the score the other night, but that year was a nightmare. Manny, the next time you screw up, I’ll tell what I had to do to get that money together.” Everyone’s laughter turned into applause. “Manny, please. Come back when you’re ready to play in the majors.”

  Baldovino nodded his appreciation and had decided to give up his post at the window when a familiar silver Cadillac made a careless U-turn and pulled up in front of the club. A bridge-sized surge of adrenaline knotted his stomach as he saw Danny DeMiglia, the family’s underboss, get out. Manny could only hope that the rare visit to the club was not about him, but with the morning’s headlines, he knew that was extremely unlikely. Since the don’s stroke two months earlier, DeMiglia had been assuming more and more authority, much of it a questionable departure from the traditions everyone was comfortable with.

  Now forty-four, younger than most who rose to that position, he had worked his way up from the streets, enforcing his decisions with unhinged violence. Within the organization, his brutality was so unpredictable that recollections of it were related only in the most guarded tones. But violence often created the very problem it promised to cure. This was the case when the honorable William G. Ferris had disappeared.

  Judge Ferris had exhibited more political ambition than self-preservation when he publicly named two members of the Galante crime family who had tried to extort a portion of a cement-hauling contract that had been impartially awarded to one of the voters from Ferris’s district. He played a recording for the media of one of the Galante men making a threatening call to the contractor. The newspapers ran front-page stories for a week. DeMiglia hated specifics about the family’s operation being aired in the press. Four days later, Ferris’s wife reported him missing.

  For a month, the media attempted to link the Galante family to the judge’s disappearance. Manny didn’t know for sure whether DeMiglia was responsible or not, and he would have liked to say he didn’t care except that, like the judge, he too had been a source of bad publicity for the family.

  Hurrying to the back room, he found Mike Parisi on the phone. “DeMiglia’s out front.”

  “I’m on the phone here,” Parisi said, waving him away absentmindedly. But Baldovino stood in front of him, his expression insistent. He wasn’t sure Parisi understood the gravity of the underboss’s visit. For that matter, he wondered if he understood DeMiglia at all. When the don was healthy and his authority unquestioned, DeMiglia had treated Parisi with some regard, but the two men had not met since Carrera became ill. Baldovino feared that the crew’s existence, as they knew it, was about to take a turn for the worse; if that happened, his ill-planned efforts to be an entrepreneur would be pinpointed as the catalyst.

  When the don had made Parisi a capo, resentment floated openly throughout the organization, most of it traceable, with little effort, back to DeMiglia. He referred to the appointment as nothing more than a wedding dowry, a custom, which—not unlike the don’s leadership—was out of date and out of place.

  Parisi could no longer ignore Baldovino’s increasingly panicked expression. “I’m going to have to call you back. But get started on that roof by Monday, or we’re going to have a problem.” He hung up and said to no one in particular, “Fucking contractors.” But his words lacked conviction, which caused Manny to smile. Everyone on the crew understood that Parisi was trying to prove that he belonged, trying to convince them that even if he hadn’t married the boss’s niece, he still had the stuff from which real mafiosi were made. None of them thought so, but then most of them didn’t think they had much of the real stuff either.

  “DeMiglia’s here,” he repeated a little more urgently.

  “Christ, Manny, you look like you’re going to piss your pants. I heard you the first time.”

  “He’s probably here about me.”

  Parisi lit a cigarette and held the filter half-crushed between his molars. “So what. You’re on my crew. If he has a problem with any of my people he has to come to me.”

  “Mike, you didn’t come up in the neighborhood. I know you were involved in some shit in Queens when you were a kid, but these guys around here are different. We’ve seen Danny operate since he was a kid. He isn’t a—a whaddaya call it—chain of command kind of guy.”

  “Then I’ll go see the old man.”

  “Have you seen DeMiglia since your uncle got sick?”

  “No, why?”

  Baldovino didn’t answer, but Parisi finally recognized the fear in his eyes and decided some caution wouldn’t hurt. “Okay, go on down to the basement and stay out of the way until I get rid of him.”

  While Parisi waited out of sight of the front room, he listened to the conversation around the card table.

  “Don’t even, ya fuck,” Gus Dellaporta warned.

  “Me fuck? You fuck.” Jimmy Tatorrio slammed down a queen, taking the final trick. “Ba-boom.”

  When they were by themselves, Parisi had noticed that the crew’s language became more abbreviated than usual, a kind of shorthand they prided themselves on. It demonstrated friendship and, as an ancillary benefit, provided a certain amount of increased security. Usually the first thing to go was their use of interrogative pronouns. The who, what, and wheres were replaced with an all-inclusive “the fuck.” The fuck’s that guy’s name? The fuck is going on here? The fuck is my drink? Sometimes when Parisi walked in on one of those conversations, he would start laughing, not because of the content, but because the whole thing had the tantalizing confusion of a too-hip beer commercial. Reacting that way made him doubt he could ever be one of them.

  Danny DeMiglia walked in followed by his driver, Angelo. He peeled off his sunglasses and smiled at Parisi. Almost imperceptibly, a couple of the crew at the table stiffened. “Mikey, how are you?”

  Danny DeMiglia was no more than five foot six, even in his heeled boots. He wore a custom shirt of pale lavender, whose collar could not disguise his thick neck. He stood with his arms angled away from his torso like a bodybuilder at the end of a posing competition. His hands, as wide as they were long, extended from the sharply starched cuffs, one bearing the initials DMD in purple thread. The knuckles on his right hand were scarred and irreparably misaligned. His suit iridesced in the subdued light, accenting his stiff movements. The men around the table stole glances at his clothes and considered how only Danny DeMiglia could wear a monogrammed lavender shirt with impunity.

  His bodyguard seemed twice his size, but if bets were placed on the two of them squaring off, most suspected that the underboss would prevail on pure viciousness. Parisi hadn’t thought of DeMiglia that way—he had never had to. But after Baldovino’s warning, he couldn’t help but feel some apprehension. “I’m good, Danny, how about yourself?”

  DeMiglia made sure each of the men saw his anger. “If you’re asking me that, I guess that means you didn’t see the papers this morning. Where is the dumb fuck?”

  “Let’s go in the back.” DeMiglia gave a slight nod for his driver to remain with the others.

  In the back room, one of Parisi’s men, Tommy Ida, sat reading a book. Seeing the mood of the two men, he got up to leave. DeMiglia shook his hand. “Tommy, how have you been?”

  “Good, Danny, real good.” Ida seemed nervous, and Parisi r
ealized that if the most composed member of the crew sensed danger, there had to be more to it than Manny’s nervousness. Ida closed the door behind him.

  “Every time I see that guy, he’s reading something. Gives me the fucking creeps.”

  “He just likes to read, Danny. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Still, it gives me the creeps. It’s like that fucking guy that stabbed Julius Caesar in the back. What’s his name?”

  “Cassius.”

  “Yeah, with the hungry look. He thinks too much. You got to watch that, Mike. That’s about the only thing I remember from high school. Worst two weeks of my life.” The pronouncement of his failed education was spoken boastfully, implying that his hard-won “blue collar” success was the antithesis of Parisi’s rise within the organization.

  Parisi smiled carefully. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Suspecting Parisi’s reply contained some nuance of condescension that he was incapable of deciphering, DeMiglia looked Parisi up and down, letting his eyes intentionally drag across the warmup suit and gold necklace, his leering smile an obvious insult. “See, that’s the difference between you and me. You remembering that name, and me not giving a shit. I don’t know, sometimes it’s like you think you’re entitled to this life, and at the same time I get the feeling you think it’s beneath you.”

  Apparently Baldovino had been right about Parisi not knowing the real DeMiglia. Proceeding with care, Parisi mustered as conciliatory a tone as he could manage. “What is it you would like to hear?”

  “See, there’s the problem. You want to offer me words. Words are not action.”

  “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to start running this crew like a business, not a summer camp for losers. This whole thing with the Lag is a symptom. It reflects no leadership on your part. If your guys were out making real money, busting real balls, they wouldn’t be embarrassing the family, giving this FBI asshole the opportunity to rub our faces in it.”

  “We bring in our share of money.”

  DeMiglia, still not getting all the signals he was used to, leaned in and let his voice harden. “You bring in what was handed to you as a wedding present, nothing more. I’ve been around this most of my life, and that’s taught me one thing—the old days don’t cut it anymore. The FBI’s got all those laws on their side, all that RICO shit. Every phone is tapped. We have to improvise or we’re through. Especially gambling. That’s all done on the phone. When’s the last time any of your places got hit?”

  “Not in the two years I’ve been here.”

  “You know what that tells me—you’re way overdue. If they’re hungry enough to put a sting on a slug like Manny, they got to be all over your gambling operation.”

  “The don doesn’t seem worried about it. As far as I can tell, he’s happy with the way things are going.” The anger in Parisi’s voice had risen another notch, and it seemed to please DeMiglia.

  “You of all people shouldn’t be bringing up your uncle. Your crew’s lack of production is disrespecting him. Besides, he is not in good health. He’s not going to be the head of the family forever. In the meantime, I’m giving the orders. I want you to start earning your way around here.”

  “We’ve got something we’ve been working on.”

  “Which is?”

  “There’s this guy over in Queens, he’s a loan officer at a small bank. He approves all the home equity loans and lines of credit. Turns out he made himself a couple of loans to play a few can’t-miss stock deals. When they missed, and he needed to put it back before the auditors found out, he came to us.”

  “How much?”

  “With this week’s vig, almost fifty K.”

  “Fifty, that’s it? This better start getting real fucking interesting real fucking fast.”

  “He’s missed payments the last three weeks, so I sent Manny to talk to him. Now he’s scared—”

  “The Lag scared him? He must be easy.”

  “Well, evidently he is, because now he has this idea for these scam lines of credit. He tells us that if we come up with people who own their own home and have at least a hundred thousand in equity, he’ll dummy up the application and get seventy-five thousand for each of them. You know how these old-timers are, they got the first dollar they ever made. Most of their houses are paid off and have doubled and tripled in value since they bought them. We just have to give him the names and addresses that have that much equity. He’s even got a guy who’ll dummy up appraisal reports for a hundred apiece if we need him. Then, as soon as he approves them, we get a checkbook and can write checks on each of them for seventy-five thousand.”

  “How many we talking about?”

  “Tommy’s found a way to get all the information on any home we want from the county tax assessor through the Internet. So far he’s searched hundreds of houses, so there’s no limit to it. As soon as this banker gives us the word, we’ll hit it hard until it breaks down.”

  “What’s that work out to be?”

  “Every thirteen—you know, times seventy-five thousand—is almost a million dollars.”

  “What part of the city we talking about?”

  “Right here, Bensonhurst.”

  “You’re doing this in our own backyard?”

  “We thought it was best to stay local, you know, in case something went wrong on the homeowner end. It would be easier to reason with people who know who we are.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me about this?”

  “Well, it’s not completely in place yet, and you’re the one always talking about too many ears.”

  “And when it collapses, what then?”

  “Then he’ll have to do three or four years in one of the federal hotels. He’s about a hundred pounds overweight. So he’ll get himself in shape, get his teeth cleaned, get his cholesterol and blood pressure down. He’ll probably live twenty years longer. We’ll be saving his life.”

  “Who can he give up?”

  “Just Manny. He gave him the original loan and will handle all the contacts with him.”

  “Might be worth risking it just to get Baldovino to take the fall. I’d pay for the call to the auditors myself.”

  “I told you, I’ll take care of Manny.”

  DeMiglia’s eyes answered with a bright flash of anger. Finally, he drew in a big breath and spoke with a nonchalance that was practiced and chilling, an unmistakable warning that further insubordination would have irreversible consequences. “No, I don’t like it. You know who handles it when the banks are ripped off—the FBI. This thing sounds shaky to me. Everything going out of the bank and nothing coming in. They’re set up to spot bad money trends like that. They’re probably already looking at your guy for cooking the books from when he was loaning himself. It’s probably one of those stings, like Manny’s deal. Either that or they already got him and are setting you up. Either way I’m not giving you another chance to let those assholes humiliate us. You stay away from this, understand?”

  “We’ve put a lot of time in on this. Tommy’s got the info on all those houses already. This could be a big payday for everyone.”

  “We don’t do business in our own backyard. The reason these people protect us is because they know we’d never screw them. You got a lot of balls doing this here. You’re from Queens. You don’t have any idea about these people and obviously could give a good fuck less about them.”

  DeMiglia’s argument might have been convincing if Parisi thought the underboss cared about anyone but himself. With his injunction now registered, it suddenly became clear to Parisi that this wasn’t about getting caught. Other than Manny’s exposure, the bank scam offered little risk. The real purpose of the underboss’s visit had still not been revealed. “Well, that’s the best we’ve got right now. Unless you’ve got a suggestion.”

  A little surprised that Parisi didn’t argue his case further, DeMiglia lit a cigarette, taking the moment to stall, to make sure he wasn’t missi
ng something. “Yeah, I do. It’s a once in a lifetime score. Whether your crew has the finesse to pull it off is another question.”

  DeMiglia’s tactic was so obvious Parisi couldn’t help but misdirect him. “Well, if you don’t think we do, maybe I should look around for something else.”

  DeMiglia stood up. “Come on, we’ve been talking too long in one place. Let’s go for a walk.” Parisi couldn’t tell whether he was on to him or not.

  When they were within earshot of the others in the front room, DeMiglia asked, “When’s the last time you had this place swept for bugs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weren’t you told a minimum once a month? I have my joint and car done once a week. That’s the way they always get us. But they’ll never get me. Why the fuck can’t you people understand that?”

  Outside, the underboss scanned the neighborhood for anything out of the ordinary. The clouds had cleared and the heat had again become oppressive. They walked for a block before DeMiglia spoke again. “So, I assume you talked to Baldovino.”