Las Vegas was the promised land.
One time a jerkwater nothing of a place somewhere in the desert – gas stations, truckstops, a scattering of run-down and ramshackle slot-machine emporiums and greasy diners where the Blue Plate Special was the kind of mystery meat you wouldn’t serve to a dog – but envisioned as a glittering opportunity going to waste by Meyer Lansky. Lansky kept hounding Bugsy Siegel to see the possibilities, to open his mind and let it run wild – the legalized gambling, the unconquered territory – and finally, in 1941, Siegel sent a trusted lieutenant, Moe Sedway, to see if he couldn’t figure out what Lansky was talking about.
After the war was over, Siegel, far more interested in his Hollywood playboy lifestyle, finally looked for himself and got a glimpse of the Las Vegas that Lansky had conceived of. Las Vegas, and the six million dollars that Siegel ploughed not only into building The Flamingo but also into his own Swiss accounts, became the legacy that would not only memorialize his life, but also instigate his death.
Meyer Lansky, never a man to capitulate on his own vision, assumed control of The Flamingo, and within a year it turned a profit. Las Vegas became a honeypot for the wasps. Las Vegas State officials levied stringent rules and regulations to keep the families out, but it was futile. Lansky controlled The Thunder-bird; Moe Dalitz and the Cleveland mob assumed autonomy over The Desert Inn; The Sands was controlled jointly by Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and Doc Stacher. George Raft, the Hollywood actor, came in on the deal, and even Frank Sinatra was sold a nine percent share. The Fischetti brothers – the same brothers who took Sinatra to provide entertainment at the Havana Conference, Christmas Eve of 1946 – controlled The Sahara and The Riviera, alongside Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana. New England’s head honcho, Raymond Patriarca, moved in and took possession of The Dunes.
And then there was Caesar’s Palace. Back of Caesar’s were Accardo, Giancana, Patriarca, Jerry Catena from Vito Genovese’s outfit, and Vincent ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes’ Alo. Conversations with Don Ceriano never failed to include the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, leader of the Teamsters’ Union, a man who orchestrated the investment of ten million into the Palace and another forty million around Vegas’s other numerous hotspots. The money masqueraded as loans, but those loans were as good as permanent and no-one ever thought to return a dime. No-one thought, either, of the hundreds of thousands of over-the-hill truck drivers who never did get their pension checks as they’d been promised.
I went to Caesar’s soon after the Alcatraz Swimming Team arrived in Vegas. It was vast and extravagant, a place guested by those who, some decades before, might have guested the Titanic. I had never seen anything like it before. The hotels we had frequented in Havana, places like The Nacional and The Riviera, paled in comparison. I walked barefoot on a carpet that almost reached my ankles. I took a bath in a tub in which I could have effortlessly drowned. I lay on a bed, wide like a football field, and when I called room service they were there within minutes. Las Vegas seemed to be everything I could never have imagined it to be, and though I was there in Caesar’s no more than forty-eight hours, I felt I had – at last – truly arrived.
Once Don Ceriano’s business at the hotel was done, I and the rest of the crew moved to the outskirts of the city. We took a house on Alvarado Street. Don Ceriano came down the following morning and he gathered us together.
‘People here,’ he said, ‘ain’t nothing like the people back in Miami. This is where the real deal lives. This is where we get the running orders, and we run just like they say. Job needs doing we do it, no questions asked, no answers expected.’
He smiled, leaned back in his chair. ‘We ain’t smalltime, never have been, never will be, but this is earned territory. Lot of blood got spilled to make Las Vegas, and that blood belonged to men like us, men who were better than us truth be known, and we keep our hands in our pockets and our eyes going both ways at once if we wanna stay alive. You get me?’
There was a consensual affirmative from the gathered crew.
‘Down here you got politics and kickbacks and folks in high places who wanna stay high. They don’t wanna get their shoes dirty kicking shit down the sidewalk. That’s where we come in, and if we do what we’re asked then there’ll never be a shortage of money or girls or respect. Key to all of this is knowing your place on the totem pole, and while we may not be feeling sand between our toes we sure as shit ain’t the fancy bit on top.’
Where we were on the totem pole was the hired hands, the wet crew, the guys that got a call in the early hours of the morning to go down to The Sands, come in quiet through the back kitchen doorway, turn left, left again, and there in the meat locker find some poor dumb schmuck who figured he could take the place with a blindside hand fat with Schaffners; figured he could get the dealer to catch the eye of some pretty cigarette girl and slip a jack where it shouldn’t have been; where we were was hammering that poor schmooze’s thumbs to a pulp and then kicking his ass six ways to Sunday so he and his confederates got the message loud and clear; where we were was driving a trailer jammed to the gunnels with stolen liquor and Luckies out of the desert at three in the a.m., parking it up behind a cheap bordello, unloading those cases into a lockdown garage, slipping away quietly and losing the trailer down a ravine near Devil’s Eyelid, and walking four miles back on foot as the sun rose and the heat got mighty and the shirt you were wearing stuck to your back like a second skin.
Where we were was things like that, and though there was always an element of edge to such things, though the fun you got out of it was never more than the fun you made, there were times I believed that I was destined for so much more. And that’s why I spoke to Carlo Evangelisti, and that’s how I ended up involved in the death of Don Ceriano and taking an audience with Sam Giancana’s cousin, Fabio Calligaris.
Early part of 1970. Six months and I would be thirty-four years old. I was all grown up in some ways, other ways still like the kid from way back when. Watched the people around me, watched them well, saw them married, having kids, and then walking out on their wives and screwing some two-bit floozy who shifted smokes from a tray at one of the smaller casinos. Never made a deal of sense to me, but then I don’t know it was ever supposed to. Couldn’t understand how a man could have a family and then do such a thing. Taking a wife and children was the farthest thing from my mind at the time, but right back to my father and the way he treated my mother I could never really understand the seeming absence of loyalty that these people demonstrated. I spoke with Don Ceriano. He took me aside, and quietly he said, ‘There are some things you see, some things not. Likewise, there are some things you hear, and just as many you don’t. A wise man knows which is which, Ernesto,’ and we never spoke of it again.
Business was varied but good. There were younger men earning their scars in my place. Days came when I would be despatching one man to make collections, another for enforcement of an agreement made with the Ceriano crew. I would spend most of my time with Don Ceriano himself, there at his right hand, listening to him, speaking with him, learning more of the ways of the world. Only once during that year was I directly involved in the death of a man. A mile or so from the house, back of the intersection that split that quarter of the city in half, we ran a bookmaker’s shop out of a factory warehouse. Warehouse fronted for some frozen orange juice exporting scam, good-sized operation turning over something in the region of five million a year. Warehouse was owned by one of Slapsie Maxie’s cousins, man by the name of Roberto Albarelli. Fat guy, too fat by too much, and the way he’d lumber across the yard shouting and badmouthing the Ricans and niggers who worked the joint made me smile. Asshole was a good enough guy, but sure as hell he looked like a gunny-sack full of shit tied at the neck and busting in the middle. Rumor had it when he fucked his wife she always had to ride on top, otherwise he would’ve suffocated the poor bitch.
Weekend came around. Me and Slapsie, and another pair from the Alcatraz Swimming Team, went down there to make some book, to collect some dues for Don Ceriano. Found Roberto sweating like a stuck pig on barbecue day in the trailer office he managed on the backlot. Those days I was old enough to do the talking when Slapsie didn’t feel like it so the conversation went down between me and the lard-ass.
‘Jeez, stinks like a Turkish sauna bath in here, Roberto. What the fuck you been doin’?’
‘Got trouble,’ he started, and his voice went high-pitched at the end and I knew there was something he was excited about.
‘Trouble? Kinda trouble?’
‘Got skinned by some asshole Puerto Rican motherfucker for eight grand and change,’ Roberto said.
Slapsie pulled me up a chair and I sat down facing the fat guy. ‘Eight grand? What the fuck you talkin’ about? What Puerto Rican motherfucker?’
‘Puerto Rican motherfucker who skinned me for eight grand this morning,’ Roberto said. ‘That Puerto Rican motherfucker.’
‘Whoa there, slow the fuck down, Roberto. What the hell you talkin’ about?’
Roberto took several deep breaths. He murmured some Italian prayer under his breath. His shirt was black beneath the armpits and he smelled ripe like a sour watermelon.
‘Took a long shot on a mare that should’ve made it no further than the boneyard,’ he said. ‘Thing was nothing more than three pints of glue and a handbag. Took a thousand dollars and knew I had it made… dumb stupid motherfuckin’ Puerto Rican asshole wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the next. So anyways and whatever, I took the fucking bet, okay? I took the goddamned stupid fucking bet and the boneyard mule came in just before a pony that’d lost its rider halfway down the lane. Figured I had it made. Cut for Don Ceriano, cut for me, and we’s all happy as Larry for the weekend. Puerto Rican motherfucker comes down with his tab and claims an eight-to-one payback placing first in the line-up. I tells him he’s got a mouth full of shit and a head full of piss, and then in comes three of his asshole Puerto Rican motherfucker friends, and they got heat on them, one’s got a lead pipe and whatever the fuck. He shows me the ticket, and even my blind grandmother, may her soul rest in peace amen, coulda seen that they scratched out the name of the boneyarder and wrote in the name of the winning horse.’
I was watching Roberto with both my eyes going the same way. Roberto was family, as good as family got, but he had a reputation for varnishing the lies with a gloss of truth. He knew well enough that any lie around this place walked with mighty short legs, but that wouldn’t have stopped him hitting on the race winnings for a few grand. From what I could see he was telling the truth, and already my mind was asking premature questions.
‘So these assholes demanded a payback of eight grand, and shit I didn’t wanna die, Ernesto, I really didn’t wanna die today, so what the fuck was I gonna do? There was four of them and one of me, and you know I don’t move so fast these days, and they had heat and they had a freakin’ lead pipe, and it was right there in their eyes that they didn’t give one single scrawny rat’s ass about whacking me and taking everything I got.’
Roberto started blubbering then, shaking like Jell-O near a drum roll, and I gripped his shoulder and held it firm and made him look in my eyes and tell that what he was saying was the truth so help him God.
‘Sure as shit is brown and the Pope ain’t never got laid,’ he said.
‘It’s the fucking truth, Ernesto… those asshole Puerto Rican motherfuckers took eight grand off of me and Don Ceriano, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do.’
‘Where’re they at, Roberto?’
He looked surprised. ‘Who?’
‘The goddamned Puerto Ricans, Roberto, who the fuck d’ya think I mean? Jeez, goddammit, Roberto, sometimes you are the dumbest motherfucker ever to walk the face of God’s green earth.’
‘The bowling alley down on southside, you know?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t fucking know, Roberto. What bowling alley?’
‘Near Seventh and Stinson-’
‘I know where he means,’ Slapsie said quietly.
‘So I’m gonna go down there, Roberto, and I’m gonna find me some Puerto Ricans living the high-life with eight grand and change, and I’m gonna sort this thing out. But I’ll tell you once and once only… I go down there and you’ve pissed down my back and told me it’s rainin’ then I’m gonna come back and cut your goddamned pecker off and make you eat it, you get it?’
‘It’s true, all of it’s true,’ Roberto said, and then he started crying and blubbering again.
I stood up. I looked at Slapsie. ‘You come with me, and you,’ I said pointing to another of the crew. I turned back to Roberto. ‘I’m gonna leave one of the boys here to take care of you ’til we get back, okay? You try any weird shit and he’s gonna ventilate your fucking head, you understand?’
Roberto nodded. He nodded between one sobbing wretched sound and the next.
Me and Slapsie and the younger guy, kid with bad skin and crooked teeth called Marco who was related to Johnny the Limpet in some way or other – we took the car and headed southside. Slapsie drove, he knew the way, and within twenty-five minutes we’d pulled up outside some beat-to-shit bowling alley with a small greasy-looking diner attached to the side like a malignant tumor. Outside there was one teenager, couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, and from the look of him he was as high as Vesuvius on some filthy-smelling shit these assholes always smoked.
I nodded at Marco. He got out of the car and walked straight towards the kid. A handful of words. The kid nodded and sat down on the ground. He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, lowered his head until his chin touched his chest and he stayed there like a sleeping Mexican outside a five-dollar bordello.
Me and Slapsie came from the front of the car. Slapsie carried a baseball bat, a good solid wooden thing with a four-inch nail hammered through the head. See him coming like that and you’d piss your pants and reaffirm your belief in the baby Jesus. I smiled to myself. Adrenaline pumped like a jailhouse bodybuilder.
The door wasn’t locked. Me and Slapsie went through quietly. Could hear voices as soon as we were inside, that and the thunder of a bowling ball making its way down one of the lanes, the clatter of pins as the ball made its target, the whoops and hollers of three or four dumbass Puerto Rican motherfuckers who’d figured their luck was in when they took down Roberto Albarelli for eight grand and change.
They saw Slapsie first. The one nearest us couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. He looked for a second like someone had asked him to cut his own pecker off, and then he started screaming at us in Spanish. The second Rican came up behind him. He looked pissed, real pissed, and then the third one came, and the third one was reaching in back of his pants waistband for what could only have been his heat.
Slapsie was a big guy, big like Joe Louis, yet when he decided to run he ran like one of those small greyhound niggers, all stick-bones and painted-on muscles and not an ounce of fat to share around.
He came alongside the first guy and pushed him aside, the second one too, and then he let fly with his bat and caught the gun-puller in the upper arm with the four-inch nail.
Can’t remember a scream that ever sounded quite like that before or after. Later I figured it must have been the acoustics of that place, for the sound that erupted from his mouth was like some strange prehistoric bird. He went down like a bag of bricks and lay there for some time. Slapsie kicked him sideways into the bowling lane and he didn’t move. I don’t know whether he was out cold or frightened stiff, but whichever it was it was fine by me.
I approached the taller of the Ricans. In my hand I held a.38, just loose at my side but enough so they both could see it.
‘Eight grand and change, please,’ I said.
The taller one looked at me kind of weird. I shot him in the left foot. He went down silent, didn’t even utter a sound, and but for the scrabbling of his foot on the glossed surface of the floor you wouldn’t have known he was there.
‘Eight grand and change, please… and don’t make me ask you again or you’ll be leaking out through a hole in your fucking head.’
The shorter one made a move. Slapsie had him gripped by the back of his neck before he went a foot.
‘You wanna play a ball or two?’ I asked Slapsie.
Slapsie grinned. ‘Sure… ain’t played this shit for years.’
‘Put his head in there,’ I told Slapsie, and Slapsie dragged the kid across the floor and pushed his head down into the bowling ball return chute. I could hear him screaming. Sound echoed out from the chute like he was calling me long-distance from Poughkeepsie.
The first ball Slapsie threw went like a rocket along the lane and would’ve broken any number of pins had his aim been any good.
‘Throw like a bitch,’ I said, and Slapsie laughed.
I heard the ball go back over the far edge and drop into the return runway. I listened as it was projected back upwards and started its rapidly accelerating journey home.
The kid screamed. He knew what was coming.
The sound as that bowling ball hammered into the top of his skull was like Slapsie’s baseball bat colliding with a side of beef. The kid didn’t utter a sound.
I turned and looked at the kid with the bullet in his foot. His eyes were wide, his skin white like a nun in wintertime.
‘Try again,’ I told Slapsie, and he let another ball fly down the lane.
Bang on target. Strike.
The pins caterwauled away like frightened children, every last one of them.
‘Motherfucker!’ Slapsie shouted, and he did this little dance from one foot to the other.
We waited. We quietened down. The ball dropped down the back and started its way home.
The sound of contact was wet and crunching. Whatever tension may have existed in the kid’s body dropped out of him completely. I hauled him up and let him slide to the ground. The top of his head was little more than mush as far down as the bridge of his nose. One of his eyes lolled drunkenly out of its socket and dangled against his blood-spattered cheek.
I turned and looked at the kid on the floor.
‘Eight grand and change, please,’ I said quietly.
The kid raised his hand and pointed to a bag on the seats behind us. Slapsie walked over and opened it up. He smiled. He nodded. He picked up the bag with his left hand, and then he took one step backwards, another, and with his right hand he raised his bat way over his shoulder and brought it down like Thor’s hammer. The four-inch nail punctured the kid’s forehead. His eyes bugged out like they were on springs, and then there was nothing but the nail through the bat holding him up off the ground. Slapsie wrenched sideways and the nail tore free. The kid slumped to the ground and rolled onto his side.
I looked at Slapsie. Slapsie looked at me.
‘Figure the fat guy is off the hook,’ he said quietly.
‘Figure he is,’ I replied.
We left as quietly as we had entered. The teenager outside still sat there with his head on his knees. Back of his neck showed a dark black bruise just above his shoulders. Marco had more than likely stamped on him and just broken his freakin’ neck.
Business done, we went back to see Albarelli. We gave him the money. He would’ve sucked my dick if I’d asked him. Told him not to say a word. Way it worked was that you just dealt with the bad news, but you never passed it up the line. Albarelli wouldn’t have said a word anyway, would’ve shot his reputation to pieces, but despite that there was a form and a protocol to these things. Don Ceriano never knew what Don Ceriano didn’t need to know. Like he’d told me himself, There are some things you see, some things not. Likewise there are some things you hear, and just as many you don’t. A wise man knows which is which.
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.
We took Don Ceriano’s car. Don Ceriano drove, beside him Carlo Evangelisti, myself and Don Calligaris in the back. We drove for an endless time, it seemed, but the streets were still familiar and so we could not have traveled for very long. Don Ceriano spoke incessantly. I wanted to tell him to shut up, that he would need all his energy to fight against what would inevitably come, and when he asked questions of me there was nothing I could do but murmur an affirmative or a denial.
‘Once again you think too much and say too little, Ernesto,’ he said, to which Don Calligaris interjected, ‘Seems that would be a good attitude for a whole lot more of our people,’ and they all laughed, and they were laughing in the face of something terrible, and it seemed that Don Ceriano was the only one who could not see it. Perhaps he was blinded by greed, the promise of money or reputation or acknowledgement from the family, but he was blind whatever the reason, and inside I had already done my grieving because I knew there was nothing I could do to save him.
Don Ceriano was dead even in the moment that he had awoken that morning, perhaps earlier, perhaps in some brief exchange of words that had taken place between his visitors from Chicago the night before. Only later would I understand the weeks and months of prelude to his death. Only later would I understand that the decision had been made by someone he had never even met.
We pulled over at the back of a warehouse downtown. We were close to the edge of the desert. The sun was high, the air heated and dry, and there was a breathless tension in the atmosphere.
‘Here we can do anything to a car that you can do to a car,’ Don Ceriano said. ‘Here we have a crew who can steal cars to order, who can strip and remove chassis numbers, change plates and log books and whatever the hell else in a handful of hours. We run maybe six to a dozen vehicles through here a week, many of them winding up in the mid-west and the northern states.’ He was lighthearted, proud even, and he sat back in the driver’s seat with the window open, in his hand one of the expensive cigars that had been delivered that very morning.
It was in that moment, as he raised the cigar to his lips, that Don Fabio Calligaris whipped the wire over Don Ceriano’s head and pulled it back again with every ounce of strength he possessed. Caught between the wire and his neck was Don Ceriano’s right wrist, and I watched with a sense of abject and disconnected horror as the wire cut into the flesh and the cigar he was holding was crushed into his face.
Even as instinct urged me forward, urged me to do something to help Don Ceriano, I glanced to my left and saw Don Evangelisti looking at me. His eyes challenged me to move. The way he held his body, the way he leaned against the back of the seat, I knew he held a gun that was aimed directly at some part of my body.
Everything seemed to slide away into a vague unreality. I felt the urgency of Don Ceriano’s helplessness. I felt the need to do something to help him. I was aware of my loyalty to him, the agreements that had been made, and against all of these things the necessity to preserve my own life and the memory of my family.
‘Aah fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Don Calligaris was saying, and then Don Ceriano started thrashing and screaming.
Don Calligaris leaned back and placed the bottom of his right foot against the back of the driver’s seat. He clenched his fists, and started jerking the wire back again and again. Don Ceriano screamed louder. Blood poured from the gash in his wrist, a gash that grew deeper with every sudden movement.
I watched in horror. I could not move. Everything inside me told me to do something, anything, but I seemed unable to move.
Don Ceriano, his eyes wide, his mouth open – screaming in agony as the pain increased – looked at me.
I looked back at him – blank, feeling nothing.
I was oblivious of the gun that Don Evangelisti held. I had gone beyond the point of concerning myself with what might happen if I reacted. All I knew was that this was not my time to die. It could not be.
‘For Christ’s sake shut the fuck up!’ Evangelisti was shouting, as if Don Ceriano had a choice, and it was in that second, as I watched the blood pumping from his wrist, as I watched the muscles straining in Fabio Calligaris’s face, as I saw the sudden panic that registered on the face of the man beside Ceriano, that I knew I had to do something.
I looked to my left. I remember that. I looked to my left out through the window, looked out towards the desert, the sheer absence of anything recognizable against the horizon, and I asked myself if this could be the end of my life also.
My mother looked back at me. I had to survive, if only for her. That was my decision. The decision prompted action, and I clenched my fist. I leaned forward, past Don Calligaris, and with my right hand I hammered sideways into Don Ceriano’s temple.
He stopped screaming for a split second.
He looked back at me over his shoulder. He realized in that moment that I was not going to help him, that I had made a decision to let him die in that car.
He started screaming again.
I pushed Don Calligaris aside, the wire loosened from its hold, and awkwardly thrusting myself between the two front seats I gripped Don Ceriano’s throat with my hands. Again his screaming ceased. I pushed his arms down, removed the obstruction to the wire, and then I fell back into my seat.
Calligaris looked at me for a heartbeat moment, and then, once more and with force, he jerked the wire back. I heard it slide through the flesh of Don Ceriano’s neck. I heard his breath fighting to escape through the sudden rush of blood, heard his feet as they kicked against the pedals in the well of the car, and within seconds he slumped back.
Don Ceriano was dead. He, who had been spoken of weeks before in New York; he, whose death warrant was signed, sealed and delivered before Christmas; he, whose name had already passed into the vast and forgotten memory of the National Commission of la Cosa Nostra, was dead.
Don Ceriano, his head lolled back against the seat-rest, bled out into his own lap while Fabio Calligaris and Carlo Evangelisti closed their eyes and regained their balance.
I said nothing. Not a word.
After some minutes Don Calligaris opened the door and stepped out of the car. I followed him and walked a good ten or fifteen yards away from the vehicle. Don Evangelisti followed suit, but then he turned back towards the warehouse and made his way towards it swiftly. Somewhere I heard an engine revving, a heavy diesel engine. From the back doors of the warehouse a wide tractor with a loading scoop on the front emerged. We three watched as the tractor rumbled across the dirt and neared the car. Within a minute or two the tractor had lifted the car as if it were made of nothing but paper, and turning slowly, lumbering like some vast prehistoric creature with prey in its jaws, the tractor made its way back towards the warehouse, towards the car crusher that sat idling and patient on the other side of the lot.
I watched it go. My heart beat slowly. This was life and death in Las Vegas, family-style.
Don Calligaris walked towards me and offered me a cigarette. He lit it for me, and then with the same dead stare he fixed me to the ground. He smiled coldly. ‘What did you see here, Ernesto Cabrera Perez?’
I shook my head. ‘Here? I didn’t see anything here, Don Calligaris.’
I saw then, as he raised his cigarette to his lips, the blood on his hands. I looked down and saw blood on my own. There was blood on Carlo Evangelisti’s five-hundred-dollar suit. Don Giancarlo Ceriano’s blood.
‘You saw nothing here,’ Don Calligaris stated matter-of-factly.
I shook my head. ‘There was nothing to see.’
He nodded and looked down at the ground. ‘You ever seen New York, Ernesto?’
I shrugged.
‘No?’ he asked.
I shrugged again, shook my head. ‘No, I’ve never seen New York.’
‘There could be a place in New York for a man such as yourself, a man who sees little and speaks less.’
‘There could be,’ I said.
‘Man like you could make some money in New York, have a position of influence… have the time of his life in fact.’ He laughed as if remembering some personal experience.
I looked across at Don Evangelisti. He was smiling too.
‘You’re not from Chicago, are you?’ I asked.
Don Calligaris shook his head. ‘No, we’re not from Chicago.’
‘You don’t work for Sam Giancana, and you are not his cousin?’
Calligaris smiled once again. ‘Sam Giancana is an asshole, a shoeshine boy in a five-hundred-dollar suit. Sam Giancana will be dead before the year is out. No, we do not work for him, and no I am not his cousin. We work for people who are an awful lot more powerful than Sam Giancana, and you can come work for us if you wish.’
I was quiet for a moment. With the death of Don Ceriano there was nothing for me here. I was the hired hand, part of the wet-job crew, and for all I knew Slapsie Maxie, Johnny the Limpet and the rest of the Alcatraz Swimming Team were as dead as Don Ceriano somewhere in Vegas.
‘There is nothing for me here,’ I said. ‘I can come to New York.’
They both smiled. Don Evangelisti said something in Italian and they laughed some more.
Don Calligaris walked towards me. He reached out his blood-spattered hand and I shook it. ‘Welcome to the real world, Ernesto Perez,’ he said quietly, and then he released my hand, and started walking, and I followed him back to the warehouse where a car was waiting for us.
I looked back as we drove away, saw the tractor as it raised Don Ceriano’s car high above the ground and then let it fall into the crusher. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for his soul, even now on its swift and inevitable passage into Hell.
I turned around and looked forward, because forward was the only way I could look, and if New York was my destination then so be it.
I was thirty-six years old. I was alone. I was no longer part of this family. I took what was given to me and there seemed no choice.
By the time I boarded an aircraft, in my hand a single case holding all my possessions, I had separated myself from all that had come before, and prepared to start over again.
This was how it had to be done, for to look back was to see the past, and the past was too painful to see.
New York beckoned; I flew out of Las Vegas towards it with hope in my heart.