“Vincent Gargano was in here looking for you.”
The bartender had leaned over with his elbows on the bar to confide this news. He apparently expected Ricky to crap his pants when he heard it. When Ricky played it off, didn’t even blink, the bartender straightened, relieved and disappointed.
“What about?”
“He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“When?”
“Couple nights ago.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I haven’t seen yuz.”
“Thanks.”
“What do I do if he comes back?”
“Just tell him the truth, Sull. Keep your nose out of it.”
“Hey, maybe it’s nothing, right?”
“Yeah. Just business.”
“May be nothing.”
“It is nothing. I just got through saying.”
The bartender twisted a rag in his hands, anxious to change the subject. He gestured with his chin toward the evening Globe in front of Ricky.
COP FOILS STRANGLER ATTACK
Big photo of Joe with his grim scowl and mussed uniform, a damsel swooned in his arms. “What’s with your brother? Can’t keep his mug out of the papers lately.”
“Who? You mean Elvis?”
“Yeah, Elvis Daley.” The bartender snorted, but he was plainly worried. “Hey, Rick, no offense, but if you got trouble with Vincent Gargano, I’d just as soon you don’t bring it in here, know what I mean?”
“It’s no trouble. I told you.”
“Just the same.”
A look passed between them. Because of course it was trouble. Vincent “The Animal” Gargano was a stalker for Carlo Capobianco, the North End boss currently waging a campaign to consolidate the countless smalltime bookmaking operations in the city under his own control-a campaign that was building to its own bloody climax.
Until then, organized crime in Boston had never really deserved the name. No one had ever succeeded in organizing the city, or even tried. Boston had never produced an Al Capone or a Lucky Luciano, a Caesar to unite it. So the city’s gangland remained fragmented and smalltime. It was not even the seat of power for the Mafia in New England. That was Providence, where a heavily Italian population had created more favorable conditions for the Italian Mob than Irish-dominated Boston. It was from Providence that Raymond Patriarca governed New England beginning in the early 1950s, with the blessing of the Genovese and Colombo families in New York. Boston was a backwater. But now perhaps the city had found its Caesar after all, a cocky, pugnacious North Ender, the son of Italian immigrants, whose talent was perfectly aligned with the greatest opportunity: gambling.
Carlo “Charlie” Capobianco was a born bookie. He had got out of the Navy in 1947; just three years later he was running the bookmaking rackets of the North End consigliere Joe Lombardo. But this, Capobianco found, was no military operation. The bookies Capobianco saw were amateurs. They took bets on the numbers in the back of their groceries or barrooms. They treated the books almost as a secondary business. Most were independents: they paid a tribute to the Mafia in exchange for protection from the cops and from Mob shakedowns, and access to the race wire and layoff bank. Nobody was monitoring them, nobody knew how much they were making or how much more they could afford to pay. It was a mess, run by old Mustache Petes like Lombardo who did not understand the numbers business or the potential of a properly managed, centralized gambling network.
Capobianco set out to take it over. From now on, there would be no more independents. Everyone worked for Capobianco and everyone paid. The bookies would render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. A tax on your take. A tax on your telephone-your lifeline, your link to the whole operation. A tax just for staying in the business. Charlie Capobianco wanted a piece of every nickel bet.
He was not interested in anything but bookmaking and the profits it threw off. He did not dabble in other Mob businesses-unions, dockworkers, truck hijacking, pornography, drug trafficking-because that was not where the big money was. Gambling, that was where the money was. Capobianco had grasped a simple truth: The Mafia was in the gambling business. Since the end of Prohibition, gambling had been far and away the Mafia’s biggest source of income. The rest was a sideshow, for dumb-shit Irishmen and grabby New Yorkers. Capobianco meant to stick to his knitting.
He streamlined the whole operation. Business grew. In boiler rooms in the North End, phones rang off the hook. A dozen guys in each room to handle all the action. Horse races in the afternoon, dog races at night, numbers all day. In the horse room, Danny Capobianco, Charlie’s little brother, carried a roll of half dollars to pay the phone operators, fifty cents a bet.
But alone, Capobianco could only go so far. He was not a made man. That meant he could not muscle in on crews that operated with Raymond Patriarca’s blessing. He couldn’t collect a debt if the deadbeat also owed Patriarca. He could not even protect himself from the other sharks in Boston’s chaotic crimeworld. When they began to shake Capobianco down-when they taxed him -Capobianco did what he had to do.
He drove down to Providence to see The Man. Capobianco handed Ray Patriarca an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars cash and he offered the don a deal: fifty grand down and a guarantee of at least a hundred thousand a year in exchange for a monopoly on bookmaking in Boston. Patriarca accepted.
The deal changed everything. Capobianco moved in on the bookie rackets citywide, and in the early 1960s Boston got bloody.
Capobianco unleashed his stalkers, now augmented by a battalion of Mafia strong-arm men, hundreds of them, with orders to bring the bookies to heel. The stalkers confiscated half the bookies’ take-the tax. Bookmaking profits in turn fed a loan-sharking business, as sharks put that money back on the street at three or four percent a week. And that was the fatal formula: enforcers ordered to show no mercy in collecting debts; and debtors everywhere-bookies unable to keep up with the taxes, borrowers unable to keep up with the vig of three, even four hundred percent a year on sharked money. Bodies began to fall, particularly in the run-down South End. A New Boston indeed.
In the mayhem, a new generation of enforcers flourished. They were feral and vicious. Their violence was flamboyant. They cruised the city like sharks.
The apotheosis of this new breed was Vincent “The Animal” Gargano. And he was hunting for Ricky.