Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [16]
What he wanted first was to play Italians who were in the Mafia. The crime actors had been mostly Jewish: Edward G. Robinson, Alan King, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Paul Muni, Jerry Orbach. De Niro and Pacino took it over. They were the stars of an American industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, soundmen, location men, and casting agents who were all on the job and on the payroll because of the Mafia.
Now the whole Mafia industry is slipping on a large patch of black ice. Soon it will be totally gone.
“We had one wiseguy in the first season,” Bill Clark, former executive producer of the now departed NYPD Blue, told me the other day. “That was all, because they just couldn’t make it as characters for us. Their day was gone.”
Both of us remember when it wasn’t. There was a hot late afternoon in July 1979 when Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno Mob at the time, was shot dead at a picnic lunch in the backyard of Joe and Mary’s Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. Bill Clark, then a homicide detective, was the first detective on the scene. He looked at Galante and grabbed the phone and called my office at the New York Daily News.
The great A.M., secretary, took the call. She was a Catholic schoolgirl who was a true daughter of the Mafia in the Bronx.
“Tell Jimmy that Galante is down on Knickerbocker Avenue,” Clark said. Then he hung up. Inspectors were barging in to grab the phone and have it for themselves the rest of the day. There was no such thing as a cell phone.
Secretary A.M. sat on the call for one hour.
“People shouldn’t know about a thing like this,” she said.
Today, aside from grieving showmen, the only ones rooting for the mobsters to survive—or at least for keeping some of them around—are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase Mafia gangsters across the hard streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. The squads are numbered, such as C-16 for the Colombo squad. Each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one capo in the family. The work is surveillance and interviews. Agents will interview a cabdriver or a mobster’s sister. It doesn’t matter. Just do the interview. Then they get to their desk and fill out FD-302 forms that get piled up in the office. They must do it in order to keep the FBI way of life in New York. They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, and do no real heavy lifting on the job. After a five-hour day they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents, and they always talk about what jobs they want when they retire. If, after interviewing, surveilling, and paying stool pigeons, they do not come in with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face doing true work for their country: antiterrorism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or tent living in Afghanistan.
“What do you want?” Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue, in front of the great De Robertis espresso shop.
“We just want to talk to you,” one of the two FBI agents said.
“You’ll have to wait here until I get a lawyer to stop by,” Red Hot said.
“We just wanted you to take a ride with us down to the office.”
“The answer is no,” Red Hot said.
“We just want to get fresh fingerprints. We haven’t taken yours in a while.”
“That’s because I was in jail. And nothing happened to the prints you have. What are you trying to say, that they faded? They wore out?”
His friend Frankie “Biff” LoBritto cut in, “Red Hot, if you go with them, you won’t come back. They’ll make up a case in the car.”
When the agents left, Red Hot said in a tired voice, “They’ll be back. They’re going to make up something and lock me up. Don’t even worry about it.”
Some nights later Red Hot was walking into De Robertis when he dropped dead on the sidewalk.
“He ruined the agents’ schedules,” Frankie Biff said.