Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [21]
“Put me down for the eighty years first,” Orena said.
He went to Atlanta, and his lawyers entered a motion to throw everything out and let him come home. He was certain his motion would prevail over the whole government. He called Gina, his girl on Long Island, and told her, “Get my suits and have the tailor take them in. I’ve lost weight down here. Then go and get me some new shirts. I’m going to win this motion and make bail. We’re going to Europe on the first day.”
Orena was brought up by prison bus from Atlanta. His motion, a foot-high stack of paper, was on Weinstein’s desk. The judge had studied it for some days.
Gina was in the courtroom with a suit for her now-slim love. The clerk called out “All rise,” and Weinstein entered the courtroom. The door to the detention pens opened and a slim Vic Orena came in, his eyes glistening with hope.
“What is he doing here?” Weinstein asked. “He belongs in prison.”
“He is here on his motion,” the lawyer said.
“Motion denied,” Weinstein said. “Marshal, take this man back to prison.”
Vic Orena, his one and a half minutes of hope over, went through the door and onto a prison bus that would stop five or six times at dingy county jails on the way to Atlanta.
His love, Gina, with his suit folded neatly over her arms, went back to Long Island.
Vic Orena is still doing the eighty-years part of his sentence; then all that remains for him to do is the two lifetimes.
There is now no real Colombo family boss whose name is worth typing.
THE LARGEST, FIERCEST, AND BUSIEST FAMILY, the Genovese, had Vincent “the Chin” Gigante as boss—the boss in a bathrobe. Babbling in pajamas, robe, and truck driver’s cap, he staggered through the night on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and entered the black-painted private club at number 206, where the guys played cards all night. The Chin, suddenly alert, sat down at the game. The cards were dealt. He picked up his hand and without looking at it called “Gin!” Money was pushed to him. Next he tired of picking up the cards. While they were being dealt, he called “Gin!” Always he got paid.
When in front of Judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn, he flopped around in his chair and mumbled for hours without stopping. My guess, and it is well educated, is that he was saying the Hail Mary, a lovely prayer that is short and can be repeated without end. Lawyers presented results of new tests they said showed the Chin had Alzheimer’s. Weinstein, who reads science periodicals every morning, was greatly interested in the new test, the PET scan. “Congratulations. You are on the cutting edge of science,” he told the lawyers. “But you omitted one important part of your test. In order to show that it is Alzheimer’s, you need an autopsy.”
Gigante shook and went to prison. The outfit was left with nothing.
Now there were five families in name and no bosses. At the start of 2005, in the midst of all the squalling over the Christmas money that went to Joe Massino’s wife, federal agents came through Brooklyn like armed locusts and arrested twenty-seven members of the Bonanno family.
It followed that one morning when Tony Café was at home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his eighty-year-old sister, the last of four sisters, the first three dead of cancer, he heard knocking on the door downstairs. He looked out. He could see two agents, each holding up identification.
Tony Café sighed. “I’ll be right down,” he called. He threw his wallet to his sister.
When he got downstairs there were three agents, one of them a little Irish woman who did the talking.
“Are you going to lock me up?” Tony asked.
“No, but you’re number one.”
She made it official. A week before, an article by Jerry Capeci appeared in New York magazine and was first to mention that Tony Café—proper name Anthony Rabito—was suddenly an important figure. Capeci, whose Gangland News is on the Internet, is the authority on the Mafia to the extent that all those left in crime know that on Thursday, when