Omerta - Mario Puzo [40]
But now, years later, Cilke realized it was happening. Inzio Tulippa wanted his own little nuclear bomb. He lured American scientists to South America and built them labs and supplied money for their research. And it was Tulippa who wanted access to Don Aprile’s banks to establish a billion-dollar war chest for the purchase of equipment and material—so Cilke had determined in his own investigation. What was he to do now?
He would discuss it soon with the director on his next trip to FBI headquarters in Washington. But he doubted they would be able to solve the problem. And a man like Inzio Tulippa would never give up.
. . .
Inzio Tulippa arrived in the United States to meet with Timmona Portella and to pursue the acquisition of Don Aprile’s banks. At the same time, the head of the Corleonesi cosca of Sicily, Michael Grazziella, arrived in New York to work out with Tulippa and Portella the details on the distribution of illegal drugs all over the world. Their arrivals were very different.
Tulippa arrived in New York on his private jet, which also carried fifty of his followers and bodyguards. These men wore a certain uniform: white suits, blue shirts, and pink ties, with floppy yellow Panama hats on their heads. They could have been members of some South American rhumba band. Tulippa and his entourage all carried Costa Rican passports; Tulippa, of course, had Costa Rican diplomatic immunity.
Tulippa and his men moved into a small private hotel owned by the consul general in the name of the Peruvian consulate. And Tulippa did not slink around like some shady drug dealer. He was, after all, the Vaccinator, and the representatives of the large American corporations vied to make his stay a pleasant one. He attended the openings of Broadway shows, the ballet at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, and concerts given by famous South American artists. He even appeared on talk shows in his role as president of the South American Confederation of Farm Workers and used the forums to defend the use of illegal drugs. One of these interviews—with Charlie Rose on PBS—became notorious.
Tulippa claimed it was a disgraceful form of colonialism that the United States fought against the use of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana all over the world. The South American workers depended on the drug crops to keep themselves alive. Who could blame a man whose poverty entered his dreams to purchase a few hours of relief by using drugs? It was an inhumane judgment. And what about tobacco and alcohol? They did much more damage.
At this, fifty followers in the studio, Panama hats in laps, applauded vigorously. When Charlie Rose asked about the damage drugs wreaked, Tulippa was especially sincere. His organization was pouring huge sums of money into research to modify drugs so that they would not be harmful; in short, they would be prescription drugs. The programs would be run by reputable doctors rather than pawns of the American Medical Association, who were so unreasonably antinarcotics and lived in dread of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. No, narcotics could be the next great blessing for humanity. The fifty yellow Panama hats went flying into the air.
Meanwhile, the Corleonesi cosca chief, Michael Grazziella, made an altogether different entry into the United States. He slipped in unobtrusively, with only two bodyguards. He was a thin and scrawny man with a faunlike head and a knife scar across his mouth. He walked with a cane, for a bullet had shattered his leg when he was a young Palermo picciotto. He had a reputation for diabolical cunning—and it was said that he had planned the murder of the two greatest anti-Mafia magistrates in Sicily.
Grazziella