6

Corrado Prizzi sat in his favorite chair gazing dreamily, out of the large window sixteen feet away, at the view of lower Manhattan, which resembled the teeth in the lower jaw of a tyrannosaurus rex, while he absorbed the tenderness of Aroldo’s cavatina “Sotto il sol di Siria.”

Corrado Prizzi was the inventor of franchised crime; sort of a Sicilian Thomas Edison. His organizational vision had broken the patterns of merely local or regional organized crime and had made his own family an international presence that financed and designed local criminal organization and its enterprises down to the last detail, in the manner of the 803-page manual for the operation of a neighborhood McDonald’s. The Prizzi family, because of Corrado’s foresight, was in partnership with more than seventy percent of the families working in the United States: Mafia, black, Hispanic, Jewish, cowboy, and Oriental, in such high-yield activities as narcotics, gambling, tax-free gasoline, counterfeit merchandise, pornography, labor racketeering, junk bond financing, prostitution, toxic waste disposal, loan sharking, and extortion. These were industries that required capital to maintain quality and excellence. Corrado Prizzi provided the seed capital, the know-how, and a vastly growing array of political protection.

When he was seventeen Corrado Prizzi became a qualified man. When he emigrated to America with his wife and infant son Vicenzo in the following year, 1915, they were well-to-do compared with other Sicilian immigrants. They had $900—a big edge which, with his training as a specialist, enabled Corrado to build a family of compari that would grow as a syndicate and a kinship unit.

The year after he landed in New York, after he had established strong bonds with the Irish and Jewish hoodlums in lower Manhattan, he and his family followed the mass movement of immigrant Sicilians to Brooklyn, to the area between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Navy Yard. Corrado organized the lottery and that provided the backlog of operating cash with which he established his legitimate front: an imported cheese and olive oil business and his storefront bank. Originally the bank was there to receive deposits and send money back to the old country. Most of the time, storefront banks like his operated outside the restraints that bound state and national banks, and there were ample opportunities for fraud. There was no doubt that his interest rates on bank loans were high, but so were the risks. He was investing in poverty which could pay back only in small amounts—so much so that he was obliged to establish a small Black Hand unit to ensure collections. Individuals who were unwilling to repay him would suffer the consequences by losses of their peace, their businesses, or their lives. The plain fact was that immigrants who wanted to start up businesses were forced to go to his storefront bank for capital. After a while, in some of the cases, he wrote off part of the loans in exchange for an interest in the businesses. The experience gave him a knowledge of banking that was to profit him in later years.

He established his own ethnic-political machine and, because he was fair, because the immigrants needed someone to tell them how to get started in a strange, new country, he handed out patronage in return for support on Election Day. As he accumulated capital he bought into other political organizations in other parts of Brooklyn and in Manhattan, as an invisible partner of such men as James March (aka Antonio Maggio) and Paul Kelly (aka Paolo Vacarelli), keeping ward and political machines in power; obtaining exemptions from city ordinances for businessmen; arranging bail and obtaining pardons; sponsoring dances, parades, picnics, boat rides, bazaars, and church functions; and adding to the ranks of mourners at funerals.

In 1928, the young man Angelo Partanna, whom Corrado had brought over from Agrigento to run the lottery, bribed a woman clerk in the office of Charles J. O’Connor, the liquor administrator in charge of permits, for the withdrawal of tens of thousands of gallons of prohibited liquor for “medicinal purposes.” The stolen permits were serially numbered and had a rubber stamp facsimile of O’Connor’s signature. Corrado Prizzi sold the liquor at the official underworld curb exchange that ringed police headquarters along Kenmare, Broome, Grand, and Elizabeth streets in Manhattan and that met day and night to carry out business. In two years, back when the purchasing power of the dollar was ten-to-one against what it would become, Corrado Prizzi made two million dollars, the capital that financed his move into vaster, more widespread operations long before his competitors could get there.

Don Corrado was mafiusu—from the Sicilian adjective that has been used since the eighteenth century to describe people and objects as “beautiful” and “excellent.” Elsewhere, modern man sought wealth as a means of acquiring material objects; the mafiusu sought wealth as a means of commanding obedience and respect from others. Elsewhere, man believed that power follows wealth; Don Corrado knew, in his medieval mind, that wealth comes from power.

The room where he spent most of his time was in a house owned by a Bahamian company, whose shares were held by an Anstalt in Liechtenstein. The don didn’t own anything but seemed to live very nicely on his Social Security payments. These were, thank heaven, still untaxable in the late 1960s.

He was a pitiably old-looking man though he had only just reached seventy-one. He was small, wore suits that were two sizes too big for him in such a way that he appeared shriveled and unprotected. Angelo Partanna said that the don believed that looking old and feeble gave him an edge and, after his wife died, what was to stop him?

He shuffled when he walked. He smiled wanly when he smiled, which fortunately wasn’t often since it was a smile that chilled the bones.

Every room in the don’s house was decorated the way he remembered the furnishings of a Sicilian duke’s country mansion that he had seen when he was twelve years old, while the duke was away in Paris for the season. He could remember every room he had entered that day as if he were looking at a set of photographs. The room Corrado Prizzi lived in was a replica of a room decorated in 1872, following the decor of the duke’s father’s palace in Palermo, which had been decorated in 1819. So, while the furnishings of the Prizzi house were not modern in any way, they were rich, if a little worn; fringes, velours, ormolu, and gilt-framed pictures everywhere; carved cherubim, and portraits of Jesus in his many manifestations, as well as several realistic limnings of St. Francis of Assisi.

The telephone rang. Still listening to the Verdi, he reached out and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“This is Angelo, Corrado. You remember Vito Daspisa who worked with his brother Willie in the—”

“I know him.”

“He killed two cops. Now he is inside his apartment out at the beach surrounded by a giant stakeout of cops and television people.”

“So?” The don tried to listen to the music and to Angelo Partanna at the same time.

“So he sent for Davey Hanly and he—”

“Hanly?”

“The Borough Squad. The bag man for the Department in Brooklyn.”

“Ah.”

“He told Hanly he would give him the whole rundown on our East Coast shit operation if Hanly would get him out.”

“If Hanly would get him out? Vito Daspisa is one of our people.”

“Yeah.”

“One of our people and he offers to betray us so they can get him out? I can’t believe it. I took his father in when the Horowitz Novelty Company failed. The father handled punch-boards for Frank Costello.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Where are you?”

“In a bar across the street from his apartment. I got Hanly with me.”

“We gotta take Vito off the payroll, Angelo. Us, not them.” He hung up.

Angelo left the phone booth and went back to the table where Hanly was waiting. He sat down heavily. “I am disappointed. This man come to us nine years ago when his brains was running out of his nose because he was getting his head punched off as an Armory fighter. We took him in. This is how he pays us back.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Angelo. How do you want to handle it?”

“All anybody wants is for this crazy cop-killer to be dead, Davey, but the Department has to get the media credit after all the trouble you guys are going through. Without risking any more cops’ lives.”

“Yeah? How do we do that?”

“We’ll send my son Charley in.”

“Charley?”

“Give him a temporary rank of first-grade detective and some name off the department’s personnel computer for his protection. Get him an assault rifle. He’ll handle everything.”

“I’ll have to clear that, Angelo.”

“Why not? It makes sense.”

Hanley left the bar and plunged into the crowd.