11
Willie Daspisa had not only taken the oath of omertà but had made a fortune of money off the Prizzis over the years, plus he walked with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars of Prizzi money when he left. He owed them in more ways than one. If he had said he had escaped into the Witness Protection Program to get away from what he looked like, it would have made more sense than the word which got out—that he did it because he was scared by what had happened to his brother Vito.
After Willie finished singing for the U.S. Attorney, he said he wanted to have a meeting with George F. Mallon, the opposition mayoral candidate. Mallon’s campaign was going so badly that he would talk to anybody.
Willie’s singing led the Feds to pick up fourteen key Prizzi shit people between Boston and Miami, and federal indictments were sought on one of the biggest banks on the East Coast for laundering shit money. The indictment, the arraignment, and the trial were slammed through like an express train. Willie and Joey came into the federal courtroom surrounded by U.S. Marshalls. They testified against the fourteen Prizzi people. Joey worked like a Trojan to play it very straight, slipping only three or four times into his impersonation of the Sugarplum Fairy, but no cameras were allowed in court anyway so it didn’t make any difference. Eventually everybody charged would be found guilty, and everybody would be absolutely clobbered by the judge.
Willie and Joey were kept in a midtown hotel suite off Broadway in the protective custody of a revolving team of U.S. Marshalls until the government was ready to move them out to the plastic surgeons, the new pocket litter, and to their new homes and businesses, wherever that would be. While they waited, Mallon came in to listen to what they might have to say.
George F. Mallon was a multimillionaire with a head made of ferroconcrete, “your typical hardheaded businessman,” as he often defined himself. He had made his fortune building tabernacles with their attendant dormitories, broadcast studios, gymnasiums, prayer halls, computer installations, office wings and underground passages, money crypts and strong vaults for the hundreds of evangelical television clergymen in the United States. These preachers instructed the country on such things as the Supreme Court and the Constitution; national and international politics; apartheid, democracy in the Philippines and Nicaragua, and Star Wars; Social Security and welfare parasites; narcotics-user tests for all Americans; the pressing First Amendment constitutional right for cigarette companies to advertise; abortion; selective diplomatic representation in China; and the need for prayer, if not abortions, in the schools.
Mallon undertook the construction of these innumerable holy cities by guaranteeing building costs in return for ironclad mortgage guarantees and a percentage of the electronic pulpit profits. The operations had been successful from the first broadcast. His share of the salvation grosses had put him on the Forbes list among the wealthiest men in America.
He was a wispy, sandy-haired man with a wide mouth and narrow lips. He may have been a bungled-instrument delivery, because his head came to such a point that no hat, other than those designed by Dr. Seuss, would fit him. He was running against everything New Yorkers stood for: corruption, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, high-cost luxury housing, and racism. He had never been in politics before, but he had seen shrewd operators pretending to be country boys, climbing into their pulpits under television makeup, feigning simplicity, to be swept to national heights by crying out to the millions in the unseen congregations for the glory of the Lord and postmarked contributions. He knew what money could do in politics and he had an understanding with the more powerful of the electronic clergy that if he filled public offices they would see that the money and the glory were provided, although he had not taken into account that what had worked so well far out there in the golden fields of the American heartland might be incomprehensible in Gomorrah.
He seemed to be running against the grain of voter prejudice and opinion but, backed by his militant army’s evangelical fervor, he cried out against abortion and for prayer in the schools, wishfully believing that the voters would be able to remember what he was saying while they nurtured what they so steadfastly rooted for: corruption, gambling, purer narcotics, high-cost luxury housing, and racism. These voter passions could have been offseting the righteousness of George F. Mallon’s zeal, he realized, since he was far behind the incumbent in every poll.
Monitoring Mallon’s candidacy was a normal, even a routine part of Angelo Partanna’s job. He maintained a surveillance of the Mallon campaign from the inside by making substantial cash contributions which, by dint of Eduardo Prizzi’s solid political connections on all sides, allowed him to plant his people inside the Mallon organization—and elsewhere—to keep tabs on Mallon’s plans as well as on members of Mallon’s family on the remote chance that they could be used to change Mallon’s mind on this campaign issue or that.
Mallon sat down opposite Joey Labriola and stared into his eyes. “You sent for me?” he said.
“Him,” Joey said.
George F. Mallon turned to Willie, who was resting on a bed. “What’s on your mind?” he asked Willie in as macho a way as a five-foot-six-inch man could assemble, which, in his case, was plenty.
“You wanna talk, get him outta here.” Willie pointed to the U.S. Marshall.
“Would you mind?” Mallon asked the marshall.
“These men don’t leave my sight,” the marshall said. “Those are the U.S. Attorney’s orders.”
Mallon looked at Willie and lifted his eyebrows. Then he gave a short, abrupt shrug. He said, “Rules are rules.”
Willie swung his legs off the bed and faced Mallon. “Did you see the mayor on television the night they gave it to my brother?”
Mallon nodded.
“Did you see that Lieutenant Hanly come out and report to him twice?”
Mallon nodded.
“You thought the cops did the job on him.”
Mallon nodded again.
“No way. The Prizzi family done it while the mayor was practically looking.”
Mallon was stonily disbelieving. “Why would the police allow such a thing? Your brother was entirely surrounded by almost two hundred policemen.”
“They didn’t want to risk anybody. Maybe they wanted to save on pensions and insurance.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“It was business.”
“Business?”
“My brother probably tried to make a deal to get out of there. He was probably going to give the cops everything he knew about the Prizzi’s East Coast shit operation.”
“Shit operation?”
“What you like to have the newspapers call controlled substances. Capeesh?”
“Dope? Narcotics?”
“But the only ones he could work a deal with was the cops. He made his offer to Hanly, the bagman for Brooklyn, so he had to go down.”
“Go down?” Mallon was horrified.
Joey tittered.
“So the Prizzis sent Charley Partanna in to zotz him,” Willie said.
“Zotz?”
“Partanna killed my brother.”
“The mayor was involved in this?”
“He was standing outside, wasn’t he? Hanly reported to him, didn’t he? Hanly was inside the building with Charley Partanna, wasn’t he?”
“How can you prove such a thing?”
“Not me. You. Grab Hanly. Make him talk. Talk to Munger, the task force sergeant who went into my brother’s apartment first, before the cameras. Ask the television guys. They’ll know if Vito was standing up when the cops went in. Then, when you got an airtight case together, pick up Charley Partanna. Charley blitzed my brother for the Prizzis.”
When Willie finished talking to the U.S. Attorney, the Feds took the Prizzis’ stash of $200,000 worth of blow—the cost price, not the street price. After he had finished costing the Prizzis so he could buy his way into the Witness Protection Program, and after he finished paying off Angelo Partanna for saying what he had said about Joey, he and Joey disappeared into the Program with new faces, new prints, and new paper. Before you knew it, they were gone. They were probably selling real estate or Buicks somewhere in Nebraska with both of them now born-again Protestant-Episcopals who could tell a great Irish dialect story.