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Charley’s work in Baltimore was to put the fear into the three Social Security administrators who came over from Washington for the meeting and who had already been bribed and handled by Pop.

From the time he had been a kid, Charley had generated fear. At first it wasn’t something he had known he was doing, and after a while it became just another skill; a part of policy. If people weren’t doing right, they felt the fear and tried to shape up. The fear made people judge Charley’s seriousness about his work and made them more respectful. His father had made it clear to him that a man who is feared does not receive challenges to his honor and that the shield that fear creates covers everyone who is close to him. So, as he saw how hosing out fear could save time and get better results, he polished his techniques and encouraged his own awesome reputation. Techniques or not, Charley was basically a frightening man without even trying, forget the techniques, except maybe to women. His job in Baltimore was to frighten the three SSA civilians so that they wouldn’t be able to open their mouths if anything went wrong, which, because Pop had set it up, could not possibly go wrong.

Pop had been working on the SSA people for four months and now everything was ready to go. The don wanted Charley to talk to the people and hose the fear all over them so that they understood in their hearts that if they fucked up now that they had made a deal, they were the ones who were going to have go down.

They had the meeting at the John Arundell Hotel in Baltimore, and for the first time in his life Charley ate turtle soup. The SSA guys were tickled that he liked it so much. They said it was native American cooking. Charley was amazed; he thought hamburgers were native American cooking. “What is the TV dinner,” he asked them, “if turtle soup is native American cooking?”

In the meeting Religio’s man worked with two of the SSA technicians while Charley set up the delivery arrangements with the third for the 19,556 Social Security checks for an average of approximately $530 a check, to be collated by state and city and street of destination as they came off the presses. The computer would blank out while they were coming off, then wake up again when the series was finished. When the beefs started to come in from the SSA recipients who hadn’t gotten that month’s check and the government backtracked on it, all they would find out was that somehow the computer had spun its wheels and had not printed that particular run of 19,556 checks, out of millions of checks. With any luck, they would decide the checks had never been printed at all. So they’d print them up again and send them out.

The franchisees would have to move fast to turn the checks into cash before anybody figured out that the government had been ripped off when the canceled checks started to come back. The three SSA guys would have to sweat out what they called mass loss procedure, but the way it turned out, nobody caught on.

The checks were shipped out at government expense, marked as paper stock, to the distribution point Pop had set up in New Jersey. From there the checks went out to the Prizzi franchise cities around the country, where they were cashed in 819 banks. The Prizzis made a gross of $10,335,000 on the deal, a good score when it was considered that they had to pay out only $337,843 for the cooperation of the three SSA people, but it really was a pittance compared to the taxes they had avoided and the money they had pocketed on six or seven hundred billion dollars’ worth of tax-free business they had done over the years because they had trained the politicians to pretend it would be dishonorable to collect taxes on illegal money earned by the citizens. Charley was beside himself with admiration. It was the don’s own dodge.

When he got back to the Laundry, Charley told Vincent and the Plumber about the turtle soup, but they didn’t believe him.