Ever since the raid on the farmhouse in upstate New York—a meeting of all the Families, bigger than a Commission meeting, and an event that made many Americans aware for the first time of the word “Mafia”—the Commission had met as rarely as possible. Tonight’s meeting would be the first since Michael Corleone returned to New York.
Like the meetings in any large organization, its success depended on settling everything of any importance long before anyone took a seat at the table. Michael served on the boards of several corporations and charitable organizations and was always amused to hear otherwise sensible people champion open debate—a fine notion, for fools more concerned with being self-righteous than effective. The only unresolved matter Michael could foresee concerned Carlo Tramonti. Tramonti’s deportation had not held up in court, although his ongoing citizenship woes were making a battalion of lawyers rich. He had refused to discuss his grievance in any other forum but before the Commission. But no matter what Tramonti proposed, Michael had enough votes in his pocket—Altobello, Zaluchi, Cuneo, Stracci, probably Greco—to block anything. And Tramonti had, via intermediaries, agreed not to say nothing about the Cuban assassination plot.
The security precautions for the Commission meeting were intricate—though, for the first time in decades it did not involve the Bocchicchio clan. Cesare Indelicato, the Sicilian capo di tutti capi and Carmine Marino’s godfather, had put a stop to it. There were too few of them left.
The restaurant chosen for the meeting was tucked in a corner of Carroll Gardens that had been cut off from the rest of the neighborhood by the construction of the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a walled concrete canyon that whined with constant traffic.
The buildings closest to the restaurant were empty, save for the apartments loaned to appreciative friends of the Corleone Family, who were using them for both lodging and security. The nearby street fair and upcoming fireworks display in Red Hook would draw most people in the area down by the East River for the evening.
Down the block from the restaurant, an open fire hydrant spewed water into the darkening street. A nicely compensated crew from the water department cheerfully pretended to be fixing a water-main break. As promised, the precinct sergeant had dispatched uniformed cops to close off the street and keep the curious at bay. The cops at the scene had no idea what was going on inside the restaurant. They were clock-punchers—men handpicked for their purposeful lack of curiosity.
At seven sharp, five men gathered at the back door of the restaurant, five more at the front, so each door had a trusted soldier from each of New York’s Families: the Barzinis, the Tattaglias, the Straccis, the Cuneos, and the Corleones, whose turn it was to provide the security detail—a job that Eddie Paradise had overseen. Men grunted hellos to each other but otherwise milled around and smoked and did not talk. Paradise came by and shook hands and thanked everybody for their efforts, then hovered around the periphery.
The arrivals of the Dons were staggered between seven-thirty and eight. Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen were already inside.
First to arrive was Carlo Tramonti. His seat on the Commission was a complicated formality. He did not always attend, but when he did, he was allowed to take his seat first, one of several courtesies granted to him because of the nature of his organization, by far the nation’s oldest. Behind him trailed a bodyguard and his little brother Agostino. Augie the Midget’s promotion to consigliere was recent; this would be his first Commission meeting.
The embrace that Carlo Tramonti and Michael Corleone shared betrayed nothing of the differences these men had had over the years. The men exchanged pleasantries about their families. A casual observer would have mistaken them for friends.
Tom Hagen, whose shoes were new and squeaking, showed the Tramontis to their seats at one of the two long, facing tables in the back banquet room. Each was covered with a white tablecloth, bottles of red wine, baskets of bread, and plates of antipasti. Hagen plucked an olive from one of the plates. He used to feel like a sideshow attraction at these meetings; when Vito first tabbed him as consigliere, Tom was the youngest man in the room and the only one who wasn’t Italian. Now, almost twenty years later, Hagen felt entirely in his element.
“The shoes, they start doing that there,” said Augie the Midget, pointing as he sat, “squeak like that, got to throw ’em out, eh? And start over.” Only with his strange accent—a cross between Brooklynese and Southern Negro—it sounded like, De shoes dey start doin’ dat dere, squeak like dat, gotta trow ’em out, eh? And start ovah.
Hagen smiled and nodded and told them to make themselves at home.
“What shoes?” asked Carlo, who was a little hard of hearing.
“Forget it,” Augie said. “Just shoes, all right?”
BY NOW, TWO OF THE OLD LIONS HAD ARRIVED, ANTHONY Stracci from New Jersey and Joe Zaluchi of Detroit. As was customary, each brought his consigliere and a preapproved bodyguard. Zaluchi and Stracci were the Corleones’ oldest friends and strongest allies. Zaluchi was a moon-faced, grandfatherly man in his seventies. He’d married one daughter off to the scion of an automobile company and another to Ray Clemenza, son of the late Corleone capo Pete Clemenza. Joe Z had taken over in Detroit after the chaos of the Purple Gang and built up an empire known for being one of the most peaceful in the country. Lately, though, there were rumblings that the Negroes were taking over in Detroit, and that the auto unions were getting their marching orders from the Chicago outfit. Many of the Dons believed Zaluchi was going senile. When he greeted Michael by calling him “Vito,” Michael chose not to correct him.
Black Tony Stracci, also in his seventies, doggedly maintained that he did not dye his thinning ink-black hair, which seemed to get blacker every year. He’d always been so loyal to the Corleones that some outsiders wrongly believed the Stracci Family was merely a Corleone regime. The Corleones’ narcotics operation used Stracci-controlled docks and warehouses (an alliance cemented by Nick Geraci, but not a part of Geraci’s conspiracy). Black Tony had also—in one of the most bitter arguments the Commission had ever known—joined with Michael Corleone to overcome the opposition of several other Dons (particularly Tramonti and Silent Sam Drago) to secure the backing of the Commission for New Jersey governor James K. Shea’s bid for the presidency. The Straccis had dealings in New York, but their power base was in New Jersey, which was less prestigious and lucrative, thus relegating them to their perpetual status as the least of the New York Families.
Next to arrive were the two newest members, both in flashy suits and loud ties: Frank Greco from Philadelphia, who’d replaced the late Vincent Forlenza (leaving Cleveland without a seat at the table), and John Villone, who’d returned from Vegas to take over in Chicago from the late Louie “Fuckface” Russo. When Michael greeted Frank the Greek by saying he looked good, Greco scoffed. “When I was a young man, I looked like a Greek god. Now I just look like a goddamned Greek.” Michael smiled. He’d heard Greco make this joke before. In fact, at fifty, Greco still was a young man, compared to most of the Dons. Philadelphia was another outfit that was losing ground to the Negroes, but Frank the Greek remained strong in South Jersey, which had given him connections to several men in the Shea administration.
John Villone had overseen the Chicago outfit’s interests in Nevada, which was how Michael first met him. He was a “man with a belly” from the old Sicilian tradition, connoting both power and courage as well as literal corpulence. Unlike such men, however, he wore shiny, clownish clothes, tailored, oddly, to make himself look even fatter. Still, Villone was the kind of man everybody liked and wanted to be around, and Michael envied him for it. John Villone had been close to Louie Russo and remained so even after Russo froze him out of important Family business over some dispute concerning a woman. Villone walked to his seat in the back room with his meaty arm around Tom Hagen, unaware that Hagen had used the very belt he now wore to strangle the fat man’s dear friend Louie Russo.
The deeply tanned boss of the Tampa syndicate, Salvatore “Silent Sam” Drago, was next to come through the door. On his shoulder he bore a webbed bag of oranges, as was his custom. Smiling, without a word, he deposited them on the bar. He and Michael embraced. Al Neri checked the oranges for anything concealed there. Drago must have expected this and took no offense. Despite their differences, Michael and Sam Drago had much in common. Drago, like Michael, was the youngest son of a boss, and, like Michael, he’d set out in life hoping to avoid the family business. Drago’s father was the late Sicilian boss Vittorio Drago, a close friend and ally of Lucky Luciano’s. When Mussolini seized power and threw Vittorio and all the other bosses in prison on the island of Ustica, young Sammy Drago—who was in Florence, studying to become a painter—fled to America and settled in Florida. He’d tried to make a go of it as a commercial fisherman, but he lost everything. He was in danger of being deported. Back in Sicily, his mother got Lucky Luciano himself to pull a few strings, though Sam Drago did not know this until he was already beholden to the exiled American. He told himself he was helping run some of Luciano’s interests in Florida only to provide support for his sainted mother while his father was in prison. But soon the War started, and the years dragged on, and Sam Drago, who’d been a promising painter, seemed to find his true calling as a racketeer and leader of men.
Al Neri shook his head. Nothing in the bag except oranges. He began to peel one. Hagen showed Drago and his men to the back room.
The last to arrive were the three remaining New York Dons—Ottilio Cuneo, Paul Fortunato, and Osvaldo Altobello.
Altobello held the door for the other two Dons and their men. He’d been on the Commission for a year, but it had not met in that time. This gesture of humility drew approving nods from the wheezing Fortunato and the jolly-looking Cuneo.
Sweating and breathless from the strain of the ten-foot walk from the curb to the restaurant door, Fat Paulie Fortunato, Don of the Barzini Family, sat heavily on a chair just inside the door and exchanged embraces with Michael and Tom Hagen from there. Fortunato looked fat enough to have eaten John Villone for breakfast. His eyes were slits in his doughy face, and his leonine head was perpetually bowed, as if his neck muscles couldn’t hold it up. Fortunato was the closest thing the Corleones had to an enemy among the Five Families. He’d been a devoted capo to Emilio Barzini, whose murder had never been pinned on the Corleones (or on Al Neri, who’d donned his old cop uniform to do the shooting), and he’d been close to Vince Forlenza in Cleveland, who—to be technical—had disappeared and was only presumed dead. Fortunato’s personal power base was the Garment District. He’d also been one of the Barzini men pushing to expand into narcotics, which, on Fat Paulie’s watch, the Family had done. He resented what he called the hypocrisy of the Corleones, who’d withheld their political support for the drug business while Vito was still running things, and then, under Michael’s reign, created a covert regime that seized a piece of the action. Despite these differences, Fortunato was not, by nature, a man who took offense or took the offensive. He’d been boss for eight peaceful years, ruling Staten Island the way the Barzinis had for decades.
There might have been no greater testament to Michael Corleone’s power than Ozzie Altobello’s elevation to Don of what was still known as the Tattaglia Family. Once the Corleones’ bitter rivals, the Tattaglias were now headed by Connie Corleone’s literal godfather, a loyal friend of Vito Corleone’s since Prohibition. The Tattaglias—less diverse than most Families—specialized in prostitution, strip clubs, and pornography. This empire was built by Philip Tattaglia, who enjoyed its fruits with epic gluttony. After he was killed in 1955, his brother Rico came out of retirement to succeed him. The organization started falling apart. It was undercapitalized and increasingly vulnerable to police raids and the crusades of the self-righteous. When Rico died last year of natural causes, most expected the new Don to be one of the Family’s glorified pimps or, failing that, one of its young warriors. Instead, the courtly Altobello, a born consigliere, found himself thrust into the role of Don. Most saw him as a human olive branch extended toward the Corleones.
Leo “the Milkman” Cuneo was a small old man who somehow had the presence of a large one, the way a skilled but tiny actor might. He wore a plain, sensible suit. He’d been given the honor of arriving last not in deference to his power but as a gesture of respect, now that, with Forlenza’s disappearance, Cuneo had become the senior member of the Commission.
Michael Corleone, briefly, took Cuneo’s hat and coat himself, until a horrified waiter swooped in and relieved Michael of that imagined indignity. “On the contrary, it was my honor,” Michael said in Italian, “to touch the hem of Don Cuneo’s garment.”
Michael forced a smile so that Cuneo would not think he was being sarcastic.
Cuneo mumbled a few bars of a Sicilian song Michael didn’t know and didn’t understand. “Am I right?” he said in English, patting Michael on the cheek.
“As rain,” Michael said, showing Cuneo toward the banquet room.
The Cuneo Family had some business in New York City, mostly in Manhattan and the Bronx, but it ran up-state New York (and owned the biggest milk company in the region, too, which was how Ottilio Cuneo became Leo the Milkman). Leo Cuneo had played a key role in negotiating peace after the Five Families War, but his tenure as a statesman of the underworld had been short-lived. It had been his associate’s white farmhouse where the infamous raid had occurred. Half the mob bosses in America were caught as they tried to run away through the woods. How was it possible that no one from the Cuneo Family heard about the raid in advance or noticed the cars approaching? Michael had no idea; it passed beyond all human understanding. He’d noticed men in the bushes as he drove up, and he’d kept going. It was supposed to have been the meeting at which he negotiated his own retirement from all this, a goal that was not abandoned but was no longer even on the horizon, which Michael tried not to think about.
Nobody spent more than a few hours in jail. Lawyers pointed out that the United States Constitution guaranteed the right to free assembly. These points, however, came later in the story and were not featured on the cover of anything. They were also too complicated to be admissible in the court of public opinion.
The fallout from the raid was still falling. Without all the publicity and public outrage, the FBI would have almost certainly continued to keep its distance. If not for the raid, the public—perfectly willing to ignore that its government killed innocent people all over the world, every day of the year—would have never felt so threatened by men like those on the Commission. What, after all, posed more of a threat to the average American: the business discussed at a meeting such as this one? Or—to cite only one current example—the CIA-sponsored efforts under way in the obscure nation of Vietnam? So why the public scrutiny of Michael’s business and the indifference to the larger-scale dangers carried out in the name of the American people? Simple. Look what made the most money in Hollywood, that whorehouse of the American dream: morally uncomplicated comic-book depictions of heroes and villains, simple stories for uncurious people. That raid had given the people what they wanted. Now, largely as a consequence of the hysteria the raid touched off, flawed and complicated men of goodwill like Michael Corleone and James K. Shea had been reduced in the public eye to the stuff of comic books. Never mind that both were sons of men who’d emigrated to this country as boys, men who’d been in business together, making their fortunes selling something that was no longer a crime. Michael Corleone and James K. Shea were both decorated war heroes. They both attended Ivy League schools and married a woman they met during those years (never mind that Michael, who had been resolutely faithful, was a Bad Man, or that Jimmy Shea, a cunt-drunk philanderer, was Prince Charming). They both had two young children, a boy and a girl. They were both Catholics who went to church only when appearances decreed. Their families had each suffered a series of operatic tragedies. Together, in Chicago and West Virginia and Florida, they stole the American presidency. Each man’s love for his country was deep and sincere.
Never mind all that. All the public wanted was black hat/white hat.
On one side, the public faced the threat of a vast, thrilling, and terrifying criminal conspiracy, conducted by the members of a secret society: nefarious super-fiends, swarthy men with foreign-sounding names. On the other side, protecting the public from evildoers everywhere, stood the fair-skinned and handsome Jimmy Shea, a square-jawed superhero from central casting, and his sidekick Danny, the toothy boy wonder.
All of which came about only because Leo Cuneo bungled the security detail.
Vito Corleone had taught his sons that great triumphs and great mistakes were rarely representative incidents in a man’s life, but only a child would think it unfair to judge a man by such things. The issue was not fairness. The issue was what it meant to be a man.
In fairness, though, Leo Cuneo had taken responsibility for the security lapse. As he entered the banquet room, his fellow Dons greeted him with genuine warmth. But the blunder had cost him, in ways he had no doubt noticed and others he would never know about. Leo Cuneo had been a good friend to the Corleone Family. He had voted with Vito and then Michael on every important issue that came before the Commission. His people had even located the killer of Michael’s first wife, Apollonia, a man named Fabrizzio, who’d been working under an assumed name at a pizzeria in Buffalo. Cuneo himself had made the arrangements to send Fabrizzio Michael Corleone’s regards, along with three shots from a 9mm pistol, two to the chest and one point-blank into his skull. Such loyalties had kept Leo the Milkman alive.
ANOTHER HALF HOUR OF GREETINGS AND DRINKS went by. The preliminaries might have gone on even longer if not for Michael Corleone’s blood sugar. He’d eaten some olives and cheese and cappacolla off the antipasti plates, but that wasn’t going to cut it. He needed to really eat. He took his place at the table and gulped down some water. Tom Hagen slipped into the seat beside Michael, signaling Neri to corral the other bodyguards and go wait in the main dining room. The other Dons saw that Michael had taken his seat and quickly followed suit.
As Neri stood in the doorway and watched, the waiters brought out steaming bowls of macaroni and scrambled around refilling the drinks and replenishing the bread. When the last waiter left, Al Neri gave Michael a nod and pulled the door closed.
The Commission had not met in two years and thus had a backlog of relatively routine matters to decide. “If no one objects,” Michael said, “I’d like to work while we eat, so we can maybe go see the fireworks or, at least, get home by dawn.”
This inspired no objections. For all the lurid images people have of men like this—the beatings, extortion, and murder—this was in fact the kind of business where almost everything truly important got decided over a meal. Same as in real estate or publishing or out in Hollywood. But for these men it wasn’t just business. Some of them did practically everything while they ate. Paulie Fortunato, for example, regularly fucked two women at a time while eating beef-spleen sandwiches, the puzzling choreography of which Fredo Corleone—who’d claimed to have seen it with his own eyes—had once explained to Michael in foul and loving detail.
The first order of business was the approval of the promotion of the new bosses, Greco and Villone, and also the new man out in Los Angeles, where Jackie “Ping-Pong” Pignatelli had stepped down for health reasons. Unanimous, no discussion, warm calls of welcome all around.
Then came the approval of men who’d been put forth for membership by various Families. Families not represented here had to get permission to open their books in the first place and by how many. Then they had to find a Commission member to present the names. Families with seats at the table not only had a better chance of being allowed to open their books but also could speak up if anyone had a problem with one of their nominees. By and large, though, once names got this close to the table, the men in question had been vetted and the process was something of a formality—despite which, Michael thought, it took forever.
As a courtesy to the new Dons, they were allowed to go first. Villone graciously deferred to Greco.
“OK, so,” Greco said, “Vinnie Golamari. Some of you may know his family maybe, I don’t know. Good man. Good, good man.”
“I know a Vicente Colamari,” said Black Tony Stracci, squinting and cocking his head as if at that angle some distant memory might emerge. “No disrespect, but if it’s the guy I’m thinking of, you gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“It’s Golamari,” Greco said.
“Because if it’s the same Vinnie Colamari I’m thinking of, he must be, forget about it. Old. Eighty, if he’s a day. Help me, Elio.” He turned to his consigliere, who shrugged.
“You’re thinking of another gentleman, I’m afraid,” Greco said.
Carlo Tramonti, frowning, drummed both hands on the table. He bent toward his brother’s ear and whispered something.
“I may be wrong about this Vinnie,” the New Jersey Don admitted, “because who can be sure about everything, especially at my age? But isn’t he the fella they caught with the broad in the monkey house? Remember that? Young kid, the girl was, something like thirteen. Terrible.”
“Different guy altogether. I know the guy you’re talking about and—”
“Enough,” said Sam Drago. He pointed a breadstick at Stracci.
“Wait,” Stracci said to Greco. “Golamari’s the one who did that job in the Pine Barrens with what’s-his-face, Publio something.”
“Right!” Greco said, visibly relieved. “Yes. Publio Santini.”
“Santini I can vouch for personally,” Ozzie Altobello said.
Greco tapped the table with his index finger, as if at an invisible sheet of paper. “He’s the next guy on my list here.”
There was no written list. Nothing was ever written down.
Tony Stracci bobbed his head and pursed his lips in concession. “Those are good men, Vinnie and Publio. I hear good things.”
Carlo Tramonti threw back his head and heaved a sigh.
Several other men gave him a look. Augie Tramonti put a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
Carlo looked like he was about to say something but didn’t.
Things kept going like this: names tossed out, briefly discussed, and approved—one Family at a time. All the while, Carlo Tramonti did not disguise his impatience. His brother, a known hothead, kept trying to calm Carlo down. At one point Augie even cleared the dirty dishes in front of his brother and cleaned up the crumbs, too, like a busboy.
Carlo Tramonti, of course, would not be proposing any names. He, alone, didn’t need such approval from the Commission.
Leo Cuneo peppered Ozzie Altobello with questions about the Tattaglia nominees—even though at a benefit last week for a crippled children’s fund, he’d told Michael that everything he knew about everyone proposed for membership by the other New York Families was good.
Carlo Tramonti put his face in his hands.
Michael Corleone was sympathetic. He might have tried to streamline the process, too, except that people already spoke behind his back about him being a college boy, too American, a modernizer who just pretended to embrace tradition, somebody who never wanted to be here in the first place, who wanted out from the moment he was in. The one time he’d even brought up his desire to make the process more professional, it was to Tom Hagen. Tom told him to let it go. These men were friends, Tom had pointed out, who don’t get to see each other so much. They want to talk, let ’em talk. The tide of Tom’s disappointment had drowned out anything else Michael might have said or done.
AFTER THE PASTA COURSE CAME A STANDING RIB roast. Over exclamations about how tender it was, the men settled various disputes—conflicts that couldn’t be settled simply with a sit-down with the right two or three men. As Michael’s father had explained it, the Commission existed for two things only: opening the books and making peace. On Michael’s watch, it had branched out into the realm of politics, but even if the problems with the Shea administration had become the elephant in this particular room, Michael still tried to stick to the fundamentals.
Tramonti gave Michael a look. Michael shook his head. Not yet.
The conflict that had provoked this particular meeting in the first place was not the Danny Shea situation or even the need to initiate new members and confirm the new Dons. The conflict was about pushcarts.
It had started as an argument between two hot-dog vendors over a street corner on the Upper West Side, one vendor who was under the protection of the Barzinis, another whose cart was sharecropped from a man who reported to Eddie Paradise. The corner had been worthless, but then two new office buildings opened, and now it was a gold mine. Each man claimed to have been the first to stake his claim. After a few days, the vendor who worked for Eddie’s soldier threw boiling hot-dog water on the other vendor, who nearly died from the burns.
In retaliation, the Barzinis sent someone to break the first vendor’s arm. Then they parked a brand-new cart a few feet away from a different cart, one they thought belonged to the Corleones, undercutting the prices for everything, but in fact that cart belonged to the Cuneos, and the soldier who watched over it retaliated by having two of his men blow up the encroaching Barzini pushcart (with the advent of propane tanks, the carts were rolling bombs). But the Cuneo men got their wires crossed—literally—and blew themselves sky-high instead, along with a pushcart that was under the protection of the Tattaglias.
One thing led to another.
By the time any of the Dons caught wind of these squabbles, they were no longer petty. The newspapers weren’t covering this yet—other than the one mysterious explosion—but that wasn’t going to last much longer. All five Families had pushcarts jockeying for position, and the ad hoc decisions that had been made about who got what corner were proving inadequate. They were also being ignored. There was no systematic way in place about how to divide up the turf, and the Commission had been charged with developing one. This was not an uncomplicated matter, but they’d come to the table with a basic plan, hatched in various small conversations over the last few months. All the Commission needed to do was approve it.
As the plan was explained, Carlo Tramonti, red-faced, gathered enough composure to excuse himself in a level voice to go use the john, though he practically leaped from his chair. Michael knew Neri could be counted on to keep an eye on the guy.
The other out-of-town Dons patiently listened, perhaps counting their blessings that each had a city all to himself, even if that meant it was a second-rate place, less lucrative than what a fifth of New York was.
But it was unlikely that anyone there thought that pushcarts were, in and of themselves, a trivial or even tedious matter. This humble business was a gangster cash cow everywhere. The carts were pricey enough—several grand, the last Michael heard—so that average citizens had a hard time affording them. Instead, they’d sharecrop the carts from someone else. Everybody made out. Some hardworking immigrant got a small business to run, and his benefactor got two-thirds of everything and didn’t have to pay out one dime in salary. Permits the immigrants would have otherwise struggled to get from the city magically appeared. Other Family businesses supplied the pushcarts with food, beverages, condiments, paper napkins, butane, umbrellas, tires—the works. A good pushcart, bottom line, could be as profitable as a restaurant but with none of the risk. No taxes to speak of, no utilities, nothing much in the way of maintenance, none of the headaches that go along with having a payroll, and none of the paper trails that go along with owning or leasing real estate (or getting a front to own or lease it). Plus, if a neighborhood goes bad, a restaurant goes bad with it. But a pushcart just moves on. Pushcarts made money: every cart, year in and year out. The only thing that could mess up a good thing like that would be if the men bankrolling the system started fighting among themselves.
Which, by a unanimous vote, they agreed not to do.