27

Brooklyn, 1941

They brought a steam shovel out to Jimmy Ferraco’s chicken farm, and there it scratched and banged at the still-frozen earth while the press photographers roamed the property, snapping pictures of the abandoned farmhouse, and the dead chickens where they lay in the yard after they were left to be ravaged by raccoons and packs of feral dogs. Tom spent the long days huddled with the cops and the assistant DAs against the wind off the Passaic, stomping back and forth to get some feeling in their feet, smoking continuously to cover the smell from the slaughtered chickens and the fetid sink of a river.

After three weeks of the cold, and the stench, and the wind that swept the desolate ground up into stinging eddies of dirt, and pebbles, and dried chicken droppings, his brother brought Reles and some of the other squealers out to see if they could narrow down the search. The little man chuckling and smacking his hands together, proclaiming in a voice loud enough for the reporters to hear: “I’m tellin’ ya, there must be six or eight stiffs planted out here. It’s like old home week!”

“Just pipe down an’ show us where,” the Old Man told him, and he skittered back and forth across the farm before finally pointing happily to a slight rise near the river.

Tom had brought some of Panto’s men from the old Rank-and-File Committee, and when the steam shovel made its initial cut they jumped in, carefully digging out the fetid marshland around it, until at last the steam shovel was able to gingerly lift up a single, gigantic block of frozen earth and quicklime. Chunks of it fell away as they raised it toward the wintry sun, and suddenly the bones were visible—half a skeleton still wrapped in scraps of clothing, and a skull grinning obscenely down at them. The dockworkers dropping their spades and tearing off their caps at the sight, and even the cops and the reporters taking a step back when they saw it, the remains of Peter Panto, rising above them into the light.

“That’s him! That’s him—see the gap in his front teeth!” one of the longshoremen was shouting, but Tom had already seen all that he needed: the remains of that silly black hat. Half eaten away by the quicklime, but enough of the hatband still there, where one of his killers had tossed it in, idly or contemptuously, next to the strangled corpse of his friend.

 

“The little man was right. They had all kinds of bodies out there,” Charlie told him when they were trying to get warm back in his office, over endless cups of coffee and a little brandy. “The morgue’s still tryin’ to sort it all out, but it looks like they’ve been dumping ’em out there for years—maybe decades. One outfit passin’ it on to another.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. Can you imagine it? Going back out there, night after night, all those years?” Charlie said, looking more drained than Tom could ever quite remember seeing him, as if something more than sheer fatigue had gotten under his skin. “Going back to that same evil fucking place, like an animal returning to its lair.”

They had loaded the great block of molting earth onto a flatbed truck, and they drove it slowly through the tunnel and back into the City with an escort of police motorcyclists and whirring prowler cars, out of the official fear that some gangsters might try to hijack the evidence. But there was no chance of that. Panto’s friends standing along the flatbed, linking arms to balance themselves and make a protective ring around the frozen cube of ground. Holding their shovels fiercely out before them and glaring back at any gawkers while they shielded his opened grave from their eyes.

That was how they brought Peter Panto back to Brooklyn. And a few weeks later, when it was warm again, they walked up from the docks to carry his casket from the Scotto funeral home over to the Church of the Sacred Heart. The men bearing it along through the crowds in the streets like they carried the statue of Saint Anthony on his name’s day but still in their work clothes this time, their box hooks slung over their shoulders.

And when it was all over, when the pallbearers took the casket back down the aisle to the hearse, and the ride to the cemetery, they crowded around Charlie. Eager to pump his brother’s hand and squeeze his shoulder and thank him for bringing Pete Panto back to them.

“They were so grateful, we brought the body back, at least,” Charlie had marveled afterward, in the car to the graveyard. “Just to have something to hold on to, so they knew he wasn’t disappeared in the middle of the night, just like that.”

“You did it—and you’ll do much, much more, that’s what they’re thankin’ you for in advance,” Tom said, punching his shoulder in his pride.

“We’re all proud of you,” Jimmy said on the other side of him, in the broad funeral limousine. “And now you’ll go clean out all the rest of the bastards.”

“We’ll see, boys,” Charlie said—a note of real fear in his voice that unsettled Tom for a moment. “We’ll see if I possibly can.”

“You can, Charlie. If anybody can, it’s you.”

He shook his head.

“All these little monsters. Pittsburgh Phil, an’ Blue Jaw Magoon, an’ Tough Tony this an’ Buggsy that. A whole other world, going on right under our noses.”

“It’s them that are the illusion, Charlie. That’s why they can’t last against men like you,” he said, trying to reassure him, but his brother was hardly listening.

“Living amongst us like they were real human beings—when they’re . . . something else. Standing around their candy stores an’ their poolrooms like real people—imitating the rest of us. Waiting for the call to go back to that swamp.”

“People aren’t bad, Charlie. Not most of ’em. They’re just scared, want someone to lead ’em. . .”

Charlie looked at Jimmy with his head half cocked then, as if he were about to say something but changed his mind—a gesture Tom would remember all the rest of his life.

“Or maybe just someone to frighten them,” he said instead of whatever it was he’d been thinking of, “and is that the same thing in the end?”

 

But by then they were all singing. All the rats, scuttling in—the wheelmen and the bookmakers and the shtarkers. Anyone who had done business with Lepke Buchalter, willingly or not, up in the garment district, or in the unions, or even driving a truck, now that they knew Abe Reles was talking. The Old Man coming up with the idea to stow the most important witnesses out in the Half Moon, the newspapers going crazy over the idea of the “Rats Suite.”

There was a new rumor circulating every day—that the syndicate was bringing in a special team of assassins from the Purple Gang, or the Mayfield Road Gang out in Cleveland, or maybe all the way from L.A. They were going to storm the beach in speedboats, put snipers with high-powered rifles up on the Wonder Wheel, or the Parachute Jump. Frank Bals sending out squads of uniforms to search through bathhouses full of old Russian men, or the crumbling fairyland towers of Luna Park. Back at the DA’s office it became a standard joke, the kind used to build camaraderie in war, which is what they felt they were all in now.

In court, everything went easier than they could have imagined. The old clubhouse judges replaced by the governor, or browbeaten into giving them a fair shake by the papers, and Dewey’s office over in Manhattan. The defendants’ high-priced legal talent suddenly discovering that none of their old ploys or stalls would work any longer. The papers amazed and titillated by the contract killings, dubbing Reles’s troop Murder, Inc., in huge block headlines. The tales of their exploits—of that unimagined world, existing in the same city, all around them—filling the front page.

The gangsters could barely believe it, even snared in court. Falling perfectly into their parts. Speaking out of turn, sneering and growling threats at the state’s witnesses, declaiming their innocence or swearing vengeance like the villains in some old Bowery theatrical.

Buggsy Goldstein ranting and raving at Reles during his testimony, shouting out, “For God’s sake, that’s some story you’re telling! You’re burning me!” Happy Maione lunging at the little man in the hallway outside the courtroom, yelling, “You stool pigeon son of a bitch! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna tear your throat out!” Flinging a water glass from his lawyer’s table at Reles when he dared to mention his house: “You son of a bitch, leave my home out of this! You was never in my home!”

Pittsburgh Phil faking insanity, refusing to shower or shave or cut his hair, answering every question in non sequiturs:

“Did you kill him?”

“Over easy, please. Plenty of toast.”

“It’s a circus out there, every day,” Charlie admitted. “But it’s trials like people think they should be—like they see them in the movies, or hear them over their radios. They understand them this way.”

And still, the little man kept talking. Closing the books on eighty-five murders, the papers calculated. Sending one of his old pals after another up to the chair, Lepke and Louis Capone, and the Dasher, and Reles’s oldest friend in the world, Buggsy Goldstein. Allof them leaving the court quietly enough, looking stunned and uncomprehending when the verdicts came in.

Back at the suite in the Half Moon, Abie helped them line up each case. Giving them names of witnesses, telling them how to get to the defendants. When he wasn’t testifying for him, Charlie loaned him out to DAs all over the country, for their unsolved murders. Tom flying with him sometimes, to make sure it all went according to Hoyle. The guards bundling him off the plane when they stopped to refuel at some tiny airstrip out on the Great Plains. Hustling him out to the edge of the tarmac. Brandishing their shotguns while Reles smoked and stared out forlornly at the illimitable expanse of prairie.

 

Tom had never seen his brother work so hard, or so concertedly. He seemed to have command of everything, every detail of every prosecution. The papers already full of speculation about him running for mayor, though he didn’t let it throw him off track, refusing questions about anything but the cases. Toiling into the early-morning hours, night after night, until his face began to take on a dull gray sheen. Tom and Natie Cohen begging him at last to take some time off, spend at least a full Sunday back in Bay Ridge with Claire.

“I can’t, Tommy, much as I’d like to, much as it kills me to neglect her,” he told him—a certain air of serenity, of satisfaction about him beneath the fatigue. “But she’s got Jimmy, an’ Neddy Moran to look out for her, and I’ve gotta do this now, Tommy. If we don’t—if we don’t sweep it all clean right now, who knows if it can ever be done again?”

The key to it all was the rapport between the little man and Burt Turkus—suave and dynamic in his slick, shiny gray suits, with his pencil moustache and his skill at seeming to hold a conversation with the jury. The mobsters and then the papers calling him “Mr. Arsenic.” Every eye in the courtroom on him when he was up from his chair, weaving dramatically back and forth from the bench to the jury box. He and Reles worked together with the ease and the timing of a vaudeville team on its thirtieth swing around the circuit. Turkus anticipating each of the jurors’ silent objections. Reles, his big, second-banana’s eyes turning instantly wounded and sincere, punching home each line they expected, before they knew they expected it:

“Are you a stool pigeon, Mr. Reles?”

“I am not a stool pigeon.” Gesturing out toward the scowling prisoners. “I didn’t just talk to get out of jail. I did it because I knew I had to change my life.”

“What made you decide to change your way of life?”

The big brown eyes going soft and bewildered. The words coming out rambling and a little confused, as if he were just articulating them now, no matter how many times he had said them before: “I was expecting another child, and I had one already. I was disgusted with the way I was living. It was my life: I was fed up with my life.”

“Your conscience told you to make this change?” Burt Turkus prompted, putting a touch of the sneer into his voice, preempting the defense attorney and the jury’s own skepticism. Reles looking up at him with puppy dog eyes.

“Conscience? That is too deep for me. I just made a change.”

“Why should we believe you? Why shouldn’t we believe you’d say anything to save your life?”

The eyes slightly smaller then, fearful, with their awful cunning dimmed. “Because Charlie O’Kane told me if he found out that I told so much as a little white lie, he would send me to the electric chair the same as the rest of ’em, and that is why I am telling the truth.”

The meaningless tautology, spoken with convincing, childlike simplicity. The better defense attorneys, the men living in Park and Fifth Avenue penthouses who came over to defend Brownsville’s killers, forced his crimes out anyway, as Turkus knew they would. One judge so appalled by them that he felt obliged to rant to the jury: “For the record I will say this man never had a conscience when he killed men. He killed men as a business. He had no sympathies. He was killing other men for money. He is a living tiger.”

Reles staring blankly back out at the courtroom, Tom noticed. Eyes flaring only when he registered on the word tiger.

They won their cases on attrition. Wearing down the jurors, taking them past their initial revulsion with Reles by repeating the pitiless, petty cruelties of the killings and the men who did them. The people who were just like them: a newsstand owner gunned down when he was out on the curb, picking up the Sunday papers. A union truck driver, shot while crossing the street at midday. A pair of middle-aged bachelor plasterers, shot to pieces because they refused to murder another plasterer, their pet bulldog killed next to them. Lured out of their basement apartment by a thug dressed up like a blonde, complete with a wig.

The killers killing because of an unpaid debt, a slight, a suspicion—a whim. Killing because they were told to. Killing men who didn’t even know why they were being killed. Killing without question, but with verve and enthusiasm. Whacking away with hammers and meat cleavers, slipping in shivs and ice picks. Strangling a man in any number of inventive ways—so close they could feel his death gasp on their cheeks, watch him cough up his blood on their overcoats.

Putting across always the visceral, sexual release of the act—if never quite spelled out in so many words. Communicating it to the jury nevertheless, that this was what they lived for, their one escape around the tedious hours spent pawing through comic books and racing sheets at Midnight Rose’s. The dull routine of stink bombs and shakedowns, stickups and beatings, petty jobs done for petty cash that was their regular operation. Broken only by the orgasmic release of these all but random murders, followed by postcoital orgies of food and drink.

“We all went down to Sheepshead Bay for a shore dinner,” Reles told the jury in a climactic recitation, describing the aftermath of the killing of Puggy Feinstein, an ex-boxer whose murder was what sent Pep Strauss and Buggsy Goldstein to the chair. Feinstein left to choke himself to death on what Reles called “the rope trick,” a way of binding a man so that the more he struggled, the more he strangled, leaving him finally in a bloody mess.

“A shore dinner?” Turkus pressed it home.

“You know. Lobsters, steamers. Corn on the cob. The works.”

“Did you talk about it there?”

“Not much. I give Pep some grief for lettin’ that bum bite his hand, an’ he give it right back, tellin’ me I shoulda helped him.”

“After that talk, what happened?”

“Then the lobsters came. We ate.”

 

“All these Puggies and Buggies, and what have you.” Charlie shuddered in disgust afterward, back in his office. “What little monsters they all are, all around us. Can’t wait to get back an’ stuff their faces after it! They’re not natural—”

“That they ain’t, and it’s a great thing you’re doin’, Charlie, puttin’ ’em all away,” Tom interrupted. “But is this all of it?”

“What do you want from me, Tommy?”

“When are we going to get to the big boys, Charlie? The men who had Panto killed?”

His anxiety growing, too, ever since he’d seen how ill Reles had begun to look. His lung problems worse than ever, the guard detail rushing him up Surf Avenue to the Coney Island Hospital on more than one night.

“Patience, Tommy, we still don’t have Mr. Anastasia in custody! Once they bring him in, that’ll be the moment, I promise ya.”

A month later, the little man got Mendy Weiss convicted for another killing, this one the murder of a truck driver in the garment district. He left the courtroom raving, “All I can say is I’m innocent!” while Captain Frank Bals hissed at him as he was walked past, “Peter Panto is waiting for you!” and Tom squeezed his hands behind his back in triumph, until he felt his knuckles pop.

Sure, then, that it couldn’t be much longer before someone gave up Anastasia, and they started in on the real work. On not only convicting one more hired killer, but getting down to the bottom of it all, to who had set up Panto in the first place.

And then came the call that Abe Reles had gone out the window.