1

Early in December 1985, a rotten day weatherwise, Charley Partanna, CEO of the Prizzi family, sat behind his desk in the St. Gabbione Laundry, the family’s executive offices for street operations, in central Brooklyn, and listened, over the sloshing roar of the laundry vats turning outside his office door, to a proposal by Sylvan Robbins, president of the hotel company that ran the three Prizzi casinos in Atlantic City.

“This is it, Charley,” Robbins said. “Believe it. The wave of the future. Could you ever conceive of such a thing? A credit card for slot machines?”

“I don’t get it, Sylvan.”

“No more coins, no costs for cash security, handling, counting, wrapping, and guarding coins. No theft.”

“Sylvan, please, tell me how it works.”

“The player just sticks the credit card in the machine, coded to the value he wants to play for, and pulls the handle. If he hits a payoff, the recording inside the machine makes a sound like a bunch of silver falling out, but nothing happens, nothing comes out. But the card gets credited with the win, or, if he loses—ho, ho, ho—the card shows a debit. It can save the Prizzis about five million three a year on all the machines they have out.”

“Jesus. Modern science. But a lot of romance is gonna go out for the players.”

“I should put them in?”

“Not only put them in, send me all the dope so we can put them in at Vegas and all the other locations. You done good, Sylvan. If this really works, we’re gonna give you another quarter point.”

Charley didn’t depend only on outside inspiration. He checked out every operation zealously so that his middle management would know that he was on top of every one of their opportunities and all of their problems. At four in the afternoon he had an appointment with the chemist in Matteo Cianciana’s shit division to test batches of a new delivery of cinnari that had just come in from Miami and to supervise cutting it into dealer lots.

At half past six he had a meet with Girolama “Jerry” Picuzza to evaluate one of the new convenience orgy opportunities that they were testing out at eleven locations around town. If the orgies continued to win money the way they were going, he would recommend to Don Corrado that they go national.

Jerry Picuzza was an old-timer who ran vice and pornography for the Prizzis, and, being the old pro that he was, he had built up the orgies into something that really looked like it could hit. He had set up a regular schedule in four of the boroughs and in eastern New Jersey and southern Connecticut. He circulated a weekly chain letter to prospects, and it was really building membership. Sessions were held every weeknight, although special bookings could be arranged for Saturday, a slow television period, as well as patently promotional “brunch” orgies, with door prizes, on Sundays, at selected locations.

Jerry picked him up at the chemist’s at seven o’clock. They had dinner at a small Sicilian joint on West Fourth Street, a nice, clean place with white tablecloths and white-haired waiters who wore old-fashioned tablecloth aprons. In the entire restaurant there wasn’t a ketchup bottle in sight. He liked the atmosphere, but Charley hated to eat out because, no matter where, the food was never as good as the food he cooked himself—and they charged too much for it.

“Hey, how about this farsumagru?” Jerry asked. His cousin owned the place.

“Where’s the salami?” Charley asked with harsh justice. “Where’s the parsley?”

They drove uptown in Charley’s beat-up Chevy van. They got to the site just before eight-thirty. The action began at ten; and Jerry felt that within four months they would have to add an extra midnight session. The site was in an apartment house at Seventy-fourth and West End Avenue that was owned by one of the realty companies of the Prizzis’ Barker’s Hill Enterprises.

“This ain’t our top orgy unit,” Jerry said. “This is what you call a nice middle-class orgy opportunity.”

“We got other kinds?”

“What the hell, Charley: poor people are Americans—they gotta have a little fun of their choice, too.”

He rang the bell at apartment 7E. A very large man wearing a white jacket and pressed black trousers over his muscles opened the door. “Good evening, Mr. Gibson,” he said to Jerry Picuzza. “Miss Coolidge is expecting you.”

They went into the large, heavily carpeted living room, entirely free of furniture, with about two dozen cushions placed on the carpet around the room. “Miss Coolidge is in the viewing room,” the man said.

“We get sixty-five bucks a head from people who just like to watch,” Jerry said. “One hundred and ten bucks a head from the players, plus they both gotta pay a membership fee and an initiation fee. After all, this is a club. Also, we sell alia them refreshments, mostly pot, some coke, and a little booze. The players don’t know the watchers are watching, and neither side knows that both of them are having their pictures taken in case it should ever come up that we need the shots to negotiate something.”

“Good thinking,” Charley said.

Jerry opened a door and they went into a room with tiered chairs facing a one-way glass partition. A beautiful, willowy young woman, severely dressed in a black skirt and a gray blouse with high niching at the neck, was testing the lighting in the main room when they came in. She stood up abruptly. Charley felt a jolt of high voltage electricity run through his body, starting deep inside and spreading out simultaneously to the roof of his head as if a horned ibex had leaped from his stomach and had crashed into his skull. He had to take a step and a half backward because of the sudden force of an instant erection. He knew he had never had such an instantaneous reaction to seeing a woman. He couldn’t understand it. Nothing showed on her. The high collar of her blouse came up under her chin almost, and he couldn’t see her legs because she was standing behind a sofa, but if anybody asked him to bet, and he never bet on anything, he would bet that she had absolutely gorgeous pins.

“Good evening, Mr. Gibson,” she said.

“This is Claire Coolidge, our manager for the site,” Jerry said to Charley. To Miss Coolidge he said, “Whatta the bookings look like tonight?”

“Thirty-eight players, sixteen watchers,” Miss Coolidge said.

“That ain’t all we got going for us,” Mr. Gibson said to Charley. “We got exotic book sales. We’ll make them an individual videocassette of their action for an additional two-fifty, and the membership is beginning to show a lot of interest in S and M equipment.”

They left the site at 9:10 P.M. and drove back to Brooklyn with Jerry talking numbers all the way. “Figure this, Charley,” he said. “At this site alone we are taking down $4,180 from the players and $1,040 from the watchers plus the refreshments, which average about $800, and that’s only from one session a night.”

“Not bad.”

“Wait! Popular demand is gonna make us move up to midnight matinees. Eleven sites are working tonight and they work five nights a week.”

“Very nice.”

“But that’s nothing. When it goes national, we’ll have seventy-four national availability cities with an average of three sites per city, each one holding seven sessions a week. You can’t beat it for a moneymaker. This can be the biggest thing since crack and hula hoops. The public is really going for it.”

“You done good, Jerry. And if we go national, we’re gonna get you a piece of the action.”

“Jesus, Charley. That is terrific.”

“Who is the girl?” Charley asked. His tone was mild, but that wasn’t how he felt. His heart began to kick at his ribs as he asked the question. He had been absolutely knocked out by the girl. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

“What girl?”

“The girl—the orgy manager. Is she a hooker?”

“A hooker?” Jerry seemed shocked. “She’s got the worst case of the straights of anybody ever worked for me. She’s an outta-work ballet dancer.”

“Whatta you mean?”

“What I mean? She couldn’t get any work at what she does so somebody sent her to us and she was so straight I figured to myself this is exactly what we need to run the retail side. I took out the hookers I had in the other ten operations and I put in straights and business went up twenty-three percent.”

“How come?”

“Straight people don’t approve of orgies. They show it. That provides the necessary feeling of guilt which the players and the watchers gotta have.”

“That’s very tricky.”

“You gotta know my side of the business, Charley.”

“She wants to be a ballet dancer?”

“Go figure it. I am paying her five hundred bucks for a twenty-hour week but I know all she’s doing is saving up so she can quit me and go back to being an unemployed ballet dancer.”

“That’s the way you figure it?”

“No question. I got her replacement all lined up.”

“When she quits, tell her to call me.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe I can get her a job as a ballet dancer.”