Chopper Unchopped (123 page)

Caesar Bonventre got out of the Caddie.

‘Give me five minutes to get in, then hit the place,’ he ordered.

Bonventre shook hands with another man Big Bill recognised as Baldassare Amato. Shit, thought Big Bill, these dagos are treacherous, low-life dogs. Amato and little Caesar are personal bodyguards to Carmine Galante and they are going in to have lunch with him – then going to watch me and two Italians all the way from South Africa kill him. Shit, these guys can’t even do their own killing any more. Big money and imported help is their caper. They can’t trust any of their own any longer. Today was an example. Evil, treacherous dogs.

The three men walked into the restaurant. Frank Sinatra was singing in the background on some well-worn LP record. The front wall of the place was covered with a large painting of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’, which was always a nice ironic touch in Mafia haunts.

The walls were decorated with photos of various local American Sicilian identities stuck between photos of various dead Popes, which probably made sense, what with the Church racket being the only one bigger than the Mafia. Both organisations had a strict hierarchy and scared little people shitless. The difference was one gang used to have more sex but then again, the Mafia sometimes got a bit as well.

Gee, I love killing these fucking wogs, thought Big Bill. It was great to have a job you loved. I’d nearly do it for nothing, he chuckled to himself.

Galante and Coppolla sat at a courtyard table eating fish salad and drinking red wine. As they’d got fatter they’d lost their taste for blood – and had been ordered off red meat as well, as if they thought they should worry about living to a ripe old age. Fish salad, snorted Big Bill contemptuously. A meal for gay boys and dancers. And soon-to-be corpses. Big Bill smiled a bleak smile, like a grey nurse shark.

THE lunchers sat under a checked yellow umbrella. There were tomato vines growing all over the courtyard. It was just like home in the old country – except the Empire State Building wasn’t sticking up half a mile into the sky in some one-horse village in Sicily.

Christ, thought Big Bill, all we need now is for Marlon Brando to come out humming the theme music to the ‘Godfather’ movie, and the whole comic production would be complete.

Little Caesar and Amato had vanished. No doubt they’d excused themselves to go to the lavatory, the way the weak mice do in all good dago set-up jobs.

It wasn’t hard to guess where Hollywood got all its plots from. Big Bill almost felt embarrassed as he raised his sawn-off. His two companions opened fire. Galante copped a head full of slugs to go with a mouth full of fish salad. He should have complained. Slugs in the salad was not a good look. Even if it was good roughage.

Big Bill took the top off Coppolla’s head with one shotgun blast. The wogs liked to spray a few shots around when they got excited, but Bill knew that when it comes to gunplay, less is more. For him it was a very ordinary day’s work.

Big Bill had seen more blood shed on the Melbourne waterfront in one month than he had in the New York Mafia wars in a year, but would anyone believe it? No way. Why? Because Hollywood don’t make movies about Melbourne, that’s why.

Let’s get out of this panty-waist shithole of a town and back to Aussie land, Bill thought. He was sick of Yankee Doodle dago gangsters and their Al Capone lookalike false pretence.

After the shooting party was over, the three gatecrashers left suddenly, leaving someone else to clean up the bodies, the blood and the fish salad. And nobody would be picking up the bill, let alone leaving a tip. Unexpected gangland executions can make life hard for a small restaurant business, especially if the health inspector gets to hear about it.

They drove the big Caddie over to Menlo Park and walked in to the Roma Restaurant to meet Little Caesar Bonventre and Baldassare ‘Baldo’ Amato. There was still ten grand each to collect. Ten up front and ten after. That was the deal.

Big Bill and his two mates were greeted by two shifty-looking wops with shiny shoes and oily smiles. Gaetano Mazzara and Frank Castronovo.

Bill knew Castronovo. He was a cousin to the Corsetti family, or at least had some connection with the Corsetti clan from back home in Lygon Street, Carlton. Mazzara had a Melbourne connection, too. He had a brother who helped run the Victoria Market.

Immigration split families three ways. They could choose Canada, America or Australia, which meant a Sicilian crime family could reach from Lygon Street in Melbourne to Hester Street in New York. And speaking of Hester Street, that’s where Castronovo told Big Bill to go.

Bill didn’t like this. It was a change in plan and he didn’t want to play. Big Bill had one dago friend, a Sicilian named Filippo ‘Jersey Phil’ Sinatra. His older brother, Pat, lived in Carlton.

Jersey Phil had a small club in Belleville, New Jersey. Big Bill would ring the Toyland Social Club on Hester Street and get Little Caesar and Amato to come to him. He knew one thing these New York boys didn’t like was driving over to New Jersey, but Big Bill knew Caesar would come.

When he got to Jersey Phil’s club over in Belleville, Bill walked in and held out a package to him. ‘Hey Phil, do me a favor,’ he said. ‘If something fucks up, post this money and this letter for me, will ya?’

Jersey Phil looked at the thick letter and said, ‘Sure Billy, but nothing will go wrong. Caesar’s a good guy.’

BIG Billy Hill was never seen again. It was as if he just vanished into the smoke, smog and fog of a steamy New Jersey summer night.

‘Big Bill was right about one thing,’ Little Caesar said to Jersey Phil a while later. ‘He said we import all our hit men.’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Phil Sinatra. ‘But he forgot the most important thing. Ha ha ha.’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Amato Baldassare. ‘We don’t fucking export them again. Ha ha.’

‘What about this letter he gave me?’ said Phil.

Caesar looked at it. ‘Money for the family, hey? Shit, I’m a family man. Billy wasn’t a bad guy. Post it.’

‘Ya know,’ Amato said. ‘Caesar, you got a big fucking heart. That’s a nice thing to do.’ Little Caesar grinned at him. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I’m a family man myself.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ said Jersey Phil. ‘Ain’t we all.’

MOTHERHOOD wasn’t something Karen Phillips had exactly planned on. She had many plans but being Mother of the Year was not one of them.

Johnny Go Go had taken her to visit the graves of Micky and Raychell Van Gogh and Ripper Roy Reeves, and one thing led to another and Johnny ended up humping her on top of Ripper Roy’s grave with Micky Van Gogh on one side in his grave and Raychell Van Gogh on the other side in hers. There was an extra stiff in the boneyard that night.

As she was in the throes of passion she started to yell, ‘Micky, Roy. Yeah, I can feel you both.’

She was a sick bitch. When she found she was in the family way she would have got rid of it, only she was convinced that somehow the spirits or ghosts of Ripper Roy Reeves and Micky Van Gogh had entered her body and that the baby she carried was part of them.

‘God,’ said Johnny Go Go. ‘Karen is so possessed with the memory of Ripper Roy and Micky the Nut and Mad Raychell she’d crawl into their graves and kiss their corpses if she could.’

Karen had a baby boy and, true to form, she named him Michael Roy. What outraged Johnny was that she told the doctors at the hospital that the father was a one Michael Van Gogh, not Johnny Go Go, and insisted the child’s last name be registered as Van Gogh. Johnny was deeply hurt and offended.

It was his little baby boy, not a dead man’s, and he planned to take the child from Karen. But the Rabbit Kisser was a dangerously psychopathic lady and the only way to remove the child from her would be to kill her, before she killed him. To top it off, Karen had started a war with the Carrasella family. This was a complication: the left overs of the Corsetti clan had regrouped and, along with the Mazzaras and the Castronovos, had regained control of everything they’d lost at the hands of Micky the Nut, Mad Raychell and Ripper Roy.

Karen didn’t know that Johnny was in business with Tito Carrasella, who was mixed up with the other Italians. God, he thought, the Rabbit Kisser was turning into a bigger mental case than Micky Van Gogh, Ripper Roy and Mad Raychell put together, and now the baby. He had to get that poor baby, his son, away from her.

KAREN Phillips and Russian Suzi sat in the plush office of Anita Von Bibra, baby Micky lying quietly in Suzi’s arms. Karen held a cigarette in her left hand; Anita couldn’t help but notice a heavy blue spider’s web tattoo that covered her hand and appeared to run up her left arm under the sleeve of her leather jacket.

Anita switched her mind back to the business at hand. She was in her brisk, meet-the-new client mode. ‘Who told you about me?’ Anita asked.

‘I read ya name in the paper and it seems you’re a friend of a friend,’ was the blunt reply.

‘Oh?’ said Anita coolly. ‘And who might that be?’

‘Muriel Hill.’

Anita stopped. ‘Oh yes, poor Billy’s Auntie M. Oh yes, indeed.’ Her eyes started to go all moist.

‘Look, I want a trust fund set up for my son and I want him placed into the care of Muriel Hill,’ Karen said. ‘Muriel was an old friend from long ago, and she has agreed to do it for me. I am unable to care for and protect my son. Muriel has agreed. I’ve got a million dollars to go into a trust fund for my son.’

Anita Von Bibra knew exactly who Karen Phillips was. The Carrasella family and the Mazzara clan had hired Anita on small matters from time to time.

Anita had carefully avoided handling any matter to do with the Caballero Night Club and the crew of deranged killers connected with it, and now she had the Rabbit Kisser herself in full psychopathic living color sitting in her office.

There was a small but definite silence. Anita cleared her throat daintily. ‘I’m afraid that I am unable to help you, Miss Phillips,’ she said in her most neutral voice. ‘Conflict of interest, you know.’

‘Listen,’ hissed Karen. ‘How would you like to vanish, just disappear one night and reappear about a month later with a raging heroin habit, getting your ring gear jack-hammered by twenty Turks a night in a brothel a mile north of Istanbul.’

Anita shifted in her seat. So did her ethics. By the time she’d controlled the nervous tic in her cheek she seemed to have it all worked out.

‘A trust account, you say?’ she said brightly. ‘Yes, and having this beautiful baby placed into the loving and protective care of Miss Muriel Hill, a wonderful woman, by all accounts. And all in secret, naturally. Yes, well. I think I can handle that.’

Karen smiled, got to her feet and shook Anita’s hand. Anita smiled too, though there was something about her body language that said she’d rather be picking up a tiger snake than Karen Phillips’s hand.

But she hadn’t lost her poise, or sense of humor. ‘No need for Turkish brothels for me, my dear,’ she said. ‘I’m quick on the uptake, if nothing else. I fully understand your requirements in this matter.’

‘Make sure you do,’ Karen said, thinlipped. ‘Or else I’ll put you in a brothel and sell your daughter to a pet food factory. Fuck me around and I’ll make mince meat of your whole friggin’ life. Dogs and cats will be shitting bits of your family out all over Footscray.’ Anita swallowed hard. ‘Miss Phillips, you have my sworn word all will be done and all will be correct. I swear it.’

Karen and Russian Suzi walked out into the street.

‘Remind me to have that old moll killed once she fixes all this legal shit up,’ Karen said.

‘Why not sell her to the Turks?’ said Suzi.

‘What,’ said Karen. ‘Black dyed hair and a flat chest. We’d be lucky to get enough money to cover the taxi fare to the wharf. Nah. Not worth worrying about.’

‘We will just vanish her, like a German backpacker,’ Suzi said. Being European herself, it was a pretty ordinary crack to make, but that didn’t worry Suzi. She was a pretty ordinary cracker, when it came to matters of taste and delicacy.

‘Yeah,’ said Karen, with a giggle. Nothing worried her, except not getting her own way. That didn’t often happen these days.

Karen took baby Micky. ‘Okay, now listen, Suzi. Get yourself over to Lygon Street. You know the drill, wear something short and low cut. These bloody dagos can’t help themselves. Tits and arse. God, have we put some wogs off with this old trick. And remember, we want the prick with the American accent.’

It was back to business. ‘Okay,’ Suzi smiled. ‘I’ll doodle shake his brains out. Ha ha.’

Karen snapped, ‘Just get him back to the club. His brains will be coming out another way.’

Suzi turned and walked away. She had her orders, and she knew what she had to do. You didn’t argue with Karen Phillips if you knew what was good for you. And, so far, Suzi had shown a high instinct for knowing what was good for her. The Rabbit Kisser was about as sympathetic as Joseph Mengler. But she had better legs.

OLD Salvatore ‘Sally’ Castronovo was visiting Melbourne. He’d come all the way from New York City. He’d become a major force in the Bonanno crime family and had branched out to work also for the Carrasella clan in Palermo, Sicily, and the Mazzara clan in the small seaside town of Castellamare del Golfo, in Sicily. This place was also the home headquarters of the now powerful Bonventre clan.

Old Sally Castronovo was in Melbourne to strengthen ties and to pull the Spanish connection together. Tito Carrasella handled that from Melbourne. Sally was to fly to Spain, but there was something he wanted before he left: a memento of his trip to the city beside the Yarra. And he knew exactly what he wanted, he cackled to his young nephew Benny, ‘but I just don’t know how to wrap it.’

It was an old joke but a goody; Sally had been most amused to hear some Aussie DJ called Ross Patterson crack the gag on a Melbourne talkback radio station called 3AW. What dear old Uncle Sal wanted for a going away present, he told young Benny, was to be set up with some Melbourne pussy.

Benny promised the old guy he had just the ticket. He’d met a sex-crazed, bleached blonde Amazon about a month before who would fit the bill very nicely indeed. She was a female body builder with a body that had to be seen to be believed, and he knew his old uncle would be greatly impressed with his thoughtfulness and judgment in this matter.