Chopper Unchopped (173 page)

“Ya could have proposed marriage to me after I’d finished, Joe” she said, pouting a little.

“I’m sorry, Princess. Please baby, will ya marry me?”

Tina smiled. “Yeah, Joey of course. I will, but on one condition.”

“Anything,” said Joey. “Just name it.”

“Get out of the bricklaying business, Joey. It’s too bloody dangerous.”

Joey nodded solemnly.

“I swear on my mother’s grave, honey, I’ll never lay another brick.” And that, he thought, was one promise he knew he could keep.

THE wedding of Joey Gravano and Tina Torre was, at Don Hector Aspanu’s insistence, to be held at the Church of the Fisherman on the Palermo waterfront. It was nicknamed the Church of St Juiliano after the great Sicilian hero bandit and legend Salvatore Juiliano.

To get his way, Don Hector claimed ill health and heart trouble. Most who knew him knew the only heart trouble he had was that he didn’t have a heart at all. But, anyway, the Aspanu company paid for Tina’s whole family to be flown from Melbourne to Sicily first class and accommodated, all expenses paid. Friends and relations from various corners of the world were ordered to attend, including a gaggle of razzle dazzle boys from New York, who thought they were tough guys back home but felt like boy scouts at a bum bandits’ picnic when they got off the plane in Sicily.

Conversations with the American connections had to be in English as their Italian was hopeless. They had lost any idea of the various Sicilian dialects and Scarchi was a word they had only heard their grandfathers mention in whispers. In true American fashion they talked loud, splashed plenty of money, produced lavish wedding gifts and offered everyone the benefit of their advice. This was pretty funny, because it led to mob guys talking about junk bonds and computer fraud with Sicilians who were still killing each other over being short-changed on the sale of a truckload of fish.

For the Americans, it was a step back a hundred years. They were looking at where they had all come from and it secretly frightened and embarrassed them.

They didn’t know what to make of strange Sicilian finger signs that had died out everywhere else but were still being used in the old country. The American Italians were shocked to learn that their much-loved term “Goombata” — meaning “my friend” — was also a Scarchi term used by homosexuals when talking about a favourite bum boy. In Sicily, a Goombata was a young friend who was so friendly he would cop it up the clacker. This had some comic results when the yankee mob guys greeted their Sicilian brothers with “hey Goombata”. Guns and knives were drawn and one American wedding guest was shot and two stabbed before Don Hector could call for order and explain the verbal misunderstanding. Most amusing.

SALVATORE “Fat Sally” Gigante wanted to talk with his Uncle Hector. Thinking he was some sort of cousin of Joey’s, Fat Sally felt Don Hector was his uncle. Don Hector, on the other hand, while politely calling Gigante his nephew, could only recall a Sicilian whore named Gina Gigante that his grandfather and half the village use to screw before they cut her pimp’s head off and Gina and her three bastard sons, one of them the sly product of his grandfather, ran away to America.

Fat Sally sat down. They were at a table outside Lorenzo’s Cafe on the Palermo waterfront. While the Aspanu clan controlled Sicily with sheer bloodshed, it had little direct influence in America. However, it had life or death influence over the Sicilian crime families, which in turn did have powerful influence with the New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago mafia crime families. And it had its own interests all over the world.

In America, Miami was the only city where the Aspanu clan had any direct business. This was because Don Hector had predicted the Cuban trouble in the early 1950s and had made arrangements with contacts in half a dozen South American countries to use Naples as a clearing house to wash cash all through Europe. The Aspanus also controlled heroin and cocaine distribution in France, Spain, and Amsterdam and had even backed Afghanistan with money against its various enemies.

“I have a message from our friends in New York,” said Fat Sally.

Don Hector was slightly insulted, but didn’t show it. It couldn’t be a very important message if they send a Goombata like this to deliver it, he was thinking. He made a mental note to get Joey to kill this fat faggot when he could find the time. But there was no great hurry.

“What message?” said Don Hector with a thin smile. “Are our friends in New York so fond of copping nigger dick they no longer want us to export Sicilian salami sausage. Ha ha ha.”

Fat Sally was shocked at this remark but took it as some strange Sicilian comedy, not understanding that the old Don was quite serious.

Franco Di Tommaso and Luigi Monza sat at the next table. They burst out laughing. Bobby and Benny Benozzo were standing six feet away and also joined in the comedy. Sally Gigante thought it polite to also laugh at the old Don’s jest.

“So what is your message, Miko mio?”

“My friends want to borrow from you some helpers,” said Sally. “Little Juilianos.”

“So tell me, little fat boy,” said Don Aspanu, “what is a bambino Juiliano?”

“A little killer,” said Gigante.

“And in return for the lend of my Bambino Juilianos I get what?”, asked the Don.

Gigante puffed himself up.

“Don Hector Aspanu gets the love, respect and undying friendship of my friends.”

Don Hector nodded then smiled.

“If my name was Marlon Brando I’d be very pleased but this request indicates you can’t trust your own people, so a little money as well as the love, respect and undying friendship would be nice, if your friends don’t mind.”

“I will speak to them, Don Hector. How much money?” asked Fat Sally.

Don Hector looked bored. “Ten per cent of your friends’ net operation for as long as they want my friendship.” Gigante was dumbstruck. This was a fortune.

“I tell you a story,” said Don Hector. “Many years ago I visit America. I had a friend, a Jew called Meyer Lansky, and another friend, Frank Costello. Lansky, he died of the old age in Miami. Costello, he dead too. But they really give me wonderful time. I fell in love with America, with Hollywood. They introduce me to the only woman I ever loved, a real Hollywood movie star actress. Her name not important, you too young to remember, anyway. My old friend Frank Costello, some fat former heavyweight dago boxer wanting to climb the ladder took a few shots at Frank, but Frankie lived. The bum who pulled the trigger was named Vincent, Vinnie the Chin, you remember that name, hey?”

Gigante went pale.

“Now,” said Don Hector, “I hear that the bum who tried to kill my old friend is now a big boss in New York — God only knows how that happened — and he walks around in his dressing gown pretending to be a mad man. Stupido. Tell me, little fat boy, what is his last name?”

Sally choked. The Don continued calmly.

“Because if the Chin is one of these New York friends, then you can’t ask me for help.”

“No,” said Sally, “he isn’t.” He was praying the Don wouldn’t request Vincent “The Chin” Gigante’s last name again.

“Okay,” said Don Hector, slapping his knee, “tell your friends we can do the business. But remember, ten percent or I’ll get your friends whacked just for wasting my morning. And their fucking children.”

“Tell me, Don Hector, if I may ask,” said Sally. “Who was the Hollywood movie actress?”

“Ah,” said Hector, “just a beautiful woman I lost my head over, then my heart broke and, as fate would have it, she lost her own head. Anyway young Sally, enough is enough. This is a wedding, a celebration. No more business.”

As Sally walked away Don Hector said to Di Tommaso in Sicilian: “Get our friends in Miami to check out our New York friends because they are either fools, desperate or they are trying to play the trick on me. By the way, your English is improving.” He was referring to Di Tommaso’s laughter at the nigger gag.

“Bobby and Benny are teaching me,” said Di Tommaso.

“Ah,” said the Don with a sharp look at his two bodyguards. “School masters as well as bodyguards. Hector Aspanu is indeed a fortunate man to have such clever helpers.”

Somehow, they didn’t think he meant it.

ITALY, 1949. Young Hector Aspanu, Pietro Baldassare and Filippo Delia Torre crossed the Strait of Messina from Sicily to the mainland and made their way north to the “second Sicily”, as they called Naples. The Sicilian Mafia nicknamed the Naples gangsters “little brothers” or the “little cousins” as, next to the gunmen of Sicily, the gangsters of Naples were the only men the Sicilians trusted as men of honour.

Another reason they liked Naples was that the whores there were famous. Prostitution was the backbone of the Naples underworld, but there were plenty of sidelines to go with it. Gambling, blackmail, extortion, robbery, murder, the black market in American cigarettes, whisky, or anything else that could be stolen and trafficked. They dealt in drugs to a small degree, as well as medical supplies, weapons, pornography, kidnapping, opium and hashish. They trafficked in teenage boys and girls to the brothels of Morocco, Tunisia, Arabia and North Africa.

But business being as competitive as it is, gangs from Rome and Calabria had moved in and a war had erupted for control of the Naples brothels. Which is why the Naples gangsters called for some young unknown guns to come up from Sicily to help in the battle for Naples.

Those who’d made the call were Carlo Fontana and Danilo Domenico, heads of the La Santa Casa gang. La Santa Casa meant “the Holy House”, and Fontana and Domenico had been Jesuit Priests, defrocked and ex-communicated by the Church for crimes the details of which were never revealed. The fact was they were both psychopathic killers whose reputation for violence and sexual excess was legend.

The two former priests turned gang leaders were disappointed that their call for help resulted in three Sicilian gunmen and not thirty, but they welcomed Aspanu, Baldassare and Delia Torre with open arms.

It was said that the woman who slept in Mussolini’s bed, his mistress Clara Petacci, was once a whore from the Naples brothels, and it was her who encouraged Mussolini to execute the bosses of all the Camorra gangs as a payback for the Camorra killing her grandfather and four uncles.

It was also said that when Mussolini and Petacci were murdered and strung up by the heels in Milan it was done in Camorra revenge style. Fact or fiction, it all strengthened the legend about the shadowy organisation that controlled the third largest city in Italy, meaning Naples.

To the young guns fresh from the hills of Sicily, Naples was mind blowing. It meant taking money with both hands and an endless supply of women. For the three young Sicilians it was a glittering, city of laughter, sex and sin.

It was in reality a filthy, poverty-stricken slum that no self-respecting dog would die in. But compared to the peasant poverty of Sicily it seemed like New York.

It seemed to the Sicilians that they couldn’t walk more than ten feet down any narrow street without seeing a whore on her knees or some gangster sticking a knife into the neck of another. The whole city was corrupt and violent. The men robbed and killed. The women whored and robbed and killed. And there was a Camorra war for control of the city. It all needed some Sicilian-style discipline, and so it was that that the three Sicilians sat down with Carlo Fontana and Danilo Domenico in a small brothel and gambling den called the Santa Lucia club.

“The whole fucking town is bleeding to death in its own vomit,” said Fontana.

“Yes,” said Domenico. “They kill us, we kill them. Bang, bang, bang every night but no-one wins, no-one loses. We rob them, they rob us. We steal their whores, they steal ours. The whole city has become a dog eat dog affair.”

Hector Aspanu spoke. “But I thought the old men of the Camorra controlled the gangs.”

“What old men?” said Fontana. “The Germans killed the ones Mussolini didn’t. Now it’s just the young bloods all fighting each other for their own slice of this maggoty pie. You can buy a twelve-year-old boy and his thirteen-year-old sister in the Capri Club for five American dollars each for the whole night and the pimp will, I promise you, turn out to be either the mother or the father. The whole city needs burning in the fires of hell.”

Hector Aspanu spat on the floor. He was trying to follow the conversation but on the other side of the club was the most beautiful girl he had seen, a classic Naples princess. Big seductive eyes, a Roman nose, the full lips of an Arabian harem teaser, a slender neck, black silky hair tied up in a bun and held in place with a Spanish comb. She wore a plain white cotton dress full and long, tied at her narrow waist with a white belt to reveal a cleavage you could holster a .38 in.

As she walked from table to table selling flowers, her hips swung in time with the music. She was no more than 15, maybe 16 years old. She had a teenage face, but the eyes of a knowing woman years older. She was a girl who had seen things during the war that children shouldn’t see.

Men bought flowers from her and she seemed to tolerate their hands running up under her long white frock to caress the back of her smooth legs. Hector noticed she allowed the American sailors, for a tip, to fondle her firm ripe round arse. But she had rage in her eyes at odds with her smile.

When the girl approached Hector’s table Fontana ordered her away.

“Fucking street rats. I told you before, we don’t need fucking flower sellers. Put your arse on the street. You come in here teasing with your flowers, fucking virgin slut. We all know your mother would sell you tomorrow but for your attitude. Get out, whore.”

“I’m not a whore,” spat the young girl.

“Ah, yes” replied Domenico. “But you will be, I promise you. Your mother is coming to see me in a week’s time. If she hasn’t got the money your family borrowed by then, she has promised us that she does have a daughter.”

The young girl started to shake with anger and tears welled up in her eyes.

“My mother wouldn’t sell me. You’re lying, you pig.”