Interface (90 page)

Wednesday, October 23:

COZZANO
          
51%

PRESIDENT
            
10%

MCLANE
                
21%

UNDECIDED
           
13%

OTHER
                   
5%

In Chicago, a press conference was held by Tommy Markovich,
a venerable Chicago sportscaster who had been well known to
sports fans in that city during the late sixties and early seventies. He
had retired in 1980. Markovich said that his conscience had been
troubling him about something. He showed an excerpt of a Bears-Vikings game from the year 1972. Late in the game, the Vikings were leading by ten points and the Bears were driving from their
own thirty with only one minute left in the game. William A.
Cozzano, who was a tight end, went out on a screen pass, caught the
ball, and found himself out in the open with nothing between him and the goal line except for hard-frozen turf. He ran unobstructed
all the way to the Viking ten, where, inexplicably, the ball squirted
loose from his arms and dribbled back upfield for a few yards, where
a pursuing Viking fell on it. It had been a famous gaffe at the time,
not so much because it was significant to the outcome of the game
(it wasn't), but because Cozzano was known for being a steady and reliable sort of player who didn't make mental mistakes.

Now, a couple of decades later, the shriveled old man who had
called that game on TV wanted to point something out: the
Vikings had been favored to win that game by ten points. By
dropping the ball, Cozzano had preserved the point spread.

Thursday, October 24:

COZZANO
          
45%

PRESIDENT
            
12%

MCLANE
                
25%

UNDECIDED
           
14%

OTHER
                   
4%

In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author of
books on the Mob said that Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles")
Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had made
something like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano had
simply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.

A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicago
released the results of a two-month investigation into connections
between the Cozzano family and the Mafia. The centerpiece was a
vast family tree - actually, several family trees intertwined into a
thicket - so big that it had been drawn, in minute letters and lines,
on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. The extended Cozzano
family was shown in blue. Mob families were shown in red. The
family trees went all the way back to the twelfth-century Genoa
and showed that William A. Cozzano, John Gotti, Al Capone, and Benito Mussolini were all distantly related.

The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that the
American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths had
not existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a membership of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdraw
from the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor who
had been discharged under other than honourable circumstances.
One of them no longer practiced because he could no longer
obtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcy
after fifty of his patients filed a class-action suit against him
complaining of botched breast implants.

The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own,
showing the incumbent President and Tip McLane tripping over
their shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these two
might want to have neurological exams of their own.

Finally, a video expert was trotted out to state that the videotape
of Cozzano nearly dropping the baby in Newark had evidently
been doctored; other videotapes made of the same event did not show him doing anything unusual.

Friday, October 25:

COZZANO
          
40%

PRESIDENT
            
14%

MCLANE
                
29%

UNDECIDED
           
13%

OTHER
                   
4%

Acting on an anonymous tip, a reporter for a Chicago network
affiliate tracked down Alberto ("Stitches") Barone, ninety-six years
of age, who was living in a dingy convalescent home on Chicago's
south side. Stitches agreed to have the nurses unbutton his shirt so
that he could display the numerous scars that he had received
during an epochal knife duel with John Cozzano, William's father,
some
 
sixty
 
years
  
earlier,
  
for the
 
hand
 
of the
 
fair
 
Francesca
Domenici. Over time, the scars had contracted and become even
more grotesque than they had been to begin with. Stitches Barone,
fortified with a few injections, managed to sit up in bed and deliver
an unrehearsed, four-hour statement to the TV cameras, telling the
entire story of his ten-decade life and times. Of these four hours,
one hour was devoted to his childhood in Italy, one hour to his
heyday in the Al Capone organization, one hour to his physical
ailments, and one hour to recounting the antics of his favorite dog,
Bozo, who had died of vehicular trauma in 1953. The reporter
took the videotape home and culled the one sentence devoted to the subject of John Cozzano: "he was a vicious man who would
stop at nothing to get what he wanted, and I was afraid of him."

William A. Cozzano appeared at a press conference in New York
with a number of leading Italian-Americans, including the daughter
of Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza. The Italian-American
leaders blasted the media for defaming Cozzano, and Costanza's
daughter, in particular, stated that there had never been any
connection between her father and Cozzano. A family tree was
brought out to show that Cozzano was also related to Leonardo da Vinci and Joe Dimaggio.
Saturday, October 26:

COZZANO
          
36%

PRESIDENT
            
14%

MCLANE
                
31%

UNDECIDED
           
14%

OTHER
                   
5%

Campaigning in the state of Washington, William A. Cozzano
visited Seattle's Pike Place Market, where a number of Southeast
Asian immigrants had been able to set up thriving businesses selling
produce that they raised on truck farms outside the city. Making his
way down the center of the market, surrounded by a high cloud of
media, Cozzano stopped at one stand and bought an apple from the attractive young Laotian-American woman on the other side of the
counter.

Just as he was biting into the apple, he was assaulted, and nearly
knocked down, by a tiny, rabid, screaming person who had charged
in underneath the radar of the Secret Service men. It was an old
woman, not much more than four feet tall, wearing a conical hat,
screaming hysterically in Vietnamese, pummeling and clawing at
Cozzano with both hands.

By the time the Secret Service dragged her off of the shocked
Cozzano, roughly a hundred dollars' worth of assorted produce had
been destroyed by the feet of video cameramen and still
photographers who leapt up on to the high ground as soon as they
heard trouble, running back and forth along the tables looking for
a camera angle, churning the opulent displays of fresh strawberries,
asparagus, basil, chanterelles, blackberries, and sweet corn into
succotash. Most of them just barely had time to zero their cameras
in on the contorted face of the old Vietnamese woman before she
began to scream, in English: "You killed my baby! You killed my baby! You are an evil man!"
Sunday, October 27:

COZZANO
          
35%

PRESIDENT
            
15%

MCLANE
                
34%

UNDECIDED
           
12%

OTHER
                   
4%

A front-page exclusive in the Sunday editions of
The Dallas
Morning News
told an interesting story of about Cozzano's son, James. James Cozzano had spent most of the spring and summer
following the primary campaigns as part of a research project for his
doctoral dissertation. During this period he had made contacts with
Lawrence Barnes, a wealthy Dallas businessman who was a big
supporter of the candidacy of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph
Sweigel. After Sweigel's loss to Tip McLane, Lawrence Barnes had approached James Cozzano and offered him a position on the board
of directors of an import-export business, based in Houston, in
which Barnes held a majority interest. The business dealt mostly in
equipment related to oil exploration and drilling.

It was now revealed that this company did most of its business
with Iraq and Libya, and that minority interests were owned by
shady offshore companies that were known to be controlled by the
governments of those countries.

Monday, October 28:

COZZANO
          
32%

PRESIDENT
            
16%

MCLANE
                
34%

UNDECIDED
           
13%

OTHER
                   
5%

Fifty newspapers across the United States ran the same photo
graph on the front page, a wire service photo taken on a small lake a few miles south of Tuscola, Illinois. The photo showed a local farmer out on a little rowboat, examining the surface of the lake,
which was covered with dead fish. The farmer said that the fish kill
was almost certainly caused by a spill of toxic waste originating
from the CBAP plant in Tuscola - the economic foundation of the
Cozzano fortune.

The Cozzano campaign held a press conference in Seattle, in which
leaders of the local Vietnamese-American community stated that no one had ever seen, or heard of, the little Vietnamese lady who
had accused Cozzano of war crimes. The woman herself had gone
into seclusion after having been released by the police, and was no
longer speaking to the press; but her family insisted that Cozzano
had rolled a hand grenade into their hut in Vietnam and blown up
three small children.

Tuesday, October 29:

COZZANO
          
30%

PRESIDENT
            
17%

MCLANE
                
38%

UNDECIDED
           
11%

OTHER
                   
4%

A retired nurse who had once been hired to work in the
Cozzano home, during the prolonged illness of Christina Cozzano, said that during the last few weeks of her life, Cozzano's late wife
had become addicted to painkilling drugs.

The wife of Tip McLane's vice-presidential candidate, during a speech to a conservative Christian group, stated that Eleanor
Richmond's overbearing and "unusually aggressive" personality
had played a significant role in driving her husband to suicide.