Saints Of New York (9 page)

'
A dream . . .'

  
'A dream? More like a nightmare.'

'About the
girl?'

'The girl and
her brother.'

'Tell me.'

'What's to tell?
It's just a dream. Doesn't mean anything.'

'It can do.'

'I don't agree.'

'You don't have
to. Just tell me anyway.'

'She talked to
me. She was beside me in the car, and she was talking to me.'

'What did she
look like?'

'I don't know
exactly. I couldn't look sideways at her, could only look directly ahead. And
she asked me not to look at her anyway . . . she said she didn't look her
best.'

'Because she was
dead?'

'I assume so.'

'And what did
she say to you?'

'I can't
remember.'

'You want to try
and remember?'

'It has no
significance. I do not think that the solution to her murder is my dreams.'

'Her
murder? What
about her brother?'

'That's a
casualty of war. Overdose and murder are just occupational hazards for people
like Danny Lange. Anyway, that's not the issue right now.'

'You don't want
to talk about this anymore, Frank?'

'No.' 'What do
you want to talk about?'

'I was gonna
tell you about JFK.'

'I looked up
some stuff last night on the internet.'

'What you'll
find on the internet and what I can tell you are not the same thing.'

'I know that. I
was just reading up some of the history of it.'

'Idlewild?'

'Yes, Idlewild.'

'Well, that was
what it used to be, and then, when it became JFK Airport, things didn't change
a great deal aside from the scope of what they were getting up to. Even as
Idlewild, right from the point it opened in '48, this airport was run by the
Mob.'

'Your father
used to tell you about all of this?'

'Sure he did. He
told me the whole history of the Mafia in New York, how it all started, how it
all ended up.'

'And how did
that make you feel? When he talked to you about these things?'

'Made me feel he
was the smartest guy in the whole freakin' world.'

'A saint, even?'

'The Saints of
New York? No, that wasn't for years.'

'So tell me
about it. Tell me some of the things he used to talk to you about.'

'Well, to tell you
the truth, the height of the Mob's control of New York was from the Thirties to
the Fifties, certainly as far as the docks were concerned. That was the
International Longshoremen's Association. You saw
On The Waterfront?'

'Marlon Brando.
Yes.'

'Right, Marlon
Brando. Anyway, that was all about that shit. The way the unions and the mob
controlled which ships could get loaded and unloaded, and whether the crews
were working down there. The largest ILA local, Brooklyn 1814, was controlled
by a guy named Anthony Anastasio, but they called him "Tough Tony".
Anyway, Tough Tony died in '63, and 1814 was taken
over
by a guy
called Anthony Scotto, and he was a big deal. He was
a
great success in the ILA, and he was also a capo in the Gambino
crime family. He had some of the most powerful political
con
nections in New York's history.

'Now, the
business coming through the ports and Idlewild
itself
had been
big, don't get me wrong, but in 1963 when Idlewild became JFK, these guys
realized that JFK's traffic would make everything they'd done before seem like
pocket change. They saw the possibilities there, not only because of all the
merchandise that they could steal from the airport, but also the way in which
the freight forwarding could be managed.'

'How do you mean?'

'Well, this goes
back to the Fifties. The Teamsters. You've heard of the Teamsters, right?'

'Sure. Jimmy Hoffa and all that.'

'Yeah, Jimmy
Hoffa. Well, Teamsters Local 295 was established back in '56 to represent the
clerical guys, the dispatchers, and also the truck drivers and the warehousemen
employed by the freight- forwarding and trucking companies that served the
airport. The Lucchese family controlled 295, and the two guys that ran that
show were Johnny Dio - John Dioguardi to give you his full name - and a guy
called John McNamara who was the nominal president of 295. So McNamara and
Johnny Dio get busted for conspiracy and extortion in '58, and there's this
thing called the McClellan Commission set up to investigate all the corruption
in this end of the business. Well, they dig deep, and they find out that Jimmy
Hoffa created Local 295 and a couple of other paper locals—'

'Paper locals?'

'Sure, locals
that just exist on paper, but they don't really exist. Anyway, they find that
Hoffa created these outfits to milk as much money out of the freight-forwarders
as possible, and that money was going directly to the Lucchese family, and they
were supporting Hoffa's candidacy for President of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters. Anyway, there's so much corruption and so much money
in all of this. It's a mess. No-one knows who to believe or who to trust. The
New York State Investigation Committee gets involved, there's public hearings
into racketeering at the airport, but it isn't for ten years that anyone is
really charged with anything. That tells you how much they were all Involved.
Politicians, police, representatives of the Mayor's Office, the FBI, the SIC .
. . they were all getting paid off. Finally, in '69, John Gotti takes a fall
for three years for hijacking trucks.

That
was nothing more than a publicity stunt to give everyone the idea that they
were really changing things down there.'

'And
your father knew about this?'

'I'm
getting there. Let me finish with the history. So, 1970, the Luccheses support
the creation of Teamsters Local 851, and this outfit represents over two
thousand truckers and warehousemen and fourteen hundred clerical people, all of
whom were former members of Local 295. New name, old face, right? Anyway, this
same old crap goes on. They are pulling merchandise and money out of the
airport like there's no tomorrow. Finally, the US Attorney General, John
Mitchell, has had enough. It's 1971, and he announces two antitrust indictments
against a whole bunch of trucking companies and the entirety of the National
Air Freight Association. The shit hits the fan. Everyone pleads no contest, the
NAFA is dissolved, and they set up this commission to ensure that air freight
price-fixing is prevented.'

'But
I guess that doesn't happen, right?'

'The
airport is fifteen miles from the center of Manhattan, it accounts for thirty
percent of air cargo coming in and going out of the mainland United States. It
covers five thousand acres, and there's endless runways, terminal buildings,
cargo hangars, warehouses, high-security storage vaults, container stations
and truck depots. It has forty thousand people working there. For God's sake,
there's the same number of people working there as the whole of the New York
Police Department. The thing is managed and run by the Port Authority for New
York and New Jersey. The
Port
Authority, right? For New York and
New Jersey.
All the way back to the Fifties, when planes instead of ships started carrying
America to the rest of the world, organized crime has been in charge of this
stuff. The Luccheses already owned many of the port trucking firms, and they
were the backbone of the Metropolitan Importer Truckmen's Association. It was
just a matter of switching from one area of business to another. You think that
something so insignificant as the US Attorney General and a few court cases are
going to stop this shunt they had into the financial arteries of the airport?'

'And
that was what your father was involved in?'

'Sure
he was. That was what the Saints were all about. If these people needed help
from the NYPD they would call the Saints.'

'So
how did he manage to get all these commends and citations for his work against
organized crime?'

'The
Mob gave him people. They sacrificed people every once in a while. A bust or
two. A small truck firm folds and somebody gets a couple of years. The trucks
get confiscated, they are sequestered in a police compound somewhere, and six
months later someone loses the paperwork and they are sold to another trucking
firm for peanuts. That was the way it worked.'

'And
you never thought to report this to—'

'To
who? Report it to who? The police were taking more money than anyone else, and
besides, you can't break the police. No-one ever has, and no-one ever will.
Aside from the police closing ranks, aside from the fact that Internal Affairs,
the very people who are supposed to investigate police corruption, are part of
the police department themselves, it is highly unlikely that any congressman
or senator would ever sanction the prosecution of anyone higher than a
sergeant. Why? Because you can't have the people losing faith in the police.
You understand this, right? I don't need to tell you why. You start to point
the finger at the people in charge, and society gets very nervous.'

'And
when you were younger, when your father was still alive, you knew he was doing
this, taking money off organized crime people, turning a blind eye to thefts at
the airport?'

'Turning
a blind eye? Taking some bribes? Hell, they were doing a hell of a lot more
than that.'

'Such
as?'

'Well,
let's say this. My father spent ten years in the Organized Crime Control
Bureau, and then a further ten years in the Brooklyn Organized Crime Task
Force. That's twenty years in the guts of this thing. Twenty years investigating
these people, talking to them, arresting them. Twenty years up against the
worst kind of temptation you could find. The money, the women, the booze, the
drugs, the opportunities were limitless, and he and his friends, no more than
ten or twelve of them, ran the most successful unit within the NYPD for all
that time. They busted more people than anyone else. They secured the greatest
number of convictions, the greatest numbers of years of imprisonment, but if
you look closely, if you start to look beneath the surface, you'll find that
the people they took down were just the foot soldiers, never the under-bosses
or the bosses. This was the way it worked. Hell, these assholes even had a
roster for who was gonna get busted next. It was part of the game. Three years
out working the business, six months in prison. Five years living the life, a
year or two in prison. These guys, these Mafia soldiers, even paid each other
off to take the fall. So-and-so's wife was pregnant, someone'll take your turn
on the roster, do your twelve months for you, but when it comes to his turn you
have to take his charge and do his time.'

'And your father
did some serious things?'

'He didn't just
do them, he organized them. He was instrumental in some of the scams they
pulled at the airport.'

'Such as?'

'You like this
shit, don't you? You like hearing about this stuff, right? The war stories?'

'It's
fascinating. Worrying, to say the least, but fascinating as well.'