Thunder City (6 page)

Nothing, Borneo had learned, was permanent, though everything was cyclical. Goodness and vice must each take its turn, but neither could hold it forever. He had followed with interest the formation of various antisaloon leagues across the country, most notably the one headed in Ohio by the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, a dried-up old raisin with white hair and spectacles, Carrie Nation in a vest and without her bonnet. The idea seemed to be catching on, and with a teetotaler in the White House, there was no telling how long that fire would burn or how much it might consume. Better to sit it out, or fan it in a direction more beneficial. There was money to be made from fighting fires, once people had had enough of them, and if one took care not to step in the path of the flames.

Uncle Joe was safe on his deathbed. Not so his son Carlo, who at age thirty was even fatter than his father, and who had announced the old man’s retirement by having himself listed as a greengrocer in the city directory. His first official act was to target a butcher on Heidelberg, in what was until recently Germantown.

Vito Grapellini was no ordinary purveyor of steaks and chops. When he closed his shop at night, he changed out of his apron and straw boater into blue-and-white flannels, white spats, and a Panama hat, and struck off toward the streetcar swinging a bamboo cane like Eddie Foy. He supplied the finest cuts to wealthy homeowners on Jefferson and through Big Jim Dolan had contracted to fill the larders for twenty-five-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners thrown by the Democratic Party. For this boon the Irish Pope received a 20-percent return on every slice of corned beef sold. Grapellini had been known to drop what would have been a month’s wages for a bricklayer on a single race at the fairgrounds, and to be seen in Dolph’s Saloon an hour later, drinking beer and eating bratwurst and laughing. When Carlo Sorrato gave Borneo a letter to give to the butcher and said he should be good for five thousand if he didn’t want to see his shop burn down, Borneo thought Carlo was inspired less by Grapellini’s prosperity than by national pride; had the man sought comfort in cannoli and Chianti instead of that German rot, one or two thousand might have been satisfactory.

Borneo accepted the commission and delivered the letter. He had decided that if the butcher took fright and agreed to the demand, then his plans must be postponed and the matter treated as an ordinary transaction. When Grapellini opened the envelope and moved his lips over the words, his features lost all color; Borneo turned to leave. Then the blood returned to the butcher’s face all at once, a deep, liverish red, the hue of rage. Borneo waited while both paper and envelope were torn in two, then the pieces shuffled together and torn again. The scraps fluttered to the sawdust covering the floor. Borneo was distracted by them for an instant. When he looked up, the butcher had jerked his cleaver from the block between them and was holding it like an axe.

“Get out of my shop, you damn Sicilian nigger!”

Grapellini, he realized at that moment, was a Calabrise. There was a special hatred between the two regions, separated only by the hair’s breadth of the Strait of Messina, that amounted almost to love.

Borneo held up a palm. “Put down your weapon, Vito Grapellini. I have a proposition.”

He spoke in English, lest his island dialect goad the butcher into violence. His face was already the same shade of scarlet as the stains on his apron.

“I read your proposition already.” The cleaver remained where it was.

“You have been here ten years, long enough to know that not much is different here. If you refuse to pay the money, a fire in your place of business is the least you have to fear. You may lose your life.”

“We will see what Jimmy Dolan has to say about that.”

“Dolan is a mick. He will not interfere with what goes on in Little Italy. If he roars, Carlo Sorrato will give him a streetsweep he has paid to plead guilty to manslaughter. Dolan will be satisfied, and you will still be dead. He will find another butcher.”

“I will not be dead alone.”

“No one is dead alone. The cemetery is crowded. Why should you tax its capacity further? I am offering you a way by which you will keep your life and most of your money.”

“Why not all of it?”

Borneo smiled. The moustache he had started turned down at the corners, and the expression was melancholy. “Like you, I must live.”

The cleaver came down slowly. “How much?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

Grapellini’s smile was not melancholy. Borneo saw in it that the butcher now considered him a tenth as important as Uncle Joe’s fat son.

“Five hundred dollars a month for as long as Sorrato and everyone else leaves you alone to do business.”

The smile went away. The cleaver ground curls of white maple out of the block.

“I will let you think about it,” Borneo said. To aid him in his decision, he gave the butcher the names of three men to whom he might turn for references. One of them was Gilberto Orosco, the barber.

When Borneo returned the next day, Grapellini did not pick up his cleaver. He finished wrapping a package of veal for a woman with thick ankles and a faint moustache, fumbling a little with the string, and thanked her for her order. When the bell tinkled behind her, he addressed Borneo as Signor Bornea and said that he was very much interested in the proposition he had made.

Borneo was grave. “It was no less interesting yesterday. It is true that at the end of ten months you will have paid me as much as Carlo Sorrato is asking, and then the payments will continue. However, Carlo Sorrato does not offer a guarantee that he will not return in six months to demand another five thousand. Nor does he promise that you will not be bothered by others who will say that if Vito Grapellini can afford to pay Uncle Joe’s fat son five thousand dollars to leave him in peace, he can give us two hundred in return for the same service. It goes on, you see. There is no unity among these fellows. I will see that you are not bothered by them.”

“I have no doubt that you can, now,” Grapellini replied. “The Sorratos are a different matter. The old man is dying, but Carlo has three brothers.”

“A cockroach has six legs. They are harmless once you cut off its head.”

“I will not pay for murder.”

“I do not murder for pay. We are discussing an arrangement to insure your business and your person against loss and injury. Grapellini, I did not come here to say all over again what I said yesterday. Do you accept my proposition or not?”

The butcher turned around. His cleaver and a number of knives with blue-edged blades were laid out on the back counter. When he faced Borneo again he was holding a thick envelope, smeared with bloody juice.

Borneo did not take it. “You will pay me when we meet next. Do you open your cash register before you have cut and weighed your meat in full view of the customer? Satisfaction comes first.”

The next day, Carlo Sorrato was found lying face-down on Riopelle Street, north of the Eastern Market, with his pockets turned inside out and his throat slit from ear to ear. The coroner’s physician who performed the autopsy, a young man named Edouard, reported that he hadn’t enough blood left in him to float a five-cent cigar. It was decided at the inquest that he had died at the hands of robbers. Salvatore Bornea was among those brought in for questioning. A salesgirl at Partridge & Blackwell’s department store named Graziella Carbone told police that at the time of the atrocity she and Borneo were watching the vaudeville show at the Temple Theater, after which they went roller-skating at the Pavilion. She produced ticket stubs in support of her claim. Borneo was released. Three weeks later, the couple married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. Vito Grapellini provided the meat for the reception at the Wayne Hotel.

The murder of Carlo Sorrato was never solved. His brothers, Vincenzo, Gaetano, and Giuseppe Jr., offered a reward of a thousand dollars for the name of the perpetrator, but it was withdrawn after Vincenzo fell into the path of the Woodward Avenue streetcar and his right leg was amputated. His claim that he was pushed was investigated by the police, who reported that the incident was a regrettable accident caused by the eagerness of the homebound crowd to board the car. The same night, Gaetano found a note under his door advising him to forget about Carlo. A program for a dance recital featuring Gaetano’s five-year-old daughter was included in the envelope. Upon Vincenzo’s release from St. Mary’s Hospital, all three Sorratos and their families moved to Toledo, where they opened a market.

Shortly after Vincenzo’s accident, other merchants began paying Sal Borneo to insure themselves and their businesses against injury and loss. He recorded the amounts in a ledger as dues paid to the Unione Siciliana, a benevolent organization of which he was founder and president. Two years went by, a period remembered as a time of peace within Detroit’s Italian community. Then Borneo entered Vito Grapellini’s shop on a day when his dues in the Unione were not expected. He said, “I have a proposition.”

“Another one?” The butcher wiped his bloody hands on a rag.

“This one will not cost you.” Borneo reached inside the coat of the suit he had ordered cut to his measure at C. R. Mabley’s in Cadillac Square and placed an envelope on the maple block. It contained $12,000 in crisp new hundred-dollar bills. “That is the money you have paid me for protecting yourself and your business since we made our agreement. I offer it back in return for controlling interest in your shop.”

Grapellini smiled, but his eyes were troubled. He had grown to admire Borneo as a man of his word, but he feared him more than ever. “You want to be a butcher?”

“Certainly not. I don’t know chuck from sirloin. I seldom even eat meat. I want you to go on running Grapellini’s Meats just as you have from the beginning. I will be your silent partner. We will share in the profits and I will not presume to tell you how a butcher’s shop should be run.”

“Twelve thousand would buy the whole thing.”

“As I said, I am not a butcher. I wish merely to share in the profits and to declare on government forms that I am a businessman in the city of Detroit.”

“You could do that anyway. Who would dispute you?”

“No one here, whom I can persuade by reason, or kill if he does not see things as clearly as I. The government is an ant heap. You can neither reason with it nor kill it.”

The proposition was accepted, as both men knew it would be. Salvatore Bornea had himself listed in the city directory as a butcher, and entered the business community. Less visibly, he entered into Grapellini’s unspoken agreement with James Aloysius Dolan to furnish the Democratic Party with meat in return for 20 percent of the proceeds.

Thus began the relationship that would carry the hidden city machinery into the twentieth century. The thing was not written about in the newspapers nor discussed except in back rooms in Corktown and in the public rooms of saloons among those who had nothing to gain or lose from it, but it was understood by people who could make neither head nor tail of the city charter, and accepted as far away as the state capital in Lansing as an essential ingredient in the grease that kept the democratic gears turning. At election time, young hooligans were paid by Borneo to tear down posters advertising the campaigns of candidates who opposed Dolan’s ticket; telephone lines into their headquarters were cut, vociferous supporters were beaten and robbed in the very streets their champions had pledged to make safe. Pugs employed by the Unione Siciliana plucked ballots from the hands of voters at the polls, made their marks next to the correct names, and dropped them into boxes, glaring silent challenges at would-be objectors. Dolan in his turn kept police away from Borneo’s brothels and horse parlors and, when the Sicilian received a note threatening the life of his newborn daughter if he did not put out ten thousand dollars with his empty milk bottles, stationed officers in front of his house twenty-four hours per day until the danger had passed. The officers were able to give witness to the fact that Borneo was secure at home the night an extortion suspect, a hooligan of Neapolitan descent, had his heart cut out on Mt. Elliott Street. (Two others involved in the attempt apologized, saying that they were forced into the scheme by the Neapolitan, of whom they were afraid. Borneo hired them to perform various errands, and was impressed with their efficiency and loyalty. He sincerely regretted it when they were taken by carriage to a point on the river near Flat Rock, forced to kneel on the bank, and shot in the back of the head. It was said in Sicily that your enemy is not your friend, no matter if he marries your daughter and fathers your grandchildren.)

The Dolan-Borneo tie increased the wealth and influence of both parties, even as it caused grumbling among some of their acquaintances. Older Sicilians, not reconciled to Borneo’s ascendancy over the still-stricken Uncle Joe, referred disparagingly to him and his confederates as “the Irish,” and Assistant Party Chairman Brennan complained that you could trust a greaseball guinea to stick you in the kidneys when your back was turned and not a bit further; but even detractors could not dispute the advantages of the arrangement, and gave both men credit for not flaunting their association. Indeed, they had never met.

Sal Borneo was built slightly and stood below the average height for his race, having survived a bout with smallpox at an age when most young men experienced their final growth spurt. The bones of his face were prominent, particularly the bridge of his nose, which hooked like a Sioux Indian’s. He had in fact grown out his moustache because it was less disadvantageous to be thought a foreigner than a New World savage. The pox had spoiled his complexion, made it mealy, but he had fine dark eyes with long lashes and excellent teeth, which he attended as closely as his diet. Some women thought him handsome. He was a good family man, however, and kept only one mistress, a waitress who lived in an apartment he maintained on Vernor Street and who led her friends to believe her benefactor was a stove-company executive living in one of the fine homes on Jefferson.

What meals he ate outside his house he preferred to take in the little restaurant on Charlevoix Street. The food was only adequate, but the service was good without being effusive and he liked the wall murals, which reminded him of his boyhood in Siracusa. His father had been a fisherman there until he was mistaken by a vendettist for an enemy and murdered. Borneo was cheated of his vengeance when the man for whom his father was mistaken murdered the murderer. He shipped for America soon after to escape his grief and disappointment. New York City was too noisy for a boy from a small fishing village, and he had lacked the train fare as far as Chicago, where he had cousins; while stopping off in Detroit to seek employment to raise the difference, he had discovered something of home in the smell of the river, the elegant brick houses facing Canada, and the pushcarts and pomp of the saints-day parades in Little Italy. The stove makers and carriage builders were hiring immigrants and paying well. Chicago, he had felt, could get by without him. It had taken him just twenty years to rise from a common day laborer and street tough to a power in the city. In private, a great deal of argument would have been required to convince Sal Borneo that there was no gold beneath the asphalt.