CHAPTER 5
That evening, a few minutes before ten o'clock, Sal Lombardi was sitting in a back booth of a bowling alley bar, drinking warm milk. The Pla-Mor Lanes, all forty of them, took up the entire second floor of a two-story row of businesses (florist, liquor store, fish market, druggist) on Kinsman Avenue, just into Shaker Heights. Sal owned the building, but the only business he owned there was the Pla-Mor. He didn't bowl himself, but his cousin Angelo did, and, besides, it was a good legit business. More than a front, or a money laundry: It paid its own way.
To look at him, you would think Salvatore Lombardi was the calmest man in Cleveland. A big man, five-eleven and two hundred and twenty pounds, neatly attired in a dark brown tailored suit with a green striped tie with emerald stickpin, he sat impassively with both hands caressing the glass of milk as if he were warming his hands. His eyebrows were as thick and dark as mustaches; his hair was dark and combed back, staying in place with a minimum of oil. Despite a hooked nose and hooded eyes that were as dark as his eyebrows, his olive-shaped, olive-complected face had a softness. His mouth was almost feminine, cupid-like, his small chin cushioned on a larger second one. For a thick-necked, thick-fingered gangster, Sal Lombardi had a surprisingly gentle demeanor.
Big Tony's 'Fat Boy,' he had been derisively called as a youth. A spoiled kid from Shaker Heights, a baby-faced mama's boy who in his teens had been forced to grow up, when his papa was murdered.
Now he was the most feared, most powerful man in the Mayfield Road gang. Or at least, he and his cousin Angelo Scalise together were the most feared; it had been a long time since Sal himself had pulled a trigger. Little Angelo, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of that.
Other than the milk, the only clue to an impartial observer that Black Sal Lombardi had a nervous stomach, a pre-ulcerous condition his doctor called it, was the almost imperceptible flinch of his face, a momentary wrinkling about the eyes, when somebody in a lane close to the thin-walled bar hit a strike. The echoing sound of bowling pins clattering against smooth wood made Sal jumpy. He didn't show it much. But it made him jumpy.
He liked nothing better than to hang out in a saloon with Ange or any of his other close Murray Hill pals, putting beers away, playing pinochle, bullshitting with the paesans. They'd talk broads, they'd talk boxing, they'd talk betting, they'd have a hell of time. Used to be a night in a bar was Sal's favorite way to relax.
Lately it had been different. He had never liked hanging out in the Pla-Mor bar, because the noise from the lanes was an annoyance. But lately no bar was pleasing to him, because booze, even beer, seemed hard on his stomach. The only thing that soothed his jittery belly was warm milk.
Even his goddamn food had to be mashed up for him or he couldn't stomach it; if he wasn't puking, he was constipated, and when he wasn't constipated, he had the fucking trots. If he'd had a sense of humor, he would have smiled at the irony of 'Baby-Face Sal' (a nickname he had shaken years ago), now at the height of his power, reverting to a baby-like diet. But he didn't smile, or have a sense of humor.
It was that goddamn Ness. That goddamn fucking Ness. In the last six months that cocksucker had driven damn near all the gambling out of the county, and Sal had no piece of the northern Kentucky action-all of that was in the pocket of Horvitz and other Syndicate types too big to fuck with.
Fortunately, about the same time, Sal had sewed up local pinball distribution, and now-thanks to friends on the City Council-the machines were even legal. Many of Sal's enterprises were legal these days: real estate, linen supply, auto sales (he got his Cadillacs for cost, that way). Not long ago he'd made a small killing selling coal to the city of Cleveland.
No, the loss of income from the shuttered bookie operations was hardly crippling Sal, whose numbers action had grossed millions in the last five years. But it was annoying, and he had lost face.
Which was why Sal was here tonight, to meet with his cousin Angelo. More trouble, this time on the numbers front. Ness trouble. And, at the same time, out-of-town competitors trying to move in on them. Sal sighed, though it was barely noticeable.
He sipped his milk. He didn't mind the taste of it and had even come to love the soothing warm flow as it found its calming way to his twitchy belly. The glow of the warm milk hitting his stomach was better than Jack Daniel's.
Some people were going to have to die. No way around it. Sal regretted that, though not for any moral reason; he had a reputation for being shrewder, more far-sighted than his papa. Sal had displayed an ability to maintain reasonably peaceful relations with both his fellow racket bosses and the policy niggers in the Roaring Third. This earned him respect, which (although he wasn't conscious of the fact, exactly) he wanted more than money.
Though his earliest memories were of the same slum area where he now ruled (by proxy, mostly) the colored numbers racket, Salvatore Lombardi had grown up in the wealthy suburb of Shaker Heights. Big Tony, Sal's papa, was one of the first Italians to dare infiltrate that Protestant enclave, and Sal had spent most of his life living in the family mansion on Larchmere Boulevard; he lived there still, though Mama was gone now, and none of his brothers and sisters lived under that gabled roof.
Sal had warm memories of his papa, and much pride in the memory of the mighty immigrant Black Hand leader.
Big Tony Lombardi was only sixteen when he left a politically turbulent Italy behind, finding his way from New York to Cleveland, where he worked as a fruit and vegetable peddler. Getting active in the Black Hand, Big Tony used extortion money to buy his own wholesale sugar distribution company. He brought over first his three brothers, and then his boyhood chums, the Torellos, to help in the business.
Big Tony crowned himself corn-sugar king of Cleveland, making a fortune selling to bootleggers. He built a monopoly the good old-fashioned Black Hand way: He warned his competitors to quit and, if they didn't, had them shot.
Tears would warm Sal's cold dark eyes when he recalled the booming bass of his massive papa singing opera in the front parlor of the Larchmere mansion. And a startling sound it was, in that proper Protestant neighborhood. Not that any neighbor ever complained: Six feet tall, three hundred pounds, papa was a mustached bear of a man, a brute in diamond jewelry and silk shirts.
Sal remembered vividly when papa had pulled him out of the private Catholic school in Murray Hill, and sent him east to a boarding school. Sal had thought he was being punished for some unnamed something, not realizing a shooting war had broken out between Papa and the Torellos, and that it was dangerous for Sal, even with his bodyguard/chauffeur, to make that daily trek from Shaker Heights to Murray Hill.
So Sal, after fighting off an older kid who tried to cornhole him, ran away from the boarding school. He mugged an old man in a train station and took the train home. He figured his papa would beat him-though he'd only had a few halfhearted beatings from his father, when he was a lad-but when he peeked tentatively in the kitchen window, to see if Papa was home, his father looked up from his breakfast and saw his son, framed in the window. And papa began to cry.
Papa had gone to the window, reached his big arms out and hauled fifteen-year-old Sal up and in like he was a tyke, and hugged the boy fiercely and sat him down to breakfast. Mama had only smiled and served him. Sal's only other memory of that breakfast was glancing over at the window and seeing it filled with one of his father's ever- present bodyguards.
Sal wasn't entirely sheltered. He had some idea of what his father's business was. Papa had made sure of that, having teenage Sal from time to time accompany underlings of his father's, as they made their rounds, collecting money from bootleggers and loan sharks. Papa stressed early on the importance of business-that money was something you made.
'You will not inherit my money,' Papa said many times, 'you will inherit my business-and my good name. Take neither lightly.'
Papa had taken him, when he was perhaps twelve, to see the corpse of a man who had betrayed him.
'This is what happens,' Papa said, as they stood in a warehouse looking at a naked white corpse in pools of blackening blood, 'to stupid people.'
Stupid people, Sal was taught, were those who were too greedy, who were not loyal, who stole from their friends. It was made clear to the boy who was being groomed to be a 'don' like his father that this could happen to him. It was also made clear that he could, and should, make it happen to those who betrayed him.
On an autumn evening in 1927, Big Tony and his brother Ralph, dressed in their usual natty attire, diamond stickpins winking in the neon night, entered the barber shop of Octavio Torello. A meet had been set up by Dominic
