You were Frank Nitti’s friend, and you know that it was his dream to be entirely legitimate.”
“Problem is,” I said, “these days, legitimate business isn’t entirely legitimate.”
He patted my shoulder, twice. “Excellent point. Excellent point. And politics…which is an area of expertise of mine…it’s no better. The reality of business is compromise. Only in the arts can a person be truly uncompromising.”
He continued showing me around his sky nest—spent a good fifteen minutes showing off his collection, about a third of which was valuable stuff by name artists, the rest junk by “up and coming” new “talents.” Charley spoke well for a mob guy, but he wasn’t fooling me.
For all his posturing and pretension, and his man-of-the-world airs, this was still the same Charley Fischetti who’d been his uncle Al Capone’s bodyguard/chauffeur, and nicknamed Trigger Happy.
This was the same Charley Fischetti who started as an alky cooker and rose to be Capone’s top lieutenant, who had been implicated in several murders though arrested only once—by Bill Drury—with a conviction for carrying a concealed weapon (reversed in the higher courts).
And this was the same Charley Fischetti who was the Outfit’s top political fixer, tunneling endless money into local and national campaigns, whose criminal business interests extended to St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Miami.
Gambling. Prostitution. Narcotics. Extortion. Usury. Bribery. Murder. Those were the arts Charley Fischetti was a patron of.
“Hey, I don’t want you thinking I’m a goddamn snob,” Charley said. “Let me show you my TV room—we’ll talk there…. Joey, wait out here and bring Rocky in, when he shows.”
My host took me by the elbow—he had a barely perceptible limp, from a long-ago gun battle—and soon we were in a more casual room, with cork-paneled walls and windows with closed Venetian blinds and geometric- design drapes. A pair of boxy pink foam-cushion couches hugged two walls to form a V, with a couple chairs of the same ilk, only light blue, forward of the douches at left and right, all squatting on fuzzy white wall-to-wall carpet, sharing space with light-blond oak tables. The seating faced a blond console—as wide as the couches—with a TV in the middle with a huge screen…twenty-one inch, easy…and built-in radio and record player and album storage bins, with a cloth-covered speaker as big as the picture tube.
“Yeah, I’m a TV fan,” Charley said, man of the people that he was, slipping behind the blond oak bar along the side wall. “Care for something?”
“Rum and Coke, ice.”
“I got martinis made.”
“That’s fine.”
He poured from a pitcher. “I’m addicted to that damn tube…Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and this
“So is watching Jake La Motta catch Dauthille with a right.”
He came around, a martini with olive in either hand. “No frog is gonna send one of my people to the canvas.”
By “my people,” I wasn’t sure whether Charley meant an Italian or a mob-owned boxer—La Motta fit either category, after all.
We sat on the pink sofa opposite the massive TV console and he gestured toward it, with his martini. “What I’m afraid of is this Kefauver clown will be the next Uncle Miltie.”
“They’ve been televising some of these hearings.”
“Yeah, and ’cause of the response,
He set his martini on the coffee table and reached in a sportcoat pocket for a small round silver box, the lid of which he popped off; he selected two small pink pills and took them with a drink of martini.
“This bum ticker of mine,” he said, shaking his head. “Goddamn business pressures.”
Joey and his brother Rocco came in—Rocco had traded in his maroon robe and railroad cap for a dark brown sportcoat, lighter brown slacks, and a yellow shirt.
I nodded to Rocco, and he nodded back; he went behind the bar and came back with a bottle of beer. He and Joey sat on the adjacent sofa.
“What took you?” Charley asked Rocco, a faint edge of crossness in his voice.
Rocco’s ugly face got uglier. “That cunt—she got mouthy again. She’s fuckin’ worthless. I told her to pack her fuckin’ bags. She’s got half an hour and then I throw her down the fuckin’ stairs.”
Shaking his head, Joey said, “She used to be such a nice kid.”
Rocco sneered, shook his head once, and had a gulp of Blatz.
Charley sipped his martini, shrugged, and said, “Sooner or later they all wear out their welcome…. Rock, we were just getting started, here. I explained to Nate how we don’t like this bad publicity.”
Rocco nodded, belched. “This traveling dog-and-pony show, it’s really just a sham, y’know. Kefauver don’t know his dick from a doughnut.”
“A sham?” I said.
“Don’t misunderstand my brother,” Charley said. “The senator is a sincere, honest man—but he’s a man, with weaknesses, or anyway…traits.”
“What kind of traits?”
