A Quiet Vendetta

The second call, a fortnight later, had been slightly warmer. She had asked him how he was, and he’d said, ‘Sober, sober since December twenty-eighth,’ and she had wished him well, told him that she wasn’t ready for anything ‘complicated’, that Jessica was fine, she sent her love, and last week she was chosen to lead the gymnastics team for the Homecoming Pageant.

The third call, six days later, Carol let Ray speak to his daughter.

‘Hey daddy.’

‘Hey sweetpea.’

‘You okay?’

‘Sure I am, honey. Your mom says you’re leading the gym team for the Homecoming?’

‘Yes, sure. Are you gonna be able to come?’

Ray was silent for a moment.

‘Daddy?’

‘I’m here, Jess, I’m here.’

‘So you gonna be able to come?’

‘I don’t know, Jess, I don’t know. It kinda depends on what your mom says.’

This time it was Jess’s turn to be silent, and then she said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to her.’

‘You do that, honey, you do that,’ and then Ray heard the sound of his own voice breaking up with emotion, and he didn’t think he could talk to his daughter any more without crying, and so he told her he loved her more than anything in the world and asked to speak to her mom again.

‘Don’t come to the Homecoming, Ray,’ Carol had stated matter-of-factly. ‘It’s too soon for me and Jess to see you.’

‘Too soon for you… but what about Jess?’

‘Don’t start it up again, Ray, just don’t start it up again, okay? I gotta go now. I gotta take Jess to get her hair done.’

And the call had ended, and Ray Hartmann had hung up and had asked himself why – after things seemed to have been going so well – he just had to be an asshole all over again.

Thirty-seven years old, sick leave from work, holed up in a crappy apartment in Little Italy while his wife of thirteen years took his twelve-year-old daughter to have her hair done.

What he would have given to have taken her himself.

Never did when you were home, the voice inside said, and he cut that short, because he knew from long experience that listening to such voices was the road to madness, and that road led only one way: right down the neck of a bottle, and that was the kind of shit that had gotten him into this kind of shit in the first place.

Ray Hartmann was an enigma. Born in New Orleans, 15 March 1966. Younger brother, Danny, born 17 September 1968, the two of them close like flesh and blood should be. Went everywhere together, did everything together, Ray always leading the way, Danny – looking up to him, forgiving all his faults, wide-eyed and wondrous the way that younger brothers always seem to be – and always in trouble, and dreaming like little kids do, and throwing stones and water bombs and skinnydipping, and missing school days to go catching frogs down in the glades… all these things, living their lives so fast, so furious, like they wanted nothing left for tomorrow. It was always Danny and Ray, Ray and Danny, like a litany, a mantra to brotherhood.

And then it all ended. 7 July 1980. Danny was eleven years old, eager and enthusiastic and overwhelmed by the magic of everything, and he went down beneath the wheels of a car on South Loyola, and the guy never stopped and Danny got his legs crushed and his head stoved in, and there wasn’t even a single breath left in his tiny broken body when Ray got down there and saw his brother was killed.

Ray, fourteen years old, knelt on the sidewalk with his brother’s body across his lap, and he didn’t say a word, and he didn’t shed a tear, and even when the paramedics came down and tried to separate the pair of them there was nothing they could do but carry them both, carry them like they were one, into the back of the Blue Cross ambulance… It was Ray and Danny, Danny and Ray, in life, in death, in trouble. Always and forever would be.

They didn’t fire up the siren, because they didn’t need the siren when the passenger was dead.

The boys’ father wasn’t there to comfort his eldest because he was gone too, back in the fall of ’71 with a coronary that could’ve leveled a horse. Big man, strong man, a fighter by all accounts, but drank like a buffalo at the desert’s last watering hole, and Ray thought maybe that’s where his own taste for the liquor came from, but then he told himself no, because asshole wasn’t genetic. So mom took it all on board, and she held them together, held herself together as well until the little one got rolled by a Pontiac Firebird on South Loyola. They caught the guy later, and he was a drunk too, and they knew it was him because they found the little kid’s blood and the little kid’s hair caught in the radiator grille on the front. Mom hung in there until after Ray graduated, and then she went too, May of ’87. Natural causes, they said. Sure thing. Natural causes like a broken heart and too much losing, and little enough of life to keep the spirit wanting in the face of such adversity. Those kind of natural causes.

Ray went into the National Guard, shoveled folks out of snowdrifts and cleaned boots on the weekend; started hitting the bottle a little too often and invalided himself out before he shot himself or someone else. Worked a regular job for six months and then moved to New York in February of 1988. Even now he couldn’t understand why he had chosen New York, perhaps for no other reason than it was the one place he could think of that was most unlike New Orleans. He took to studying the law, studied it every hour that God sent, studied it like there was an answer to be found. Didn’t find it, but did find a practice that took him as an intern, and he trawled his way through the Circuit Court system, took the bar, became a public defender and tried to make sense of the mistakes that people all too easily made. It was then that the House Judiciary Subcommittee started the integration programs, posting public defenders inside the police precincts, and there they acted as filters for the courts, an attempt to limit the traffic that hit City Hall. It was an economy drive, and to some degree it worked. It was during that program that Ray Hartmann met Luca Visceglia, one of the key investigators who finally nailed Kuklinski. Richard Kuklinski was a star among stars. Recruited by the Gambino family, his audition was a very simple test: he was driven out into New York, driven along regular streets where regular people walked, and with a single word a man was selected at random, a man walking his dog, minding his own business, perhaps thinking about a birthday present he had to buy, maybe his daughter’s engagement dinner. The car slowed, Kuklinski climbed out, and with a half dozen steps he faced the man, raised a gun and shot him dead. That was all the Gambinos required of Kuklinski, and Kuklinski was in.

Living on a quiet street with his wife and family in Dumont, Bergen County, Kuklinski took his orders from Roy DeMaio, the Mafia boss whose office was located in the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn.

Over the next three years the New Jersey Organized Crime Task Force concentrated their efforts on nailing Kuklinski. In the early ’80s, when Paul Castellano and the Gambino family instigated a collaboration between the State Organized Crime Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Castellano happened to mention his concern regarding Roy DeMaio. Castellano was worried DeMaio would talk, that he would ‘go the wrong way’. DeMaio was acting increasingly paranoid, and so in 1983 Roy DeMaio’s body was found in the trunk of a car. He’d been there a week. Later, much later, when Kuklinski was finally secured in Trenton State Prison, he said of DeMaio’s death, ‘it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person… If somebody had to die that day, it was a good day for him to die.’

The New Jersey Task Force employed the assistance of the FBI, and they assigned an undercover agent called Dominick Polifrone to the case. Posing as a fellow hitman, an associate from New York City called Dominick Michael Provanzano, he managed to get Kuklinski talking, and once Kuklinski started talking he was a man who appreciated the sound of his own voice. It was those tapes that finally got him, and whereas the police and the Organized Crime Task Force believe Kuklinski murdered something in the region of forty people, Kuklinski placed his record at something over a hundred. He was a busy boy. As was his younger brother Joey, already serving life in Trenton for raping and strangling a twelve-year-old girl, a girl he dragged across two adjoining rooftops and then hurled, along with her dog, forty feet to the sidewalk below. Maybe such things were in their blood, perhaps – as FBI Criminal Profiling suggested – there were situational dynamics that precipitated the direction the Kuklinski brothers took.

Not until 4 July 2002 did Federal and New York State prosecutors finally bring charges against seventeen members and associates of the Gambino crime family. The charges they faced involved racketeering, extortion, loan sharking, wire fraud, money laundering and witness tampering. It was in this miasma of brutality that Ray