‘Line one,’ Woodroffe barked.
‘Line two.’
Hartmann’s heart thudded like a derailed freight train in his chest.
‘Line three… go!’
A moment’s pause, a moment that stretched out for ever.
Woodroffe’s hand on his shoulder.
Hartmann watching his own hand as it reached for the receiver ahead of him.
‘Yes?’ he said, his voice subdued, almost cracking.
‘Mr Ray Hartmann,’ the voice at the other end of the line returned. ‘Welcome home to New Orleans…’
SIX
Later, the lights out, through the window from the street the faint glow of New Orleans as it ached in slow- motion through the chilled hours of early morning, Ray Hartmann asked himself why he had chosen this life.
A life of crime, if you like; others’ crimes, but crimes all the same.
Just as with the police, the FBI, the county coroners and medical examiners, all those whose lot it was to scour the underbelly of America, to turn over the stones, to search out the darker shadows and find what lurked within, he had somehow – through fate or fortune – found himself charged with this duty. The killers, the serial rapists, the hitmen, the murderers, the child molesters, the assassins, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the guilty, the tormented, the tortured and depraved. Here, in all its resplendent glory, was the worst the world could offer, and he – he of all people, wishing now for nothing more than safety and sanity for himself and his family – was once again walking along the edge of the abyss, looking down, tempting equilibrium, challenging his own sense of balance to see if this time,
Back in New York, in the office complex he shared with Luca Visceglia and the crew, were the details of a hundred thousand lives wrecked by a collection of truly crazy people. Even the FBI’s January 1997 release of fifteen thousand pages of documents relating to the Mafia, the death of Kennedy, of Jimmy Hoffa, the workings of the Teamsters’ Union and the killing of their associates and cohorts, gave no indication of the extent to which the government and its many systems had been infected by corruption and Machiavellian dishonesty. Even Hoover, perhaps the most shrewd and conniving hypocrite of them all, had once commented, ‘I never saw so much skullduggery…’
Ray Hartmann had spent hundreds of hours immersed in the history and heritage of these people. He remembered vividly the conversations he and Visceglia had started and never seemed to finish in the small office they had first shared. Back then Hartmann had believed himself cognizant of the methods and motives of these people, but Visceglia had illustrated his naivety.
‘Never really been anything other than the Gambino and Genovese crime families,’ Visceglia had told him. ‘Those families were established many generations before any of the stuff we have to deal with. Those people divided New York like it’d always belonged to them… like it had always been their own.’
Visceglia chain-smoked, he drank too much coffee. He possessed an air of philosophical resignation regarding his place in life. He seemed to carry the weight of this darkened world on his shoulders, and those shoulders would bow and strain beneath the pressure, but they would never give.
‘Stressed?’ Hartmann had asked him one time, and Visceglia had smiled wryly, nodded his head as if such a thing was the understatement to shame all understatements, and said, ‘Stressed? Like the Brooklyn fucking Bridge, Ray… like the Brooklyn fucking Bridge.’
Hartmann had acknowledged him but hadn’t known what else to say. In the face of what they were dealing with what
‘Billions of dollars,’ Visceglia said. ‘And these people own territories that cross the fucking world, and all of it gained within a handful of decades. It beggars belief sometimes, it just beggars fucking belief. Lives are lost with no more concern than a five-dollar hand of poker. This whole thing goes back forever… and this is where the names you have heard come from, people like Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Al Capone.’
Visceglia would shake his head and exhale. There was something about the way he did it that sounded like he would empty out and vanish.
‘The Genovese family was where Joseph Valachi came from, and he threw everyone a left-handed curve when he testified at the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee in September and October of 1963. Valachi was the one who used the term “Cosa Nostra”, “This Thing of Ours”, and the things he told the Committee freaked the living shit out of everyone who heard him. Bottom line was that what he had to say didn’t directly incriminate anyone enough to charge them, but it did turn things around for the families.’
‘I’ve read about that stuff,’ Hartmann said. ‘The whole code of silence thing-’
‘Omerta,’ Visceglia said. ‘Valachi violated omerta… one of the few family members ever to do so, and he opened up a can of worms that gave more insight into the power struggles and rank-and-file operations of the Mafia than any other man.’
‘You know why he did that?’ Hartmann asked.
Visceglia shook his head. ‘I know something of it, yes.’
Hartmann raised his eyebrows expectantly. It was late, he should have been on his way home, but there was something about the subject that both intrigued and appalled him.
Visceglia shrugged his shoulders. ‘Valachi had joined Salvatore Maranzano’s organization in the late ’20s, and he served beneath Maranzano until Maranzano was assassinated in ’31. Thereafter Valachi served beneath Vito Genovese within the Luciano family. He was nothing more than a button man, a soldier. He was a hit man, an enforcer, a numbers operator and a drug pusher, and he did whatever he was told to do. They got him in ’59 and he went down on a fifteen to twenty for trafficking. Sent him to Atlanta Penitentiary in Georgia, and there he kind of lost his mind – maybe the lock-up, maybe the loneliness, but he got it into his head that Vito Genovese had named him as an informer and ordered his death. He mistook another prisoner called Joe Saupp for a hitman called Joe Beck. Valachi killed Saupp with an iron pipe and was given a life sentence. It was only at that point that he decided to turn informer. He wanted federal protection and that was the only way he could buy it. The only thing he had of any value at all was what was inside his head.’
Visceglia smiled, again that expression of philosophical resignation. ‘Ironic,’ he said, ‘but by the time Valachi reached the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee hearings he was guarded by no less than two hundred US marshals. More bodyguards than the fucking president. The Mafia put a $100,000 tap on his head. Regardless, Valachi went on to name more than three hundred Mafia family members and present a more detailed and concise history and structure of the Mafia than had been available before. Valachi named Lucky Luciano as the most important voice within the Mafia. He told them about the Havana conference and how, even in exile, Luciano had still controlled the business relentlessly. He gave up Meyer Lansky as Luciano’s second-in-command. The family started to call Valachi Joe Cargo. That was bastardized to Cago, the Italian dialect expression for shit.’
Visceglia laughed and lit another cigarette.
‘Valachi wasn’t no fucking Einstein. He was just muscle, and most of what came out of his mouth during those hearings was later discredited. Seems that members of Valachi’s crew knew Valachi well enough. They told him a whole heap of bullshit, things that Valachi actually thought were the truth. Nevertheless the words of Joseph Valachi and the subsequent Valachi Papers proved devastating to the Mafia. That was the point at which it all started to come apart at the seams. If Valachi hadn’t gone down and sung like a fucking canary who knows what the fuck might have happened.’
Visceglia paused and shook his head. ‘Truth was that after Valachi’s testimony the New York City Police Department released a very significant statistic. More family members in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area had been jailed in the subsequent three years than in the previous thirty. The guy did what he did, right or wrong, as far as the federal people were concerned, and though not one word actually served to finger anyone directly it still raised public and political awareness of what was really going on and what these
