silence.
Word had gone ahead of me to Don Ceriano. He greeted me like a long-lost son. There was much drinking and talking. Afterwards I slept for the better part of a day, and when I woke Don Ceriano told me that Antoine Feraud and he were working together exactly as he had planned.
‘Whatever you did,’ he said, ‘it was a good thing, and I thank you for it.’ Don Ceriano smiled and gripped my shoulder. ‘Though I think perhaps you scared these people a little.’
I looked at him and frowned.
Ceriano shook his head. ‘Possibly they are not used to things being dealt with so swiftly and with so little difficulty. I think Antoine Feraud and his friend… what was his name?’
‘Ducane,’ I said. ‘Charles Ducane.’
‘Right, right… I think they are a little concerned that if they cross me you will visit them in the night, eh?’ He laughed loudly. ‘Now they know your name, Ernesto, and they will not wish to upset you.’
I did not hear Antoine Feraud’s name again, not directly, for some time. I did what I was asked to do. I stayed with Don Ceriano in the house in Miami, and from there I watched the world unfold through another year.
I remember the fall of 1963 with great clarity. I remember conversations that were held into the early hours of the morning. I remember the names of Luciano and Lansky, of Robert Maheu, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. I remember feeling that there were things beyond the confines of those walls that were of greater significance than all of us combined.
In September of the year a man called Joseph Valachi revealed the key names in organized crime to the Senate Committee. Don Ceriano spoke of Jack Kennedy’s father, how he had been in with the families, how family money had put Jack Kennedy in the White House with the promise that concessions and allowances would be made for New York, for Vegas, for Florida and the other family strongholds. Once Kennedy was in, however, he had reneged, and with the assistance of his brother Bobby they had announced their intention to oust the families from all illegal businesses and rackets countrywide.
‘We have to do something,’ Don Ceriano told me one time, and this was after Valachi’s testimony, and the way he spoke of it made me feel that something had already been done.
November twenty-second I realized what had been done. I believed that the family had consorted not only with the wealthy Cuban-American exiles, but also with the big conglomerates who paid for the Vietnam War. It was ironic, to me at least, that the only criminal case ever brought against any man for the assassination of Kennedy took place in New Orleans, the trial of Clay Shaw overseen by District Attorney Garrison.
I did not ask questions. Who had killed Jack Kennedy and why was of no consequence to me.
On 24 November Jack Ruby, a man I knew by name and face, a man who had been to the Ceriano house on more than three or four occasions in the previous three months alone, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on television.
‘Eight bullets,’ Don Ceriano told me later. ‘They found a total of eight bullets down there in Dealey Plaza, and not one of them matched the rifling of the weapon Oswald was supposed to have fired.’ And with that he laughed, and said something in Italian, and then he added
It was as if I had stepped back to watch the world commit itself to madness during those subsequent years. I was down in Miami. The weather was good, the girls were beautiful, and I had all the money I needed. Every once in a while Don Ceriano would call for me, and with a name, a face, I would walk out into the world and do what I was asked to do. Sometimes they were Italians, other times Americans, even Cubans and Mexicans. Miami was a cosmopolitan place, and I had no prejudice when it came to killing a man.
In early 1965 I heard of Che Guevara again. He had left Cuba to form guerrilla groups in Latin America. A handful of months later I would see a photograph of him dead. He looked no different than any other man. Castro still held sway in Cuba, but I did not care. Cuba was not my home, and I believed never would be again. America was a drug, and I was addicted.
I was twenty-nine years old when Richard Nixon said he would run for president. On the same day I killed a man called Chester Wintergreen. I garrotted him with a length of wire in an alleyway behind a pool hall. Now I do not remember why he died, and now it does not matter.
In March Robert Kennedy, the same man who had orchestrated the reversal of agreement between his own father and the heads of the families, announced he would run for president.
Don Ceriano spoke to me of this man, how he was the first attorney general of the United States to make any serious attempt to destabilize the hold of the families on organized crime and the labor unions. He mentioned a man called Harry Anslinger, referred to him as ‘Asslicker’, one-time US Commissioner of Narcotics, and how Anslinger believed that Robert Kennedy would hound the families until they were undone.
‘Asslicker speaks about Robert Kennedy like he’s a crazy man,’ Don Ceriano said. ‘He says that Kennedy holds these meetings, and where previous attorney generals have felt that their job was done if they merely called attention to the families, Kennedy goes down the list, one by one, and he names each and every significant figure in organized crime and asks the relevant officials what progress has been made in bringing them down. Asslicker doesn’t see eye to eye with Hoover. Hoover would always run the party line, tell the press and the government that there was no such thing as the Mafia, but after the Apalachin Conference in ’57 he had to change his tune.’
Robert Kennedy went on to win the first Primary in Indiana and the second in Nebraska. In June, after similar meetings in similar houses with similar gatherings as those in the fall of ’63, Robert Kennedy was shot dead in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel after winning the Californian Democratic Primary. The Kennedy era was over, the Nixon era was to begin, and Don Ceriano – with him Jimmy the Aspirin, Slapsie Maxie Vaccorini, others who had become part of the Alcatraz Swimming Team – well, Don Ceriano decided it was time for a change.
‘We’re going to Vegas,’ he told me in July of 1968, ‘where the money comes down on you like rain, where the girls stay beautiful for ever, and where people like us can’t break the rules because we were the ones who made them in the first place. And if anyone complains, well
I nodded. I smiled. I felt a quiet sense of importance.
We didn’t drive. We went out to the airport in Tampa and we flew. The car, the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser that had once belonged to Pietro Silvino, was housed in a lock-up owned by the family. It would stay there for as long as it was necessary. I had no idea then that it would be more than thirty years before I would see it again.
I would follow Don Ceriano to the ends of the earth, and Las Vegas… well, Las Vegas was only half as far.
FOURTEEN
At first they spoke of nothing but Charles Ducane, how the present governor of Louisiana may have been instrumental in ordering the brutal killing of two people so many years before.
Schaeffer challenged Woodroffe and Hartmann, challenged them to say nothing beyond the confines of the FBI Office, but challenged also the veracity of the information given by Perez.
‘The guy’s a killer… not only a killer, but a psychopath, a homophobic fucking death machine,’ Schaeffer said, more venom and anger evident in his voice than Hartmann had ever heard before.
‘But he knows shit,’ Woodroffe said. ‘He knows about Ducane-’
‘And he knows who killed Kennedy,’ Hartmann said, and later he would think that he’d said it just to throw a further curve into the proceedings.
‘Aah fuck off!’ Schaeffer snapped at him, and tempers were thinner than ever, and emotions were frayed at the edges, and it seemed like all it would take was a single wrong word and everything would fall apart at the seams.
‘Why the hell not?’ Woodroffe said. ‘Someone knows who killed Kennedy… why not our man?’
‘Yes,’ Hartmann added. ‘Perez knows who killed John F. Kennedy.’
Schaeffer rose from his chair. ‘Enough!’ he snapped. ‘Enough already. We’re dealing with the present, the facts… we’re dealing with the kidnapping of Catherine Ducane. We’re dealing with nothing but those things that relate directly to what has happened to Catherine Ducane.’
