A Quiet Vendetta

then he would go home and do his best to straighten out the Vietnam of his own existence.

‘So talk to me,’ Hartmann said. ‘I want to hear what you have to say, Mr Perez… I really do.’

‘Very well,’ Perez said. ‘Because you asked, and asked politely, I will tell you.’

‘Okay,’ Hartmann said, and reached out to close the door behind him.

FIFTEEN

Las Vegas was the promised land.

One time a jerkwater nothing of a place somewhere in the desert – gas stations, truckstops, a scattering of run-down and ramshackle slot-machine emporiums and greasy diners where the Blue Plate Special was the kind of mystery meat you wouldn’t serve to a dog – but envisioned as a glittering opportunity going to waste by Meyer Lansky. Lansky kept hounding Bugsy Siegel to see the possibilities, to open his mind and let it run wild – the legalized gambling, the unconquered territory – and finally, in 1941, Siegel sent a trusted lieutenant, Moe Sedway, to see if he couldn’t figure out what Lansky was talking about.

After the war was over, Siegel, far more interested in his Hollywood playboy lifestyle, finally looked for himself and got a glimpse of the Las Vegas that Lansky had conceived of. Las Vegas, and the six million dollars that Siegel ploughed not only into building The Flamingo but also into his own Swiss accounts, became the legacy that would not only memorialize his life, but also instigate his death.

Meyer Lansky, never a man to capitulate on his own vision, assumed control of The Flamingo, and within a year it turned a profit. Las Vegas became a honeypot for the wasps. Las Vegas State officials levied stringent rules and regulations to keep the families out, but it was futile. Lansky controlled The Thunder-bird; Moe Dalitz and the Cleveland mob assumed autonomy over The Desert Inn; The Sands was controlled jointly by Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and Doc Stacher. George Raft, the Hollywood actor, came in on the deal, and even Frank Sinatra was sold a nine percent share. The Fischetti brothers – the same brothers who took Sinatra to provide entertainment at the Havana Conference, Christmas Eve of 1946 – controlled The Sahara and The Riviera, alongside Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana. New England’s head honcho, Raymond Patriarca, moved in and took possession of The Dunes.

And then there was Caesar’s Palace. Back of Caesar’s were Accardo, Giancana, Patriarca, Jerry Catena from Vito Genovese’s outfit, and Vincent ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes’ Alo. Conversations with Don Ceriano never failed to include the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, leader of the Teamsters’ Union, a man who orchestrated the investment of ten million into the Palace and another forty million around Vegas’s other numerous hotspots. The money masqueraded as loans, but those loans were as good as permanent and no-one ever thought to return a dime. No-one thought, either, of the hundreds of thousands of over-the-hill truck drivers who never did get their pension checks as they’d been promised.

I went to Caesar’s soon after the Alcatraz Swimming Team arrived in Vegas. It was vast and extravagant, a place guested by those who, some decades before, might have guested the Titanic. I had never seen anything like it before. The hotels we had frequented in Havana, places like The Nacional and The Riviera, paled in comparison. I walked barefoot on a carpet that almost reached my ankles. I took a bath in a tub in which I could have effortlessly drowned. I lay on a bed, wide like a football field, and when I called room service they were there within minutes. Las Vegas seemed to be everything I could never have imagined it to be, and though I was there in Caesar’s no more than forty-eight hours, I felt I had – at last – truly arrived.

Once Don Ceriano’s business at the hotel was done, I and the rest of the crew moved to the outskirts of the city. We took a house on Alvarado Street. Don Ceriano came down the following morning and he gathered us together.

‘People here,’ he said, ‘ain’t nothing like the people back in Miami. This is where the real deal lives. This is where we get the running orders, and we run just like they say. Job needs doing we do it, no questions asked, no answers expected.’

He smiled, leaned back in his chair. ‘We ain’t smalltime, never have been, never will be, but this is earned territory. Lot of blood got spilled to make Las Vegas, and that blood belonged to men like us, men who were better than us truth be known, and we keep our hands in our pockets and our eyes going both ways at once if we wanna stay alive. You get me?’

There was a consensual affirmative from the gathered crew.

‘Down here you got politics and kickbacks and folks in high places who wanna stay high. They don’t wanna get their shoes dirty kicking shit down the sidewalk. That’s where we come in, and if we do what we’re asked then there’ll never be a shortage of money or girls or respect. Key to all of this is knowing your place on the totem pole, and while we may not be feeling sand between our toes we sure as shit ain’t the fancy bit on top.’

Where we were on the totem pole was the hired hands, the wet crew, the guys that got a call in the early hours of the morning to go down to The Sands, come in quiet through the back kitchen doorway, turn left, left again, and there in the meat locker find some poor dumb schmuck who figured he could take the place with a blindside hand fat with Schaffners; figured he could get the dealer to catch the eye of some pretty cigarette girl and slip a jack where it shouldn’t have been; where we were was hammering that poor schmooze’s thumbs to a pulp and then kicking his ass six ways to Sunday so he and his confederates got the message loud and clear; where we were was driving a trailer jammed to the gunnels with stolen liquor and Luckies out of the desert at three in the a.m., parking it up behind a cheap bordello, unloading those cases into a lockdown garage, slipping away quietly and losing the trailer down a ravine near Devil’s Eyelid, and walking four miles back on foot as the sun rose and the heat got mighty and the shirt you were wearing stuck to your back like a second skin.

Where we were was things like that, and though there was always an element of edge to such things, though the fun you got out of it was never more than the fun you made, there were times I believed that I was destined for so much more. And that’s why I spoke to Carlo Evangelisti, and that’s how I ended up involved in the death of Don Ceriano and taking an audience with Sam Giancana’s cousin, Fabio Calligaris.

Early part of 1970. Six months and I would be thirty-four years old. I was all grown up in some ways, other ways still like the kid from way back when. Watched the people around me, watched them well, saw them married, having kids, and then walking out on their wives and screwing some two-bit floozy who shifted smokes from a tray at one of the smaller casinos. Never made a deal of sense to me, but then I don’t know it was ever supposed to. Couldn’t understand how a man could have a family and then do such a thing. Taking a wife and children was the farthest thing from my mind at the time, but right back to my father and the way he treated my mother I could never really understand the seeming absence of loyalty that these people demonstrated. I spoke with Don Ceriano. He took me aside, and quietly he said, ‘There are some things you see, some things not. Likewise, there are some things you hear, and just as many you don’t. A wise man knows which is which, Ernesto,’ and we never spoke of it again.

Business was varied but good. There were younger men earning their scars in my place. Days came when I would be despatching one man to make collections, another for enforcement of an agreement made with the Ceriano crew. I would spend most of my time with Don Ceriano himself, there at his right hand, listening to him, speaking with him, learning more of the ways of the world. Only once during that year was I directly involved in the death of a man. A mile or so from the house, back of the intersection that split that quarter of the city in half, we ran a bookmaker’s shop out of a factory warehouse. Warehouse fronted for some frozen orange juice exporting scam, good-sized operation turning over something in the region of five million a year. Warehouse was owned by one of Slapsie Maxie’s cousins, man by the name of Roberto Albarelli. Fat guy, too fat by too much, and the way he’d lumber across the yard shouting and badmouthing the Ricans and niggers who worked the joint made me smile. Asshole was a good enough guy, but sure as hell he looked like a gunny-sack full of shit tied at the neck and busting in the middle. Rumor had it when he fucked his wife she always had to ride on top, otherwise he would’ve suffocated the poor bitch.

Weekend came around. Me and Slapsie, and another pair from the Alcatraz Swimming Team, went down there to make some book, to collect some dues for Don Ceriano. Found Roberto sweating like a stuck pig on barbecue day in the trailer office he managed on the backlot. Those days I was old enough to do the talking when Slapsie didn’t feel like it so the conversation went down between me and the lard-ass.

‘Jeez, stinks like a Turkish sauna bath in here, Roberto. What the fuck you been doin’?’