the assassins exited. Each of the four male witnesses stated frankly that they were Juan Carranza's bodyguards. I noted that none of them said they fired at the men who had bumped off their boss. In fact, they stated that they put Ramona Velarde in their car and jumped the curb onto the grass, driving around the assassins' abandoned car and the Corvette, but they made no attempt to pursue the assassins. The subtext here was that they recognized that their boss had been hit by the Italian mob, and they didn't want to be dead heroes. The New Jersey State Police determined that this rubout had federal drug and racketeering implications and contacted the FBI. Through an anonymous tip, Ramona Velarde was picked up, and she subsequently identified the four bodyguards, who were all picked up or surrendered within a few weeks. All of them agreed to become federal witnesses.
The issue of identification seemed to me a little vague. Ramona Velarde was only a few feet from the assassin, but I don't see how she could have seen his face if he was standing beside a low-slung Corvette. All she could have seen was the hand and the gun. Similarly, the assassin and his partner would have exited their car with their backs to the four bodyguards, who had let that car come between them and their boss. However, all four men stated that the assassin and his partner glanced back at them a few times as the two men stepped up to Carranza's Corvette. All four of the men said they recognized the face of Frank Bellarosa. Ramona Velarde picked Bellarosa's photo out of mug shots. Well, as I read this interesting account of gangland murder, it did certainly sound like a mob hit, Italian style. I mean, it was classical Mafia: the boxed-in automobile, the girlfriend left untouched, even the bodyguards left alone so that the hit didn't become a massacre, which would draw all sorts of unwanted negative press. And the abandoned car was stolen, of course, and also Italian style, the murder weapon was left behind and was clean as a whistle. The amateurs liked to use the same gun over and over again until somebody got caught with it, and ballistics showed it had about a dozen murders on it. The Italians bought clean guns, used them once, and dumped them immediately at the scene before strolling off.
I thought about this testimony I was reading in Bellarosa's Cadillac. It was quite possible that the murder had taken place exactly this way, and the witnesses were telling the truth, except for the identification of Frank Bellarosa. I'm no detective, but it doesn't take many brains to realize that a man such as Bellarosa, even if he wanted to commit a murder personally, wouldn't do it in broad daylight where half the population of the New York metropolitan area could identify his face. But apparently someone in the FBI office or the U.S. Attorney's office saw this murder as an opportunity to cause problems in the underworld. Therefore why not assign it to the number- one Mafia boss? And I thought, if Bellarosa was right that the murder was done by the Drug Enforcement Agency, then the DEA would most probably choose a modus operandi of the underworld, e.g. an Uzi submachine-gun attack to imitate Colombians, a knife or machete attack to imitate the Jamaicans, a bomb assassination as the Koreans had used a few times, or the cleanest, safest, and most easily imitated attack – a Mafia rubout.
I realized that what I was doing was formulating a defence in my mind, but beyond that I was trying to convince myself that I was defending an innocent man. Trying to be objective, trying to be that universal juror, I evaluated what I knew of the case so far and found that there was a reasonable doubt as to Frank Bellarosa's guilt.
I glanced at Bellarosa as I flipped through the indictment. He noticed and said to me, 'They named the guys who testified against me. Right?' 'Yes. Four men and one woman.'
'Oh, yeah. Carranza's girlfriend. I remember that from the papers.' He asked, 'She said she saw me?'
'Yes.' He nodded but said nothing.
I said to him, 'They're all under the federal witness protection programme.'
'That's good. Nobody can hurt them.' He smiled.
I said to him, 'They won't made good witnesses for a jury. They're not upright citizens.'
He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.
Lenny stopped in front of a coffee shop on Broadway. Vinnie took coffee orders, then went inside to fetch four containers.
We drove through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, then came back into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel.
The car phone in the rear rang, and Bellarosa motioned for me to answer it, so I did. 'Hello?'
A familiar voice, a man, asked, 'Is Mr Bellarosa there?'
John Sutter is a fast learner, so I replied, 'No, he's at Mass. Who is this?'
Bellarosa chuckled.
The man answered my question with one of his own, 'Is this John Sutter?'
'This is Mr Sutter's valet.'
'I don't like your sense of humour, Mr Sutter.'
'Most people don't, Mr Ferragamo. What can I do for you?' I looked at Bellarosa. 'I would like your permission to speak to your client.' Bellarosa already had his hand out for the phone, so I gave it to him. 'Hello, Al… Yeah… Yeah, well, he's kind of new to this. You know?' He listened for a while, then said, 'You ain't playing the game, either, goombah. You got no right to complain about this.' He listened again, a bored expression on his face. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what? Look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Am I complaining? You hear me shooting my mouth off?'
I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation, of course, but I couldn't believe the end I was hearing. These guys were talking as if they'd just had a disagreement over a game of boccie ball or something. Bellarosa said, 'You think I'm gonna use dirty money for bail? Check it out, Al. You find it's dirty, it's yours, and I'll come back to jail… Yeah. Save yourself some time. Don't get technical.' He glanced at me, then said into the phone, 'He's an okay guy. Get off his case. He's a real citizen. An important citizen. You don't fuck with him, Al. You fuck with him, you got serious problems.
Capisce?'
Me? Was he talking about me?
Bellarosa said to the U.S. Attorney, 'I'm sorry you're pissed off, but you should just think about it. Okay?… Yeah. I'll do that. Catch you on TV tonight, right?' Bellarosa laughed. 'Yeah. Okay. See ya.' He hung up and went back to his newspaper.
Madonna mia. These people were crazy. I mean, it was as if they were playing at being Americans in public, but between themselves some sort of ancient ritual was taking place.
No one spoke for a while, then Bellarosa looked up from his paper and asked his boys, 'Okay?'
Lenny replied, 'I never spotted nobody, boss.'
Bellarosa glanced at his watch, then asked me, 'You hungry?'
'No.'
'You need a drink?'
'Yes.'
'Good. I got just the place.' He said to Lenny, 'Drive over to Mott Street.
We'll get a little lunch.'
Gaffe Roma is a fairly famous spot in the heart of Little Italy. I'd been there a few times for dinner with out- of-towers. But it wasn't on Mott Street. I said to Bellarosa, 'Mulberry Street.'
'What?'
'Caffe Roma is on Mulberry Street.'
'Oh, yeah. We're not going there. We're going to Giulio's on Mott Street.'
I shrugged.
He saw that I didn't appreciate the significance of what he was saying, so he gave me a lesson. 'Something else you got to remember, Counsellor – what you say you're doing and what you're doing don't have to be the same thing. Where you say you're going and where you're going are never the same place. You don't give information to people who don't need it or to people who could give it to other people who shouldn't have it. You're a lawyer. You know that.' Indeed I did, but a lunch destination was not the kind of information I kept secret or lied about.
But then again, nobody wanted to shoot me at lunch.
CHAPTER 28
