expanse of chemical-green lawn. It perched on a rocky outcrop with a glorious view of the sea.
As I turned into the crushed-shell drive, two heavyset men stepped in front of the car and ordered me to get out. They were dressed in identical navy blue suits with chalk pinstripes, and from the way their jackets hung, I could tell they were carrying. They patted me down, politely asked me to unbutton my David Ortiz jersey so they could be sure I wasn’t wearing a wire, and then swung the car doors open. They felt under the seats, checked the glove box, and asked me to open the trunk for inspection. When they were done, they directed me to continue up the winding drive and park under the trees. I nosed in behind five new Cadillacs, their paint shielded from the sun by sprawling oaks. All of the cars had “Cadillac Frank” emblems affixed beside their brake lights.
As I walked across the lawn to the house, Whoosh stepped down from the porch to shake my hand. Then he took me by the arm and guided me around back, where the smell of good cooking mingled with the salt air. A slight old man with a spatula in his hand was fussing over two gas grills laden with steaks, chicken breasts, and Italian sausages. Three somewhat younger men in white Bermuda shorts and Tommy Bahama shirts lounged by a glistening pool. Babes in thong bikinis passed among them with trays of tall frosty glasses decorated with little umbrellas.
“Nice,” I said.
Whoosh looked at me and smirked.
“What were you expecting? Satriale’s Pork Store?”
He handled the introductions, but I already knew all their names.
Giuseppe Arena, free on bail pending his labor-racketeering trial, put the spatula down, wiped his hands on his “Kiss the Cook” apron, and clasped my right hand in both of his. “Good of you to come,” he said. “Grab yourself a drink. The meat will be ready in a few minutes.”
We ate with Gorham sterling knives and forks, balancing Limoges plates on our laps. Music poured softly from poolside speakers. Joan Armatrading, Annie Lennox, India.Arie—voices that sparkled like the Atlantic on this cloudless late-September day.
I turned to Whoosh, who was meticulously constructing a sandwich from a heap of sausage, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and Italian bread.
“Great choice of music.”
He smirked again.
“What were you expecting, Wayne Newton?”
The conversation veered from the Red Sox to the attributes of the waitresses and back around to the Red Sox again. The Sox had stormed back when I wasn’t looking and had a headlock on a play-off spot. With Rhode Islanders going out of their minds placing bets on the looming play-offs, Whoosh was primed for a killing.
By three in the afternoon, as the plates were being cleared away, I fetched the recording and documents from my car. Then Arena led us down the sloping lawn toward a stone breakwater that thrust forty yards into the sea. Halfway down the breakwater, a long table covered with a white tablecloth had been set with wine glasses and carafes of red and white. No worries about listening devices in this unlikely meeting spot.
Arena claimed the chair at the head of the table. The rest of us seated ourselves as Whoosh filled our glasses. Arena, labor racketeer and acting boss. Carmine Grasso, Rhode Island’s biggest fence. “Cadillac Frank” DeAngelo, car dealer and chief executive of the state’s biggest luxury-car theft ring. Blackjack Baldelli, the no-show jobs king. And Whoosh, Rhode Island’s most successful bookmaker.
Johnny Dio and Vinnie Giordano were conspicuously absent.
Two more men in chalk-striped navy suits stood at the end of the breakwater, binoculars hanging from their necks, making sure none of the sailboats tacking in the light breeze ventured too close.
Once, Raymond L. S. Patriarca had ruled the rackets from Maine to central Connecticut from his little storefront office on Atwells Avenue. But in the seventies and eighties, federal investigators used their new toys— electronic surveillance and the RICO act—to break the power of the Mafia here, just like almost everywhere else. Now the mob was small-time, scratching for a piece of the action against the big boys who ran the drug cartels, the state lotteries, the Indian casinos, and the “escort services” that let you choose your whore on their Web sites.
“Okay,” Arena said. “Let’s see what you’ve got for us.”
I spread the lot plan and architectural renderings out on the table. The men stood and hunched over them. Whoosh pointed a bony finger at the “Dio Construction” label in the right-hand corner of the lot plan and muttered, “Bastard.”
Once they were satisfied, I placed the billing records for the incorporation papers on the table. Arena picked them up, examined them, and passed them to his right.
When they were done, I put the recorder on the table and pressed play. It was hard to hear over the cries of the gulls and the swish of foot-high waves breaking on the rocks.
“Play it again,” Arena said.
When it got to the part where Giordano mentioned the vacancy at Little Rhody Realty, Grasso picked up the recorder, pressed rewind, and played that part again.
“Cheryl Scibelli was my wife’s sister’s kid,” he said.
The recording played to the end again, and I clicked it off. No one spoke. Arena pushed his chair back from the table, stood, turned his back on us, and stared out to sea.
It was a minute, maybe two, before he rejoined us at the table. He had questions.
Where’d I get the architectural drawings?
I’d stolen them from Brady Coyle’s office.
How’d I get my hands on the billing records?
I respectfully declined to say.
“My fucking
“He is,” I said. And then I told him it was Coyle who’d been leaking grand-jury testimony to the newspaper.
“You know this for a fact?”
“I do.”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Would you have sanctioned the arsons?” I asked.
“A warehouse fire to collect the insurance, sure. We’d be okay with something like that. But torching a whole neighborhood? Roasting babies and firemen? Burning Whoosh’s store down? Involving Carmine’s niece in it and then whacking her to cover it up? Fuck, no.”
“Coyle knows that,” I said. “He’s sandbagging your case to get you out of the way.”
Arena walked over to me. I stood. He grasped my hands in both of his again, then reached up and draped an arm across my shoulder.
“We are all in your debt,” he said.
It was my signal to go. I gathered the documents from the table, shoved the recorder in my jeans, and walked up the sloping lawn toward the house.
78
Tuesday I slouched in front of Aunt Ruthie’s TV and fell asleep watching the final game of the regular season, a meaningless tune-up against the Yankees.
That was the day it happened. The news was a gaudy headline in the next day’s paper.
Shortly after noon, according to witnesses, a stranger in an ankle-length black raincoat strode briskly through the yard at Dio Construction. He entered the main building through the side entrance and stepped into Johnny Dio’s outer office.
“I thought it was odd,” the secretary told the homicide twins later. “It wasn’t raining.” But what she said to the stranger was, “May I help you?”
The man brushed past her, threw open the coat like he thought he was “Doc” Holliday, and raised an 8-shot pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun. He opened the inner door, fired three blasts, let the gun fall to the floor, told the secretary to wait ten minutes before calling the police, and walked out into a sunny afternoon.
