He heard the sounds of small, graceful footsteps and opened his eyes to see it was light. Brenda was making them breakfast before she had to get ready for work. She was wearing a short nightgown. When the food was ready, she went behind the door and woke Eddie so they could eat while she bathed and dressed.
As they ate, Eddie said, “Good, huh?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “She’s a good cook.”
“Then don’t forget to tell her.”
A few minutes later, she emerged to find Eddie washing the dishes. The boy said, “Thank you very much for breakfast. It was very good.”
When they left, Brenda stopped them at the door and gave Eddie a long, serious kiss. Then she said, “Let me know next time you’re back in New York.” As they stepped through the door, she grabbed the boy, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. “You too.”
They went out and walked toward the corner. Eddie looked at the boy for a few seconds as they walked. “You did great yesterday. Good nerves, giant balls. You okay?”
“Sure,” the boy said.
Eddie waved a cab to pull over, and they took the cab to the lot on Staten Island where he had left his car. Then they drove home to Pittsburgh.
When Schaeffer remembered the visit to New York now, he knew that it wasn’t just the first time he’d used Eddie’s teaching and preparation to take a step into the secret profession. It was also the start of bad times. Within a few days, Eddie was bringing home newspapers from other cities and reading them with a frown on his face. The boy would say, “What’s wrong?”
Eddie would answer, “A guy I knew died.”
“Who?”
“Just a guy. You didn’t know him.”
They had this conversation at least four times, once while he was reading the Chicago Tribune, then the New York Daily News, then the Buffalo Courier-Express, and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Finally, after a few months, after Eddie had tossed aside one of the papers and sat in silence, the boy said, “Another guy you knew?”
Eddie stared at him before saying, “Listen carefully. I’m going to tell you some things that will help you understand. The Mafia families were made up of southern Italians who immigrated around 1900 or so. Some had been criminals in Italy, and others were just desperate for a job. They established some ways of stealing money and got by. Then in 1920 the government made it illegal to sell whiskey or wine or beer. This was the best news they ever heard. If people couldn’t buy alcohol in stores, they had to buy it from somebody. The crime families supplied it—made deals with people who knew how to produce it or smuggled it in from other countries—and earned a whole lot of money. Then in 1933, Prohibition was repealed. The Mafia came into 1934 rich and strong and heavily armed. They were also friendly with thousands of cops and public officials accustomed to getting bribed and expecting that to be the same in the future.
“Once anybody who wanted to could sell alcohol, the Mafia families had to rely on other ways to make money. They had learned how to run gambling joints and bookie operations because they’d been doing it all through Prohibition. They knew extortion because they’d been doing that since the Romans. They also knew prostitution and drugs. But at this point there was competition, and the families fought over territories with each other, and with the gangs of outsiders who competed. That brought public attention. In 1936, one of the most powerful bosses, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, got locked up in prison—though he still ran his businesses from there. But there were other big arrests too.
“In 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and started World War II. For the next four years the fighting between the gangs was start-and-stop, because most of the mob guys who would have done the fighting were drafted and sent to battlefields all over the world to fight somebody besides their cousins. There was rationing. People were only allowed to buy a certain amount of anything needed for the war—butter, meat, car tires, gasoline. And so the Mafia started black markets to get those things and sell them secretly. Sometimes they stole them, or paid somebody to divert the trucks, or counterfeited rationing coupons.
“The war ended in 1945, and Lucky Luciano got taken out of prison and deported to Italy. The government must have thought that would get rid of him, but he could run his Italian operations and his American businesses even better from there. And other bosses found new ways to operate. Things stayed pretty stable for a while, and the Mafia expanded into a lot of businesses, some of them not even illegal.
“Things got more profitable. There were about twenty-five families in the United States with maybe five thousand ‘made’ men who were full members. To join, they each had to kill somebody, burn a saint’s picture, and swear to follow omertà, which was a vow that they’d never talk. The whole shebang was run by a group called ‘the Commission,’ which was the heads of the five New York families and the heads of the Chicago family and the Buffalo family.
“In 1957 the cops stumbled on a big meeting on a little farm in upstate New York. They caught sixty-two bosses, including all seven members of the Commission, trying to run away through the fields in suits. No outsider really knows what the meeting was about, but probably it was about a lot of things. They were a worldwide conglomerate by then. They called the organization La Cosa Nostra—‘Our Thing.’
“But in 1962 Luciano was in the Naples airport and had a fatal heart attack. That took away an important force, a strong man at the top who liked things quiet. Right away in Palermo, the Sicilian boss Calcedonio Di Pisa was shot to death, apparently by the La Barbera brothers. His death set off what was called ‘the First Mafia War,’ a fight for control of Sicily. It was one of those fights that are like cats in a bag—no way out and everybody has claws.
“When the fighting moved to the United States, it was Frank Costello and Vito Genovese fighting over who would control Luciano’s American holdings. Right about that time, 1962, was when a friend got in touch with me. It was a guy I knew from the army named DeSilvio. He told me that somebody he was related to needed some help in the fighting. He had been in Vietnam with me, and he wondered if I needed money. I had just started the butcher shop, but it wasn’t paying for itself yet, so I was interested. I took a job, got paid for it, and then he called me again about a month later. That’s how I got into the other business. Before long I was getting calls from his uncles. Things were okay for a long time. But now I think we’ve got trouble.”
“What kind?” the boy had asked.
“That guy that I got hired to kill on opening day outside Yankee Stadium was involved in the argument over the Luciano family’s holdings in the United States. The other guy, the one who was going to kill me if you hadn’t gotten him first, was a visitor from Italy who was on the same side of things there. I didn’t know anybody was going to be with the guy ahead of time, and I didn’t know the target was that important. Maybe I would have done it different, or turned the job down. But what we did was help turn an argument into a war.”