Prizzi's Glory Page 3
Her grandfather beamed most kindly, not showing any teeth, working hard to make his eyes simulate feeling. “What a wonderful time,” the tiny old man sang, “because it has brought you to me.” Maerose knelt before him and kissed his hand.
“Sit down. Sit down,” he said gently. “Where are the cookies? You must have a cookie, my dear.” Amalia moved the huge plate of cookies from the table at the don’s side to the table that stood between them. She kissed Maerose on the cheek and left the room.
Maerose sat primly on a chair at his side, her feet held together, her hands correctly in her lap. She was dressed in dark, simple clothing. Her only jewelry was an old-fashioned brooch that had been her mother’s, pinned to her dress at her throat. She was a striking woman, as beautiful as a condor.
He held on desperately to his smile, allowing her to get used to its implied threat, staring at her with what he hoped to be benevolence. “How is your marriage?” he asked in the dialect of Agrigento.
“Rewarding, Grandfather.”
“No complaints?”
“Not one.”
“I have a complaint.”
“A complaint?”
“When are you and Charley gonna have kids?”
“Why shouldn’t we have kids?”
“You are married for a whole year! Where are the kids?” he shrilled.
“Of course we’re gonna have kids. Why shouldn’t we have kids?”
“When you have kids you wanna be somebody for them and you and Charley are somebody.”
“Maerose looked away.”
“Whatsamatter?”
She took a deep breath as if forcing herself to say something that she had been rehearsing for a long, long time. “In the old country, Grandfather, to be a mafioso was to be a man of honor and respect. You were an important part of the life of the country—the people looked up to you, the government and the aristocracy understood that they had to respect you, and you made the history of Sicily.”
“Yes?” He was perplexed by her use of the obvious.
“Here we are criminals.”
“Criminals?” His tiny jaw dropped with disbelief.
She shrugged. “Read the papers.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “I am saying that I don’t want to create children who will be seen as criminals with a father who is the Boss of a fratellanza family.”
“What else should they be? Your father, my son Vincent, was the Boss before your husband. I, your grandfather, was Boss before that. Your children will be Sicilians who will be born into the Honored Society. That is their good fortune. What else did you think they could be?”
“Do you want your grandchildren to be outcasts?”
“Outcasts? With the other families owning all the legit businesses and industries they own, we control the country.”
“You think money is everything?”
“Gimme an example where it ain’t.”
“Yeah? Do you remember when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and Al Capone offered, from the can, to intercede to get the baby back—what did the Lone Eagle say? He said, ‘I wouldn’t ask for Capone’s release if it would save a life,’ that’s what he said, and I am telling you that because you’re always saying what a nice man Capone was.”
“Lindy said that?”
“Grandfather—thirty years ago you invented franchising—before McDonald’s, before Pizza Hut, before Colonel Sanders. That let you expand your business nationally and internationally, while sharing in the profits with the franchisees. You had operating manuals written on every franchise operation, no matter what it was: labor racketeering, recycled postage stamps, dope, loan sharking. The one on the shit business alone, at 504 pages, is thicker and better than the manual for Burger King. You made it possible for dummies who couldn’t find their noses with both hands to put big, tricky operations on a businesslike basis in hundreds of cities everywhere, extending our influence, tripling our income from the royalties, but letting the franchisees take the heat.”
“So?”
“Grandfather, lissena me! The family’s street operation—Charley’s operation—it’s too labor intensive! Everybody along the line takes a piece of the action before what is left gets to you. Who needs that?”
“Whatta you mean?”
“I mean if you franchise the entire New York East Coast street operation to the Blacks, the Hispanics, and the Orientals, and you take the same high net royalty that you take from the franchise operations around the country, the profits will be absolutely net profit—the franchisees will have to live with the cuts their soldiers and capos take and be stuck with handling all the political payoffs. It could deliver a net that is bigger than Charley’s street operation delivers to you now.”
“How come you know so much?”
“My father was your Boss! My husband is your Boss! I am a certified public accountant and a lawyer! I am in charge of the Cray XMP 48 super computer that Barker’s Hill has in Omaha!”
“The computer says this is the way to go?”
“Grandfather—I can show you the printouts—it cannot miss.”
“What does this have to do with you and Charley not having kids?”
“You said—I didn’t say it—when you have kids you wanna be somebody for them.”
“So?”
“So—by franchising Charley’s street operation, we take the family out of all the areas which the media and the politicians keep calling the organized crime area. In America, which is not Sicily, that is something that kids are supposed to be ashamed of. So, right away, when I have kids, they don’t have to grow up ashamed of their father and their family.”
“Who’s gonna enforce it with these franchises? Who’s gonna collect?”
“Just like now on the national basis. Charley sets up a unit.”
“If we lease out the street operation, what happens to Charley?”
“Charley moves up to take over Barker’s Hill Enterprises.”
“You mean after Eduardo retires?”
“Now.”
“If Charley takes over Eduardo’s spot now, then what happens to Eduardo?”
“You run Eduardo for president in ’ninety-two. He’ll have to campaign for two years just like the other twenty-six candidates.”
“President of the United States?”
“Eduardo is the leading financier and industrialist in this country, among other things, and his public relations department, the biggest in the world since the Office of War Information in World War Two, has been reminding the country of that for over twenty years. Eduardo is sixty-nine years old. After two years of campaigning he’ll be seventy-one, which most of the American people consider young for a candidate. Even if he doesn’t get elected, it can be arranged so that he’s appointed attorney general, a profitable spot for us.”
“I see what you mean.”
“That’ll give Charley a year to set up the East Coast franchises and organize the enforcement, and it’ll give Eduardo time to break Charley in with my help.”
“Mae, lissena me, Charley ain’t no Eduardo. Eduardo is a Harvard man, a lawyer, a business school graduate, a leader of the community, or else how could we be talking about running him for president? Charley is—well Charley is not only the Boss on the street but, after all, he had a lot of years as the vindicatore of this family.”
“How did you get Eduardo started? You gave him a new name, a new nose, and, even before he began Harvard, you got somebody to teach him how to speak funny. That’s what you’ll do for Charley, and he’ll be as respectable in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of his own children as Eduardo. The family will be out of street operations, the net profit on all operations will go way up, and you will make the Prizzi family as respectable as money has insisted that all very rich families be since the dawn of history.”
6
Outwardly, Corrado Prizzi was an American because he had the papers to prove it and becau
se he had never failed to go for a buck. But, internally and eternally, he was a Sicilian who kept an open countenance and a closed mind. When he thought of the old country, more and more often in the past few years, he remembered the part he had never really known, the great house of the Duke of Camardi. He remembered the almost suffocating pleasure of not more than eighteen minutes alone in the great rooms of that house one afternoon in a distant summertime.
After years of routine Sicilian suffering, he had earned the privileges that came with being made a member of the Honored Society, but time had taught him that it was not in any way the same as having been born into the nobility or the aristocracy or even as being seen by the world as a galantuomo.
He had consolidated his position as a member of the fratellanza from the day he had landed in New York with his little family because that was his destiny as much as if he had been born an American. He moved with determination from that day. He had more money sewn into his clothes than any other Sicilian immigrant who landed before him or with him.
Before he left the isolation of Sicilian rocks and wasteland, he had earned and saved $885, more than most Sicilians ever saw in a lifetime. He had earned the money dangerously. From the time he was fourteen until he was almost eighteen, he had voluntarily become a cancia, a usually doomed occupation because it meant acting as a middleman between the contadinos, who wanted their wheat ground into flour, and the flour mills, owned by the Mafia, which were placed at distant and inaccessible points along the northern coast, fifty to seventy miles away from the sources of the wheat, so that the Mafia who owned the mills could hijack the flour from any peasant who was foolish enough to make his own deliveries.
The cancia had to guarantee the safe return of the flour to its owner after undertaking the long journey with the wheat to the flour mill, then to repeat the journey with the milled product back to the client. It was a violent profession, a very tricky one considering the ferocity of the mill owners and the relatively small profit each journey produced.
Corrado had considered all sides of the opportunity, deciding that it would be greedy to hope to keep the cancia’s entire fee, so he had laid the proposition out before his mother’s brother, the most successful bandit operating out of the adjacent Cammarata mountains. The arrangements were made for the protection his uncle would sell him, so that all deliveries of grain and of flour were made without incident (although Corrado had to accept 80 percent less as his share).
When Corrado married, at seventeen, his father-in-law, Cusomano Pianelli, was a gabellotto, a man of respect, who had “leased” the estate of the Duke of Camardi. Gabellotto meant tax collector, but that was a euphemism. As a mafioso he did not work the land himself but parceled it out among sharecroppers on extortionate terms. The sharecroppers passed down as much of their own misery as they could to the day laborers, the greatest percentage of the population, who were at the bottom of the pile.
Anyone who could learn to read or write could escape all this by joining the Church. Corrado, who could read and write, escaped by succeeding so well as a cancia that he was invited to join the Honored Society while he was still seventeen. From the moment he became a mafioso, he and his wife began to plan to emigrate to New York to seek their fortune. Corrado had his $865, after paying for the steamship tickets, and the gabellotto had endowed his eleventh daughter with a dowry of $100.
In New York in 1914, they moved into the Sicilian community along the easterly side of Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn, not far from the Navy Yard. He had just turned nineteen years old. He had enough to start a storefront bank and, in eight months, enough to start a neighborhood lottery. Both made money, and by 1922 he was in the booze business in a big way, he had the old Palermo Gardens going, and a lot of people who had come over from Sicily looked to him for help and friendship. He had two families that were the same family: he had his wife and two sons, Vincent and Eduardo; his daughter, Amalia; and his orphaned sister, Birdie; plus the Sicilians of Brooklyn; and he had such manliness and humility that he became the natural leader among the capi di famiglia of the city.
He had taken his ideal from Baldassare Castiglione: behave with decorum; win the favor of one’s superiors and the friendship of one’s equals; defend one’s honor and make oneself respected without being hated; inspire admiration but not envy; maintain a certain splendor; know the arts of living; be in one’s proper place in war, in a salon, in a lady’s boudoir, and in a council chamber; live in the world and, at the same time, have a private and withdrawn life.
Through various associations that extended beyond Brooklyn, he was recognized by the Irish and Jewish gangs that operated over the bridge in New York as a factor who could enhance their business.
Corrado Prizzi’s art was in controlling individual people. His qualities appealed to man’s whimpering need for leadership: the warm/cold combination of affection/fear that he projected, his massive dignity, which was so unexpected from a man who was barely five feet, two inches tall, and the total reflection, mirrored by every attitude of his life, such as of the preposterousness of anything he did being considered criminal, reassured everyone who met him—senators, judges, and police—that he had the power to help them to make an extra buck. All this was possible because deep within himself he saw himself and carried himself both as an aristocrat and as a continuing family service whose organization was ready to provide goods and assistance to all the people to whom such goods and services were denied by law. In that sense he felt as concerned with the welfare of America as his father and uncles before him had been concerned with the welfare of the Sicilian people.
Never one to leap into the abyss, Don Corrado, for almost a year, mulled over his granddaughter’s plan to break into what had always seemed to him to be the impregnable fortress of respectability, reading copies of the computer printouts at the end of every week and talking through every part of such a drastic change in course with his consigliere, Angelo Partanna, who was the great technician of all street operations. Now, in June 1988, he sat listening to the music, weighing his decision, and thinking of many things.
His granddaughter, Maerose Prizzi, he thought, was effectively his own self-portrait. She thought as he thought despite her college education and her gender. At forty-three, although the don did not know this, she was carrying out the basic plan she had held since she was twelve years old. It was a simple-enough plan, considering that it was intended to control between nine and eleven billion dollars. She had obeyed the wishes of her grandfather by getting high honors from a university education. She had excelled from the beginning when she had started her own interior decorating business, which she had allowed her grandfather to finance so that she could have reason to report to him and keep him involved. She had built the business into an international success with branches in London, Paris, Rome, Beverly Hills, Washington, D.C., and Palm Beach; then, with the help of her grandfather, she had sold the business to her uncle, Edward S. Price, financier, banker, philanthropist, and industrialist, to become his executive assistant within the family’s international holding company, Barker’s Hill Enterprises, which administered the legitimate businesses that had been bought with money that had been laundered from street operations. She had never taken a wrong step where business was concerned.
Maerose Prizzi’s basic plan was to outwait the senior men of her family, and, when they were all dead, or too old to be useful, she would succeed to their various portfolios because she would have made herself the only one qualified to handle such complex and entirely special operations. Once she had gained the total power, she would remain in the background, pulling the strings to drag the ever-accruing power to herself.
The family’s income was divided into two parts: the street operation and the legitimate operation. Until she was twenty-two her grandfather had run the street operations. Then her father, Vincent Prizzi, was made capofamiglia by her grandfather, who retired to his house in Brooklyn Heights to oversee and expand both operations. The street
side handled what the media obediently termed the “organized crime” side of the operations, even though the transactions involved almost two-thirds of the American population: gambling, narcotics, vice, loan-sharking, labor racketeering, prostitution, pornography, and extortion were only a few of the money-spinners. It also ran the family’s casinos in Nevada, Atlantic City, Florida, the Bahamas, Aruba, and London, as well as all numbers and policy. She could hardly believe it but, in the year just reporting, 1987, the American people had bet $198 billion on dog races, horse races, bingo, numbers, poker, casinos, lotteries, and team and individual sports, and that didn’t even include bets on elections and the stock market. It had generated $3,938,000,000 worth of gross profits for the Prizzi family alone, plus the bonanza from the popularity of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and the other divisions, bringing up the gross and net sharply since the early ’70s—all of it tax free.
Nonetheless, as Maerose had reasoned, the street operation was extremely labor intensive. Everyone took a piece of the action. The soldiers who did the heavy work took their piece; then the capos took theirs, passing what was left up to the Boss to take his end; then the rest went to the Family.
On top of that, about 12 percent of the gross every year had to be held out for federal, state, and local politicians and police as well as a big puntura going to judges, prosecutors, cops, and prison officials.
When what was left of the gross was in the Family’s hands, it was transferred out of the country to family-owned banks in Switzerland, Panama, the Bahamas, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean, then reinvested in legitimate businesses in the United States by Barker’s Hill Enterprises, which owned institutions and organizations in such areas as banking and investment banking; insurance; aerospace, oil, electronics, construction; and long distance telephone and transportation systems. It owned real estate (2,231 downtown and midtown office buildings from coast to coast, as well as 1,612 shopping centers and malls) and took enormous profits from merciless residential rental and condominium sales in cities with a population of over five hundred thousand. It was heavy in cable television, brokerage and underwriting firms; department store and specialty chains; wineries, junk bonds, giant buyouts/takeovers, soft drink companies; all professional sports; high-tech consumer credit; fast-food chains; theatrical and television motion picture production, financing, and distribution; the food industry from agriculture to restaurants to supermarkets; undertaking and cemeteries; heavy media concentrations in television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines, phonograph records, videocassette and book publishing companies; 734 stretch limousine car rental services; racetracks and blood stock breeding farms; parking lots; 32 law firms; 19 certified public accounting firms; 381 hospitals, 1 flower farm, 137 hotels and 3 laundries, which, taken all together, produced an annual gross income of $16,900,000,000 each year.