See No Evil E-Book

Ron Felber

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

See No Evil is based on the life story of a Jewish kid from the Bronx who, through his childhood defence of a bullied young boy, became a trusted friend and, later, physician to New York mafia dons, while simultaneously securing and maintaining a career as a high-flying surgeon at home among the city's chattering classes. The doctor was forced to lead a double life: a well-respected surgeon and socialite by day and hard-living mafia doctor by night. He was welcomed into a seductive underworld by his mafia connections: clubs, drugs, high-stakes gambling and, of course, beautiful women. Yet somehow he continued to pursue his profession seriously and, in time, became one of the nation's leading cardiac surgeons. Eventually, the high life came crashing down when the heads of the five mob families were prosecuted by then Attorney General Rudy Giuliani. The doctor's life and career hinged on the fate of Ralph Scopo, a man lying on his operating table awaiting heart bypass surgery. In one ear was John Gotti: 'When it's over, make sure that only one of you comes out breathing.' In the other, Giuliani and his men threatened to ruin the doctor's career if their star witness were to die. Torn between an unspoken loyalty to La Cosa Nostra and devotion to the Hippocratic Oath, the doctor had to make a decision that would indelibly mark the rest of his life.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

FOREWORD

1. THE COMMISSION

2. BRONX BOY DISCOVERS BODY

3. INITIATION

4. BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN MAFIA

5. INTO THE MIRROR

6. BOSS OF BOSSES

7. SURGEON1

8. STUDIO54

9. BABANIA

10. GIULIANI AT THE WALDORF

11. THE BUSINESSMAN GODFATHER

12. LOVE AND BULLETS

13. MOB COURIER

14. JFK AND THE MAFIA

15. GODFATHERS AND PRESIDENTS

16. TROUBLE IN PARADISE

17. THE SPEEDOF SOUND

18. THE MAFIA AND HOOVER’S FBI

19. GIULIANI VS. GOTTI

20. TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

21. RICO REDUX

22. STAR WARS

23. HURRICANES, TORNADOES, AND PESTILENCE

24. THE CONCRETE CLUB

25. THE HIT ON SCOPO

26. “NEW GODFATHER HEADING GAMBINO GANG”

27. A TANGLED WEB

28. AN “INTERESTING” LIFE

29. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FRANKIE VALLI

30. THE DEATH OF MYSELF

31. A NEW BEGINNING

EPILOGUE

Copyright

FOREWORD

The idea for writing SeeNoEvil was given to me by Bill Bonanno, author of BoundbyHonor,AMafioso’sStory. The son of godfather and Commission founder, Joseph Bonanno, in addition to writing, he was involved in film and having read a manuscript of mine titled ThePrivacyWar became interested in the possibility of a movie. We were meeting at Anthony’s, a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, to discuss the project when, in the course of conversation, he mentioned an acquaintance who’d led an intriguing life and now was willing to have a book written about it.

At first, I was cool toward the notion of writing yet another “Mafia book.” Certainly anything that needed to be said on the subject had been committed to paper by more capable authors than myself ranging from Gay Talese, HonorThyFather, to Mario Puzo, TheGodfather, and Joseph Bonanno, AManofHonor. Nevertheless, since I was living in New Jersey, as was Dr. Elliot Litner, I agreed to meet with him to see what kind of chemistry developed.

To my delight, I found Elliot to be brilliant, likable, and remarkably “human.” Contrary to what one might assume about the stereotype for a man raised on the periphery of organized crime and who had by choice opted to lead a double life, I became enamored with the notion of it. A “double” life. What did it mean? Were there people in this world for whom one life was simply not enough? People whose hunger for living allowed them, perhaps even compelled them, to be two different men? If that was the case, what was the penalty for living too much? Once ethical considerations vanished from one’s radar screen and the borders of individuality were wiped clean, what was it like to be two people, one living the life of a high-society Manhattan physician with wife and children, the other living the life of a sex addict and inveterate gambler working secretly for the Mafia?

The introduction that Bill Bonanno offered, I understood after meeting Elliot, was an opportunity to explore a world that few will ever live or even know about. It was an invitation to see the world of La Cosa Nostra through the eyes of an outsider, a self-confessed “nerd” who hailed from the Bronx in New York and through a series of choices and coincidences evolved into an “everyman” historian capable of walking one through a Mafia house of mirrors as unfamiliar and frightening to him as it would be to any potential reader.

From that point on, Elliot Litner and I worked together on this project. He drove me to his old haunts on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and even to the “backies” where as a young boy, his brother, Steve, their pals, Jewish and Italian, and he would ride cardboard boxes down the garbage heaps, their version of Swiss Alps. As important, I spent hours taping the events that made up his life, past and current, putting those accounts today—with the benefit of hindsight—into their historical context, while getting to know him as a person and his family going back to their emigration from Russia immediately following the Revolution.

Beyond that, during my two years of research, I had the good fortune to get to know Bill and meet his father, Joseph, shortly before he died. Having taken my nephews along on the trip, we found ourselves at Joseph Bonanno’s home where the feisty godfather, then in his mid-nineties, told anecdotes about Al Capone, the Kennedys, and a priceless gem about having once bribed President Calvin Coolidge. Prior to that, I had, of course, instructed my nephews, Matt, fifteen, and Colin, ten, to be “polite” and on their “best behavior.” Once we’d finished talking and were about to leave, I was careful to point out that I wanted them to “shake hands” and say “thank you” for the hospitality.

As it turned out, the conversation was enthralling, and at its conclusion, Colin and Matt lined up dutifully in front of me to bid farewell to the retired godfather. As Bill, and his nephew, Frank, looked on, Colin stepped forward expecting to shake hands when to his shock and amazement, the old man turned his right cheek to him. Colin was mortified, not having a clue about what he should do, but wanting to remain ever polite, simply stood there in silence. It was then that his older brother nudged him. “Hewantsyoutokisshim,stupid,” he exhorted. At which time, Colin looked into the eyes of the grizzled Joseph Bonanno, whose cheek was still showing, then turning to me in total desperation, asked, “Where?”

Our good-byes were suitably arranged in the moments that followed, and we all had a good-natured laugh about the comedies of everyday life. Still, sensing at that moment the possibilities for historical intimacy that Elliot’s story offered, I vowed then to write something more than just another Mafia book. I wanted to capture not just his life, but the Cosa Nostra way of life from his unique perspective, interweaving the exploits of Rudolph Giuliani, for example, known to him through his career as a well-respected Manhattan surgeon, with those of John Gotti, known to him through his alternate life as I1 Dottore, the Mafia doctor.

In the final analysis, then, I was determined to discover who this man was. How could he be so driven by the need to heal and achieve social acceptability in his visible life, yet demonstrate such destructive tendencies, steeped up to his eyeballs in what, at best, could be described as moral ambiguity in his invisible one? Was there a price to pay for living too much? The answer would come for Elliot Litner in the unlikely specter of heart patient Ralph Scopo, union official and capo for the Columbo crime family, whom he would be coerced both to murder and to save on the operating table of New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital in December 1986.

What was the price for cutting a Faustian deal with New York high society and the godfathers of La Cosa Nostra? This was the mystery I set out to solve in the biography of a physician forced to probe for “truth” amid the inner workings of the Mafia, the hidden agendas of American hypocrisy, and the darkest recesses of his own spirituality.

R.F.

Mendham, New Jersey

August 2004

1

THE COMMISSION

“Giulianihadachievedanationalvisibilityhe’dcravedhisentirelife.”

—Foley Square, February 27, 1985, 10:35 A.M.

Abuzz of speculation swirled around U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani as he stood on the Federal Courthouse steps in Manhattan. Flanked by FBI Director William Webster, the news conference had a carnival air about it as television and newspaper reporters roiled around New York’s top federal lawman calling out questions, popping camera flashbulbs, and shooting videotape as he tried to wave them down.

“The New York City Bar Association called you ‘overzealous’ and said your use of RICO has led to abuses. What do you say about that?” asked David Margolick then of the NewYorkTimes.

“I’d say they’re provincial and should stop acting like a trade organization,” Rudy shot back, casting a quick grin in Webster’s direction.

“What about John Gotti?” called out NBC’s Gabe Pressman. “There’re reports that with Castellano out of the picture, he’s the new boss of bosses.”

“No comment.”

“You wanna be mayor? That’s the word down at City Hall,” shouted Newsday’s Lenny Levitt.

“I’ve been U.S. attorney less than a year, Lenny. Why don’t you give me a break?” Rudy answered, then directing himself to the crowd and Webster, who stood by his side bemused, “Come on, guys!” he exhorted. “Let’s get a little organized here!”

The night before, on February 26, 1985, fifty major mob leaders were busted and hauled before a swarm of cameras in Foley Square. Today, Giuliani was about to rock the world of organized crime again by announcing grand jury indictments against the bosses of New York’s five ruling Mafia families.

“This is a great day for law enforcement,” Giuliani proudly declared, “but a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia because we have not only attacked the ‘heart,’ but the ‘brain’ of La Cosa Nostra.”

Based on taped evidence, he asserted, the U.S. Attorney’s Office would prove that the heads of five Mafia families essentially ran the construction industry in New York, collecting two percent of the price of every significant contract in the state.

Giuliani then presented the indictment charging the bosses with running a RICO enterprise known, since its formation in 1931, as the Commission. Indicted were Paul “Big Paul” Castellano (Gambino Family); Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Genovese Family); Gennaro “Gerry Lang” Langella (Columbo Family); Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (Lucchese Family); Philip “Rusty” Rustelli (Bonanno Family). In other words, every ruling godfather in the state.

On that day and the next, Giuliani appeared on ABC’s “Evening News,” “Nightline,” “Good Morning America,” and CBS’s “Morning News” boasting about his prosecutorial triumph. In those forty-eight hours, he achieved a national visibility he’d craved and worked for his entire life.

Then it happened. An event that would forever link Elliot Litner’s fate with the destinies of two of this generation’s most extraordinary men: future New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and John Gotti, Time magazine’s “Teflon Don” and heir apparent to the throne of the nation’s most powerful Mafia crime family.

On November 13, 1986, in the midst of the Commission trial, Ralph Scopo, president of the Concrete Workers’ District Council, complained of nausea and numbness in his right arm. Then, while listening to prosecution tapes of himself secretly recorded by the FBI, he stood and clutched his chest, seized by a knifelike thrust of excruciating pain. He turned to his left toward Asst. U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff as if to say something, then to his right, robotic, as he tried to move out from behind the defense desk. Finally, reaching for the oak rail behind him, he fell forward, then collapsed to the courtroom floor, suffering a heart attack.

Coronary patient Ralph Scopo lay motionless on the operating table at Mount Sinai Hospital, chest bare, electrodes attached to the back of his shoulders, intravenous needles inserted into his right arm and left wrist. Fifty-six years old, grossly overweight, and a three pack-a-day smoker, Giuliani’s pride and joy had collapsed four weeks earlier, headlines in the morning papers screaming SCOPO HEART ATTACK DISRUPTS RACKETEERING TRIAL. But there was much more to it than racketeering. This case was an attempt by the FBI and New York City’s Organized Crime Task Force to bring down the Commission, the “bosses” of the five La Cosa Nostra families that governed organized crime in New York and possibly the nation.

In the background played “The Wanderer,” a 1961 hit by Dion in place of Verdi or Puccini, Elliot’s usual fare. The anesthesiologist jerked Scopo’s head back so the blunt blade of the L-shaped laryngoscope could be put in his throat and a one-half-inchendotracheal tube inserted past his vocal chords. A balloon on the tube’s lower end inflated, creating an airtight seal as Clark Hinterlieter, the resident surgeon, inserted a Foley catheter through Scopo’s penis into his bladder, then nodded to Dr. Elliot Litner, the chief operating surgeon.

Litner glanced to his right where outside Operating Room #2 the Giuliani team of three federal investigators led by Special Agent Peter Hogan awaited the operation’s outcome like vultures. Then, to his left where John Gotti’s right hand, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, and two of his underlings loomed nearby the patient’s waiting room pacing the floor with equal intensity. The Brooks Brothers Ivy Leaguers versus the polyester suit gumbas, Litner mused sardonically, the voice in his head sounding like a cross between Woody Allen and a manic Jerry Lewis. “Howthehelldidanerdy,JewishkidfromtheBronxgetcaughtupinamesslikethis?” he anguished. The feds want Scopo alive to prosecute and “twist” into a government witness against New York’s five families. The goodfellas don’t want him leaving this operating room alive. Either way, it’s understood, Litner was a dead man.

Dion warbled in the background about Flo on the left, Mary on the right, and Janie being the girl he’ll be with tonight. When Janie asks who he loves the best, Dion tears open his shirt to show Rosie on his chest.

’CauseI’mthewanderer,

Yeahthewanderer,

Igoaround,around,around …

The chest was open; the heart-lung machine ready to go. It was impossible to stall any longer. It was time for Elliot Litner, a man who could have been the poster boy for moral ambiguity, to choose between life or death: loyalty to La Cosa Nostra or devotion to his Hippocratic oath.

“Fifty cc’s going in to test the line,” the technician announced.

“On bypass,” Litner commanded, “start cooling.’

Almost immediately, Scopo’s heart slowed.

Judy Harrow, his surgical nurse, held the shiny stainless-steel needle up in the air. She depressed the syringe plunger, and a stream of clear liquid potassium spurted from it.

She handed it to Litner.

This was it. The moment of truth, for if ever there was a time to see to it that Scopo never awakened from his drug-induced sleep to testify, this was that time.

Litner took the syringe into his right hand, clamped the aorta, then injected the icy fluid directly into the vessels below the blockages in Scopo’s lower aorta.

RalphScopo’shearthadstoppedbeating!

2

BRONX BOY DISCOVERS BODY

“ThesegangstersaregoingtokillmylittleEllie.”

HarleyHotel

Cleveland,Ohio

March8,1987

The tiny hotel room was overrun with the waste generated by a man who’d given up living, and it showed as he stood naked before the full-length mirror that covered the pine wardrobe before him. Elliot Litner had become part of the environment since he’d gone into hiding, as much a part of the decadent décor as the used styrofoam McDonald’s hamburger shells, crushed Big Mac wrappers, and half-empty beer cans that adorned the place: a human wreck, both physically and psychologically.

For nearly three decades, he’d maintained secret relationships with America’s most notorious criminals, smuggling precious gems from Brazil, disposing of sensitive medical records, and acting as a courier transporting counterfeit stocks, bonds, and who knew what else from Switzerland and other parts of Europe. He’d been a personal physician to Carlo Gambino, worked with capoditutticapi Paul Castellano, and tended to business for garment district boss Al Rosengarten, as well as Mafia up-and-comer John “Johnny Boy” Gotti.

More, he’d reaped the rewards of those efforts, shooting craps gratis at the Sands in Las Vegas and Resorts in Atlantic City, $1,000 a throw; partying at Studio 54 with Cybill Shepherd, Richard Gere, and Roy Cohn; engaging in threesomes, and even foursomes, at Plato’s Retreat with the most beautiful women in the world. Christalmighty,itwaslikebeinga fuckin’rockstar.

But suddenly it came to a screeching halt. The Mafia empire tumbled down around him like a house of cards. And for him, it had all come down to the life of a single potential government witness who Gotti, himself, had ordered to be hit. A man named Ralph Scopo.

Elliot’s eyes scanned the human wreck he’d become, eyes ringed and lifeless from lack of sleep and paranoia, face unshaven, pot belly swollen, and even his penis, once the pride and joy of his life, hanging ludicrously shriveled. He sat down naked and alone on the Spartan wooden chair set before a desk as stripped and bare as his ravaged brain these days and nights to begin writing the notes that would become the basis of SeeNoEvil:TheTrueStoryofaMafiaDoctor’sDoubleLife.

When did Elliot Litner’s involvement with the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra as it’s sometimes called, first begin? Very early. In 1953, to be exact, at the age of five, when he was playing Cowboys and Indians with his older brother, Steven, in a deserted lot near their tenement apartment on Anthony Avenue in the Bronx, New York.

It was there that he witnessed a gun deal gone bad, leading to the murder of one man by two others. Bam!Bam!!Bam!!! He heard the sound of the final bullets shot into the back of the man’s head. Then, maybe to make identification more difficult or as a last gesture of contempt, a rock the size of a watermelon dropped onto his skull, crushing it in a pool of blood, bone, and brain tissue.

That’s when they noticed Elliot, a skinny, little Jewish kid, Roy Rogers’s six-shooter in hand, standing petrified with fear, not ten feet from them. Both men were huge—broad shouldered, dressed in dark overcoats and hats.

“You didn’t see nothin’, did you, kid?” the man with the pistol asked.

Elliot shook his head “no,” shaking, literally, in his shoes.

“Good,” the man said shoving a $10 bill in the boy’s shirt pocket. “You remember that. You didn’t see nothin’.”

Then they drove off in a black Cadillac leaving him wondering if anything had happened at all, but knowing that it must have. “Where else would a dead body come from?” he asked himself. Moments later, his brother returned complaining loudly about his lack of enthusiasm for Cowboys and Indians when he noticed Elliot’s stunned expression.

“Hey,” he said. “You peed in your pants!”

Once he could bring himself to speak, Elliot showed his brother the body.

“Jesus,” Steven muttered. “It really is a dead body—and you saw who did it, Elliot.”

“No. No, I didn’t,” he stammered remembering his pledge. “I didn’t see nothin’. I didn’t see no one.”

From there, Steve, who immediately saw star status in the murder, took credit for finding the body since his little brother was too frightened to care and offered no objection. Together they made a beeline for their Uncle Lou’s luncheonette on Webster Avenue.

“I found a dead body! I found a dead body!” Steve proclaimed.

“Shut up,” his Uncle Lou shouted back. “You’re going to make people lose their appetites!”

Undeterred, Steve left for their Uncle Saul’s laundry, just down the block on 174th Street, with Elliot in tow.

“I found a dead man. He was shot. I found him. Now we’ve got to call the police!”

Saul, who owned the laundry where their father worked as a driver, couldn’t fathom what they were trying to tell him.

“Marty,” he said turning to their eighteen-year-old cousin, “go back to the lot with them, and see what they’re talking about.”

The three went to the deserted lot, filled with garbage and debris, and Marty couldn’t believe his eyes.

“My God, Steve,” he managed to utter, “you really did find a dead body! You’re like,” he thought for a minute, “like a moviestar!”

They were not movie stars, and in truth, though the term “nerd” had yet to be coined, if you were to look up nerd in the dictionary, a photo of him, Elliot Litner, scrawny and bookish, with thick, black-rimmed glasses, would undoubtedly be staring back at you. Still, finding a dead body and witnessing a murder in those days was front-page news, and though the police, who later arrived, came to learn the truth of what happened, Elliot kept his vow of silence even after intense questioning. It was this stance that earned him notoriety and an odd kind of respect in the neighborhood as a kid who could be trusted and wouldn’t “rat.”

The next morning, headlines in papers ranging from the NewYorkMirror to the DailyNews carried the headline BRONX BOY DISCOVERS BODY. Then below, GANGLAND VICTIM MURDERED IN GUN DEAL GONE BAD. But if notoriety would get him free penny candies at Moe Greenberg’s corner candy store, it was obviously something his mother, Etta, could do without.

“Abe, I tell you these gangsters are going to come and kill my lil’ Ellie,” she wailed to his father. “I know it, I know it as sure as God is in ’eaven!”

The gangsters didn’t come. They didn’t have to. They were already there. This was the Bronx, stomping grounds for such notorious mob figures as Dutch Schultz and Abner “Longy” Zwillman; chosen location for the coronation of capoditutticapi Salvatore Maranzano as “boss of bosses” attended by Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, Tom Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Joseph Bonanno—in other words, anyone that was anyone in the Italian underworld. The mob’s infiltration of New York had started long before that.

The Sicilian Mafiosi, symbolized by the “Black Hand,” had been well-known in the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx since the turn of the century extorting immigrant shopkeepers, hijacking goods, and kidnapping wealthy businessmen for ransom. Even the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, became a victim when during an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, shortly before World War I, he received a Black Hand letter demanding $2,000. He paid without resistance. Then a second demand, this time for $15,000 arrived, compelling him to meet with the police, who captured two prominent Italian businessmen as they attempted to retrieve the money from beneath the steps of a deserted factory. It was one of the few successes by law enforcement against the early New York Mafia, but Caruso, despite his fame, required police and private protection for years to come.

Still, while Elliot was doing his best to survive in the Bronx, working with his brother at Uncle Saul’s laundry and reading biographies about Pasteur, Curie, and Einstein, there were two other kids whose lives would later become entwined with his living just a few miles away. One was John Gotti born, like him, in a rented tenement apartment in the Bronx. The other was Rudy Giuliani, living in a modest two-family brick house in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Interestingly, even then, both were admiring historical icons placed at poles exactly opposite one another. Gotti’s hero was Chicago crime lord, Al Capone, and Giuliani’s, the ambitious and cunning New York prosecutor-turned-governor, Thomas E. Dewey.

In days to come, of necessity, Elliot would become an expert on Rudolph Giuliani. Born in New York, the son of Harold and Helen, Giuliani’s family had by the early 1950s relocated to a two-bedroom Cape Cod house in Garden City, Long Island. Rudy was enrolled at St. Anne’s, a Catholic school run by the Sacred Heart of Mary nuns, where students were required to wear uniforms consisting of navy blue pants, a white shirt, and blue tie. There he learned the value of discipline above most everything else. Along with teaching discipline during the Cold War era, the sisters’ secondary agenda was imbuing the ability to isolate an enemy, Communism in this case, and despise it to the core.

In those early days, and through his adolescent years at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School where he was taught by Christian Brothers, Rudy, much as his hero Thomas Dewey, developed a love of opera even while his father pushed him toward more “manly” endeavors such as boxing and baseball. Encouragement to compete was hardly needed, however, as the academic requirements at Bishop Loughlin were rigorous and unforgiving. The walls of the classrooms bore just two symbols, a crucifix and an American flag.

John Gotti’s childhood was ultimately “different,” but intrinsically the “same,” as if a chemical formulation of identical constituents had been mixed at dissimilar proportions creating an alternate version of the same amalgam.

Described at the zenith of his career as ‘Al Capone in an $1,800 suit,” John “Johnny Boy” Gotti was anything but dapperwhile growing up in the Bronx with twelve brothers and sisters. His father was a low-earning man of Neapolitan origin, barely able to provide for the thirteen children he’d fathered in less than sixteen years. “The guy never worked a fuckin’ day in his life. He was a rolling stone. He never provided for the family,” Gotti once complained in an FBI-taped conversation with underboss Sammy Gravano. “He never did nothin’. He never earned nothin’. And he never had nothin’!”

When he was ten, the Gotti family moved, not to Long Island like Giuliani’s, but to a rented Brooklyn house in East New York where La Cosa Nostra was as intertwined with its citizens as the Catholic Church. Gotti’s parents cared little about his education, and by the time he was fourteen, he was committing petty crimes and sporting a tattoo of a serpent on his right shoulder. At sixteen, he quit Franklin Lane High School to run full-time with a gang called the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. They stole cars, dealt in stolen merchandise, ripped off stores, and rolled drunks stepping out of gambling parlors.

Other members included guys who would become lifelong criminal associates like Angelo Ruggiero, known as “Quack-Quack” because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, a sometimes professional boxer, who would loom large in the life of both John Gotti and Elliot Litner as Il Dottore, the Mafia doctor.

3

INITIATION

“You’reaguywhocanbetrusted,andthatmakesyouoneofus.”

As a young boy, Elliot lived an extremely sheltered life, and if there was a line drawn that sequestered him, his aunts, uncles, and parents from the rest of society, it was the parameters of the Bronx itself. Rarely did his father or mother, both Jews who had emigrated from the Kiev province of Russia, venture outside the borough. Why should they? His dad worked eighty hours a week at Uncle Saul’s laundry. His mother, a genius when it came to cooking, spent her time filling their tiny kitchen with the intoxicating aromas of her specialties: noodlekugel, a pudding of noodles and eggs; matzobrei, matzo fried with eggs into a pancake; and rosca, Elliot’s favorite, big round sweet rolls with sesame seeds.

His world, and that of his brother, Steven, five years older than he, was also self-contained: P.S. 28, two blocks from the six-story apartment house where they lived on Anthony Avenue; Saul’s laundry; Uncle Lou’s luncheonette; 174th Street where they played stickball; and the “backies,” their word for the mountainous garbage dumps they sledded down on cardboard boxes for fun after school. That was the extent of their universe, all separated by Tremont Avenue, the main thoroughfare before the coming of the Cross Bronx Expressway, where, if they valued life and limb, all forms of motion stopped. It was verboten. They were forbidden from crossing such a dangerously trafficked street.

The neighborhood itself was made up predominantly of Jewish merchants. There were very few blue-collar types among the Jews. For those services, there was the next largest population, the Italians, who just as the Irish became cops, seemed to prefer employment as masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and on occasion, somethingelse.

Exactly what “something else” meant didn’t occur to Elliot until much later, but among the Italian kids and their families, there was one occupation that seemed ineffable.

“My dad works at the laundry. Where does your dad work?”

Silence. Shuffling of feet. “He don’t really work nowhere. He does a little of this and a little of that.”

“Oh,” Elliot would say, as if some secret understanding had passed between them, thinking that maybe he was what? A Catholic priest?

That was the way it was in many respects between Italians and Jews in the Bronx at that time. No question, there were differences in culture and religion, but there were also many values they shared. Their parents, for one, had brought with them the European experience along with the monumental decision to move to America. And while they were Americanized, they had both acquired century-old habits from the Old Country that bonded Jews and Italians into a respect for family values that they felt all around them on a daily basis.

No better example of the symbiosis that existed between them was the fact that for the Orthodox Jews, during the High Holy Days and bar mitzvahs, Italians would often act as Shabbes goys who turned the lights on and off on the Sabbath for those whose orthodoxy forbade it.

But the cooperation didn’t end there—at least not for Elliot. While he was a totally subpar athlete and about as tough as tofu when it came to fighting, he was always an extraordinary student and would get 100 percent and A+ for nearly every subject, except gym, on his report card. Phrases like quid pro quo meant nothing to him then, but the basic arrangement went something like this. At their next-door neighbor, Mr. Micelli’s request, Elliot would tutor his son, Nicky, and others to help get them through exams. In turn, they’d protect him from neighborhood tough guys who viewed him as an easy mark for lunch and spending money.

It was at about that time that Elliot discovered the opposite sex, and for a fourteen-year-old, it was quite a discovery. Her name was Helga Schmidt, and if a name like Helga stirs visions of a large, redhead with horned helmet and loud singing voice, this was not a Helga of the Teutonic-Amazon variety. Far from it, for she was, to him, like a goddess. Her hair was long and golden, her face radiant, and when she smiled, paradise opened up to him.

As important, Helga was what adults at the time called “mature.” This meant that she had breasts, twoofthem, that swelled from her chest like the choicest fruit on the vine. Simply outstanding. And, one day, Elliot actually touched one, or at least, brushed up against it during a study hall when she reached across a tabletop to get a mathematics book. Elliot looked at her. She looked at him. And, miraculously, Helga smiled. It was a sweet, vaguely coquettish glance that immediately evaporated when everyone at the table who’d seen their encounter laughed and teased until she rushed away, embarrassed.

Unfortunately, Helga’s brother, Max, who was captain of the football team and a bully in the Goebbels tradition, was not so amused. After school that day, he waited for Elliot, along with four or five members of the team, mostly Irish. The football players circled Elliot in the schoolyard while Max, who was with him in the center, began shoving.

“You Jew purr-vert! You like to touch the tits of the girls, huh?”

Shove—no response.

“So, you tink you can get a feee-1 from my little sistah, Jew boy, is that it?”

Shove—no response.

Well, not only did Max talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was built like him and seeing that his friends were getting restless, finally rolled up his huge fist and hit Elliot hard in the stomach. That, of course, doubled him up. Then, Max clasped his two hands together in the shape of one gigantic fist and slammed it down onto the back of Elliot’s head. At that point, totally nauseous and gasping for air, Elliot was down, but not so incapacitated that he couldn’t see Nick Micelli, Joey Ficshetti, Sal DiGregorio, and Little Eddy Sabella charging up the concrete hill where P.S. 28 stood to descend upon the varsity bullies.

One by one, the German and Irish guys were handled or fled as Nicky, who was shorter than Max, but broader and strong as a bull, broke through, throwing Max to the ground like a rag doll.

Slowly Elliot got to his feet, horrified by Nicky’s ferocity as he beat Max’s face with his rock-hard fists, then got up and kicked him, joined by the others once Max’s fair-weather friends had been vanquished.

Rolled into a ball, Max was surrounded as they wailed into his body, taking full-scale kicks into his arms, back, and ribs once they were exposed.

“Hey! Nicky!!” Elliot screamed. “Enough! This guy’s balls are coming out of his eye sockets for Jesus’s sake! Stop it! Stop it already!”

And they did, but not before Nicky grabbed Max by the front of his shirt and lifted him so that Max’s face was no more than two inches from his. “Listen, you Nazi bastard,” he seethed. “If you or any of your fucking friends ever lay a hand on Elliot Litner again, you’re dead, understand? This kid is ‘protected.’ He’s one of us, capisci?”

Max nodded, licking blood away from the side of his mouth as Nicky shook him. “Copisci?” he demanded.

“Yah. Yah, capisci” Max finally uttered.

Then Nicky lowered him down to the ground, and once he collected himself, Max left to the shoves, smacks, and jeers of the others who had now formed a circle around him.

“Elliot,” Nicky said, then turning to him with the care and sincerity of a zayde, blood brother, “are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

“No, no, Nicky,” he said, so shy that he was embarrassed to even look up at him.

“Nothing like this will ever happen to you again, Elliot. You have my word on that. You’re a good kid—solid. You help us, and you never tell anyone, even when they ask. You’re a guy who can be trusted, and that makes you one of us.”

Elliot nodded, then looked into Nicky’s eyes understanding that he genuinely meant it. For whatever reason, Nicky had feelings for him. And, in an odd way, he was proud not only of the friendship, but that given Nicky and the group’s prominence in the school, he didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Not of Max. Or one dozen Max’s. For Elliot, this was a kind of epiphany.

4

BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN MAFIA

“ItwasonlylaterthatElliotlearnedOfficerKahlerwasa ‘bag’man,andSalvatoreMicellia caporégime.”

Of course, as Elliot would come to understand much later, the “special” relationship Jews and Italians shared wasn’t restricted to the Bronx, or New York for that matter. Historically, the symbiosis built around power and money between the two ethnic groups went back at least to the heyday of Chicago underworld boss Johnny Torrio and a hoodlum genius named Arnold Rothstein.

Torrio, who was nicknamed “the Fox,” was born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1882, but gravitated to Chicago where he went to work for Chicago crime boss “Big Jim” Colosimo running gambling operations, brothels, and narcotic distribution. Street smart and ruthless when he had to be, Torrio climbed his way through the ranks of Big Jim’s operations preaching an approach considerably different from his boss and most others working in the business of crime at the time.

Torrio believed that “violence leads only to more violence,” though it was he who arranged Colosimo’s assassination by a young hood named Frankie Yale so he could take over his operation. Afterward, seeing, as many did, that Prohibition was a bonanza for crime lords like himself, he formed distribution alliances in Chicago, Detroit, and Canada, counterfeiting legal U.S. government alcohol certificates, buying distilleries in England and Scotland to control supply, and carving up the city of Chicago into inviolable territories to lessen mob tensions and maintain a “permanent” peace.

The old joke goes “Jesus saves, but Moses invests,” and maybe there’s some truth to it because while Johnny Torrio saw a future for the Mafiosi in multinational corporations, it was Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, who articulated a vision of what organized crime could someday become.

Rothstein was nicknamed “the Brain” because it was he who brought La Cosa Nostra to entirely new levels. Active, as were Al Capone and Torrio, in bootlegging, Rothstein expanded the world of crime into Wall Street, counterfeiting stock certificates, selling worthless bonds, making millions per year on the sale of stolen Liberty Bonds issued by the federal government during World War I. Not content with indirect control of most bootlegging operations in New York, stolen and counterfeit Liberty Bonds began showing up in Cuba, England, Nassau, France, and the Near East to purchase liquor and narcotics worldwide.

A great believer in cooperation over violence, Rothstein saw crime as a corporation exercising limited use of force and called for the creation among his gangland counterparts of a multiethnic, multinational federation. Truly the world of Arnold Rothstein was a limitless one uninhibited by morals or prejudice, leaving no stone unturned, no business opportunity unexploited.