19 Purchase Street Page 11

  Calmly, he told Winship, “I knew.”

  “I was sure you did, all along.”

  “Not to the dollar but my figure was within ten million.”

  “Amazing,” Winship said, playing to it. He was grateful that his judgment had been influenced by his fear.

  Still calm, Costello said: “I thought about having you killed.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Costello did not reply.

  “Really, why didn’t you,” Winship pressed.

  Costello sensed that this banker from Boston was making a move, although he didn’t see in what direction it could be. He decided to tell Winship part of the truth they both knew. “Killing you,” he said, “would have been too expensive. You and that half billion in the fund are too tangled up. Kill you, we lose it all.”

  Exactly what Winship wanted to hear. He had, by God, control.

  “Do the others realize that?” Winship asked.

  “It may have occurred to them, but I doubt it.”

  “How would they react if they knew about the double folios?”

  “Anastasia would kill you no matter how big the loss. So would Luciano.”

  Winship hoped Costello wouldn’t let it go at that.

  After a long silent moment spent considering Winship’s leverage, Costello threw his loyalty over the fence. “They don’t need to know,” he said.

  WINSHIP was made a partner in Ivison-Weekes in 1942.

  The strength of the Ruffco account was a factor in his getting the promotion. Realizing that, he looked and saw how the account, with its perpetually increasing nature, would eventually become too much for him. It was like a spiraling, replicating mass that he was bound to, unable to prevent its rise into a financial atmosphere rare and dangerous. Left on its course, it would overexpand, expose itself, destroy itself and him.

  It was vital that he take measures while the account was in a less conspicuous stage.

  He decided to stake his fine old name and position on greed.

  He went about it methodically. Formed a mental profile of the sort of men who were needed, and over the next three years singled them out.

  Nine men.

  Some Winship was quite sure of. The others he was positively sure of. The similar eastern establishment backgrounds of the nine already had them affiliated. Their lives went back to the original colony, their ancestors had fought at the bridge. Only Saint George’s or Phillips Andover, Harvard or Yale were in them. They had the same double values, the same well-guarded psychological soft-spots, pretty much the same hard old wealth under them.

  On the first of November, 1945, Winship invited the nine to attend an early evening meeting in the partner’s room of Ivison-Weekes. And there they sat in their English wool vested suits and their shirts that had been starched and ironed just so, at home, by laundry maids. They did not know why Winship had called them there but they hoped it had nothing to do with charity.

  Winship did not beat around the matter. Right off, he revealed the Ruffco account, the shady underside of its inception, the basis for its remarkable growth and its present flourishing status. He took special care that it came across as a history, not a confession. He even showed them the double set of portfolios he had been using.

  No one walked out.

  Winship drew the future of crime for them, as though it were like any business. What he foresaw in the prosperous years ahead. How the growth rate of crime could make it the most profitable of all industries, by many billions. How if the financial power of it were brought to center, those who controlled it would eventually have the wherewithal to control the economy of the country.

  They tugged at ear lobes, scratched necks, recrossed legs and picked specks off sleeves, as though motion was needed to cover their thoughts. They did not look to one another. The notion of controlling the economy, farfetched as it might be, was particularly amusing.

  Winship noted their receptivity.

  He took the advantage, proposed they form an alliance. Clandestine, of course. Their single, mutual concern would be the Ruffco account, all its ramifications and potential.

  Did that mean he was willing to put Ruffco into the pot?

  Yes.

  Ruffco, according to its latest, honest folio, held over a billion dollars.

  They would each share equally. As they would also each contribute whatever special service or influence that was needed for the well being of the account.

  Winship had read them accurately. Except for one thing. He had thought they would take leave at that point in the meeting. Just short of commitment. Straighten their backs and ties, pull tight their puritanical coats and say they would think it over. They had long cars and obsequious chauffeurs out on the street waiting to carry them to a decent night’s sleep. However, at two in the morning, they were still there, wrapped up everyway in it, assuming responsibilities, suggesting strategies.

  It was decided they would refer to the body they now were as the High Board.

  That meeting gave Winship the backing and the underpinning needed to make the most of the business of crime. It gave access to the facilities as well as the money muscle of the three largest commercial banks. It opened the way in several prominent Wall Street brokerage houses, their most inner doors. And it supplied a direct reach into the government, such agencies as the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service.

  The only essential Winship didn’t have covered through the High Board came into place as a consequence of World War II. During the war numerous men with eastern establishment backgrounds chose to serve in intelligence. The OSS, Office of Strategic Services, was to some extent their own elite corps. It was by no means a sheltering niche removed from the action. Most often it meant being deep in danger, moving behind enemy lines for information and working with resistance groups in enemy occupied countries. Strange, that fellows from the east with their more rigid, offish ways should choose such a tenuous and dramatic part of that war. Perhaps they had the well-schooled cunning for it or perhaps being on constant edge, not knowing from one moment to the next there would be another breath offset the inevitable security they were born and blessed with. Anyway, they did their duties and killed in the efficient ways they were taught to kill whenever they had to and sometimes when they really didn’t have to.

  The OSS was discontinued after the war. Many of those men were left stranded, unable to return to a predictable routine. Some ran to Allen W. Dulles and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Some went with Winship. Winship simply ran a modest two-column-by-six-inch advertisement in the Boston Globe and the New York Times saying that Ivison-Weekes was looking to employ several experienced people for security work. At the same time Winship made certain that word got around that some of Ivison-Weekes stock-and-bond messengers had been held up at gun point and that what the firm wanted was not someone just to go around checking doors and identities as though danger had a particular odor that they found irresistable. Former OSS people flocked to be interviewed. Winship had more than enough to choose from.

  On behalf of the High Board, he enlisted those most addicted to jeopardy and deadliness. He immediately put them to work gathering information on the national crime syndicate and all those who belonged to it. They went at it systematically, and it was not difficult for them, so experienced in covert operations, to travel about and learn what was what and who was who in each of the syndicates’ territories. Winship’s boys compiled fat dossiers not only on the bosses but also on those second in command, the underbosses or sottocapo, those who had the elbows of the bosses and whose duty it was to pass messages and orders down to those lower in the order. Winship’s boys also learned each and every consigliere, those elder powerful confidants to the bosses, and, as well, the trusted, clever go-betweens, buffers, who were precisely that, who saw to it that a boss never need be directly involved with underlings and their dirty work, thereby insulating the bo
ss from the police. More on the working level there were the caporegime, to whom a number of soldiers, buttons, wise-guys, were responsible. Winship’s boys were interested in them all, every made guy from top to bottom, and before long they had an exquisitely organized file on them. Identities and whereabouts, professional credits and personal habits were noted and kept up to date. Winship could reach into that file any minute and know, for example, where Scalice had his suits made, or if the preferred weapon of a certain soldier in Cleveland was an automatic, a revolver, a .45, a .38 or whatever.

  In mid-February of 1946, the High Board decided it was time to move.

  Winship met with Costello. This time on Winship’s ground. An afternoon meeting at an apartment on Fifth Avenue, almost directly across the park from Costello’s place.

  Costello was in high spirits that day. “Luciano’s been deported” were his first words.

  “So I heard.”

  “Now I won’t have to make that goddamn trip every month up to Dannemora. He was crazy. No one can run things from prison.”

  Winship agreed. He was strictly business, abrupt, not out to solicit or appease Costello. In fact, it did not really matter what Costello’s reaction might be. The words had to be said, had to be heard. That was all there was to it.

  Winship informed Costello that he and his people, the High Board, intended to take over the national syndicate and the greater part of its income. They naturally would not be involved in its day-to-day operation. That would be left to the district bosses and their subordinates, who would be compensated for their efforts in two ways.

  First, by being allowed to continue in business.

  Second, by being permitted to keep ten percent of everything earned through gambling, loansharking and other major activities—plus every cent of whatever came in from garbage hauling, linen supply, olive oil, funeral homes, restaurants, vending machines and other minor things such as extortion on the neighborhood level.

  The bosses would make more than enough to live as well as usual and keep up their fronts. There would still be hundred dollar shoes and fifty dollar hats and cash in the pocket to hand out for respect. The remaining ninety percent from the higher profit areas, gambling and so forth, would go to Winship and his people. Their end was much greater, but all things considered, it was, Winship said, fair. There could be no holding back, he made clear. A ten year projection had been worked out of how much he and his people would expect. No amount less than their figures would be acceptable.

  Briefly, that was it. A ninety-ten split.

  For the time being the Syndicate need only acknowledge its obligations, Winship said. It had three days, until three-thirty Friday afternoon, to respond.

  Costello said nothing.

  Not even good-bye.

  He felt if he questioned it, it would lend credibility to what he had just heard.

  He pulled up his coat lapels and headed across the park. The wind cut through the camel hair fabric and the silk lining. No matter, he was already numb.

  Only one reasonable explanation for Winship’s behavior, Costello thought. The man had lost his mind. And, if that was so, he had lost his share of the Ruffco holdings. Counting both portfolios, his share came to over four hundred million dollars.

  No good fucking horny Boston banker … should never have gotten mixed up with him. His sort married first cousins, had too much of the same blood in them. There was no telling when their brains would flop over. The crazy bastard Winship, the way he’d sat there and said all that shit about taking over the Syndicate. Straight faced and serious. As though it were possible.

  What, Costello thought, was he going to tell Anastasia? And the others. Couldn’t expect them to just smile good-bye to their money. It was his mistake, he’d brought Winship in, he’d advised Anastasia to leave his money in the fund. Anastasia would make a point of that. Anastasia might take it all out on Winship, but more probably not. There wasn’t much satisfaction in killing someone crazy.

  Costello couldn’t manage the long strides that would have suited his mood on account of the icy patches along the way, and the leather soles and heels of his polished black shoes made the going all the more slippery. He had to take short, cautious steps, slide his feet along. Like an unsure, old man.

  By the time he reached the west side of the park he had settled on how he’d have to handle it. For his own sake, for the time being, he would not mention it to anyone. On the chance that Winship might snap back to reality, stop playing boss of bosses. If only just long enough for everyone to get their split and to hell with the IRS.

  AT three-thirty the next Friday afternoon, Sabato Nani was on One hundred-sixth Street just east of Second Avenue, parked in his gray Plymouth sedan. Nani was one of the survivors of the Masseria-Maranzano gang war of the early thirties. His record was eleven arrests and two convictions that he took as though he couldn’t pronounce any name other than his own. As a result, he was being taken care of, a made guy. He wasn’t in the upper echelon of the New York organization, nor was he merely a soldier. A sort of permanent in-between who could be relied on to do a killing or trusted with more complicated tasks. Such as being the field man for the “numbers” in that section of lower East Harlem. Every day at that time Nani was at that spot where runners brought their collections to him. Nani was waiting for it, just sitting there without a fear in the world, when the fat gray .45 caliber entered the base of his skull, tore on through and exploded out of his face.

  That same Friday afternoon, Rosario Tarditi was at 130 West Twenty-ninth Street, a ten story building in the fur district. He had just lined things up with the wholesale furrier who would handle a shipment of Canadian pelts that had been hijacked earlier in the week. Tarditi was alone in the sixth floor corridor, his attention above on the arrow of the elevator indicator, when the .45 caliber piece of metal slammed into him, just above the nape of his neck.

  There were two killings in each city. In New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Saint Louis, Miami, New Orleans and Los Angeles. Altogether, sixteen. They could not be accepted as coincidence. All sixteen were Syndicate men, made guys of about the same standing in their districts, experienced soldiers. All were shot in the back of the head with a single bullet of the same caliber. All were killed just after three-thirty.

  The reflex of the district bosses was to blame one another. At once the points of old grudges were brought out and sharpened. Actually, the bosses did not know what to make of it.

  Except Costello.

  Costello found it hard to believe that he could have been so off the mark with Winship. He remembered clearly that three-thirty Friday had been Winship’s deadline, and so it followed that the sixteen killings were the penalty for not having met that deadline.

  What most concerned Costello, and convinced him, was the tidy, professional way the killings had been carried out. It meant Winship had an organization to deal with such matters, a formidable one. More efficient even than anything the Syndicate could call on. The typical Syndicate killer was not a marksman, never practiced. Which was why he used a shotgun or machine gun whenever he could. To make up for his poor aim.

  Winship’s gunmen, however, had used only sixteen shots to do away with sixteen guys in eight cities like clockwork. Such competence was to be respected—in another word, feared.

  Costello decided it was past the point when he could lay it all out for Anastasia and the others. He was in too deep. It would be burying himself. His one possible advantage was from not telling them, staying ahead of them. Maybe he could cover himself, even come out of it with his Ruffco money.

  He got together with Winship, saw Winship in a different light. No longer was he manipulatable or deranged, or a man with a cock for a brain. Winship was extremely intelligent, shrewd and remarkably lacking in conscience. He was, Costello thought, the most devious man he’d ever met.

  Winship, answering before he was asked, said that he and his people had confiscated the Ruffco account.

&
nbsp; All of it.

  All but a fourth of Costello’s share.

  The opening was evident.

  Costello put his life into it. He offered to be Winship’s man within the Syndicate in return for that twenty-five percent, that hundred million, and any possible future considerations. It was, Costello pointed out, a perilous, straddling position, but fortunately the Syndicate and Winship’s side were worlds apart.

  Winship agreed. He set another deadline.

  Costello was to deliver the ultimatum.

  Costello did not. Partly because he wondered how strong Winship’s next move would be, but mainly because he was afraid of the task and so procrastinated, could not get himself up to delivering those words that still at least sounded insane to him.

  Eight consigliero were killed.

  Eight of the right hands of the bosses, the well-known, counselling shadows of the bosses in those same eight cities from New York to Los Angeles … the victims died almost identically, same trademark, shot once in the base of the skull by a .45.

  The funerals of the eight were not held with closed coffins. However, opaque linen squares had to be placed over their blown-away faces.

  That was enough for Costello. He called for a convening of the bosses, explained that he had just been contacted to act as intermediary. He conveyed the terms of the High Board.

  The bosses were shocked, stunned. Hated the idea of being forced to give anything to anyone, being on the other end of extortion. They were so enraged they couldn’t speak English, and spat on themselves as they raved. It was almost as though they were competing to determine who could express the most fury. However, below the surface of all their angers lay their fears—the prospect of sudden death, as already demonstrated. That simmered them down to some reason.

  Grudgingly, shaking their head, they gave in to the High Board.