Popeye Franzini took a sheaf of papers from the attaché case, studied the first page for a moment, and then laid them down on top of the case in front of him. His voice, his whole manner, suddenly changed and he was now the businessman.
"Frankly, Nick, you're not the man T would pick for this job. We don't know you well enough and I would prefer someone who had been with the organization. However, Louie here says he wants you, and if he thinks he can trust you, that's the main thing."
I returned his gaze without expression. "Whatever you say, Don Joseph."
He nodded. Of course whatever he said. "The point is," he went on, "this organization has been having some difficulties lately. Our receipts are off, a lot of our people are getting into trouble with the cops, the Ruggieros are moving in left and right. In other words, somehow or another we seem to have lost our grip on things. V/hen that happens in a business organization you call in an efficiency expert and make some changes. Well, I consider us a business organization and I'm going to do just that."
Popeye Franzini drew hard on his cigar and then pointed it through the smoke at Louie. "There's my efficiency expert."
I looked at Louie, remembering how my impressions of him had changed so quickly in Beirut. Outwardly, his demeanor suggested anything but efficiency. I was beginning to grow fond of this man. Though I was sure he was more intelligent than he appeared at first, I doubted he was very tough.
As though reading my thoughts, Popeye went on. "Louie's a lot tougher than most people think. I brought him up that way. Like he was my own son." His face grimaced in a smile at his nephew, who grinned back at him. "Right, Louie?"
"Right, Uncle Joe." He spread his hands expressively, his dark face beaming.
The Franzini story played through my mind as I listened with one ear to Popeye's obviously oft-repeated story of Louie growing up as the man he'd raised him to be.
Up until the second World War, the three Franzini brothers had been a team. Louie's father, Luigi, was killed during the Marine landing at Guadalcanal in August, 1942; the young Louie was taken in by Joseph.
By that time Joseph was battling the ravages of MS, though he was still able to walk with a lurching gait and drive a car. He also had his older brother, Alfredo, to contend with; the two brothers had grown steadily apart, and after Luigi's death, their quarrels grew into a bitter war for control of the family interests.
If the schism between the brothers had continued the entire Franzini famiglia as a Mafia power center would have been undermined. Joseph wasn't about to let that happen. In February, 1953, he set up a peace parley with Alfredo. On the day of the meeting, he took his Cadillac, alone, to pick up Alfredo, and the two brothers drove east, out of the Village.
It was the last time anyone ever saw Alfredo Franzini.
Joseph maintained — still did — that after they visited Alfredo's New Jersey place, he drove his brother back to the city, leaving him off on Sullivan Street — the spot where he'd picked him up. No one had ever been able to prove otherwise. Officially, Alfredo Franzini had been kidnapped off the streets of New York by persons unknown. Unofficially, the authorities knew better.
Only Joseph Franzini could support their suspicions, and Joseph Franzini never wavered from his story.
Joseph had made a great show of vowing vengeance against whoever had abducted his brother. He took Alfredo's wife, Maria Rosa, into his own home — "for protection," he said — along with her daughter, Philomina, who was just three years old at the time. Maria Rosa had died two years later of cancer, but Joseph had continued to care for his two brothers' children as if they were his own. He had never married.
Popeye Franzini continued to talk, an articulate mountain of flesh encased in a chrome and canvas cage with spoked wheels.
"…So then I sent Louie on to Columbia and he graduated magna cum laude. Since then, he's been running the Franzini Olive Oil business, and that's just about the only thing we have going that is producing the amount of revenue that it should."
"What did you study, Louie?" I was curious.
He grinned self-consciously. "Business administration. That's why Uncle Joe thinks I might be able to straighten out some of our operations."
"What operations are we talking about?" I asked the old man.
He glared at me.
"Look," I said. "If you want me to work with Louie, I have to know what we're getting into. You forget, I just got here yesterday."
He nodded. "All right. We're talking right now about porno, securities, numbers, trucks, vending machines, laundry supply, and narcotics."
"No prostitution?"
He waved the idea away disdainfully. "We leave that to the flashy black pimps." He looked thoughtful. "We do have other operations, of course, but those I named are the ones we're having trouble with."
I turned to Louie. "You done your homework on these?"
He sighed and looked a little embarrassed. "Well…"
Popeye explained. "Louie's never been in any of the operations. I worked hard at keeping him out, except for olive oil, and that's legit."
I tried to keep from smiling. In the Red Fez in Beirut, after I had pulled my trump with the tube of heroin, Louie's manner had implied that he was right in there, one of his Uncle's men behind all the Franzini rackets. In reality, he knew almost nothing about their inner workings. And Franzini wanted him to straighten out the «operations»? My skepticism must have shown.
"Yeah. I know," Popeye said. "It sounds crazy, maybe. But the way things have been going… something has to be done. I think Louie can do it by streamlining our business practices."
I shrugged. "It's your ball game. Where do I come in?"
"Louie here is my efficiency expert. I want you — somebody new to the organization — to provide the muscle. These guys all work for me, and they do what I say. But sometimes they have to be convinced more directly. They're not going to want Louie poking around in their operations because they're probably cheating me somewhere along the line — I know that. If Louie goes by himself, they're going to try to bamboozle him. If you go along, they'll know I sent you just to let them know this is coming straight from me and no shit about it."
For the job I was supposed to be doing for Uncle Sam, it was a heaven-sent opportunity. "Okay. Now, you mentioned porno, securities, numbers, trucks, vending machines, laundry supply and narcotics. What is 'trucks'?"
The old man grasped both wheels of his wheelchair with gross hands and moved himself back from the desk a foot or so before he answered. "Trucks' is what we call our hijacking operation run by Joe Polito. It's mostly garment district stuff, once in a while a little hardware like TV sets or stoves. We took three hundred stoves out of Brooklyn the other day. But it's been going bad. The cops, the feds, even the Ruggieros, everybody's cracking down."
"The Ruggieros?" I was amused. If he thought he was having trouble with the Ruggieros now, wait until he got that package with Larry Spelman's clothes in it!
He dismissed the Ruggieros with a wave of his hand. "Nothing big. Some of our boys picked up a garment truck the other day, then a couple of Ruggiero's boys hijacked our boys."
"I thought things were coordinated between the families in New York."
He nodded a massive head. "Usually. This time, Ruggiero said it was a mistake, that his boys pulled the job independently."
I laughed. "You believe that?"
He glared back at me. Levity was not part of Popeye Franzini's way of life. "Yeah, I do. Once in a while you have to let the boys go off on their own. You try to control them a hundred percent, and you're asking for a lot of internal troubles."