That bullet finally came in just below Sweet Tooth’s ear while he was waiting for his driver outside his father’s pastry shop on 9th Street. He had a pig’s ear in his mouth and was reading the sports section of the Daily News when a woman with a baby carriage passed behind him and stuck a silenced.45 into his neck just below the ear and pretty much blew Tony Raffaello’s head right off his body. Enrico rushed out of the store and found his son on the ground, his head twisted grotesquely, the blood filling cracks in the sidewalk and falling in a viscous stream into the gutter. The picture of Enrico on his knees, covered in his son’s blood, staring up at the sky and bellowing in agony as Sweet Tooth’s head lay cradled in his apron, made the front page of the New York Times and was nominated for a Pulitzer.
About ten days later there began a brutal flurry of killings. Mob leaders and lieutenants up and down the charts were wiped out in a veritable plague of violence until the charts themselves became obsolete. Businesses closed, people stayed home, every night another picture of a sprawled and bloody corpse made the papers as the city sickened from the spreading pool of blood. And then after a month of horror, after a month in which more mobsters died than in any previous year, after a month that forced the police commissioner to resign and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission to throw up its hands and the United States Attorney General to set up a special task force to investigate, after a month in which even those fans who bet in pools on the next mobster to fall turned away in disgust, after a month that put Philadelphia on the cover of Time and Newsweek and National Detective, after a month that has gone down in history as the “Thirty-Day Massacre,” after a month there was quiet.
It took the attorney general’s special task force and the newspapers a full year to reconfigure the charts, and it was a year of peace. No more bodies were discovered floating face down in the Delaware, no more bodies found in the trunks of abandoned cars under the bridge in Roosevelt Park, no more corpses sprawled on the cover of the Daily News. The government sent out its informants like an infantry of spies and they came back with word that there was a new boss with support from New York and a series of interlocking agreements among the city’s mobsters that kept everything peaceful and profitable. He was a strong man, a respected man, he was called the “Big Cannoli” by the cognoscenti, he was not a man to be trifled with, but he was an honorable man who through his strength would keep the peace. In one short year he had become a legend and his power flowed from Philadelphia through Atlantic City into New York and Pittsburgh and as far away as Las Vegas. He was the most powerful man in the city, in the state, he was the Big Cannoli, and on the first Monday of every month he visited the grave of Sweet Tooth Tony and left a pig’s ear on the mound of earth rising above the specially ordered oversized coffin.
“I want you to know, Victor,” said the Big Cannoli, sitting next to me in the back seat of that Cadillac, “I want you to know that I am not a violent man by nature.” His voice was soft, genteel even with the accent, a grandfather’s voice, a voice without obvious menace. It was the voice of Geppetto. I would have thought him a harmless old man, ugly but harmless, if I hadn’t known who he was. “I think I would have been happy as an artist, painting flowers on canvases. But such was not my fortune. I tell you this so you should not be frightened of me. The newspapers, they exaggerate so. Now my friend Dominic… You know Dominic, I believe, Victor.”
“Yes.”
“Dominic is a violent man. It’s in his nature, it’s in his blood. Even though he’s retired now, it still takes everything in my power to keep him under control. And Jasper, too. Such a nice man, Jasper, but there is a streak in him that is very hard to restrain. Lenny, my driver, was a boxer for years. You’d think a boxer would be violent, but not Lenny. He’s a sweetheart. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”
“That’s what my grandchildren say, Mr. Raffaello, so long as I treat ’em to taffy.”
“What Lenny did as a profession Dominic and Jasper do for pleasure. Such is the way of mankind. But that’s not my way, Victor. I am more like Lenny.” Suddenly his voice hardened. “It’s a good thing that I have people like Dominic and Jasper because without them, Victor, without them, I tell you, I don’t think I would get any respect in a world such as this.” He was almost shouting now. “Without them, Victor, I’d just as well be baking cookies.”
“You listen to Mr. Raffaello, Sport,” said Jasper.
Raffaello threw up his hands in a kindly shrug and when he spoke, his voice was soft and grandfatherly again. “I had two children, Victor. We wanted more, of course, but two was all we had. A boy and a girl. A millionaire’s family. Anthony and Linda Marie. You might have heard about Anthony,” he said, looking at his nails. “It was in all the papers.”
“I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Raffaello,” I said in a voice as soft as a whisper.
“Yes, well, these things happen. That leaves me with Linda Marie. Linda Marie is a sweet girl, a wonderful girl. I love her totally, believe me. Do you have a daughter, Victor?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, have a daughter and hold her in your arms and then you’ll know how much I love my Linda Marie. So it is with this much love that I say in all honesty my daughter is troubled. She is married to a man who doesn’t love her, a man who’d sooner keep the company of other men than sleep with his wife. Do you know her husband, the councilman?”
“I know of him.”
“Well, he is one of her troubles. And sadly, I am another. She has difficulty accepting my current position. I pay for a psychiatrist for her, an hour a day, five days a week, but it doesn’t seem to help. You see, along with her husband and father she has another problem, the fact that she’s a slut.”
Dominic quickly said, “Enrico, no, don’t say such a thing,” and Jasper started demurring to his boss, but the Big Cannoli lifted up his hand to stop them and they quieted immediately.
“I say this with a heavy heart. It hurts me to call my daughter such a thing. But it is the truth, a truth I can live with. Now, Victor, I can call my daughter a slut.” His voice suddenly deepened. “But don’t you ever.”
“You listening, Sport?”
“You see,” said Raffaello, his voice slowly falling back into calm, “I’m very touchy about my family. What do you think of my daughter, Lenny?”
“A very fine girl, a sensitive, pretty girl,” said Lenny without turning from the road, tilting his head up as if he were talking into a microphone in the ceiling of the car. “A princess, a queen.”
“It is well known among my associates,” said Raffaello, “to only speak well of my family. There were once men who treated my family with disrespect, Victor, and they’re not around anymore. Now there was a poker game not too long ago in which you were involved, along with Dominic and Jasper and certain other friends of mine, and in that game you treated my family with disrespect.”
“I didn’t mean to…”