“My name is Ms. Yang, Mr. Garafalo.”
“Hey, sorry. You can’t imagine the things I’ve been called. The name Garafalo confuses a lot of people. Ask these other guys around the table, especially the good-looking Polish guy over there, what people have done with their names. You gotta get used to it, you gotta have a sense of humor about it.”
“Thanks for the insight, Mr. Garafalo,” Horace Clark said.
“No problem.”
“Let me ask you this, sir,” Clark said, “what happened to your baseball prospects? I’m just curious.”
“I decided there was another line of work I was going to like better.”
“And what was that?”
“Gangster.”
Three of the agents laughed aloud. Yang glanced disapprovingly at them, the censorious expression of a grade-school teacher. Their laughter slowly, defiantly subsided.
“Why,” Clark asked, “did you make that choice?”
“Who knows? But my baseball training came in real handy. I always had a bat nearby. Hitting a head is a lot easier to hit than a speedy baseball. So before I went to jail I had two names, Tony the Horse, Tony the Batter.”
“What,” Horace Clark asked, “did “The Horse” mean?”
Garafalo glanced at the Asian girl. “I’ve got a dick the size of a Louisville Slugger.”
Yvette Yang, unblinking, stared at the yellow legal pad.
“Ask the commissioner,” Garafalo said. “She’s known that for a long, long time. She knew it when she sat here seven years ago when our friendship was so hot again, but I didn’t know until that minute that she was part of the hit squad that wound up with me spending years at the Supermax in Colorado. At the trial they ended up playing tapes of me talking to Gina Carbone, my friend, who used to wear a wire when we drove around or went to restaurants together.”
Again adjusting the right joint of his slender glasses-in what Garafalo now understood was a nervous tic-Clark asked, “Are we to understand that from time to time you and the commissioner are in an intimate relationship?”
“Good guess.”
“When was the last time you and Commissioner Carbone were friends?”
“We’ve been good friends for two years.”
“How,” Yvette Yang asked, “did the most recent friendship begin?” “Our families still live close to each other. Italians on Staten Island like to have barbecues in the summer. I was out of Supermax for two, three weeks. The barbecue was at her parents’ house. They have a nice patio. I just walked over with my family, like we’d been doing since I was a kid. Gina was there. She was already the police chief. She had a security detail. I guess she was really surprised to see me because she and her people began to leave.”
“What happened next?”
“I called out ‘Gina.’ She stopped. She looked great. She let me walk over to her. I said, ‘Gina, no hard feelings, please. It was your job, you did what you had to do.’”
Yvette Yang asked, “Did you mean that?”
“Not one fucking word. I wanted to kill her. She had even had the tapes going when we were in bed. They, by the way, were useless, hundreds of hours of them. All you could hear was an hour or so of me banging her and her screaming, More, more, yes, yes!” He paused. “My lawyer, Vinnie Sorrentino, wanted to play one of those tapes for the jury. Vinnie’s a great guy, a great lawyer. When the judge asked what the point was of letting a jury listen to an hour of pornography, Vinnie said, Prosecutorial misconduct. Even the judge, an old woman, laughed, but she said no. Ms. Yang, do you scream or moan?”
Serious-faced, Clark asked, “Did you, at this barbecue, say anything else to the commissioner?”
“‘I was only doing my job, too.’ That’s what I told her. ‘No hard feelings,’ I said.”
“What happened next?” Clark asked.
“I had gotten a job as a salesman at the Mercedes Benz place on Queens Boulevard. I knew I was a good salesman. Back in my ball-playing days some writer for the Daily News said watching me play was like watching a top-of-the-line Mercedes racing on a highspeed track. I still have a copy of the article.”
“That,” Yvette Yang said, “is a very rapid period of time for someone just released from Supermax, the highest security prison in the United States, to find work at a prestigious auto dealership. Is the owner of the dealership part of organized crime or connected to it?”
“That’s none of your fucking business.”
“Let’s return to Commissioner Carbone,” Clark said. “Tell us the next event.”
“At the barbecue I said to Gina, ‘Wow, now you’re the chief, the capo di tutti capi.’ And I told her what dealership I was working for, just casually. And then she left with her security detail, but not before kissing my eighty year-old mother and father. Just like friends do.”
“And next?”
“Next, just a few days later, I’m at my desk at the dealership, and it’s a slow day, and my desk phone, with caller ID, rings. The little screen that tells you whose calling says Pay Phone. That’s really unusual, I think. There must have been six pay phones left in all of New York. But I’m a salesman and, hey, you never know.
“And so I take the call and it’s Gina. She obviously didn’t want to use her phone at the PD or her cell phone. A pay phone call is untraceable. Right away I think Fuck, this is great. Bingo.
“And Gina bullshits for a little while. How’s the job going? How are your kids? Bullshit like that. And then Gina, who was never shy, asked if I can get together with her at that coffee shop near LaGuardia off the Grand Central Parkway. It’s just a silver-sided coffee shop, no name on it, just a red neon sign on it that says Diner. The kind of place where limo and cab drivers stop off for coffee and hamburgers at all hours of the day and night. Transients, people tired from long flights, taxi and limo drivers on breaks.”
“What did you say?” Horace Clark asked.
“I joked. I said to her, ‘You gonna be wearing a wire this time, Gina?’”
“And?”
“She said, ‘Come on, Tony, those days are long over. I’ll let you take me into the bathroom first and I’ll strip completely so you can check for wires.’”
Tony had noticed that Yvette Yang’s eyes blinked very infrequently. She said, “You do realize, Mr. Garafalo, don’t you, that Mr. Clark and I are law enforcement agents of the federal government. As are all the other officers in this room. Lying to us is, in and of itself, a federal offense punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.”
“Not a problem, Ms. Yang. I’m not lying. Ask Gina. Ask Commissioner Carbone.” Tony Garafalo knew that the other agents, all men, all trying not to smile, were having the time of their lives as they listened to him.
Smooth as a dark marble, Clark asked, “Did the meeting at the diner take place?”
“The next day. Middle of the afternoon. She came in a little Toyota one of her brothers owned. She wore an oversize Mets baseball cap. She was already famous, she didn’t want to be recognized. If she had security with her, I didn’t see them. There were a few guys at the counter who were already there when I got there a few minutes before her. They didn’t necessarily look like limo or cab drivers taking a break.” Tony glanced up at the male agents at the far end of the table. “No, I didn’t take her to the bathroom to check out whether she was wearing a wire.”
“What did you discuss?”
“Discuss? We weren’t there to talk about a nuclear treaty with Iran. After half an hour or so she wrote down on a napkin what her address was-it’s an apartment on East 79th Street and East End Avenue near one of the downtown entrance ramps to the FDR so that she has an easy time getting downtown to One Police Plaza, and she said she wanted to cook for me that night.”