Chapter Nine

      ‘He ain’t no button guy anymore’n I’m a fuckin’ virgin. He’s been workin’ on the arm all his life.’

      ‘The asshole came suckin’ up to me askin’ me to put in the word with Mike. I said, “Hey, paesano, I’m only a soldier, ya know?” If Mike needs another shooter he don’t have to go lookin’ in shit alley.’

      ‘He was tryin’ to run a game on you, Sal.’

      ‘Well, I clocked him pretty good. He ain’t connected and in this business, if you ain’t connected, you’re nothin’.’

      They were talking in the kitchen of a three-hundred-year-old Dutch farmhouse in upstate New Jersey.

      There were three of them in the room: Nick Vito, Joseph Colella and Salvatore ‘Little Flower’ Fiore.

      Nick Vito was a cadaverous-looking man with thin lips that were almost invisible, and deep green eyes that were dead. He wore two hundred dollar shoes and white socks.

      Joseph ‘Big Joe’ Colella was a huge slab of a man, a granite monolith, and when he walked he looked like a building moving. Someone had once called him a vegetable garden. ‘Colella’s got a potato nose, cauliflower ears and a pea brain.’

      Colella had a soft, high-pitched voice and a deceptively gentle manner. He owned a race-horse and had an uncanny knack for picking winners. He was a family man with a wife and six children. His specialties were guns, acid and chains. Joe’s wife, Carmelina, was a strict Catholic, and on Sundays when Colella was not working, he always took his family to church.

      The third man, Salvatore Fiore, was almost a midget. He stood five feet three inches and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. He had the innocent face of a choirboy and was equally adept with a gun or a knife. Women were greatly attracted to the little man, and he boasted a wife, half a dozen girlfriends, and a beautiful mistress. Fiore had once been a jockey, working the tracks from Pimlico to Tijuana. When the racing commissioner at Hollywood Park banned Fiore for doping a horse, the commissioner’s body was found floating in Lake Tahoe a week later.

      The three men were soldati in Antonio Granelli’s Family, but it was Michael Moretti who had brought them in, and they belonged to him, body and soul.

      In the dining room, a Family meeting was taking place. Seated at the head of the table was Antonio Granelli, capo of the most powerful Mafia Family on the east coast. Seventy-two years old, he was still a powerful-looking man with the shoulders and broad chest of a laborer, and a shock of white hair. Born in Palermo, Sicily, Antonio Granelli came to America when he was fifteen and went to work on the waterfront on the west side of lower Manhattan. By the time he was twenty-one, he was lieutenant to the dock boss. The two men had an argument, and when the boss mysteriously disappeared, Antonio Granelli had taken over. Anyone who wanted to work on the docks had to pay him. He had used the money to begin his climb to power, and had expanded rapidly, branching out into loan-sharking and the numbers racket, prostitution and gambling and drugs and murder. Over the years he had been indicted thirty-two times and had only been convicted once, on a minor assault charge. Granelli was a ruthless man with the down-to-earth cunning of a peasant, and a total amorality.