Beirut Incident

Chapter 12

Louie and I sat hunched over cups of cappuchino in the Decima Coffee House on West Broadway.

The walls were a chocolate brown, and the worn linoleum on the floor, perhaps green years ago, was a filthy black. A dozen oversized, gilt-framed paintings hung from the walls, their canvases barely distinguishable through a patina of fly specks and grease. A dirty glass counter showcase displayed a tired collection of pastries — napoleone, baba al rum, mille foglie, cannoli, pasticiotti. The only evidence of cleanliness was the magnificent espresso machine at the other end of the counter. It gleamed brightly, all silver and black, polished to a high sheen. Atop it an eagle rampant, its wings spread defiantly, reigned in cast-iron glory.

Louie looked a little sick.

I stirred my coffee. "What's the matter, Louie? Hangover? Or haven't you ever wasted anyone before?"

He nodded bleakly. "No… well, no. You know…"

I knew, all right. All of a sudden it was no longer so clean for Uncle Joe's little nephew Louie. All his life he'd been glorying in the Mafia game with all of its excitement, romance, money and mystique. But he had never really been involved himself. For Louie, life had been a good private school, a good college, a good easy job running a legitimate olive oil business, a good time associating with famous mobsters but unsullied by them.

Even his name was clean, I remembered again. "Louie," I asked, "how come your name is Lazaro? Wasn't your Dad named Franzini?"

Louie nodded, smiling ruefully. "Yeah. Luigi Franzini. Lazaro is my mother's maiden name. Uncle Joe had it changed for me when I came to live with him. I guess he wanted to keep me away from all the trouble. I mean, you wouldn't want your kid to be named Al Capone, Jr."

I laughed. "Yeah. Guess you're right. So what are you going to do now?" I asked.

He spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know. It's not like anyone did anything, really. I mean, hell, to just go out and blast a guy because he belongs to the Ruggieros…"

It's the facts of life, sonny boy, I thought. I squeezed his shoulder. "You'll think of something, Louie," I said comfortingly.

We stepped out of the Decima and Louie looked up and down the street for a moment, as if trying to make up his mind. "Look, Nick," he said with a sudden grin, "why don't I show you the Counting House?"

"Counting House?"

"Yeah. It's great. The only one of its kind in the world, I'll bet." He took my elbow and led me down the street a few doors. "It's right here, Four fifteen West Broadway."

It didn't look like much. Another one of those big old loft buildings you see in the Soho section of downtown New York. There was a big blue door over a wide ramp, which I guessed to be the freight elevator. To the right of it was an ordinary residence-type windowed door, with the standard apartment house bank of mailboxes.

Louie led me through the door. Inside the foyer he pushed a button.

A disembodied voice answered. "Yeah? Who is it?"

"Louie Lazaro and a buddy of mine."

"Oh, hi, Louie. C'mon up." A buzzer sounded, long and rasping, and Louie opened the unlocked door. From there, it was five steep flights of narrow stairs. By the time we reached the top, I was having trouble catching my breath and Louie was practically in a state of collapse, his breath coming in gasps and his face dripping sweat.

An amiable looking little man greeted us in the fifth-floor hallway and Louie, in between gasping for breath, introduced me. "This is Nick Canzoneri, Chickie. Chickie Wright, Nick. Chickie runs the Counting House for Uncle Joe. I thought you'd like to see it."

I shrugged. "Sure."

Chickie was a little gnome of a man, with wisps of gray hair floating over his balding head and bushy gray eyebrows sprouting from a humorous little face. He was dressed in a dark blue silk shirt, a black-and-white checked vest, and gray flannel trousers. A bright red bow tie and red garters on his sleeves made him look like a parody of a riverboat gambler. He gave us a huge smile and stood aside to usher us through the big, unmarked blue door that had stood half-opened behind him.

"Come right on in," he said expansively. "This is one of the neatest operations in New York City."

That it was. I hadn't known what to expect of a fifth-floor loft called the Counting House, but it certainly wasn't what I found. Chickie took us through, step by step, explaining the entire operation.

"What we've done," he said with obvious pride, "is computerize our bookie and numbers operations."

The entire loft had been turned into a modern, brightly polished business office. At the front, a huge computer bank whirred and clicked, manned by earnest young men in neat business suits who handled the computerized readouts with consummate familiarity. Attractive secretaries worked attentively along the squarely spaced rows of desks, their electric typewriters competing with each other. The place held all the accoutrements of any executive office building.

Chickie waved an expansive hand. "Every numbers bet made below Houston Street is processed here, and every bet on the horses. All the results from the races come in direct by phone, from Arlington in Chicago all the way east. All the money bet is funnelled through here, all records kept, and all payoffs made from here."

I nodded, impressed. "Electronic data processing comes to bookmaking. Very nice!"

Chickie laughed. "Very efficient. We process around eighty thousand dollars a day here. We figure we have to run it like a business. The days of the little guy in the candy store with a notebook in his hip pocket are over."

"How does the Off-Track Betting affect you?" New York's OTB offices around the city had originally been approved by the voters not only as a way of making money for the city and as a convenience to the bettor, but also as a means of driving out the underworld bookie.

Chickie grinned again. He appeared to be a happy man. "It hasn't hurt us much at all, though I was worried about it once, when it first started. People like to deal with an old established firm, I guess, and they're sort of suspicious of a government running a betting operation.

"And of course, we're heavy into numbers, and the government isn't into the numbers game."

"Not yet, anyway," Louie chimed in. "But the way things are going, they probably will be before long." He clapped me on the shoulder. "What do you think, Nick? Pretty slick, isn't it? Uncle Joe may look and act like an old Mustachio Pete, but this has got to be the most modern setup in the business."

Louie's ebullience was exceeded only by his naiveté. The Counting House was a step up in underworld organization, but it was hardly the last word. I could show Louie a Mafia-operated communications center in an Indianapolis Hotel that would make New York Telephone look like a PBX switchboard. The results of every gambling event in the country — racing, baseball, basketball, football, you name it — pour into that hotel every day, and then are relayed in microseconds to betting parlors from coast to coast.

Still, the Counting House was an interesting innovation: centralized, organized, efficient. Not bad. "Great," I said. "Terrific!" I tugged at my ear lobe. "I guess you run your trucks business through here, too, huh?"

Louie frowned. "No, but… I don't know, it might not be a bad idea at that. Sort of a central command post, you mean?"

"Right."

Chickie looked a little pained. "Well, we really haven't got a lot of room to spare up here, Louie, to say nothing about how hard it is to get someone you can trust these days."

I had to laugh. He was right up to his throat in underworld business but acting like any office manager in any legit concern… worried that he might have more work to do, or might have to change his ways of doing it. Honest people aren't the only ones who resist change.

"Nick's new in town," Louie explained, "and I thought I'd show him our showcase operation. Anyway, Uncle Joe's going to have Nick and me going over all the operations one of these days, just to see if we can't tighten things up a bit."

"Yeah." Chickie looked dubious.

"We're mostly going to be worrying about security," I said.

Chickie brightened. "Oh, good. I could use some help there."

"You've been having some trouble?" I asked.

He sighed. "Yeah. More than I want. Come in my office and I'll tell you about it."

We all went into a nicely paneled office in one corner of the big loft. A neat carpet was on the floor, and steel filing cabinets lined all of one wall. A fat safe squatted blackly just behind Chickie's desk. On the desk top were the pictures of an attractive gray-haired woman and a half-dozen children of varying ages.

"Have a seat, guys." Chickie gestured at a couple of straight-back chairs and settled himself into the swivel chair behind the desk. "I got a problem, maybe you can help me with."

Louie hunched his chair up and gave him a confident grin. For the moment, he'd forgotten that Popeye had given him some pretty explicit instructions. Uncle Joe wanted someone killed.

"What's up, Chickie?" Louie asked.

Chickie leaned back and lit a cigarette. "It's Lemon-Drop Droppo, again," he said. "At least I think it's him. He's been ripping off our runner again. Or at least someone is."

"Hell, Chickie," Louie interjected. "Someone's always ripping off the runners. What's the big deal?"

"The big deal is that it's getting to be a big deal! We got hit fourteen times last week, already five times this week. I can't afford that."

Louie turned to me. "We usually figure three, four times a week we're going to have a runner get taken for whatever he's carrying, but this is a lot more than usual."

"Can't you protect them?" I asked.

Chickie shook his head. "We got a hundred forty-seven guys bringing cash in here every day from all over the lower Manhattan territory. There's no way we can protect 'em all." He grinned. "In fact, I don't even mind if a few of them get ripped off once in awhile, makes the others more careful. But this is getting to be too damned much!"

"What about this Lemon-Drop Droppo?"

Louie laughed. "He's been around a long time, Nick. One of the Ruggiero bunch, but sometimes he goes off sort of independently. He was a runner himself once, for Gaetano Ruggiero, and it seems like every time he's short of cash, he picks on a runner. They're pretty easy pickings, you know."

"Yeah." Runners are at the very bottom of the crime ladder. They pick up the money and the betting slips and run it to the policy bank, and that's it. They're usually half-batty old winos, too far gone down the chute of aged poverty to do anything else, or young kids picking up a fast buck. There are thousands of them in New York, loathsome little ants feeding off the discarded carrion of crime.

"Think it would help if we got rid of this Lemon-Drop character?"

Chickie grinned again. "Couldn't hurt. Even if it's not him, it might scare someone else off."

I nodded and looked at Louie. "Might even kill two birds with one stone, Louie."

This kind of reality didn't come easily to Louie Lazaro. He looked sour. "Yeah," he said.

"How come they call him Lemon-Drop?" I asked.

Louie answered. "He's a nut about lemon drops, eats them all the time. I think his real name is Greggorio, but with a name like Droppo and a bag of lemon drops in his pocket all the time… I'd really hate to hit him just for ripping off a few runners. I mean, hell, I went to school with the guy. He's not so bad, just kind of nuts."

I shrugged. I'd been doing a lot of that on this assignment it seemed. "It's up to you. It was just an idea."

Louie looked unhappy. "Yeah. We'll think about it."

"What's this two birds with one stone bit?" Chickie asked.

"Never mind," Louie snapped.

"Yes, sir." Chickie was still very much aware that Louie was Popeye Franzini's nephew.

There was an awkward pause. I waved a hand at the row of gleaming file cabinets, each stack locked with a formidable looking iron rod running from the floor up through each drawer handle and bolted to the top of the file. "What you got in there, the family jewels?"

Chickie stubbed out his cigarette and grinned, glad of the change of atmosphere. "Those are our files," he said. "Records of the whole thing from A to Z."

"Everything?" I tried to sound impressed. "You mean for the whole betting operation?"

"I mean for the whole organization," he said. "Everything."

I looked around. "How good is your security?"

"Fine. Fine. That part of it I'm not worried about. We're on the fifth floor here. The other four floors are empty except for a couple of apartments we use in emergencies. Every night we put steel gates across each landing. They fit right into the wall and lock there. And then there's the dogs," he added pridefully.

"The dogs?"

"Yeah. On each floor we got two guard dogs, Doberman Pinschers. We let 'em loose each night, two on each floor. I mean, man, there ain't nobody's gonna come up those stairs with those dogs. They're mean sons of bitches! Even without them, there's no way anyone's going to blast through those gates without alerting Big Julie and Raymond."

"Who're they?"

"My two guards. They live up here every night. Once everyone leaves and they lock those gates, there's no way anyone could get in."

"Looks good to me," I said. "If Big Julie and Raymond can take care of themselves."

Chickie laughed. "Don't worry, man. Big Julie's the strongest guy this side of the circus and Raymond used to be one of the best ordnance sergeants in Korea. He knows what guns are all about."

"Good enough for me." I got to my feet and Louie did the same. "Thanks a lot, Chickie," I said. "We'll be seeing you, I guess."

"Right," he said. We shook hands, and Louie and I went back down the staircase. Alerted now, I could see the steel gates inset into the walls on each landing. It was a nice tight setup, but I had an idea how it might be breached.