Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

19

Don of the Dead

Matt had glimpsed Macho Mario Fontana once. From a distance, at Aldo’s and Temple’s Aunt Kit’s wedding at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel.

Matt had been most impressed that Macho Mario had all his hair at his age. And half of it was impressively silvered. He almost resembled the most Interesting Man in the World, recently replaced by a younger actor in the Dos Equis TV ads. Or the more professionally preserved Anthony Bennedetto, a.k.a. Tony Bennett.

Since Mario’s sister, Mama Fontana, had founded an empire on pasta sauce, most people, including Matt, considered Macho Mario an aging Don, quaint, colorful, and a harmless throwback, even respectable.

The new Mob Museum in the renovated 1933-built post office and courts building downtown treated former mob kingpins like any other Vegas icon from Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack to Elvis and Liberace, Phyllis Diller and Celine Dion, David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy.

And Macho Mario also had his own personal high-profile exhibit at the Fontana Family hotel-casino, Gangsters. His personality seemed lavish on peccadilloes and light on lawlessness, but he definitely had been an up-and-coming young player in the bad old days of the seventies.

So when Aldo gingerly escorted Matt into the plush, secluded penthouse of Gangsters Hotel, Matt was prepared to tread lightly. He’d been suckered by one old man and he wasn’t about to do likewise with another.

“Aldo, Aldo, Aldo.” A portly man wearing a quilted maroon satin robe rose out of his easi-lift chair to kiss his eldest nephew on each cheek. “You are here to tell me of times gone by.” Macho Mario turned to Matt. “And I hear we are to have a priest marrying into the Family. What a weird world, but our own. Bene, bene,” he added in the manner of a Papal blessing.

“Ex-priest,” Matt emphasized. “And I didn’t just walk away like some. I was officially laicized when I left. I honored my vows until then.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Macho Mario waved his left hand bearing a heavy gold signet ring as he sat again. “You are a real rules respecter. And we of a certain brotherhood respect that loyalty to be demonstrated to the letter. Most impressive, my boy. But now you marry, eh? I recommend it, having done it three times, not all blessed by the Holy See. So, even better for you, my son. You have less time to sin like me.”

Mario kissed his fingers in Matt’s uneasy direction. “You are like a seasoned Mama Fontana sauce. Sautéed in Holy Orders and a blessed man for it, but now graduated into the sadly human world we all live in. What can I do for you? Aldo said you needed my counsel.”

Matt guessed it had been many, many years since Macho Mario’s counsel had been seriously sought.

“Sit,” Mario offered, or ordered. The only nearby option at a conversational level opposite the senior booster model Mario occupied was a wheeled and closed potty chair. This situation was surreal, but Matt sat.

“I need your help,” Matt said. Baldly.

Mario tented his fingers and nodded. “Direct. That is good. I have it to give. I admire a man humble enough to seek.”

Matt was already chaffing at having to kowtow to a notorious capo. He should be referring the old man to Hell for his sins. Yet Macho Mario was so obviously pleased to exercise his long-gone powers… He was old and not what he had been, unlike something sinister Matt had glimpsed still stirring like a Jurassic beast on the Las Vegas scene.

“I’m interested,” Matt said, bracing his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward and concentrated all his attention on Macho Mario, “to know the dirt on a really bad man active from the seventies, and probably before as a punk, to the nineties. Someone who would tie a man to the prow of the Goliath’s sinking ship attraction and let him die slowly in the dark just out of sight of a hooting audience of tipsy tourists there for the midnight show.”

Even as he said it, Matt realized that he was now broadcasting in Vegas at the same hour as Cliff Effinger had probably died, only he hadn’t hosted a talk radio show then. Not yet.

“Hmm,” Macho Mario hummed as he sank back into his own chair. “You said ‘active’ into the nineties. How about just up to the nineties? I have a cork-popper for you, my boy.”

The old man beckoned Aldo near. Aldo went on one knee to be level with his uncle’s seated, shrunken frame. “Some lubricant for my aging vocal cords, nephew. This will be a long story for me to tell and my future—?” His small black pupils flicked to Matt.

“Nephew-in-law, I believe,” Aldo said, “but don’t quote me. What are you drinking?”

“We will have Compari with Perrier water.”

Aldo rose to rattle bottles and glasses behind the bar at the back of the shaded, sprawling bedroom that smelled of Vick’s VapoRub.

Mario leaned forward and whispered to Matt, “Compari and Perrier water. The first drink James Bond ordered in his first book, Casino Royale. I like that “casino” is in the title. I ordered that same drink when my casino-hotel opened.”

Mario rubbed his shiny lined palms together as Aldo set a stubby old-fashioned glass with an iceless blood-red drink on a swinging side table attached to Mario’s chair and gave Matt a matching glass.

“Grazie,” the old man told Aldo. “Now step back. You may know much of this, but I have a feeling this young man needs to know it all. And I will tell all, young Matt, although you only are only a whisper of family, if you promise to come and tell me what comes of it, if anything.”

Matt nodded. “Grazie.”

Aldo had retreated, like a discreet butler, to the room’s far shadow. Mario glanced to his distant position.

“‘Grazie,’” the old man repeated. “You have a not bad Italian accent for a blondie, but it will get better. All right. Have you heard of a man named Benny Binion?”

Matt nodded. The Binion name was notorious in Vegas history. “A lot. Owned the Horseshoe Casino Downtown. Didn’t it used to have a million dollars embedded in a giant Plexiglas horseshoe in the lobby?”

“Yes. Benny founded the World Poker Championships at the Horseshoe. Where’d you grow up?”

“Chicago.”

Mario cackled and sipped. “You’re going to like this. Binion was a hanger-on of the Chicago Outfit that tried to take over Vegas. Almost did. Offed Bugsy Siegel. He was a killer hick out of Dallas and Fort Worth. Took over the numbers-running and gambling rackets there with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. Loved to be called ‘Cowboy’.”

“He put on rodeos and cutting horse events, all that Western stuff, playing the fine generous citizen then.

“No finesse. We Fontanas had our eyes always on the future, the Strip. He dug his bootheels into the sawdust floors of Glitter Gulch downtown. The ‘Horseshoe’. The name said it all.”

Matt had a question. “Isn’t that what they call the dealing mechanism that holds multiple decks for games of chance. The ‘shoe’?”

Mario’s upper lip curled. “Never thought of that, but ‘Leslie’ a.k.a. ‘Benny’ Binion didn’t either, I bet. Despite his girly first name, he was a crude, murderous thug with a trail of dead men behind him even before he hooked up with the Chicago Outfit here, and you know how bad they were.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Hmmph. Word was enforcer Tony Spilotro out of Chicago liked to get a guy alone in the desert and put his head in vice and crank until his eyeballs popped out.”

Matt suddenly knew what a face going “a whiter shade of pale” felt like.

Old-time mobsters were as bloodthirsty as Genghis Khan and Dracul the Impaler, and yet such torture had happened in the last century. So Jack the Hammer hadn’t been a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale ogre, but the real thing, a thug of his time.

And someone was now taking that jackhammer of his out of cold storage in the desert.

There was only one reason for the storied violence of the mob. To threaten and intimidate to get money.

“Hey, kid. Suck a little Compari. From the old country. Put some blood back in your face.”

Matt snapped out of his nightmarish speculations and did as he was told. One sip told him that Compari was a bitters, nothing sweet about it. Just like Matt’s situation.

However, Uncle Mario was getting a little glow. “Arriving here just as the fifties were starting, Binion was a braggart, always buying up this property or that to get something going, whether the party wanted to sell or not.”

Matt nodded. “I just heard of a case like that, um, today, involving a building my landlady inherited.”

“Nothing evil’s new.” The old man leaned forward and Matt strained toward him to hear as his thin voice got lower. “Benny got more careful as he got more established, but I know for sure one unsolved murder he got away with. Ever hear about a jazz joint named the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo?”

Way too eerie to be a coincidence. Matt tossed off his Compari in one gulp while Mario winked approval at him.

“Ah…” Matt coughed. He tried to sound naive. “Wasn’t that an all-black nightclub that got started in the fifties across the tracks from the Strip?”

“You’re thinking of the Moulin Rouge. That was the first integrated hotel-casino, big-time operation. Chorus girls, acts, gambling. The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo was a low-rent joint, for kooks and the hip cats back then. Independent. Not mob. But the Strip was already clawing outward for land, and a crook like Binion always had his big ears to the ground.”

Macho Mario’s eyes lost themselves in rumpled bags of flesh as he searched his memory. “Black guy named Jumpin’ Jack Robinson owned the place and starred there like he was Cab Callaway on a budget. Maybe he wasn’t black, maybe Mexican, hell, maybe Giacco from southern Italy who had Americanized his name like a lot of them performers did then. Perry Como, Dean Martin.”

Mario leaned closer, prompting Matt to perch on the edge of his squeaky, squishy “whoopee chair” seat so the old man didn’t fall face-first on the floor. His breath smelled of garlic, false teeth adhesive and Compari. The name Giacco, pronounced “Jacko”, shivered down Matt’s spine.

“Yeah, the murder method harked back to Spilotro style,” Mario whispered, going hoarse and a little “Marlon Brando” as The Godfather. “They were zoot suit wearers. You know, baggy pants, long jacket, pancake hat with a feather in it and a ‘cat chain’, an overgrown watch chain down to their ankles. Real clowns. I can’t believe some of the dumb stuff I lived through. Some of those chains were twenty-four carat gold, and worth stealing. Some were steel toilet chains, you know, when the tanks were way up on the walls and you needed a pull chain as long as your you-know-what.”

Matt almost choked again.

“Naw, a kid like you wouldn’t know. Anyway, that’s how Jumpin’ Jack was found dead, hanging from his cat chain on an onstage light pole. Zoot Suit dancing king and Sin City wild card. Nineteen fifty-six. Never solved.”

“And no suspects?” Matt had heard this story before and glanced over his shoulder to glimpse Aldo’s pale suit, his undrunk glass of Compari blood red against it and positioned like a crimson pocket handkerchief. Aldo had told this story before, only days before.

Mario chuckled. “Cops wanted to finger a rogue mobster for it. A guy they called ‘Jack the Hammer’. He was famous for taking guys out into the desert and using a jackhammer to encourage them to talk, or keep quiet forever. A real paisano, not a nobody out of Dallas. Name of Giaccomo Petrocelli. Giaccomo. Italian for ‘James’, but in English it shortens to just plain ‘Jack’. Giacco the Hammer.”

“What happened to this monster?”

“Somebody offed him back in the nineties. Most of his power was gone. He never adapted to Vegas going corporate. You had to be smoother than a jackhammer then. But I never made him for the Robinson killing. I think it was Benny Binion having a last run at being the knee-jerk Cowboy killer he was before settling down to make real money from his enterprises.

“So. Talk about Binion in the seventies, nineteen-seventy-one, is when the really ugly action started. As far back as forty-nine Binion arranged a head-to-head poker tournament between Johnny Moss and ‘Nick the Greek’, who dropped two mill. Two mill in nineteen forty-nine! So twenty-one years later, Binion held a tournament for six high-rollers and Johnny Moss won again. Binion made it annual and anyone could buy in with ten thousand bucks. Benny hoped it would get as big as fifty players. Now there are thousands.”

“So when did Binion’s reign end? What did he die of?” Matt asked.

“Get this,” Mario said with a ho-ho-ho chuckle. “Heart failure did in the ‘Cowboy’ killer from Dallas. I’ll never forget the date because it was December 25, 1989. A Christmas present to Vegas as one of the most ruthless founders went down. He gave the rest of us a bad name. And he was immediately put into the Poker Hall of Fame in the New Year. And that’s when the family fun began, when son Lonnie ‘Ted’ Binion began running things after Benny’s death.

“Ted! A hopeless alki and drug-addict. Fifty-five the guy was. You’d think he’d make something of himself, like my sister’s boys. Nicky, the youngest, owns the Crystal Phoenix, which is in a class of its own. Aldo here and his brothers run this hotel and their custom limo service and some other little things we won’t mention.” Wink.

“Ted had millions stashed all over Vegas, in his house and hotel and out there in the desert in Spilotro and Petrocelli country, including a huge underground vault holding a hoard of silver bullion and coins. The asshole only shared the location with the one guy he should have offed on completion of the job. Get this: the one who built the vault. Seriously stupid. And the guy was pronging his young stripper girlfriend at the time. Beyond stupid.

“Guess what?”

“Someone killed Ted for the money.”

“Tried to make it look like a drug overdose, but it was faked. Nasty kinda death, drugged and then overdosed and then smothered.”

“I remember news about excavating that huge desert vault,” Matt said. “Who got the money?”

“Crazy. The scheming couple was convicted of murder, but went to a retrial on a technicality, where they were acquitted of murder, but convicted of burglary! Binion had changed his will two days before his death to exclude his girlfriend, but she got it all anyway, the house and the millions in its safe. There were millions in the hotel safe too, and still four or so million unaccounted for, and it has never been found. Presumed to be buried out on the Mojave.”

Mario finished his Compari with a lip smack. “Fitting end for a bad outfit over six decades from Dallas to Chicago to Vegas. I love it when the legal system screws itself royally. Benny Binion was dumb not to have a bigger family. My nephews would never try to off me for my money, because there are too many of them. They can watch each other.”

“They’re also savvy businessmen who can make their own money, unlike what you say of the Binion clan.”

Aldo came over and clapped Matt on the shoulders, raising him from the sinkhole of the potty chair at the same time. “Thanks for the great reference, Uncle, but I think our time has passed.”

A woman in hospital scrubs covered in tiny penguins had materialized like a magician’s assistant to take the still full Compari glass from Uncle Mario’s hand.

Matt started to bid the old guy farewell when he realized Macho Mario Fontana was in lullaby land.