Charlie Opera

Chapter 25

When Carol felt the knots in her stomach again, she was sure her husband was close. She studied the faces of every patron who walked through the door. She scanned the parking lot and as much of the street as she could see from the front door. When the manager yelled at her for leaving her station, Carol told him she was sick and needed to leave early.

“Excuse me?” the manager said. “What the hell do you think this is, lady? Leave early and don’t bother coming back.”

“Okay,” Carol said as she headed for the small locker room.

“Okay what?” the manager asked.

“I won’t come back,” Carol said.

Abe Gold glanced at the organized crime report Albert Iandolli had prepared for him. Iandolli was on his knees, patting down fresh soil for a flowerbed alongside his driveway. His wife and two kids were in the backyard, having lunch

He motioned toward his yard. “If you’re hungry, Angie just cooked some franks,” he said.

Gold looked away from the report. “No, thanks. I grabbed something on the way over.”

Gold admired the house from the driveway. Iandolli had just finished painting a few weeks earlier. It was a light blue ranch on a quarter acre of neatly groomed land. The driveway was paved. A white wood fence surrounded the lot. It was a house Gold had always pictured himself living in.

“The place looks good,” Gold said.

Iandolli stood up from his knees. “Thanks,” he said. He slapped dirt off his pants. “I’m too old for this.”

Gold scanned a fax copy of a New York organized crime attachment. It provided details and comments about Nicholas Cuccia’s criminal record. A list of bookmaking charges starting from when Cuccia was twenty-two years old made up the bulk of the sheet. There was a separate notation about a two-year jail sentence for loan-sharking when Cuccia was in his late twenties.

He was arrested, but not convicted, a total of fourteen more times. The arrests included assaults and bookmaking exclusively. A special notation suggested the year it was believed Cuccia became a made member of the Vignieri crime family, 1992.

The report also provided the following personal notation:

Cuccia is married with no children. He has two known steady girlfriends. He frequents known prostitutes and uses escort services. Kinky sex? His hangouts include Scores and Pure Plantinum, two expensive strip clubs in New York. Confirmed cocaine and alcohol use.

Gold wondered why the kinky sex notation was followed with a question mark.

The rest of the report was commentary concerning Cuccia’s illegal businesses. He was alleged to operate a large bookmaking office in New York run by lower-level associates. His latest business ventures included Internet pornography and offshore gambling.

“Lano and Francone are the two guys came in ahead of Cuccia,” Iandolli said. He washed his hands with a garden hose. “Two days ahead out of Newark. We can thank the DEA for their names. Otherwise we’d have fifteen names to pick from.”

On the last page of the report, Gold saw a name circled. The notation read: Anthony Rizzi coming to Vegas.

“This Anthony Rizzi is coming in when?” Gold asked.

“This morning, later tonight, early tomorrow morning. America West out of Kennedy. An overnight. He changed the flight twice already.”

“What’s that about?”

“Anthony Rizzi. A guy with so much money he got bored and bought his way into the mob as an associate. It doesn’t say it on there, but I spoke to an O.C. guy in New York. They think Rizzi’s coming here to make his bones. Maybe to whack Lano or to be a part of whacking Lano.” Iandolli chuckled. “The thing is, this Lano, the guy they think is getting whacked, was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His partners in crime don’t know it, but O.C. does. His doctor gave him a few months.”

Gold looked confused. “Maybe they wanna put him out of his misery.”

Iandolli shook his head. “Lano’s a mustache to these kids,” he said. “They’re purging the old mobsters for morons like this Rizzi character, clowns who have nothing better to do with million-dollar businesses besides trying to act like tough guys.”

“So this Rizzi guy isn’t a real mobster then.”

“New York calls him ‘The Crier,’” Iandolli said. “They fucked with him one night, sent one of teir guys to test his balls, man to man. An undercover cop cut him off on a street outside one of his warehouses or some shit. Rizzi cried, he was so scared. Their guy pinned him against his Mercedes, and Rizzi sprouted tears like a fountain. They nicknamed him ‘The Crier.’ Imagine having a mob name like that?”

Gold was still confused. “So what makes them think they’re sending this Rizzi here to whack this other guy?”

“They’re bleeding Rizzi for his business. They get a sucker like this on the line and they make him feel like a gangster until he’s dry. They let him play with the big boys until they don’t need him anymore. Then they cut him loose or whack him. It happens here, too. Happens anywhere there’s a mob and suckers with money and no life. They find these guys like Rizzi and clean them out. New York thinks Cuccia is setting Rizzi up. He comes out to Vegas to supposedly make his bones and they wind up killing two birds with one stone.”

“Lano and Rizzi,” Gold said.

“Sooner or later.”

“This guy Rizzi is worth that much?”

“Ten million or so, what his business is worth,” Iandolli said. “His wife dumped him for another woman. New York thinks he’s trying to be a tough guy ever since. He’s buying his button into the mob, and these guys are more than happy to sell it to him. Ten million to these guys is like owning Microsoft.”

“That’s an expensive button, ten million,” Gold said.

“The money should be the least of his problems,” Iandolli said. “Once they have that, they won’t need him.”

Anthony Rizzi checked in at the registration desk at Caesar’s Palace a few minutes after noon. Now he was exhausted. He was having conflicting feelings the past few nights about his adopted lifestyle. Rizzi needed a drink.

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes as his bags were wheeled on a cart being pulled by a valet. He followed the valet through the casino to a long marble hallway with high-priced stores on either side. He noticed the number of Asian women in the walkways and wondered if he might lure one into his bed before he left Las Vegas.

He left several messages with the front desk at the Bellagio for both Nicholas Cuccia and Joey Francone. He spent the next ten minutes dressing. He spent the following twenty minutes combing his hair. It lay in a perfect left-to-right swirl, covering the large bald spot on the top of his head.

He was a short, fat man with very light skin, puffy cheeks, and dark blue eyes. His mother was German-Irish. His father was Dutch-Italian. He had concocted a long, involved story about his last name. Mostly, he denied his mother’s side of the family and his father’s Dutch mother.

After painstakingly grooming himself, Rizzi spent the next hour on the Cleopatra Barge with a tall Asian prostitute who called herself Niko. He had spotted her and another prostitute, a tall blonde in a red-sequin dress, earlier. Both women had propositioned him as a team, but Rizzi told the blonde he could only handle one at a time today and that he was kind of looking forward to an Asian broad because it had always been a fantasy of his to “eat a noodle.”

The prostitutes had both giggled while they huddled a few seconds before breaking up. The blonde left Rizzi to negotiate with his fantasy date.

“Let’s just say I’m a businessman,” he told the prostitute when she asked what he did for a living.

“What kind of business?” Niko asked. She had a slight Asian accent. She was swirling a plastic straw in her white wine spritzer. She licked at the straw just before Rizzi answered h question.

“Little of this and a little of that,” he told her.

“You sound very mysterious to me,” she said. She sipped her spritzer carefully. She set the glass back down on the napkin as she sat back in her chair.

The cleavage showing from her low-cut blouse caught Rizzi’s eye. “You’re a very beautiful woman,” he told her.

“Sank you. Also very espensive.”

“I’ll bet,” he said as he took a sip of Absolut.

He figured Niko was worth five hundred for the night, but he’d go as high as seven-fifty.

“You ever stay here before?” he asked.

“Overnight? Yes, of course.”

“Do you have a change of clothes?”

“No, silly. That would be your present to me.”

“That depends on where you buy them.”

“Gift store,” she said. “Sweatshirt, T-shirt. I have underwear in my purse.”

Rizzi gave a quick glance at the purse on her lap. “In your purse, huh?” he asked. “What else you got in there?”

“Condoms,” Niko said. “Lipstick. Advil. K-Y Jelly. Tums. I have sensitive tummy.”

“Ah, so you swallow.”

The prostitute suppressed a giggle. “If you are generous,” she said. “Yes, I do that.”