The winter of Frankie Machine

88

Dave Hansen remembers a breakfast he had with Frank Machianno at the OBP Cafe a few years back, some months after the Carly Mack case.

It was after an especially flat session at the Gentlemen’s Hour, and Frank was in a rare bad mood. It was something in the paper about a crackdown on organized crime, and Frank just went off on a rant.

“Nike pays twenty-nine cents to achild for making a basketball jersey, then turns around and sells it for one hundred and forty dollars,” Frank said. “AndI’m the criminal?

“Wal-Mart sends half the mom-and-pop stores in the country the way of the buffalo while they pay the kids who maketheir cheap crap seven cents an hour. AndI’m the criminal?

“Two million jobs have gone adios in the past two years, a working man can’t afford a down payment on a house anymore, and the IRS mugs us like drunks at an ATM, then sends our money to a defense contractor who closes down a factory, lays off workers, and pays himself a seven-figure bonus. AndI’m the criminal? I’m the guy who should get life without parole?

“You could take the Crips, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the Mexican cartels, and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. You could take every gang banger selling crack on every corner in America, and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO.

“My father told me that you can’t beat the house, and he was right. You can’t beat the White House, or the House of Representatives. They own the game and the game isfixed, and it isn’t fixed forus.

“Sure, every thirty-eighth blue moon, they’ll whack one of their own. Send a human sacrifice to some Club Fed for a couple of years as sop to the masses and an example to the others of what happens to a rich white guy stupid enough to let that fifth ace fall out of his sleeve in full view of the public. But letme slip on the cosmic banana peel, and I am going to the maximum hole with the rest of the losers for the rest of my life.

“You know why the government wants to shut down organized crime?

“We’re competition.

“That’s it. That’s what’s behind the OC Task Force, your FBI, RICO. RICO? Big government and big business? That is the workingdefinition of ‘racketeering in conspiracy.’ A felony happens every time two suits take a piss together in the Senate men’s room.

“So the government wants to beat down organized crime.

“That’s hysterical.

“The governmentis organized crime.

“The only difference between them and us is they’remore organized.”

That was Frank’s rant on organized crime.

Dave didn’t believe it then, but he sure as shit believes it now.

Not that it matters, he thinks. I have to do what I have to do.

I have the rest of my life ahead of me.

The rest of the guys are coming along the beach, but Dave is coming in by boat, from the water.

It seems only fitting.