The Godfather returns

Nick and Charlotte Geraci took a seat in the pew directly behind Laughing Sal Narducci, his wife, and Narducci’s son Buddy, who was in the shopping center business along with Ray Clemenza-like the Castle in the Sand, a wholly legitimate, privately held enterprise in which elements of the Corleone and Forlenza organizations were legal investors. (That is, irrespective of where that money had come from in the first place, although where does any money come from in the first place? How would one define “first place”?) Sal turned and reached over the back of the pew to give Geraci an enormous, lengthy embrace. Throughout the homily and several eulogies, at every pause, Laughing Sal, characteristically, muttered the speaker’s last few words, and not in a whisper, either. Charlotte had barely known Clemenza, but it got her goat.

After the service, Laughing Sal turned to face the Geracis, tears streaming down his face. “So young,” he said. “Such a tragedy.”

Nick Geraci nodded grimly, as anyone at a funeral would do. Narducci and Clemenza were about the same age.

As a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera sang “Ave Maria,” Charlotte crossed her arms and turned to face the back of the church. The huge oak double doors were open. The pallbearers started down the steps. Clemenza’s rosewood casket disappeared into the falling snow.

Chapter 20

EXPERTS CITE MANY factors that led from the heyday of La Cosa Nostra in the fifties and sixties to the ma

These things were all hugely important, of course, but they flowed from a common source, the single most devastating blow ever dealt to organized crime in America: the order, placed less than a month before that first meeting of all the Families in a white clapboard farmhouse in upstate New York, for two dozen custom-built maple tables.

If, say, they’d just bought or stolen or even rented tables, the stain wouldn’t have been so fresh. The vapors wouldn’t have forced the men to open the windows. The aroma of the roasting pig wouldn’t have had all afternoon to waft inside and work its succulent magic. The Dons and their consiglieres wouldn’t have lingered. They might never have scheduled further meetings of the heads of all the Families.

Even if the tables had been custom-made at the last minute but the head carpenter had been anyone other than a Mr. Floyd Kirby, we might all be living in a very different America. This was not only because another carpenter might have favored a less noxious brand of stain but also because Mr. Kirby was married to a cousin of a New York State trooper. That Christmas, the trooper had heard about all those tables and what kind of people he thought they might have been for. The trooper knew that the brewing company owner who lived in the house was suspected of having the local police in his pocket. The trooper and his partner talked to several residents in the area, but no one had seen anything unusual, or so they said.

The trooper made a note to keep an eye on things there, but who knows if he’d have followed through on it if he hadn’t been recently divorced and if the woman who lived in the rusty trailer near the road that led to the farmhouse hadn’t been so friendly. They began dating. By the time the Families met the second time, they were married. She’d moved out of the trailer, but they kept it because she owned the land. They pla

Again: to build power, sometimes one must control the least powerful. The trooper slipped te

It nearly didn’t happen. His own commander didn’t see enough merit in the investigation to allocate anyone to it other than the trooper and his partner. No one at the FBI would return his phone calls. In a last-ditch effort, he contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The man he talked to was young and gung ho. The trooper also took it on himself to make a few calls to reporters. The next day, he and his partner were sitting in his wife’s old trailer with binoculars. Twenty ATF agents were poised in their gray government Chevrolets at a truck stop out on the main highway, waiting for a call. In rented cars behind the Chevys were the press, a platoon of shooters and scribes, and even a radio guy from Albany.

What happened next made the front page of every major newspaper in America and the cover of Life magazine. Even these many years later, most readers will be familiar with it: the raid on that white farmhouse and the seventy-odd men who saw them coming and scattered.

The pictures are famous: heavy men in silk suits and white fedoras hauling ass through the woods. Fat Rico Tattaglia and even fatter Paulie Fortunato being handcuffed as a half-carved hog turns on a spit behind them. ATF agents crouched beside sawhorses at a roadblock on that tree-lined road, guns drawn, as the Dons of Detroit, Tampa, and Kansas City emerge from their respective vehicles (armored, a fascinated public learned). The state trooper, gri

The men were taken to the nearest state police barracks and charged with-what? That turned out to be a problem. It looked bad, all those men in that farmhouse together, but looking bad was in itself no crime. “It’s safe to say,” an ATF agent told a New York newspaper, “that all those Italians in fancy suits didn’t come from all over the country just to roast a pig.” Maybe. But what had they come there to do? No one but the men themselves had any idea, and they weren’t talking.

Eminent lawyers swooped in (including a former assistant attorney general of the United States, the senior partner of what was then the largest law firm in Philadelphia, and onetime U.S. congressman Thomas F. Hagen of Nevada). They were good enough to point out that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to free assembly.

Those detained invoked their constitutionally guaranteed right not to testify against themselves. As a consequence, a few were charged with obstruction of justice-charges that were later literally laughed out of court. Despite the efforts of countless state and federal attorneys, the only direct result of the raid was the deportation of three of the detainees to Sicily, including one, Salvatore Narducci of Cleveland, who’d lived in America since he was a baby, more than sixty years. He claimed he was unaware that he’d never become a citizen.