Gold Coast

"I get the picture. I've got a church like that, too. I give five bucks a week, ten at Easter and Christmas."

"It's different here."

Instead of getting back into the car, Bellarosa turned and looked back at the sad old church and surveyed the mean streets around us. He said, "I used to play stoopball on those rectory steps there. You ever play stoopball?" "I've heard of it."

"Yeah. The slum kids played it. What did you play? Golf?" He smiled.

"I played the stock market."

"Yeah?" He laughed. "Well, we played stoopball right there. Me and my friends…" He stayed quiet for a few seconds, then said, "Father Chiaro – that was the old pastor you just talked to – he used to charge out of the rectory and run us off. But if he got hold of you, he'd drag you by the ears into the rectory and put you to work on some shit job. You see those doorknobs in there? They're brass, but they don't look it now. I used to have to polish those fucking knobs until they looked like gold."

"He's still got you by the ears, Frank."

He laughed. "Yeah. What a sovanabeech."

"A what?"

He smiled. "That's the way my grandfather used to say it. Sovanabeech. Son of a bitch."

"I see." Well, I tried to picture fat little Frank Bellarosa on these streets, playing ball, making zip guns, kneeling in the confessional, getting his finger wet, kneeling in the confessional, and so on. And I could picture it, and I'm a nostalgic guy myself, so I'm partial to people who are sentimental about their childhood. I guess that's a sign of middle age, right? But with Bellarosa, there was more to it, I think. I believe he knew then that he was going home for the last time, and that he had to take care of Santa Lucia so that the priests there would take care of him when the time came. There had been a few stories in the newspapers over the last ten years or so about problems with certain priests and churches providing burial services for people in Frank's line of work. I guess this frightened Frank Bellarosa, who had assumed all along that he was dealing with a church that was under direct orders from God to forgive everyone. But now people were trying to change the rules, and Bellarosa, not one to take u

Bellarosa put his hands in his pockets and looked down the intersecting street. "In those days you could walk down this street here late at night and nobody bothered you, but a lot of the old ladies would yell at me from the windows, 'Frankie, get home before your mother kills you.' You think anybody says that on this street anymore?"

"I doubt it."

"Yeah, me too. You wa

"Yes, I would."

Instead of getting into the car, we walked from Santa Lucia in the heat, the way Frank Bellarosa must have done many years before. Le

We stopped in front of a burned-out five-storey brick tenement, and Bellarosa said, "I lived on the top floor there. It was a hundred degrees in the summer, but nice and warm in the winter with those big steam radiators that banged. I shared a room with two brothers."

I didn't respond.

He went on, "Then my uncle took me out of here and sent me to La Salle, and the dorms looked like a Park Avenue penthouse to me. I started to understand that there was a world outside of Williamsburg. You know?" He was quiet again, then said, "But I got to tell you, looking back on this place in the 1950s, I was happy here."

"We all were."

"Yeah." We got back into the car and drove some blocks to a better street, and he showed me the five-storey brownstone where he and A

I asked, "Are you trying to get into heaven?"

"Yeah, but not this week." He laughed, then added, "Everything's got an angle, Counsellor."

We drove around the old Italian section of Williamsburg, which had never been very large, and what was left of Italian Williamsburg seemed rather forlorn, but there were stops to be made, and the trip was not all nostalgia, but partly business. As I said, it must be difficult to run a crime empire when you can't use the telephone, or even the mail for that matter. And this fact obviously necessitated a lot of driving and quick stops to call on people. Frank was the three-minute Mafia manager.

After Williamsburg, we drove into more lively Italian neighbourhoods in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and Coney Island, where we made more stops and saw more people, mostly in restaurants and in the back of retail stores and in social clubs. I was quite honestly amazed at the number of branch offices and affiliates of Bellarosa, Inc. – or would one say franchises and chain outlets? More amazing, there didn't seem to be any written lists of these stops. Bellarosa would just say a few words to Le

We left Brooklyn and went into Ozone Park, Queens, which is also an Italian neighbourhood. Frank had some relatives there, and we stopped at their row house and played boccie ball in an alleyway with a bunch of his old goombahs who wore baggy pants and three-day whiskers. Then we all drank homemade red wine on a back porch, and it was awful, awful stuff, ta

Anyway, we moved on into the late afternoon, making a few more stops at modest-looking frame houses in other Queens neighbourhoods. Frank Bellarosa had entertained the movers and shakers of his world, the chiefs and the 'made men', at the Plaza Hotel. Now he was going out into the streets to talk to his constituents, like a politician ru

The man had a natural instinct for power, I'll say that for him. He comprehended on some level that real power is not based on terror, or even on loyalty to an abstract idea or organization. Real power was based on personal loyalty, especially the loyalty of the masses to the person of don Bellarosa, as I witnessed with the sausage vendor and with everyone else we'd stopped to see. Truly the man was an intuitive and charismatic leader – the last of the great dons.

And as evil as he was, I nearly felt sorry for him, surrounded now by enemies within and without. But I had also felt sorry for proud Lucifer in Paradise Lost when he was brought down by God and heaven's host of goody-goody androgynous angels. There must be a serious flaw in my character.

We headed back to Manhattan after dark. New York is truly a city of ethnic diversity, but I don't have much occasion or desire to hang around with the ethnics. However, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the Italian subculture that I had caught a glimpse of that day. It was a world that seemed both alive and dying at the same time, and I remarked to Bellarosa in the car back to Manhattan, "I thought all that Italian stuff was a thing of the past." He seemed to understand what I meant and replied, "It is in the past. It was past when my old man took me around on Saturdays to sit with the goombahs and sip wine and talk. It's always in the past."