“All right. I’ll lay it down to him when I see this guy, see what he says. If the guy says, ‘All right, go ahead,’ then youse go ahead, nobody will ever bother us. But if he says, ‘Listen, I got three, what do I need four for?’ Then forget about it. Because you gotta show him respect. The deputy was happy with that four hundred we gave him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Rossi says. “I give him money all along—two hundred, three hundred.”

“I mean, for that one night.”

“The Vegas Night? Oh, yeah.”

“We should tell him that we’d like to get another one in a few weeks time. I’ll bring the crew down, two guys for the crap table. This way maybe this time we could take down some real money.”

Phone calls home were not satisfying. “When are you coming home? Why aren’t you coming home?”

I would talk to each of the girls, ask about school, whether they were keeping the horses fed—they had three horses now that they kept in a barn down the road. Mainly they wanted to know when I was coming home. My wife would say, “Joe, tell me some of the things you’re doing. Knowing where you are, picturing you doing something, that makes me feel more comfortable about it, helps keep my mind clear.”

I would tell her a little bit. If the kids were afraid for me, I’d say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. These guys are so stupid, they couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.”

Bills, household problems, teenager problems—I couldn’t do anything about any of it. So much had been going on, guys coming and going in Florida, that I hadn’t been home in seven weeks.

I got home for my oldest daughter’s graduation, the first weekend in June. I was a stranger. A month earlier my wife had fallen while mowing the grass and sliced open her ankle, requiring six stitches. She hadn’t mentioned it. My daughters had gotten into a couple of bad habits—nothing disastrous, just frustrating because I wasn’t there to deal with it. At one point when I was by myself, I put my fist through the bedroom door.

My wife produced a nice brunch party for my daughter’s graduation. My mother was there; her mother was there. I wasn’t in sync. I wasn’t conversational. I was missing a lot of years.

Afterward my wife said, “It was your daughter’s graduation. You should have just forgotten for a while and been happy and put a different face on.”

I had to get back to Florida because Sonny and Lefty were coming down. They had arranged a sitdown with Trafficante. I had been home for three days. “You’ve been in a horrible mood the whole time,” my wife said. She didn’t ask what was wrong. I wouldn’t have known what to answer.

Tuesday morning, June 3, she drove me to the airport. It was our nineteenth wedding anniversary.

When I got to Tampa, I called to apologize for my mood.

Sonny came down with his girlfriend, Judy, and Lefty, and checked into the Tahitian Motor Lodge. Sonny had to wait for a call. Trafficante would say when and where they would meet. We hung around the pool.

The next day he got the call. He was to meet Trafficante that night at eight. He wanted me to pick him up at six forty-five. “I like to get there early,” Sonny says, “and get the feel of the place, look it over to make sure it’s not a setup or there aren’t any cops.”

A top Bonanno captain was meeting with the biggest boss in Florida. The FBI put a surveillance team on.

I took Rossi’s car because it was wired with a Nagra in the trunk. I picked Sonny up. Lefty was not with him.

“We’re going to Pappas,” he says, indicating the restaurant in Tarpon Springs. “He didn’t even say the name. He didn’t have to. He just said ‘I feel like eating Greek tonight.’ I said, ‘I know the place you mean.’ ”

At about seven-fifteen we went into the restaurant. We sat at the bar and had a drink. Sonny scanned the place casually.

“How’s this guy gonna know you?” I ask.

“I met him up in New York last week. I been trying to set this up all along. He was up there. Stevie knew him from years ago. Stevie introduced me to him.”

At about seven-thirty, Sonny says, “Okay, Donnie, you leave, go back to the club, and I’ll call you when it’s time to pick me up.”

I walked out. Going through the parking lot, I passed right by Trafficante and another man heading toward the restaurant. Trafficante was such a quiet-looking old gentleman, shoulders slightly hunched, calm old face. It was odd to think of him as what he really was.

Sonny called at ten o‘clock. I met him in the lounge at the restaurant. We had a drink before we left. I didn’t say anything about having seen Trafficante.

“He’s a dynamite guy,” Sonny says. “He likes me. We got whatever we want. All the doors are open to us in Florida now, just so we do things properly. A fifty-fifty split. If we fuck up, Donnie, the old man will shut every door on us. One of the things we should start looking at, he said, was bingo. He’s big in bingo, but he doesn’t have any in Pasco County. Big money in that.”

In the car, Sonny unwound. “It was a feeling-out conversation,” he says. “I told him, ‘Listen, I’m no sophisticated person. I’m a street person all my life.’ I says, ‘I love the streets, you know. I don’t know nothing about nothing, about gambling or anything.’ I says, ‘Me, I just like to go in the street, rob who the fuck I gotta rob.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed.”

“He probably likes you because you’re honest.”

“I really respect the man. You show that when you talk.”

“It was a stroke of luck that you met him in New York last week.”

“You know what I told Stevie before? I went down to see him and I says, ‘Hey, Stevie, you gotta come to Florida. I’m telling you now. I never asked you for a motherfucking thing, I’m always alongside you. If you don’t come to fucking Florida with me, I ain’t even gonna fucking come around here no more-just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll do my own thing.’ And I got up and walked out. He called me the next day. He says, ‘Look how lucky we are—the guy is here. We reached right out,’ he says.”

“Is that right?”

“He says, ‘What are you getting mad at me for? I would have come with you,’ he says.”

“So the guy tonight, nice guy to talk to, huh?”

“It’s like me and you talking already, Donnie.”

“That’s great.”

“He was saying stories, you know, about other people. He says other people think like—take this Bruno, for instance, from Philadelphia—he says because you wasn’t born there, Bruno don’t wanna open up the door for you. ‘That’s the wrong thing,’ he says. ‘Like, you come here, I was born here,’ he says, ‘you got something. We’ll work together,’ he says.”

“Well, everybody is gonna be making the money, right?”

“Right, bro.”

We were both happy for the same reason, more or less. I felt deeply satisfied for having engineered a second marriage between two Mafia families.

The next day, Trafficante’s man, Benny Husick, a short, white-haired guy, came to see Sonny about the bingo operation. Afterward Sonny said that Benny ran Trafficante’s bingo parlors. He said that we would start looking for sites with Benny, and that we had to get a building of 8,000 to 10,000 square feet, with air-conditioning. An old supermarket was perfect. He said that we would supply the location and half the money to open it up; Trafficante would supply the equipment and know-how and the other half of the money. We should dream up the name of a charity as sponsoring organization, but the word Italian should not be included. Some kind of disabled war veterans group was good, and you could hire a disabled guy to sit near the door to make it look real.

I started to fill Lefty in on what Sonny had told me about how the sitdown with Trafficante came about, but he knew all about it.