“Hey, that’s good.”

“But these motherfuckers, they was all partying. They thought I was clipped, you know? When I was missing? They had me fucking dead, these motherfuckers. So everybody’s celebrating.”

“Are they crazy or what?”

“Even Mike Sabella. He doesn’t know that I know. But he was saying, ‘That’s a shame, but I’m glad I took his wife’s jewelry.’ ”

Lefty had put up his wife’s jewelry as collateral on a loan.

I say, “What a surprise he’s gonna have, huh?”

“Unbelievable, these motherfuckers. Wait’ll I talk to Blackstein tomorrow. He knew they thought I was clipped, but he didn’t know it got that far.”

Blackstein was Sonny Black.

“Those cocksuckers,” Lefty says, “they don’t know the surprise they’re gonna get in a couple months. I got news for you, pal. Nobody bothers you no more. When that man comes out, you’ll be in good shape.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I stuck with you all the way. And it’s very surprising, he stood by you too.”

“Blackstein?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Because what I did this here week, you’re a lot better off tonight.”

“Than last week, huh?”

“Ain’t no way of stopping the situation. I can’t go into details. When you walk around, you can smack anybody you want in the mouth, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Anybody?”

“Anybody. When I get out there, you point them out to me, you smack them in the fucking mouth. Donnie, you’re gonna be very shocked. Blackstein is so fucking happy.”

He wanted me to meet him in Miami, where he would fill me in more on the results of the sitdowns.

“Do me a favor,” he says. “Tell Tony bring a tie and a shirt. Not dress like a fucking Hoosier from Pennsylvania. I’m bringing down sharp clothes.”

He put Louise on the phone. “Hi, Donnie, what you gonna do tomorrow?”

“Same thing I do every Sunday.”

“No special plans? What kind of dinner you going to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s Easter.”

“I know, but I don’t have any special buddy to spend Easter with anymore, you know?”

“Oh, we gotta fix that.”

I started thinking about close calls and what would happen if Lefty or Sonny started adding things up. There was the time in P. J. Clarke’s when I was with Larry Keaton and Larry was recognized as an agent and Lefty was told. And when were they going to get the call from the Chicago mob tipping them off to the fact that Tony Conte was an agent? Going way back, what about the guy at Jilly’s in Brooklyn that I had once arrested? Would he see me again on the street and remember who I was? And there was the ABSCAM boat, and there was Rocky.

In the mob it’s your close friend that will kill you. Here I was staying with Lefty all the time in hotels, with him twenty-four hours a day where any little slip could be noticed. I was dodging a lot of bullets, so to speak.

Rossi and I picked up Lefty at the airport in Miami. Mirra and his side had lost the sitdowns; I was okay.

“The case is closed,” Lefty says. “There’s no more. They lost, and they lost nationwide. New York, Miami, Chicago—they lost nationwide. Listen, that’s why it took me fucking five days to go out and do what I had to do.”

“That’s good. Sonny happy now?”

“Forget about it, lit up like Luna Park. Well, I’m glad youse are satisfied, because this is the whole thing in a nutshell.”

“Hey, Left, that’s what we were working for all this time, right?”

“We’re hurting, in the sense we don’t have big money. But we have the power today. I’d rather have the power than the money. Because these guys have all got the money, and they don’t know what to do with it no more. Where they gonna go? They can’t run to nobody. They still got their captains. But who the captains gonna go to?”

“Are they still gonna be under Rusty, those guys?”

“Everybody’s under Rusty. The law of the land. Nationwide. There’s only one fucking boss.”

“And that’s it?”

“And nobody can take his place.”

We went into the piano bar at the Deauville. Lefty told us that he, Sonny, Joey Massino, and Nicky Santora had been engaged in an important job in New York “for the Commission.” He said that they had “put it together” and that in return they had been assured by the Commission that Rastelli would remain boss.

I didn’t know what Lefty had done during his five days “working from the street” or what they had done for the Commission, or whether it was all one and the same. The FBI had kept him under surveillance for two or three days and nothing happened, so they abandoned it—they don’t have unlimited manpower to keep everybody under surveillance for long periods. I assumed it involved a hit, because everything was typical of that—the secrecy and the working from the street, the fact that afterward all the serious problems raised in the sitdowns and going all the way up to the boss were solved. And finally the whole thing had been ratified nationwide by the Mafia Commission representing all the families. I figured that the paper bag Lefty had taken to Rabito’s contained guns—that was a common way of carrying a bunch of them.

I couldn’t ask direct questions. Supposedly I was experienced enough now as a connected guy to figure out certain things on my own, take what I was told, and, as Lefty liked to say, “leave it alone.”

Even though everything pointed to a hit, I couldn’t think of anybody that was missing. No bodies turned up.

We were sitting there listening to Lefty spin out his tale of trouble between family factions, shit with Mirra, all the difficult and violent solutions within the mob.

“Lefty,” Rossi says, “I understand how we all like to make money. But what is the actual advantage to being a wiseguy?”

“Are you kidding? What the ... Donnie, don’t you tell this guy nothing? Tony, as a wiseguy you can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people—legitimately. You can do any goddamn thing you want, and nobody can say anything about it. Who wouldn’t want to be a wiseguy?”

A few guys from the New York crew were down having a good time. Rossi wanted to use the pay phone and didn’t have any change. He asked one of the guys—the retired New York detective—if he had change for a dollar.

“Use these,” the ex-cop says, handing Rossi four copper-colored metal discs the size of quarters. “They work good.” He said that a few of the guys in New York had access to large supplies of these slugs at five hundred for fifty bucks—ten cents apiece.

Rossi used one in the phone and later turned in the other three to the contact agent.

The next afternoon we were sitting by the pool at the Deauville. Lefty was moaning and groaning about us not hustling enough. He wanted a lounge on the beach, for status. “Let’s do it now,” he says, “because I’m older and tired.” He complained about everything. “Promised about the racetrack. We embarrassed ourselves, it died. Promised about the Vegas Night, it died. Promised about bingo, it died.”

Rossi went inside. Lefty complained that Rossi wasn’t pulling his weight and that I wasn’t leaning on Rossi enough. He droned on for another hour. At about four o‘clock he says, “I think I’ll go up and take a nap so I’ll be fresh for when we go out tonight.”

A few minutes later Rossi came out. “You won’t believe what I did. I turned the air-conditioning up full-blast and took the switch off.”

“Holy shit,” I say. “We’re gonna hear him screaming all the way out here at the pool. I ain’t going up there for a while because he’s gonna be going bullshit.”

Lefty hated air-conditioning. Summers in New York or Tampa, in cars, in hotel rooms, he would not allow me to turn it on. He couldn’t stand the cold air blowing on him. We’d be riding around on the hottest days with the car windows open. We had fights. I’d turn the air-conditioning on, he’d turn it off. I’d be drenched in sweat, he didn’t sweat at all. “How can you not sweat in this car?” I’d say. “Ah, just keep the windows open and you don’t need air-conditioning,” he’d answer.