The Godfather's Revenge Read online

  Gaetana ordered her family to eat, as sternly as she would on any given Sunday.

  “Your procedures?” Carlo Tramonti hissed as he was shoved into the backseat of one of the black Biscaynes. “Spite and humiliation, these are procedures?”

  “I’m afraid,” the head agent said, “that in cases like yours, that’s an affirmative.”

  THE PELICAN MOTOR LODGE WAS A CLEAN, WHITE cement rectangle of rooms surrounding a landscaped courtyard and a drained kidney-shaped swimming pool. The pool had a stockade fence around it. Tramonti kept his offices in a suite of four gutted, remodeled rooms in the far back corner, largely obscured by an artfully trimmed thicket of nandina.

  The agents frog-marched Tramonti into the suite’s reception area, where, weekdays, his sister-in-law Filomena answered the phone and screened visitors.

  Carlo Tramonti’s name did not appear on the thick door to his office. Instead, painted right onto it in large, flowing gold script, was an epigram: Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. The lettering had been a birthday gift from his brother Joe—a painter of local renown, whose canvases (jazz scenes, Negro funerals, gators) sold briskly in the French Quarter and who was represented by a gallery there (which Joe also owned). He was also the man in charge of the Family’s jukebox and vending-machine interests.

  Inside, the paneled office walls sported several framed newspapers, yellowing and biased accounts of that infamia, the mob that had claimed the life of Tramonti’s grandfather, among many others. The rest of the walls were all but covered with more than a hundred carefully arranged family photographs. The mahogany desk gleamed. The carpeting smelled new. Tramonti replaced it every year. There were no ashtrays here and, famously, no trash can. Carlo Tramonti supposedly found it distracting to conduct business in any room that was not perfectly neat, a compulsion that extended to trash cans, even empty ones.

  The agent in charge of this charade asked Tramonti for his passport.

  Tramonti sat down heavily in his leather desk chair. “I wish to have my lawyer present.”

  In the reception area, Augie Tramonti arrived, out of breath. Agents grabbed him by the shoulder and restrained him just outside the open door. Before he’d gone on to bigger things, Augie “the Midget” Tramonti, small as he was, had enjoyed a long, sadistic run as an enforcer. If dead men could tell tales, many would say they’d seen Augie look at them with the same cold contempt he now showed these agents.

  “My brother’s not going to talk to you people without a lawyer.” Augie’s voice was raised but even. “So forget it. And he don’t like that, the smoking there. The lawyer’s coming.” When Augie Tramonti mentioned the lawyer’s name—a distinguished one in Louisiana for more than a century—it seemed to mean nothing to the agents, who continued to smoke.

  The agent in charge took out a letter from Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea and read it aloud. It accused Tramonti of being a citizen of Colombia, not Italy, as his work visa claimed. As evidence, the letter cited several trips to Cuba for which Tramonti was alleged to have used his Colombian passport. It cited the fact that Tramonti apparently had no Italian birth certificate (he was hardly the only person born in the Sicilian countryside in the nineteenth century who did not). It cited his lack of an Italian passport (it had expired under the reign of the hated Mussolini; Augie used his connections in Colombia to get a passport there for his brother). It alleged that Tramonti had used a “pattern of bribes and coercion” to keep his work visa current. “Because of this pattern of falsification,” the letter went on, it was “incumbent” on the INS to deport Tramonti to his “native Colombia.” Carlo Tramonti had never set foot in Colombia, but of course everyone here knew that. The cost of “said transportation” would be recovered by placing a tax lien on Tramonti’s home.

  The agent in charge nodded. His associates started pulling out file and desk drawers, dumping their contents onto the carpeted floor. Carlo Tramonti reddened but did not speak.

  “You need a warrant!” Augie called.

  “We need you to kindly shut up,” the agent said, “sir. And, no, for an illegal foreign national, we don’t need a warrant. In matters of national security such as this, our only directive is to protect the American people.”

  Carlo Tramonti closed his eyes and rocked slightly back and forth.

  “We are the American people!” Augie Tramonti shouted. “You’re just the fucking government.”

  Carlo Tramonti groaned, and then he bent over and vomited.

  The chains prevented him from spreading his legs far enough apart, and the vomit—red wine; coffee; peppers and eggs—spewed onto his shoes and into the cuffs of his trousers.

  “Found it,” an agent announced. Top desk drawer. The most obvious place, and the last place the agents chose to look. Another agent rushed outside to vomit in the shrubbery.

  The agent in charge took the Colombian passport from his colleague, stepped around the pool of Tramonti’s reddish vomit, pointed toward the door, and said something in Spanish.

  Tramonti cocked his head.

  “My brother,” Augie said, “don’t always hear everything so good sometimes.”

  The agent repeated himself. “Your brother doesn’t appear to speak Spanish, either.”

  “What Spanish?” Augie said. “Spanish how?”

  “I was just reading his door,” the agent said. “‘Three can keep a secret if two are dead’—sounds like a sign my kids would hang on their tree house, right next to NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

  Carlo sat up straight but did not answer. He shot a look at his brother. Augie was the kind of man who would take pleasure in humbling this nothing, this federal nobody, by answering the question. For a moment, though, he held his tongue.

  “Oh, I get it,” the agent said. “It’s some kind of knife-wielding-Guido manifesto.”

  “For your information,” said Augie Tramonti, “the fella who said that there was none other than Mr. Benjamin Franklin. OK? Who I’m not surprised if you never heard of, since he’s one of the ones who signed the Constitution of Independence, which, with all due respect, it seems like you gentlemen aren’t familiar with, huh?”

  “Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.”

  Augie Tramonti shook his head in disagreement, Carlo in disapproval. “He signed ’em both,” Augie said. “Guarantee, hey? Grade school, you should have learned that, which is…how is it people say it? Shocking but not surprising.”

  “Enough.” Carlo rose unsteadily to his feet. One of the agents blew cigarette smoke in his face. Carlo swallowed hard and withstood it.

  The agents pushed Augie aside and led Carlo out into the fresh air, back to their plain black cars.

  “I am being kidnapped,” Carlo Tramonti said. It was a clear accusation, evenly leveled.

  The agents ignored him and kept moving.

  “This is America!” Carlo Tramonti hissed.

  “Correct,” said the agent in charge. He slammed the door.

  “This is not how people are treated in America!”

  “From here on out,” said the agent in charge, “for people like you, it sure as heck is.”

  As the three black cars drove away, Augie Tramonti, standing alongside Highway 61, pointed and stomped and screamed Sicilian curses.

  AT THE NEW ORLEANS AIRPORT, THE ATTORNEY GENERAL of the United States waited on the tarmac in a black limousine. An aide brought him word that the Whale was on his way. Outside, other aides were putting the finishing touches on a makeshift podium—Justice Department seal, American flags, sound check. They informed the network television crews it wouldn’t be long now. Daniel Brendan Shea looked amply ready for his close-up. He was an almost pretty man, black Irish with sharp cheekbones, long white teeth, and the kind of disproportionately large head the cameras love. In person, Danny Shea looked less like his brother than he did a Hollywood actor cast as President James Kavanaugh Shea, a taller man, whose handsome features were more recognizably
human.

  Sirens drew closer. A jet airplane was parked nearby, engines running and crew on board.

  The A.G. stepped out of his limo and stood, alone, squinting and shading his eyes, facing the direction of the sirens. The cameramen and reporters shouted at him, but he either did not hear or pretended not to. As the three Chevy Biscaynes came speeding into view, escorted now by what looked like an endless string of state and local police cars, Danny Shea turned his face into the wind, folded his arms, and shook his head in a way that suggested hard-won victory. If this was only a pose, it was nonetheless an excellent one.

  What was Danny Shea thinking? He had to have known that this would never hold up in court. That this was just for show.

  Was the motivation revenge? Four years ago, he’d sat behind his then boss, Senator Theodore Preston Davies of New York, and been captured on TV getting increasingly angry as Carlo Tramonti took the Fifth Amendment again and again, reading it off a printed card his lawyer gave him. The more agitated Shea got, the more times he whispered in his boss’s ear, the more Tramonti seemed to be enjoying himself. It’s possible that this deportation was Danny Shea’s way of wiping the smug grin off Carlo Tramonti’s face—particularly since other aspects of his initiative against the so-called Mafia would give it the appearance of a vendetta. There was, for example, the suspicious death of one of Shea’s young attorneys, William Van Arsdale (whose people were the Van Arsdale Citrus Van Arsdales), who was killed the year before in a hit-and-run in D.C. His mistress had been guilty of adultery, she admitted, but not murder. The jury unanimously disagreed. No hard evidence ever came to light that Billy’s widow, Francesca, the daughter of the late Santino Corleone, somehow had the mistress framed. But recently declassified documents did show that the A.G. had dedicated this entire operation to the memory of William Van Arsdale. The rationale for this has never been definitively proven, which of course only made it a more delicious morsel for conspiracy theorists.

  Historians, however, favor the theory that Danny Shea was trying to atone for the sins of his father, the late M. Corbett Shea, former ambassador to Canada. Danny must have known that Tramonti had made his first few millions off slot machines that came his way via Vito Corleone, just as Mickey Shea made his first millions off bootleg liquor hauled to New York in Vito Corleone’s olive oil trucks. Danny’s chilly, unyielding father had been brought low by a stroke not long after the election, but he’d lived long enough to catch televised glimpses of his sons running the free world as they saw fit, distancing themselves from the old man’s prejudices and unholy alliances.

  Was it possible that Danny Shea didn’t quite know his father’s history? That he had no idea how his brother really got elected? Was it possible that the A.G.’s motive was to serve the public good and nothing but the public good? Possible. Some people believe in simple, noncontradictory motives, and in America people are at least nominally entitled to their beliefs. The American soul has been bought and paid for at the crossroads of Fact and Belief.

  As the convoy passed Danny Shea, cameras recorded his thumbs-up to the INS agents. But nothing in his body language or facial expression betrayed what was on his mind.

  The cars stopped. The INS agents got Tramonti out and ushered him in a camera-friendly way toward the plane. It was impossible to walk in chains on TV and not look guilty. What the cameras captured was a wild-haired old man, staggering across the tarmac in stained trousers, raving like a debased evil genius. Tramonti was actually shouting about the principles on which America was built, but the airplane’s engines drowned him out. On camera, he might as well have been yelling, I’ll get you for this, Superman!

  Two uniformed MPs appeared in the doorway of the plane and took Tramonti inside, where—other than the pilot and copilot and the MPs—it turned out he would be the only one on board.

  The plane took off.

  Several members of the press corps broke into applause.

  The attorney general lowered his head, turned, and strode to the podium.

  “Today,” he said, “the United States of America is a freer and safer nation.”

  He outlined some of Carlo Tramonti’s suspected illegal activities, not only in Louisiana but throughout the South and in Florida. Mr. Tramonti listed “motel owner” on his income tax return where, according to the A.G., it should say “crime boss.” He was a part of “a vast criminal underworld” in which he had conspired to swallow up so many businesses—both legal and illegal, everything from a chain of beachwear shops in Florida to a chain of bordellos in Texas—that he was commonly known as “the Whale.” Mr. Tramonti claimed to be Italian, but now it seemed that all along he was a citizen of Colombia, at least according to documents procured during a lengthy Justice Department investigation. Mr. Tramonti was being returned to the documented town of his birth, a tiny mountain village called Santa Rosa. Shea looked into those cameras and, with God’s perfect straight face, told the world that this deportation had been handled in strict adherence with the laws of the state of Louisiana and federal immigration statutes as well.

  “But make no mistake,” he said. He paused. He seemed to be looking beyond the cameras, to some elusive paradise that only he could see. Near baggage claim, maybe. “The matters at hand are grave. There are more men out there like Mr. Tramonti, many more, evildoers who are destroying liberty in cities all over America. All over the world, in fact. Mr. Tramonti is an archenemy of our basic American freedoms, but he’s not the only one. There are others, and we will not rest until they have been brought to justice.”

  A reporter asked the A.G. what he meant by that.

  Daniel Brendan Shea was still in his thirties, but he was a born politician. Ordinarily he discussed accomplishments and objectives by saying we did this, we believe that, we will do the other thing. He avoided the first-person singular, affixing credit to others, both to individuals and to “this administration” or “our department.” But he was visibly excited now, enough so to abandon any semblance of humility.

  “I plan to go down in history,” he said, straight into the lens of the top-rated evening news show in the world, “as the man who brought down the Mafia.”

  This claim provoked a brief, stunned silence. Then one of the reporters raised his hand. “So what you’re telling us is, the so-called Mafia—it’s real?”

  There was nervous laughter, but not from Danny Shea.

  “They’re real,” he said. “They’re among us.”

  AT THE MEDELLÍ AIRPORT, THE MPS TOOK CARLO Tramonti straight to a back room where VIPs went through customs. They were met by several uniformed Colombian officials and two other Americans. One wore a guayabera shirt and green sunglasses. Under the sunglasses was a pirate-style eye patch. The other man was weak-chinned with thick-framed black glasses, good posture, and a cheap black suit. He was the one who did most of the talking. He spoke Spanish and seemed to be a previous acquaintance of the Colombian official with the most medals.

  Tramonti looked dizzy. He asked if the Americans were from the embassy or the INS.

  “Pardon me,” said the weak-chinned man, “but perhaps you’d be more comfortable sitting down?” The man’s voice dripped with Waspish old money. It made the cheap suit seem like a costume. “Sir? Please.” He pointed to what seemed to be a row of seats from a dismantled stadium. Tramonti sat.

  Badges were shown and paperwork exchanged and eventually the men all started laughing, all but Tramonti. The MPs handed the keys to the handcuffs and Tramonti’s bogus passport to the American with the eye patch and then left. The Colombians and the weak-chinned man left, too, laughing all the way.

  The man with the eye patch freed Tramonti’s hands and feet and tossed the chains in the trash can. Resentment came off him like a stink. He looked like someone whose friends had gone fishing for tarpon and left him back at camp to do woman’s work.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?” Tramonti said. “What you are? Because I think I get the picture. CIA, eh? I worked with s
ome of your people before, you know.”

  “Then you know that if I was or if I wasn’t,” he said, “I’d say I wasn’t.”

  He had a New Jersey accent. He took Tramonti out a side door, where a battered taxi idled at the curb. A sign in Spanish welcomed them to the Land of Eternal Spring.

  They got in the back together. In Spanish, the agent told the driver to go to the Hotel Miramar and suggested a particular route.

  Darkness had fallen. Tramonti seemed to be having trouble breathing. He returned the agent’s silence with silence. Like many men in his tradition, he had a talent for waiting people out.

  Carlo Tramonti had been one of three American bosses (Silent Sam Drago and Michael Corleone were the others) who, independently, had cooperated with the CIA to train assassins to go into Cuba and take care of some things from the top down. The bosses had compared notes and concluded that the government’s plan all along had been to effect a regime change in Cuba and blame the assassination on the so-called Mafia—although rumor had it that the Corleones had gotten fancy and tried, unsuccessfully, to pin one particular botched attempt on a caporegime named Nick Geraci. Geraci was said to have betrayed them, though there were other versions of that story swirling around, too. Tramonti had no way of knowing that both the Yale-educated Wasp, slumming in that cheap suit, and Joe Lucadello, the man with the eye patch, had worked on that project, too—with Geraci, in fact.

  The taxi came to a stop in front of the hotel.

  “Get out,” Lucadello said. “You have a reservation. In the restaurant here, my advice is, stick with the steak dinner.”

  The Hotel Miramar had a doorman, the sign of a reasonably classy joint.

  “You forgot my passport,” Tramonti had the presence of mind to say.

  Lucadello shook his head. “Sorry.”