He paused. He pursed his lips, considered what he'd just explained to Sandra, and realized that he'd also just explained it to himself, but incompletely. He worked his arm under his wife's blond head, then added, "An' ya gotta give 'im the benefit a the doubt. I guess what I'm sayin', ya gotta love 'im."
4
The offices of the Key West Sentinel, like everything else about the paper, were shabby, cheap, and disheveled.
They were located on the second floor of an unhistoric building on a cheesy block of obnoxious Duval Street. To get to them, you squeezed into a corridor between a T-shirt shop and another T-shirt shop, then went up a narrow stairway that not infrequently smelled of urine or of barf. Behind a frosted glass door with flaking letters on it, a suite of tiny rooms snaked away. Dampness lived in the ancient wooden floor, it felt unwholesomely spongy underfoot; light came from egg-box fluorescents that made eyes nervous. Certain privileged cubbyholes had windows, certain privileged windows were equipped with archaic air conditioners. These air conditioners no longer refrigerated; they only dribbled condensation on the rotting floor and threw the same air back at you. Their real value lay in their pulsing, rumbling whine, a strangely restful noise that muted the bad amplified music, unmufflered motorcycles, and drunken cackles from the street.
It was around eight when Arty Magnus returned from the Eclipse Saloon. No one was working late, because at a paper like the Sentinel no one ever did. He went to his desk, switched on the AC and his obsolete computer, and opened up the bag of pretzels he'd brought for dinner. He hooked into the database, typed in the name delgatto, vincente, and started eating.
The database went back ten years, and the oldest reference to Delgatto was from The New York Times of December 20, 1985.
Frankie Scalera, aged boss of the Pugliese family and for a decade the head of the New York Mafia, had recently been rubbed out, and organized crime experts were analyzing the likely shape of the post-Scalera Mob. The new Godfather, it was broadly agreed, was Nino Carti, a preening thug of violent charisma. Carti lacked finesse, but he was young, broad-shouldered, and cocky; he represented, in the words of one FBI source, "the Mob's last best hope to rejuvenate itself." Carti's under-boss would be Tommy Mondello, regarded by Mob watchers as an uninspired choice. Mondello wasn't bright, nor was he showy. One state attorney dismissed him as "a glorified bodyguard" whose main qualification was that he would be no threat to Carti's leadership.
More interesting, in the experts' view, was the promotion to consigliere of Vincente Delgatto.
Delgatto was sixty-three at the time—almost two decades older than his new bosses—and there was much conjecture about the meaning of this wide disparity. One investigator saw Delgatto's selection merely as "a sop to the old men" and claimed he would be a figurehead with no real power. Another expert said, however, that while Delgatto's position might indeed be a symbolic one, the symbol was significant; it indicated that the "Sicilian Mob was not ready to abandon altogether its traditions of respect and relative restraint, to sink wholly into the depths of random violence and dog-eat-dog."
This discussion, in the short term, turned out to be academic, because the Mafia, for the next three years or so, was Nino Carti, period.
Arty Magnus, his back to the dribbling air conditioner, munched pretzels, skimmed through hundreds of Carti cites, and remembered the cult of personality that had prevailed through the late eighties. Carti made all the decisions; Carti hogged all the headlines. Carti was a one-man show.
But the flamboyant Godfather's fame was also his undoing. By 1989, the Feds and New York State had put together a blue-ribbon task force whose single mandate was to make an airtight case against this brazen gangster whose continued freedom was a needling embarrassment. "We want him badly," said an unnamed prosecutor, when the 116 count indictment was finally announced. "He's made it so the machine can hardly run without him, and if we put him away, that's our best chance to destroy the entire enterprise."
Carti told the press, "I wish the suits good luck."
Then, in early 1991, as the still cocky Godfather was waiting to go on trial, the unthinkable occurred. The Daily News, with its great gift for succinctness, put it best in a front-page headline: mondello rats out carti. The nearly invisible under-boss, picked solely for his dumb and doglike loyalty, had contemplated those counts of murder and extortion in which he was also an accused and cut himself a deal.
Over the next months, the gambits of prosecutors and defense attorneys dominated the New York local news, but when it became clear that Nino Carti was going away, probably for life, the journalists' attention returned to the Mafia's battered state and uncertain future. The database showed a steeply rising number of references to delgatto, vincente. Arty Magnus ate his pretzels, rubbed his itchy eyes, and delved.