The Home of Great

  Crime Fiction!

  All his life Collino had lived by the rules of Omerta—the ancient Mafia Code of Silence. Like his father and grandfather before him, he had sworn the blood oath of allegiance to the Honored Society. But it wasn’t the threat of death than kept the Brooklyn capo loyal. The Mafia—the Family to which he belonged—was all he knew, or understood. He had robbed and murdered for the Organization, but it always took care of its own. That was the rock on which Collino had built his life.

  Then one bright summer day he found himself marked for death for something he didn’t do. The most powerful Godfather of all the New York families had made a personal contract—to hit Collino!

  OMERTA

  By Peter McCurtin

  First published by Belmont Books in 1972

  Copyright © 1972, 2023 by Peter McCurtin

  First Electronic Edition: October 2023

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: David Whitehead

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.

  Chapter One

  JACOPETTI HAD AN Italian name, a French passport, and he loved the food of his native Corsica. That information plus thirty-five cents would get him on the subway, Collino thought irritably, sitting in his car across the street from The Corsican Brothers Cafe on East 52nd Street. After a month of searching for the Frenchman through the wholesale drug marts of New York, the fact that Jacopetti loved Corsican food was all he had to go on.

  More or less, he knew what Jacopetti looked like; the American Syndicate contact man in Marseilles had sent a photocopy of a ten-year-old newspaper picture taken from a Paris newspaper. The picture was old and smudgy to begin with, but Collino knew he would recognize the Frenchman if and when he saw him. The photocopy had the details of Jacopetti’s only arrest for narcotics trafficking. Collino couldn’t read French, but he knew the case had been dismissed for lack of evidence. The bit about liking Corsican food had been added in ballpoint by the man in Marseilles. Collino stubbed out the end of a cigarette and put another one in his mouth. He coughed slightly as he lit it.

  Our man in Marseilles, he thought angrily, drawing hard on the fresh cigarette. Then his mood changed and he forced himself to be patient. Shit, you couldn’t blame the guy over there, because they hadn’t been able to find Jacopetti either. Jacopetti was a smart frog-wop son of a bitch, but he was on the wrong team, so he had to be hit. So said Don Francesco from under his shawl in that fucking wheelchair, well-guarded and safe in his stucco mansion in Sheepshead Bay.

  Collino grinned because no disrespect was intended. Don Francesco was old country, stiff talking as if he had a poker up his ass, but he was all right—Collino knew the old man liked him—and, besides, the man with the dead legs in the wheelchair always knew exactly what he was doing. So hit this Frenchman with South American drug connections, he said—but how the fuck could you hit a man you couldn’t find? Collino knew that was the wrong answer. Don Francesco said hit the mother, so you found him, you hit him.

  Sooner or later Collino knew he’d do it. But that was no answer either, because later was too late. For years the independent French mob had been supplying ninety per cent of the stuff for the American trade. It was a good arrangement: the frog mobsters got the raw stuff from Turkey and other places in the Middle East, processed it “pure” in the factories near Marseilles, then smuggled it into the U. S. Heroin, cocaine—the French mob didn’t fuck around with hash, the other shit in pills—there was no real money in that.

  Watching from the car, Collino saw a guy in a grey topcoat and grey homburg who might have been Jacopetti pause under the awning of the Corsican Brothers to light a cigarette. The man walked on toward Lexington Avenue and Collino pulled irritably at his own half-burned cigarette. Maybe he was wasting his time, he thought. He had been waiting there for two nights. He cursed. Maybe the Frenchman had developed an ulcer, maybe he stayed home—wherever that was in New York—and drank milk.

  Later Collino would go home and eat the supper his wife had left in the oven, the dial turned down to LO. For a month that was what he’d been doing. Collino liked to eat good Italian food as much as this fucking Frenchman liked Corsican; it was never the same after hours on LO. Having his supper fucked up was reason enough to waste the frog, Collino thought with sour humor. But Don Francesco’s reasons were better: Jacopetti and his French and South American friends had decided to move into the American drug market—and to hell with the people who had set it up. Had worked out the distribution, paid off the cops; had busted the competition wherever it showed its face.

  Don Francesco had summoned Collino to his stronghold in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn’s Gold Coast, a place where just about nobody in the “family” ever went. The situation was that serious.

  Collino had never been there in his life, although his association with the DeSimone family—first as a favored outsider, later as a member—was of twenty years duration. He had been a member for fourteen years, a capo for seven; and still he had never been inside, or even close to, the pink stucco house behind the high, spiked steel fence facing the sea. The telephone call that brought him there had come from Bruno Garafalo, underboss of the family and Don Francesco’s closest associate, but it was a great honor nonetheless.

  Like his father and grandfather before him, Collino had sworn the blood oath of allegiance to the Mafia, the Honored Society, as the old country members still called it, but they frisked him for a gun or a knife before they let him in to see the man in the wheelchair.

  It was a short meeting; Bruno Garafalo was present all the time. Collino knew that Garafalo didn’t like him. That was all right, although he didn’t know the reason. In a way, it was a mark of importance to have someone of such importance as an unspoken enemy.

  Although obviously in some pain, Don Francesco was most gracious; a man in his position could never display casual friendship. Still, Collino knew, the old man liked him. Collino declined to accept a glass of grapa, the good but fierce-tasting Italian brandy, but when the old man pressed the drink, he accepted. And he toasted Don Francesco’s health.

  His hands clasped on his shrunken legs, Don Francesco told Collino that all his good health seemed to be behind him. Collino’s apology was shut off by a wave of the old man’s hand. “You meant well. I thank you, my friend,'’ Francesco DeSimone said.

  Collino liked that—my friend!

  Then they got down to business. Collino expected Don Francesco to be angry about the Frenchmen, their South American friends. He wasn’t: he was almost sorrowful. In the past, the Frenchmen had been most valuable. Personally, Don Francesco said, he disapproved of the narcotics business. However, the taking of drugs seemed to be an American madness, one that would not go away because of an old man’s strongest disapproval. Therefore, the family had to move with the times. It was America for the Americans—Don Francesco was an American citizen despite the best efforts of the Justice Department—and he did not approve of these Frenchmen moving in.

  Don Francesco sketched it out for Collino while Garafalo listened, his heavy face in repose. Nixon’s man in the Justice Department, Mitchell, as well as the men led by Rogers in the State Department, had been making it hot for the French. A number, not all, of the narcotics refineries in the Marseilles area, had been closed down. With the Turks it wasn’t so easy, and instead of finding some other way to move the stuff, the Frenchmen had decided to deal direct. More or less direct: first they got the Turks to move the stuff to South America. To Paraguay, to be specific. The head Frenchman, Bergeron, had moved his headquarters there; had paid off the right people, had brought his top man, Jacopetti, along to set up business with the States.

  Independent of the Syndicate of Don Francesco. The man in the wheelchair smiled briefly when he mentioned the American Syndicate. He controlled most of the eastern ports where the stuff was brought in. He knew he was most of the Syndicate, crippled or not, so he smiled.

  “New York is the biggest drug market in the world,” he told Collino. “Bergeron sits down in Paraguay, but his boys come up here. Garafalo, my friend here, calls them spics, like they maybe still call us wops. But Bergeron’s picked the right people: they’re tough and they want in. They’re hitting Manhattan first, then the boroughs. The thing is, Lorenzo, you got to stop them. Stop this big dealer the Frenchman sent up—this Jacopetti.”

  “You told them you didn’t like it?” Collino said without waiting to be asked.

  Garafalo laughed harshly and spoke for the first time since he told the special button men to frisk Collino. “You don’t ask questions, Larry—you listen to orders.”

  But Don Francesco held up a frail hand. “Lorenzo spoke out of turn, but that’s all right.”

  He looked at Collino again and his own laugh was dry sounding as someone walking in dead grass. “I told them, Lorenzo. I told them and I explained how wrong they were but they wouldn’t listen. Even with Nixon’s price freeze� �—the man in the wheelchair laughed again—“I offered them a better price. You know what their answer was? Of course you don’t. They offered to go fifty-fifty, no hard feelings—and no trouble.”

  Don Francesco sighed. “I’ll give them trouble. You’ll give them trouble. You’re the man to do it, Lorenzo. I know everything you do, Lorenzo, and I like how you do it.”

  Lorenzo—Larry—Collino had gone away from the big stucco house feeling good. The old man had patted him on the shoulder, said he was depending on him. Before he left there had been another glass of Italian brandy and a brief, dry handshake with the old man.

  At first, it looked easy: hit this trespassing Frenchman, and why not? How could a guy who knew the city like he did fail to knock off a shitty Frenchman—and to hell with the greaseball spics who were riding shotgun for him.

  A month later, sitting in his car across the street from the Corsican Brothers, Collino knew the answer to that one. The Brothers was probably the only real Corsican restaurant in the city—New York didn’t get many Corsicans—but the mother hadn’t turned up. There had been three telephone calls from Garafalo, and all three had mentioned how impatient—pissed-off was Garafalo’s word—Don Francesco was getting at the lack of action. Collino didn’t like Garafalo, but he knew the dick-licker was right. It was his territory and he was supposed to get the job done. Three bullets, the last one in the head to make sure, and one dead Frenchman.

  Putting out the word hadn’t done any good; even friends of the family in the NYPD hadn’t turned up the Frenchman. Thirty men under Collino’s direct command had failed to get a smell. Well, not exactly: a few smells blew down from Harlem, from the Spanish bars on Eighth Avenue below 34th Street. The men who brought the smells and traded them for money said that Jacopetti and his South American gunmen—“tough spics” were invariably the words—could only say that better stuff, shit and coke, was already on the street at better prices than any of the Syndicate families offered.

  It looked like Jacopetti was all over the lot—but never when you needed him. Needed him to put a bullet in his head. Collino kept telling Garafalo that he didn’t need more men. Garafalo said he needed more men. Garafalo thought like Dragnet. Collino knew better, although he knew that Don Francesco’s righthand man was right about one thing: he always wanted to do these jobs on his own.

  Yeah, Collino thought, sitting in his car on East 52nd Street, maybe he did. Maybe he had been a Mafia soldier too long before he made capo in the DeSimone family. But that wasn’t true either; what he was, was an independent—what they called a maverick. It was a flaw, he knew, and he fought against it. Even so, he knew the old man liked him because he always brought home the bacon, in a manner of speaking.

  Smoking another bitter-tasting cigarette, Collino stiffened when he spotted a short man getting out of a cab about halfway down the block from the restaurant. There was no reason for a man to get out of a cab in front of a shuttered pastry store unless he owned it and wanted to go in. The short man got out there and he carried a cane. Collino thought his movements were too deliberate, the way he stooped to tie a shoelace, the way he walked, tapping his cane as if he were blind, although obviously he was not.

  Collino knew it was Jacopetti, though, if questioned, he couldn’t have explained how he knew. Twenty years of stalking men in New York streets had taught him to trust his instincts. He reached into his coat pocket to touch the Smith & Wesson .38, the Military and Police model loaded with hollow-point bullets. He didn’t do it to reassure himself that the revolver was there; the movement was instinctive.

  He grinned as Jacopetti’s pace quickened as he came closer to the entrance to the restaurant. He knew he was right. That had to be it: the Corsican couldn’t wait to roll around in all that food. With the car window open on the far side from the driver’s seat, Collino knew he could try for a long shot with the .38, but that would be stupid. For a month he had searched for the frog-wop motherfucker—and this was no time to get impatient. He had checked out the restaurant: there was no way out in back.

  Now he felt better, he relaxed. They said Frenchmen were big, slow eaters, so why should this guy be different? The cocksucker would stuff his gut; Collino knew the restaurant closed in an hour, so he gave Jacopetti an hour. While he waited he thought of his own supper getting dry in the oven, but that was all right. After tonight, an hour from now, he could get home when his wife Lizabeta said he should.

  Like she said: no later than seven. Lizabeta liked him to be home in time for supper; mostly, though, so he could kiss the two kids goodnight before they went to bed. Collino had married sort of late—his children Mark and Luke were five and four, and he was forty-two—but there was no more devoted father, not a hint of crankiness, in all of Brooklyn.

  Completely relaxed now, he could think of his wife and children. His wife was born in the old country and wanted to give the two boys old country names; and there had been some tension around the house until she gave in and he, the second generation American father, got his way. Collino thought of his own given name Lorenzo. His mother always thought it an elegant name, but then his mother didn’t have to carry it out in the crumbling streets of South Brooklyn. Nowadays the thing was to go back to old country names, but in 1930, when Collino was born, names like Lorenzo were a joke.

  He stopped thinking of his sons and looked at his wristwatch. The Frenchman had been in there for forty-five minutes: it was fifteen minutes to eleven. It would be simple to get out of the car, walk across the street, wait until the Frenchman came out—then hit him. Those were his orders—and they were direct enough—but Collino wanted to make it something special. They said Jacopetti brought a whole shitpot full of stuff into the country. It wasn’t all on the street yet, or else the word would have gone around.

  He looked at his watch again: it was five minutes before eleven. Fuck Garafalo! Maybe he did too much by himself. Like hell he did. Jacopetti walked out of the restaurant, adjusted his hat, and looked around for a taxi. But there were no cabs in sight, and Collino grinned tightly at the way Jacopetti banged his cane on the sidewalk.

  Collino turned the key in the ignition and the engine came to life.

  Chapter Two

  A TAXI WITH an off-duty sign came along as the Frenchman, after waiting for a minute or so, started east for Lexington Avenue. Collino grinned as he watched the Frenchman’s annoyance: he struck the sidewalk so hard with his steel tipped cane that sparks flew. There wasn’t much traffic on the street, but Collino had to stay with the car. Tailing Jacopetti on foot would be less likely to get noticed, but he’d be shit out of luck if the Frenchman got a cab quickly, and there wasn’t another one right behind.

  Jacopetti got to the corner of Lexington and East 52nd Street. Cabs came down the avenue, and the Frenchman snagged a ride on the third try. After the driver picked him up, he moved over into the outside lane, heading south. Collino pushed hard on the gas pedal and the car jumped forward, but he stayed with the inside lane as long as he could without losing the speeding taxi. He had to move out because some chicken-shit tourist, with South Dakota license plates and moving like a funeral, got in his way.

  The Frenchman’s cab went south through Murray Hill, down to 23rd Street, where it turned west and sped across town to 7th Avenue, where it made a left turn and went south again. At Charles Street, just above Sheridan Square, it turned and headed west. It went past the abandoned police station on Charles, with Collino hanging back as far as he could.

  The Frenchman got out at the corner of Charles and Washington. Collino increased his speed, drove past, turned onto Washington and parked halfway down the block. Over in that part of town illegally parked trailer trucks sprawled all over the place like sleeping monsters. He parked between two trucks and got out. It was quiet except for the whooshing sound of traffic on the West Side Highway, another block west from there, but he could hear the rippety-rap of the Frenchman’s leather soles on the crumbling sidewalk.

  Flat against the back of a Hemingway trailer with the jacks down and the cab gone way, he listened to the footsteps crossing the street. Sure—what else? he decided. On the other side of the street there was a big parking lot surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Behind the double gates of steel-poles and chain-link there was a parking attendant’s wooden hut with a badly lettered sign nailed to its side. The daily rates were low and the monthly rates were a bargain at thirty dollars, even if you had to walk that far into the mugger-infested West Village to get your car.

 

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