Road to Paradise Read online

  Little Sammy’s expression froze.

  “Ah, don’t be a pussy, kid! He deserved it. So upstairs I join the dinner party and give a speech about Patsy, only it ain’t no jolly-good-fellow spiel. It’s me saying that Patsy broke my heart by stealing from me, but that I loved him so much, I decided to forgive him. Right then the fellas drag Patsy up and toss him in the middle of the room, naked, burned, dripping with piss.”

  Sam started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  The nephew watched with a strained smile.

  Shaking a school teacherly finger, Sam said, “And do you think any of them people ever pulled anything on me again? Patsy is still with me, and he don’t snitch a penny since. See, kid? Psychology!”

  The boy sighed. “I don’t know, Uncle Sam. You’re stronger than me. Better…mental toughness.”

  He patted the boy’s leg. “You’ll get there, Little Sam. You’ll get there. You remind people of me, otherwise they wouldn’t give you that nickname, right?”

  “Right. What about this…this trial coming up?”

  “Just a nuisance. We’re workin’ on where the safe house is, where they got Chuckie holed up. We’ll take care of that little thing.”

  Sam DeStefano was out on bail, his old partner Chuckie Grimaldi having flipped on him. What a crock! The murder was what, ten years ago? Old fucking news! The ancient stiff in question was that guy Foreman, a real estate broker who’d also been a collector for Sam, and who had been embezzling from Sam (hadn’t Foreman heard about Patsy’s party?).

  When Sam had confronted Foreman (when was it, 1963?), the bozo had said, “Big deal! So maybe I made some arithmetic mistakes.”

  “Yeah, well add this up,” Sam had said. “You think Action Jackson had it tough? You’re gonna think we took that fat bastard out on a picnic, when we’re through with your crooked ass.”

  A few weeks later, Foreman died with a smile on his face—happy that it was over.

  Now Chuckie, who’d been in on it, had turned government witness, the disloyal fuck.

  “Hey,” Sam said, walking his nephew out, a hand on the young man’s shoulder, “in the unlikely event it does go to trial, I’ll just give ’em a little of the ol’ ‘Mad Sam’ magic.”

  “What do you mean, Unk?”

  “I’m a sick man. I’ll go in on a stretcher and do what I did last time—talk to the judge usin’ a bullhorn. I’ll go off my nut yakkin’ about this being America, how we’re livin’ in a gestapo country, and I got civil rights just like the coons.”

  “More psychology, Unk?”

  Sam laughed. “Oh yeah. If I don’t scare ’em away, I’ll get off on temporary insanity.”

  The boy sighed glumly. “Too bad these federal courts are getting into the game.”

  “Yeah.” Sam shook his head. “Goddamn pity. Here I am, biggest fixer in town, can buy anybody outa anything…and I’m havin’ to deal with this J. fucking Edgar Hoover, who is a fag, incidentally.”

  “No!”

  “Do you know that fed, that big guy—Roemer?”

  “Heard of him.”

  “He tried to turn me state’s witness. Me! I played along, awhile, had him out to the house maybe half a dozen times. Rolled out the red carpet. He didn’t know, every morning before he come around, I was pissing in his coffee.”

  “What? Unkie, you are outa sight!”

  Sam hit his nephew lightly on the arm, saying, “Don’t insult me with that hippie shit, you little hippie shit.”

  “Unk, you’re a caution.…”

  Little Sammy was still laughing when he rolled away in the Rambler, waving to his uncle.

  The boy would come around; he would.

  Walking slowly back toward the garage, Sam smiled to himself, reflecting on how much he loved this boy, and what plans and hopes and dreams he had for his nickname namesake. His own children were not going into the family business—his son was in college, and the twin girls would grow up and marry well, no doubt, smart little cutie pies that they were—and he liked that his three off spring would be free of this dangerous life.

  But he also liked having Little Sammy going down the same road as his uncle. Sam had a special kinship for the young man, and even felt he owed Antonio a debt of sorts. Little Sammy was like having a second chance with Angelo, the brother Sam had lost so many years ago.

  Angelo had been a drug addict. This was a shameful thing that embarrassed Sam with the Outfit. So when Giancana expressed concern that Angelo might—due to this weakness—become unreliable, Sam had read between the lines and taken on the responsibility.

  After stabbing his brother to death in a car, Sam had taken Angelo to where he could strip him and wash his body with soap and water. To send him to God clean, to cleanse Angelo’s very soul. Angelo was found that way, naked and clean and dead, in the trunk of a car.

  In the garage, Sam got his broom and dustpan, and soon the mound of dirt in the driveway was transferred to a nearby garbage can. Finally he stood in the midst of the garage, hands on his hips, thinking what a job well-done this was, how pleased Anita would be with him. He was doing a sort of pirouette, taking the tidy garage in, when—with his back to the street—he missed seeing the new visitor arrive.

  But he heard the footsteps, and whirled, and saw a figure dressed for winter—black stocking mask showing only cold dark eyes, and a black turtleneck, slacks, and boots, even a black topcoat, from under which emerged in black gloved hands a double-barreled shotgun.

  “You fucker,” Sam said, and the visitor fired once, blowing off Sam’s right arm.

  Sam did not fall, just did a small dance, like a tightrope walker keeping his footing. He stood there, weaving just a little, looking down at his arm, which lay like a big dead fish, even flopping, twitching a little. Damnedest thing. He heard something, a kind of splashing, spraying sound, and his eyes quickly went to the wall at his right, where he was geysering blood, painting his own Picasso, his workshop area finally as bloody as the other one in the soundproofed room downstairs.

  The voice was familiar, but muffled enough under the ski mask to remain unidentifiable.

  “You really don’t deserve it quick,” the visitor said, “but I’m in a hurry.”

  The second blast opened Sam’s chest. He gazed down at the gaping hole in himself and swallowed once and collapsed in a pile too big for any dustpan.

  Then Sam DeStefano was gone, and his visitor, too.

  No time at all for psychology.

  BOOK

  ONE

  CASTLE IN THE AIR

  One Week Earlier

  ONE

  On the morning of the day his life went to hell, Michael Satariano felt fine.

  At fifty, a slender five feet ten, with a face that had remained boyish, his dark-brown Beatle-banged hair only lightly touched with gray at the temples, Michael appeared easily ten years younger, and the guess most people made was, “Thirty-five?” Only the deep vertical groove that concentration and worry had carved between his eyebrows gave any hint that life had ever been a burden.

  He wore a gray sharkskin suit and a darker gray tie and a very light gray shirt; he did not go in for either the cheesy pastels or Day-Glo colors that so many middle-aged men were affecting in a sad attempt to seem hip. His major concession to fashion was a little sideburn action—that was about it.

  And unlike many (most) Outfit guys, Michael had no penchant for jewelry—today he wore pearl cufflinks, gold wedding band on his left hand, and single-carat emerald with gold setting on his right. The latter, a present from his wife, Pat, was as ostentatious as he got.

  His health was perfect, aided and abetted by nonsmoking and light alcohol consumption. His eyesight was fine—in the one eye that war had left him, anyway—and he did not even need glasses for reading, which remained the closest thing to a vice he had. If pulp fiction were pasta, Michael would have been as fat as his food-and-beverage man here at Cal-Neva—give him the company of Louis L’Amour, Mickey Spillane, or Ray Bradbury,
and he was content.

  Neither could gambling be counted among the sins of the man whose official position at the resort/casino was entertainment director. Nor did he have a reputation for womanizing—he had been married since 1943 to Patricia Ann, the woman he always introduced as his “childhood sweetheart”—and though working in environs littered with attractive young women (from waitresses to showgirls, actresses to songbirds), he rarely felt tempted and had not given in. It was said (not entirely accurately) that he’d never missed a Sunday mass since his marriage.

  For this reason he had acquired a mocking nickname—the Saint.

  Saint Satariano, the wise guys called him, particularly the Chicago crowd. Not that his churchgoing ways were the only thing behind the moniker: for three decades now he had served as the Outfit’s respectable front man in various endeavors, the Italian boy who had been the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner of World War II, the combat soldier whose fame rivaled that of Audie Murphy.

  “Saint” had not been his first nickname.

  During his months on Bataan in the Philippines, when he was barely out of high school, Michael had earned from the Filipino Scouts a deadly sobriquet: un Demonio Angelico. He had killed literally scores of Japanese in those vicious early days of the war, and had lost his left eye saving Major General Jonathan Wainwright from a strafing Zero. The latter event had been prominent in his Medal of Honor citation, but so had an afternoon battle in which he’d taken out an even fifty of the enemy.

  General MacArthur himself had helped smuggle the wounded soldier off Bataan, to give stateside morale a boost with the war’s first American GI hero. But Michael had not lasted long on the PR podium and rubber-chicken circuit—he kept asking his audiences to remember his fellow “boys” who had been abandoned by Uncle Sam back on that bloody island.

  And so the adopted son of Pasquale and Sophia Satariano was sent back to Chicago a proud son of Italy (few knew that the boy was really Irish), and had been embraced by Al Capone’s successor himself, the dapper and intelligent Frank Nitti, as a good example of just how patriotic a dago could be, Mussolini go fuck himself.

  What Nitti had not realized was that Michael was fighting another war, a separate war, a personal war.

  The young man’s real father had been blessed (or perhaps damned) with his own colorful nickname: the Angel of Death. Michael Satariano was in long-ago reality Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., son of the infamous enforcer who had railed against the Looney gang of the Tri-Cities and their powerful allies, the Capone mob of Chicago.…

  …that same Angel of Death whose face had appeared on True Detective magazine covers, and in several movies that had romanticized Mike O’Sullivan, Sr., into a kind of Robin Hood who had traveled the Midwest stealing mob money from banks and giving it to poor farmers and other Depression unfortunates.

  The story went that Mike O’Sullivan had been the top lieutenant of Rock Island’s Irish godfather, John Looney, but that (back in ’31) O’Sullivan and Looney’s homicidal off spring Connor had vied for the old man’s chair, which led to an attempt on O’Sullivan’s life, that succeeded only in taking out the Angel’s wife, Annie, and younger son, Peter.

  This tale was true as far as it went, but the power-play aspect was guesswork by second- and third-rate journalists. Michael Satariano knew why and how the Looney feud had really begun: he himself, at the tender age of eleven, had stowed away on one of his father’s “missions” (as he and Peter used to romantically put it, daydreaming that Papa and his gun were doing the bidding of President Hoover).

  Instead the boy had stumbled onto a mob killing, witnessing Connor Looney murdering an unarmed man, followed by his own father machine-gunning a clutch of the murdered man’s understandably riled compatriots.

  So it was that Connor had schemed to wipe out the O’Sullivan family, only to fail miserably, as was Connor’s wont.

  The two surviving O’Sullivans—Michaels senior and junior—had become outlaws, moving by car from one small Midwestern town to another, striking out at the Capone Outfit by hitting banks where the gang hid its loot, to pressure the Chicago Boys into giving Connor over to the Angel’s righteous vengeance. This went on for six long dangerous months—young Michael himself had killed several times in defense of himself and his father—until finally Capone and his top man, Frank Nitti, handed Connor Looney on a platter to Michael O’Sullivan.

  When Connor finally lay dead in the gutter of a Rock Island street, O’Sullivan struck a peace with the Chicago Outfit; but Capone and Nitti betrayed that pact, dispatching an assassin who indeed cut down O’Sullivan Senior—an assassin Michael himself had then killed…despite the pulp-magazine-and-Hollywood sugarcoating of a child unable to pull the trigger, only to have his dying father bail him out with a bullet.

  Eliot Ness—the famous Untouchable, to whom Michael O’Sullivan, Sr., had turned over evidence on Old Man Looney, consigning him to stir—had placed Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., in that orphanage in Downer’s Grove. And his new parents, the Satarianos, had never known of his real beginnings, raising him in idyllic smalltown DeKalb, outside of Chicago.

  In 1942, when he went to work for the Outfit, Michael Satariano’s pedigree had seemed as perfect as his Medal of Honor heroics. In those early days, to put himself in solid, he had committed acts for Frank Nitti not unlike those his father had done for John Looney; but his plans for settling scores had gone awry, when the architect of his father’s murder, Al Capone, revealed himself to be a drooling VD-ravaged near-vegetable, beyond any revenge, save for what God might eventually have in store.

  And then an unexpected friendship had grown between Michael Satariano and Frank Nitti, that dignified, intelligent CEO of organized crime. As an Outfit soldier who’d killed in the line of duty, Michael had taken the blood oath of omertà, and now found himself a member of Chicago’s La Cosa Nostra family, whether he liked it or not.

  The saving grace had been that damned Medal of Honor, and the fact that Michael Satariano had not a single arrest on his record. Oh, he’d been brought in for questioning a few times, and was known to have associated with certain notorious types; but for a Sicilian “made man” to look so respectable was a not-so-small miracle in the world of the Outfit.

  His new godfather had been Paul Ricca, and the white-haired, slender ganglord—the only man in the mob who knew that Satariano was in reality O’Sullivan—had over the years treated him almost like a son, or perhaps grandson. Ricca had protected Michael, and used him wisely and well, in key management positions at Outfit-owned entertainment venues.

  Michael had started by booking acts at the Chez Paree, the closest thing to a Vegas showroom in the Windy City, and the Chez also boasted a huge casino, running wide-open with police protection. In the early ’60s, when Mr. Kelly’s, the Happy Medium, and the Playboy Club heralded a hipper Second City scene, the Chez finally folded, and Michael was dispatched to Vegas, where more traditional show biz still held sway.

  As “entertainment director” of the Sands, he met all the big stars, and became friendly with that charming manic depressive Frank Sinatra, and the other Clan members like Sammy Davis and Dino (the term “Rat Pack” was one Sinatra despised). Michael did more than just run the showroom and the lounges, however—he learned the casino business, and rose to second-in-command. Soon the Outfit honchos had big things in mind for Michael.

  Then, just as the ’60s got into gear, Michael’s guardian godfathers, Ricca and Accardo, retired, allowing that crazy whack job Sam “Mooney” Giancana to take the top chair. Even on the periphery, however, the two respected elders held a fair share of power, keeping various fingers in assorted pies, and reining Mooney in.

  Still, Michael knew his long period of protection had ended.

  Giancana, the unpredictable hoodlum who’d been chauffeur and snarling bodyguard to both the former bosses, had come to power via reckless violence and sheer moneymaking ability—Mooney had, for example, taken over (bloodily) the Negro numbers racket, a
great earner for the mob to this day. The level-headed, dignified Frank Nitti must have been spinning in his grave, what with that psycho punk from the Patch’s old 42 gang holding the Capone throne.

  On the other hand, Giancana had always been friendly if patronizing to Michael, for example when he gave Michael the entertainment director position at the Villa Venice, an elaborate nightclub in the northwestern Chicago boonies. For two months, top talent came in, in particular the Clan of Sinatra, Dino, and Sammy Davis…none of whom were paid a cent, doing the gig as a favor to Giancana (presumably as a repayment for helping Sinatra’s pal Jack Kennedy get to the White House). After the show, guests were taken two blocks by shuttle for fleecing at a Quonset hut with a plush casino interior. Then Giancana—aware that FBI eyes were on him—shuttered the facility, pocketing three mil.

  Soon, mysteriously, the handsomely insured Villa Venice facility burned down.

  Again, Michael had had nothing to do with the casino end, his role that of a glorified handshaker, not unlike the indignity former heavyweight champ Joe Louis suffered in Vegas, where a casino employed him as a greeter. The Medal of Honor winner with the boyish countenance rated big with the Chicago columnists, guys like Irv Kupcinet and Herb Lyon, and if the Outfit could have been said to have a golden boy in the ’60s and early ’70s, Michael Satariano was it.

  And Giancana himself was pleased enough with Michael to offer him a real job, specifically that big promotion he’d been groomed for by Ricca and Accardo: in 1964, Michael Satariano became entertainment director (and in reality top boss) here at the Cal-Neva Lodge and Casino at Lake Tahoe.

  Pronounced Kal-Neeva, the resort dated back to the ’20s, a rustic fishing/gaming retreat built on the California/Nevada state line, which bisected Lake Tahoe south to north, running up the hilly, rocky shoreline and through the hotel’s central building (and fireplace and outdoor kidney-shaped swimming pool). Six of its acres were on the California side, eight on the Nevada. Before gambling in Nevada was legalized in 1931, the casino’s gaming tables were on wheels, to be rolled across the dark line on the wooden floor to California, should Nevada coppers show, and vice versa. In the years since, food, drink, and guests had stayed in California, with the casino all the way over in Nevada…across that painted line.