See No Evil by Ron Felber Read Free Book Online

they’d eaten and drunk to satiation , his aides suddenly surrounded his guests and tied them to their chairs. Then, Capone picked up a baseball bat and with slow and cool deliberation, beat each one of them to death. Even men like Bugs Moran seemed shocked when on Valentine’s Day, nine months later, four men dressed in police uniforms, lined six of Moran’s soldiers and an innocent bystander against the wall of the S-M-C Cartage Company warehouse, riddled them with machine-gun bullets, then fired a shotgun at close range into the faces of those who were still moving. “There’s only one man who kills like that,” Bugs Moran later told police. “‘The Beast,’ Al Capone.”
    Stories not unlike these would circulate among Elliot’s associates about John Gotti as he worked his way up the Mafia ladder, earning his “bones” through murders equally brutal. But that would be later. The problem Johnny Boy faced in the fall of 1969 was a thirty-month stay in Lewisburg Penitentiary for December 1967 and February 1968 hijacking convictions, followed by an interstate theft and kidnapping conviction just two months later. Soon after his release from prison in 1972, however, the irrepressible Teflon Don would strategize a way into the heart of Don Carlo Gambino and position himself for all the fame his hero, Capone, had achieved while living up to the worst fears of all the godfathers before him.
    By 1972, as Gotti and Giuliani were making names for themselves at opposite poles of American society, Elliot saw his reputation among Manhattan’s medical elite growing exponentially with honors like the Medical Center of Brooklyn’s Research Committee Award and the Boehinger-Ingelhein Scholar Award given by the American College of Chest Physicians. Though meetings with goodfellas from the old neighborhood became infrequent, his childhood reputation of being a man who could be trusted was enhanced by his successful dealings with Dellacroce so that he was now considered a full-fledged “associate” of the Gambino Family.
    During that early period of his double life, Elliot’s involvement with the mob remained limited to three key areas: one, treating Gambino Family members because they knew he was a top-flight physician; two, recruiting young interns for their thriving illegal abortion trade; three, disposing of evidence and sensitive medical records. Evidence could be a spent bullet recovered from a gunshot victim, which might prove embarrassing if reported to the police. Sensitive information could be a drug overdose, the physical presence of illegal drugs on a patient’s person, or the very fact that a particular man, someone fleeing the police, for example, had ever come into the emergency room for treatment.
    As they say, there was no “heavy lifting” until a hot summer night in June when a knock sounded at the door of Elliot’s two-bedroom apartment sometime around midnight. Even with money coming in from other interests, he spent twelve to fifteen hours a day at the hospital, so he’d already fallen into a sound sleep.
    Groggy, Elliot looked through the peephole in his apartment door and was startled to see three intimidating men. The biggest, pounding with his closed fist, was in his midforties , square faced and broad of frame. He wore a dark suit and looked like a bodybuilder. The other two were younger, maybe in their late twenties, with long slicked-back black hair, black slacks with shirts opened down to the fifth button, gold crucifixes dangling.
    “Dr. Litner? Dr. Litner!”
    “Yes …”
    “Neil said you would help us. We need you to see someone . It’s important.”
    Reluctantly, Elliot opened the door, “Jesus, it must be midnight …”
    “We know that,” the large man answered stepping in through the door as the others who didn’t seem to understand much of what was being said stood in the hallway, “but we need to go now. Like I said, we’re friends of Neil, Sal, too. There’s a sick man