The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online Page B

there.” Castellano went in.
    Betty was told, “Esposito is a politician. Castellano is the Godfather.”
    “A killer?” Betty said.
    “He gives the orders to get people killed.”
    At the meetings of the two, which were often, she never said a word to them and always tried to be busy so she wouldn’t have to look.
    Castellano, the boss of his crime family, was the man in charge, and Esposito was a loud messenger boy. He was the boss of everything in local politics in Brooklyn and a lot of the city, and he had a rough charm, which was fine in cheap politics, but his true strength was the field-artillery battalion lined up behind Paul Castellano.
    On one occasion Betty was aware of Castellano leaving for the elevator, but Esposito did not come out for some time. She wondered if she should go back and look in theoffice and see if he had been killed there. She saw the door slightly open. Esposito was on the phone.
    “I knew the FBI was around,” Betty was remembering. “Castellano was friendly with one of them. I know they even came up to the office. They weren’t there to arrest him. They liked him. I don’t know what that was about. Were they working for him? I don’t know. It looked like it.”
     
    Today the number of Mafia members with long-range money is infinitesimal. You need no complicated thinking to be a gangster. You can be an illiterate in good clothes, and you don’t have to work. All through the years, the worst penalty for these men has been honest labor. A neighborhood tough guy I used to know, his name was Jack, was up for parole at Attica and needed a legitimate job, a can opener, or he would have to remain for the last six months of a long sentence. I went to three people, who told me, “Please, no ex-cons. They don’t want to work.” Finally a guy I knew who had a fuel-oil delivery business took Jack on. That got him out of jail. He came home from Attica. With flourishes, amid vows to the sky of total honesty, Jack started his job on a Monday. On Wednesday his boss called me. “Where is he?” he asked. I stuttered, then said, “He’ll straighten out. Let me get at him. It’s just one day.” The boss said, “He wasn’t here yesterday either.”
    These people are not attracted to work even in illegitimate places. Sal Reale had his airline workers’ union officejust outside Kennedy, and it was all right, except he had to hire people highly recommended by the Gambino family. Sal had a list of employees’ credentials. Typical was:
    “Harry D’s son-in-law—$200G”
    “Harry D’s wife—$150G”
    Each morning the list ruled the office, particularly when work orders started to fill the in-baskets.
    “The morning starts with sixty-two people in the office,” Sal recalls. “By ten o’clock there were twelve people working. We had a lot of paperwork. You had to fill out insurance forms, various federal forms, everything you think of that they could put on paper. We were left with twelve people to do the work. Where did the others go? Here’s a woman who gets up, picks up her purse, and walks past me without even nodding. I call after her, ‘Couldn’t you give us a hand?’ She says, ‘I was told I didn’t have to do any of this work. I have to get my hair done. I’m Paul Vario’s cousin.’”
     
    The Mafia no longer sends great chords crashing down from the heavens. As it dissolves, you inspect it for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are actually either unintelligible or ignored.
    It lasted longest in film and print, through the false drama of victims’ being shot gloriously with machine guns but without the usual exit wounds the size of a soup plate.The great interest in the Mafia was the result of its members’ being so outrageously disdainful of all rules that just the sight of a mobster caused gleeful whispers. Somebody writing for a living could find it extremely difficult to