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Authors: Brian Garfield
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of a thick, red-nosed man, squinting and hard-jawed behind the wheelâthen it was gone beyond the freeway overpass, the wind rush and dopplering-down engine roar fading. Nobody I knew. I chastised myself with profanity for being a jumpy fool and chugged onto the road, headed for the foothills east of the city.
As the Jeep surged along the eastbound boulevards I reviewed what I knew about Vincent Madonna.
Madonna, at fifty-five or thereabouts, had arrived in the States at the age of six or seven, grown up in East Harlem and the Bronx and graduated from hoodlum to crook to gangster. At various times he had been named publicly by the FBI and other agencies as a wartime gasoline ration-coupon racketeer (arrested in 1944; released when witnesses failed to turn up), as a labor union and slot machine boss, andâin the early fiftiesâas the top enforcer of the Mosto Family, which went west to Las Vegas in 1949 and moved into the Southwest. When Don Frank Mosto had died of natural causes a few years ago, the resulting gangland earthquake had settled with Madonna firmly established; even since then, he had stood on his empire like a crowing cock on a dunghill. He was big and powerful and had tried to polish himself with a surface of respectability, but he hadnât succeeded; Madonna had come a long way up from the gutter but he never managed to wash off the smell. He lived in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and circumscribed by the law of omerta âthe Cosa Nostra code of silence. He paid a New York outfit $20,000 a year to keep his name out of the papers; he put a price on everything, and a value on nothing. A nice cozy chap to deal with. I had never met him, but there wasnât a cop south of Boise who didnât know him by sight.
The foothill suburban ghetto which Madonna inhabited was singularly free of crimeâa fact that had puzzled me when I was a cop, because it was the kind of rich folksâ neighborhood that normally makes fine pickings for cat thieves and night-crawling burglars. I soon learned the warnings had gone out: independent crooks were to stay out of the area and avoid giving it a bad name. Any lone wolf crook who ignored the warnings was likely to disappear permanently. Madonna didnât want to give the cops any excuse to prowl the neighborhood, because he didnât have all the cops in his pocket. It would have been not only expensive but impossible: there were certain cops he couldnât get to. Not all cops were actively corrupt, although virtually all of them were passively corrupt: they couldnât help knowing their buddies were on the take, but they did nothing about it. Corruption was not open, it was never admitted; a bribed cop stood on tenuous footing, and wasnât likely to confess his corruption, not even to another cop he was sure was equally guilty. And no honest cop could feel safe in blowing the whistle; he couldnât be sure of the superior officer to whom he had to blow the whistle. The power of graft-producing organizations like Madonnaâs lay in that twilight dubiousness: no official could trust a fellow official enough to spell out what he knew.
Vincent Madonnaâs command fortress was a sprawling foothill mansion perched on a cactus-studded knell with a view of the entire city. It was an architectural bastardâpart Spanish adobe-mission, part Texas ranch style, part Sunday Times house-beautiful feature page. All on one story, it had several wings and outbuildings, spidering out with the shambling graceless opulence of a Las Vegas motel. There were sprinklers on the lawn, ticking loudly, and four or five cars cooling their wheels in the circular gravel drive, including Madonnaâs 1941 Lincoln Continental, a painstakingly restored classic. Everybodyâs got to have a hobby. The smell of the watered grass was a warm spice that registered keenly in my nostrils when I parked the Jeep behind the Continental and stepped out.
I had taken
As the Jeep surged along the eastbound boulevards I reviewed what I knew about Vincent Madonna.
Madonna, at fifty-five or thereabouts, had arrived in the States at the age of six or seven, grown up in East Harlem and the Bronx and graduated from hoodlum to crook to gangster. At various times he had been named publicly by the FBI and other agencies as a wartime gasoline ration-coupon racketeer (arrested in 1944; released when witnesses failed to turn up), as a labor union and slot machine boss, andâin the early fiftiesâas the top enforcer of the Mosto Family, which went west to Las Vegas in 1949 and moved into the Southwest. When Don Frank Mosto had died of natural causes a few years ago, the resulting gangland earthquake had settled with Madonna firmly established; even since then, he had stood on his empire like a crowing cock on a dunghill. He was big and powerful and had tried to polish himself with a surface of respectability, but he hadnât succeeded; Madonna had come a long way up from the gutter but he never managed to wash off the smell. He lived in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and circumscribed by the law of omerta âthe Cosa Nostra code of silence. He paid a New York outfit $20,000 a year to keep his name out of the papers; he put a price on everything, and a value on nothing. A nice cozy chap to deal with. I had never met him, but there wasnât a cop south of Boise who didnât know him by sight.
The foothill suburban ghetto which Madonna inhabited was singularly free of crimeâa fact that had puzzled me when I was a cop, because it was the kind of rich folksâ neighborhood that normally makes fine pickings for cat thieves and night-crawling burglars. I soon learned the warnings had gone out: independent crooks were to stay out of the area and avoid giving it a bad name. Any lone wolf crook who ignored the warnings was likely to disappear permanently. Madonna didnât want to give the cops any excuse to prowl the neighborhood, because he didnât have all the cops in his pocket. It would have been not only expensive but impossible: there were certain cops he couldnât get to. Not all cops were actively corrupt, although virtually all of them were passively corrupt: they couldnât help knowing their buddies were on the take, but they did nothing about it. Corruption was not open, it was never admitted; a bribed cop stood on tenuous footing, and wasnât likely to confess his corruption, not even to another cop he was sure was equally guilty. And no honest cop could feel safe in blowing the whistle; he couldnât be sure of the superior officer to whom he had to blow the whistle. The power of graft-producing organizations like Madonnaâs lay in that twilight dubiousness: no official could trust a fellow official enough to spell out what he knew.
Vincent Madonnaâs command fortress was a sprawling foothill mansion perched on a cactus-studded knell with a view of the entire city. It was an architectural bastardâpart Spanish adobe-mission, part Texas ranch style, part Sunday Times house-beautiful feature page. All on one story, it had several wings and outbuildings, spidering out with the shambling graceless opulence of a Las Vegas motel. There were sprinklers on the lawn, ticking loudly, and four or five cars cooling their wheels in the circular gravel drive, including Madonnaâs 1941 Lincoln Continental, a painstakingly restored classic. Everybodyâs got to have a hobby. The smell of the watered grass was a warm spice that registered keenly in my nostrils when I parked the Jeep behind the Continental and stepped out.
I had taken
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