The third man, Salvatore Fiore, was almost a midget. He stood five feet three inches and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. He had the innocent face of a choirboy and was equally adept with a gun or a knife. Women were greatly attracted to the little man, and he boasted a wife, half a dozen girl friends, and a beautiful mistress. Fiore had once been a jockey, working the tracks from Pimlico to Tijuana. When the racing commissioner at Hollywood Park banned Fiore for doping a horse, the commissioner’s body was found floating in Lake Tahoe a week later.
The three men were soldati in Antonio Granelli’s Family, but it was Michael Moretti who had brought them in, and they belonged to him, body and soul.
In the dining room, a Family meeting was taking place. Seated at the head of the table was Antonio Granelli, capo of the most powerful Mafia Family on the east coast. Seventy-two years old, he was still a powerful-looking man with the shoulders and broad chest of a laborer, and a shock of white hair. Born in Palermo, Sicily, Antonio Granelli came to America when he was fifteen and went to work on the waterfront on the west side of lower Manhattan. By the time he was twenty-one, he was lieutenant to the dock boss. The two men had an argument, and when the boss mysteriously disappeared, Antonio Granelli had taken over. Anyone who wanted to work on the docks had to pay him. He had used the money to begin his climb to power, and had expanded rapidly, branching out into loan-sharking and the numbers racket, prostitution and gambling and drugs and murder. Over the years he had been indicted thirty-two times and had only been convicted once, on a minor assault charge. Granelli was a ruthless man with the down-to-earth cunning of a peasant, and a total amorality.
To Granelli’s left sat Thomas Colfax, the Family consigliere. Twenty-five years earlier, Colfax had had a brilliant future as a corporation lawyer, but he had defended a small olive-oil company which turned out to be Mafia-controlled and, step by step, had been lured into handling other cases for the Mafia until finally, through the years, the Granelli Family had become his sole client. It was a very lucrative client and Thomas Colfax became a wealthy man, with extensive real estate holdings and bank accounts all over the world.
To the right of Antonio Granelli sat Michael Moretti, his son-in-law. Michael was ambitious, a trait that made Granelli nervous. Michael did not fit into the pattern of the Family. His father, Giovanni, a distant cousin of Antonio Granelli, had been born not in Sicily but in Florence. That alone made the Moretti family suspect—everybody knew that Florentines were not to be trusted.
Giovanni Moretti had come to America and opened a shop as a shoemaker, running it honestly, without even a back room for gambling or loan-sharking or girls. Which made him stupid.
Giovanni’s son, Michael, was entirely different. He had put himself through Yale and the Wharton School of Business. When Michael had finished school, he had gone to his father with one request: He wanted to meet his distant relative, Antonio Granelli. The old shoemaker had gone to see his cousin and the meeting had been arranged. Granelli was sure that Michael was going to ask for a loan so that he could go into some kind of business, maybe open a shoe shop like his dumb father. But the meeting had been a surprise.
“I know how to make you rich,” Michael Moretti had begun.
Antonio Granelli had looked at the impudent young man and had smiled tolerantly. “I am rich.”
“No. You just think you’re rich.”
The smile had died away. “What the hell you talkin’ about, kid?”
And Michael Moretti had told him.
Antonio Granelli had moved cautiously at first, testing each piece of Michael’s advice. Everything had succeeded brilliantly. Where before, the Granelli Family had been involved in profitable illegal activities, under Michael Moretti’s supervision it branched out. Within five years the Family was into dozens of legitimate businesses, including meat-packing, linen supplies, restaurants, trucking companies and pharmaceuticals. Michael found ailing companies that needed financing and the Family went in as a minor partner and gradually took over, stripping away whatever assets there were. Old companies with impeccable reputations suddenly found themselves bankrupt. The businesses that showed a satisfactory profit, Michael hung on to and he increased the profits tremendously, for the workers in those businesses were controlled by his unions, and the company took their insurance through one of the Family-owned insurance companies, and they bought their automobiles from one of the Family’s automobile dealers. Michael created a symbiotic giant, a series of businesses through which the consumer was constantly being milked—and the milk flowed to the Family.
In spite of his successes, Michael Moretti was aware that he had a problem. Once he had shown Antonio Granelli the rich, ripe horizons of legitimate enterprise, Granelli no longer needed him. He was expensive, because in the beginning he had persuaded Antonio Granelli to give him a percentage of what everyone was sure would be a small pot. But as Michael’s ideas began to bear fruit and the profits poured in, Granelli had second thoughts. By chance, Michael learned that Granelli had held a meeting to discuss what the Family should do with him.
“I don’t like to see all this money goin’ to the kid,” Granelli had said. “We get rid of him.”
Michael had circumvented that scheme by marrying into the Family. Rosa, Antonio Granelli’s only daughter, was nineteen years old. Her mother had died giving birth to her, and Rosa had been brought up in a convent and was allowed to come home only during the holidays. Her father adored her, and he saw to it that she was protected and sheltered. It was on a school holiday, an Easter, that Rosa met Michael Moretti. By the time she returned to the convent, she was madly in love with him. The memory of his dark good looks drove her to do things when she was alone that the nuns told her were sins against God.