perfect circle. Their strategy had been this: Instead of nailing the one person with enough knowledge to bring down the entire organization and finding a way to force them to testify, grab all the little people with partial knowledge and weave a fabric of corruption. Instead of one key witness, bring on fifty to a hundred witnesses with something worth saying, anything.
This line of attack had a hidden benefit: In prior cases against us, as in the instance of the McCartneys, we had one unified target to eliminate. But here, how would we eliminate dozens of people? Even if we could, how would we ever know who they were? And how would we make them disappear without widening the potential circle of new witnesses?
This plan started to unfold once people we dealt with on a peripheral basis started mentioning to our crew that some guys came by asking questions. At first, it didn’t matter; that kind of stuff happened on a regular basis. But once Peter and Pop and the rest of us started comparing notes, it became evident the problem was epidemic.
At the same time, my father hinted that he was receiving nebulous information from someone inside Justice about the government’s general intentions, someone working with my father—and only my father—that the source, while not providing comprehensive data, would be kept strictly to him. My first thought was that it was not Gardner; we’d already pushed him for operational data year after year and every time he’d tell us the same thing: that his databases were not within that scope.
Based on the information we were getting from people on the street, coupled with the vague information supplied to us from my father’s inside source, it became apparent that a storm was on the horizon—a rain that would last for months, flood our homes, and destroy our land.
I met my father, brothers, and a few senior crew members at my parents’ house in Tenafly to discuss the list of potential problem witnesses—the obvious fruit that Justice had picked—and prioritize the ones to be immediately eliminated. Again, killing was never taken lightly in our home, and I could read the stress the event was causing in my father’s demeanor, his concentrated focus and near silence. Justice had played their hand well, for we were no longer going to kill individuals; we were going to kill witnesses, and the potential punishment would be all that more severe. This meant choosing wisely, eliminating only those we were certain would be testifying, the ones most likely to want to see us pay.
This team, possibly the largest group I’d ever seen assembled at one time, was spread evenly across my father’s den. The Bovaro men, the capos, and a few from my father’s growing circle of trusted associates shared our insights into those we knew best, those we could vouch for, those who seemed untrustworthy. I offered up as much as I could, but most of the people I associated with were semilegitimate guys serving Sylvia, though using their businesses for some other illegal and higher-profit endeavor. I trusted all of them as much as I trusted anyone outside of my bloodline, couldn’t recommend putting a bullet in a single one. My casual everyone-is-okay-on-my-end position came across as my not having put much thought into it all, and I got the most skeptical looks from the most recent additions to my father’s circle of trust: Donny Vingelli, a punk about my age and nephew of my father’s sister, whose primary interest lay in jacking cars; and Edoardo “Eddie” Gravina, an associate whose greatest accomplishment was his identical age to my father, a slender guy with snow white hair and a silver mustache who only spoke when he had something of value to offer, words so anticipated that when he spoke everyone froze to listen, the closest thing my father ever had to a consigliere.
As the meeting progressed, we spent less and less time discussing each individual, a consequence of there simply being too many choices. The group of us sat far from the wives and children of the family, the content of the entire conversation masked in double meanings. This is the life we led, where someone is usually listening.
My father rubbed his temples. “Sammy Meat Market.” Ted Simone, owner of Brooklyn Meats and Cheeses.
Peter slowly nodded. “Agreed. Always thought his meat was going bad.” Neither liked nor trusted the guy.
My brother Jimmy, wanting to bring more to the table than muscle, offered people up