ran numbers back before I was born, a business line our family all but exited once most states in the Union had sanctioned lotteries. I grew a lot during that period—physically, of course, I started to resemble the rugged structure of my older brothers, Peter and Gino, eighteen and fourteen, respectively—but psychologically, too. Prior to then, I thought my dad was in the restaurant business, and he was, sort of. He owned many—as a means to launder money and shuffle stolen goods out the back. But I soon came to realize that we were special. Mafia special. The terms my father’s family and associates started using in my presence began sounding more significant. Guys were getting whacked, deadbeats were getting roughed up, troublemakers were having their balls handed to them and occasionally shoved down their throats. In my younger days, where my uncle Sal told me to stay out of Vin’s kitchen to forestall the horror of my father’s brutality, now he’d ask me to grab a mop and do my share.
I was, however, only twelve, demonstrated by my assumption that the only targets were the senior McCartneys. But once I heard my father speak of the plan to eliminate all three of them at once, I experienced the very first instance of disrespect for the way my family conducted its business. Why would anyone want to off a child? A child that was probably still learning how to read? Wouldn’t it be easy enough to confuse or scare the kid on the stand?
But here’s the term I heard over and over in our house like a frigging mantra: no loose ends.
I mentally ran through the roster of men in my father’s organization, trying to find the sociopath who might be able to level the barrel at a little girl and pull the trigger. Only one contender came to mind: Paulie Marcone, a nut job who found heartfelt enjoyment in assaulting and killing for any loosely justifiable reason. The problem with Paulie was how odd things would haunt him and cause him to break down. The guy could eat steak pizzaiola every day of the week but couldn’t fathom eating a hunk of veal. He couldn’t bear to see a suffering animal or a crying kid or an old lady struggling to get her groceries to the top floor of her brownstone. Beat him backing into a parking spot on Court Street, though, and you’ll drive home one-handed. This strange, largely unseen sensitive side made him useless in conducting the last hit.
Ultimately, no one materialized—because no one had to; the feds managed to keep the McCartneys well hidden. We had a few people in Justice, mostly lower-level clerks working off gambling debts, who’d occasionally cough up nothing more than advanced notice on what judge we might draw for a particular case or how many boxes of evidence were sitting in a warehouse in Jersey. But getting information on the Federal Witness Protection Program is precisely as difficult as you might imagine. For starters, the program is run out of the U.S. Marshals Service, and the entry points to that system are fragmented; having contacts at Justice wasn’t enough. At the time, we didn’t have direct insiders with the FBI, either—but if we had, they’d have been useless, too. We needed a source at the Marshals Service simply to figure out where to begin.
The entire thing seemed to go away for about a month—for me; tension in our family mounted as the McCartneys disappeared into an oblivion of safety. It should be noted that the one thing the Bovaros have done well since the moment our elders stepped off the boat is the one thing that saved my father from a life in prison. Those things we deal in on a daily basis—money laundering, carting, fixing, bookmaking, loan sharking—are the incidental things that occur as a result of the one integral component. The district attorneys call it fear; we call it influence. Possessing power over others is the most instinctive human concept; you either want it or are willing to succumb to it.
That said, my father’s influence cut a wide swath across this great land, a terribly unfortunate truth for the McCartneys. While the feds did an impressive job of keeping them hidden, they could do little to stop those who served my father. A mere five weeks into their relocation, the little McCartney girl accidentally outed her entire family to her first grade class by using her birth name. Within