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wealthy one.”
    The newspapers, the official said, are filled with speculations about Tramonti’s exploits and origins. He produced a copy of one called La Imparcial. On the front was a picture of Carlo Tramonti in chains at the New Orleans airport and a flattering file photo of Daniel Brendan Shea.
    Tramonti handed it back, stone-faced.
    “Whatever small help I might be able to give you for that school,” he said to the official, “will be impossible while I am in here. I am a victim of the kind of injustice men face only in nightmares. Without my lawyers or my accountants or my brother Agostino…” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.
    Three days later, that was where Augie Tramonti found him. Carlo’s shoes had been spit-shined and a trash can had been placed right outside the bars. A bed-sheet concealed the cell’s sink and toilet.
    The brothers embraced. The brothers wept. They could hardly breathe. Even Augie, who had been to Colombia before, had never really strayed far from the coast. They had spent their lives at sea level or, more often, below it.
    Augie, whose pockets were swollen with wads of American cash, told his brother he had things under control. He had connections in this country, plus lawyers who, at that very moment, were working to get Carlo out of this hellhole and back home. As jail cells go, this was hardly a hellhole, but Carlo did not correct him. All over Colombia, Augie said, the newspapers were attacking the government for allowing a notorious gangster like Carlo Tramonti into their country, especially under such a fraudulent pretext. The story had actually died down in America, even in New Orleans. This was partly because of Americans’ indifference toward anything that happened beyond their shores and partly because of a few strategic favors Augie had engineered. Here in Colombia, though, the crusading newspapers and the political pressure they’d whipped up were a godsend.
    Agostino Tramonti then lowered his voice and told his brother that two days ago, deep in a bayou south of New Orleans, the INS agent in charge of Carlo’s deportation had died in a boating mishap: a fire on board that had been ruled an accident. The news item on it had been brief—a tiny story, buried in the Picayune , with no mention of the particular cases the agent had worked.
    Carlo clenched his teeth and, in Sicilian dialect, whispered that to kill a snake, one does not cut off the tail but rather the head.
    Augie nodded. He seemed to understand this cryptic rebuke immediately. They found no need to discuss it further.
    The guards brought a cot, and Augie moved into the cell as if he were a hospital visitor unwilling to leave a loved one unattended.
    The next day, Augie and Carlo Tramonti stuffed their shoes with cash and waited for the Colombian military detail to come and deport them to Guatemala.
    There, Augie had arranged for them to be met by the Dominican Air Force. They’d be taken to Santo Domingo, where a United States senator—a second cousin of the Kingfish himself, that old friend of the Tramontis’—would then personally arrange an escort from there to Miami. From there, they could turn their attention to Michael Corleone.
    Back in 1960, it had been Michael Corleone’s support of the Shea family that had gotten Jimmy Shea elected president. The other members of the Commission—especially the southern Dons, Tramonti and Silent Sam Drago—had preferred the man who was now the vice president. It was Michael Corleone who had turned the Commission around. True, he had been backed by the late Louie Russo of Chicago and, to a lesser degree, Black Tony Stracci, who was from New Jersey and was thus partial to the devil he knew. But Michael Corleone had been the ringleader, trading favors and pulling every string he had to get Jimmy Shea into the White House. The other Dons should not have been surprised. The Corleones had a weakness for the Irish. They even had an Irish consigliere , a fellow