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up a couple ofcommon homes in any neighborhood and bail out your uncle for child molesting.
    Later, the cops are upstairs in the courthouse, where two of their lawyers, Bettina Schein and Rae Downes Koshetz, go over bail papers with clerks and jailers. I sit there talking with Cutler when Eppolito comes into the hallway and tells me he remembers a St. Patrick’s Day afternoon that we spent in a bar on Third Avenue with another detective, Jimmy McCafferty. It never happened. If there is one part of life that I can recall, it is anything that happened in a saloon. While Louie is talking, Caracappa slips out and is soon alone, staring at the harbor water on the ferry going home to Staten Island.

CHAPTER 5
    There had been so many years when it was so secret that nobody knew it existed. There were the five New York Mafia families and I heard of some of them only because I lived on 101st Avenue in Queens and up the street, past the old Jerome Theatre, was a place called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, with a big plate-glass front window that had a fish in it. Inside were men wearing hats and smoking, playing cards. They were safe, almost completely protected by the ignorance of our times. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, declared there was no such thing as the Mafia. The Mafia agreed. Federal agents looked no further.
    When I was in grammar school, walking to the Ace movie theater, we passed the house on the corner where a woman died. There was a tall pole sticking out of a grass plot. Atop the pole was a big spread of flowers. One of us—Elmo Ryan maybe, he knew all things—told us that the house belonged to a big gangster in the Mafia, Vito Genovese, whose wife had passed away. I had no idea what he was talking about.
    Then I was twenty and one step off the copyboy’s bench when Curly Harris, the press agent for the Teamsters, pulled me out of a bar and off to lunch at Dinty Moore’s in thetheater district. I had seen Moore’s name many times in the gossip columns. Walking into the place, my feet felt important. Harris had me at a table with Frank Costello. They called him the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.” He was with a friend named Joe who was with the Internal Revenue. That’s nice, I thought. He has a legitimate friend. Costello assured me, “This Mafia is a dream so that they could sell it to the public in movies. It don’t exist. You’re starting off. I don’t want you to look silly.”
    It wasn’t much later that a gangster named Joe Valachi got up and showed the world three-deep Mafia organizational charts.
    Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But I knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old Herald Tribune, they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.
    So I was walking into the federal courthouse in Newark,and in the hallway was Tony Provenzano with a cigarette holder in his mouth and a group of his guys from the Teamsters. Tony began to mutter, “Eugene is a friend of mine, he will do it anytime….” He then punched Eugene on the shoulder. Punched him hard.
    As Tony’s hand moved, his great diamond pinkie ring glared in the sun coming through the lobby windows. It made you blink. On his way in, Matt Boylan, the chief prosecutor, said to me, “Take a look at that ring. It’s the size of the thing they have in India.”
    What did Eugene do after being hit?