Falling Into the Mob by Steve Zousmer

Author:Steve Zousmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579625177
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2016-11-05T04:00:00+00:00

THE CHOICE was war or something else. I was the sole advocate of something else. Viv seemed to lean my way but he was in and out, not fully engaged.

It was hard for me to understand why the brothers, Roncade, and Bazzanella seemed unable to fathom the idea that a Mafia war would destroy all of its major participants including them. They were bright people but under pressure they had a single ingrained response: kick ass. There was no space in their minds for consequences, such as outraging not only the public but the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of municipal, state, and federal governments and bringing down the full policing and prosecuting powers of all of the above.

Maybe this is the traditional leadership mind-set of mobs and mob-like regimes: if you have a problem, shoot people. If that creates another problem tomorrow, shoot more people. If all this shooting fails and you end up dead, what the hell— you never planned on a long life anyway.

Jake, the wisest mobster, saw farther than that. It dawned on me now that what he’d seen in me—perhaps the solution to the mystery of why he offered me the family leadership— was that Catcher would not hesitate to let slip the dogs of war while I would grasp the wisdom of keeping those foaming hounds on the leash. The family would not survive with Catcher; it had a chance of surviving with me. My shortcomings were insignificant if I could achieve just one thing: preventing war.

In fact, preventing war had become my problem. I seemed to have taken charge. Six men were staring at me intently, waiting for a solution now. I needed, at the very least, a shortterm tactic that might catch their imagination, meaning it had to make doing nothing sound like doing something. What I needed was time—time for an idea or, more likely, time for events to create an opportunity. That led me to the same tactic I’d used with Draybin, Tindall, and Fromkin: stall, and give no satisfaction.

“Here’s what we do,” I said. “We stall, we feint, we never do what they expect. They expect a head-on attack so that’s what we don’t do. They expect a traditional fight but instead we invite the cops into it. Everything in the Cosa Nostra play-book, that’s what we don’t do.”

This was a bold start but not enough to run the table. I saw unconvinced faces all around, though Roncade seemed intrigued. Military guys love the frontal attack but they also savor the tricky maneuver.

Bazzanella said, “You’re saying play games with them. Fuck up their heads?”

“Something like that,” I said, because I really didn’t know what I was saying. Then I realized he’d set a trap for me.

“Catcher gets killed and you want to play head games,” he said. “Instead of going out and disemboweling these cunts you want to play guerrilla warfare with them?”

But Viv came to life and saved my butt.

“What Phil’s saying is that instead of starting a disastrous war, we allow some other situation to develop and maybe that gives us a way out.

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