Sugar Cube by Joe Morello

Sal Benedict has become one of the most powerful mob bosses of all time. He's an understated man who lives frugally with his wife. But he's also highly temperamental, and he's about to confront an issue that'll make him go through the roof.

Someone has kidnapped his son Johnny, a gifted young student at Harvard Medical School. The Irish mob has been taking family members of Italian gangsters for some time, but no one has been dumb enough before to sign their own death warrant like this. How will Sal get Johnny back, and fend off Thorson Kincaid of the FBI – with whom he's been playing a ‘cat and mouse' game – at the same time? The feds want to put Sal behind bars, and they've chosen the worst time possible – for Sal, that is – to do it.

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Excerpt from Sugar Cube © Copyright 2024 Joe Morello

PROLOGUE

IF THINGS GO WRONG, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO SEND BODY PARTS THROUGH THE MAIL. Nobody likes forking out their hard-earned cash. But most people like getting a package with a loved one's ear or thumb in it even less. You can imagine what that feels like.

It was New York City in the 1970s. That's what made it work. The time, the place. But there were really three scenarios.

The most immediate one was the Marino case. I remember Billy Marino very well. He was a muscular guy who worked out a lot. Tattoos all over his arms. It must have been 1972 when he was taken, July or August. Billy was a loan shark and numbers runner who worked for the Benedict family. There'd been peace between the Italian and Irish mafias for years, so I'm pretty sure that this wasn’t authorized by the Westies. They knew that they couldn't or shouldn't rock the boat, after so many years of peace. So it was a disgruntled splinter group that did the damage.

The whole scheme was about raising cash – isn’t it always? – and they did it by taking members of the Italian mafia hostage. They got the money illegally, they probably thought, so we’re just taking it off their hands. The people targeted were always relatives – say, cousins or uncles – or the spouse of the person who was expected to pay up, but were rarely major players in their own right. In Billy's case, they wanted a ransom of 100K. But our people found out that he was being held at a house in Hell's Kitchen. A raid was launched, and they got him back without paying a dime.

Usually, the Irishmen would turn up at your front door when you're the only one home. They’d appear once the wives, girlfriends and kids were gone. You're under arrest, they said, and you would follow meekly into a car because they’d flash an FBI or NYPD badge at you. The arrest warrant is phony, and they're phony cops, of course, but you don’t know that. Many Italian American illegals are shit scared of being deported, so it worked well on Italian mafioso in particular.

For some reason, that’s not how they did it with Billy. Maybe they thought he was too smart to fall for the phony badge routine. They grabbed him off the street, and put a bag over his head. They shoved him into the back of a waiting van. Then they stuck a gun in his gut. Billy knew that they would kill him if he didn’t follow instructions, so he went along with it. He didn’t have any other choice.

Identities have to be hidden, at this stage. If the kidnapped person sees faces, they would have to kill you. And Billy knows that they will. They would rather lose the money they’re going to get for you than do twenty years in a New York or New Jersey jail. So Billy screwed his eyes up tight, to avoid any chance whatsoever of seeing their faces.

Instinctively, we all know in this situation that it’s the faces that have to be covered. There’s an old story about a college professor who went skinny dipping once with his students. Set aside for now the question of why he would do this. Seems a bit dodgy. But the Dean came along and caught them, and instinctively the students all tried to cover up their balls. But the professor did something a bit different. He covered up his face instead. Asked afterwards why he did it, the professor said that the chance that the Dean would recognize his face was quite high. But the chance that he’d recognize the professor's balls seemed quite slim.

Billy never thought that this would happen, not today and not any day. And he was obviously shit scared. All he could see was the inside of the sack on his head. Total darkness. It smelled bad too, like they’d used something a goat is usually fed upon. People around him were screaming orders, do this and do that. So he tried to do exactly what they said, attempting to think happy thoughts in all the chaos. He imagined himself eating ice cream and boating at Howard Beach, a place he found especially relaxing. He's welcome to it. It isn’t really a beach, as such. But before long, it all worked out. In a few days, he was back home.

Maybe over time they would run out of targets, and there’d be pressure to look for bigger people. Even sons or daughters, maybe.

The moral of the story: sometimes, you’re a fool to pay up, if you can easily get the hostage returned via some other route.

It’s in the manner of these things that they let the family stew for a while. Let them think all sorts of things that might or might not happen. But once it begins and the kidnappers have had time to contact the family, you watch for any signs that your people are refusing to pay up. That the ransom isn’t going to come. You don’t want brothers and dearest ones to be killed, of course. But you don’t want to part with more money either. It’s a lot of cash. So the kidnapper sometimes sends the family a bit of encouragement, if it looks like that’s the way things are going. That’s where the body parts are going to come in.