Nothing But Money Read Free Page A

pretty deep so if the rain comes a hand or a leg or a head won’t come popping out of the ground. In December, with the ground frozen, getting the job done right could take a long time.

    And time was important on a job like this. For instance, it would not be a good idea to be standing out there with Gabriel Infanti lying on the permafrost when the sun came up and people started showing up to buy split rails or pickets or whatever they needed to fence in their little slice of Staten Island heaven. The men continued chipping away. In a few minutes, everybody was out of breath.

    Tommy Karate and Kojak said they would handle the job themselves. Tommy was a very practical guy. He had brought along a bucket of lye. The lye would go on Gabriel Infanti, and in no time at all, Gabriel would be all gone. For Tommy Karate, Gabriel Infanti was just another job. Standing there in the headlights, he and the bald guy, Kojak, began to joke about how scared Louie looked the moment Tommy shot Infanti in the head. Kojak cracked up thinking about how he’d fished $2,500 cash out of Infanti’s pants after Tommy had put a bullet in the guy’s brain. All that was easy. This business of making Gabriel Infanti disappear, this was anything but. They’d thought they’d come out here and dig a hole and dump in Gabriel and the lye and then everybody goes home to their nice warm beds. Who would have thought they’d still be out here after two miserable, frigid hours, with nothing to show for it but Gabriel still lying there and the sun coming up at any time?

    But they kept at it, and soon the hole was dug, the body dumped, the lye applied. The work was over. Robert Lino, the good son, said good night to his father, as if they had just watched a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and now it was time to go home. Bobby Senior and cousin Frankie drove off for a late dinner at one of their favorite restaurants, Villa Borghese in Brooklyn. They were hungry. That’s what you did when you were hungry. Robert didn’t quite have the appetite. He drove back to his home in Midwood, Brooklyn. The night’s work was done.

    It was different now for Robert. Now he was officially implicated. He was what the lawyers called an accessory after the fact, the fact being a homicide, the after being the digging part. And this was because of his own father. This was how the father wanted it for his son. In murder, if you’re there when they bury the body and you don’t run to the police, you’re an official accomplice. A co-conspirator. That was Robert Lino’s new relationship with his father; instead of “Hey Dad,” or “Hey son,” they could say, “Hey co-conspirator.” Perhaps the father thought this would bring him closer to the son. Perhaps the father did not think at all.

    In a few hours, the sun rose on Arthur Kill Road. Off the gravel road by the Island Wholesale Fence warehouse, a mound of freshly dug dirt could be seen—if you knew where to look. The crew had done a good job of making Infanti disappear. He was hidden by rotting wrecks and weeds and concrete barriers. Customers would show up and buy their wares, and business would be transacted as it had been yesterday and the day before. In a few days, Gabriel Infanti’s wife in New Jersey would report Infanti as a missing person. She’d tell the police that he’d left the house with a big pile of cash. He was going to buy a car from a guy. That was all she knew. That was pretty much the extent of what she knew in general about her husband. He was always going off to see a guy about a thing. She was upset, but for the Bonanno crime family, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Christmas was coming, and Gabriel Infanti would be spoken of no more.

CHAPTER TWO

    October 19, 1987

     
    The young man of means awoke in his thirty-eighth-floor Manhattan aerie high above the East River. Below he watched the sun rise up over Queens and spread across the towers of the Upper East Side. He could see