Tragic Read Free Page B

him, to jump. “What the fuck does it take to get something done around here?” he snarled.
    They were gathered around a back corner table at Marlon’s, a pub popular with Manhattan’s longshoremen, located in Hell’s Kitchen near the west side of the New York City waterfront. No other patrons had been seated near them, a concession to Vitteli’s importance as the president of the North American Brotherhood of Stevedores, or NABS.
    Vitteli kept his voice low, but there was no mistaking the intensity and anger that boiled just beneath the surface. He was an imposing man, barrel-chested, and his cinder block of a head seemed to sit directly upon his broad shoulders. With his mashed nose, pewter-gray crew cut, and facial scars, he looked like a middle-aged prizefighter. But the marks weren’t earned in the ring; he got them on the streets, most from his days as a “union organizer” thirty years earlier.
    He glared at the other two men as if challenging them to answer his question. Of them, only Joey Barros could hold his gaze. Barros, tall and gaunt to the point of cadaverous, had started on thedocks with Vitteli when he was young, and both men had come up through the ranks based largely on their willingness to bust heads to protect the union’s party line. The difference between them was that as they’d aged, Vitteli was more likely to use his brains to achieve his ends, whereas Barros was happier doing his persuading with bats, brass knuckles, and a wicked straight razor. He was not afraid of Vitteli, who trusted him like no other.
    The third man at the table was Jack “Jackie” Corcione. Vitteli didn’t trust him like he did Barros, though in some ways he was more valuable. Corcione was the son of Leo Corcione, the union’s founder and president for forty-five years until his death almost two years earlier. The old man had hoped that his only child would succeed him, but Jackie didn’t have the nerve or leadership skills to lead a rough-and-tumble union. Leo had recognized the weakness and instead packed his boy off to Harvard, where he’d earned an MBA and then his law degree. He was then brought back into the fold as the union’s legal counsel and chief financial officer.
    Vitteli kept Corcione in his inner circle for two reasons. There wasn’t anything about the union’s legal and financial operations, including those that were “under the radar,” that Jackie didn’t know inside and out. The other reason was that, for all his toughness, Vitteli had a soft spot in his black heart for Leo Corcione. He owed the union’s founder everything. He’d been a thug and a dockworker, but he’d made a name for himself during the dockworker strikes in the seventies, and the old man had rewarded him by bringing him into management.
    And now I’m dressing in silk suits and living the good life, he thought whenever Barros warned him that Jackie was a weak link in his armor. I owe it to the old man not to let Joey go after his kid. Not unless it becomes necessary.
    While the old man was alive, Vitteli hadn’t worried about Jackie because of what he knew about him, including that he had expensive tastes he paid for by embezzling union funds albeit on a small scale. But more important was the fact that Jackie Corcione was gay.
    “A raging queer,” Barros had said with a smirk when he brought him the news. “With a taste for Dom Pérignon, Brooks Brothers, and pretty Columbia University frat boys.”
    Vitteli had used the information to his advantage years ago, when the old man was still alive, by sitting Jackie down in his office one day and telling him what he knew. “It don’t bother me what side of the bun you butter,” he said, “or that you’re padding your bank account from the union’s benefits account. But it would kill your dad.” He stopped and grinned. “If he doesn’t kill you first.”
    Jackie blanched. “Please don’t tell him,” he’d begged. “I’ll stop stealing. I won’t see