1
OUT OF THE PAST
Beverly Hills, California, May 6, 1966
Johnny Rosselli walked down Brighton Way. He was in no hurry, enjoying the warm spring weather and the streets full of pretty girls on their lunch break. Silver-haired and suntanned, groomed to perfection—he was fresh from his weekly visit to Drucker’s Barber Shop—in big dark glasses, custom-made suit, alligator shoes. A hard-looking, confident-looking man in late middle age, he appeared very much a part of that opulent neighborhood. Passersby might have taken him for a motion picture producer or a powerful agent, even an old movie star, one of those tough-guy actors from the days of black-and-white.
Nearing the corner of Brighton and Rodeo Drive he paused before crossing, and as he stood there he felt a sensation at his back, a sudden change in the atmosphere, like the chill from a dark cloud crossing the sun.
With a glance over his shoulder he saw two men in black suits coming up the sidewalk, coming up, flanking him at the corner.
One of the men said, “John. We need to talk to you.”
He gave no reaction and started across the street. They followed, and on the other side they moved ahead of him and blocked his way.
Staring through big dark lenses, Johnny Rosselli said, “You know how it goes, fellas. If you’ve got a problem, go talk to my attorney.”
The second man said, “You don’t want your attorney to know about this.”
The first said, “This is different, John. Something new. You need to take a look.…”
The second man held out a buff-colored envelope.
Johnny looked at the package but kept his hands at his sides.
“Listen. For your own good. The Bureau knows who you are.”
Johnny looked past him, as if no one were there and nothing had been said.
“Do you understand? We know everything.”
The first man held out a business card. It read “DuPar’s Restaurant,” with an address in Thousand Oaks.
“This is a place where we can meet. After you’ve had a look in the package.”
Johnny glanced at the card but did not take it, and he did not take the package, saying, “If you’ve got a subpoena give it to my attorney. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He started walking again.
“Have a nice day, John,” said the second man. “We’ll be seeing you.”
* * *
Halfway to the next corner he stopped and looked back. The two FBI agents were gone.
You have a nice day, too.
Vaffanculo.
In the ass.
* * *
He entered his place on the eighth floor of the Glen Towers Apartments, a large, modern, sleekly furnished apartment with a sweeping balcony view of western Beverly Hills. Slipped under the door was the envelope one of the men on the street had tried to give him.
He picked it up and dropped it on the glass-topped coffee table in his living room.
He went to the telephone and dialed his attorney’s office. He stopped. He put the phone down. He went to the bar and fixed himself a drink, took it to the couch by the coffee table.
He smoked most of a cigarette and then reached for the envelope and unsealed it. He withdrew the contents. There were two pieces of cardboard packing and between the cardboard two black-and-white photographs. He placed them faceup next to each other on the tabletop.
Both were newly made prints but the images themselves were vintage—two figures in the clothing and hairstyles of many years ago. They were formal portraits taken against plain backgrounds in a studio setting. One was of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her thirties, the other a grim-faced schoolboy about ten years of age.
He leaned close to the photographs. He looked at one, and then the other. He had not seen these pictures in a very long time.
My mother.
And me.
He looked into the face of the boy staring out of the picture from long ago. Nearly fifty years had passed since he and that boy had gone their separate ways. Now they shared only a trace of physical resemblance, but once upon a time …
He sat in his living room and considered the meaning behind the arrival of these old photos, the two images that connected him to his former self. What purpose did they serve? “We know everything,” the agent on the street had said. He turned the claim over in his mind. To a man who held as many secrets as Johnny Rosselli, it was a statement of some concern.
He studied the old photographs on the table, the woeful look on his mother’s face, and the boy’s grim expression. For a few moments he found himself adrift in sad recollection.
He finished the vodka and lit another cigarette.
Only a handful of people in the world could have connected his present identity to this kid from the distant past and might have been willing to give that information to the law. One of them was going to wish he was dead.
2
It was “Rosselli” with a double s and sometimes “Roselli” with just the one.
Somebody at the FBI thought that was a pretty funny thing. When a guy starts to write his name different ways in different years you wonder what is his problem. That was how things got started—you found a loose thread and you pulled on it until something opened up. Here was a little mistake that might lead to a bigger mistake and when you found the big mistake there was a good chance you were going to get your man. Agents started to sniff around. This was in the 1950s, after the Kefauver hearings on organized crime in America. What they learned at the hearings was big shocking stuff. Nobody before then had understood how much of the country was populated by gangsters all working together for the common bad. Johnny Rosselli had been among the many forced to testify. He told the senators his story, about being born in Chicago, losing his parents, and being raised by a kindly old uncle. It was a sad story, with little bits and pieces of the truth thrown in.
Someone at the FBI went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Chicago. They looked for the papers on Johnny Rosselli, and they found out something interesting: The document recording Johnny Rosselli’s birth had been filed thirty years after the fact; the document itself was a forgery, and there was no other evidence to be found that the person described therein had ever been born—in Chicago or anywhere else.
An investigation into the “facts” of Rosselli’s life was begun. In all parts of the country agents gathered evidence, examined files, followed leads, interrogated people from all known periods of the man’s life. It went on for years. They found little that wasn’t already known, or wasn’t what Johnny Rosselli allowed them to find.
He had covered his tracks well—his origins, his early years. The FBI was sure he was not who he said he was. But who was he? What was he hiding? For a guy whom everybody in law enforcement knew about for decades—one of Al Capone’s boy wonders, the Mob’s man in Hollywood, big wheel in Las Vegas, the hundreds of pages of police reports in which he figured, numerous arrests and trials, headlined convictions—he was a mystery.
Agents looked at the file and cursed. It nagged at them. There had to be some good reason he had gone to the trouble of falsifying his birth, covering up his past, when his known record was already so bad. Had he run away from a crime for which he could still be prosecuted? If they could solve the mystery, find out who he was, what he was hiding, they were sure they could nail him good, close the book on another major hoodlum.
One day they lucked out. An old soldier in the LA crime family—and a longtime associate of Johnny’s—had become an informant. His handlers in the Bureau kept the informant on a long leash so as not to expose him to his fellow gangsters, but they kept him under observation too. One day they followed him to the airport, saw him greet a stranger from across the country. The agents pulled him in. What was going on at the airport? He wouldn’t talk, which made them more interested. They told him the deal again: If he ever held anything back it was over and they would throw him in prison. The mobster tried to figure a way out, but he couldn’t. Fuck it, he decided. I’m a rat, I’m dead already. He told the agents he’d been doing a favor for his friend Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli? Keep talking, said the Feds. It was nothing, he said, a little errand. A little cash for the guy’s mama. He’d done it before, many times through the years. For Johnny’s mother back in Boston. The fella at the airport was Johnny’s kid brother.
His mother? the FBI agents said.
Johnny Rosselli had a mother? In Boston? A brother? The agents grinned like cats over a spilled bowl of goldfish.
* * *
Armed with the slight but crucial biographical information supplied by their informant, the Bureau refocused its long-running investigation of Rosselli—what it described as an “intensive discreet endeavor to develop the facts,” to “uncover some crime committed which would have caused him to change his identity.” As long as it was still under the statutes, an old crime was as good as a new one to the Feds. But the goal was not just to convict and punish the man for his individual crimes. The Feds were working to undermine and degrade the whole criminal system—La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Syndicate, the Organization, whatever you called it. To blow it up from the inside. The goal was to get him, and then to “turn” him, to make him talk and to keep him talking.
As the FBI’s investigation advanced, moving deep inside Johnny Rosselli’s shadow world, on a quest to uncover his hidden past, a strange course of events was set in motion, one that would reach far beyond the investigators’ original intent, a Pandora’s box opened to unforeseeable consequences, to chaos and scandal, the exposure of dirty secrets and black lies in the corridors of American power, and, in the end, to sudden and ghastly death.
3
His certificate of birth—the real one—is held in the house of records in the Italian provincial capital of Frosinone. The document indicates a male child, last name Sacco, given name Filippo (after his father’s father), born on July 4, 1905, to Vincenzo and Maria Antonia Sacco (née DiPasquale), the Comune di Esperia, Provinzia di Frosinone. There is no mention of Chicago.
Copyright © 2018 by Lee Server.
