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Overview
Lake Tahoe, 1973. Michael Satariano, now middle-aged, is running a mob casino, his days of killing behind him. So when Godfather Sam Giancana orders him to eliminate a foe, Michael refuses. The hit goes down anyway...and Michael is left holding the bag, becoming the target for bloody retribution. To save his family, Michael agrees to testify in return for a new life in the Witness Protection Program. But nobody can save him from the mob's wrath...and once again the son of the Angel of Death finds himself on the road, this time with his 16-year-old daughter...his life-long struggle for redemption at odds with his thirst for revenge.
"A gripping, blood-soaked journey. Collins' compelling mix of history, bloodshed and retribution is irresistible. Readers will eat it up and beg for more." Publishers Weekly
"Collins not only gives you a great mob novel, but a serious family drama that blows away anything The Sopranos has done." Bookgasm
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780997832334 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cutting Edge Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2017 |
| Series: | Perdition , #3 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 292 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.66(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
On the morning of the day his life went to hell, Michael Satariano felt fine.
At fifty, a slender five feet ten, with a face that had remained boyish, his dark-brown Beatle-banged hair only lightly touched with gray at the temples, Michael appeared easily ten years younger, and the guess most people made was, "Thirty-five?" Only the deep vertical groove that concentration and worry had carved between his eyebrows gave any hint that life had ever been a burden.
He wore a gray sharkskin suit and a darker gray tie and a very light gray shirt; he did not go in for either the cheesy pastels or Day-Glo colors that so many middle-aged men were affecting in a sad attempt to seem hip. His major concession to fashion was a little sideburn action — that was about it.
And unlike many (most) Outfit guys, Michael had no penchant for jewelry — today he wore pearl cufflinks, gold wedding band on his left hand, and single-carat emerald with gold setting on his right. The latter, a present from his wife, Pat, was as ostentatious as he got.
His health was perfect, aided and abetted by nonsmoking and light alcohol consumption. His eyesight was fine — in the one eye that war had left him, anyway — and he did not even need glasses for reading, which remained the closest thing to a vice he had. If pulp fiction were pasta, Michael would have been as fat as his food-and-beverage man here at Cal-Neva — give him the company of Louis L'Amour, Mickey Spillane, or Ray Bradbury, and he was content.
Neither could gambling be counted among the sins of the man whose official position at the resort/casino was entertainment director. Nor did he have a reputation for womanizing — he had been married since 1943 to Patricia Ann, the woman he always introduced as his "childhood sweetheart"— and though working in environs littered with attractive young women (from waitresses to showgirls, actresses to songbirds), he rarely felt tempted and had not given in. It was said (not entirely accurately) that he'd never missed a Sunday mass since his marriage.
For this reason he had acquired a mocking nickname — the Saint.
Saint Satariano, the wise guys called him, particularly the Chicago crowd. Not that his churchgoing ways were the only thing behind the moniker: for three decades now he had served as the Outfit's respectable front man in various endeavors, the Italian boy who had been the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner of World War II, the combat soldier whose fame rivaled that of Audie Murphy.
"Saint" had not been his first nickname.
During his months on Bataan in the Philippines, when he was barely out of high school, Michael had earned from the Filipino Scouts a deadly sobriquet: un Demonio Angelico. He had killed literally scores of Japanese in those vicious early days of the war, and had lost his left eye saving Major General Jonathan Wainwright from a strafing Zero. The latter event had been prominent in his Medal of Honor citation, but so had an afternoon battle in which he'd taken out an even fifty of the enemy.
General MacArthur himself had helped smuggle the wounded soldier off Bataan, to give stateside morale a boost with the war's first American GI hero. But Michael had not lasted long on the PR podium and rubber-chicken circuit — he kept asking his audiences to remember his fellow "boys" who had been abandoned by Uncle Sam back on that bloody island.
And so the adopted son of Pasquale and Sophia Satariano was sent back to Chicago a proud son of Italy (few knew that the boy was really Irish), and had been embraced by Al Capone's successor himself, the dapper and intelligent Frank Nitti, as a good example of just how patriotic a dago could be, Mussolini go fuck himself.
What Nitti had not realized was that Michael was fighting another war, a separate war, a personal war.
The young man's real father had been blessed (or perhaps damned) with his own colorful nickname: the Angel of Death. Michael Satariano was in long-ago reality Michael O'Sullivan, Jr., son of the infamous enforcer who had railed against the Looney gang of the Tri-Cities and their powerful allies, the Capone mob of Chicago....
... that same Angel of Death whose face had appeared on True Detective magazine covers, and in several movies that had romanticized Mike O'Sullivan, Sr., into a kind of Robin Hood who had traveled the Midwest stealing mob money from banks and giving it to poor farmers and other Depression unfortunates.
The story went that Mike O'Sullivan had been the top lieutenant of Rock Island's Irish godfather, John Looney, but that (back in '31) O'Sullivan and Looney's homicidal off spring Connor had vied for the old man's chair, which led to an attempt on O'Sullivan's life, that succeeded only in taking out the Angel's wife, Annie, and younger son, Peter.
This tale was true as far as it went, but the power-play aspect was guesswork by second- and third-rate journalists. Michael Satariano knew why and how the Looney feud had really begun: he himself, at the tender age of eleven, had stowed away on one of his father's "missions" (as he and Peter used to romantically put it, daydreaming that Papa and his gun were doing the bidding of President Hoover).
Instead the boy had stumbled onto a mob killing, witnessing Connor Looney murdering an unarmed man, followed by his own father machine-gunning a clutch of the murdered man's understandably riled compatriots.
So it was that Connor had schemed to wipe out the O'Sullivan family, only to fail miserably, as was Connor's wont.
The two surviving O'Sullivans — Michaels senior and junior — had become outlaws, moving by car from one small Midwestern town to another, striking out at the Capone Outfit by hitting banks where the gang hid its loot, to pressure the Chicago Boys into giving Connor over to the Angel's righteous vengeance. This went on for six long dangerous months — young Michael himself had killed several times in defense of himself and his father — until finally Capone and his top man, Frank Nitti, handed Connor Looney on a platter to Michael O'Sullivan.
When Connor finally lay dead in the gutter of a Rock Island street, O'Sullivan struck a peace with the Chicago Outfit; but Capone and Nitti betrayed that pact, dispatching an assassin who indeed cut down O'Sullivan Senior — an assassin Michael himself had then killed ... despite the pulp-magazine-and-Hollywood sugarcoating of a child unable to pull the trigger, only to have his dying father bail him out with a bullet.
Eliot Ness — the famous Untouchable, to whom Michael O'Sullivan, Sr., had turned over evidence on Old Man Looney, consigning him to stir — had placed Michael O'Sullivan, Jr., in that orphanage in Downer's Grove. And his new parents, the Satarianos, had never known of his real beginnings, raising him in idyllic smalltown DeKalb, outside of Chicago.
In 1942, when he went to work for the Outfit, Michael Satariano's pedigree had seemed as perfect as his Medal of Honor heroics. In those early days, to put himself in solid, he had committed acts for Frank Nitti not unlike those his father had done for John Looney; but his plans for settling scores had gone awry, when the architect of his father's murder, Al Capone, revealed himself to be a drooling VD-ravaged near-vegetable, beyond any revenge, save for what God might eventually have in store.
And then an unexpected friendship had grown between Michael Satariano and Frank Nitti, that dignified, intelligent CEO of organized crime. As an Outfit soldier who'd killed in the line of duty, Michael had taken the blood oath of omertà, and now found himself a member of Chicago's La Cosa Nostra family, whether he liked it or not.
The saving grace had been that damned Medal of Honor, and the fact that Michael Satariano had not a single arrest on his record. Oh, he'd been brought in for questioning a few times, and was known to have associated with certain notorious types; but for a Sicilian "made man" to look so respectable was a not-so-small miracle in the world of the Outfit.
His new godfather had been Paul Ricca, and the white-haired, slender ganglord — the only man in the mob who knew that Satariano was in reality O'Sullivan — had over the years treated him almost like a son, or perhaps grandson. Ricca had protected Michael, and used him wisely and well, in key management positions at Outfit-owned entertainment venues.
Michael had started by booking acts at the Chez Paree, the closest thing to a Vegas showroom in the Windy City, and the Chez also boasted a huge casino, running wide-open with police protection. In the early '60s, when Mr. Kelly's, the Happy Medium, and the Playboy Club heralded a hipper Second City scene, the Chez finally folded, and Michael was dispatched to Vegas, where more traditional show biz still held sway.
As "entertainment director" of the Sands, he met all the big stars, and became friendly with that charming manic depressive Frank Sinatra, and the other Clan members like Sammy Davis and Dino (the term "Rat Pack" was one Sinatra despised). Michael did more than just run the showroom and the lounges, however — he learned the casino business, and rose to second-in-command. Soon the Outfit honchos had big things in mind for Michael.
Then, just as the '60s got into gear, Michael's guardian godfathers, Ricca and Accardo, retired, allowing that crazy whack job Sam "Mooney" Giancana to take the top chair. Even on the periphery, however, the two respected elders held a fair share of power, keeping various fingers in assorted pies, and reining Mooney in.
Still, Michael knew his long period of protection had ended.
Giancana, the unpredictable hoodlum who'd been chauffeur and snarling bodyguard to both the former bosses, had come to power via reckless violence and sheer moneymaking ability — Mooney had, for example, taken over (bloodily) the Negro numbers racket, a great earner for the mob to this day. The level-headed, dignified Frank Nitti must have been spinning in his grave, what with that psycho punk from the Patch's old 42 gang holding the Capone throne.
On the other hand, Giancana had always been friendly if patronizing to Michael, for example when he gave Michael the entertainment director position at the Villa Venice, an elaborate nightclub in the northwestern Chicago boonies. For two months, top talent came in, in particular the Clan of Sinatra, Dino, and Sammy Davis ... none of whom were paid a cent, doing the gig as a favor to Giancana (presumably as a repayment for helping Sinatra's pal Jack Kennedy get to the White House). After the show, guests were taken two blocks by shuttle for fleecing at a Quonset hut with a plush casino interior. Then Giancana — aware that FBI eyes were on him — shuttered the facility, pocketing three mil.
Soon, mysteriously, the handsomely insured Villa Venice facility burned down.
Again, Michael had had nothing to do with the casino end, his role that of a glorified handshaker, not unlike the indignity former heavyweight champ Joe Louis suffered in Vegas, where a casino employed him as a greeter. The Medal of Honor winner with the boyish countenance rated big with the Chicago columnists, guys like Irv Kupcinet and Herb Lyon, and if the Outfit could have been said to have a golden boy in the '60s and early '70s, Michael Satariano was it.
And Giancana himself was pleased enough with Michael to offer him a real job, specifically that big promotion he'd been groomed for by Ricca and Accardo: in 1964, Michael Satariano became entertainment director (and in reality top boss) here at the Cal-Neva Lodge and Casino at Lake Tahoe.
Pronounced Kal-Neeva, the resort dated back to the '20s, a rustic fishing/gaming retreat built on the California/Nevada state line, which bisected Lake Tahoe south to north, running up the hilly, rocky shoreline and through the hotel's central building (and fireplace and outdoor kidney-shaped swimming pool). Six of its acres were on the California side, eight on the Nevada. Before gambling in Nevada was legalized in 1931, the casino's gaming tables were on wheels, to be rolled across the dark line on the wooden floor to California, should Nevada coppers show, and vice versa. In the years since, food, drink, and guests had stayed in California, with the casino all the way over in Nevada ... across that painted line.
Eight thousand feet above sea level, ringed by the peaks of the High Sierras, accessed by one long winding narrow mountain road, the Cal-Neva — a.k.a. the Castle in the Sky — perched high over the northern tip of the lake, ideally positioned to take in Tahoe's deep, clear azure sunshine-dappled waters, against the surrounding forest's plush dark green. The sprawling lodge itself was a sort of barnwood wigwam castle, with a commanding A-frame stone porch. In addition to a motel-like row of cabins, small wooden bungalows, and a few larger chalets on stilts clustered on the slope below the lodge, between granite outcroppings, the pine bluff dropping sharply to Crystal Bay.
The Cal-Neva, like so many Nevada casinos, was owned by a syndicate of investors, which often involved silent partners, including over the years various bootleggers and gangsters (Joe Kennedy, for instance), and thus it was that this magnificently situated rustic resort came to be "owned" largely by a certain Italian American singer. That the singer's half-share of Cal-Neva represented Chicago investments in general — and Sam Giancana in particular — was a fairly open secret.
But Sinatra and Giancana had been arrogant, even for them, and a series of misadventures culminated in disaster.
A cocktail waitress Sinatra had dallied with was the wife of a local sheriff, who got tough with Frank, and when said sheriff was run off the road and killed a few weeks later, the Nevada Gaming Commission arched an eyebrow. They would soon run out of eyebrows, as a statewide prostitution ring began operating from the front desk, a guest was murdered on the resort's doorstep, and Sam Giancana himself cavorted openly, even beating up one of the customers.
The latter infraction drew more heat than murders and hookers. Whenever the singing McGuire Sisters played Sinatra's acoustically perfect, seven-hundred-seat Celebrity Showroom, Giancana would shack up with his favorite sister (Phyllis); he would also play golf and dine with Sinatra, even though both knew Mooney was under FBI surveillance.
Giancana was, after all, prominent in the Gaming Commission's "List of Excluded Persons"— colloquially, its Black Book — at the top of the list of criminals forbidden even to set foot on a Nevada casino floor. (That half the joint was in California became Giancana's excuse.) When the commission had the temerity to point this out, Sinatra got so indignant and abusive, he had to surrender his license, and sell out.
Everybody, including the FBI, assumed that when Sinatra left Cal-Neva, so did Giancana; after all, the place closed down upon the Voice's departure, and stayed that way for some months. But the truth was, Giancana still held a considerable interest, and although former Outfit rep Skinny D'Amato had exited when Sinatra did, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner from Chicago had stepped in, to continue looking after Giancana's silent partnership.
Though it had been almost ten years since Sinatra's fall from grace, the singer's presence was still felt at Cal-Neva — the Vegas-like showroom he'd built, the secret system of tunnels and passageways that connected the lodge with select chalets, even the orange, beige, and brown color scheme within the lodge. This was not a bad thing for business, and pictures of the famous crooner remained on display in both the Indian Lounge and (as it was now known) the Sinatra Celebrity Showroom.
After parking his pearl-gray Corvette in an almost empty lot on this pleasantly cool April morning, Michael walked across the gravel and then through pine and rock to the edge of the bluff.
To him, this job, in this location, was about as close to paradise as he could hope to find, in the life he'd chosen. Las Vegas was just a neon stain on the desert, a loud metal-and-plastic purgatory; but Tahoe was a heaven of clear sweet mountain air, the vast royal-blue lake sparkling with sunshine set against snowcapped peaks. Birds flashed colorfully as they darted between giant pines, while the stripes of speedboats on the water made abstract patterns, and a seaplane tilted a nonspecific salute against a sky almost as blue as the lake.
Back in '64, Michael and his family had relocated to Crystal Bay (on the California side), whose year-round population was just over seven thousand which took some adjusting for the Satarianos, who had lived in Chicago (or that is, Oak Park) forever. Also, since Cal-Neva was seasonal, open Memorial Day through Labor Day, Michael would periodically help out back at the Sands and at Miami's Fountainbleu, covering vacation time for other casino execs. This had taken him away from his family for several months a year, which he had not relished.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Road to Paradise"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Max Allan Collins.
Excerpted by permission of Brash Books, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE,
BOOK ONE CASTLE IN THE AIR One Week Earlier,
BOOK TWO PARADISE OF DEVILS Two Months Later,
BOOK THREE SAINTS' REST,
ROAD TIPS,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
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