Free Two Jakes by Lawrence de Maria Page B

his
grandparents died. He dubbed it “the Wild East.”
    For
most of its history, Staten Island had been a bucolic refuge from the grime and
crime of the greater metropolis, ignored by the Manhattan elite. It became a
haven for city workers, especially police and fire officers, lured by
affordable single-family homes that had plenty of room and land for kids to
grow. It also attracted mobsters for the same reasons. The Island’s cops and
resident robbers were equally intolerant of local crime and violence was a
rarity. That began to change in 1964 with the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge connecting the borough to Brooklyn and the rest of the world. Political
corruption became rampant, fueled by the easy money in a real estate boom that
rapidly made much of Staten Island unlivable.
    In
the decades following the opening of the “guinea gangplank,” as Mack delighted
in calling the bridge in Scarne’s presence, the Island’s population quadrupled
to almost half a million people. (In fact, many of the hundreds of thousands of
post-bridge “immigrants” flooding the borough were Italian-Americans fleeing
the crowded and racially charged confines of Brooklyn and Queens.) Unscrupulous
developers crammed townhouses on top of townhouses. Huge swaths of the Island
fell to the bulldozers of builders whose every project was approved, thanks to
bags of cash exchanged in Hero Park on a bench next to a marble tablet listing
the names of honored war dead from Staten Island. The money eventually wound up
in Caribbean banks or Florida condos. In return for unbridled development,
scarring of pristine hillsides, traffic snarls, crumbling roads and the obliteration
of centuries-old neighborhoods, Staten Islanders were granted free ferry
service. The politicians who orchestrated the carnage named the ferries after
themselves.
    Dudley
Mack avoided real estate entanglements. A seventh-generation Staten Islander,
he loved the place. “There’s enough honest crooked money to be made,” he once
told Scarne. “I want to be able to sleep at night.”
    The
Mack clan had started out in the funeral business in the 1890’s. But when
Dudley took over he sold the two parlors they owned in declining drug-infested
neighborhoods. As he put it, “You don’t go to a funeral home to get killed;
besides there was never enough parking.” He opened up newer funeral homes in
safer neighborhoods and eventually merged with the Sambuca Home for Funerals.
The Macks and Sambucas had long been close. After bloody confrontations in the
early part of the 20 th Century between the first Italian immigrants
and the more established Irish, truce evolved into trust. In the handful of
local public and parochial high schools, loyalty to teams soon outweighed
loyalty to nationality. Many a refrigerator-sized Sambuca opened a hole in the
line to running backs named Mack at Curtis or St. Peter’s. Lifelong bonds
formed. It was the same for other families. Then came the war. The guy who
saved you on Iwo Jima was no longer a Mick or a Dago. He was your Mick and your
Dago. And while boys loved their sisters they lusted after their friends’
sisters. Wedding bells united families that had once shot each at other.
    Dudley
Mack branched out into nursing homes and hospitals (“not much of a stretch”)
and made a fortune, which he plowed into a city-wide string of massage parlors
and hot sheet motels. (“I get them coming and going.”) His reputation for a
ruthless integrity made him a power broker. The Italian mob, weakened by RICO
prosecutions facilitated by the propensity to talk into every listening device
the Feds could plant, was fighting a losing battle with Russian gangsters who
saw the Island as the Promised Land. (“The Ruskies have been landlocked so long
they can’t believe they can drown people in every direction.”) Mack knew there
was money to be made in a competitive environment. He financed the Italians to
keep them in the game and formed joint