Free Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile Page B

church with its own. As recently as 1980, fourteen thousand steel workers earned their living there.
    Today it’s as if the bomb had struck. There’s nothing but great hulking iron forms and rusting steel. About the only sign of life are a few teams of workers dismantling one of the abandoned steel plants to sell as scrap to the Japanese. But Avrakotos remembers Aliquippa the way it was when he was growing up and delegations of Japanese used to come in buses to study this marvel of industrial America. They brought movie cameras and notebooks to record everything about the workings of the largest integrated steel mill in the world. No one felt anything but pride as the plant operated at full tilt twenty-four hours a day, spewing out great clouds of pink and black smoke that would engulf the ethnic neighborhoods of Aliquippa.
    “That’s Plan Seven, where the Dagos lived,” Avrakotos says, like a tour guide passing through the ruins of some past civilization. “Plan Twelve was all Irish. The Polacks lived in Plan Five. Plan Eleven is where the niggers were.” For all his years at the CIA, Avrakotos has never stopped using the brutal street talk of his youth. He’s as proud of it as he is of the scars that lace his body from teenage knife fights. “Each of the plans had a gang, and they fought like cats and dogs,” he explains. “Each plan fought among itself, but when the niggers came we all banded together. You had to be very fucking practical…. The guys who made it out of Aliquippa had one thing in common: you can’t fuck around all day trying to make up your mind. The niggers will overrun you.”
    This kind of talk is jarring, but it was the language of Aliquippa—and it shaped Avrakotos’s brutal instinct for the jugular. There are legends in Aliquippa about the ones who escaped and made good: Henry Mancini, who got his start at the musical and political Italian clubs; Mike Ditka, Avrakotos’s high school friend from Plan Seven, the former Chicago Bears tight end whose name is synonymous with toughness; Tony Dorsett of the Cowboys. Becoming a sports hero was one way out.
    The mafia was another. There were three thousand Sicilians in Aliquippa. Most of Avrakotos’s friends were Sicilians, and he knew the Alamena family as “men of honor.” Gust’s father, Oscar Avrakotos, distributed Rolling Rock beer for them, and they always treated the Avrakotoses with respect. But the Sicilian mafia wasn’t an option for a Greek-American. And anyway Oscar Avrakotos had high hopes for his son.
    Like many other immigrants, Oscar’s American experience had begun at Ellis Island, as an eight-year-old boy from the Greek Island of Lemnos. He had come over with his brother in 1894 and for three decades toiled in the sweatshops of New England and the “Iron House” of Aliquippa. But then Oscar broke away from the pack with a vision of making a fortune selling his own soda pop.
    With his hard-earned savings he bought a bottling assembly line from the Smile and Cheer-up Company of St. Louis. He named his new company after the Greek sun god, Apollo. Apollo was his good-luck god, and he figured the name would win customers from the Greek Orthodox church, not to mention workers in the mills.
    As the owner of the Apollo Soda Water Company, Oscar was a man of means, at least by the standards of Lemnos. He was close to fifty when he went back to the old country and took a bride, Zafira Konstantaras, twenty-one years younger and with a big dowry. Back in Aliquippa three years later, Gust Avrakotos was born into a household that would know nothing but unrelenting hard work. His earliest memories are of his father moving about in the kitchen at 4:30 A.M. , eating his breakfast of pork chops and potatoes and polishing off several beers and a couple of shots, if it was cold, before walking downstairs to begin the day’s labor.
    By five A.M. he would have the bottling machine cranked up and moving. On one side was Louisa, a large black