The wine was a 1961 Bo, expensive, imported from Northern Italy, specifically for this dinner. Carlo Gambino had chosen it himself, a gesture of respect for the occasion, a sitdown between the five New York crime families to discuss territory disputes in Manhattan’s garment district. It was May 18th, 1971. The meeting was held…
The phone call came at 3:17 a.m. on February 12th, 1986. Thursday morning, a pay phone in Queens ringing the emergency number that connected directly to the Gambino family’s Brooklyn headquarters. The voice on the line was frantic, terrified, young. They took him. They took Bobby. The Colombians, they’re saying they want $5 million…
Brooklyn, New York. January 1983. 10 days before the body is found. Roy Deo drives a new 1983 Cadillac registered in his wife’s name. The car is black. The registration keeps his name off the paperwork. In the back seat, a chandelier from his home in Masipiqua Park, Long Island, sits wrapped in…
The 4th of October 1990, level B2. The underground parking garage beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center, Manhattan. A 1987 Cadillac has been sitting in the same spot for 3 days. Nobody has looked at it. There are 2,000 parking spaces down here. Thousands of people walk past every day. No…
January 14th, 1979. Somewhere in New York, Tommy Desimone arrived for his induction ceremony. He wore his best suit, carried himself with pride. He’d been told he was finally going to be made. Paul Vario’s son, Peter, and Bruno Fatiolo drove him. Desimone never returned. Shot multiple times. His body was never found. Good…
On the morning of November 26th, 2007, Sean Taylor was the most feared player in the National Football League. 6’2, 230 lbs, running a 4.5 140, leading the NFC in interceptions despite missing two games. And by 3:30 the next morning, he was dead on a gurney at Jackson Memorial Hospital with a single…
Here’s something nobody ever says out loud. When the Queen Mother died in March 2002, the BBC cleared its schedules. The flags went to a half-mast. Parliament suspended business. The tributes were uniform, wall-to-wall, almost eerie in their sameness. The nation’s grandmother, the last great Edwardian, the woman who held Britain together during the…
Every marriage has rules. Most of them are never written down, never spoken aloud, never explained to anyone outside the two people who made them. They are the invisible architecture of the relationship, the agreements and understandings and lines that both people know are there without ever having formally drawn them. The Kennedy marriage…
There is a photograph taken on November 22nd, 1963 that almost no one can look at for very long. It shows a woman in a pink wool suit standing inside Air Force One, her clothes still stained from the hours before. She is not crying. …
There is a photograph taken in the summer of 1959 on the deck of a yacht called Christina. In it, Maria Callas is laughing. Really laughing. The kind that reaches the eyes, that makes a person look like they have no idea what’s coming. She looks free. She looks like a woman at the…
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