The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

No loose ends. It's the Bovaro family motto. As part of the Bovaro clan, one of the most powerful and respected families in organized crime, Jonathan knows what he must do: take out Melody Grace McCartney, the woman whose testimony can lock up his father and disgrace his entire family. The only problem: he can't bring himself to do it.

Had Jonathan kept his silence, Melody and her parents would never have been identified and lured into the Witness Protection Program, able to run but never to hide. So he keeps her safe the only way he knows how - by vowing to clean up his own mess while acting as her shield.

But as he watches her take on another new identity in yet another new town, becoming a beautiful but broken woman, Jonathan can't get her out of his mind . . . or his heart. From the streets of Little Italy to a refuge that promises a fresh start, Jonathan will be forced to choose between the life he's always known, the destiny his family has carved out for him, and a future unlike anything he's ever imagined.

Release date: August 7, 2012

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

When violence arrives, it rarely knocks. It seldom taps you on the shoulder, suggests you get ready. It creates change with the most capable tools in the toolbox: confusion, humiliation, destruction. And its survivors are lucky to have coughed out a raspy I never saw it coming.

I learned this in my earliest days, like all great family traditions. Some mothers hand down a culinary talent, some fathers pass a skill to a son or daughter, the familial reverence for the Holy Bible or a football team. But I grew up in a Sicilian household steeped in the practice of influence over the lives of others. We are the Bovaros, one of the oldest and most respected families in organized crime, and the tradition passed down to me with faith and accuracy was violence. I first witnessed it at age eight, first delivered it at age twelve. In our world, violence is the fulcrum. It keeps everything in—or out—of balance.

Perhaps no one has learned that lesson as well as James Fratello—known in our family as Jimmy “the Rat.” What Jimmy’s specific crimes against our family were I was never completely sure, though his coming and going—really, the going—kick-started events that altered the trajectory of my life. Jimmy was known as the Rat long before it turned out he really was one, named so for the stringy remains of oily hair that clung to the back of his meaty head. Whatever images of mafiosos your mind conjures from the movies, Jimmy would have been summed up like this: He wasn’t the strong one, the smart one, or the one with the good lines; he was nobody’s favorite; he was expendable, the one who might take a bullet and you wouldn’t waste the energy to shrug.

I was ten years old when my father gave the Rat what became a fabled slicing. Glad to say I never saw the result of my father’s brutality that day. I was hanging around, bored out of my mind—a difficult age to be Mafia-bred; too old to be innocent, too young to understand what’s really happening around you. I eventually strolled downstairs to see if I could catch a glimpse of what it was my dad did for a living, which at the time I misunderstood to be the manager of various restaurants. I stayed out of sight, watching the two of them chat in the kitchen long enough to realize nothing interesting was going on anywhere around them, around me. My father and Jimmy talked quietly, shared a few jokes. I yawned as I quietly made my way outside to the sidewalk.

All I can say is this: Jimmy never saw it coming.

Had I been inside or still within viewing distance of that kitchen, my life would have been cemented; the only way I could’ve survived the horror of witnessing premeditated murder by my father’s hand would’ve been to herald it, embrace it as my own, to become a player in the same league. Instead I was outside kicking stones into the sewer, watching some yokel from Jersey parallel park his Oldsmobile, back and forth and back and forth. Here I was ten years old and I knew enough to want to yell, “You gotta turn the wheel! Turn your freakin’ wheel!”

The guy spent close to three minutes inching his Cutlass closer to the curb, finished a good foot and a half shy of avoiding a citation. Then the suburban family slowly emerged. First the tall blond mother who would’ve had my adolescent brothers cracking crude jokes, then the father wearing an unseasonable wool raincoat and Yankees cap. But you can erase all of these images from your mind; that’s what I did as soon as I saw the little girl who wiggled out from the passenger side of the car. She was a few years younger than me, but I would never forget her. It was the first time a girl caught my attention, and she did so by staring up at the buildings with genuine admiration, inhaled the dirty air like a freshly lit cigar. A little Mary Tyler Moore, she was. A cascade of blond curls danced around her neck as she spun in circles on the sidewalk, her arms flailing about. She wore a short dress popular with the teenage girls in our neighborhood at the time and shoes that were black and shiny.

I still cannot understand what captivated me; she was just a little girl and I a little boy. But I became aware of myself—fearful that she might sense my noticing her—so I slid between a pair of Chevys on Mulberry Street and hunched down, continued spying on her from a safe distance.

Her old man stretched as though he’d driven straight through from Boston or Philly, threw his arm around his wife and planted one on her. The little girl seemed to adore this, giggled as though it embarrassed her but stared like it was her favorite scene in a film. They all chatted briefly about the restaurant—my father’s—then attempted to open the door.

It was 7:12 a.m. on Sunday morning. The restaurant was closed; Mass was coming soon.

Here is the first truly regrettable moment of my life: I stood back up and made steps their way in an effort to tell them the place was closed—but as I caught another glimpse of the girl, my feet faltered. Had I completed this mission, spoken a half dozen words, the story would have ended here, complete with a built-in happy ending.

Instead it went like this:

I slid back between the cars, rested myself on the hood of a Camaro, and watched them tug on that door with enough determination to loosen the hinges. Then came the conversation that suggested they might find somewhere else to go—a tough bill to fill on a Sunday morning in New York’s Little Italy. Instead, the father slipped down the narrow alley adjacent to the eatery and headed toward the kitchen, waving them his way; mom and daughter followed.

That’s the last I saw of them for about forty-five seconds.

I sat staring at the rear of their Oldsmobile, wondering what brought these folks in from Jersey, pretending to convert their license plate into a vanity tag. My brothers and I would fancy that the rich and famous were riding covertly through lower Manhattan disguised and hidden in average cars, slipping out of hotels and restaurants with no one being the wiser. It became a regular competition between us.

783-JCM

John Cougar Mellencamp, 783 concerts performed.

025-SRL

Sugar Ray Leonard, 25 wins by KO.

1037-EVH

Eddie Van Halen, 1,037 fully consumed bottles of Jack Daniel’s.

I focused on that Olds with all my might but the combination of letters and numbers left me struggling: FNP-18X. Plates from New Jersey routinely stumped us, as the state had just started replacing the last digit with a letter on all their tags. I sat on the verge of progress—Florence Nightingale? Fig Newton?—when the screams startled me back to awareness. Down the alley came the three of them, the mother hobbling in front of the father, the little girl tossed over his shoulder like a sack of flour, the females screaming, the man a shade whiter than when he ventured down that alley, cap now missing. I remember thinking that people squeamish at the sight of rats shouldn’t go down alleys in New York.

If the mother had been trying to loosen the hinges on that restaurant door, she was now attempting to completely rip off the door of the Olds with her bare hands. Dear old dad tossed the girl in the backseat like old luggage, then fumbled with his ring of keys to find the one that fit the ignition, all while staring down that alley of trash and shadows. He slammed the door, started the car, gunned the accelerator. And I guess the guy had it in him; it may have taken him forty-seven back-and-forths to parallel park his bomb, but it took him one to get out. Then the squeal of the wheels, the fishtailing, the coughing exhaust, the fade.

That must have been one gigantic rodent.

A minute or so later, my uncle Sal came strolling out. The guy was all salt and pepper: his hair, his freckled skin, his personality. Sal lit up a Camel, casually drifted my way, and blasted me one in the shoulder, messed up my hair. He blew a cloud of smoke in my general direction. “You stay out of the restaurant, kid, eh?”

I stared at him, but he understood I was saying sure. “Rat in the kitchen again?”

He took a drag long enough that he burned through a half inch of cigarette, two minutes’ worth of nicotine. He looked up and down the street looking for something, for the absence of something, exhaled slowly in both directions. Then, walking away from me, toward the restaurant, he muttered, “Yeah, big fat friggin’ rat.”

I walked down the block to the corner store and got a Pepsi out of a near-historic vending machine resting alone on the sidewalk. This was my neighborhood, my town. Manhattan and Brooklyn combined into one beautiful myriad of possibilities. So many of the establishments my father and our family ran were in Little Italy, but home was a three-mile trek across the Brooklyn Bridge. The borders of my life existed on this side of the world, bounded by the Hudson, the East, the BQE. Everything was here: our home, our church, our livelihood. My entire family lived within these lines, every cousin, aunt, and uncle, each as thick and rich as their Italian accents. There was no reason to leave, and it never really occurred to us to try. The fact that people came in—from Jersey, Connecticut, upstate—made perfect sense. This was not merely the center of our world; it was the center of everything. New York remains the center still. I sipped that soda as I surveyed all that was around me. It was not unusual to get a nod from owners sweeping sidewalks or a Hey, Johnny from the folks we treated with respect. Everyone knew who I was—John Bovaro—and they always gave me space. I took my time; I had no motivation to hurry.

But when I finally returned to Vincent’s, things had changed, though not as dramatically as you might imagine. Out front: three cops, one patrol car, two bystanders who wished they knew more. One of the cops I’d seen before, a kid whose folks were from Palermo and had commanded him to become a cop and ditch the life of a hoodlum. He rewarded them with partial obedience: a cop whose allegiance was to the Bovaro clan. The other two officers looked annoyed and eager, respectively. I approached slowly and Allegiant gave me a sly nod. I rolled a kink out of my shoulder. Who knows why the shakedown was occurring. It happened with regularity and never amounted to anything.

As for the bystanders, these were the Kerrigans. A husband-and-wife team, both Irish, determined to take down not only the Bovaros, but sixteen other major crime families in New York, including but not limited to the Italians, the Greeks, the Russians, and the Irish, with whom they had some not so distant relatives. When anything went down in our neighborhood, the cops were provided one common response when they started banging on doors looking for information: I didn’t see a thing; I didn’t hear a thing; I don’t know nothin’. No one ever wanted to get involved. Unless the cops tagged the Kerrigans. They had an answer for every friggin’ question that was ever asked, except their success rate was around 15 percent. The cops always took a statement, though they knew it would pan out to more paperwork than product.

This morning, however, was quite different. Why? Because I arrived at the wrong time. I knew nothing about what had happened in the kitchen at Vincent’s—in fact, it would be days before I found out the truth and only because I read vivid headlines in the Times. So what could I possibly offer the cops? What value could a little kid standing on a city sidewalk offer regarding a crime that happened a building away?

Eager caught Allegiant’s glance and slowly headed my way. Annoyed rolled his eyes.

It was clear to everyone—except Eager—that whatever was going on was merely a matter of procedure. In today’s standards, it would be one drug dealer killing another, a matter of filling out the right forms back at the precinct, giving the coroner a heads-up, placing a check mark in the right box on the marker board outside the captain’s office. But Eager didn’t care, he came over and asked me questions anyway, a kid he had just watched walk down the street from a decided distance.

“And what did you see?” Eager asked.

I stared at him, understanding the inherent hatred my family had for cops. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Didn’t hear anything? Didn’t see anyone rush out of Vincent’s? Nothing strange or unusual?”

Were I twelve or thirteen at the time, I would have shut down like a prison at lights-out. But I was ten. And the girl. And the panicked parents. And the screams. And the girl. And the gunning of the engine. And the frantic escape down Mulberry. And the dust cloud.

And the little girl.

I gave him a shrug/swallow combo. “Saw a family run down the alley a while back.” I tugged at my shirt a little bit. “They okay?”

Eager took a step closer. “How’s that?”

“I saw a man and woman and little girl come running down that alley.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago.”

Allegiant started making his way toward the discussion. Now he and Annoyed looked like fraternal twins.

Eager threw up his hand as if to stop the two of them from getting an inch closer, and stop they did. He knelt before me, which made me the taller one.

With a throaty whisper, he said, “Now, this is important. What can you tell me about them?”

“Are they okay?”

“What did they look like?”

“I don’t know. Plain. The girl was pretty, had blond curls, danced on the sidewalk.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Plain,” I said. “Did anything happen to them?”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about them.” He hesitated, then, “I need to make sure they’re safe and sound.”

That bastard. He used my obvious anxiety for the family, for the little girl, against me, manipulated the innocence of a kid to garner a pat on the back. I haven’t felt the same about cops since.

I let out a nervous sigh and started rubbing my temples. “Um, they were from New Jersey.”

He inched closer, his shoes making a scraping sound against the cement. “How do you know this?”

“Their license tags.”

Annoyed took a step in our direction, but Eager still had his hand up. As for Allegiant, he couldn’t have gotten back into Vincent’s faster if someone had loaded him into a shotgun and fired, though by his swagger he made it appear like his purpose was procedural.

Eager swallowed like he’d been salivating. “Do you remember the license plates?”

Fig Newton. Florence Nightingale.

“FN… uh, FN something. Started with FN. Had an eight in it.”

Eager started scribbling on a notepad.

From the corner of my eye I could see a herd of Sicilians running in my direction. At that moment, the vertigo kicked in.

From a distance I heard, “Questioning a minor without his parents’ presence or permission?”

It turns out that means nothing, but it disabled me. A wall of olive skin was coming to rescue me—from causing irreparable damage.

Eager leaned in and asked quickly, like I might take a bullet and he had one last shot to get the goods, “What kind of car was it?”

The Italians were closing in.

The little girl was fading out.

The words dribbled from my voice as though they were my last. “Olds. Silver. Cutlass Sierra.”

What occurred next is much like what a defensive tackle must feel like when he recovers a fumbled ball: bodies coming from every direction, along with a clear understanding that the best you can do is fall on the ball and take the turnover; leave the touchdown for the offense. The only difference here is that Eager did not get leveled, but merely surrounded.

The discussion was over.

The men shepherded me back into Vincent’s, never sent a harsh word my way. They spoke to one another in Italian about how I was the one that was wronged in this ordeal. Their deference and protection of me were pure, things I never doubted—though for the first time I failed to comprehend the justification. My father came to me and put his hand behind my neck, turned his mouth into a consoling half-smile as though I’d failed a test for which I’d spent my life preparing. “Let’s get you something to eat, Johnny,” he said, then kissed me on the head. I curled into his safe hands like a sleepy baby.

The cops took pictures, swabbed drying puddles and stains, did a lot of head-scratching. People gossiped in the streets, in the stores, on the front steps of brownstones.

I didn’t see a thing.

I didn’t hear a thing.

I don’t know nothin’.



At 10:35 a.m. on that same Sunday, Eager performed a query on New Jersey’s Department of Transportation vehicle registration database.

Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ:

2,323

Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra:

675

Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver: 177

Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver, registered tags possessing characters F, N, 8:

1

At 11:08 a.m., Allegiant performed the exact same query.



What followed was little more than a simple race: two sets of men attempting to acquire the same bounty.

At eight minutes past noon, a large black vehicle with tinted windows pulled into the driveway of a modest Cape Cod in Montclair Township, New Jersey. The vehicle was not a police car. Out stepped three large men, firearms safely tucked beneath their clothes, determination in their strides.

The house held the McCartney family: Arthur, a chemist; Lydia, a stay-at-home mother; and a little blond kindergartner by the name of Melody Grace. It would be fair to say the McCartneys never really knew what hit them. Once these men were allowed into their house, they would not be leaving until they got exactly what they wanted. These men understood the power of fear, were masters at the art of manipulation.

Fifteen minutes later, a black Lincoln, brimming with Bovaros and made men—the capodecinas, or capos as they were called—slowed as it pulled in front of the same house in Montclair. A light mist rose from the hood of the car already parked in the driveway, a small puddle of moisture below the tailpipe. They were too late—mere minutes. They had no other option but to drive away.

By three o’clock, another vehicle was summoned to the Cape Cod, a dark Suburban with bulletproof windows. It remained in the street while two men guarded it from the outside. Thirty minutes later, Arthur and Lydia walked the forty paces from the front door of their home, adorned in bulletproof vests, flanked by two men commanded to preserve their lives. Behind them was little Melody Grace, crying as she was carried by the third man, weighed down by a Kevlar wrap draped over her tiny body, watching her home fade with every step.

The McCartneys never returned to Montclair.

To New Jersey.

To the Northeast.

There were two reasons to kill the McCartneys: to keep them from testifying or to punish them for having testified. Either way, bleak.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department started working its sloppy sleight of hand, a magician with only one trick in its repertoire: the disappearing act.

Federal Witness Protection.

This suburban family had witnessed less than fifteen seconds of criminal activity, and once the Department of Justice was done getting theirs, the McCartneys would be thrown out in the wild to fend for themselves, protected by the illusion of contrived existences. Five years earlier, Louie Salvone had tried giving my dad up in a plea bargain, gave the feds four crates of documentation, and they still couldn’t nail Pop for a single thing.

Things didn’t turn out very well for Louie. All I can say is this: shiv.

In Salvone’s case, he had it coming. He could have done his six months and come out a stronger man in the organization as a result. But by that time Louie’s desire to party had matured into a pretty serious coke habit, and the combined thought of going a half year without a fix—not to mention the nightmare of going through withdrawal in prison—had him looking for the fastest way out.

The McCartneys, on the other hand, were guilty of nothing more than wanting a plate of eggs, some orange juice, and a pair of cappuccinos. You can’t even say it was an error in judgment; they were simply customers, and frankly the kind any restaurateur would want in his establishment. Going down the alley might have been a bit much, but what father wouldn’t go knock on a few doors for his child?

A little over a year later, I started to hear more and more about taking care of the McCartneys. On our retainer were not one but two of New York’s most powerful law firms. The bigger of the two, the firm with the most connections and people on the take, crafted a gorgeous defense for my father. The Justice Department wasn’t foolish; they had the McCartneys deposed to what they’d witnessed mere minutes after they were thrown into Witness Protection, produced enough videotape to single-handedly turn a profit for TDK. But Pop’s legal team somehow managed to get anything this innocent family said in the videos thrown out on some technicality I never fully understood, which had little impact on how airtight the government’s case was; the witnesses would simply be able to retell it live in court—and Pop’s legal team knew it. What it gave the Bovaros, you see, was time.

Time to eliminate the witnesses.

I was getting older, had just turned twelve, and as my usefulness surged, so did the significance of conversations I might be privy to, or at a minimum overhear. Couple that with my oldest brother, Peter, basking in the glory of knowing and hearing more than the rest of us and desperate to prove it, and the image of the future started taking shape, its brightness and vibrancy hinging on finding the McCartneys. Without them, the Justice Department would have to return to Louie Salvone’s ineffective documentation of how the Bovaros ran numbers back before I was born, a business line our family all but exited once most states in the Union had sanctioned lotteries. I grew a lot during that period—physically, of course, I started to resemble the rugged structure of my older brothers, Peter and Gino, eighteen and fourteen, respectively—but psychologically, too. Prior to then, I thought my dad was in the restaurant business, and he was, sort of. He owned many—as a means to launder money and shuffle stolen goods out the back. But I soon came to realize that we were special. Mafia special. The terms my father’s family and associates started using in my presence began sounding more significant. Guys were getting whacked, deadbeats were getting roughed up, troublemakers were having their balls handed to them and occasionally shoved down their throats. In my younger days, where my uncle Sal told me to stay out of Vin’s kitchen to forestall the horror of my father’s brutality, now he’d ask me to grab a mop and do my share.

I was, however, only twelve, demonstrated by my assumption that the only targets were the senior McCartneys. But once I heard my father speak of the plan to eliminate all three of them at once, I experienced the very first instance of disrespect for the way my family conducted its business. Why would anyone want to off a child? A child that was probably still learning how to read? Wouldn’t it be easy enough to confuse or scare the kid on the stand?

But here’s the term I heard over and over in our house like a frigging mantra: no loose ends.

I mentally ran through the roster of men in my father’s organization, trying to find the sociopath who might be able to level the barrel at a little girl and pull the trigger. Only one contender came to mind: Paulie Marcone, a nut job who found heartfelt enjoyment in assaulting and killing for any loosely justifiable reason. The problem with Paulie was how odd things would haunt him and cause him to break down. The guy could eat steak pizzaiola every day of the week but couldn’t fathom eating a hunk of veal. He couldn’t bear to see a suffering animal or a crying kid or an old lady struggling to get her groceries to the top floor of her brownstone. Beat him backing into a parking spot on Court Street, though, and you’ll drive home one-handed. This strange, largely unseen sensitive side made him useless in conducting the last hit.

Ultimately, no one materialized—because no one had to; the feds managed to keep the McCartneys well hidden. We had a few people in Justice, mostly lower-level clerks working off gambling debts, who’d occasionally cough up nothing more than advanced notice on what judge we might draw for a particular case or how many boxes of evidence were sitting in a warehouse in Jersey. But getting information on the Federal Witness Protection Program is precisely as difficult as you might imagine. For starters, the program is run out of the U.S. Marshals Service, and the entry points to that system are fragmented; having contacts at Justice wasn’t enough. At the time, we didn’t have direct insiders with the FBI, either—but if we had, they’d have been useless, too. We needed a source at the Marshals Service simply to figure out where to begin.



The entire thing seemed to go away for about a month—for me; tension in our family mounted as the McCartneys disappeared into an oblivion of safety. It should be noted that the one thing the Bovaros have done well since the moment our elders stepped off the boat is the one thing that saved my father from a life in prison. Those things we deal in on a daily basis—money laundering, carting, fixing, bookmaking, loan sharking—are the incidental things that occur as a result of the one integral component. The district attorneys call it fear; we call it influence. Possessing power over others is the most instinctive human concept; you either want it or are willing to succumb to it.

That said, my father’s influence cut a wide swath across this great land, a terribly unfortunate truth for the McCartneys. While the feds did an impressive job of keeping them hidden, they could do little to stop those who served my father. A mere five weeks into their relocation, the little McCartney girl accidentally outed her entire family to her first grade class by using her birth name. Within hours the little Arkansas town was abuzz with what had happened, which eventually spilled its way to a bar where a drunken loser looking to make good on an extended debt in our organization hoped he might turn the information into a clean slate. The feds hurried the McCartneys along, but not before the information got back to New York, not before Arthur, Lydia, and Melody were being followed by men in our crew.

My life began a transformation in that moment. The little girl was to be hunted, killed, buried, her existence whittled down to a memory for her extended family that would grow fainter by the year. The flame of innocence that had been flickering for years in my family would soon be extinguished and redemption would be impossible—and most troubling, I seemed to be the only one who cared. Granted, most guys who took a beating (or worse) from a Bovaro had earned it, and even as a kid I learned to be okay with that. But knowing that this poor little girl would be running her whole life because of me became more than I could bear.



For the next eighteen months, through the countless motions to delay the trial, both the Bovaros and the McCartneys lived out a series of near misses. My uncles were on the trail of the McCartneys repeatedly, with a few opportunities for elimination that ended in empty-handed returns. Other times, the McCartneys inexplicably slipped right out from under us, as though we were right behind them—when we weren’t.

Every trip, every time someone was sent to rub them out, I went sleepless. I lost weight. When I didn’t actually become ill, I feigned it and resigned myself to my bedroom. I spent some time throwing up and more time fighting back tears and a burgeoning anger. Shamefully, the elder McCartneys weren’t my concern, rarely crossed my mind; the little girl would come into my room and haunt me like the ghost she had yet to become.

I’d overhear the conversations and loose planning of how and who would terminate the family. They would run through a generic itinerary like a grocery list. The mother. The father. The plans to evade the feds. And the girl. One conversation in particular stuck with me, a discussion between my father and an associate whose voice I couldn’t quite place.

Then they started speaking in Italian, which usually meant they wanted to talk confidentially. The only people in my family who could really get a full grasp of a conversation spoken in full Italian, complete with Sicilian dialect, would be the grown-ups. By then, though, I was well on my way to acquiring broken Italian—learned mostly through discussions like these—that I carry with me to this day, and I was able to understand enough of the language to translate the following exchange while they ate at the small table in our kitchen:

“This is our last shot, amico,” my father said softly. Amico means friend, and everyone was amico—could have been a son, an associate, or someone about to serve him a gelato or take a bullet.

“We know how to find them, Tony. We’re going to take care of it, eh?” said Amico.

“Need to be.” Or something like that.

“You know what this means for our family. For me.”

“I know, ’Tone.”

Then some gibberish about the puttanesca.

“We can’t take them out on the courthouse steps.” I’m not even sure which one of them said this. The point