The world, on its surface, had settled into a fragile, deceptive quiet. Several months had passed since Ezra's silent coup in Chicago. Sam Giancana, humbled and leashed, was playing his part, feeding sacrificial lambs to Robert Kennedy's eager prosecutors. The Cuba plot was a buried secret, a ghost that no longer haunted the headlines. To the outside world, it appeared that the Kennedy administration's righteous war on organized crime was proceeding with triumphant success.
But in the deep, unseen currents of the American underworld, a different kind of storm was gathering. Beneath the surface quiet, the tectonic plates of power were grinding against each other, building a pressure that had to be released.
The meeting took place in the back room of a traditional Italian social club in Apalachin, New York, a place with a long and storied history of hosting the nation's most powerful and dangerous men. This was a secret, high-level summit of "The Commission," the clandestine ruling council of the American Mafia. The men who sat around the simple wooden table were the old gods, the patient, calculating masters of a vast and violent empire.
Carlo Gambino of New York, the quiet, fox-like "Boss of Bosses," presided with an air of somber gravity. Santo Trafficante Jr., the master of the Tampa and Cuban rackets, his face a mask of sun-weathered cunning, smoked a thin cigar. And Carlos Marcello, the diminutive but volcanic boss of New Orleans, his eyes burning with a hot, impatient fury, radiated a palpable menace.
They were here to discuss the "Giancana problem," but it was no longer just about one man. It was about the existential threat he represented.
"He has shamed us," Marcello began, his voice a low, gravelly growl, thick with a Louisiana accent. "This Giancana. He kneels. He kneels before this… this outsider. This ghost from Wall Street. He has allowed an outsider to dictate the terms of our business. It is a sign of weakness. It is a disease that will spread if it is not cut out."
Trafficante, whose Cuban casino empire had been the single greatest casualty of the failed Castro plot, spoke next, his voice a soft, silken hiss. "This 'Prentice'," he said, the name sounding like a curse on his lips. "He promised us Havana. He promised us revenge. Instead, he delivered us nothing but federal heat and public humiliation. He cost us a fortune. He cost us face. He made a deal, and then he broke it to save his friends in the White House. This cannot be allowed to stand."
Gambino, the most cautious and strategic of the three, listened, his fingers steepled. He understood the rage. He shared it. This outsider had meddled in their affairs, had destabilized the delicate balance of power they had maintained for decades, and had done so with an impunity that was both terrifying and insulting.
They reached a unanimous, unspoken consensus. An act of this magnitude required a response. A judgment had been passed in the silent court of the Commission. They agreed that a direct attack on Ezra Prentice himself was too risky. The man was a ghost, protected by a level of power they could not yet fully comprehend. To strike at the king and miss would be suicide.
"No," Gambino said finally, his voice quiet but carrying the weight of a final verdict. "Not the man himself. Not yet. We will send a message first. We will take one of his pieces from the board. A message he will understand."
He looked at the other bosses. "He has an enforcer. A European. A German, they say. The one who brokered the deal in Miami. This is the man who walks in our world on Prentice's behalf. We will remove him. It will be a lesson. It will show this Wall Street ghost that his power does not extend to our streets."
They issued a quiet, informal, but deadly serious contract. Not a loud, public hit, but a clean, professional "accident." The target was the man they knew only as the "fancy German suit." The target was Baron von Hauser.
While the old gods of the Mob were passing their sentence, a new and far more modern intelligence network was already listening to the whispers. After the catastrophic failure of his telex machines, Ezra had tasked von Hauser with building a new, purely human-based intelligence network focused exclusively on domestic threats. It was a sprawling web of informants, a collection of the desperate, the greedy, and the indebted. It included lawyers who overheard things in courthouse hallways, bank tellers who noticed unusual transactions, and, most crucially, low-level bookies and enforcers on the bottom rungs of the organized crime ladder.
One such informant was a man named Sal, a small-time bookie in the French Quarter of New Orleans who owed his life to the Baron after a gambling debt to Marcello's organization had been discreetly, and mysteriously, paid off years ago. Sal, in a smoke-filled backroom bar, overheard two of Marcello's capos talking, their voices low and laced with whiskey. He heard only fragments: "a contract from the top," "a job up in New York," and, most intriguingly, a target described as a "fancy German suit who works for some Wall Street ghost."
The whisper, vague and uncorroborated, traveled up the intelligence chain, from the bookie in New Orleans to a cut-out in Miami, and finally to von Hauser's desk in his Brooklyn workshop. On its own, it was nothing, street-level gossip. But when von Hauser placed it before Ezra, the older man's analytical mind immediately saw the shape of the threat.
"Marcello, Trafficante, Gambino," Ezra murmured, tracing the connections. "The Cuba fiasco. Giancana's submission. This is the blowback you warned me about, Baron. It's arrived."
He did not wait for the threat to materialize. He did not wait for confirmation. He acted, immediately and decisively. He ordered a full-court intelligence press on the three key Commission bosses.
"I want to know everything," he commanded von Hauser, his voice a blade of ice. "Their daily routines, their safe houses, their business fronts. I want the names and profiles of every professional assassin they are known to keep on their payrolls. We are not the prey in this hunt, Baron. We are the predators. They think they are setting a trap for you. We will set a better one for them."
Ezra's teams went to work, deploying the full, terrifying power of his technological superiority. They used methods the Mob, still operating in a world of whispered conversations and strong-arm tactics, could not even imagine.
His team in Tampa, using a high-powered parabolic microphone from a boat offshore, began twenty-four-hour audio surveillance of Santo Trafficante's heavily guarded waterfront estate. For days, they listened to the mundane sounds of the mob boss's life: arguments with his wife, the barking of his prized guard dogs, business deals conducted over the phone.
Then, they got the lucky break. On a clear, still evening, Trafficante walked out onto his back patio for a cigar, accompanied by a visitor. The microphone, over a quarter-mile away, picked up their conversation with a startling clarity. The visitor was a man with a thick, Corsican accent, a notorious freelance assassin known in intelligence circles as "Le Serpent."
They spoke in coded language, but the meaning was unmistakable. They spoke of a "job" up in New York. Of a target described as a "German gentleman of refined tastes." Of the need for it to look like a simple street mugging gone wrong, an "accident."
The whisper from the New Orleans gutter had just been confirmed by a voice from a king's patio. The threat was real. The Commission's assassins were in motion. And their target was the man sitting right across the desk from Ezra.