The Commission convened another, even more secret and frantic meeting. This time, there was no arrogant talk of retribution, no confident pronouncements. The atmosphere was thick with a palpable, almost religious, fear. They met in the suffocating humidity of the Florida Everglades, on a fishing boat owned by Santo Trafficante, believing the vast, open water was the one place they could not be overheard.
Carlo Gambino, his usual calm shattered, played the tape Ezra had left for him. The sound of their own voices, plotting in what they had believed was absolute secrecy, echoed eerily over the still, black water. Carlos Marcello, the hot-headed brawler, was uncharacteristically silent, the image of the white feather on his mountain of cash burned into his mind. Trafficante chainsmoked, his hand trembling as he remembered the sight of his loyal, dead guard dogs.
They had been violated. This outsider, this Prentice, had penetrated their most secure sanctums. He had demonstrated a power that was almost supernatural. He was not another rival gangster to be dealt with through violence, nor a politician to be bought. He was something else, a ghost, a devil who could hear their thoughts and touch their souls.
Their decision was immediate and unanimous. The war was over. The contract on the "German gentleman" was rescinded. All operations, all inquiries, all thoughts of retribution against Ezra Prentice and his associates were to cease, permanently. To continue the fight would not be war; it would be suicide.
But their terror did not extinguish their rage; it merely redirected it. The immense humiliation they felt, the fortunes they had lost in the disastrous Cuba venture, the continued, relentless pressure from Robert Kennedy's public crusade—all of it needed a release. Their rage, like a cornered animal, now turned from the untouchable phantom that had so masterfully defeated them, and focused with a new, venomous intensity on the one target they believed was still vulnerable.
It was Carlos Marcello, his voice a low, seething hiss, who gave that rage its new name. "We can't touch this Prentice," he growled, spitting over the side of the boat into the dark water. "He's a devil. But the Kennedys… the Kennedys are not devils. They are men. They are politicians. They have parades to walk in, speeches to give. They have families they like to show off to the cameras."
Santo Trafficante, whose connections to the fiercely anti-Kennedy, anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami were deep and personal, nodded in slow, grim agreement. "The Cubans hate them," he murmured. "They feel betrayed. They believe Kennedy was a coward who abandoned them at the Bay of Pigs. They would do anything to see him fall."
A new, terrible consensus began to form in the humid darkness of the Everglades. Their rage, unable to strike at its true, hidden cause—Ezra—now redirected itself entirely. It coalesced around the public face of all their problems: the crusading Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, and his charismatic, popular brother, the President of the United States. They began to quietly, deniably, put out feelers. They would explore the possibility of a different kind of solution, a more permanent one.
From his silent, ordered sanctuary at Kykuit, Ezra received the reports from his network. The surveillance on the Commission bosses ceased. The whispers of contracts and retribution vanished from the underworld. He saw the sudden silence for what it was: a complete and total victory. He had met the challenge of the American Mafia, the most feared criminal organization in the country, and he had broken them with a single, silent counter-move.
He believed he had contained the problem. He had stabilized the underworld, protected his own people, and, in doing so, had shielded the Kennedys from the dangerous blowback of the Giancana affair. He had, in his own mind, once again acted as the perfect, invisible guardian of the administration, cleaning up a mess that their own recklessness had created. He had no idea that his brilliant, surgical victory had just created a far more dangerous and virulent strain of the disease. By making himself an untouchable target, he had inadvertently painted a giant, glowing bullseye on the back of the President.
The final scene was a chilling montage, a cross-cut of worlds that were now unknowingly, and tragically, intertwined.
In the Kykuit study, Ezra Prentice stood before his great world map, coolly and confidently managing the threads of his global empire. He was issuing orders to his financial teams in London, reviewing intelligence reports from Kessler in Berlin, and approving a new, massive philanthropic project that would further cement his public legend. He was a master of the universe, secure in the belief that his domestic crisis had been decisively and permanently averted.
In his office at the Department of Justice, a frustrated but determined Robert Kennedy was planning the next phase of his public war against the Mob. He was unaware of the secret, invisible war his family's protector had just fought and won on his behalf. He saw only the enemy in front of him, and he was preparing to charge, a righteous, unknowing soldier marching deeper into a minefield.
And finally, the scene shifted. It moved to a smoky, dimly lit bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. A low-level associate of Carlos Marcello, a man whose face was a mask of calculated menace, was having a quiet drink at a corner table. He was meeting with two other men. One was a bitter, disgruntled anti-Castro Cuban exile, a man who had lost everything and blamed the Kennedys for his fate. The other was a younger man, twitchy and unstable, his eyes burning with a strange, fanatical light. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist who, paradoxically, hated the Kennedys for their actions against his hero, Fidel Castro. He clutched a newspaper clipping about the President's upcoming visit to Dallas.
The men were talking, their voices low, their shared hatred of the Kennedy brothers a palpable, toxic thing that filled the small space around them. The unholy, combustible alliance of interests that would one day converge in Dallas—the vengeful Mafia, the betrayed Cubans, the lone, unstable gunman—was being born in that smoky room.
Ezra, in his brilliant, ruthless effort to protect the President, had inadvertently created the very monster that would destroy him. He had not prevented a tragedy; he had simply, and unknowingly, changed its target. The architect of order had become the unwitting architect of chaos.