The rental wasn't exactly a rental at all. It was a house owned by someone my father once saved from a burning car wreck back in the nineties, a man who owned a bunch of properties in the area. There was no actual paperwork, but there was an understanding. The man, Joel, left that house empty for my father should he need it.
He knew better than to ask questions.
And in all the years since then, we'd only ever needed the house twice. And never for anything nefarious. Just a place to gather, to regroup.
But it had a basement without a walkout, with barred windows, with a newly Drylok-painted floor that would make for easy clean-up. Which I hoped to fuck wouldn't be necessary.
"It's settled then," he said, raising his glass to me, taking a sip, then moving out of the booth. "Keep me posted."
"Always do," I agreed, watching him walk over to the security as they came in for their shift.
Famiglia started as a front, a legitimate business to keep the IRS off our backs, to allow us to excuse our dirty money as restaurant income.
It became, over the years, an actual passion of my father's. Especially as he stepped back from the heavy lifting work-wise. Food had been a passion of his, handed down from his grandmother, his mother, then my mom after they married. But the man didn't know a whisk from a hairbrush, so being a restauranteur was as close he could get to the food without having to know how to cook it himself. And, never remarrying, it gave him the opportunity to get gourmet meals cooked for him every night.
I, not having my grandmother, then, later, not my mother either, hadn't developed the deep love of food he had, much to the disappointment of my aunts and cousins who served up their hearts in their dishes every night of the week, always inviting me, rarely getting me at their tables.
I ate something on the run more often than I did with a knife and fork.
So as much as Famiglia was part of my legacy, I didn't have the passion for it that my father did.
For me, the passion was in the business. The other business. The main business. The one that would be my real legacy, the legacy of my kids should I have any, if I settled down for long enough to find a woman.
There was no time for women now, though. Except, of course, if the woman was screwing around at the docks.
Kindled attraction to her aside, I couldn't let her fuck with my business. Not with New York breathing down our necks.
The Costa Family was struggling. The New York mafia had been struggling since the nineties when the old bosses were being locked up for life sentences on RICO charges, leaving other made guys running scared to the feds, singing family secrets.
Omerta, the mafia code of silence, was a thing of the past in most of the big families. There'd been a freeze on promoting any associates for the past decade.
The unrest, the lack of iron-clad loyalty, the hunger at the bottom while those at the top gorged, it all made for tension in the capos, in the boss.
If Costa had run out of new scams or business ventures, if he was feeling a financial squeeze, and he knew our coffers were overflowing, he would want to raid them. He would send us into war if he needed to.
War.
When we'd known peace for a long time.
We needed to do whatever it took to prevent that.
The Henchmen weren't exactly allies, but they weren't enemies. I distinctly remembered walking past their clubhouse once when I was maybe ten or eleven, and my father pointing to the leather-cut-wearing, gun-toting bikers, telling me, "You don't fuck with two types of people, Luca. The cartels and the fucking outlaw bikers. They don't give a fuck."
"About what?" I'd asked.
"Anything," he'd told me, leading me away.
I didn't want to start shit with the Henchmen because the Russians wanted to import their weapons through our port.
So if I wanted any kind of leverage against Costa—through his son Lorenzo—we needed to get our shit together. They wouldn't trust us to make our own decisions about what was—and wasn't—good for the family if we had people running around our docks unchecked.
"Ey, Luca, wait up," Dario called, jogging down behind me as I made my way across the lot.
"What's up, Dario?"
"You got a minute to talk about the job I mentioned last week?"
The job he mentioned.