search among gangland's
higher echelons for a substitute for bootlegging.

And when Cesare was an innocent high-schooler, sporting a Paleolithic
switchblade knife and black leather jacket, his father and his
father's friends had reached a new plateau. They consolidated into a
Syndicate, and began to concentrate on gambling and the whole,
complex, profitable network of unions.

And then World War II had come along, and it was time for Cesare to do
his part. Bidding a fond farewell to his father and such of his
father's friends as had survived the disagreements of Prohibition, the
painful legal processes of the early Thirties and the even more
painful consolidations of the years immediately before the war, young
Cesare went off to foreign lands, where he distinguished himself by
creating and running the largest single black-market ring in all of
Southern Europe.

Cesare had followed in his father's footsteps. And, before his sudden
death during a disagreement in Miami, Giacomo "Jack the Ripper"
Manelli was proud of his son.

"Geez," he often said. "Whattakid, huh? Whattakid!"

At the war's end, young Cesare, having proven himself a man, took unto
himself a nickname and a shotgun. He did not have to use the shotgun
very much, after the first few lessons; soon he was on his way to the
top.

There was nowhere for Cesare "Big Cheese" Antonio Manelli to go,
except up.

Straight up.

Now, in 1973, he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue,
where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he
was only a small cog--indeed, an almost invisible cog--in a large
advertising machine. His best was, for all practical purposes, good
enough.

Though it was common knowledge among the spoil-sport law enforcement
officers who cared to look into the matter that Manelli was the real
owner of the agency, there was no way to prove this. He didn't even
have a phone under his own name. The only way to reach him was by
going through his front man in the agency, a blank-faced, truculent
Arab named Atif Abdullah Aoud.

According to the agent-in-charge of the New York office, Malone had
his choice of two separate methods of getting to Manelli. One, more
direct, was to walk in, announce that he was an agent of the FBI, and
insist on seeing Manelli. If he had a search warrant, the A-in-C told
him, he might even get in. But, even if he did, he would probably not
get anything out of Manelli.

The second and