And so it ends… with a bang.
Fiction: Mob Rule - Part 49
The family feud finally explodes in a hailstorm of bullets and foaming blood on the front lawns of Hyannis as Jack and his mob brothers storm the Kennedy castle
By John Armstrong
We got off the highway and headed toward Marchant Avenue, the road the compound lays on. Just before the turn for the long driveway I waved them to a halt again and got back out, standing in the street and directing the trucks down the road toward their respective “points of insertion”, as Beppe put it.
Then I stood there looking at my watch. At two minutes to five, in the first misty light of dawn and the fog off the Atlantic still swirling around us, I got back in and waved our own group forward and into position. Then we waited again, listening to birds chattering in the trees.
A car came down the road and slowed to see what was going on. Our driver pulled his gun from under his jacket and waved the driver through. Just as he passed, the first semi in our group ...
A Last Supper with Lansky
Mob Rule: Part 48
An army of mafia foot soldiers file into semitrailers for a final shootout at the Kennedy corral
By John Armstrong
The car with Meyer, Frank and I drove up alongside the convoy on the wrong side of the road and pulled in at the head of our army. It was an impressive sight – I just hoped it was enough, and I said so.
“Don’t worry about that,” Meyer said. “I got a surprise for you, and for Old Joe, too.”
I looked at him, waiting for more and he just smiled back.
“Well, give. What is it?"
He just smiled some more and said, “Then it wouldn’t be a surprise. But don’t worry, you’re gonna like it.” Then he squeezed Frank’s knee and said, “Adoro I piani be risusciti, eh?” which means “I love it when a plan comes together” and started laughing to himself as if it was the funniest thing in the world.
Frank said, “Don’t look at me, Jackie. I stopped trying to figure this guy out before you were born.”
So down the ...
Countdown to Confrontation
Mob Rule: Part 47
A presidential bid is about to get bloody as the bosses from the Big Apple face off against the boys from Beantown's brassiest, classiest and gassiest family, The Kennedys
By John Armstrong
It all came together fast, fast enough to scare me. Call me cynical but I have a basic mistrust of anything that goes too smoothly. It usually means there’s a joker in the deck, ready to pop up and laugh at you when things fall apart. But I looked over my work and couldn’t see where it was, if it was there at all.
There was one thing I could see laying in the weeds and ready to bite us, but there was little I could do about it.
We were moving as quickly as we could, not least because we had no way to house and feed 2,000-plus soldiers even if we wanted to, and the plan was to sign them up and then move them out almost immediately. So with all this speed did we have the element of surprise?
Not on your life. You can’t keep the raising of an army quiet, especia...
Assembling nations for a New World war
Fiction: Mob Rule - Part 46
Still reeling from the road trip down South, Jack and Vanessa debrief the bosses on the Kennedys' collusion with the British Prime Minister
By John Armstrong
She looked at me and I looked right back at her and gave the age-old “Who, me?” shoulder-shrug. She hitched hers in resignation and sighed.
“I was sent here by my father, the British P.M., who knows Joe Kennedy from decades ago, to see if it was possible to recruit Jack to our cause. Then we fell in love and I met the Kennedys and everything else and … here we are. Now I need to get hold of my father and tell him to stay well clear of those people. That’s it, in a nutshell.”
In modern slaughterhouses, instead of a sledgehammer, they now use an electric gun with a retractable bolt. As the steer comes through the chute onto the conveyor belt in the killing room, a man steps up beside it, puts the gun to the cow’s head and pulls the trigger while Bossie is still considering ...
Baptized in dishwater
Mob Rule: Part 42
On the run and low on funds, Jack and Vanessa hunker down in a roadside diner and discover the unsung joys of a short-order life and red-eye gravy
By John Armstrong
I have to say, if you’ve ever complained that you had no time to ponder life’s mysteries, get a job as a dishwasher in a busy lunchroom. Once you get into the swing of it, your hands learn the job and most of your mind is free to contemplate and wander where it will. It’s also sort of a non-stop process — a room full of hungry customers can dirty plates and cups just as fast as you can wash them so you soon forget any crazy ideas like “catching up” and just settle into a machinelike routine of dip, scrub, rinse, stack and repeat. The kitchen clock was on the wall behind me so I had no clue what time it was and I was honestly surprised when Cooter tapped my shoulder and said, “Hang up your brush. Time to eat.”
It was just past three and Lurlene had hung the closed sign on the ...
Stalls, but no loitering
Mob Rule: Part 41
On the run from old Joe Kennedy and the D.C. spin parade, Jack and Vanessa hole up in Savannah in a vain search for relief
By John Armstrong
I was prepared when we got to Savannah, not that it did me any good. There were two pay phones, one out of order and the other in use by a man with two old cloth shopping bags at his feet who looked as badly off as we were. I shuffled and danced and muttered behind him in an agony of impatience but he just stood there saying “Ummm-hmmm” every few seconds. By his reaction, whatever they were telling him wasn’t terribly exciting but he seemed determined to hear all of it. At one point he pulled the phone away and I thought he was going to hang up but he was just changing ears.
I was anxious to get the phone but I was also hopping back and forth on my feet while I waited because our bus had no toilet on it, and it had been a long time since Tallahassee. I considered solving both problems at once, just unzipping right ...
Jack and Vanessa get out of Dodge
Mob Rule: Part 40
When Jack realizes he's stuck between The Kennedys and his old mob buddies back in New York, he makes a bold squeeze play to abandon the Presidential campaign trail and return to the family fold
By John Armstrong
So now I was in the middle of a triple-cross, because surely the last thing Meyer and Frank expected was for me to come home having made a side deal with one of my co-conspirators. But, like Sidney said, this was a game where the rules changed while you played.
It wouldn’t matter anyway unless I figured out how to excuse Vanessa and myself from this party without getting shot. I had to keep myself ready for any opportunity to get a small head start on them, even a few hours. They’d relaxed on watching me so far as I’d noticed and as I thought about it I realized why. They’d hamstrung me in the most efficient way possible: I had no money.
I’d gotten so used to Sydney or one of the others paying for everything or simply signing for it ...
Getting down to brassy tacts
Mob Rule: Part 39
Jack and Lyndon sit back on the campaign trail with a bottle of bourbon and dig at the roots of each other's deep beliefs
By John Armstrong
We had more than several over the next few hours. There were twin beds in his room and I sat on one with Vanessa beside me and him on the other, facing each other. I took a long drink of bourbon and smoked half a cigarette trying to figure out how to start and then finally just began at the beginning, with Frank and I diving for cover on a New York sidewalk, only a few months ago. Back when the world made sense.
If I left anything out it was because I’d forgotten it, not because I was being cagey. I’d had enough of subterfuge and lying to last me a lifetime and I trusted Lyndon implicitly, no matter what side we wound up on in the end.
Over the last few weeks and especially during our early stops in the South he’d gone off-script regularly, hitting on poverty and race equality whether he was in front of ...
From the frying pan to the panhandle
Mob Rule: Part 38
Jack learns that brokering political deals in Florida means biting into fat slabs of bad meat
By John Armstrong
So that’s what we did. When we got to Florida Bobby called Wallace and arranged a conference in Albany, Georgia for the following day, the closest reasonably sized city to both camps.
I didn’t go along with them and I confess I didn’t argue hard for the privilege. I’d seen enough of Wallace, Conner, and the "superior white race” and so far as I was concerned, I’d be just as pleased if the next time I saw them it was to identify the bodies. Our two diplomats left with a driver around 10 a.m. and expected to be back for supper. While they were gone I thought I’d take Vanessa to the beach and let the sun bake the stress away. It was already over 80 degrees.
I found Sydney drinking coffee and asked if he knew how to get to the beach and he looked at me like I’d already been in the sun too long. I was in my shorts and sandals, a towel ...
Romancing the Swine
Mob Rule: Part 37
Jack and Lyndon come face to face with the devil called politics and those who wear their mother's laundry in the Deep South
By John Armstrong
We convened a nervous war council in the station’s coffee shop, with three hours before our train to Tallahassee. The only other departure between then and now would have taken us back through Alabama to Memphis and that didn’t seem like any real improvement over where we were, so we sat tight and waited. I repented of our decision to trim the touring party down for the Deep South campaign. We’d left the bulk of the staff and most of the guns behind us in Texas, the brain trust reasoning a larger party could seem confrontational, particular one with a dozen or so hired gunsels in it.
There’s an old theory that in a dangerous situation, you’re sometimes better off to be unarmed, because it makes you tread carefully where you might not with a gun in your hand. That may be so, but I had two guns under my ...
