the absurdity of their situation. Did those three have nothing better to do in life than hang out in an empty house in the middle of a little Norman town thousands of miles from home? Overcome with silent homesickness, they ate the pasta with little appetite. Maggieâs presence was even more of a comfort than her cooking â just the fact of a woman looking after them, sometimes like a wife, sometimes like a sister. They knew she was sincere, and that trust had, over the years, become a valuable link between them. She would appear, and a wave of comfort and reassurance would help them to forget another silent day of boredom and regrets. Maggie helped them to hold fast and to continue to test the limits of their professional dedication.
In order to understand how Caputo and Di Cicco had come to be there, you had to go back six years, to the end of the âfive families trialâ as it had been known in the papers. The Manzonis had been taken in hand by the Witness Protection Programme. They had become the Blakes, a little family with no story, who had left the Big Apple to go and live in Cedar City, Utah, a town of eighteen thousand inhabitants, in mountainous country in the middle of a desert. The town ticked the right boxes â it was small enough not to have a crime syndicate but large enough to allow a modicum of anonymity. The Blakes settled into a residential area of rich retirees, and began adjusting to their new life of idleness as best as they could. It was a strange environment, a sort of imprisonment, but completely relaxing after all those stressful months. The shopping was delivered to the house, they signed up to correspondence courses, and they lived like recluses, ignored by the neighbours. Quintiliani had stuck with Fred since the end of the trial. He had been picked for his incredible tenacity as well as his Italian origins, and he had chosen Di Cicco and Caputo as his lieutenants for the same reasons. All three knew the Manzonis better than anyone, having followed them and listened in on them unceasingly for the four years until Giovanni was finally trapped. The Witness Protection Programme had set two goals to establish their reinsertion into society: schools for the children in Cedar City, and a job for Maggie, as long as their identity remained secret.
But they hadnât reckoned on the determination of the five families who controlled the state of New York.
Each one of them had lost two or three men by the end of the trial, not to mention Don Mimino himself, whose battalion of lawyers had been reduced to silence in the face of the mass of evidence supplied by Giovanni Manzoni as to his position as supreme leader of the Cosa Nostra: Brutus had plunged the knife into Caesarâs heart. And so the five families had got together â money no object; anyone who could supply the smallest accurate piece of news about the whereabouts of the Manzonis could claim a reward of twenty million dollars. After this announcement had been made, squads of four or five hitmen had been assembled for the sole purpose of tracking down the Manzonis. Enzo Fossataro, who was acting boss of the families until Don Mimino named his successor, had made deals with the families in Miami, Seattle, Canada and California, and had created a countrywide network of information and surveillance. He had even, quite openly, placed barely disguised advertisements in several perfectly respectable papers which, although not in the pay of the Mafia, were happy to see the resulting huge increase in their circulation, thanks to this real-life soap opera. Very soon a phenomenon was observed that had hitherto been unknown on American soil: death squads, or âcrime teamsâ as the
Post
called them, began methodically dividing up the country, visiting the smallest townships, asking questions in the seediest bars, leaving tips and mobile-phone numbers wherever they went. The FBI itself had never come across such a thorough
In order to understand how Caputo and Di Cicco had come to be there, you had to go back six years, to the end of the âfive families trialâ as it had been known in the papers. The Manzonis had been taken in hand by the Witness Protection Programme. They had become the Blakes, a little family with no story, who had left the Big Apple to go and live in Cedar City, Utah, a town of eighteen thousand inhabitants, in mountainous country in the middle of a desert. The town ticked the right boxes â it was small enough not to have a crime syndicate but large enough to allow a modicum of anonymity. The Blakes settled into a residential area of rich retirees, and began adjusting to their new life of idleness as best as they could. It was a strange environment, a sort of imprisonment, but completely relaxing after all those stressful months. The shopping was delivered to the house, they signed up to correspondence courses, and they lived like recluses, ignored by the neighbours. Quintiliani had stuck with Fred since the end of the trial. He had been picked for his incredible tenacity as well as his Italian origins, and he had chosen Di Cicco and Caputo as his lieutenants for the same reasons. All three knew the Manzonis better than anyone, having followed them and listened in on them unceasingly for the four years until Giovanni was finally trapped. The Witness Protection Programme had set two goals to establish their reinsertion into society: schools for the children in Cedar City, and a job for Maggie, as long as their identity remained secret.
But they hadnât reckoned on the determination of the five families who controlled the state of New York.
Each one of them had lost two or three men by the end of the trial, not to mention Don Mimino himself, whose battalion of lawyers had been reduced to silence in the face of the mass of evidence supplied by Giovanni Manzoni as to his position as supreme leader of the Cosa Nostra: Brutus had plunged the knife into Caesarâs heart. And so the five families had got together â money no object; anyone who could supply the smallest accurate piece of news about the whereabouts of the Manzonis could claim a reward of twenty million dollars. After this announcement had been made, squads of four or five hitmen had been assembled for the sole purpose of tracking down the Manzonis. Enzo Fossataro, who was acting boss of the families until Don Mimino named his successor, had made deals with the families in Miami, Seattle, Canada and California, and had created a countrywide network of information and surveillance. He had even, quite openly, placed barely disguised advertisements in several perfectly respectable papers which, although not in the pay of the Mafia, were happy to see the resulting huge increase in their circulation, thanks to this real-life soap opera. Very soon a phenomenon was observed that had hitherto been unknown on American soil: death squads, or âcrime teamsâ as the
Post
called them, began methodically dividing up the country, visiting the smallest townships, asking questions in the seediest bars, leaving tips and mobile-phone numbers wherever they went. The FBI itself had never come across such a thorough
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