CHAPTER ONE

         In a small side chapel in the church of San Giovanni Battista in the town of Angri, south of Naples, Italy, the candles on the altar are kept lighted all day and night in remembrance of a departed soul whose name has become inextricably linked to this town in which he’d never set foot: the most notorious gangster of the 20th century, Alphonse Gabriel Capone.
         Ever since Capone’s death in 1947, at the age of 48, someone had given instructions and funding to the church in order to maintain the votive candles as a way to atone for his criminal life, perhaps allowing him to avoid an eternity in Hell by spending many years, even centuries, in Purgatory.
         Angri—not Chicago or Palm Island, Florida, where Capone spent most of his career as the most powerful crime boss in America—seems to have been chosen for the perpetual vigil because it was the birthplace of his mother, a seamstress named Teresina Raiola, and father, Gabriele Capone, who emigrated to the New York borough of Brooklyn in the 1880s.  There, in the Italian section of Williamsburg, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born, one of nine children in the family. 
         None of Capone’s family except Teresina ever went back to visit the town of their origins, and though a few people in Angri regarded Al Capone as a kind of folk hero who rose from poverty and achieved great notoriety, his name was rarely mentioned there, and tourists who visited the town because of its distant link to the mobster were usually spurned when they asked what places of interest might be associated with the mobster, because none was. 
         Yet more than fifty years after his death, the candles—made of the finest bees’ wax—still burned in the side chapel that only a few family members knew was in memory of Al Capone.  Each morning an altar boy would trim or replace the candles in time for the seven o’clock Mass, which was never attended by more than a half dozen old women, or perhaps by a young one praying to God to allow her to become pregnant. 
         Each day and night the candles’ flames flicker and glow in the dark, smoke-stained chapel, year after year, decade after decade, like the fires of Purgatory that purified the souls of those who dwelt there.
 

        David Greco knew seven ways the New York Mafia used to kill a man besides shooting him in the head, but he himself had never used any of them while he was a rackets cop, and none of them would work on the giant hogweed that had invaded his two-acre plot of land along the Hudson River. 
        Giant hogweed was more than just a nuisance—it had been brought from Russia to the U.S. a hundred years earlier as an ornamental plant—for it had grown wild and rampant throughout the Northeast, first in forests and along roadsides, then invaded backyards as a noxious weed, growing up to fourteen feet tall and causing anyone who came in contact with it to develop blistering, scarring, even blindness.
         David Greco knew that destroying it completely was a losing battle, even after contacting the State Department of Environmental Conservation, which had for weeks promised to send someone out to assess the situation and make recommendations. No matter how much he cut down or uprooted, the grotesque weed would always creep back, choking off the life of the carefully landscaped indigenous plants and foliage.
         The frustration dogged him daily, now that he was forty-eight years old and retired from the New York City police force, where as a chief detective assigned to mob activities, he had achieved a stellar record of investigating, arresting and putting Mafiosi away to the point where, by his retirement, the mob had been severely contained. 
         Detective Greco prided himself on his slow, patient, careful, highly detailed investigations of the mob, first grabbing the low-hanging fruit in order to get the bosses at the top, by which point the only way to beat the rap was for a wise guy—the Mafia’s “made men”—to suborn a witness or threaten a jurist.  That happened a lot when Greco started out, but later on the low life members ratted out their bosses, who, even if it took two or three trials, ended up going to prison.
         Of course, David Greco knew that the mob, like the giant hogweed, could never be eliminated because it was always mutating, so that the demise of one group gave rise to another.  By the mid-‘90s the Russians and other Eastern European gangs had taken territory and picked up the slack from the Italians, and the newcomers were at least as violent and vicious. In the black and Latino neighborhoods the gangs were younger, dealing street drugs, and in constant battle with each other over turf that might span less than two or three city blocks.  Even there, the crack wars of the 1990s had burned out and killed off a lot of the suppliers and dealers.
         In any case, he was happy to be out of and far away from it all.  In the two years since he’d retired, David Greco had barely kept in touch with his old friends on the force and no longer even picked up the New York Times, Post or Daily News.  The only items on his local paper’s police blotter were arrests for D.U.I. or a rare house break-in.  Still, David Greco locked his doors.
         It was a warm summer’s day while he was ripping out  hogweed that his speaker system buzzed from the gate at the end of his property.  “What now?” he sighed, for he wasn’t expecting anyone and the delivery people knew to leave packages at the gate.
         He put down his shearing equipment, took off his thick garden gloves, and said one word into the speaker: “Yeah?”
         “Detective Greco?”
         No one had called him that in more than a year.
         “Who’s asking?” he replied.
         “My name is Katie Cavuto, and I’m the journalist who called you the other day about a possible job.”
         David Greco rolled his eyes and said, “You mean the one I told  I was retired and had no interest in?”
         “Well, yes,” stammered the woman, who recalled he had hung up the phone about three seconds later. “But I’m not looking for a security guard or anything like that.”
         There was no response, no clicking off, so she continued. “I’m a journalist and I’d like to speak to you about possibly taking on an interesting project with me.”
         “What’s it involve?”
         “Well, I can’t really explain it to you on the speaker.  May I come up for a few minutes?”
         There was no answer, but the buzzer unlatching the gate sounded, so the woman entered, walking up a gravel driveway towards the house, where she saw the retired detective walking down to meet her.  She stuck out her hand but David Greco raised his.
         “Sorry, but if we shake hands you might get some of the toxin from the plant I’ve been trying to root out.”
         “Oh, what is it, giant hogweed?”
         “Matter of fact it is.  You familiar with it?”
         “A little.  My parents have it growing in their backyard, and it’s driving them crazy.”
         “It’s very nasty stuff.”
         There was an awkward pause, then David Greco asked, “So, what’s this project you want to talk to me about?”
         “Well, as I said, I’m a journalist, mostly for magazines, and one of the ones I write for—McClure’s—has asked me to write an article about Al Capone’s lost fortune.”
         “You mean his theft of gold bullion no one’s been able to find for fifty years?”
         “Oh, so you know about it?”
         “A little.”
         “Well, then you also probably know that the Treasury Department and the F.B.I. have had a longstanding offer of $300,000 for any information that leads to its discovery.”
         “And this magazine—what’s it called? McClure’s?—thinks that you may succeed where everyone else has failed so far over the last fifty years?”    
         Katie Cavuto smiled and said, “Actually, they don’t really expect that I can find it, but they think the story itself would be a good one.  Nobody’s written anything about it in decades, but there has been some new archival material on Al Capone and the mob that might make for an exciting story.  As a matter of fact, I’ve done some spadework and turned up some interesting stuff.”
         “Like what?”
         “I wouldn’t be much of a journalist if I told you, unless you agreed to help me.”
         David Greco snickered and said, “Y’know, I think I liked you people better when you called yourselves reporters, rather than journalists.”
         Katie Cavuto countered, “Oh, I’m sure you never had a real high regard for reporters either in your line of work.”
         “Usually they get in the way of an investigation, always quoting `high-placed sources’ when they didn’t have any and printing complete bullshit when they had nothing at all.  And, obviously, they were all more interested in the bad guys, how much money they had, how much power they had, how many guys they’d rubbed out, rather than write about the work the police had to do to arrest and convict them.”
         “I can imagine.”
         “What I really love about you . . . journalists,” he said sarcastically, “is that unless a cop is either working undercover to root out police corruption or infiltrating the mob, you ignore us, never mention the guys who do all the dirty work, then you just quote the police commissioner in your last paragraph.”
         Katie Cavuto tried to keep calm, saying, “I feel your pain, Detective Greco, but that’s as much the fault of the police press office as it is the writer of the story. They control all the access.”
         “Fair enough,” said David Greco. “And frankly, after twenty years on the force, the last thing I want to see again is my name in the paper.  Such exposure ruins you for the job when you believe your own press.  Makes you crave it.”
         “You certainly had your share.”
         “More than I could justify or handle. But, anyhow, so you want to interview me about Capone—who died thirty years before I joined the force?  My interest in the bum was only incidental to knowing the history of the mobs in New York, where, by the way, Capone never really operated beyond a short stint as a lowlife bouncer.”
         “No,” said Katie Cavuto, feeling the quick display of a retired cop’s humility had run its course, “I want you to help me throughout my entire investigation of the story, and the magazine is willing to pay you for your time.”
         “Let me get this straight: you want me to traipse all over the place with you on a wild goose chase for Capone’s gold bullion? What’s the fee?”
         “Well, I figure the story will take about six weeks to complete—at least the research part before I write it—and for that the magazine is willing to pay you between $10,000 and $15,000.”
         David Greco tried to stifle his surprise, saying, “The money sounds good, but what about expenses?”
         “They’re all taken care of, too, wherever we have to go, Chicago, Florida, wherever.  We go where the leads take us.”
         “And, if in the unlikely event we actually find where Capone’s gold is hidden, who gets the $300,000?”
         “That’s the really interesting part of the offer, at least for you: If we find the gold, the reward will be split two ways. The magazine claims two-thirds of the money and gives it to charity, and you get the other third.  I can’t take it as a journalist, because it wouldn’t be ethical.”
         This time David Greco could not stifle a low whistle. “So you’re saying you don’t get a penny from the reward and I get a hundred grand?”
         “I’ll get paid a very handsome fee for the article and my reputation as a journalist would soar.  Who knows, Pulitzer Prize?  Maybe be appointed head of a newspaper’s investigative unit.”
         “Or a job on ‘Entertainment Tonight’? Sorry, that was a cheap shot.”
         “Yeah, it was,” said Katie Cavuto, knowing she had the advantage for a moment.
         “Sounds like you don’t really need the money.”
         “Anyone can use $100,000, but it’s out of my hands.  I’m going into this with an eye on my future.”
         David Greco went quiet for a moment, then said, “Miss Cavuto . . .”
         “Katie.”
         “Okay, Katie. I’m going to go inside and give my hands a good scrubbing, then I’m coming back out here to shake yours.”