2 July

David Ferrie drove the Rambler south past chemical plants where waste gas flared yellow and red. Farther on he saw oystermen's shacks in the windy distances, set on stilts above the marsh grass. He reached a place called Wading Point, the country retreat of Carmine Latta. He went past the Dead End sign, past the No Trespassing sign, waved to three men conferring on a lawn, then turned onto a dirt road. Men were always conferring at Wading Point. He'd see them clustered at the door of one of the outbuildings or seated in a car on a rutted lane, four large men crowded into some nephew's VW, absorbed in serious talk.

The hunched bearing, the repetitive gestures, the set jaws and fixed regard, the economy of the group, the formal air of exclusion, bodies leaning inward toward a center.

Ferrie understood the gestalt of serious talks. He'd studied psychology through the mail with Italian masters. This was long before Eastern Airlines fired him for moral turpitude and for making false claims about a medical background. As if a degree could solve the riddle of Comrade Cancer. They took away his uniform for good.

He drove to an old lodge in the swampy bottoms where Carmine liked to relax with the boys. Four of the boys were roasting a goat on a spit outside the lodge, which was weathered past the point of rustic charm, with swallows' nests mud-stuck to the eaves. Ferrie parked in the shade and went inside. The white-haired man, bright-eyed, veined, ancient, was sitting on a sofa, drink in hand. He was frail and spotted, with the drawn and thievish look of a figure in a ducal portrait. There were times, entering his presence, when Ferrie experienced a deferential awe so complete that he found himself becoming part of the other man's consciousness, seeing the world, the room, the dynamics of power as Carmine Latta saw them.

Carmine ran the slots. Carmine had prostitutes from here to Bossier City, a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost. There were casinos, betting parlors, drug traffic. Carmine had a third of the Cuban dope before Castro. Now he had a shrimp fleet making deliveries from Central America. There was. a billion dollars a year in total business. Carmine had motels, banks, juke boxes, vending machines, shipbuilding, oil leasing, sightseeing buses. There were state officials drinking bourbon sours in his box at the racetrack. The story was he funneled half a million cash to the Nixon campaign in September 1960. What the boys call a tremendous envelope.

"My friend David W. Ferrie. What's the W. for?"

"Wet my whistle," Ferrie said.

Carmine laughed and pointed at the liquor cabinet. The third man in the room was Tony Astorina, driver and bodyguard, occasional courier, known as Tony Push for obscure reasons. He and Carmine were reminiscing grimly about the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was an obsessive topic of conversation wherever Carmine settled for ten minutes. Carmine had grudges. Ferrie could see the Bobby Kennedy grudge come to life in his eyes, a determined rage, but fine and precise, carefully formed, as if the lean old face held a delicate secret within it, one last and solemn calculation.

"So what I'm saying," Astorina said, "the whole thing goes back to Cuba. You look at everything today, the Justice Department, the pressure they're putting. If the boys took out Castro when they were supposed to, we wouldn't have a situation like this here."

"That's half true," Carmine said. "We would have leeway, with Cuba back in the firm. The value of Cuba, you use it to relieve pressure on the mainland. But the fact is nobody ever gave the Castro matter their full attention. We weren't very sincere."

They all laughed at that.

"Removing Castro was strictly a CIA daydream. The boys in Florida just strung them along. They were looking to keep the prosecutors off their back. They could always claim they were serving their country. And it worked. The CIA backed them up constantly."

"I still say everything goes back to Cuba."

"All right. But we're realistic people. We don't do tricks with mirrors and false bottoms. The styles don't match."

Ferrie wasn't surprised to hear them talking about delicate subjects in his presence. He did research on legal matters for Carmine and knew a great deal about his holdings and operations. He also knew the answers to some touchy questions.

Why did Carmine hate Bobby Kennedy in such a personal way, right down to the sound of his crackling Boston voice?

In early 1961 Carmine walks out of his modest house outside New Orleans and sees he is being followed by FBI. They tail his car,.eat lunch at an adjoining table, photograph his movements to and from his office, above a movie theater in Gretna. It is the beginning of a campaign of total relentless surveillance carried out at the direction of the Attorney General. In March they go to Las Vegas with him, take his picture in hotels and casinos, come back with him, camp outside his house, photograph his family, the neighbors, the mailman, the boy who delivers groceries. In April they go to church with his wife and his niece, play with his great-granddaughter in a supermarket and shoot movies of his sister's funeral. It is Carmine's personal Bay of Pigs, coinciding in time with the better-publicized one. Although there is public ruckus here as well. Sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine. There are traffic jams, skirmishes with the boys. It goes on for close to a year. These men are in his face day and night. It is the systematic humiliation of a senior citizen in front of his family, his neighbors and his business associates. And that little Bobby son of a bitch is calling every shot.

Carmine said, "The CIA comes up with exotic poisons one after another. They all end up in the toilets of South Florida."

"But if we want to clip this Castro," Tony said.

"The word is feasible or not feasible. We don't go on fools' errands." He stared at the glass in his hand. "Then there's the other theory why Castro's still alive. One of our people in Florida made a deal with him."

Tony Astorina stood against the wall across the room. Ferrie saw in him the ruins of a certain kind of grace. He was one of those nervy sharp-dressing kids who wake up at age forty, ruefully handsome, with a wife, three babies and a liver condition, the adolescent luck and charm lost in mounting body fat. He'd worked his way from the floor of the gaming room at the Riviera in Havana. Ferrie thought he'd probably built some corpses in order to be standing where he was now.

Tony said, "Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks ago I dream I'm swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I'm on Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence. "

"We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper," Ferrie said. "You're a gambler. You get a feeling about a horse, a poker hand. There's a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome. Sometimes we tap in. We see it, we know. I used to run into Jack Ruby now and then. What was he doing in New Orleans?"

"Shopping for dancers. There's a girl at the Sho-Bar he's salivating. "

"I was making leaflet runs in a light plane out of the Keys. A little while after Castro came in. I saw Ruby in Miami once or twice."

"Stop-offs," Tony said.

"He was running cash or arms or something."

"He was buying people out of Cuban jails."

Ferrie was drinking scotch and soda, same as Carmine. He was watching Carmine. They shook their glasses simultaneously, rattling the cubes. The old man's hands were long and thin. His ears were tufted with snowy hair. Ferrie smelled the roasting goat.

Tony Push said, "I remember I seen a picture six, seven months ago in a magazine. Anti-aircraft guns outside the Riviera. Dug in right in the street. Which comes a long way from what we had there. A whole city to pluck like a fruit."