Daughter of the King Read Online Free PDF

because he must have socked a lot of tough guys in the nose on his way to the top of this super-tough field.
    You’d think Uncle Joe would have been a big fish eater, but I never saw him touch anything but big steaks. At dinner, Daddy was even more serious than usual, and he and Uncle Joe kept talking about “Salvatore” who turned out to be the famous uncle Charlie I was yet to meet, because he was otherwise engaged at Dannemora prison. Uncle Joe and Uncle Charlie had both been born in Sicily, and Uncle Joe, who had a heavy accent, stuck to the Old World lingo. Of all my uncles, Uncle Joe was one of the rare ones who didn’t affect the custom-tailored style of a Wall Street banker. Somehow his bullish presence made me feel even safer during wartime.
    What Daddy and Uncle Joe cooked up at Moore’s was a patriotic Irish stew crafted by a Jew and an Italian. Uncle Charlie would use his still-massive influence, which no prison bars could contain, to mobilize dockworkers up and down the East Coast to root out the kind of sabotage that had sunk the Normandie and that conceivably could sink America. Of the thousands of Italian longshoremen, many might be as loyal to our enemy Mussolini as some of the Yorkville Germans could be to Hitler, and Uncle Charlie had the immense power to find out who the traitors were and stop them before more harm was done. But Meyer Lansky and Socks Lanza had an ulterior motive, which was to free Salvatore Luciano from Dannemora. Daddy was all about deals, and this was a big one, involving naval intelligence and Governor Dewey, who agreed to pardon Uncle Charlie in return for his inside information, his vast influence, and his high-level detective work. Although Daddy dreamed up the deal, it was brokered by Daddy’s lawyer, Moses Polakoff, a grand and scholarly man I would call “the Professor.” As with most of Daddy’s deals, all the parties—Governor Dewey, the new New York district attorney, Frank Hogan, the navy, the entire war effort—got what they needed and wanted. Many Axis agents on the waterfront and beyond were identified and arrested. Nomore ships were sunk. Plus Uncle Charlie provided valuable intelligence to the Allies for their invasion of Sicily.
    Knowledge was power and also a gambling chip. Once the war was won, Governor Dewey kept his word and pardoned Charlie in 1946. And Daddy was key in concluding the deal in which Luciano, in return for his liberty, had to agree to be deported back to Italy. It may have seemed like a raw deal for a would-be patriot who had helped America win the war. But it was freedom, and better to dress in the elegant silks of the Via Veneto than in the rough prison stripes of Dannemora. “You always have a friend in Italy,” Daddy told me many times, once I was old enough to figure out where and what Italy was.
    Did I really want friends like that? As a little girl, as Daddy’s girl, I had no idea what Daddy and my uncles were really up to. Whatever it was, they seemed great at it, and I was living like a little queen.
    The Unclehood had seized a golden opportunity in Prohibition, a law that very few Americans liked or respected. In fact most Americans liked the people who broke the Prohibition laws way more than those who tried, in vain, to enforce them. And when America gave up its crazy dry experiment in 1933 Daddy and my uncles leapt into this void, turning the speakeasies—that for the prior decade had sold their bootleg liquor—into legitimate nightclubs. Illegal gambling still went on in the secret rooms of these glamorous roadhouses and talent emporia across America. The gambling was where the big money was, because Americans liked to gamble just about as much as they liked to drink.
    Just as Washington, D.C., had foolishly tried to keep people from drinking, now the legislators’ puritan efforts were focused on gambling, which, as time as shown, has become as American a pastime as baseball. Daddy and my uncles were just as puritan as