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Sparks’s management win a sweetheart union contract. He didn’t expect to be treated like a butcher when he went there, and he wasn’t; but in a secretly recorded conversation with two union leaders, he had complained that Sparks wasn’t respectful enough to pay for his meal. The Pope was a complex man. Although generous with secretaries, he could be surprisingly grubby about money in his business relationships.
    “Ya know who’s really busy making a real fortune?” he began. “Fucking Sparks … what those guys do is good for a hundred grand a week. I don’t get five cents when I go in there.”
    His colleagues expressed surprise that Sparks allowed the Pope to pay for his dinners.
    “Pay, hell, I don’t get a thing. You know, they don’t buy you a drink. Forget about it.” “Forget about it” is a common expression among New Yorkers seeking to shrug off the everyday absurdities and ironies of life.
    The Pope would be chauffeured today by forty-seven-year-old Thomas Bilotti. Bilotti was not an ordinary chauffeur. He was an official of a concrete company on Staten Island and thus a member of the Family’s white-color wing. He had become Castellano’s aide-de-camp in the last few years, and Castellano had just named him to succeed Neil Dellacroce as underboss.
     
     
    The rise of Bilotti, rather than John Gotti, the protégé of Dellacroce, was another disappointment to the Family within the Family. Dellacroce had been its buffer against misfortune.
    Gotti, at age forty-five, was the swashbuckling “skipper” of a large crew in Queens, the Crime Capital’s largest-sized borough. He was a dangerously handsome man who dressed to kill. He regarded himself as Dellacroce’s successor, although in recent years his position had been undermined by drug charges against some of his crew members. Like Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano had forbidden drug dealing.
    Gotti had a reputation for ruthlessness. He cultivated it by speaking to subordinates and enemies in a ferocious manner. His image was not based on words alone, as some tragically knew, but he did use words like knives. Hundreds of times, Gotti’s voice had been secretly preserved on government tape recordings; it was an occupational hazard for all Family men, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.
    “I like to go and crack fucking heads,” he had recently said about someone who offended him,” and I’ll put them in the dumpster. I’d take a few guys and have a little fun. I love batting practice. I go regular, ya know?”
    Gotti, who began with nothing, had an ego as expansive as any in Yankee Stadium, Trump Tower, or City Hall. He sometimes became giddy when he realized how far he had come, as when he recalled what had happened at the recent wedding of the son of Frank DeCicco, a Castellano man whom Gotti had befriended:
    “Hey, Bobby, whose wedding was that this weekend we went to?”
    “Ahh, Frankie DeCicco’s son.”
    “Whose wedding did it look like it was?”
    “Yours.”
    “How many people come and bother me until what time in the morning? They put a chair next to me.”
    Three o’clock. Three-fifteen.”
    “Every good fellow [Family member] and every non-good fellow came and bothered me. My brother Pete said he clocked seventy-five guys. I say he undersold me. I’d say there was more than seventy-five guys came and talked to me.”
    Gotti was listed as an employee of a plumbing company, but detectives who followed him hundreds of times never saw him fixing faucets or laying pipe. Since 1982, they had spotted him meeting with Failla, DeCicco, and other captains in what was seen as an effort to foster relationships with the Family around the Family, which the men themselves sometimes called “the other mob.”
     
     
    Thomas Bilotti lived only two miles from the Pope. He arrived at the house on the hill just before noon. Castellano walked out through the big double doors, past a large Christmas wreath, and got into Bilotti’s black