The Godfather's Revenge Read Online Free PDF

face—particularly since other aspects of his initiative against the so-called Mafia would give it the appearance of a vendetta. There was, for example, the suspicious death of one of Shea’s young attorneys, William Van Arsdale (whose people were the Van Arsdale Citrus Van Arsdales), who was killed the year before in a hit-and-run in D.C. His mistress had been guilty of adultery, she admitted, but not murder. The jury unanimously disagreed. No hard evidence ever came to light that Billy’s widow, Francesca, the daughter of the late Santino Corleone, somehow had the mistress framed. But recently declassified documents did show that the A.G. had dedicated this entire operation to the memory of William Van Arsdale. The rationale for this has never been definitively proven, which of course only made it a more delicious morsel for conspiracy theorists.
    Historians, however, favor the theory that Danny Shea was trying to atone for the sins of his father, the late M. Corbett Shea, former ambassador to Canada. Danny must have known that Tramonti had made his first few millions off slot machines that came his way via Vito Corleone, just as Mickey Shea made his first millions off bootleg liquor hauled to New York in Vito Corleone’s olive oil trucks. Danny’s chilly, unyielding father had been brought low by a stroke not long after the election, but he’d lived long enough to catch televised glimpses of his sons running the free world as they saw fit, distancing themselves from the old man’s prejudices and unholy alliances.
    Was it possible that Danny Shea didn’t quite know his father’s history? That he had no idea how his brother really got elected? Was it possible that the A.G.’s motive was to serve the public good and nothing but the public good? Possible. Some people believe in simple, noncontradictory motives, and in America people are at least nominally entitled to their beliefs. The American soul has been bought and paid for at the crossroads of Fact and Belief.
    As the convoy passed Danny Shea, cameras recorded his thumbs-up to the INS agents. But nothing in his body language or facial expression betrayed what was on his mind.
    The cars stopped. The INS agents got Tramonti out and ushered him in a camera-friendly way toward the plane. It was impossible to walk in chains on TV and not look guilty. What the cameras captured was a wild-haired old man, staggering across the tarmac in stained trousers, raving like a debased evil genius. Tramonti was actually shouting about the principles on which America was built, but the airplane’s engines drowned him out. On camera, he might as well have been yelling, I’ll get you for this, Superman!
    Two uniformed MPs appeared in the doorway of the plane and took Tramonti inside, where—other than the pilot and copilot and the MPs—it turned out he would be the only one on board.
    The plane took off.
    Several members of the press corps broke into applause.
    The attorney general lowered his head, turned, and strode to the podium.
    “Today,” he said, “the United States of America is a freer and safer nation.”
    He outlined some of Carlo Tramonti’s suspected illegal activities, not only in Louisiana but throughout the South and in Florida. Mr. Tramonti listed “motel owner” on his income tax return where, according to the A.G., it should say “crime boss.” He was a part of “a vast criminal underworld” in which he had conspired to swallow up so many businesses—both legal and illegal, everything from a chain of beachwear shops in Florida to a chain of bordellos in Texas—that he was commonly known as “the Whale.” Mr. Tramonti claimed to be Italian, but now it seemed that all along he was a citizen of Colombia, at least according to documents procured during a lengthy Justice Department investigation. Mr. Tramonti was being returned to the documented town of his birth, a tiny mountain village called Santa Rosa. Shea looked into those cameras and, with