Chapter 6 - The Council of the Captains
At 3:00 AM, the lights in the basement winery of the Moretti mansion were turned on. This wasn't the clean laundry corridor; this was the old vault, reinforced with three feet of industrial concrete, where Vincent’s father used to hold the meetings that decided the fate of the Chicago unions.
Six men sat around a heavy oak table. The caporegimes of the Moretti family—old soldiers with gray skin and expensive suits who had survived forty years of street wars. They had been pulled from their beds by Vincent’s private security, brought to the estate without explanation while their wives were still sleeping in their suburban mansions.
At the head of the table sat Vincent. Beside him stood Marcus Vance, holding a thick leather binder full of financial records, banking receipts, and the blue child welfare referral form.
"Vincent, what the hell is this?" Frankie "The Sledge" Bruno muttered, rubbing his tired eyes. "It’s three in the morning. I got a shipment of timber coming into the docks at six. Why are we sitting in the concrete?"
"We are sitting here, Frankie, because my house has a cancer," Vincent said, his voice flat as he opened the binder. "And if we don't cut it out before sunrise, the Moretti family won't own the docks by noon."
He slid the financial records across the table. The old men adjusted their glasses, leaning over the pages.
"These are the lease agreements for Vale Development," Sal Lucano said, his wrinkled finger tracing a line item. "They’ve been buying up the real estate around our shipping terminals in Indiana for three years. So what? The senator gives us the political cover, we let him make his margins on the side. That was your father’s deal."
"My father’s deal was based on the assumption that the Vales were partners," Vincent said. "Not predators. Marcus, show them the Denver transfers."
Marcus Vance stepped forward, placing a series of wire transfer receipts on the table. "Four years ago, two weeks before Anthony Moretti’s plane went down in Colorado, Vale Development transferred three hundred thousand dollars to a shell company in the Cayman Islands. That company paid out forty thousand dollars to a chief maintenance engineer at the Denver private airfield. The engineer disappeared two days after the crash. He was found in a ditch in Utah last year with a bullet in his skull."
The room went completely cold. The old capos stopped breathing, their eyes shifting from the papers to Vincent’s face. Anthony had been their favorite. He was the boy they had raised to be the king. To find out his death wasn't an act of God, but a corporate contract from the family they were currently celebrating an alliance with—it was an insult that went deeper than money.
"Are you sure about this, kid?" Frankie Bruno asked, his voice dropping into a dangerous, gravelly growl, his fists clenching on the oak table.
"The paper doesn't lie, Frankie," Vincent said. "But it gets worse. Anthony had a daughter. A legitimate heir under the 1992 family trust contract. If she is recognized, forty percent of our primary infrastructure assets bypass the marriage contract and stay in the Moretti bloodline. Isabella Vale and Edwin Clark tried to kidnap that child from my house seven hours ago using a forged child welfare referral."
He threw the blue form onto the center of the table.
"They wanted to lock the mother in a state cell, put the child in a facility controlled by her father’s committee, and force me to sign the marriage contract tomorrow morning so they could absorb the remaining sixty percent of our wealth," Vincent said. He leaned forward, his eyes cutting through the old men like a blade. "Edwin Clark has been on the Vale payroll since my father had his stroke. He’s the one who loosened the screws on my brother’s plane."
Sal Lucano stood up so fast his heavy chair scraped against the concrete floor. "That silver-haired bastard. He’s been serving my tea for twenty years. I’ll skin him myself."
"No," Vincent said, his voice rising just enough to command the room. "Edwin stays alive until he signs the confession in front of a federal prosecutor. We don't do this like my father did. We don't leave bodies for the police to find. We destroy doors."
He looked at the clock on the wall. 3:24 AM.
"Frankie, take your boys and secure the docks. Every container bearing the Vale Development logo is to be seized under maritime lien. Sal, call the district attorney. Tell him I have the banking records for Senator Vale’s Springfield campaign. If he wants to be the next governor, he’ll have an arrest warrant for corporate fraud ready by six o'clock."
May you like
"And the girl?" Frankie asked. "Isabella?"
Vincent stood up, buttoning his suit jacket with a slow, chilling precision. "Isabella is upstairs sleeping in my guest suite. She thinks she’s waking up to an engagement breakfast. I'm going to go give her the bill."
