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“Brewster Payne,” he said.
“Sorry to bother you,” Mrs. Craig said, “but Armando C. Giacomo, Esquire, is on the line, begging for a brief moment of your time.”
“The Colonel’s not here?”
“I tried that. Manny wants to speak with you.”
The Colonel was J. Dunlop Mawson, Esq., the other founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, who had served as a lieutenant colonel, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Army, and loved the sound of that rank.
It was arguable whether the Colonel or Manny Giacomo was the most successful criminal lawyer in Philadelphia. Giacomo & Giacomo—the second Giacomo was his son, Armando C. Giacomo III—was a thirty-plus-attorney law firm with its own building on South 9th Street that did little else but criminal law.
The elder Giacomo—a slight, lithe, dapper, fifty-year-old who wore what little was left of his hair plastered to the sides of his tanned skull—was very good, and consequently, very expensive. Like Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, he had a well-earned reputation for defending, most often successfully and invariably with great skill, people charged with violation of the whole gamut of criminal offenses. His clients in criminal proceedings were seldom ordinary criminals, however, for the very good reason that ordinary criminals seldom had any money.
The difference between them was that from the beginning it had been understood between the Colonel and Brewster Payne that their firm would not represent the mob—as often called the Mafia—under any circumstances, and Giacomo often did.
Giacomo, himself the son of a lawyer and whose family had been in Philadelphia from the time of the Revolution, was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale School of Law. He had flown Corsairs as a naval aviator in the Korean War. He could have had a law practice much like that of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester’s, which drew most of its clientele from the upper echelons of industry, banks, insurance companies, and from familial connections.
Manny Giacomo had elected, instead, to become a criminal lawyer, and had become known (unfairly, Payne thought, since mobsters were only a small fraction of his clients) as the mob’s lawyer. Payne had come to believe—he knew Giacomo’s personal ethics were impeccable—that Giacomo represented the mob primarily because they had the financial resources to pay him, but also because he really believed that an accused was entitled to the best legal representation he could get.
Giacomo was also held in high regard by most police officers, primarily because he represented, pro bono publico, police officers charged with police brutality and other infractions of the law.
Payne reached for one of the telephones on his desk and pushed a flashing button, aware that he was doing so for the same reason Mrs. Craig had put the call through: curiosity why Manny Giacomo wanted to speak to him, rather than the Colonel.
“Armando, how are you?” Payne said.
“Thank you for taking my call, Brewster.”
“Don’t I always take your calls?”
“No, I don’t think you do. Sometimes, frankly, when Mrs. Craig tells me you just stepped out of the office, I suspect that you’re at your desk and just don’t want to talk to me.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Armando? Isn’t that the tactic of putting someone on the defensive?”
Giacomo laughed. “Did it work?”
“To a degree. But it also heightened my instincts of self-preservation. What are you about to try to talk me into, Armando, that you already know I would rather not do?”
“I need a personal favor, Brewster.”
“Personal? Or professional?”
“Truth to tell, a little of each.”
“My curiosity is piqued. Go on.”
“I represent a gentleman named Vincenzo Savarese.”
“A ‘gentleman’ named Vincenzo Savarese? If that’s the case, your Mr. Savarese is not the same chap who immediately came to my mind.”
Silver-haired, sixty-four-year-old Vincenzo Savarese was the head of the Philadelphia mob.
“Mr. Savarese, my Mr. Savarese,” Giacomo said, “has never been convicted, in any court, of any offense against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or any of the other United States of America.”
“Possibly he has a very good lawyer.”
“I’ve heard that suggested,” Giacomo said.
Payne chuckled.
