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Lorenzo's Legacy

by John Davies

324 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0004; ISBN 1-4120-2080-8; US$26.50, C$30.95, EUR22.00, £15.50

Lucky Luciano, the world's number one mobster, was exiled by the USA to his native Italy where he spawned a bastard son, and moulded him into an evil gangster like himself.

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about the book      about the author      excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book Lorenzo's Legacy is a work of fiction. Most of the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author's imagination. Lucky Luciano was a real person and the world's number one mobster. It was true that he was serving a 30-50 year jail sentence when the USA government released him and exiled him for life to his homeland of Italy in 1946. History does not record that the Mafia's boss of bosses ever spawned a bastard son by the name of Lorenzo while in exile. If he had this is the legacy he might have left his unfortunate offspring. It is a tale of gory gang murders, drug trafficking, brothel keeping, smuggling, bank heists and child abuse at an orphanage run by Franciscan monks. Lorenzo became a hoodlum just like the notorious father who disowned him - Lucky Luciano.

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About the Author John Davies spent 35 years of his life traveling to many parts of the world as a sportswriter with two of England's top newspapers, The Daily Express, and The Daily Mail.As an international freelance journalist since 1987 he spent many years researching the evil machinations of the Mafia. The novel Lorenzo's Legacy is the latest addition to his portfolio, which includes the football-orientated novel Golden Studs and a coffee-table 100-year history of Soccer, Moonstruck Parrots, including many personal anecdotes of his long career as a sportswriter. He served in the RAF during the Second World War.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 17

It is an odd quirk of human nature that harlots, the world over, are frequently emotional caring women giving their hearts and affection to pets and pimps who are often mean violent men addicted to drink and drugs.

Visit the red light district of New York, London, Paris or Rome and you will see the streetwalkers cradling cuddly poodle dogs. Call in the nearby taverns and you will see the pimps grab a purse and help themselves to the banknotes their woman had earned the hard way in some adjacent alleyway half an hour earlier.

These unfortunate women crawl back for more of this vile treatment from men who often beat them up unmercilessly. Many of them have children from an earlier, more civilised, life that went wrong. Every dime, penny, centime or lira they manage to keep away from the greedy talons of their pimp will go towards buying clothes or toys for the little child. Yet in their professional life whores - putas in Spanish, prostitutars in the Italian language - are hard, calculating, predators swooping like vultures to take advantage of mankind's promiscuous urges.

Signora Lisa Tara's days of street walking had ended with her stunning good looks two decades past. At 55 years of age she ran the sleaziest, roughest, most perverted bordello in the teeming seaport of Napoli.

She ran that brothel with a rod of iron! Or more accurately with a knotted leather quirt with which she would viciously crack against the silk covered bottom of one of her girls who failed to please one of the sex-crazed rough-necks who had paid hard-earned lire for their erotic services.

It was thirty long years since Tara had given her heart to any man or beast! In that time her once voluptuous figure had ballooned into a grotesque pear-shaped 120 kilos. Her upper lip was adorned with a black moustache that would have been the pride of Pancho Villa. Her right cheek carried a deep scar that was the result of a razor slash from a former pimp.

Yet unsparingly Tara gave her heart to 13-year-old Lorenzo Berni from the moment he arrived to repair the ferro battuto railings and gate that encircled the brothel grounds. It was not love at first sight in a sexual sense but a deeper even more passionate maternal affection that prompted her to help the unfortunate boy whom life had already short-changed.

Having watched him toil for hours with his oxyacetylene burner she invited him to her private sitting room for a cup of coffee and sweet tortas.

After he had washed his face and hands in her pink and scented bathroom they sat down to talk. She listened, with interest, as he answered her questions!

He had been in the orphanage for eight years, he explained, and before that in the kindergarten run by the nuns, where his mother had left him as a baby.

When he told her his name was Lorenzo Berni it sounded a klaxon warning in her memory bank.

'Berni?' she quizzed. 'What was your mother's first name?'

She had a feeling of foreboding about what his answer would be.

'My mother's name was Gina Berni but I can only remember meeting her once. That was when one of the nuns took me to the hospital to see her on the day that she died.'

Tara reflected on what Lorenzo had told her: 'Gina Berni - God forgive me for what that bastardo Luciano made me to do to that poor girl. So this boy is her son? Well I like the lad and I'll try to make it up to the lad for what his mother suffered here.'

When Lorenzo returned to the brothel the following day to finish repairing the ferro battuto railings Tara invited him again to her quarters for biscottos ed limonata after he had finished his work. Tara and Lorenzo were enjoying the talk and refreshments when Lucky Luciano knocked on the door and entered as he was prone to do from time to time when he visited for a business discussion with the Madam who ran the brothel he owned.

Neither Lucky nor Lorenzo realized this was a first meeting between father and unwanted son. Tara explained that Lorenzo was the workman who had been welding the broken railings outside the brothel. Although he was employed by Paulo Tite the blacksmith, she explained, Lorenzo was still an inmate at the Franciscan Orphanage for Boys.

Luciano nodded towards Lorenzo and told Tara that he would call in for a talk the following morning - which was in fact the day in every month that she handed over the brothel takings to the mobster.

Before Lorenzo left to go back to Tite's blacksmith's workshop Tara said that she would like him to visit her on Sunday afternoon when he had a day off from work. She slipped several lire notes into his hand as a mancia in gratitude for the work he had done, with the cautionary advice: 'Spend that money on yourself and don't let that greedy pig Paulo Tite get his grubby hands on it.'

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Catalogue Information

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