Hooligans by William Diehl Page A

dune fitted what looked like a pineapple onto the end of the weapon and adjusted a
    knob on the rear of the barrel. There was the faint sound of metal clinking against metal.
    The old man looked around, not sure where the sound had come from.
    One of the men in the gazebo stood up, stepped out onto the terrace, and looked up.
    “Something?” the other one said.
    The first one shrugged and walked back into the gazebo.
    There was a muffled explosion—
    Pumf!
    A sigh in the night air over their heads.
    Then the terraced backyard of the house was suddenly bathed in a sickening orange-red glow.
    The two men in the gazebo were blown to the ground. The grandfather arced like a diver doing a back
    flip as he was blown off the terrace. He landed in the pool. The merry horses were blown to bits.
    The night calm was shattered by the explosion, by a crescendo of broken glass, by the screams.

    8
    THE CINCNNA11 TRIAD
    Morehead had pinned seven photographs on a corkboard in the front of the big room, each one
    identified with a felt-tip pen. Since we had already made Tagliani and Frank Turner as one and the
    same, ditto Stinetto and Nat Sherman, Dutch crossed them out.
    Until a couple of hours ago Tagliani had been capo di tutti capi, “boss of all bosses” of the Cincinnati
    „Tagliani family, known as the Cincinnati Triad.
    For fifty years the Taglianis had ruled the mob world in southwest Ohio, operating out of Cincinnati.
    The founder of the clan, Giani, its first capo di tutti capi, died when he was eighty-three and never
    saw the inside of a courtroom, much less did time for his crimes. The empire was passed to his son,
    Joe “Skeet” Tagliani. While the old man had a certain Old World charm, Skeet Tagliani was nothing
    less than a butcher. Under his regime the Taglianis had formed an alliance with two other gang
    leaders. One was Tuna Chevos, who married Skeet Tagliani‟s sister and was also one of the
    Midwest‟s most powerful dope czars. Across the Ohio River, in Covington, an old-time Mafioso
    named Johnny Draganata controlled things. When a black Irish hood named Bannion tried to take
    over, Skeet threw in with Draganata. The war lasted less than three months. It was a bloodbath and to
    my knowledge there isn‟t a Bannion hoodlum left to talk about it.
    Thus the Cincinnati Triad was formed: Skeet Tagliani, Tuna Chevos, and Johnny Draganata.
    I had put Skeet away for a ten spot, but it had taken three years of my life to do it and I had spent the
    better part of the next two trying to prove that his brother, Franco, had taken over as capo in Skeet‟s
    place. It was a nasty job and costly. Several of our agents and witnesses had died trying to gather
    evidence against the Taglianis.
    Then Franco had vanished, poof, just like that, no trace— and another year had gone down the drain
    while I chased every hokum lead, every sour tip, up and down every dead-end alley in the country.
    The Cincinnati Triad had simply disappeared.
    A clever move, Tagliani selling out and hauling stakes like that. Clever and frustrating. Now, almost a
    year later, he had turned up iii Dunetown—stretched out in the morgue with a name tag on his toe that
    said he was Frank Turner. The name change was easy to understand.
    What he was doing on ice was not.
    The other five faces in Dutch‟s photos were familiar although their names, too, were new. „[hey were
    the princes of Tagliani‟s hoodlum empire, the capi who helped rule the kingdom: Rico Stizano, who
    was now calling himself Robert Simons; Tony Logeto, who had become Thomas Lanier; Anthony
    Bronicata, now known as Alfred Burns; and Johnny Draganata, the old fox, whose nom de plume was
    James Dempsey. The subject in the last picture was less familiar to me, although I knew who he was:
    Johnny “Jigs” O‟Brian, a nickel-dime hoodlum who had been doing odd jobs for the mob in Phoenix
    until he married Tagliani‟s youngest daughter, Dana. At the time the Triad had done its