Chapter 6
1568 Words
Carroll Gardens Funeral Home, 11:04 A.M.
Four caskets closed, no flowers, no ceremony, just rain and rage.
Luca stood under a black umbrella, face hard as wet stone. These were his men, his people. Ambushed the night before at a warehouse near Red Hook. Giannelli’s crew had torched it, leaving them inside to scream.
Elena stood nearby, silent, distant.
Matteo leaned in close. “They were kids, men, eighteen, nineteen. They signed up to watch the doors, not get barbecued.”
Luca nodded once. “We’re done playing defense.”
“What’s the move?”
“We take back everything.”
The fentanyl sat in a sealed envelope, untouched. Cruz stared at them like they were a death sentence.
Elena entered, soaked and wired.
“Joey’s running product through a hospice supply company in Jersey,” she said. “They hide the pills inside legitimate runs, gloves, saline, wheelchairs.”
“You got the evidence?”
“I’ve got more than that. I’ve got the trucks, the names, the routes.”
Cruz looked up slowly.
“You’re talking about a RICO indictment the size of a small war.”
“Then you’d better start preparing your troops.”
Night, a storm was brewing, wind was whipping between parked semi-trucks.
Luca, Matteo, and Rizzo crept across the yard, faces painted black, armed and silent.
They weren’t there to kill, they were there to steal.
Inside Warehouse 14 were six crates of pills, with a total value of over $6 million. Moretti soldiers moved fast, coordinated, and clinically. A few guards went down, stunned or shot with non-lethal rounds.
Luca’s men loaded the crates into their own trucks and vanished before NYPD even caught wind.
Two hours later, Joey Giannelli screams himself hoarse in his Jersey mansion.
“They took it all?!”
Frankie Velasquez nodded grimly. “All of it. Like ghosts.”
Joey punched a mirror. “He’s playing chess. I’m playing checkers.”
The Morettis had their first council in years. Every capo left standing, small-time crews too. Even the Vegas boys flew in.
Matteo stood up first. “We lost seven this month, seven. Some of ‘em I knew since they were kids. I watched ‘em shoot their first 22. I buried them with their baby teeth still in a drawer at home.”
Silence.
“Joey wants us scattered, wants us scared, wants us extinct.”
Luca stepped up, eyes dark and still.
“He thinks we’re finished.”
He pointed to the crates behind him, the fentanyl heist haul.
“But this? This is his empire and we just stole the foundation.”
He opened a box. Empty.
Gasps.
“Because we flushed it,” Luca said. “Every last pill.”
“You flushed six million?” someone barked.
“I flushed a legacy of poison. I won’t run a family off the backs of overdoses and dead kids.”
Half the room erupted, half stood stunned.
“You crazy son of a b***h,” one capo muttered.
“No,” Rizzo said. “He’s cleaning the house.”
The old man was found dead alone in his safehouse, no wounds, no signs of struggle, just slumped in a chair, drink still in hand.
Vincent gave the eulogy, and nobody cried.
Afterward, he handed Luca an envelope. Inside: a note.
"I made you out of fear, If I had loved you instead, maybe you'd be a better man or worse." C.
Luca folded the note in silence, burned it in the ashtray.
Cruz walked into the court building like a man stepping onto a battlefield. Elena beside him, hair tied back, adrenaline sharp.
In his briefcase: warrants, names, digital logs, and ten years of Giannelli's empire mapped like a virus.
By the end of the night, five federal judges had signed off.
By morning, Giannelli would be a fugitive.
Joey stood in the backyard, rain soaking his white shirt, staring at the horizon.
Frankie ran outside, frantic.
“It's over, Joe. They got everything. Accounts, routes, and customs contacts. The Feds raided two stash houses already.”
Joey didn’t move.
Frankie grabbed his arm. “We run, we grab the last offshore, and we run.”
Joey turned slowly.
“I don’t run.”
“Then you die.”
Joey pulled a pistol from his belt.
“You first.”
Luca sat in a corner booth, alone except for the rain hitting the windows and the old waitress pouring coffee.
Elena slid in across from him.
“You really flushed it?”
“Yes.”
“You just made enemies in five states.”
“Let them come.”
“You’re not your father,” she said.
“No,” Luca replied. “But I might become something worse.”
He sipped his coffee, black, no sugar.
From the kitchen, Rizzo leaned out.
“We just got word that Giannelli’s compound is burning.”
Luca didn’t smile.
He just said: “Good.”
A cargo ship burned quietly against the skyline, no sirens, no crowd.
Only the sound of oil drums cracking and the distant hiss of sea against steel.
Joey Giannelli crouched behind a stack of crates, his hair soaked, face slick with blood and sweat. He held a burner phone in one hand and a pistol in the other.
“This isn’t over,” he whispered into the phone.
“Then why are you hiding like a stray dog?” came the voice.
Joey's eyes twitched.
“Get the crew to Philly. Anyone still loyal? Anyone not talking to the feds.”
He hung up. Tossed the phone in the harbor.
He had one play left and it was going to hurt.
Luca stood in front of a whiteboard covered in strings and photos, Giannelli’s crew, their territories, allies, and backdoor deals. Most had red Xs across them.
“Two left,” Rizzo said. “Frankie Velasquez and Benny Taps.”
Matteo lit a cigarette. “Frankie’s gone underground, Benny? Benny is he’s trying to broker a truce with Philly. Real coward shit.”
Luca nodded. “Let him.”
“Are you serious?” Rizzo asked.
“Yeah,” Luca said. “We let them come out into the open.”
“Then what?”
“Then we make an example, something biblical.”
The apartment exploded at 3:17 a.m. Three floors went up. The news said there was a gas leak and everyone who mattered knew better.
Message sent. Message heard.
Elena sat across from Cruz, the lights humming above like a countdown.
“You want immunity?” Cruz asked. “You gotta give me something real, not what I already know, not what I suspected.”
She slid a USB stick across the table.
“Encrypted chats between Joey and three judges,” she said. “He tried to buy their silence.”
Cruz plugged it in, scanned the contents.
“That’s... enough to bury him.”
“No,” she said. “It’s enough to bury half the city, cops, prosecutors, even a state senator.”
Cruz leaned back, face pale.
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure I want this to end.”
Matteo had gone alone against orders.
He caught up with Frankie Velasquez near Malcolm X Boulevard, trying to catch a ride out of town with a woman and a duffel bag full of burner phones.
“You look tired, Frank,” Matteo said.
Frankie reached, too slow, three shots.D one.
Matteo stood over the body, rain washing blood down the gutter.
He called Luca.
“It’s done.”
“You alright?” Luca asked.
Matteo hesitated.
“No.”
Cruz entered with two marshals and a satchel of warrants.
Elena followed, hair tied back, eyes glassy.
“Today we take the roof off this city,” Cruz said. “And let the rot crawl into the light.”
By 8 a.m., eight more arrests.
By noon, a judge was suspended.
By 5 p.m., one of Giannelli’s former lieutenants was dead, apparently a suicide.
The old world was cracking.
Luca walked the empty boardwalk at dusk, suit rumpled, silence in his bones.
He sat on a bench, staring at the ocean.
A girl jogged by. A father flew a kite with his kid.
Luca watched, not with longing but with calculation.
“You ever think it could’ve been different?” Elena asked, stepping beside him.
“No,” he said.
“Do you ever want to go out?”
“Wanting people with choices.”
She sat next to him.
“They’ll come for you next. The people who funded all this, the shadow money. They’ll want the new king to kneel.”
Luca looked out across the gray Atlantic.
“Then let them send a message.”
They found Joey's body in a burned-out car near the Delaware state line.
No fingerprints, no teeth, only a ring-hiring-his-stuff, in the glove box.
Back in Brooklyn, a silent crowd watched the smoke rise from the crematory chimney.
Luca didn’t attend.
Instead, he stood in the ruins of his father’s old study, staring at a faded photograph, Carlo, Joey, and a third man, long dead. Vincent entered quietly.
“You’re the last one now,” he said.
Luca nodded.
“No saints left,” he said.
Vincent handed him a file.
“Then maybe it’s time to become something else.”
- Writer
