Panic in Philly
The Executioner, Book Fifteen
Don Pendleton
For Jim Schmidt of Michigan,
Frank Marrone of California,
Alberta Simmons of New Jersey,
Eugene and Rosemarie Harney of Indiana—
and for the countless others who know
that their names belong here—
MB sends his thanks.
dp
Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.
—Thoreau
So maybe I can’t win this lousy war. But I’m going to give it one hell of a try.
—Mack Bolan, THE EXECUTIONER
OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS
**RESTRICTED COMMUNIQUE**
SCRAMBLE CIRCUIT AUTHY #SD105
FROM SAN DIEGO PD 120915L
TO H BROGNOLA/USDOJ/WASHDC
**IMMEDIATE ATTN**
BT
M BOLAN CONTACT REPORT AND
MOVEMENT ADVISORY.
SUBJECT BELIEVED TO HAVE
COMMENCED OPERATIONS THIS CITY
EARLY 9TH. ENGAGED LOCAL ARM
OF OLD DIGEORGE FAMILY WITH
STANDARD RESULT, SAME DEAD OR
DISBANDED AND IN FLIGHT. FULL
DETAILS FOLLOW VIA OFFICIAL MAIL.
SUBJECT APPARENTLY DEPARTED
SO/CAL AREA THIS DATE, BELIEVED
HEADED EASTERN US.
BT
TATUM SDPD SENDS
EOM
UNIFORM CRIME NETWORK—
US/DOJ—ADVISORY SPECIAL
CON/US ALERT***ALL LEA EASTERN
SEABOARD STATES***ALERT
121252L
BT
SUBJECT MACK BOLAN AKA THE
EXECUTIONER LAST SURFACED AT
SAN DIEGO NOW BELIEVED HEADED
US EASTERN SEABD.
MODUS OPERANDI NOTED AT SAN
DIEGO APPEARS SIGNIFICANTLY
ALTERED FROM PREVIOUS CAMPAIGNS
BUT PERHAPS ATTRIBUTABLE
TO PERSONAL REASONS FOR SDIEGO
VISIT. EASTERN LEA URGED
INCREASED VIGILANCE, ESPECIALLY DC
NY PHILA AREAS WHERE CONSIDERABLE
UNDERWORLD UNREST COULD ACT
AS MAGNET FOR RENEWED
EXECUTIONER WAR OF SURPASSING
FEROCITY.
**SPECIAL NOTE**
SINCE WASHINGTON HIT INFORMANTS
REPORT HEIGHTENED AGITATION
UPPER ECHELONS ORGCRIMEWORLD
WITH FIRM RESOLVE TO END BOLAN
MENACE ONCE AND FOR ALL. SHOULD
SUBJECT SURFACE ANYWHERE IN
NORTHEAST US IT IS FELT THAT
SPECIALLY ACTIVATED ENFORCER
GROUPS WILL BE AWAITING HIM. LEA
THESE AREAS URGED EXTRAORDINARY
VIGILANCE FOR QUICK REACTION
AS NEW WAR COULD EXCEED
ANYTHING PREVIOUSLY EXPERIENCED
THIS SUBJECT.
**SPECIAL ADVICE**
PAST EXPERIENCE THIS SUBJECT
INDICATES MOST EFFECTIVE LEA
RESPONSE TO BOLAN OPERATIONS
LIES IN ISOLATION OF LOCAL
ORGCRIMEWORLD FIGURES. SUGGEST
ROUNDUP AND ARREST FIRST SIGN
OF BOLAN ACTIVITIES IN AREA.
**SPECIAL REQUEST**
PLEASE NOTIFY SENDER IMMEDIATELY
ANY CONTACT OR SUSPECTED
ACTIVITY THIS SUBJECT. USE
RESTRICTED COMMUNIQUE, SCRAMBLE
CIRCUIT AUTHORITY NO 105.
BT
BROGNOLA USDOJ SENDS
SPECIAL REPEAT BACKGROUND
ADVISORY FOLLOWS
EOM
REPEATING FOR INFO UNIFORM
CRIME NETWORK—US/DOJ—ADVISORY
SPECIAL
SUBJECT
MACK BOLAN, ALSO KNOWN AS “THE
EXECUTIONER.” OPERATES ALSO
UNDER VARIOUS COVER NAMES,
USUALLY OF ITALIAN OR SICILIAN
ORIGIN. AMERICAN CAUCASIAN, AGE
30/35 HEIGHT 75 INCHES WEIGHT ABOUT
200. COLOR OF HAIR VARIES,
NORMALLY DARK. EYES BLUE, USUALLY
DESCRIBED AS ICY, PENETRATING,
OBVIOUSLY HIGHLY DEVELOPED NIGHT
VISION. SOMETIMES AFFECTS
COSTUME OF BLACK COMBAT GARB,
COMMANDO STYLE, BUT ALSO KNOWN
TO WEAR VARIOUS INNOCUOUS
OUTFITS IN SUBTLE APPLICATIONS
OF “ROLE CAMOUFLAGE.”
CHARACTERISTICS
HAS AVOWED UNENDING WARFARE
AGAINST ALL ELEMENTS OF
ORGCRIMEWORLD AND FELLOW
TRAVELERS EVERYWHERE. BY
CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATES, HAS SLAIN
MORE THAN 1,000 UNDERWORLD
FIGURES. COMBAT VETERAN OF
VIETNAM, HIGHLY SKILLED SPECIALIST
IN “DESTRUCT MISSIONS” AGAINST
ENEMY STRONGHOLDS. RECEIVED
NICKNAME “THE EXECUTIONER” IN
VIETNAM, THIS REGARD. CONSIDERED
BY MILITARY COMMANDERS AS
HIGHLY ADEPT AT PENETRATION/
INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES. MILITARY
TACTICIAN AND STRATEGIST OF
HIGHEST ORDER, GUERRILA WARFARE
EXPERT, WEAPONS EXPERT,
PHENOMENAL MARKSMAN. HAS BEEN
KNOWN TO ALSO USE HEAVY COMBAT
WEAPONS SUCH AS MORTAR,
BAZOOKA, DEMOLITION DEVICES.
CUSTOMARILY WEARS 9MM BERETTA
BRIGADIER EQUIPPED WITH SILENCER
ALSO 44 CALIBRE AUTOLOADING
MAGNUM, IMPRESSIVE FIREPOWER BOTH
WEAPONS.
**CAUTION** SUBJECT IS EXTREMELY
QUICK IN MILITARY STYLE STRIKE
TECHNIQUES WITH EXPLOSIVE-
REACTION COMBAT INSTINCTS.
NON-UNIFORMED OFFICERS ADVISED
NOT REPEAT NOT ATTEMPT GUNPOINT
ARREST BUT SHOOT ON SIGHT, TO KILL.
**SPECIAL INFO**
SUBJECT IS IN CONTINUAL “STATE
OF WAR” AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED
HIGHLY DANGEROUS. ALL LEA URGED
EXERCISE EXTREME CAUTION. DO
NOT ATTEMPT MAN-TO-MAN ARREST.
SUBJECT APPEARS TO AVOID POLICE
CONFRONTATION AND IS NOT KNOWN
TO HAVE FIRED UPON LEA. SUBJECT
IS DESPERATELY DEFENSIVE, HOWEVER
IN CONSTANT JEOPARDY VIA
VARIOUS DETERMINED UNDERWORLD
ELEMENTS. RUMORED “OPEN
CONTRACT” IN AMOUNTS EXCEEDING
100-THOUSDOLS ATTRACTS CONSTANT
ATTENTION EVER-INCREASING
FREELANCE GUNMEN. SUBJECT IS
THEREFORE UNDER CONTINUAL
DURESS AND IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS
TO APPROACH. VARIOUS REGIONAL
LEA HAVE UNOFFICIALLY AUTHORIZED
“EXTREME PRECAUTION APPREHENSION
—SHOOT ON SIGHT, TO KILL!”
**BACKGROUND INFO**
HOMETOWN FRIENDS, TEACHERS, GI
COMPANIONS, ETC DESCRIBE SUBJECT
AS MILD-MANNERED, COURTEOUS,
LIKABLE, WELL-ADJUSTED. WELSH-
POLISH EXTRACTION, ELDEST OF THREE
CHILDREN. MOTHER FATHER SISTER
VICTIMS OF VIOLENT DEATH WHILE
SUBJECT SERVING VIETNAM THEATRE.
SUBJECT GRANTED EMERGENCY
FURLOUGH BURY FAMILY AND ARRANGE
CARE OF ORPHANED YOUNGER
BROTHER. “HOMEFRONT WAR” BEGAN
DURING THIS PERIOD, OBVIOUSLY
IN
REACTION TO FAMILY TRAGEDY.
FOLLOWING VICTORY OVER
HOMETOWN ORGCRIME ELEMENTS
SUBJECT PURSUED SUCCESSIVE
CAMPAIGNS IN LOSANGS, PALM SPGS,
PHOENIX, MIAMI, FRANCE, ENGLAND,
NYC, CHI, LASVEG, PUERTO RICO,
SANFRAN, BOSTON, DC. UNOFFICIAL
POLICE SYMPATHY SUSPECTED VARIOUS
QUARTERS LEA, RECOMMEND
INDOCTRINATION PROGRAMS
EMPHASIZING PUBLIC MENACE ASPECTS
OF SUBJECTS ILLEGAL CRUSADE.
RUMORS ABSOLUTELY UNFOUNDED
REPEAT UNFOUNDED AND UNTRUE
THAT VARIOUS FEDERAL AGENCIES ARE
SUPPORTING SUBJECTS PRIVATE WAR.
**FORWARD LOOK**
EXCEPT FOR UNUSUAL FEINT AT ENEMY
IN SAN DIEGO, BOLAN HAS EXHIBITED
EXTREMELY LOW PROFILE SINCE
WASHDC CAMPAIGN, BELIEVED
PLANNING MASSIVE STRIKE NEAST
US REGION. UNUSUAL MOVEMENTS
ALSO NOTED ORGCRIMEWORLD
THIS REGION SUGGESTING MASSIVE
COUNTERBLOW RECEPTION FOR
EXPECTED BOLAN HIT. ALL LEA
CAUTIONS AND VIG STRONGLY URGED.
BT
BROGNOLA-US/DOJ SENDS
EOM
Chapter 1/ The Announcement
Panic came to Philadelphia on a cool Spring morning and its name was Death—purposeful, clad in black as a symbol of utter finality, moving swiftly in its inevitability.
It stepped silently into the rear office of Cappy’s Liberty Garage and gave the five men in there a stricken moment to see what had come for them.
Al the Mouth DiLucci was the first to unglue himself from that frozen confrontation. He yelled, “Jesus, it’s—” and spun away from the stacks of money which were being counted at the battered wooden desk.
The furious chatter of a light automatic pistol cut short the final declaration of Al the Mouth, the hot little missiles from its blazing muzzle forming a shattered-flesh wreath upon his neck and shoulders as he spun into eternity.
The other four targets were lunging about in scattered patterns of flight, two of them making electrified stabs toward their own weapons.
The chatter-gun tracked onto Iron Mike Cappolini and shredded the elbow of his gun arm just as his revolver was clearing leather. The .38 kept moving, flying from the grasp of suddenly nerveless fingers to shatter the painted glass wall of the office. Meanwhile the firetrack of death swept on, seeking and finding vital matter. Iron Mike’s throat exploded in twin crimson geysers; the big guy twisted to his knees and flopped face down into his own blood.
Jack the Bartender Avanti managed to jerk off two panicky shots toward that furiously blazing muzzle of death as he sprinted for the rear door. Then Death overtook him and pummeled him into a twisting, sliding heap at the back wall.
Collectors John Brunelli and Ham Magliocci, noted and feared throughout South Philly for their uninhibited pursuit of payday loan “vigorish,” received their final collections as they scampered for cover behind the wooden desk stacked with the fruits of their toil. Brunelli’s outflung arm raked the desk clean as he oozed across it; the collectors and the collected shared a common heap within the pool of blood that quickly marked the end of vigorish.
Death had “come fearful quick” to Cappy’s Liberty Garage—so quickly, in fact, that a mechanic and a customer standing just beyond that shattered glass wall were still frozen into shocked statues when the chattering knell ceased and quiet descended.
Gawking at the carnage through the broken wall, both men reacted with swiftly raising hands as the tall figure in executioner black turned calm attention upon them.
These two would later aver that the sight of Death Alive and Looking was even more unnerving than the sudden presence of Death Eternal Still. It was clad in black tight-fitting combat garb—belts crisscrossing the chest, another encircling the waist, “guns and stuff hanging from them,” the machine pistol suspended from a cord about the shoulders, eyes of bluest ice regarding them from an expressionless face of chiseled steel.
The muzzle of the chatter-gun dropped. The tall man’s hand moved in an almost imperceptible flick of motion. A small metallic object flew through the shattered wall and clattered to the cement floor at the men’s feet.
“That’s for Don Stefano,” a cool voice informed them. “Tell him. It’s over. Tell him.”
And then the tall apparition in black was gone, fading quickly into the shadows at the rear wall.
Perhaps ten seconds had elapsed since the first rattling burst of automatic weapons fire.
The two spectators to the awesome event did not move until they heard the door open and close; then the customer took a staggering step backwards and exclaimed in an awed whisper, “Christ—did you see that guy!”
The mechanic knelt to extend a shaking hand toward the metallic object on the floor. He picked it up, examined it, and released a hissing sigh.
“Yeah. That’s what it is,” he declared with a quiet rush of breath.
“What? What is it?”
“A marksman’s medal. The Brotherly Love Outfit is in for it now.”
“You saying that was Mack Bolan, the guy they call the Executioner?” the other man said, awed. He bent forward for a closer look at the medal. “You saying this place is a Mafia front?”
“It was,” the mechanic replied quietly, peering toward Death in the next room. “But … like the guy said … it’s over now.”
Not quite.
Mack Bolan knew better.
The Panic in Philly had only just begun.
POLICE BUSINESS
**RESTRICTED COMMUNIQUE**
SCRAMBLE CIRCUIT AUTHY #PH105
FROM PHILA PD 141025L
TO H BROGNOLA/USDOJ/WASHDC
**URGENT**
BT
BOLAN STRUCK THIS CITY APPROX 0900
THIS DATE. MACHINE-GUNNED LOAN
RACKETEER MICHAEL J CAPPOLINI
AND FOUR UNDERLINGS. LOCAL
INFORMANTS REPORT MASSIVE
MOVEMENTS ORGCRIME TRIGGERMEN.
REQUEST ALL FEDERAL ASSISTANCE
POSSIBLE.
BT
DOUGHERTY PHILA SENDS
EOM
Chapter 2/ Gradigghia
In a western Massachusetts city several hundred miles removed from the developments at Philadelphia, the number two man in that city’s local Mafia arm paced restlessly about his modest headquarters in a downtown office building.
He was a handsome man in his early thirties, medium height and build, with darkly glinting eyes which could switch in a flash from affable warmth to frosty speculation.
His name was Turrin; sometimes he was referred to but never directly addressed as Leo the Pussy.
Leo Turrin was a blood nephew of the late Sergio Frenchi, the boss of Western Massachusetts until his organization committed the blunder of the century—it was the Frenchi “family” which had figured in the birth of Mack Bolan’s home-front war against the mob.
Uncle Sergio had died during that initial skirmish and his family had fallen into almost total disarray. Leo the Pussy had proved a strong rallying point for the reconstitution of that vital Mafia arm and he had risen considerably in stature in the new organization.
Like Bolan, Turrin was a Vietnam veteran. Prior to his army service, he had resisted the tantalizing pull of Uncle Sergio and his assurances of easy money and practically unlimited power. Though he had grown up in its shadow, Leo had forever despised the Mafia and all that it stood for. With Vietnam behind him, however—and a resultant new maturity—Turrin “came in” with the Frenchi family, but he brought the entire federal government in with him.
That “penetration” had developed into the most successful undercover police operation ever attempted against the mob. With his favored position as blood relative to the aging Capo, Turrin’s rise to importance in the Pittsfield arm was almost au
tomatic. He had balanced upon the edge of that knife for more than five years, had become a Caporegime under Frenchi, and was beginning to attain national stature when Bolan the Bold came along.
The blitz artist had hit Uncle Sergio’s little kingdom with thunder and lightning, damn near dislodging Turrin himself in the process. Only the last-minute revelation of Turrin’s true role had saved him from Bolan’s vengeance. From the rubble, though, the undercover cop had built for himself an even stronger position and considerable prestige in the national reaches of the syndicate.
He had also salvaged from those ruins the beginning of a great, if terribly hazardous, friendship with Mack Bolan.
Turrin personally considered himself as neither fish nor fowl. His active friendship with Bolan presented no conflict of duties in his own mind. He was a cop … but not really. He was a Mafioso … but not really. The only real thing he had found during five years of carefully manufactured deceit was the continuing relationship with the man whom both the law and the mob considered public enemy number one. To Turrin’s mind, Mack Bolan was the greatest human being alive. He wasn’t perfect, no—not even infallible—but still the by God greatest human being Turrin had ever encountered.
A man like Bolan did not happen to the world every day, nor even in every age or epoch. The Bolans of the world came few and far between. You could count them on humanity’s ten fingers, all the ones who had ever been.
And Leo Turrin worried a lot about Mack Bolan.
Perhaps no one, not Bolan himself, understood better than Leo Turrin the staggering array of forces pitted against the guy’s survival. Turrin was in a position to view both sides of the guy’s personal gauntlet, the cops as well as the mob … and yeah, he had good reason for worry. He’d done a lot of pacing the past few days, waiting, wondering when the claws of the pincers would close around the world’s best answer to La Cosa Nostra.
And so it was on that brooding Spring afternoon when the call finally came.
Turrin’s personal shadow, a goon called Hot Stuff Ribiello, scooped up the phone and muttered into it. “Yeah. I dunno, just a minute.” He caught Turrin’s expressionless eye and announced, “Long distance, collect. For you, boss. Guy named LaMancha. You wanta accept?”
The underboss of Pittsfield coolly replied, “I don’t know no LaMancha.”
“He don’t know no LaMancha,” Ribiello relayed to the operator. “Tell the guy to get lost.”
“Tell him to spend his own damn nickle,” Turrin instructed boredly.
“He should spend his own nickles,” the goon dutifully relayed. He laughed and hung up. “Some of these boys really got their nerve. I never made a collect call in my whole life even.”