Finger Exercise

Anthony Carfano. alias "Little Augie" Pisano, 61, started out as a two-bit bootlegger in the slums of his native Brooklyn, but he came up fast. By 1930 he had become Al Capone's East Coast viceroy, specialized in laundry, loan-shark and slot-machine rackets, as well as rumrunning. He knew every hood worth knowing, was also friendly with the late Mayor Jimmy Walker (in Prohibition days, Pisano saw to it that the Tammany Hall wigwams were plentifully supplied with needled beer and hijacked hooch). But there were nasty rumors that Augie was a finger man. In 1957, he and Frank Costello had a couple of friendly drinks together at the Waldorf just eleven hours before a bullet parted Costello's thinning hair and almost put him permanently out of circulation. Five months later, Albert Anastasia was shot down in a barber's chair--just a few days after dining with Pisano.

One of Augie's best friends was blonde Janice Drake, 33, onetime showgirl, Miss New Jersey in 1944, and wife of TV Comic Allen Drake. Like Augie, Jan had a talent for encountering people just before curtain time. She was questioned closely about Anastasia's death, and Nat Nelson, a playboy garment distributor, was found murdered in his bachelor apartment the morning after a date with Jan.

One night last week Jan Drake draped herself in her best stone-marten stole and joined Little Augie for drinks at the Copa, then went on to a spaghetti house (Husband Drake had a nightclub engagement in Washington). After dinner, they headed for the Drake home in Queens to look at boxing matches on TV. They never got there. Forty-five minutes after leaving Manhattan, Augie's black Cadillac was found on a quiet street in Queens, its motor still running. Jan Drake was slumped against the car window, one bullet hole in her temple, a second in her neck. The diminutive mobster lay dead with his head on her lap, one chubby hand still clutching the wheel and the blood from three head wounds slowly staining his natty blue silk suit.

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