Angelo Cipriani was a loyal and trusted member of the Fortunato crime family for more than four decades, and a hitman without peer.
But times have changed. The new generation is now in charge of the family and forsaking the traditional family revenue streams of gambling, prostitution and loan sharking in favor of drug dealing. Angelo has been put on the shelf by Little Tommy Fortunato, as there is little need for an aging white guy.
The proud Angelo is living in a dump of an apartment in Steubenville, Ohio, driving a car that sounds like a washing machine full of nickels, and waiting for the phone to ring, hoping for a day when he’ll be welcomed back into the family. He spends much of his time at the local diner, in love with a waitress that he believes is out of his league, and visiting his old comrade, Joey “Nickels” Nicolosi, who is in a nursing home following the amputation of one leg, and who believes Alphonse Fortunato, his former boss, makes early mornings visits and brings him a fig Danish from Hourning’s Bakery. Alphonse has been dead twenty years; he died about the same time Hourning’s Bakery went out of business.
But Angelo isn’t the only one aware that he has outlived his usefulness to the family. The FBI knows, too, and Agent Lawrence G. Ross is in relentless pursuit of Angelo with offers of a new life and identity in exchange for the information he possesses.
When Little Tommy learns that Ross has been trying to flip Angelo and Nickels, he marks them both for death. Angelo must figure out how to save himself and Nickels, convince the waitress to run away with him, and extract a final revenge before the FBI reneges on its deal, or Little Tommy finds him.
Angelo grew up in the Spaghetto, a conclave of poor, Italian-Americans that was wedged between the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill and the Ohio River in Steubenville. He wanted to be a fireman, but a chance meeting in Bixby’s Pool Hall when he was seventeen put his life on a different trajectory. Crime boss Alphonse “Iceman Al” Fortunato liked what he saw in the kid and recruited him to work in his organization.
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Robin Yocum 