The crueler Tower: first-round coercion

texture · Sorkin era (B.S.)

• When: during the Twin Towers years (~B.S.)
• What: When actual coercion was called for, it was "tightly controlled and gradually progressive in like stages," and the first round — "a light beating, maybe a broken digit or two" — usually fell to Fackelmann, both because he was the naturally crueler of the two and had a controlled restraint Gately lacked. (Gately, once started, had an "out-of-control slope of ferocity" that made him ruinous for controlled work.) Fackelmann's cruelty is framed as "easy but ultimately shallow sadism," inferior for the hardest cases to Gately's out-of-control ferocity. The ledger's limit is worth its own line: the two map-eliminations Sorkin ever ordered in this period went to outside enforcers (the ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè), not to either Tower, and the one killing among the Towers was Gately's own Mace-blinded accident, assigned to Gately alone (n369) — nothing in the record puts a death on Fackelmann's hands.