Shooting Uncle Otto

Shooting Uncle Otto
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zee-Tat-to” in our barbarous Neapolitan slang) ran the candy store on President Street below Third Avenue. Candy was stale and cigarettes cheap, smuggled tax-free from North Carolina. I was fifteen, a Catholic school boy studying Latin and thinking about girls and college. My friends and I, useful dolts, played cards in Otto’s back room—usually briscola—while Otto took bets from the numbers runners and gamblers—my godfather, “Blubber Head” among them—who hurried in and out
Bookie joints were the fast food joints of the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose,” and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Desperate, soon-to-be fearful gamblers shouted and cursed in English and Italian. We were kids. We’d order oversized hero sandwiches stuffed with Genoa salami, provolone, tomatoes, olive oil and hot peppers on bread still warm from Gallo’s bakery. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci. Lucy had an odd sense of humor: she called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced their sandwiches. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. Everyone loved Lucy.
Uncle Otto dressed in a suit every day, well-cut, muted blue or brown. He wore glasses, a white shirt and tie, and never spoke above a whisper, on or off the phone. He might have been an insurance agent. One Saturday, half-a-dozen FBI agents came charging into the candy store. Otto wasn’t around and the feds, to their chagrin, found themselves rousting six teenage boys eating meatball sandwiches. They pushed us around. I felt like I was part of the civil rights movement.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or faraway Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment and walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. The conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his pure white shirt. There was no coup de grace. The guy fired once and walked away. He had an unpleasant job to do and had done it.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They’d been chased across the canal by at least 50 furious blacks—ranging in age from 15 to 50, who streamed out of the Gowanus House projects on Bond and Wyckoff Streets—the same buildings described a generation later by Jonathan Lethem.
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window.  He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand.  For the next hour, the mafia heard the grievances of the black men. It was like a powwow in a Western. I saw things that way.
Years later, when I was working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit the “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were stored—this was before everyone and everything was digitized. For fun, I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “old neighborhood.”  One story caught my eye.  The remains of four murder victims—suitably maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store. 
The feds had simply looked in the wrong place.