Gowanus Crossing Memoir Prologue

                                                                    PROLOGUE

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.
In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.
The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

Union-busting for the Mob (Part IV Conclusion)

An hour later, we left, trucks fully loaded and drove, maybe via the Cross Bronx Expressway—I don’t recall and wouldn’t have recognized it--to a much larger facility, a tan, brick warehouse surrounded by tall chain-link fencing. As we approached, my driver flicked away his cigarette and rolled up his window.
“Make sure it’s locked.”
“What?” 
“The fuckin’ door! That's what!”
I looked up. A much larger picket line, maybe 40 strikers blocked the gate to the warehouse. A couple  were pointing at our truck. Shouting. Someone had alerted them. Two NYPD squad cars were angle- parked, bubble gum machines flashing, against the curb. A beefy red-faced sergeant and a couple of patrol guys were yelling and shoving, trying to restrain a suddenly angry mob.
My guilt was instantly transformed to fear, queasy and visceral. My door wouldn’t lock. The push-button latch mechanism was gone. I stared at the bleak little hole were the button should have been.
“Here!” The driver threw me a length of clothesline.
“Where did he get that?” I thought.
“Tie it!”
To do that, I had to lower the window, which barely cranked, and anchor it to...what? I remembered two knots—square knot and sheet bend—from my Boy Scout days.
“Tie the fucking thing!”
I fumbled around, wrapping the rope around the pillar of the vent window.
“Throw it over here!”
He grabbed for it, pulled it taut, wrapped it around his door handle, all the while driving. Then he pulled a short length of pipe wrapped in electrical tape, seemingly out of the air, laid it across his lap. I had a paperback in my pocket.
At that moment, McIntosh’s car glided in front of us. He got out, casual as a lord, and strolled over to an unmarked police car—I’d completely missed it—parked across from the pickets. A police lieutenant, tall, very Irish-looking—in those days most cops were—got out. In full view of the Puerto Rican and black union men, the two began to chat like old friends, soon laughing and smirking. They stepped out of my line of vision. I didn’t see what happened after that.
Despite the GQ blazer and preposterous yachting cap, or maybe because of it, McIntosh cut a fearsome figure. In Brooklyn terms, he didn’t give a fuck; for the law, for cops, for unions or factory owners, for fashion, for himself (according to press reports he wore a size 52 suit, carried an ice pick, drove himself to the hospital after being shot in the groin, half-strangled rogue mob boss Joey Gallo), and especially not for society. Years later, he died a terrible death, broken and sick in prison. He certainly wouldn’t give a fuck for me, but looking back, I suspect that as a “college boy” from a very rough neighborhood,” I triggered a certain curiosity—think a bug pinned to a piece of Styrofoam, in the man.
How rough was my neighborhood?  Years later, armed with an Ivy League degree and working for Newsweek, I’d stop by at a bar on the corner of Madison and 49th called The Cowboy. Conversation was often dominated by columnist Pete Axthelm (a notorious gambler, now deceased) and a sportswriter named Peter Bonventre. The bartender fawned over them; he ignored me. My buddy, Dave Friendly, and I were usually too stressed out writing what seemed impossibly difficult stories, to care. One day, noticing my name on a credit card, asked, thebored bartender asked where I was from. “Third Avenue and Carroll Street,” I said. “Near Monte’s Venetian Room.” He asked a few questions. I mentioned unmentionable names. From that moment on, whenever I walked in, he’d find a way to announce, “Vince is from the roughest neighborhood in the city I ain’t shitting!” Go figure.

The police lieutenant gave a signal and the unmarked car drove off. The patrol cars left. It was us—the mob—against the union. McIntosh and a couple of his thugs strode up to the gate. Hand in his pocket, he stared hard at the protest leader, said no doubt, something terrible. The man hesitated; his face crumbled; he backed off. The picket line collapsed as we roared through. I remember of all those men, only one, a borracho (“drunk”) had the courage to step forward and curse us in Spanish. His friends dragged him safety
There it was: Jewish factory owners hiring Italian gangsters, using Irish cops, to break the poor. The end of my affair with the mob.
Inside, our truck was offloaded by scabs driving forklifts. As we waited for the rest of them to come through, I sat down by myself on a pile of cardboard and tried to read. I couldn’t focus. When I looked up, McIntosh was standing in front of me. A book was a curious thing.
“Mustache!” he said after a moment, “you like this kind of work, right?”  I had the oddest sensation that my answer mattered to him.
“Yeah. Thank you.”
 He peeled off a wad of bills and handed them to me.  I shoved the money into my pocket. When I checked, it was $200.
“See you tomorrow bright and early,” he chirped and walked away.
Next morning my mother, a fearless woman, walked down Carroll Street to Honey’s house.
“My Vinny is sick,” she said. “He ain’t working today.”

Union-busting for the Mob Part III

Our caravan drove along Third Avenue to Atlantic, turned left past the shit-brown Ex-Lax factory, and the first bloom of yuppie antique shops elbowing the Sahadi Brothers and other venerable Arab trading companies— they perfumed the air with nutmeg, turmeric and cardamom—out of the neighborhood. Past the bleak 10-story Brooklyn House of Detention and onto Cadman Plaza and the Brooklyn Bridge. I sat folded like a ventriloquist dummy in the back seat while McIntosh went giddily on and on about banging cocktail waitresses—I knew one of them—his rapt audience hanging on to every word.
 I had no idea where we were going or what doing but was not willing play Starbuck to this Ahab. We bumped off the FDR near the Willis Avenue Bridge—the crumbled Bronx as alien as Hanoi to me—and into a shabby truck rental operation. McIntosh got out, stretched and pulled a wad of bills from his pants pocket. The three cars behind us nosed into parking spots. A deal for four “straight jobs” (medium-sized trucks) had been arranged; no paper changed hands, no one asked to see my driver’s license. We divided into pairs, driver and helper.
“You, ride with me,” a slight, sallow-faced driver (think John Cazale) ordered, tapping me on the shoulder.
 I figured I’d be doing most of the heavy lifting. I was walking to his truck when another guy, rugged-looking (think James Caan)—and about my size, said, “He’s with me.” The first driver backed off, shooting me a dirty look. I opened the passenger door, its hinges shrieked, and climbed aboard. I tossed my book on the seat. I forget the driver’s name and he never asked mine. (James Caan, whose father was supposedly a bookie in Queens, often showed up on Carroll Street. When a Colombo family capo—whose name I still hesitate to mention—built a Venetian-style townhouse for his mother next to my parents’ house, Caan gifted him with an enormous brass lion’s head knocker, which, I suspect, is still there.)
Twenty minutes later, we were rumbling behind McIntosh’s big sedan, bumping up, down and across Bruckner Boulevard, the Grand Concourse, Morris Avenue, lost. It was 11:00 A.M. on a day that threatened to go on forever. Many pay phone calls later, we pulled up at our destination, a manufacturer of metal office furniture. I relaxed. I could muscle desks and chairs. Through the truck’s grimy windshield, I noticed a crowd of Puerto Rican men and women milling in front of the factory. To me, New York City was an overlay of races and ethnicities, most of them alien.
It was a picket line.
My father was a laborer, a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association; a diehard union guy who'd spent 35 years in the rat-infested holds of ships so I could attend college.
McIntosh got out. The union pickets with their sad cardboard placards looked at him nervously. Ignoring them, he swaggered up to a white guy wearing a shirt and tie, one of the factory owners. A discussion ensued. The terms of the deal were changing.The white guy, clearly nervous, handed a roll of bills to McIntosh, who counted it and stuffed the money into his pocket. He nodded, and the retractable steel gates of the shipping dock shrieked to life.
Doffing his yachting cap, McIntosh strolled up to my driver’s door.
“Fuck these Jews!” he said.
I reached for the door handle.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked my driver.
“You don’t do nothing. They do it!”
One by one, the forklifts came out and loaded our trucks.
I could not bear to look at the men on the picket line.
(to be continued)

Union-busting for the Mob Part II

 7:00 A.M. next morning, Gloria, my mom, fixed me a soft-boiled egg and toast for breakfast. (My first day on a new job.) My father was already on the docks—he’d kill me if he knew I what I was up to. I stuffed something preposterous—Moby Dick or Troilus and Criseyde into my back pocket. A knot of men had gathered in front of Monte’s smoking, sipping coffee from plastic cups. Skinny, wiry, jumpy guys looking either dangerous or stupid. Wannabes from outside the neighborhood, low-level thugs looking to make a day’s pay, settle a gambling debt or impress a wise guy. They flicked their cigarettes and stared at me—walrus mustache and longish hair—suspiciously.
I knew I wouldn’t be unloading cases of pineapple juice. I’d drawn an ethical line in my head about how much criminality I was willing to engage in for $40—though I hadn’t considered how to keep that line in front of me. I’d decided moving truckloads of stolen merchandise around New York City was an acceptable risk.
This was a world before The Godfather, Mean Streets, Donnie Brasco, et.al., exalted organized crime and romantic violence. To me, gangsters seemed great role models: adults who encouraged you to drink, smoke, watch dirty movies, who gave you the keys to their new Caddies and Lincolns, didn’t give a shit if you had a driver’s license, got drunk, gambled, fought, hung out with celebrities, flashed thick wads of money and flashier women. Shot off gigantic firework displays and allowed kids to build enormous bonfires in the middle of the street on Election Day, burning up all the phone lines in the neighborhood, then joined us in throwing eggs at responding firefighters. Our pastor, Father Mario, could often be found in Monte’s or the Capri Club with the bookies; many a time, I’d watched cops from the 76th Precinct on Union St. use patrol cars as taxis to ferry gangsters from Third Avenue to a bookie joint on Fifth and Carroll next to the funeral parlor (now reanimated as Café Moutarde). I’d seen cops walk out of the clubs stuffing brown bags of money into their uniform blouses.
In short, I was either naïve or way ahead of life’s curve.
Forty-five minutes later, McIntosh drove up. The grim, hulking figure from the night before was gone. This Apple was manic, jocular, dressed in a double-breasted blue blazer and a yachting cap with gold braid on the visor. No one questioned this fashion statement.
He circled his finger. Everyone got in their cars.
“Mustache,” he said to me. “Ride with us.”

Union-busting for the Mob Part I

I of IV

I was 20-years-old, on spring break. Lounging on Miami-or some Gulf Coast beach was as alien to me as the stars. I had to work. “Peanuts,” the dispatcher at Cambie’s Trucking on Third Avenue and First Street, would hire “helpers” to unload shipments of Del Monte pineapples and peaches—the sickly sweet smell of leaky cans intoxicating, then nauseating— delivered to Long Island warehouses. He operated out of a grey trailer on a greasy, garbage-strewn lot next to the Jewish Press, a bleak windowless, soulless building, formerly a MTA power-generating station that had been built at great cost and never used—its tons of valuable copper winding stripped and sold for pennies on the pound to local junkyards.  Cambie’s front office was run by an irascible dwarf and I had no prospects there.
I peered through the plate glass window of Monte’s Venetian Room, a Carroll Street landmark for almost a century. Though across from my house, I’d never eaten there. Monte’s was a favored by the wiseguys, Court Street lawyers and local politicians with names like Meade Esposito. Its waitresses had hair piled high like spaghetti. I’d seen Joey Heatherton—Honey Christiano had carried her shrieking across Carroll Street and tossed her in his backyard pool, her long, dancer’s legs fully exposed. I’d fought furiously for a fistful of coins Dean Martin scattered on Monte’s sidewalk one evening.
 Honey wasn’t there. I crossed the street, walked down the tiny alley, hoping he'd have Peanuts put me on as a laborer at $40 a day. I was tall and husky, awkward and rarely without a book. The door was open—nobody would rob Honey—and I walked into the kitchen expecting the usual shouted “Mamone!” which either meant “mama’s boy” or simpleton. His Scandinavian “housekeeper” (At the time Bay Ridge seemed to have more Norwegians than Oslo) did not appear, and no one was playing poker at the kitchen table. Unannounced, I walked into the “parlor.” Honey was sitting next two hardcore guys, “Jerry Lang” (Gennaro Langella) and a hulking, black Irishman named Hugh McIntosh, who, not surprisingly, was nicknamed “Apples,” though I couldn’t imagine who would dare say such a word to his face. Both of them stared coldly at me. These were men—I’d seen it—who would beat you to a pulp or worse for looking or saying the wrong thing.
Honey said, “Way, college boy, what is it!”
“I’m looking for work,” I blurted. “I thought maybe Cambie’s….”
“He’s a college boy,” Honey explained, as if to excuse my stupidity. “Joey Coppola’s son.”
Jerry Lang had once worked “down the docks” with my father at the Black Diamond Lines pier in Red Hook. A bunch of us had moved his furniture from Brooklyn neighborhood to another. (He’s now serving life along with his boss, Carmine “Junior” Persico, whom the tabloids persist in calling “Snake.” More recently, Junior has become Bernie Madoff’s confidante at the federal prison they share in Butner, N.C.)
"You wanna work?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah.” 
What I really wanted was to get the fuck out of there.
“Be here tomorrow.  7:00. A.M. Got it?”
“Yeah…Thanks.”
“What are you wating for?”
There it was: A job offer I couldn’t refuse.

Part II  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob-part-ii.html)
Part III  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob-part-iii.html)
Part IV  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob-conclusion.html

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.

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies. Rush Limbaugh for sure. I’ve been listening to and thinking about Limbaugh for years: beneath the racist, misogynist rant, the drug abuse, the divorces, the desperate yearning to be an athlete (his bombast is rife with football references), the bitter, fawning women callers he cultivates as groupies, the bottomless hatred of President Obama (who is everything Limbaugh is not) is self-loathing barely disguised. He's going to deconstruct. Of all people, the talk radio host, Michael Savage’s depiction of Rick Santorum, as a kid “no one would talk to in high school,” resonates with Limbaugh and many of these humorless talk radio “warriors,” who spew hate and divisiveness at both political parties and at anyone who’s achieved any distinction in the real world.