In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Z- Da-do” in our 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 gin rummy or the Italian briscola—while Otto kept track of the numbers runners and gamblers—my godfather, “Blubber Head,” among them—who hurried in and out.
Bookie parlors were the fast food joints of the neighborhood. There were four in a three block radius—Otto’s, the Capri and Glory Social clubs on Third and Carroll (run by “The Goose,”) and a very dangerous one on Fifth Avenue off Carroll Street. "Runners" had different territories. "Jimmy the Morgue" covered his place of employment, the Kings County morgue in Bed-Sty. And of course, everyone knew he had sex with corpses. "Fat Rosie" collected bets from Puerto Rican workers in the factories at Bush Terminal'," a manufacturing complex on 3rd Avenue near the Brooklyn piers.(A gigantic "Industrial City" billboard was painted on the first building, a primitive version of Star Wars' famous scroll. At age 7, I'd try to read it all the way down on the Tuesday evenings my father drove his '56 Caddy along the Gowanus Parkway to Coney Island for Nathan's hot dogs, fries, orangeade and fireworks. Never could finish. See image below.)
On weekends, football games, Belmont 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 hero sandwiches stuffed with ham, 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 a whacky sense of humor: she berated her regular customers as “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she filled their orders. They loved it. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac and was the kindest person I knew. Like my parents, she'd endure a lifetime of tragedy.
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 four teenagers eating meatball sandwiches. ("Who sold you that beer?")They pushed us around. Looked here and there, left.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment, nodded toward the front door and walked outside. The guy seemed nervous; Otto phlegmatic. The conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto apologetically in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his 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. Message delivered.
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 50 furious blacks 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 kids was holding a rifle. He ran by, stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand. For the next hour, the wise guys heard the honest grievances of the black men. This was a time when whistling fireworks were labeled "ni__er-chasers," and the occasional African-American corpse floated down the Canal like something out of Huckleberry Finn.
On weekends, football games, Belmont 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 hero sandwiches stuffed with ham, 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 a whacky sense of humor: she berated her regular customers as “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she filled their orders. They loved it. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac and was the kindest person I knew. Like my parents, she'd endure a lifetime of tragedy.
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 four teenagers eating meatball sandwiches. ("Who sold you that beer?")They pushed us around. Looked here and there, left.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment, nodded toward the front door and walked outside. The guy seemed nervous; Otto phlegmatic. The conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto apologetically in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his 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. Message delivered.
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 50 furious blacks 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 kids was holding a rifle. He ran by, stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand. For the next hour, the wise guys heard the honest grievances of the black men. This was a time when whistling fireworks were labeled "ni__er-chasers," and the occasional African-American corpse floated down the Canal like something out of Huckleberry Finn.
The talk was like a powwow in a Western. I saw things that way. Years later, when I was working for Newsweek, I used to visit the “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were stored. I’d read gangster stories to see whom I knew or recognized from the “old neighborhood.” One story caught my eye. The remains of four murder victims—maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
Way back when the Feds had arrived, knowing too little, too late.
Way back when the Feds had arrived, knowing too little, too late.
