Shooting Uncle Otto
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zio-Tat-to” in our Neapolitan slang) ran a 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 like fast food joints in the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose” and Mikey Romanelli, and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. More on Court Street, but that was another neighborhood. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Eager, 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, Manhattan Special coffee sodas which we'd bring into Otto's. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who ran a dingy grocery on Third and President who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci who worked in "Farmer Jones' grocery on Carroll. Lucy called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced sandwiches. They loved it. She had red hair and drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. I 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, nodded to the stranger, and they walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. 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. No need for heroics.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—Sally Fots and my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They were beingchased across the gowanus canal by at least 50 furious black guys—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 in "Motherless Brooklyn."
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. A rifle on a Saturday afternoon with kids skipping rope, and mothers returning from shopping at Spinners on Fifth Ave. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. This took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand, then slapped him. Everything stopped. For the next hour, the wiseguys,heard the grievances of the black men, like a powwow in a Western.
The treat was short-lived. Later that summer I was standing on the corner of Third and Carroll when half-a-dozen Italian kids, maybe 10 or 12 rain skipping and chortling gleefully up the street shouting
"There's a dead nigger in the canal!"
Years later, working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit our “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were indexed and stored—this was before everything was digitized and put online. I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “neighborhood.” One day a story caught my eye: the remains of four murdered wiseguys—appropriately maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
Like the dead guys, the feds had simply been at the right place at the wrong time.
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zio-Tat-to” in our Neapolitan slang) ran a 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 like fast food joints in the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose” and Mikey Romanelli, and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. More on Court Street, but that was another neighborhood. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Eager, 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, Manhattan Special coffee sodas which we'd bring into Otto's. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who ran a dingy grocery on Third and President who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci who worked in "Farmer Jones' grocery on Carroll. Lucy called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced sandwiches. They loved it. She had red hair and drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. I 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, nodded to the stranger, and they walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. 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. No need for heroics.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—Sally Fots and my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They were beingchased across the gowanus canal by at least 50 furious black guys—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 in "Motherless Brooklyn."
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. A rifle on a Saturday afternoon with kids skipping rope, and mothers returning from shopping at Spinners on Fifth Ave. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. This took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand, then slapped him. Everything stopped. For the next hour, the wiseguys,heard the grievances of the black men, like a powwow in a Western.
The treat was short-lived. Later that summer I was standing on the corner of Third and Carroll when half-a-dozen Italian kids, maybe 10 or 12 rain skipping and chortling gleefully up the street shouting
"There's a dead nigger in the canal!"
Years later, working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit our “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were indexed and stored—this was before everything was digitized and put online. I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “neighborhood.” One day a story caught my eye: the remains of four murdered wiseguys—appropriately maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
Like the dead guys, the feds had simply been at the right place at the wrong time.
