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.”