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.

A Garden of Unearthly Delights

Whole Foods, like Macbeth’s Birnham Wood has come to Gowanus! I read it in the New York Times. To the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street to be precise. I used to climb mountains there; stacks of Alpine blue barrels filled with toxic chemicals. I was thirteen. The crystals spilling out golden and emerald in my hands. Dumped there by one of the canal-side factories before they abandoned ship, or a wise guy named Honey, who, for a fee, would make medical wastes and other unwanted pollutants disappear into the glass green, shit-splattered Gowanus. Marty and Freddy, two black guys—actual brothers--from the Deep South, ran a gas station on the corner. Freddie was a great mechanic and a terrible gambler, so there was always a place for him among the bookies and loan sharks who hung out in the Capri Club on Carroll and Third Avenue. Freddie got shot one day. A credit default swap, I guess. He survived but the service station closed.
Across the street, the one historic structure in our neighborhood, a limestone mansion as architecturally dramatic as the brownstones above posh Sixth Avenue, until, of course, a local company took it for its headquarters and put linoleum on the steps of its stoop and fake orange brickwork on its exterior walls. Someone told me “George Washington slept there.” I believed it, though the history was off by at least 100 years. On Third Avenue toward Carroll Street stand the remaining walls of Washington Park, Brooklyn’s first pro-baseball stadium. I knew it as Con Edison truck depot.
Had they lived into their sixties, my mother, Gloria, and her three sisters, Mary, Marguerite, Dolly, and her two brothers, Sonny and Tony Giordano, sure would have been amazed to see Whole Foods arise on the canal’s fatal shore, though they could never shop there. They relied on “Farmer Jones” dim grocery on Carroll Street  who allowed them to pay “on time.” There was Angioletti, a proto-Whole Foods, peddler who’d call out the names of fruits and vegetables in singsong Italian as he passed by on his horse-drawn wagon. They all died of cancer. The Giordanos lived on Nevins and Carroll, less than 50 yards from the Gowanus, now a Superfund site.  When the tide was high, and the stench intolerable, their cellar would flood and my Uncle Tony, the family plumber, would wade into the toxic wastes. He developed brain cancer.

Rick Santorum, American Taliban?

Republican presidential candidtate Rick Santorum favors no contraception for women, no prenatal screening, no higher education for working class people (a pillar of the American dream) home schooling, no premarital sex; he attacks JFK's historic speech on separation of church and state, insisting the United States is a theocracy. What's missing, an exploding sweater vest? There's got to be something very dark in this guys past. See above post Politics and Pathology.

Commentary: Politics and Pathology

Single, and in her twenties, Karen Santorum commits the unforgivable sin: she has sex with Tom Allen, an OBGYN who performs abortions. Dr. Allen is 40 years her senior, and, in fact had delivered her. So perhaps Karen has “father” issues. At the time, Rick, self-proclaimed grandson of immigrant coal miners—though he’s remarkably unlike any working class Italian-American I ever knew in 12 years of Catholic school—had zero interest, say those who knew him, in anti-abortion crusading. Imagine the forces at work when Karen meets Rick. Imagine the rage simmering his jealous, unforgiving heart. It’s on display on the stump every day. So let’s assume Rick “saves” Karen, by marrying her, i.e., she renounces her sinful ways. They have children. In 1996, Karen gives birth to a boy who dies two hours later. They bring the dead infant home, encourage their other children to hold the lifeless form, then sleep that night with the child—the bitter fruit of Karen’s sin—between them. Karen delivers another child, Bella, three years ago, this one afflicted with Trisomy 18, a genetic defect easily detected by pre-natal screening. Trisomy 18 is characterized by “abnormalities in the development of the brain, heart and other internal organs.” Ninety percent of Trisomy 18 children die in the first year; the rest well before  their teens, often of pneumonia or cancer. What is Bella Santorum’s quality of life? Perhaps Rick would say her torment is mitigated in his loving embrace. Not very different from how he “saved” his wife from Dr. Allen. What is Santorum’s “Christian” response to all this tragedy: he wants to ban other pregnant women from prenatal screens, or better yet, forbid them from indulging in sex.