Odd Jobs

by Ben Lieberman

  I feel a little faint; I have to sit down. It’s fucking amazing. Everything I worked so hard for and then some is about to come apart. How can I finish the job my father started? How can I stop us from getting killed? I look at Carey, Loot and Rocky, and there is no hiding my panic. “The game is fixed. Cleveland University is laying down,” I say wearily. “Everyone in the universe got wind of this, so why didn’t we?”

  Carey attempts to answer. “Kevin, we were dealing with guys foaming on our carpet, police banging on our door and dudes getting stabbed with pencils. It was the perfect storm and we didn’t pick up on the fix. But we can deal with this. Even if we lose, we’ve been making pretty good money. We got to be able to cover that or at least come close enough to work through it.”

  I give a gallows laugh because Carey has no idea how wrong he is. “Not only can’t we come close to covering that action, but can you think of any two worse people to be on the hook with? Any other schmuck we owe money to, what could they do? Squat, that’s what. But now we have a senator we owe big bucks to. Do you think that’s a good idea? Do you think he can make life hell?” More blank stares from my posse; no one has ever seen me in full rant mode. I laugh and go on. “I just remembered something. Senator Murphy can’t make my life hell because I owe 100 grand to a mobster like Petro. I won’t have a life. It’s really just a matter of how he decides to kill me. And by the way, it was always you two guys doing the laying off, so if you aren’t scared shitless right now, I would question your common sense.”

  That certainly got their attention. I don’t think anyone thought about the mob being included in the worst-case scenario analysis. In the bookie business, if you are flat-out busted, most of the universe has no recourse. They ain’t calling the police, that’s for sure. A senator, that’s a different story; he’s got ways to make your life miserable. A mob guy, shit, this is what they jack off to.

  Loot is the first person to speak. “What the fuck is your drugged-out ass talking about? How sure are you he’s Mafia?”

  I shake my head and say, “Oh, about 150 percent sure.”

  “You know he’s a mob guy and you made us deal with him? We hate the fucking guy and could get better rates and treatment from almost anyone else in the country. What the fuck gives?”

  I look over at Rocky and she is looking intently at me. Carey is looking toward the dirty floor and Loot’s neck veins are bulging. “Remember on the bench, the bench at the bus stop?” I ask Rocky. “I told you everything I could about my business, except anything to do with Petro. I explained that if I tell you certain things it could put you in danger. Now maybe you can understand why I was so sensitive.”

  Rocky looks over and shakes her head. “I knew you were going after Balducci in Queens, but I don’t understand what a mob bookie in Albany has to do with any of that.”

  Loot, who is still fuming, says, “The girl is making a good point. Why didn’t you tell us about being involved with the mob?”

  “Because the less you knew, the less at risk you would be.”

  Loot screams back, “Well, I don’t know shit and I don’t feel too safe right now. Keeping us in the dark was a pretty stupid fucking idea!”

  “Hey!” I scream back, “Petro never would have been a problem for you. So shut the fuck up. You made him a problem when you bet an extra 100 grand on the fucking New York State Gorillas.”

  “Fuck you, Kevin!” Loot screams. “If you weren’t playing fucking nursemaid to your spoiled shit friend, then maybe you could have done better!”

  “Fuck you. Ray is in a fucking coma. What was I supposed to do, just let him die?”

  Carey finally speaks. “Damn, your boy is in a coma?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “it’s pretty serious shit.”

  The concept doesn’t reach Carey all the way. He is quietly speaking, almost mumbling in a numb tone, “Man, I thought I was going to get arrested today. Now, I got some mob guy going to kill me.”

  Loot is about to boil over. “See what you are doing to him?” he yells. “Carey can’t handle this shit! How can you do this to us?”

  “Guys,” Rocky interrupts. “Guys, we’ve got to stop pointing fingers. We got to figure this out. Please, let’s figure this out!”

  “She’s right.” I say. I’m glad she spoke up. We need some cool heads around here, and mine is about to explode. I don’t know how I can pull this off. “Look, I’m not going to kid you, we’re in a tough situation. But we got to try to fight through it.”

  “Yeah.” Loot struggles to calm down. “Let’s figure something out. But first tell us what you know. This time, tell us everything. Tell us what we’re up against. The next decision we make is going to be big. I want to do it intelligently.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “I’ll tell you everything. We are going to owe big money to the Senator and Petro, but our real problem is Petro. He’s a bad guy and the worst to owe a shitload of money to.”

  “Wait, wait,” Loot says. “Exactly how bad a guy is he?”

  CHAPTER 22

  How bad a guy is Petro? As much as I’m trying to do this full-disclosure thing with Rocky, Carey and Loot, I just can’t manage to talk about everything. For instance, I can’t admit to them that I killed Zog. The group knows I mean business, but there’s something about killing someone in cold blood that has me thinking I’ll lose a little something with them. I should tell them, because I shouldn’t hide anything, but I can’t tell them.

  How bad a guy is Petro? Loot is asking me a straight question, but if I tell them what I know, they’ll panic. They won’t be able to function. It’s fucked. I can’t rationalize like this; their asses are on the line now and they have a right to know. I don’t have to tell them about Zog the Cellophane King, but I have to tell them what I know about Petro.

  Petro became my target because I discovered that Petro and Balducci are colleagues and that Petro wants something from Balducci. I let Petro know I was tight with Balducci. Petro had ways to check up on me; he knew I was working at Kosher World, he knew about the Industrial Road fights and the fact that I’m buddies with Balducci’s son, Richie. I used the gambling business to hook Petro and throughout, I dropped in plenty of comments about Balducci.

  Petro has a way of showing his teeth like no one else in this world. He is flat-out mean. At first I wasn’t sure if Petro was putting on a show for me. He knew I spoke to Balducci, so I was thinking Petro wanted to make a point that he is some ruthless, sick fuck and that I could somehow convey his brutal merits to Balducci. The more I hung with Petro, the more I realized that it was no act. Petro was always a bad guy, but being stuck in Albany made him a bad guy with a huge chip on his shoulder. Petro wanted more than Albany, and I made him believe I could help.

  Like a cop who has to fill a monthly speeding ticket quota, Petro needs to fill a killing quota, his own self-imposed killing quota. By the end of a month, this guy is practically twitching if he doesn’t waste someone.

  So I tell Rocky, Loot and Carey about Mack Gregory, who disappeared from this planet about a month and a half ago. There are no leads to Mack’s whereabouts, according to the police.

  I know differently. I know exactly what happened. I know Mack’s 30-year-old, knockout wife Carina made breakfast for Mack and their six-year-old twin girls one ice-cold morning because I was standing outside their house, feeling my balls shrink to raisins. I was there with Petro and a bunch of his goons. Petro was barking out orders and the smoke from his breath mixing with the cold air made him look like a dragon. A big, fucking, badly-dressed dragon.

  Mack and Carina sent their twin girls to school. A few moments later, when the twins were out of sight, one of the goons broke through the front door and four of Petro’s men barged through the back door by the kitchen. With the pathway to the house clear and open, Petro waltzed in; he motioned me to follow. In the kitchen, partially eaten waffles still lay on their chipped plates. The empty drinking glasses still had a milky residue.

  Carina k
new her husband Mack gambled too much; so did everyone. That’s why the police can’t really decipher which of Mack’s bad gambling debts caused his disappearance. I don’t think it was Petro’s intention to do anything to Carina when we first barged into the house. I think when he saw how pretty she was, with her smooth skin and jet-black hair, it overwhelmed him. It was too tough to contain himself. Carina’s tight-as-paint black tank top was failing to enclose her large, shapely, attractive breasts. That poorly designed shirt is probably what put Petro over the edge. All bets were off. And so were Petro’s pants.

  The other guys worked on Mack first. They pistol-whipped him in the head. Another one of Petro’s guys broke through the door and nailed Mack in the legs with a baseball bat, all while his wife Carina was being held down on the kitchen table. Mack never had a chance to protect himself. I always heard rumors of breaking knees, but these guys kept swinging the bat and hitting three, four then five times in the center of Mack’s shin. Again and again. Those guys shattered his legs to a point where they could never function again. The sound of the aluminum bat cracking against his bones will stay with me for as long as I live, for whatever short time that may be. The sound of Mack’s cries and his wife’s cries will stay with me after I’m dead.

  When they were done crippling Mack, the thugs held him down and forced Mack to watch Petro mount his wife on the kitchen table, right next to the waffles that his little girls didn’t finish. Watching a 6’4”, 320-pound slob like Petro raping his wife was probably more painful to Mack than it was to be crippled.

  Petro finished, and then matter of factly picked up his gun and shot Carina in the throat. I don’t think he originally intended to kill her, or Mack for that matter. I’m confident Petro’s intention was to break Mack’s legs beyond repair for being a deadbeat. The guy owed money, and no one owes Petro money. He came into the house to set an example. Then things just took a different direction. After he shot Carina, Petro nodded to his goons to finish off Mack.

  One goon, Billy Shaps, tossed the baseball bat at me and said, “Go ahead, make yourself useful and finish this.”

  I tossed the bat back and said, “Yeah, like I’m your fucking laundry boy.”

  Shaps shot back, “You don’t have the stomach for this?”

  “No, Shaps, I don’t have the stomach to clean up after you.” Billy Shaps didn’t like me because he viewed himself as Petro’s right hand man and thought of me as a threat. I wanted to fuck this guy up, but Sev taught me better than that, like the time in the meat factory when I went after Bino because of my ego. This guy Shaps was a piece of shit, but I wasn’t about to ruin everything I’d worked for because he was antagonizing me.

  Shaps looked at me while he squeezed the bat. He stared me up and down; turning to the whimpering Mack, Shaps smashed him in the skull four more times.

  Petro wanted me along to see my reaction to a leg breaking. Maybe he hoped I would tell Balducci what a real player he was. I guess seeing my reaction to a sick murder that left twin girls as orphans was a bonus. Externally, I tried to stay cool but internally I was going bat-shit. What Petro did to these girls was what Balducci did to me.

  Now Carey, Loot and Rocky know how bad a guy Petro is. I guess I should explain how he became my target. Ha, he became my target. What a fucking joke. In a few hours, he’ll be after me. In the meantime, I need to let these guys know what I found out about Petro and how it relates to Balducci.

  “I guess the best place to start is right in Jimmy Balducci’s house,” I explain. “I would go back to Long Island every now and then and catch up with my old high school pal, Richie Balducci. We would go out clubbing and I would listen to the most boring stories about how great Wall Street is and how smart he is. I shit you not. Richie believes they all think he is a rising killer, but I had the opportunity to hear the other side. When I met up with him at the bar by his office, a couple of the traders were ragging on Richie behind his back when he went to the bathroom. These guys didn’t know I was there with Richie and they were relentless. But this was as bad as it got for him; the traders knew that Richie’s father has some major connections and that’s what got him into Bank of America for the summer. They’d been instructed to take it easy on the mental abuse.”

  Loot is frustrated and interrupts, “So why deal with Richie Balducci? You ain’t friendly with him anymore and if the bitch bothers you when you’re hanging out, why deal?”

  “Believe me,” I say, ‘‘I’m not disagreeing with you. He’s turned into a Wall Street maggot. It’s a bunch of months later and I still hear all about his Bank of America summer internship. It’s all he wants to talk about. But to answer your question, hanging out with Richie allowed me total access to his dear old dad. It worked like this: We would go to the clubs, I would get the dork fucked up and then we would go back to his parents’ house and crash. Whenever Richie was coming back to town to visit his folks, I made an effort to find an excuse to get back to Long Island.”

  Rocky asks, “Did it work?”

  “Hell, yeah,” I answer. “The house was like hitting the lottery. Balducci has a ton going on and he can’t keep track of it at Kosher World. His house was like my own information highway. At around two in the morning I would go on an expedition and snoop around in his home office. That’s how I came up with this brilliant, though obviously flawed, master plan for bringing down Balducci.”

  “Yeah, you and what army?” Carey asks sardonically.

  I point to Carey and say, “That’s my point; you don’t bring these guys down without an army. As a matter of fact, you need two armies.”

  Loot is shaking his head wildly. “Man, what are you talking about?”

  “I had it totally under control until today, when it derailed. Army number one is Petro.”

  All those times sleeping at Balducci’s house and doing my research, I found out the Balducci family exiled the Petrocelli family. Balducci thought of himself as this new frontier of organized crime. It was so much grander than all the bone crushers of the past. He once told me that it’s not a gumba thing anymore; it’s like the United Nations. Balducci came to the realization that the mob business wasn’t what it used to be. You had thinner margins and low job satisfaction, mainly because the cops were getting sentences to stick. Undercover cops were infiltrating mob operations. The witness protection program was working and successfully getting guys to squeal. This was a huge problem for Balducci, so he went global. He was going after foreign government contracts and getting control of construction and factories in crazy countries like Uganda and Myanmar. Anywhere there was a corrupt government, he was able to duplicate a model to control all the work, just like he had done over here. He set himself up to buy for free in different languages.

  “What does that have to do with Petro?” Loot asks.

  “That’s a good question,” I answer. I tell them that it really started with Petro’s father. Old man Petro was resisting this great expansion. He was happy with his turf in Queens and thought that this new mandate was too risky. It would bring attention, and old man Petro thought attention was an invitation to get caught. But mostly, these new initiatives would be a cash drain, and old man Petro wasn’t willing to kick in. It was causing a roadblock. As global as Balducci thought he could be, nothing could get done without going through Queens. Old man Petro was a respected leader in good standing and he flat-out disagreed. As long as he was resisting, other leaders would resist. Old man Petro was a major thorn in Balducci’s big expansion plans.

  Rocky looks at me and asks, “Is that why Petro is in Albany now?”

  “Yeah,” I answer, “there was an internal war about 15 years ago. Balducci got control in the old-school Mafia manner and wiped out guys who were resisting the big expansion. Old man Petro was a bigger tree to chop down. Petro lost, but for political reasons, still couldn’t be killed, so a truce was worked out and a territory was carved out for old man Petro. Albany.”

  Loot asks, “So you had this idea to get Bal
ducci and you lucked into finding Petro?”

  “Just the opposite,” I say. “I’ve been hanging out with Richie Balducci all this time. I’ve been making special trips down to Long Island to get access to his house, and I would choke on his Bank of America stories. For months I have been pouring over information and trying to get ideas. I had thousands of ideas and then ultimately dead ends. But finally I found it. Here I am going to New York State University and someone who hates Balducci almost as much as I do is right here in Albany as well. So now the issue is, how do I get this guy to team up with me? That’s my real motivation for the drugs and bookie operation.”

  “I’m confused,” Rocky moans. “Who was exiled from Queens? Was it old man Petro or the Petro we deal with?”

  I catch myself and say, “Sorry, my fault. Old man Petro was exiled in the late 80s. But he was an older guy and he grudgingly accepted his fate. He keeled over about five years after his exile. He’s breaking thumbs in that better place right now. The younger Petro was in his 30s and had been strutting around New York as the heir to the Petro Dynasty. This exile crushed him. Petro was going to be running Queens, the center of the universe, but instead he’s in Siberia. He turned into a joke. He thinks he should be The Dude and just doesn’t have any of the muscle to back it up. In the younger Petro’s mind, which is our Petro, he believes he’s a man in a boy’s body and this is causing frustration. This frustration created one of the most outright meanest motherfuckers I have ever seen.”

  Loot asks, “You know all this for a fact?”

  “There’s no doubt,” I say. “I’ve been rummaging through Balducci’s mail, documents and e-mails for months now. As much as correspondents try to stay under the radar, a lot of info is still passed the old-school way, just with different acronyms so the writer and the reader aren’t actually talking about prostitution or extortion. You should see all the ideas and suggestions that Petro sends Balducci, trying to get back in. He’s desperate, and that was my hook.”