Six Years Inside the Mafias: how I worked my way through college: a true story

by Yari Stern

  SIX YEARS INSIDE THE MAFIAS

  How I Worked My Way Through College: A True Story

  by

  Yari Stern

  “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

  C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

  “If things don’t start pickin’ up, you gotta start pickin’ up things.”

  Sylvan Skolnic- head of the Jewish Mafia, Cherry Hill N.J. 1972

  “I send you out to kill a squealer. You come back and tell me you killed the wrong guy. What? Are you that stupid? Do you get in the back seat of a car and think somebody stole the steering wheel?”

  John Gotti from the Ravenite Social Club, Manhattan, 1988

  His client was taken into custody. The judge ordered bail set at ten million dollars. His attorney, incensed, yelled at the judge, "That's not bail, that’s a telephone number."

  Marvyn Kornberg, New York City, 2000

  The funeral was set for 9:00 p.m. but there was still a lot of work to do; they had to kill him first.

  Jimmy Breslin, NYC, 1985

  "You can get more cooperation with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.

  Al Capone, Chicago, 1933

  “If shit were worth money, fools would be born without assholes.”

  Grandmother “Bub” Stern, Phila. 1965

  I am forever indebted to the four people who put guns to my head, convincing me that it was time to write this story rather than continuing living it.

  PROLOGUE

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  It was the Spring of 1957. Cars were customarily broad; people were predominantly lean. Physical labor in the work place coursed into mutual cooperation at home. A president who didn’t covet the position occupied the White House; money hadn’t yet been elevated to the level of deity.

  The devil was accepted as the weaker part of man, not an external entity to be insulated from and exorcised by organized religion.

  The explosion in statutes by state and federal legislatures that began in the late ‘40s, an effort to control a rapidly growing population by proportionately fewer people, had not yet gained its objective. Individuals still believed in the power of self and of government as regulator, not creator.

  Neighbors called each other “mate” during the decades before bureaucracies took away the incentive for citizens to interact, before laws were passed to ensure the perpetuation of institutions and an end to communities sharing skills and concerns.

  The temptation to emulate billboard illusions and television celebrities paled in comparison to family solidarity. Life wasn’t yet so difficult and complex as to drive the many to compensate with drugs and alcohol in order to muddle through each day.

  Husbands and wives strolled tree-lined streets after dinner, and children played stickball and king-of-the-hill on dirt fields untainted by the lure of the coming shopping malls.

  Toward the end of an especially rainy April, Yari Stern, age eleven, opened his first paper stand in front of a Horn and Hardart’s Restaurant. Within two months he had the system wired.

  Monday was trash collection day. All the garbage, including the Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, went out that morning. And so he made early rounds of the neighborhood, picking out the papers that hadn’t been tainted by spaghetti sauce or defiled by banana peels. He got thirteen cents for each return.

  No one seemed to mind that he was giving back more copies than he received, certainly not the delivery men who made a little extra, or parents who thought the clever scheme more creative talent than unethical behavior.

  By age twelve, Yari had organized teams of shoplifters. His favorite tactic was to have two members of the gang stage a fight to distract employees while the others pillaged the store. At thirteen, he was paying janitors in prime locations to toss good merchandise out in the trash where he waited for the “deliveries.”

  When Yari brought home pieces of Lalique from Wanamaker’s, or suits and dresses from Al Berman’s Haberdashery, family, friends, and neighbors didn’t ask where they came from, only how much they cost. By the 60s that was the condition of society as he knew it, where bargains overcame ethics, and association was far more potent than genetics. People loved deals so much it twisted their concept of right and wrong, and perverted their natural obligation to correct social inequities.

  In that light he found his calling: provide a worthwhile service between manufacturer and the public, bypass the middleman, keep prices reasonable and become a cog in the machinery of business, gain his freedom and, in turn, undermine a system that deadened the spirit and punished creativity.

  It was so easy to accomplish and to rationalize. All around him, individuals and companies were begging to be taken. They were too naive, too rich, too…something.

  And because Yari cut everyone in on the action, they all praised his efforts.

  His profession was founded on the greed of patrons and the praise of his peers. It worked beautifully. Just five years later, at the age of sixteen, Yari had “made his bones.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ridge Ave. Philadelphia, Pa. 1964

  The front door opened with a powerful rush, strong enough to suck the stale air out of the dilapidated building and start full-length lace curtains, hanging as display samples, in pendulum motion. Thick, rusting bars banged against the warped wooden door frame as an emaciated, wild-eyed man ran into Stern’s Specialty Shop waving a fist full of jewelry around like a bullfighter using a red cape attract his quarry. The odor of alcohol quickly permeated the surrounding area.

  “Anybody wanna buy some stones, cheap?” the intruder offered, his voice beckoning with a mix of stealth and seduction. Dark circles of sweat spread through his crimson silk shirt as he made a proud half circle with shimmering rings and bracelets held high like an offering to the gods.

  Yari, standing at the entrance of the hallway leading from the basement, sensed the stench of larceny blow into the store along with the heavy-breathing con man.

  Meanwhile, his father Sam, oldest brother Carl, aunt Toby, and the two black sales girls continued stocking the showcases, all unruffled by the erupting scene.

  Grandmother Bubby, who had been sitting calmly in her chair, a hand draped lovingly over the cash register, leaned forward. “Go help the meshugahner,” the matriarch of the family derisively ordered her daughter, Toby, toward the gonif.

  Toby - with her butch hair, generous backside, penciled brows, and dissecting eyes - began the trek up from the rear of the hundred-foot deep retail dry-goods store. Moving past shelves of neatly stacked print sheets, striped pillow cases and flannel blankets, racks of boy’s blue suits and girl’s pink dresses, and counters prominently displaying plaid socks and bright white underwear, she shuffled over to the character

  in her clacking flip-flops, a sound produced by an individual unwilling to devote enough energy to lift their feet completely off the ground.

  Yari met her in the middle of the store and said, “I’ll handle this.”

  “Fine with me; just make sure it’s not all plastic,” she said and handed Yari a stack of bills.

  “What’s this?” he asked, concentrating on the intruder.

  “Counterfeit money. You weren’t going to pay him with real bills….were you?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t get this far by dealing from the top of the deck.”

  “Right, he
said, then walked over to the mark.

  Yari started surveying the stolen jewelry with store tags still attached. He took his time, looking over the items like a gemologist, while the guy waved his arms around with a “Let’s go motherfucker, I ain’t here for the atmosphere,” expression.

  Yari was certain it wasn’t the atmosphere. His grandmother’s store was located in the darkest heart of the bottomless pit of the Philadelphia ghetto, a neighborhood beaten up by a tag-team of weather and residents using their chosen weapons of humidity and rain, singular frustration and lack of vested interest.

  Each afternoon he watched legions of tenants fill the decrepit apartments above every store, and cram single homes with an average of a dozen people from three generations. His ears were continually awash with conversations of commiseration that ensued daily between neighbors, dialogue cut off only briefly by the resounding exhaust of delivery trucks, or the scraping of streetcars riding along eroding rails.

  According to his father, the robberies and smashed windows of the merchants that occasionally took place were payback for not treating the populace with respect. It was, after all, The Ridge that made shopkeepers well off enough to send their kids to summer camp, while the residents’ only vacations were to Gratersford or Moyamensing, the local state prisons.

  Yari continued slowly checking the pieces.

  Visibly incensed, the guy fumed, “Hey, chump, I ain’t got time for dis bullshit.”

  “What’s the hurry? It’s a nice day. Sit down. Have a glass of tea.” The calmness in Yari’s voice suffused with a singsong Yiddish inflection only seemed to agitate him more.

  When Yari got that “You’ll buy ‘em or you’ll be wearin’ ‘em to your grave” look from the guy, Yari turned up the heat on his own burner. “I’m not buying shit till I check it out,” he explained. “This crap’s hot as a firecracker. I ought to charge you for the appraisal, you nitwit.”

  The man’s tone quickly changed. “Bu…bu…but ah needs to know,” he spit out apologetically. His gaze darted to the front doors and out onto Ridge Avenue like the messenger of death was about to come through. “Da police be on my ass.”

  “The Ridge,” as Herschel came to know it through his grandmother’s reminiscences, snaked for twelve miles through the city. But it was the four-mile section concentrated from Thirty-third Street on the north to Fairmount Avenue on the south that became the center of the universe for the family. That was where Jews had emigrated at the turn of the century and established themselves as merchants and landlords over what at first were dormant, yes’m blacks.

  The first thing he checked on each day upon arriving at the store, after attending his classes at Drexel University, were the protective bars. They were everywhere. Not the ornamental, decorative type, but heavy iron rods bolted onto the front of each aperture of every establishment. Yari was bemused by shopkeepers who even welded them around second and third floor windows – like the blacks had wings or something. Colored people were devils as far as most of the jobbers were concerned, but no magazine he had ever seen published a picture of one of them flying.

  The two-lane street he regularly drove down was still one of the busiest in the city, but it was trolleys and through traffic for the most part. Shoppers stayed close to home when relying on their feet for transportation.

  In the evenings, he watched it all shut down, like a western town about to host a gun fight. It was the prevalence of alcohol brewing and a simmering discontent that drew a pale, loathsome mist over the streets at night. Those oblivious to the dangers or cursed with anesthetized memories became easy targets for locals with little to lose.

  Yari looked up from his inspection and said, “Yeah, well we’ve all got our problems, don’t we? I missed my bus once.”

  The head-bobbing, leg-twitching, quick-drooling, stuttering junkie broke into a profuse sweat even while standing directly under a huge ceiling fan. “Ah…ah…ah gotsta go,” he muttered, grabbing the pieces as he burst through the front doors.

  Bub - with goitered neck, boiled forehead, gnarled fingers, and encrusted toes - sitting center stage at the store and viewing the entire spectacle, berated Yari in a dialect untainted by forty-three years in America, “So, you couldn’t swindle the goods from the Schwartze?” Ensconced in her favorite chair overlooking the action, with a blintz dripping out the side of her mouth, she continued, “You talk to the shmuck a little more, he wouldn’t even remember coming in with the merchandise.”

  “It’s bupkis,” Yari assured. “Let him keep the crap. He needs it more than we do.”

  Bub was gross inside and out. Prematurely white hair hadn’t felt the bristles of a brush in a month. The frayed, ill-fitting dresses she wore hid little, but it didn’t matter; peoples’ gazes were directed away from the modern-day Methuselah.

  Dense bifocals enabled Bub to warranty money close up, while empowering her to spot delicacies at great distances. Yari had it figured: by purchasing and consuming the most expensive and richest cuisine available, the Jewish wife pushes her husband to a stroke paying the bills while she finally, through food, attains a satisfaction that was never forthcoming in the bedroom.

  “He’ll just lose them to somebody else,” Bub reasoned.

  “How do you sit there with fat rolling down your arms and your face stuffed with food, and talk to me about ripping off people who don’t even have carfare to leave the neighborhood to steal from stores that have decent merchandise?” Yari asked.

  In verbal summation of the visual circus, the grandmother said, “If shit were worth money, fools would be born without assholes.”

  Bub turned inward for a moment, sitting transfixed, gnawing on her food. Then, rousing from that state, clearly frustrated and seeking retribution, she called to Yari. “”Go after the goniff. Get him back here…with the jewelry.” As Bub spoke, pieces of cheese sputtered out of her mouth, sticking to the limp hairs of her upper lip and mutton-chops. A quick swipe by the back of a knotted hand freed them to continue their journey, bouncing off her yellowed lace apron and into the crevices of the warped wooden boards running the entire length of the showroom.

  “Okay, Grandma,” Yari replied.

  “Hurry, petzel,” Bub insisted.

  “Have a heart attack you bitch,” he urged his penny-pinching grandmother after she impugned his manhood.

  “We’re all bitches…bitches and bastards. Didn’t you know? That’s what the Yiddishers are, bitches and bastards scattered around the world by our enemies.” Bub laughed herself into a coughing fit.

  “Looking at and listening to you, I can see why,” Yari retorted, then stepped from around the counter and toward the front door.

  “Eighty-six,” Trixie, the petite black sales clerk, called out.

  Yari heeded the code that all the merchants knew, as though it were passed down genetically: a shoplifter was working in the store.

  Yari spun toward the danger. The “eighty-six” alarm was sounded for a humungous man sporting a pimpled, oily face that had stopped many a “two by four” who’d wandered into the emporium wearing a fleece-lined trench coat on the eighty-five degree day, like a rooster into a paraplegic hen house, with an extra large milkshake bulging from one of his oversized pockets.

  He nonchalantly walked around the store, picking up items and stuffing them in a shopping bag.

  Yari moved deliberately toward the shoplifter. “Hey, you fat fuck. If you don’t put the goods back and get the hell out of our store, I’ll send you home in a body bag.”

  “You ain’t shit to me, boy,” the man responded with disdain.

  “How about I swing an elbow into your temple hard enough to make your brains ooze out your ear and on to your milkshake. Then you’ll be too stupid to realize it’s not whipped cream.”

  “Y’all better gets your scrawny ass outa my face, white trash,” the thief threatened, closing the distance between them.

  Yari reached behind for his gun, but then quickly stepped back as Trixie thre
w the front door open and entered the store with Reggie Martinez one step behind.

  Yari noted Reggie with admiration: a top-ranked middleweight fighter just a decade earlier, one bout away from a title shot. His past profession was still obvious on a face road-mapped by scar tissue and a nose pancaked by deft blows in the ring. Arms that had once put the fear of God into serious men still held the knowledge and power of those earlier years. A pronounced paunch slowed down over-burdened legs, but surely added center of gravity to left hooks.

  Instead of immediately going over to the goniff and pummeling his face to the consistency of a grapefruit, the ex-prize fighter waited at the front doors shadow boxing, a truly menacing sight.

  When the trapped animal spotted Reggie at the entrance, he started unloading the merchandise from his shopping bag.

  Yari laughed out loud at the shoplifter who reminded him of a magician pulling unending rabbits out of a hat.

  The man hadn’t even broken a sweat while speeding around the store one step ahead of everyone else, but now he was a running river of fear. After giving up his entire haul, and with one eye rotated sideways to watch Reggie, he offered Trixie a sawbuck as a contribution for all the trouble he caused.

  On the way out, the thief bellied up to Reggie sporting a chalk-gray complexion fusing hatred and dread.

  “Who the fuck you starin’ at, Mister born ugly, and got fat quick on ‘greazy’ chicken?” Reggie asked. “Looks like you got drunk and cursed out guys who make a living breaking concrete.”

  “Whatcha doin, sidin’ with whitey, boy?”

  ”I ain’t nobody’s boy, nigger,” Reggie responded, then sliced an uppercut so deep into the thief’s capacious gut that his hand seemed as though it would become permanently attached. As the wind sailed out of the pilferer’s mouth, he went flying backward hard enough to bounce off a heavy wooden counter five feet away. Several minutes passed before he was able to stagger out of the store.