American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Another Outcast was Rocco Ciofani.‡ Rocco was a tough, tough kid. His father was a straight Italian guy, a working man, who had an auto-body shop. I ran away from the boys’ home and slept in his shop until Mr. Ciofani threw me out. He knew we were no good. Rocco was a shorter guy. He was a trained boxer, and he was crazy with a shotgun.

  Not everyone in the Outcasts was Italian. Bernie Levine* was a fat, spoiled Jewish kid who lived near my stepfather’s house. All the Outcasts hung out in Bernie’s basement because he got all the drugs—weed, speed, heroin. It’s at his house that a bunch of Outcasts started shooting heroin. I took lots of drugs, but I never got hooked on injecting them.

  Bernie became very important later in my life. In the early 1970s, he moved to San Francisco and ran a recording studio for bands like the Grateful Dead. I was living in Miami by then, and Bernie got me started supplying his bands in San Francisco with cocaine. That’s how I first got big in the coke business. It started with an Outcast. These guys stayed with me through my whole life.

  Jack Buccino, the kid who drove me to see my mother in the hospital before she died, was another Outcast. I stayed at his house after Mr. Ciofani kicked me out of the auto-body shop. What a weird family. Jack’s mother was a half-baked lounge singer. His father sold fake aluminum siding. He believed he was really good-looking and dressed like he was Dick Clark on American Bandstand.

  From his parents’ stupid influence, Jack fancied himself an actor and a singer. That was his goal in life. Mrs. Buccino was a typical Italian mother who babied the fuck out of him and let him live in a fantasy world. Jack sang in bands and talked about being in the movies, but mostly he was a junkie thief who never moved out of his parents’ house.

  When I was in middle school, all the Outcasts were high school age or older. They thought I was amusing because I would fight anyone. I still went to school sometimes, and the Outcasts would come by and look for kids for me to fight. They’d stand by the playground and point at a big kid and say, “Go fucking slap him and tell him to meet you by the dugout.”

  That was the spot for fighting. I’d fight the kid, and if I started to lose, the Outcasts would all jump in and beat his ass.

  There was a black kid at my school who had two first names—Herbert Peter.* He was a real wacko, a bad kid like me. He had been held back a few grades, and his muscles were overdeveloped. To be king of the school, I decided to fight him. Even the Outcasts thought I might be overreaching, and they were right.

  Herbert Peter gave me the fight of my life. He knocked me down, stomped me. He beat the stuffing out of me. The Outcasts didn’t stop that one. They stood back laughing their balls off.

  AFTER I got my ass kicked, the Outcasts taught me how to really fight. The biggest Outcast was Dominic Fiore,† who was over six feet tall. He became my teacher. We’d hang out in his basement. We’d push all the furniture to the side, and he and the other Outcasts would beat the shit out of me.

  Dominic’s belief was: to give a beating, you got to learn to take a beating. I’d already been beaten by Herbert Peter. But Dominic believed I needed more. You learn to take pain so it doesn’t make you curl up or run. Dominic and the other Outcasts beat me with their hands, with pool cues, belts, chair legs. Then they taught me how to use those tools properly.

  I’d seen my father give hundreds of beatings with a baseball bat, but Dominic taught me how to really use one. There is an art to everything. You think you just grab a bat and start swinging? It doesn’t work like that, bro. I mean, give a normal person a bat and give me a bat, and we’ll see who does what.

  You don’t swing for the fences when you fight with a bat. I approach you carrying my bat pointed down so it matches my leg. You might not even notice it. When I come close, I bring my bat up, grip it in both hands, and swing it low at your knee. If I hit you near the knee with any force, I will put you on the ground. I don’t care if you’re a guy who weighs four hundred pounds. A bat to the knee will drop Superman, and when you’re on the ground, I own you.

  When you’re bat-fighting, as soon as you get your guy on the ground, you need to reverse your grip on the bat. Put your strong hand near the end of the handle and your weaker hand below it. Point the bat down like you’re grinding herbs in a mortar and pestle. You’re going to pump the bat up and down on the person underneath it. Focus on taking out the knees, elbows, and hands. After that they ain’t running nowhere, bro. Now you can take your time cracking their ribs, busting their balls—anything you want. When you got a bat, you’re king.

  If you don’t have a bat, no matter what the other guy is doing, focus on his weak points. Take away his legs by kicking his knees. Take away his eyes by sticking him with your fingers or something sharp like a broken bottle. Work on his shins. Shins are very sensitive, and you can hurt a person real bad on his shins. The shinbone is the strongest bone in the body, but the front edge is tender if you stomp it.

  Even though I just said the fronts of a person’s shins are sensitive, when I kick people in the balls, I will use my own shinbone. My shin hits with more force than my foot, and my shinbone won’t hurt me because I’m kicking balls, which are soft. You can break someone’s balls with your shinbone. When you’re fighting, look for every opportunity to hurt the other guy’s eyes and knees and shins. And no matter what, always be kicking his balls.

  Use gravity when you fight. Punch down, not up. When I’m fighting, I always beat down, and I always stab down if I have a knife. I do not stab up, I do not stab straight. I always stab down.*

  Dominic taught me everything about fighting.

  PETEY GALLIONE is the last Outcast I got to know, but he stayed my friend my whole life. Petey was like a brick with feet. He was five-nine and weighed 190 pounds. Later he played semiprofessional football, but he kept getting sent to prison, which stopped his career.*

  I met Petey at a party in West Englewood. There was a rich kid who had a party at his house when his parents went out of town. He was a popular athlete, so all the popular kids showed up in their letter jackets, with pretty girls and nice cars.

  I walked up with my Outcast friends, and the kid hosting the party came out on the lawn and said, “You’re not welcome.”

  Jack Buccino was always comical. He says to this kid, “How about if you box our friend Petey. If you win, we leave. If Petey beats you, we stay.”

  I’m wondering who Petey is. Then I see the brick with legs waddle out of the darkness. It’s Petey. He was seventeen or eighteen back then, and he did not talk. I later found out he was already a strung-out junkie. He drank fifteen bottles of opiated cough syrup a day. This was his secret weapon. Nobody could hurt him because he was full of painkiller in advance of being hit.

  Petey steps up to the kid hosting the party. The kid shakes Petey’s hand, as if they’re going to fight like gentlemen. They circle around, throw a few punches. But boxing takes a long time. Petey got bored. Out of nowhere, he kicks the kid in the balls, knocks him down, and drags him onto the street. Petey goes nuts. He climbs on top of the kid and starts strangling him. He isn’t fighting no more. He’s just trying to kill him.

  Girls start screaming. Kids pile onto Petey to stop him. But Petey’s like the monster in the Frankenstein movie. Not even a whole crowd with pitchforks can stop him. Finally someone gets in a car and rams into Petey. That’s how they save their friend.

  To me, Petey was beautiful. He was the most crazed Outcast there was. But because he was still serious about football, he attended high school so he could play on the team. I started working out with him at his high school gym, even though I was still in eighth or ninth grade. Back then they used to have fraternities at the high schools. They were organized to keep kids out of gangs. Fraternities were mostly groups of popular kids who looked down their noses at kids like us, who didn’t have families or whose dads were in illegal lines of work.

  All the fraternity kids worked out together at Petey’s high school gym. They’d hog the equipment. They acted like they
owned the place. One day a fraternity kid said something to me under his breath. I confronted him and his friends, and they giggled at me like a bunch of girls.

  Next day I came with a gun. The fraternity kids started to say something to me, and I took the gun out and started shooting into the ceiling. I wasn’t going to hit no kids, but they didn’t know that. Boom, boom, boom. They hit the floor, screaming. It was hilarious.

  When I told the Outcasts what I did, nobody said, “You did a wrong thing.” They laughed. We were like a pack of mad dogs running the street. There was no reasoning among us. I don’t know what made us flip out so bad, but we were all gone.

  PETER “PETEY” GALLIONE: Jon was a wild kid. He looked two feet tall when I met him. But he would take out a gun and start shooting like a cowboy in a Western.

  I have tried to figure out what made us so crazy. Jon had lost his parents. His Italian family, his father and uncles, were well known in the streets, but Jon was alone. It made sense why he was wild, but only up to a point. All of us went so far beyond “normal bad” behavior.

  Teaneck was an ideal place. There were rich areas, middle-class areas, and poor neighborhoods. It was a well-balanced city. I was from across Windsor Road in Teaneck, the wrong side of the tracks. My family was poor, but it’s not like I starved. The schools were of high academic standing. My group of friends and I should not have turned out as we did. When I look back on what put us over the edge, I believe it was drugs. In the early 1960s a wave of drugs came through, and we all got wacked out of our minds. The drugs accelerated our craziness. Drugs lowered everybody’s inhibitions for violence and crime. Drugs allowed us to put guns in our hands and not give a shit.

  Some of the kids in the Outcasts had parents in the Mafia. But we didn’t want to be a part of that. To us, the older generation of Mafia men were like company men at IBM. We didn’t want to have bosses. We wanted to be our own bosses.

  The Outcasts was a gang that was organized to be against organized gangs. What the Outcasts were about was we disliked society.

  J.R.: In the early 1960s people were square. Kids were into the Beach Boys. I didn’t want to run around like a Beach Boy. I dressed weird. I wore suede boots with points, velvet pants. I wore a beret. I carried an umbrella. The umbrella looked good, and I sharpened the tip so I could stab people with it. Nobody thinks of an umbrella as a weapon, but it’s a very good one. You can kill somebody with an umbrella.

  All of the Outcasts wore crazy, crazy outfits, with umbrellas and capes. Some Outcasts got pachuco tattoos—the cross with slashes on it—that Mexican gangs used. So-called normal kids in their ironed pants and shirts with button-down collars looked at us like we were weird, but to me, they were the weird ones.

  We disliked people, but we all had dogs. That was the funny thing about the Outcasts. Even when I was roaming around the street, sleeping in different places, I got a Doberman. Our dogs were gods.

  PETEY: Dogs were trust, loyalty, unconditional love. You didn’t have to be anything for your dog to love you. We loved our dogs. If my dog wanted meat, I’d do a stickup to get meat for my dog.

  When the Outcasts came together, we were just kids who liked to fight. But as drugs spread on the streets, we started robbing people who were buying or selling them. Drug rip-offs were ideal because the people we robbed couldn’t report us to the police, since they were doing an illegal thing in the first place.

  It’s easy to rob a drug buyer. We’d offer to sell him some shit, and when he showed up with the money, we’d rob him. At first you could take someone’s money, slap him in the head, and it was over. Then you had to start carrying a gun because other people were carrying guns, and it became something different. It got violent very quickly.

  We justified the bullshit we did. We had a code: only rob street people. Never rob a house. Never stick up a liquor store. Those people are civilians. You don’t touch them. But if it’s street people, I can do anything. If I have to hurt you to do what I got to do, that was not a problem in my mind.

  J.R.: We liked to do robberies inside cars. We’d get the kid we were going to rob to get into a car with us. I’d say, “We got to drive to see the guy who has the weed.”

  The kid gets into the car with me and the Outcasts. We start driving and tell him to hand over his money. Usually, the kid cooperates because we’re such mad dogs. When he gives us the money, we throw him from the car.

  Rocco loved to hit people because he knew how to professionally box. Even if the kid was cooperating, Rocco liked to try out new punches. He’d see how hard, or fast, he could hit somebody in the face before we threw him out of the car.

  After a while we changed up how we robbed people. Northern New Jersey was like one big small town, and the guy we robbed last week might see us again next week. Or maybe the kid we robbed had rich parents, and we knew we could rob him more times in the future because of his parents’ money. So we did a new setup, where I would get the kid in the car and make it look like I was being robbed, too. If the kid believed I was also a victim, it would keep the trust between us, so I could rob him again in the future.

  ONE DAY Jack Buccino brought a black kid into our group, Freddy Wilbert.* Freddy was a real skinny kid who talked in a soft voice. Jack said, “Freddy’s crazy. He’ll do anything.”

  Freddy was perfect, because with America being as prejudiced as it was, he could pretend to rob us and everybody would believe it was real. Nobody would think a bunch of Italians were partners with a black kid.

  I set up what was for us a big deal. I convinced a guy in his twenties that I could get him a thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. I was fourteen and too young for a license, but I’d started driving an old Chevy Impala station wagon with a V8 and the shifter on the column. I picked up the guy we were going to rob. I had Petey in the back carrying an empty gym bag that we said had the heroin in it.

  Petey acts uptight and says he won’t open the bag until I drive to a safe place. I drive to a woods in Fort Lee. The plan is Freddy, the black kid, is supposed to jump out of the trees with a shotgun and rob us.

  But when I pull up, no Freddy.

  Petey is so wacked out on cough syrup, he gets confused and almost hands the guy we’re robbing the empty bag. I pretend to accidentally honk the horn. Freddy finally runs out of the woods with his shotgun. He’s supposed to get in the car, so people don’t call the cops about a black kid running around on the street with a shotgun. But Freddy is so excited, he stands outside the window pointing the shotgun at Petey’s head.

  I roll down my window and tell Freddy, “Hey, bro. Could you get in the car so nobody sees that gun and calls the cops?”

  Freddy says, “Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.”

  As soon as Freddy gets in, our victim just hands him his thousand dollars. Freddy starts to get out before he takes Petey’s bag. That’s key to the robbery. We don’t want any chance the guy we robbed sees there’s no heroin in the bag. I turn to Petey and say, “This robber’s really fucked up. Give him your bag so he don’t get angry and shoot us.”

  Freddy takes the hint. He grabs Petey’s bag and jumps out of the car. I peel out. I’m sure the guy by now must have figured out we were all in on this. But he’s so scared of seeing a black kid with a shotgun, he didn’t notice all the mistakes we made. The next day I call the guy and say, “I’m sorry, man. We have a business relationship. I’m going to work with you to get your money back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tell him whatever money he can get his hands on, I’ll give him heroin at a discount that he can sell at his mark-up until he earns back the money he lost. This guy is so grateful about what a good guy I am, he agrees to meet me with $500 to buy more heroin.

  I pick him up that afternoon. This time I have Rocco and Dominic with me. They don’t want to go through no complicated bullshit. So as soon as the guy gets in the car, they beat the shit out of him, take his money, and throw him from the car. That was the end of our business relationship.
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br />   * One of Jon’s friends from this era says that they once assaulted Ivor Swenson for threatening to rat them out for a scheme to pass counterfeit money.

  * Bernie Levine is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  * Herbert Peter is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s schoolmate.

  * Jon insisted we clarify this: “I don’t do any of that shit now, but that’s how I used to stab people.”

  * Gallione played in a local league on a team called the Bergen County Chargers.

  * Freddy Wilbert is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s fellow thief.

  † Frank Messina is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  † Dominic Fiore is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  ‡ Rocco Ciofani is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  6

  J.R.: In the fall of 1963 my sister did an intervention. Everybody knew I was turning out wrong. My sister wanted to try to be a mother to me. She decided the way to fix me was to have me move in with her and her husband. She had married a pilot in the Marine Corps, and they were living in Texas while he trained near Corpus Christi. Poppy came and got me from Jack Buccino’s house and put me on a Greyhound bus to Texas.

  I liked Texas. My sister and brother-in-law had a little house near the water. My sister helped me get a job on a commercial fishing boat. It was called the Captain Maddox* after the name of the man who owned it. I got friendly with his son, Billy, who was a few years older than me. We worked long hours on the boat. Then Billy would take me around to beer places. It’s a funny thing, being an Italian from New York, but I got along with rednecks.

  Me and Billy had great experiences.* He got me laid the first time. Billy took me to a whorehouse filled with white-trash Texas girls and Mexican whores. For a couple of dollars, the Mexican broads would fuck you dry. That was the first time I got laid. A Mexican girl fucked my brains out.