After a year in the freight-hauling business, Kripplebauer’s fortunes turned once again. Infighting among the partners resulted in an ugly and irresolvable split. Junior and another partner were cut out of the deal, precipitating a series of lawsuits and countersuits, and the potential for more serious retaliatory strikes. Junior was eventually talked out of seeking revenge, and his rage over the hauling contract shenanigans was more appropriately directed at another bit of treachery that occurred at approximately the same time.
Junior had developed a stake in a Kensington card game run by his good friend Jimmy Dolan. Though neither of them was getting rich running a neighborhood poker table, it supplied them with income that they didn’t want to share with someone just because he had the unilateral temerity to declare himself a partner. The would-be partner was Joey Merlino, infant terrible.f the local Italian mob, who had appointed himself to fill the leadership void left by the lengthy imprisonments of mob bosses Nicky Scarfo and John Stanfa. Seeking a portion of the proceeds from every loan-sharking, extortion, and illegal gambling operation in the city, Skinny Joey had his street soldiers let it be known that a new street tax was in effect, and woe to those who refused to pay it.
When Merlino’s emissary brought to Jimmy Dolan the bad news that he now had to pay “$500 dollars a week” tribute to run the card game, he was met with a flood of indignation and four-letter words. “Jimmy was apoplectic,” recalls Junior. “He went ballistic.” But that was mild compared with Kripplebauer’s reaction. Already seething from the loss of the waterfront contract, Junior wasn’t in a mood to get financially spanked again, especially from an upstart gangster half his age. He opted to deal with the matter in his own inimitable way.
Following a pattern developed on the streets of Philadelphia and refined in some of the toughest prisons across America, Junior planned a pre-emptive strike. Rather than request a sit-down with the young Mafia chieftain to plead their case, Kripplebauer decided to do a walk-in, a bold in-your-face confrontation in the most public of places, a fashionable riverfront restaurant. Notified that Merlino would be at the upscale La Veranda restaurant on Delaware Avenue on a certain evening, Junior staked the place out and walked in on Skinny Joey’s dinner party. Attired in a dress jacket that hid a semiautomatic tucked into the small of his back, he diplomatically requested a minute of Joey’s time, and the two men walked off to a quiet section of the restaurant near the bar.
“What can I do for you, Junior?” said Merlino, slightly taken aback at the unexpected visit.
“How’s my credit?” asked Junior.
“Okay,” said Merlino. “How much do you need?”
“Five hundred dollars,” said Junior.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” replied Merlino, somewhat surprised by the modest figure. “Is that it?”
“Five hundred a week,” said Junior, more authoritatively this time.
“Five hundred dollars a week?” said Merlino, now a little confused. “What do you need $500 a week for?”
“I need it for when they come to collect on our card game.”
“What the fuck you talking about?” said Merlino, genuinely confused.
“What I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about,” said Junior, his voice rising, “is my card game with Jimmy Dolan on Allegheny Avenue. Your boy came around wantin’ $500 a week.”
“Oh, I got it,” said Merlino. “That game’s been running a long time, and we...”
“Forget it, Joey,” said Junior cutting him off. “My partner said no and I say no. We ain’t paying it.”
Merlino started to shake his head and explain the way things were gonna work now. Kripplebauer wanted none of it; he hadn’t come there to listen to a lecture. He was going to do the explaining.
“Listen to what I’m gonna tell you,” said Junior, the veins on neck starting to bulge as he stepped closer to the young Mafioso. “This conversation is over. We’re gonna walk out of here and that’s gonna be the end of it. We ain’t ever gonna talk about this again, you hear. Now listen to me carefully—I didn’t come here without thinking of the consequences. If this is not settled now, nobody is walkin’ the fuck out of here. You understand? Nobody is leaving.”
“Hey, Junior,” said Merlino, “take it easy. Nobody is looking to pressure you guys.”
“We’re not paying any street tax, Joey,” said Junior. “Remember, this is our city too.”
As it turned out, everybody walked out of La Veranda that evening on his own two feet. Kripplebauer had been prepared to go to war, having brought in a couple of serious players from North Carolina, friends he had made during his many years of imprisonment there. The men were stationed outside the restaurant and armed with two Mac 10 automatic pistols. They also had at their disposal two.22 caliber revolvers with silencers, two bombs, and a menacing-looking street-sweeper. For weeks afterward, one of the North Carolinians sat in a car outside the Allegheny Avenue card game just in case there was any trouble. Though many others around the city were grumbling about having to cough up a weekly payment, Dolan and Kripplebauer never paid any tribute to the boys downtown.
KRIPPLEBAUER WAS STILL driving a limo between Philly, Atlantic City, and the Big Apple. He was also keeping his eyes open for promising economic ventures; he was anxious to make up for the loss of the waterfront hauling contract. It wasn’t any big surprise that a good many of his Manhattan customers and well-heeled AC gamblers were recreational drug users and always willing to pay well to score a favorite mood-altering substance. Whenever he could, Junior tried to please his wealthy clients. Most were into coke, and Junior knew where to get it; he had friends. The deals were relatively small, and the extra cash they brought in was almost insignificant.
It wasn’t until he got hooked up with some serious out-of-state drug suppliers that his drug trafficking became a real moneymaking operation once again. Junior discovered a contact in North Carolina who could supply him with grass, and his old friend Eddie Loney, who had relocated to South Florida, had established business relationships with some well-stocked South American coke dealers. Junior had buyers who were interested in both grass and coke. He was well aware of the hefty penalties involved if he was caught with coke, but he rationalized that his solitary, low-level operation would fall below law enforcement’s radar screen, and figured that he could pull it off if he did most of the work himself and kept the number of contacts down to a minimum. He took comfort in the fact that he had previously moved gallons of P2P without the slightest problem.
Kripplebauer went down to Florida to visit Loney and explore the idea. He was introduced to a wealthy Colombian who said he could supply whatever Junior wanted: top-shelf stuff in whatever quantities he desired. It sounded good. Junior immediately saw how he could recoup the losses from the demise of his P2P operation and ore-hauling contract. The weekly limo paycheck and the receipts from Jimmy’s poker game just didn’t cut it.
Kripplebauer got together $22,000 to buy a key of coke from the Colombian and decided to move the stuff himself. He didn’t trust the longhaired young hippies who usually got the job of being airline pack mules. Poorly paid kids on the fringe of the drug business drew attention to themselves, were mistake-prone, and could be counted on to screw up and rat out their partners when faced with prison time. No, he’d do it himself. Junior had always done the heavy lifting; he wasn’t like some insecure crew bosses who always sent the dumbest, most malleable member of the burglary team to brute a front door.
The transaction went smoothly, though Junior sweated bullets throughout the episode. He decided to minimize his exposure at the Fort Lauderdale Airport by taking possession of the package at the very last instant before he boarded the plane. Just as the boarding announcement was made, Junior hurried to the men’s room, met his contact, and had the tightly wrapped package of coke placed in the bottom of a shopping bag that contained newspapers, candy, and T-shirts he had just purchased at an airport newsstand.
There wasn’t a whiff of suspicion or hint of trou
ble from airline personnel or airport security. A well-dressed businessman in his fifties carrying an open package of souvenirs for his family set off no alarms. Moving a kilo of coke up the East Coast went smoother than he had expected. Junior was in business.
Kripplebauer quickly sold out his supply of cocaine, but not before he cut it. Eddie Loney had shown him how to maximize his stash by watering it down with inositol, a white powdery substance normally used as a vitamin supplement. The quality of the cocaine was so good he could cut it significantly without his buyers’ having the slightest notion that the product had been diluted. Junior was buying an ounce of coke for $900 and selling it for $1,200. A five-ounce buy for $4,500 could turn a $1,500 profit after he “whacked it up” with inositol. He was making between $5,000 and $8,000 a key. For Junior it was a “no hassle” proposition like his earlier P2P transactions. “It didn’t really have much risk to it,” he says matter-of-factly. “I knew where I was getting it and I knew who I was selling it to.”
Before long he was making regular round-trip excursions to Florida on Spirit Airlines out of Atlantic City. Being his own pack mule, though physically taxing and time-consuming, not only cut out the chance of loose-lipped or incompetent intermediaries being picked up by authorities; it also gave him a chance to visit with friends and soak up the South Florida party culture. He took note: South Beach was someplace he could settle. The women were beautiful, the drinks were strong, and the living was easy. Sometimes Junior wouldn’t disembark in AC on the return flight but would fly straight on to Boston. Frank Rossi, an old Atlanta cellmate and all-around operator, had become one of Junior’s better customers.
Rossi, also known as Boston Blackie in the criminal community, was impressed with the quality of cocaine Junior was running. He had always appreciated Junior’s track record for reliability. After several such transactions Rossi told him that they could supply all of Boston if he could get the product in large enough quantities. Could Junior supply 20 keys per month? The request was music to Junior’s ears, like the constant ringing of a Vegas slot machine on a big payout. “The Rossi deal really whetted my appetite,” he says. “If that went down, I knew I’d be fat again.”
Rossi introduced Junior to Bobby Luisi, an up-and-coming Boston mobster who was a serious money-earner and seemed to be connected to major players throughout New England. He was a big talker and liked to put on a show, but Junior didn’t mind a little braggadocio if the Beantown Mafioso could back it up. Luisi said he could move whatever Junior brought him and promised lavish financial rewards for everyone concerned.
The shared excitement of an attractive and highly profitable new venture was short-lived, however. While visiting Kripplebauer in Philadelphia to solidify their new relationship, Luisi was introduced to and quickly seduced by Joey Merlino and the Italian Mob. A night on the town that started at Dangerous Curves, a Northeast Philly strip club, and gravitated later in the evening to some center city nightclubs, led Luisi to believe he could do better with the South Philly Mob as his coke connection than with Kripplebauer’s one-man operation.
Kripplebauer was incensed by Luisi’s defection, but what could he do? Merlino had a crew of soldiers and Mafia lineage. They were not much more than South Philly street hoodlums, but they had the imprimatur of the Mob and Junior was a lone wolf trying desperately to stay off the FBI’s radar screen. As it turned out, Luisi’s decision to abandon Kripplebauer and go into partnership with Joey Merlino proved quite costly. The Feds had cultivated a number of informants in the Merlino organization who wore wires and captured numerous conversations between the Philly and Boston wiseguys regarding drugs and other illegal businesses. They would all end up doing time.
Kripplebauer, meanwhile, kept to his more modest drug business and did relatively well. He was making some money, avoiding missteps, and occasionally enhancing his operation with new gimmicks that either streamlined it or made the drug transactions more efficient. For example, Ed Loney told him how to ship the coke by Federal Express and avoid the hassle of flying back and forth to Florida.
Shipping the coke by Federal Express was a simple and usually reliable way of doing business until the highly sensitive nose of a drug dog got a whiff of one of the packages at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the package contained half a kilo of pure cocaine. Not surprisingly, the DEA took a quick interest in Louis K. Bauer of Philadelphia and in the Fort Lauderdale car dealership where the FedEx package had originated.
The DEA weren’t the only ones interested in the package, though; so was Louis James Kripplebauer. “When the FedEx package was late, I knew something was wrong,” he says. “I waited for the Feds to come and wondered whether I should inquire about the missing package. After giving it some thought, I called Federal Express and asked the shipper what happened to the package. He started asking me all sorts of questions: Who was I? Where was I calling from? Who in Fort Lauderdale sent the package? I knew the Feds had gotten to this guy. They were looking for me.
“I told Eddie we had a problem and that he shouldn’t sign or accept any packages that came to his house. I figured they’d tap our phones and put surveil-lance on us, particularly me. It got to the point that I couldn’t sleep and was expecting them to come busting through the house at any moment, even though I knew the government was always capable of making mistakes and not following up. They were really stupid when you think about it, because they had me. All they had to do was deliver the package and wait for me to pick it up.”
Junior couldn’t count on the government’s tendency to screw up an investigation. His nerves started to get to him. Then, in a significant bit of luck, at least for those at the Florida end of things, the individual whose name appeared on the FedEx package at the car dealership was arrested for an unrelated charge. While in prison, he committed suicide, forcing the FBI to concentrate their efforts on one Louis K. Bauer in Philadelphia.
The waiting game eventually took its toll, and Junior finally decided to cut out. He said goodbye to Hannah, whom he had recently married, flew to Boca Raton, and stayed with Eddie Loney for a couple of weeks. Loney was doing well and had a number of businesses running, both legitimate and illegitimate, including a telemarketing operation. He hired Kripplebauer as one of his timeshare salesmen. Between his legal salary selling time-shares and his illegal income moving drugs, Junior was doing rather well also. He got a place of his own, bought a foreign sports car, picked up an attractive girlfriend half his age, and became a regular at fashionable South Beach restaurants and nightclubs. In short, life was good.
Epilogue
Hannah and I had gotten into a real bad beef, so I decided to get out of the house for a while and drove over to Wings Field and got drunk. I’m still feeling pretty good, so I drive over to Philly and go to a bar on Aramingo Avenue. I don’t mind the drive ’cause I had just bought a beautiful new Pontiac GT and that baby could really move.
Well, I’m over at this bar until closing, and the bartender offers to drive me home, but even though it’s three a.m. and I’m feeling whipped, I tell him I’m okay and can drive myself. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m in the middle of the Walt Whitman Bridge when I notice I’m being followed by a cop. I look at the speedometer and I’m doing 70 miles an hour and the bridge sign says 45 miles an hour is the maximum speed. I know I gotta problem.
The cop puts his lights on, and I pull over to the curb. He asks me if I’d been drinking. I told him I had a glass of wine at dinner and hadn’t had a drink since, but I was really totaled. He asks me if I had a good reason for going 74 miles an hour, and I told him I had just bought the car and was still getting used to it. It may have been more powerful than I expected.
The cop asks me to take a breathalyzer test, but I refuse. I got $8,000 in my pocket and don’t wanna spend any more time with this cop than I have to. I know if he finds the money I’m gonna be in for a long night. He starts asking me a series of questions: How far did you go in school? Can you read
and write? Do you know your “ABC”s? I’m starting to get a little pissed now. I ask him, is this a sobriety test or a stupidity test?
Now he’s the one getting pissed, and he tells me to get out of the car. He wants me to go through the drill and touch my nose, my ears, walk a straight line. I can’t remember if I did it right or not, but he says he’s taking me back to the station for a sobriety test. I say to the cop, don’t you wanna ask me anything? Don’t you wanna tell me my rights? Now he doesn’t want to talk.
They throw me in a drunk tank and keep me there for a couple hours, but never check my pockets and don’t find the money. After a while a cop comes around and tells me I can go, but somebody has to pick me up. They’re not gonna let me drive.
I call Hannah and wake her up. I can tell she was in a deep sleep. I tell her I need a favor. I got picked up for drunken driving, and they’re holding me in the jail by the bridge. Can she come pick me up? She says yeah, but it will take a little while. I tell her it’s okay, I ain’t going anywhere.
About an hour goes by and then the next thing I know a cop comes over to me and says, “I got some bad news for you.” “Yeah, what now?” “Your wife just got picked up on the Ben Franklin Bridge. She’s drunk and causing a disturbance. We had to arrest her. She sure as hell shouldn’t be driving. You got anybody else you want us to call?”
—JUNIOR KRIPPLEBAUER
THE INTERSECTION OF KENSINGTON and Allegheny Avenues is still busy, with pedestrians and motorized vehicles competing for space. However, the sights, sounds, and smells of the community are considerably different from the social and economic landscape of a half-century ago. Popular Kensington landmarks of that era, like the Midway and Iris movie theaters, Horn & Hardart’s and Wimpy’s restaurants, and a host of family-owned retail shops are long gone, replaced by no-frills discount houses, dollar stores, or in some cases, empty storefronts. The once-mighty Kensington industrial community is also gone, with only barren, trash-strewn vacant lots to show that multistory factories like the Robert Bruce textile mill and Philco electronics once thrived there.
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 39
