The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster

by Craig Daliessio

  The Legend of Joey Trucks

  The Accidental Mobster

  Craig Daliessio

  Copyright Craig Daliessio 2015

  LOC Number Pending

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, or otherwise—

  without prior written permission.

  ISBN: 978-0-9845336-1-9

  Craig Daliessio can be reached at craigd2599@gmail

  Or at craigdaliessio.com

  To Skip D. and To Bingo

  Because you need someone who believes in you,

  for those times when you don’t believe in yourself.

  To Leonard Isaacs

  Great stories always happen to great storytellers

  And you’re the greatest of them all.

  Always, For Morgan

  Table of Contents

  Prelude 9

  1: Meet Joey Trucks 11

  2: Make Me an Offer I Can’t Refuse 37

  3: The End of an Era 71

  4: The Long Goodbye 83

  5: Time to Go 103

  6: Getting My Father’s Blessing 129

  Book Two: Virginia

  7: The Damned Yankee 141

  8: Farmer. Joe. 163

  9: Nothing But Trouble 187

  10: Sleeping With the Seven Fishes 201

  11: I Knew it All Along 221

  12: La Vigilia 239

  13: Burial at Sea 275

  14: Chumming for Seagulls 311

  15: Two-Flush Tony an the Loan Shark 335

  16: Old Hitmen Never Die 355

  17: Today I Settled All Family Business 375

  Prelude

  How am I going to get these people to understand that I’m not in the mob?

  I can’t believe I was asking myself this. I can’t believe these people really believed that about me in the first place. And now here are the FBI standing in my living room, asking me questions about mafia activity. Mafia activity! All because of a rumor. A stupid rumor started by my stupid, nosy neighbor…the guy who watched too many mafia shows and had a lot of time on his hands. I didn’t move here for this. I thought, I didn’t come here to be some pseudo-mob boss. I’m just a dad, for God’s sake!

  But now here I am, the victim of gossip, labeled as a Mafia Don and an object of fear to my neighbor, maybe even the whole town for all I knew. Hell, before it was over, the FBI was knocking on my door!

  At first I thought the folks down here were just being nice, giving me the best parking spots at the mall, and tipping my daughter ten bucks for a fifty-cent cup of lemonade at her lemonade stand. I didn’t think anything of it when they started coming to the house asking for advice, or if I could help settle a dispute with the Homeowners Association. I mean, that’s how it was back in Philly where I grew up. People knew my family. They knew we were successful business people. They knew my grandfather and my father and they knew me. I was the third generation owner of a very successful trash hauling company. My grandfather started it with one beat up old truck. My father worked hard with Nonno to keep it alive, and I came back from college, worked with Pop, and made it into something very special.

  Now here I am, suspected of being an underworld kingpin by my neighbors, and for all I knew, every family in Forest, Virginia, and all of it based on the idiot across the street and his overtaxed imagination.

  I’m not in the Mafia. I’m not even Sicilian for God’s sake! How did it get this far?

  It didn’t start off like this, moving to Virginia and all. In fact, it started off with a phone call…

  1

  Meet

  Joey Trucks

  I wonder what the Old Man is going to say.

  Yep. That’s the first thing that ran through my mind. Not: “What will I spend the money on?” or “Can I squeeze more out of them?” No, I was worried about how I would tell my father that we had an enormous offer on the table for our family business, and I was going to take it. How the heck do I tell Pop? I wondered.

  Honestly, it was a good problem to have. Make no mistake, it was very nice being Joe Mezilli. It’s not like I was overworked, because to be very honest, I wasn’t. In fact I had life by the short hairs and there wasn’t much I was lacking by way of material wealth. I was the third generation owner of a small, but successful trash hauling company.

  Back home they call the industry “Waste Management” but I call it what it is...trash hauling. I didn’t own eighteen “Waste Management Vehicles,” they were garbage trucks. But the unions and the political correctness guastafesta made it impossible to keep calling them that. My crews weren’t garbage men anymore; they were waste management transportation engineers. Really?

  Engineers? What am I, some idiot scemo?

  Anyway, I saw the writing on the wall. The unions were always calling my guys something new and more important sounding so they could go crossways up my butt with a microscope in their unrelenting effort to unionize my shop, and squeeze more money out of me. It’s not that I didn’t want to pay my boys good money –in fact I typically overpaid by a few bucks an hour- but the unions kept trying to pressure me. I hate being pressured. I’m Italian, my grandfather was an immigrant. We don’t do pressure very well. I knew that one day, they’d force a vote and we’d become a union shop and then it would be all over anyway.

  Then there was the mob. Listen, those stories you watch on TV and read in books...they’re stories for the most part. But there are –ummm- outside forces, shall we say? I kept them out of my business, mostly because of who my grandfather was, and who my uncle is. But I knew this wouldn’t be the case forever. I had a good thing going. Choice routes. Nice township contracts. New trucks. It wouldn’t be long before those guys started getting serious about putting the squeeze on, trying to get me to sell...or take them as a partner.

  So one day, a lawyer from Waste International called me. Yeah...Waste International. You’ve seen their commercials, about how well they manage landfills and how they’ve brought science to waste management. It’s nonsense if you ask me. But hey, I didn’t handle the end product, you know what I mean? I was in the cartage end of the business. You made it, I hauled it. Those guys were the geniuses who figured out how to bury the stuff and not poison the water.

  So this lawyer asks can he come see me and discuss business. He says he wants to take me to lunch, and “talk trash.” He actually said that to me. “Talk trash.” Like I’m some fajut. But I like to eat. And I like to eat on someone else’s dime especially, so I said yes.

  I arranged to meet him at Felicia’s in Philly. It was about a year and a half before they closed. I hate that they’re gone. I loved that place. Anyway, this lawyer shows up in a Jaguar and the first thing he does is break the parking valet’s stones about the car. He hadn’t even given the kid the keys yet and he’s yelling at him about some scratch that happened two years before. I could hear him from inside the restaurant. He was obnoxious...a real boccalone. He had a damp, unlit cigar in his mouth and thick glasses and a pathetic mustache. The kind that makes you want to ask the guy if he has mirrors in his house. I tried growing a mustache once when I was nineteen. My uncle Tony laughed at me and said “You’re trying to grow on your face, what grows wild in the crack of my ass!” It was that bad. This lawyer had the same sad excuse for a mustache growing on his upper lip. I didn’t like the guy.

  I especially didn’t like him after he walked in, sat at the table I had
gotten for us, and waved an envelope in front of me. He was huffing and puffing and red in his face. He had a size twenty-three neck and was wearing a size eighteen collar. I thought his head was going to pop. He says to me in his nasally voice: “I am a busy man, as you are Mr. Mezilli. So I’m going to give you this and then I’m leaving. This is our only offer, take it or leave it.” Then he stands up, tugs on his strained waistband, like Chris Farley playing Matt Foley the motivational speaker, and tossed the envelope on the table. He spun on his heels and walked out. I thought he was a jerk. I thought he was a fat, bloated cicciobomba. More than anything, I thought I was going to run outside and throttle him on the sidewalk because he asked me to lunch at Felicia’s and never even ordered. In fact he stuck me with the tab for a lunch that he invited me to. I’m never given to violence, but something about this guy made me want to attack him.

  I finished my glass of wine, and signaled for Mario, my waiter. I was going to throw the envelope away without even glancing at it, but something about the porky attorney was interesting. Interesting in an annoying kind of way. So I took the butter knife and slid it along the envelope’s edge. I pulled out a notarized letter from Francis Methany, president of Waste International. “Dear Mr. Mezilli...blah blah blah. We would like to expand our presence in your region...blah blah blah. We estimate your business’ value at approximately twenty-four million dollars (U.S.) I sat down slowly. Twenty Four Million? I said to myself.

  Instantly I felt a cynical wave rush over me. He had typed in “U.S.” in parentheses. Like I was thinking he was going to pay in what, Kroner? “Lawyers” I thought, “Covering bases that aren’t even bases.” I folded the envelope and walked outside to my car. I left a hundred dollar bill on the table, a tip of about eighty seven dollars. When I got outside, Mario ran up to me on the street, “Mr. Mezilli!” he said “Mr. Mezilli, you left me a hundred bucks, sir. Don’t you want your change?” I turned and smiled at him. “Naah, it’s for you Mario. Take Celeste out to dinner tonight. And for God’s sake don’t take her here because the service is terrible.” Mario laughed at my joke, and then he got tears in his eyes. He gave me a hug. I’m Italian, so hugging isn’t a big deal for me, I’m used to it. But this was special. Mario didn’t say “Ay!” or “Yo!” and he didn’t kiss my cheek first. He hugged me like he was genuinely moved. And he was.

  There was something about that hug. Something about the wonder in his eyes and the very authentic way he teared up and the lovely warm feeling it gave me to have made his day like that. I knew right then I was selling. I saw this as a chance to do some good while I was young enough to enjoy it.

  I got back to my office and shut the door. I didn’t tell anyone about the meeting and I locked the letter in my safe. I went home that afternoon like I always did. I ate dinner with my wife and kids and watched the Phillies on TV. Nothing was different, but everything was. I was twenty-four million dollars richer. All I had to do was say “yes” to the offer that the fat little lawyer from Waste International had left with me. All I had to do was sign the papers. It was that easy.

  So naturally I said no. But I did it like an Italian. I went to work the next day and forgot about the envelope. In fact, I didn’t think about it the rest of the week. The following Monday I got a phone call from the lawyer. My secretary, Margie, buzzed my office. “Excuse me, Joe; there is a Mr. Donham on the line. He says it’s urgent.” “Who is he, Margie?” I had a pretty good idea who he was, although to be honest, I couldn’t remember the lawyer’s name. But I wanted him to think I’d forgotten about him. I wasn’t that easy. Margie buzzed me again a minute later.

  “He is the attorney for Waste International. He says he met you for lunch last week.”

  “Bingo!” I thought. “I got him now.” I picked up the phone. “This is Joseph Mezilli...” I said. “Mr. Mezilli?” the fat lawyer wheezed, “This is George Donham.” I paused a long minute. (I love doing this sort of thing) “Who?” I said. “George Donham” said Chubby, “I met you for lunch last week and gave you our offer.” I waited again. I rummaged through some papers. I coughed into the phone...loudly. “Donham...Donham.” I offered, “Oh yeah. I didn’t recognize the name, especially since you said you were the guy who met me for lunch.” I spit those words out slowly and emphatically. Like I was speaking to an idiot. “You mean the guy who skipped out on our lunch meeting and left me with my tab? That guy?”

  Donham was quiet for a moment. I had him now and he knew it. For a lawyer, he wasn’t that smart, because he followed up my ball-busting with the dumbest thing he could say in a negotiation. He said “So did you consider our offer, Mr. Mezilli?”

  No, no, no. It couldn’t be this easy. See, I have a gift. My sister has it too and it comes in handy. I have a photographic memory. I don’t forget anything. Chubby, the corporate barrister, forgot that, when he tossed the envelope on the table at Felicia’s the week before; he’d said it was their only offer. In my world that means only offer. When you have made your only offer, you don’t ask the guy if he had considered it. You say something else. You say “Well I’m calling to find out your answer. Mr. Mezilli” or “Listen, we figured since we hadn’t heard from you that you weren’t interested and so we’ve found someone else.” Personally, if it were me, I would have said “I just called to inform you that we have cut that offer in half, because you didn’t get back to us in a timely manner.” But he didn’t say anything like that. He just blurted out “So did you consider our offer...?” and instantly admitted that he was ready to up the ante.

  The truth is I knew he was going to call. I knew he was going to be open to negotiating the price. I know corporate lawyers. Especially for a company like Waste International. They aren’t amateurs. They’re thorough. I knew they did their research. I got calls from some friends who informed me that this fat little lawyer had been sniffing around, asking questions, poking and prodding. I knew what he was looking for, and I knew he wasn’t going to find it. Not with my company.

  The lawyer was performing his due diligence. Big corporations like Waste International do that. They have to. In this business, almost every company has, umm... “Involvements.” Most of the guys in this neck of the woods had long ago gotten in bed with the local mob guys. Maybe they’d backed themselves into a corner and needed a loan. Maybe they’d been busted too many times at the weight scales and needed some help getting things straightened out. Maybe they had driver issues. Whatever it was, they found themselves “entangled” as we called it. And they were never going to get untangled. Never.

  The mob guys weren’t so bad, really. Not in this business. They weren’t actually doing anything illegal with the business. What can you do with trash, right? Mostly they used the business to wash their money and to keep a front to cover for the other stuff they were doing. I had plenty of offers to get in bed with them too, but I was careful. My grandfather had started this company with one beat-up old truck that he’d saved for, for about seven years after he arrived here from Montecassino, Italy. My dad started on the trucks when he was in high school. By the time he took over, they had six trucks and eighteen guys. Each truck had a driver and two rollers.

  We called them rollers then because they would roll the cans down the street by cocking them on their edge at an angle, and rolling them with their hands. A good roller could steer two cans, one on each side. They dumped the customers’ cans into their bigger can and rolled to the next house. Every five or six houses they would dump their big can into the compactor on the truck and roll on up to the next house.

  When I turned sixteen, I told my dad I didn’t want go into the family business. “The trucks smell, Pop.” I’d said. “You gotta get up so early and run all day. I don’t want to be a garbage man, I’m better than that.” That was the only other time my father ever hit me. He backhanded me across my mouth. For whatever reason, I had my tongue sticking out absentmindedly, and I tasted the back of his hand for a split second before my lip swelled like a hot water bottle. The only time
he’d ever hit me other than that, was when I told my mom I didn’t want to go to Mass on Sunday morning. She asked me why. I said “Because Father Colangelino’s breath smells like Cavallo’s butt. And he gets about three inches from my face when he gives us communion. I almost throw up the wafer” (Cavallo was our dog. He was a behemoth and so we gave him his name...which means “horse”) WHACK! I didn’t even see the old man jump out of his Barkolounger. It was a thing of beauty, one smooth, swift motion. Throw down the newspaper, pull in the footrest with his legs, jump up and backhand me in the pie hole. “You don’t talk disrespect about the body of Christ in my house, Joseph!” he bellowed.

  Both times the old man got tears in his eyes. He apologized an hour later. I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me. He’d told me that when he was really young, his father -my grandpa- would hit him all the time. Pretty hard. Pop excused it, saying he was a smart mouth and deserved it or whatever. But I knew it bothered him, and he swore never to become his father. He loved his dad. He just didn’t like him.

  Anyway, my dad and I reached a compromise. I would go off to college. I could take anything I wanted to take as a major, so long as I took business for a minor so I could come back and grow the business. My dad has two brothers –my uncle Tony- who wanted nothing to do with the trucks, and Uncle Franny, who fell in love with construction and only worked a couple of years for Grandpa before going off on his own. Uncle Tony was a legend in our neighborhood. He was sort of on the fringe with the local mob guys. He’d grown up with them and they all liked each other. Uncle Tony wasn’t in “the family” per se. But he was a Local President for the Cement Finishers union, and he was also a township councilman. So he had choice information. Stuff like the dollar amount on the bids coming in for concrete jobs, and who was going to be getting the next trash contracts for St. Monica’s parish, where we lived. Information that makes you invaluable to certain lines of work, shall we say.