A few days later was Homecoming for my college. I had gone to school in Southern Virginia and always liked the area. We spent the weekend with a friend of mine who lived in Forest, Va. He had a beautiful five-acre spread with a lovely view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I fell in love with the place. Angie and I stayed a few extra days and met up with a realtor. We wound up putting an offer in on a house in a neighborhood near my college buddy and we also looked at a nice one-hundred acre piece of woodland that bordered Jefferson National Forest. It was perfect for me to build a hunting cabin on. So we planned on making the move the following summer.
I had to endure six months of Nonna’s wailing, and calling on the Blessed Mother. Along with this was the back and forth discussions about how much my old man was getting from the Waste International deal. I offered him half. He said it was way too much because I had basically taken over the business for him ten years ago when his sciatica made it hard for him to drive, or sit in the office for more than a few hours. Funny, the captain’s chair on that Sea-Ray he bought, never hurt the old sciatica any. He had gotten to the point where he was only coming in Wednesday mornings, through Friday at noon.
But I loved the old man and I figured he’d deserved the break. He’d taken the business from the one crappy truck my grandfather had purchased in 1953 and built it into a going concern. When I graduated from college and came to work for him, the old man had built it into twelve trucks and twenty-eight employees, including two mechanics, and Sylvia who ran the office. Not bad for a guy with a High School education, whose father hardly spoke English, and had backhanded him for pretty much anything.
By my forty-third birthday, I’d grown Mezilli’s Trash Hauling and Cartage into the biggest independent trash hauler in the Northeast. Everyone else was either a subsidiary of a big company, a three-truck mom-and-pop operation, or so far in bed with the mob that they were only keeping thirty-seven cents on the dollar. I’d steered clear of the syndicate, grew the company slowly and carefully, and thanks in part to Uncle Tony’s inside knowledge of Township trash contracts- made us profitable. We had eighteen trucks plus two spares. We had two semis with a pair of fifty-three- foot, open-topped trailers, a huge maintenance building, and forty-six employees. Oh and we owned forty-three percent of the county landfill.
Sylvia retired two years before I did the Waste International deal. She’d been a widow a long time and was starting to suffer from dementia. Sylvia had worked for my dad for as long as I can remember. She was a great old Italian lady with a wisp of a mustache and her clothes always smelled like oregano. Sylvia was a great cook and spent every evening in the kitchen. Bringing us lunch was her great joy. I think it reminded her of making lunch for her late husband Biagio. (Everyone called him Ben) Ben walked a beat for the Philadelphia Police force for thirtyeight years. It took an act of God to get him on the force, because back then, the Irish had pretty much sewn-up the Police force and claimed it as their own. Benny knew a guy from his days in the Army and the guy pulled some strings. To be honest, he was far too sweet a man to be a cop. Had he ever actually apprehended a criminal, Benny would have probably knelt beside them on the sidewalk and prayed the Rosary with them. Then he would have opened his wallet and given them his last twenty bucks. But Benny also was a huge man. So he could afford to be kind. He was still scary and imposing. Everyone in the neighborhood loved Benny and Sylvia.
When she took sick a few years ago, I called her son in Phoenix and told him, “Bobby your momma is starting to really slip. I think you need to consider bringing her out there with you.” Bobby got real quiet and started making excuses. He said he would be out at Thanksgiving and take her to her doctor and see what they would do. So me and Angie and my old man watched out for her every day until Thanksgiving. Bobby never flew out, and after a few months I called him again. He made endless excuses, and finally one day Uncle Tony called him for me. I can’t repeat what he said, but Uncle Tony cursed a lot. Some in English and some in Italian. A couple of days later, Uncle Tony comes in my office and says “Bobby has gambling issues; he can’t take care of Sylvia.” “How did you find that out?” I asked him. Uncle Tony usually smiles when he drops references to his mob friends, but this time he looked serious. He wouldn’t tell me much except to say “It’s not good, nephew. I think you should take care of Sylvia, because that fajut son of hers isn’t going to do it.”
He told me that Bobby had agreed to give me power of attorney and so I took over Sylvia’s affairs. Eventually we put her in St. Rose of Lima’s nursing facility. The sisters over there loved Sylvia and Benny too, before he died. They took care of her until she passed away six months ago. A week after she died, Bobby calls me, real late at night. He starts talking in generalities, but I knew where it was going. I let him squirm until he asked me “So did momma have any assets? Who is in charge of her estate?” I jumped out of my chair and screamed into the phone like he was standing there in my living room with me. I was hot. “Bobby! You haven’t been home in seven years. You hadn’t seen your mom’s face in five years, and that was only because we bought her a flight out and back for her birthday. She would come to work some days so lonely you could see it in her eyes and you never even called her!”
I was furious now. My arms were flailing and the spit was flying. I knew I was heading for stupidity with how angry I was, so I gathered my wits and said, “Yeah Bobby. Your mom had some assets. Uncle Tony is holding them. Call him with your questions.”
Bobby never called any of us again. The truth was Sylvia was pretty well taken care of. We had a nice retirement plan and I made sure she didn’t lack for anything. My dad told me once that Sylvia was as responsible as anyone else for the success of our company. There were days, he’d told me, when she would be doing payroll and notice that there wasn’t quite enough money. She would write out her own check but not cash it for three or four weeks, sometimes longer. My dad didn’t even discover it for two years. He was having a complete audit done for a business loan we were getting and the accountant came to him quietly and said “You have a real angel working here.” My old man said “What do you mean?” The accountant laid some papers on his desk, photocopies of the ledger where Sylvia had waited weeks and sometimes months before cashing her paycheck. It always corresponded to a slow period for our cashflow. Sometimes it was the lag time between hauling contracts or maybe a truck had broken down and needed an unusually large sum to fix it. My dad sat there with his jaw open. He called Sylvia into his office.
The accountant smiled as she walked in but it didn’t put her at ease. My dad realized right away she thought she’d done something wrong and so he stood up and walked around from behind his desk and gave her a big hug. “Mr. Robinson here showed me what you’ve been doing all these years Sylvia...holding your paycheck when times were tough. I never knew. Why would you do that for me?” My dad got teary eyed when he told me this story. He said Sylvia started to get weepy and said how she and Benny always loved our family. Benny’s brother Corrado had emigrated here with my grandfather and then he’d brought Benny over a couple of years afterward. The families had remained close and the children and grandchildren had grown up together. At least until that fannullone son of hers ran off to Phoenix and abandoned her and Benny. They’d had a daughter, but she died in the fifties from polio. Bobby was a change of life baby and Sylvia doted on him a bit too much. But it’s not her fault he turned out like he did. We were pretty much family to Benny and Sylvia, especially after Benny died. She spent a lot of time with Nonna and with my mom too. And like I said, the old girl could cook. She could throw a shoe and a windshield scraper in a pot and in an hour you’d ask for seconds. Cooking was how she told us she loved us, and she loved us a lot. We loved her back -the whole family did- and she sure wasn’t alone in her last years. We made certain of that. Anyway, I was ready to make the move to Forest and so I had to pin down the Old Man about his share. It was a lot more money than he’d originally thought, and a heck of a lot more than the f
at, self-important lawyer from Waste International offered in the first place. That negotiation was a thing of beauty. I had more couth than the Old Man about business dealings, having been to college and all. But sometimes, the old neighborhood just rose up in my soul and I could squeeze a stone with the best of them, and this negotiation was just such a time.
Then too, I didn’t need to sell and I didn’t particularly want to sell. They needed me, I didn’t need them. That and they had badly undervalued the business. All of it played into my hands, and I had some fun with it. It was the stuff of legends. The other trash haulers back home still talk about the way I undressed that big prosciutto.
It went like this...
2
Make Me An
Offer
I Can't Refuse
George Donham called my office about ten days after our very brief meeting at Felicia’s. He was wheezing into the phone and I thought he was having a heart attack. I found out later that the pressure was really on this guy to get me to go for the deal. Waste International really needed my routes and my trucks. Everyone else had too much baggage, or was too small a presence in the area for them to buy. They needed Mezilli Trash Hauling and Cartage. The problem for them was that I didn’t need or want to sell it. Not even remotely.
So Margie buzzes my office and tells me he is on the phone. I left him dangle for a few minutes and finally I picked up. We exchanged pleasantries and I broke his balls for leaving me at Felicia’s the way he did. He was silent for a moment. I recognized this trick. Car dealers use it a lot. You just go silent. Most people are uncomfortable with silence and they’ll start talking to fill the vacuum, and usually they’ll tell you everything you need to know to get them to buy. But like I said, I was aware of this ploy. So
George Donham says how sorry he was for the “misunderstanding at Felicia’s” and did I consider his offer? I said “Yes. I considered it.”
That was it. That was all I said. I didn’t say another word. I even held the phone six inches from my face after that so he couldn’t even hear me breathe. It was silent like a tomb for about two minutes. That sounds like nothing, but time one-hundred-twenty seconds on your watch and imagine that kind of dead air during a business call. I could feel the tubby little lawyer squirming on the other end. I had already decided...if he broke the silence I had him. If not, I would simply hang up. If he called back, I still had him. I would tell him I thought he had dropped off the line. Oh and my price would have doubled.
He cleared his throat at the one-minute-forty-five second mark. Finally at two minutes he said “Mr. Mezilli are you there?” He was speaking much softer. I knew he was mine. And he knew it too. And he knew that I knew. For a minute I almost felt sorry for him, but I remembered he was playing with house money here. This wasn’t his cash he was flaunting; it was Waste International’s, the third largest waste conglomerate in the world and desperate to become number two. Mezilli Trash Hauling and Cartage was a very big part of that plan and I knew it. So did Donham. “Yes I’m here Mr. Donham,” I said, wondering if he could hear the smile on my face. “I thought maybe you’d hung up. Listen, I have things to do, so what is it you wanted?” He cleared his throat again. “I was wondering if you had considered our offer for your company.”
This was way too easy now. But I was at the point where I was ready to talk seriously with pork-chop here and see what he was bringing to the table. So I shot back, “Yes I have considered it, and I consider it well short of where you need to be to make me consider it seriously.”
What would happen next was all-important. If he came back with a figure, I knew that was probably his limit. If he said “Well what did you have in mind?” I knew he had a blank check and I could get whatever I wanted as long as it wasn’t insane. He paused for a moment, still trying to get me to tip my hand. Finally he said “Well, I have some leeway, do you have a figure in mind?”
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I couldn’t be that easy, could it? Maybe it could. Maybe hard working, third generation, grandsons of immigrants really can make it in the brave new world. I heard an orchestra somewhere. Then I snapped out of it. “Yes,” I told him, “Yes I do have a figure in mind.” He swallowed hard into the phone and asked me what it was. “It will take a lot more than Twenty-four- million to buy Mezilli and all our assets, Mr. Donham. And it’s only negotiable in one direction, if you know what I mean. I don’t need to sell and the residuals I get from our share of the landfill alone will pay me more than your offer would over the next twenty years. I’m actually leaving some on the table here, but that’s the nature of negotiation, right?”
Donham was silent. I’m not sure, but I swear I heard him loosening his collar. He tried to talk but it sounded like his mouth had run dry. He finally choked out one word: “Residuals?” Oh man. This puffy little muffin was done. Finished. Caput. The hook was in and I had him to the boat. He didn’t know about the residuals. He didn’t know about the landfill. I had him. “The residuals, Mr. Donham. The residuals from Mezilli’s ownership in the Delaware County landfill site. We own forty-three percent of the landfill. We get a residual of Three Million dollars a year forever as long as the landfill is in use. You knew about this, right?”
No. He didn’t know about it. I’d already established this, but I asked him because I wanted to see if he would try to lie to me and play it off like he knew. Because if he tried to lie I was going to end the deal right there. Nothing good comes from dealings with a liar. But Donham manned up and said “No...No I didn’t know about the land deal.” Good boy, George! I thought to myself, At least you know when you’re beaten and things will go easier from here on out. I explained the landfill deal to him so he knew why I was asking for almost three times their offer.
“About twenty years ago, the county began making noise about wanting their own landfill instead of shipping trash down to Delaware or up to Philly to the incinerator plant. It was costing them a fortune to dump trash and the residents were getting sick of their trash bills going up every year like clockwork.” I relished in telling Donham this story. To me, it showed him the kind of business people he was dealing with. My family knows people. And people are at the bottom of every business deal that ever went down.
“So my Uncle Tony called my dad and I one day, a couple of years after the exploratory committee was formed. A committee he happened to be sitting on.” I told Donham. “He told me where the three most likely sites were, and then he gave me all the reasons why it wouldn’t be two of them. Uncle Tony was pretty sure it was going to be out by the old Hog Island area near the airport. So the next day my dad and I met with a realtor friend of Uncle Tony’s and put a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit down on forty-six-hundred acres of useless swamp land. We signed a private land contract where we held rights for ten years with a yearly renewal fee of twenty-five grand. We didn’t even have to take a mortgage. We basically owned the option on this land.” I paused here. “Cough, or sneeze, or something Mr. Donham. Let me know I haven’t lost you.” Donham laughed nervously and said “No...No I’m here. And please, call me George” Perfect! Tubby wanted to be my friend now. I think he saw already that he wasn’t dealing with just some stupid garbage man. He respected my business acumen, even if he didn’t say so. I continued with my story.
“Anyway, we renewed the option for three years. The fourth year, the county made their decision. It was the Hog Island property. That land that we had one-hundredtwenty-five-thousand invested in, was now worth about one hundred million if you looked at the fifty year life cycle of a landfill.”
Donham asked me, “So you sold? I thought you said you had ownership.” “We do.” I replied. “We negotiated with the county for six months, but they couldn’t find enough financing to buy us out. So I went to them with a deal. Pay us ten million dollars over ten years and give us a forty-five percent ownership stake in the landfill. We’ll take our money as a residual on profits each year and pay the same fees everyone else pays to dump here.” The county came back
with forty-three percent. Something about by-laws regarding partnerships and that was their maximum. We took the deal, and we’ve been collecting ever since. Six years ago the residual hit three million a year and it will go up again next year. There are still about twenty five years left on the projected life cycle of the landfill, so there is a lot of money still out there on that deal.”
Donham let out a long breath. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I could almost hear the numbers running in his head. Finally he spoke up. “I understand your position, Mr. Mezilli. I’ll take this information back to the board of directors at Waste International, along with my recommendation that they accept your counteroffer. Will you give me a week to get back to you?
No. No it could not be happening like this. I started to wonder if Donham had ever gotten a speeding ticket and told the cop not to lower the speed. “No office, I really was doing Ninety in a Seventy-Five and I’m not taking anything less.” He told me he was going to advise them to take my offer. Why did you tell me that George? Now you can’t counter. I felt like Don Corleone, when Sonny showed his hand about wanting to take the Solazzo deal. And he asked me if I would give him a week. He asked me. This guy couldn’t negotiate a tip for a shoe shine.
“Sure George,” I said...”You take however long you need. You can understand why I’m not in a hurry. I don’t need to sell at all.” “Oh and George...” I said, “You can call me Joseph.” “Thank you, Joseph.” Tubby said, “I’ll be back with you in a few days”
Joseph. Nobody has called me Joseph since Sister Joan in seventh grade. I only told him that so that if he asks around about the company, I’ll know right away. Everyone he talks to will call me asking who this goo-goots is who calls me Joseph. That’ll be worth a laugh by itself.
The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster Page 3
