by Joe Bruno
Day after day, heads were cracked, and jibones of all races got knifed, hit with chains, or shot with hand-made zip guns, which were as reliable as submarines with screen doors. Jerks who got involved with these boneheaded gangs, couldn't afford to buy any real guns, which were as easy to get on the streets as a dose of the crabs. These morons concocted fagese, single-shot zip guns, made with tubing used in coffee percolators, or radio antennas, strapped to a block of wood, with a rubber band used as a freaking firing pin.
These piece-of-garbage-guns were more dangerous to the shooter then they were to the intended target. Because it was six to five/even money that the zip gun would explode in the sucker's hand who was doing the stupid shooting.
Tony B would have no part of these dopey gangs, basically because there was no money to be made hanging with these gedrools. None of the gangs members would screw with Tony B, because word got around quick, Tony B was Sally Boy's son, and nobody, black, white or whatever, wanted to wind up doing the doggie paddle ten feet under the East River with concrete blocks tied to their legs.
So in Seward Park High School, Tony B did the smart thing. Instead of immersing himself studying math, or the finer arts, he made his entrance into Organized Crime 101, by being the school's number one (and only) bookmaker and shylock, under the protection of Sally Boy and his crew. Sally Boy had been promoted to Family Boss, a.k.a. Capo de tutti Capi, which meant in greaseball — Boss of All Bosses. As a result of his father's exalted status, Tony B, if they knew what was good for them, had no problems with any of the rival Italian crews either.
It was simple in Seward Park High. If you wanted to make a bet, you made it with Tony B. Need a few bucks to tie you over until you could make a decent score doing whatever, borrow the money from Tony B. At three points a week of course.
Tony B not only had the bookmaking and shylocking businesses locked up in Seward Park High, but also in the surrounding neighborhood, which was made of the same Moolies, Spics and Jews, Tony B had to rub elbows with in the school itself.
And it was not only the students who partook of Tony B's rackets, but some of the teachers as well, right on up to the principal. Thank God for that, otherwise Tony B never would have graduated high school on time, if he had graduated at all.
Take geometry teacher Mr. Goldstock for example. Tony B could calculate odds on bets in his head, as if he had an abacus for a brain.
Parlays. Round Robins. Teasers. Reverse bets. Exactas. Quinellas. No problem for Tony B.
But trigonometry, geometry, or calculus? The square root of pie, times the circumference of Galileo's balls. No freaking way. And who gave a crap anyway?
Luckily for Tony B, Mr. Goldstock picked horses like Venus De Milo picked people's pockets.
So when Mr. Goldstock got in the hole with Tony B. for five hundred clams, Tony knocked the figure down to a manageable fifty bucks a week, for forever, as long as Mr. Goldstock gave Tony B a “B” in sophomore geometry. Tony B figured, why get greedy and ask for an “A”, when a “B” looked just fine on his end-term report card. No reason to raise anyone's suspicions. Right?
Tony B did the basically the same deal with his junior year French teacher, Henri Pouffette, who loved betting baseball, but didn't know a stolen base from a crepe suzette. Rack up another “B” for Tony B in junior French.
And if anybody did question the validity of Tony B's grades, he had an ace in the hole in Seward Park High's principal Herman Gluck.
Was Gluck a degenerate gambler? No. As far as Tony B knew, Mr. Gluck never placed a bet in his entire life.
But Mr. Gluck did have an obsession with picture books that graphically showed young boys having sex with other young boys, which Tony B quickly provided for his esteemed principle.
Luckily for Mr. Gluck, or maybe for Tony B, the rest of his teachers fell in line, giving Tony B passing grades, either out of respect, but most likely out of fear.
This fear was the result of what happened to sophomore English teacher Manny Perez.
Tony B felt Mr. Perez was basically an educated Spic, who had a hardon for anyone whose last name ended in a vowel. Mr. Perez tortured Tony B and all of his Italian crew, with anything from nastily correcting their defective speech patterns, to questioning the validity of their parent's marriage.
One day, after being the recipient of a tirade from Mr. Perez, on about how Tony B pronounced the word “oil,” Tony B decided he had had just about enough of Mr. Perez' crap.
To Tony B, the correct pronunciation was “earl”, like, in “ give me some freakin' spaghetti with garlic and earl. And make it snappy.”
But Ok. You say it your way and I'll say it my way. Just don't freakin' embarrass me by calling me, in front of people no less, a “birdbrained Philistine.”
Tony B wasn't exactly sure what the word “Philistine” meant. But birdbrained was not a good word to precede almost any word, that wasn't associated with freakin' birds.
One day, Mr. Perez inexplicably disappeared from the face of the earth for an entire week. When he finally did re-appear, he did so in the emergency room of Mount Sinai Hospital, with his head shaved, his eyebrows burnt off his face, and no teeth in his mouth, except for one tooth in the middle of his erstwhile smile. The funny thing was, the emergency room doctor said it didn't seem like Mr. Perez had suffered any major blows to the head, but instead it looked like his teeth had been pulled out one by one from his bloody mouth.
Fortunately, Mr. Perez' legs and arms were in good working order, and after he absolutely refused to say anything about what had happened to him, he licked his wounds and walked out of the front door of the hospital under his own power.
Before you could say “Si Senor,” Mr. Perez mailed in his letter of resignation to Seward Park High School and took the next flight out of Idlewild Airport to his native Puerto Rico, never to be heard from in the Continental United States again.
Rumors reached Mulberry Street, that Mr. Perez had retired from the teaching profession and had taken a government job as a census taker in a San Juan slum. Right where the bastard belonged.
So as luck would have it, Tony B graduated from Seward Park High School in the required four years, with a solid B average, which made his father Sally Boy very proud indeed.
Yet college would never be in Tony B's future. In fact, college never was even in Tony B's vocabulary, because as we shall see, Sally Boy had already mapped out his son's entire future.
CHAPTER 5
The Fulton Fish Market
For the next few decades, Tony B's work address was in the smelly confines of the Fulton Fish Market, located on and adjacent to South Street in Lower Manhattan. The Fulton Fish Market was controlled by the mob since the 1920's, when men were men and a bottle of booze was always empty.
The Fish Market Mob, as they were called, made their best score during World War 2, when the French Luxury liner “The Normandie” suspiciously sank at its berth on a west side pier. New York politicians and lawmakers were aghast.
“How could German spies possible infiltrate our great city and bomb a ship resting in our fine harbors?” the pols screamed.
Only it really didn't go down that way. Not even close.
One night, a couple of the downtown guys, playing cards in an after-hours joint on South Street, got a great idea. Their big boss Big Bobby Braggadocio was cooling his heels in an upstate prison and not likely to get out in his lifetime, or possibly the lifetime of anyone presently living on Planet Earth.
The Boys came up with the perfect plan to spring Big Bobby B.
They thought, just imagine if persons unknown blew up a big boat anchored in New York harbor. What a shame that would be. What could we, the Fish Market Mob, do to make sure this could never happen again in our wonderful city?
We, as patriotic Italian-Americans and honest, hard-working citizens, could offer our services, free of charge, to the New York City District Attorney, to help police and Naval Intelligence (two oxymorons if there ever was one) prot
ect the fish market and the docks all over the city from enemy saboteurs.
We could help the law set up listening and communication devices in fishing boats, waterfront bars and restaurants, and any other places the DA wanted us to bug.
And if we did this, what would the law do for us in return?
We wouldn't ask for much, now would we? We wouldn't ask for money. Or ask the heat to look the other way when we did what we had to do, to make a tough buck in an even tougher town.
No indeed. All we would want is one very small favor. Just a tiny example of their good will, in return for us making the New York City docks safe from any more war-related treachery.
All the law had to do to satisfy our wants was to give Bobby Braggadocio a “get out of jail free” card, like the ones used in that Monopoly game all the kids are playing.
So after the Normandie went down like a rock on a west side pier, with a little help from Big Bobby's crew, arrangements were made with the law to protect the entire New York City waterfront. Soon afterwards, Bobby Braggadocio flew the coop and things were nice and snuggly down on the New York City waterfront for the rest of that annoying freakin' war.
Now ain't that a miracle?
Springing the boss aside, you had to give the mob credit, for always figuring out a way to make an illegal dime, when it was easier and safer to make a legal dollar.
Say you were an out-of-town fish company, who needed to have their fish unloaded in the Fulton Fish Market.
No problem, right?
No problem, as long as you paid what the mob ingeniously called “parking fees” to park your truck anywhere near the Fulton Fish Market. If you refused to ante up, at worse, terrible things could happen to your truck. At best, your fish stood unloaded on the truck and eventually smelled like ammonia capsules that boxing cornermen snapped between rounds under their wretched fighter's noses.
Then the mob came up with the ingenious idea of forming its own “security force”, which would protect the trucks of the people who paid and un-protect the trucks of people who didn't pay.
Woe to the fish monger who decided not to play by mob rules. If he dare park his truck anywhere near the Fulton Fish Market and not pay the proper tribute, when he returned he might find a few flat tires, a couple of windows busted, or sugar in his gas tank. Or maybe no truck at all.
In addition, under mob rules, none of the crew members of the fishing vessels docked near the fish market were allowed to unload their own catches.
“We do all the unloading of fish, otherwise there could be trouble,” Sally Boy told Tony B.
Sally Boy charged each boat ten bucks a pop for his union's “benevolent fund.” If the ten bucks was not paid on time, the waters around the fish market could be downright un-benevolent for certain seafaring simpletons who forgot, most likely on purpose, to pay the damn ten bucks.
Of course, mob employees and mob-controlled companies received special privileges. But that's why it's always a great idea to have good friends in the right places. Especially when these friends were more than willing, and certainly capable, of cracking a few skulls for the good of the common cause.
Right off the bat, Sally Boy figured the parking concession in the Fulton Fish Market was a good way to get Tony B started in the family businesses.
When Tony B first started in the fish business, cobbled Peck Slip, a wide, two-way street in the heart of the Fish Market, was Tony B's base of operation. During the daytime business hours, Peck Slip and the surrounding Fish Market streets was basically a ghost town. There were a few landmark restaurants, like Sloppy Louie's and Sweets, that financial district workers frequented for lunch and dinner. The Paris Bar and Grill, whose former customers included everyone from Thomas Edison, to Diamond Jim Brady, to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had stragglers slipping in and out at all hours of the day and night.
Right about 11pm, the entire dynamics of Peck Slip changed. Men with grappling hooks hung over husky shoulders started trickling in for work. In the frigid days of winter, fires were started in dirty garbage cans, so that the workers could warm their mitts between trips to and from trucks and cold storage lockers.
Tony B usually arrived at work around midnight, with a crew of about ten guys. He immediately pitched a tent on Peck Street, twenty feet from the intersection of South Street. This tent was Tony B's office, so to speak.
All workers who shaped up for work, meaning showed up in hope of finding work and sometimes got it, carried bailing hooks, which they used to hook the boxes of fish and flip them onto carts for transportation. Tony B felt he looked much tougher if he lugged around a bailing hook too. But he never needed to use that hook, except for one time and it wasn't for hooking a box of fish.
Manny the Mook was a small time gambler who had gotten in the hole bigtime with Tony B, first as a gambling customer and then as the recipient of a loan from Tony B to cover his gambling debts. Tony B charged Manny the Mook the customary three points a week, which meant, on his loan of five hundred bucks, Manny the Mook had to cough up fifteen clams a week, the vig, or vigorish, just to stay straight and up to date. That fifteen dollars a week was not deducted off the five hundred dollar principal, so Manny the Mook still owed Tony B the five hundred bucks, ad infinitum, or until he made a score and paid the five hundred bucks back to Tony B all at one time.
This was standard operating procedure in all mob transactions, betting, borrowing, or otherwise.
Which was fine for everyone involved, until Manny the Mook decided, or maybe someone gave him the idea (which was more likely, since Manny the Mook was dumber than a rock), to tell Tony B to take a hike about the loan, or Manny the Mook would tell his cousin, a freaking rat cop, that Tony B was guilty of the criminal offense of usury.
Tony B knew right away that Manny the Mook didn't have the slightest idea what the word usury meant, and had certainly had never uttered that word before in his entire life.
Manny the Mook was threatening to become a canary; a cheese-eating, rat bastard and Tony B, according to the code of the streets, could not let that go unpunished. That's when the bailing hook finally came in handy.
Tony B had a few of the boys get Manny the Mook involved in a craps game in the hallway of a tenement on Front Street. Manny the Mook was rolling hot dice, when Tony B entered the tenement, bailing hook hung over his shoulder. Manny the Mook was on his knees facing the wall. He picked up the two rocks, shook them behind his right ear and yelled, “Come on pretty momma. Come to papa.”
The rocks hit the wall and a second later they formed four dots and three dots, lucky seven. But things got unlucky real fast for Manny the Mook.
Before Manny the Mook could scoop up his cash, Tony B smashed the point of the bailing hook on top of Manny the Mook's melon head. The crooked spike dug three inches deep into Manny the Mook's skull and he fell face first onto the tiled hallway floor.
The rest of the dice players rushed out of the building and Tony B picked up Manny the Mook's winnings, then casual strode out of the building, like he had nary a care in the world.
Amazingly, Manny the Mook survived to gamble another day.
He was spotted a few weeks later in a wheelchair on West 14 Street, with a turban around his head. Manny the Mook was none too bright to begin with, so whatever brain damage he had suffered, would hardly be noticed by anyone who actually knew him.
Manny the Mook never set foot in the Fulton Fish Market again. Nor was he ever seen anywhere near the 4 or 6 Wards.
But from that point on, Tony B had a much easier time collecting money that was owed him in the Fulton Fish Market. Whenever he was there, Tony B religiously carried the bailing hook on his shoulder, as a sign to all, saying, “Screw with Tony B and I'll split your freakin' skull with this Goddamn bailing hook.”
CHAPTER 6
Greenwood Lake
Thus went the very prosperous career of Tony B. He made enough money in the Fulton Fish Market to live a very comfortable life. In 1961, when a new h
ousing development called Chatham Green was built on Park Row, Tony B got himself a nice two-bedroom, 12 floor apartment. He also bought a lakeside house in Greenwood Lake, New York, fifty miles north of the George Washington Bridge. With its majestic mountains, snake-like roads and nine-mile lake, the tiny town of Greenwood Lake was light years away in style from New York City.
The town of Greenwood Lake is located on the New York side of Jersey Avenue, which connects New York and New Jersey. On the New Jersey side of Jersey Avenue side sits the town of West Milford, which is the gateway for New Jersey residents to enter New York State. The separate drinking laws of the two states are what made Tony B a ton of money in the 1950's through the 1970's, when the drinking age in New York was made the same as in New Jersey.
Before the New York drinking law was changed, the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty one, but it was only eighteen in New York State. As a result, on Friday and Saturday nights, people from all parts of Northern New Jersey sped through West Milford, down Jersey Avenue, to Greenwood Lake, New York to drink in one of the more than fifty such establishments within a ten-mile radius of the one-horse town.
Greenwood Lake was the site of many famous establishments, some of them even legal. One such place was the Long Pond Inn, a motel/bar/restaurant, where prize fighters, like heavyweight champions Rocky Marciano and Floyd Patterson, came to train before a title fight. The Club Car was another hot spot and known for showcasing new bands. But in the 60's, the rage in Greenwood Lake was the Sterling Hotel which featured topless dancers, who were not allowed to expose their wares in New York City at the time.
Greenwood Lake was a veritable gold mind for the New York City mob. Almost every bar was owned by New York City mobsters and Tony B was sole owner of five of them himself.
Tony B spent the weekdays in New York City, but when the Fish Market closed from 10 am Friday morning, to 10 pm Sunday night, Tony B took off to the friendly confines of Greenwood Lake to enjoy the weekend and to collect the cash from his five joints.
