by Larry Lawton
“Sounds great,” said Lawton, who didn’t ask how much of a cut or much of anything else.
Lawton spent a few days casing the store. He saw what time the female employee arrived and when she left. He wasn’t as thorough as he would be in subsequent robberies because the owner was in on it. The female worker would be the only employee in the store who didn’t know it was a set up.
Willie the Weeper told him, “Do it as a real robbery – in case you get caught. Make sure you clean out the safe and the counters -- make it a real robbery cause it has to look legit.”
Lawton went in, looked around, and pulled out a gun. He said, “This is a robbery.”
The girl sprinted for the back of the store. She was going for a gun. Lawton jumped over the counter, caught her, put her on the floor, and tied her up. Lawton knew in advance where the jewelry was going to be. There was a counter in the back of the store with shelves of jewelry. Lawton cleaned out the counters and shelves quickly, went to the safe and took everything. It was loaded with jewels.
“I’m sure the owner left everything in the safe,” said Lawton.
Lawton walked out the back of the store with two pillowcases full of jewelry. He then went home, put them in a suitcase, drove to the airport, checked the bag, and flew to New York, arriving at his father in law’s house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Lawton spread the hundreds of jewels out on a bed. He gave a ring or two to his wife, and a couple of pieces to his mother-in-law.
Larry found the fence with help from his mob buddies. He was told the address, and he drove to Little Italy in Manhattan to meet the men who were going to buy his jewelry. They were members of the Genevese crime family, and they agreed to drive to his father-in-law’s home to see the jewelry and evaluate what the jewels were worth.
When they arrived the jewels were laid out on the dining room table. Lawton had no idea what they were worth, but he decided he wanted $225,000 for them. After a fierce negotiation, they haggled him down to $150,000.
The Genovese mobsters said they would bring the cash to his father in law’s house the next day. Lawton didn’t know these men, and he was concerned that they might try to rob the jewels and the money from him. He had his brother in law behind the bar waiting with a pistol and a shotgun. Larry also had a pistol.
“I was ready to kill people,” said Lawton.
It turned out that the fence was as concerned about the transaction as he was. He told Lawton, “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, whether it was a cop set up or whether you were going to kill me.”
The transaction went flawlessly, and it was the first of many. One of the fence’s men came in, handed Lawton a paper bag full of cash, and walked out with the jewels. In the bag was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
“After he walked away, I was pretty damn happy,” said Lawton.
With $150,000 in his safe, Lawton had the dough to open his own bookie operation and to start loan sharking. It wasn’t long before both businesses were flourishing but Lawton still had the gambling bug.
“Starting businesses like that aren’t hard. A guy knows you’re in the gangster business, and he comes to you. ‘Do you know where I can bet? Do you know where I can borrow some money?’
The loan sharking business would open Lawton up to a number of very lucrative scores. One of his first customers was a man who worked in a large warehouse. He had borrowed $3,000 from one of Lawton’s several bookmakers. The bookie told Lawton, “I know he can’t pay.” Lawton knew what the man did for a living and came up with the next move.
Lawton had a guy named Junior, another man who worked for him, go to the debtor and tell him that he would pay off the $3,000 debt if the man was willing to pay him $90 a week and pay him back in full in six months.
“Is that okay?” Happily, the man agreed.
“Now the guy could bet again,” said Lawton. “He’s trying for the big score, and for awhile he did win, but then there was a downturn, and he stopped paying.
“He was a typical gambler.”
Lawton told Junior to send the debtor to him.
Said Lawton, “He has to come up with the $90, and on Friday he tells me he doesn’t have it, can I be a little patient, and when a guy’s late a few days, I know he doesn’t have the money. When he goes to the bookie to make another bet, the bookie cuts him off. He still wants to gamble, but he has no way out.
“I know what he does for a living. This guy was the warehouse manager for Johnson Enterprises, which had a warehouse the size of a football field. The warehouse was located in Sunrise, Florida.
“I called him up and say to him, ‘Listen, you owe $3,000, right. You want to get rid of that debt?’dkdkkdk
“What do you mean?” He was all nervous.
“I said, ‘Here’s what you do. On a Sunday I’ll get a truck, and we’ll go to your warehouse, and you help us load up, and that’s the end of it. They will never know they were robbed.’
“‘Okay, we’ll do it.’”
On a Sunday Lawton rented a 32-foot long Ryder truck, drove to the warehouse and helped his crew load the truck. They took gold faucets, urinals, copper wire, three Jacuzzis, one for his house, and a double porcelain sink. Lawton drove the truck to New York and sold the merchandise for $70,000. When he returned he even gave the guy who owed him the money a few thousand dollars,
“And he was happy,” said Lawton. “As I predicted, they never knew they had been robbed. I think the guy still works for Johnson. I’m not kidding.
“But that’s how you do it. You come up with those kinds of scams and make money. My biggest thing was I liked to win. It was about beating the system. I was smarter than the average gangster. I knew how to hustle and to make money.”
CHAPTER 3
Loyalty
After the success of the Sunrise robbery and his other gangsterly pursuits, Larry Lawton was living well for the first time. The mobsters in New York, and Dominick Gangi in particular, wondered whether it had all gone to his head. Now that he had money they wanted to know whether Lawton would be as loyal to them in the future as he had in the past.
One afternoon the phone rang at home. It was Willie the Weeper.
“Larry, Dominick wants you up here in the morning. Nine o’clock.”
Larry hung up the phone and caught the first Delta flight out to New York, and when he arrived at LaGuardia he was picked up by a driver from My Way cab service, the Gambino’s personal cab company.
“I’d get in the car, and he’d hand me a pistol – because I couldn’t carry a pistol on the plane – and I’d be sitting in the passenger seat up front scaring the crap out of the cabbie because I’d be cursing at the traffic on the Belt Parkway going from LaGuardia to the Homestretch Bar in Bensonhurst. Here I had just left beautiful Fort Lauderdale, and you know the way Brooklyn is, dirty and stopped up with traffic.
“I always made sure I got there. At nine in the morning on a Friday Dominick was there, and we started playing gin. I didn’t say a word. That was important. I didn’t say, ‘Why am I here?’ On Friday the mob guys would play cards with the big earners. Joey Grillo, a guy my age who ran drugs while I ran robberies and warehouse hits, was there. Joey and I were very close. We played cards all day. Dominick never once said a word about why he wanted me up there. And I didn’t say a word. Later I learned he just wanted to see if I’d drop everything and come up.
“I usually stayed until Sunday. Saturday night I’d go out with the boys. I’d hang out with the guys, and on Sunday I’d go back to Florida.
“One day I asked Willie the Weeper, ‘Hey Willie, what was up with my coming up that one time?’
“Listen, you passed a big test,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“We all knew you were making tons of money in Florida.” He continued, “Dominick tested to
see how big your head was getting. If you’d have said, ‘Dom, can it wait?’ he might have questioned your loyalty. Because he might need you for something real important. But you passed a really good test. That’s what loyalty really is all about.”
“If I call up a friend and say, “I need you,” you’ll know the kind of friend he is if he says, “What do I need to do?” or “What’s it about?” Are you going to be there or not? You don’t ask questions. You just come. Whatever you had to do, you did.”
Lawton had joined with the Gambinos because he knew he would need their protection, and twice they would come to his rescue. The first time came when a made man from the Gambino family by the name of Mike the Bandit approached Lawton and told him he wanted Lawton to fence his jewels through him.
“He was a short little Italian guy, about 60 years old,” said Lawton. “He was a hustler too. He was trying to horn in on my hustle. I was supposed to respect him, but I was making more than he was. A lot of the made men didn’t make the money I was making, so I was very well respected as far as being an earner for the family.”
To get out from under Mike the Bandit, Lawton appealed directly to Dominick Gangi.
“I said to Dominick, ‘Mike wants to move in on my action. I have a great fence. I don’t need him, and I don’t need his shit. Who needs this crap? I’m making top dollar, and everybody’s making money.’
“‘Larry, I will take care of it,’ said Dominick. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
“We always went to LaPalina restaurant in Brooklyn on Friday night – mob night.
Eight guys sat around this big round table including Mike the Bandit. There was no menu. They brought us pasta and a table-full of dishes, and at the end of the meal we had the old-time Italian expresso with sambucca.
“Dominick said, ‘Nobody in here talks to Larry about anything.’ And Mike the Bandit looked right at me. He was glaring. Because he wanted to get in on all my action. He was thinking about some kind of bullshit he could pull. But he couldn’t, because Dominick said he couldn’t.”
After the two and a half hour meal Lawton went back to the Homestretch. Some guys stayed downstairs and others went upstairs to play high-stakes poker including Dominick Gangi. Mike the Bandit never bothered Lawton again.
The next incident Lawton got himself involved in could have resulted in a bad ending for him had Dominick Gangi not intervened. Being connected probably saved Lawton’s life.
He was down in Florida living the large life. He visited a nightclub called Flixx, owned by a guy named Ernie (Lawton never did know his last name), a friend of his who had inherited $30 million. His father had owned a company that did most of the asbestos removal in New York City.
Ernie and Larry went to the high-roller area of the nightclub, and they were up there drinking when a guy who Larry had never seen before started mouthing off to a girl Larry knew. Larry slugged him, bam, and the guy went flying backward. The guy quickly got up and came toward Lawton, but Ernie stepped between them.
“We’ll take you in the back and put you in a 55-gallon drum, you motherfucker,” said Ernie. “Get the fuck out of here.” Larry had no idea who the guy was. Six months later Larry was in the Homestretch, when who walks in but the same guy he had decked.
Said Lawton, “He’s with another guy, and he recognizes me, and he says, ‘He’s dead. That guy’s dead. I don’t give a fuck.’
Who the fuck does he think he is? thought Lawton
“My immediate boss, Willie the Weeper, said, ‘What’s going on?’
“I’m there with all my guys, Joey, Frankie, Jackie, Mike the Bandit, and Joe Kapp. I hear from Willie that the guy is a made man with the Bonanno family.
“Willie cleared out the bar. Forty people were standing on the sidewalk in front of the bar in Brooklyn. This was a Saturday, and I was at one end of the bar. Joey, my right-hand man, was with me. Joey was my equal. He was an earner who sold drugs. And he was a big guy. He could hit somebody. You don’t fuck with us kind of guys.
“I said, ‘Willie, I didn’t know who the fucking guy was. He was disrespecting a girl down in Florida, and I smacked him. What the fuck you want me to do? It was Florida.”
Willie knew he had to call Dominick Gangi, his boss, to straighten this out. The man Lawton had hit was equal in rank to Willie the Weeper, powerful, but not as powerful as Dominick. Lawton was pretty sure Dominick would protect him because of all the money he was passing up to him.
“It’s all about money,” said Lawton. “That’s all they really care about. And we had a very strong crew. Even John Gotti knew about our crew. People got a lot of money from us. So Dominick had a lot of juice. If Dominick said something, it got done. Dominick used to meet with Paul Castallano, so Dominick was up there on the mob ladder.”
It took Dominick about forty minutes to drive from New Jersey to the bar. He was just in time. The tension at the bar was growing.
“I was always carrying a pistol, and on this day I was carrying two,” said Lawton. “I’m saying to Joey, ‘I have to kill this motherfucker. I have to kill him. Because he’s going to want to kill me. Maybe I should do it now. I ought to shoot the motherfucker.’
“Calm down, Larry, you fucking psycho,” Joey says.
“I got two pistols. I can shoot everybody. I don’t give a fuck.”
“I thought like that. This was the business I was in. The guy was staring down the bar with his gorilla friend, and I was talking to Joey, eyeing that motherfucker, ready to pull pistols. If he made a move, I was going to shoot the fucker.”
They were sitting there at the bar exchanging dirty looks when Dominick’s car pulled into the spot directly in front of The Homestretch. No one parked there. It was Dominick’s spot. If ever someone tried to park there, someone from the bar would come out and say, “Get out of there.” They always did.
“When Dominick pulled in, everyone was standing out front,” said Lawton. “Dominick knew a little bit about what was going on. You have to picture him: short, slick-back hair, an old timer. He comes walking in with his funny strut. Dominick calls Willie over, and they talk.
“Before he comes over to me, he walks over to the guy and shakes his hand. The guy knew who Dominick was. Then Dominick gives me a nod, and we went into the back. Joey waited at the bar.
“‘Come here, kid.’ Dominick called me kid. He liked me. Or he called me Larry Florida. I was Crazy Larry, or Larry Florida.”
Dominick asked Larry what had happened.
Lawton told him, “Dominick, the guy came into the bar. It was in Ernie’s place. The guy was disrespectful to the girl. I smacked him.”
“You smacked him?”
“I punched him,” Lawton corrected himself. There was a difference: a smack is more disrespectful than a punch.
“I hit the guy.”
Dominick told him, “I’m going to have to straighten this out. You have to apologize to this guy.” Lawton said he’d do whatever Dominick asked him to do.
At this point Lawton could breathe easy. He feared that maybe he would have had to get out of town, that Dominick would say, “I can’t protect you here.” But he didn’t.
“That’s how much juice I had,” said Lawton. “Dominick was getting envelopes with thirty thousand, forty thousand from me twice a year. Dominick wanted the money.
“We’d go in the bathroom, and I’d say, “We had a nice score. Here’s an envelope, and I took a few diamonds for you.” He’d look through them and take one, maybe a nice two carat diamond, for his wife or his daughter. He’d stick it in his pocket.
“Be careful, kid,” he’d say. “Shut your mouth. Nobody knows nothing.”
After Dominick and Lawton talked in the back, they emerged into the bar. Dominick called Lawton’s antagonist over. The guy was still royally pissed off.
“This fucking pun
k did this,” he was saying. “Who does he think he is?”
“Hold on. Hold on,” Dominick said. As instructed, Lawton attempted to apologize.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know who you were. I do apologize. I was out of line.” Lawton wanted to but didn’t say, “You were a jerk off motherfucker.” Instead he tried to be nice. He said, “I was out of line.”
His curt reply: “I don’t give a fuck who you know.”
Dominick stopped the conversation. He motioned Lawton to sit down, and he made a rare phone call on the pay phone. He only said a few words, because the mob guys knew the phones were tapped by the FBI.
Dominick came back and said to the guy, “I just got off the phone with your boss. Anything happens to this kid, and you won’t make six o’clock tonight. I don’t give a fuck if he gets hit by a car. Now take your fucking ass and get the fuck out of here.”
Sure enough, the guy left.
Said Lawton, “I’m feeling like a million bucks. The guy went out pissed. I was thinking he was going to try something. But I was packing. Dominick said to me, ‘You don’t tell nobody nothing.’
“Everyone waiting outside came back into the bar. Everyone knew what had happened, that Dominick had my back. My stature went up a notch.
“I said to Joey, ‘I thought I was fucking dead, man. Fuck that. I ain’t dying for any of these motherfuckers.’
“You sick bastard,” was all Joey could say.
Dominick hung around for a few minutes talking to the guys. He told Willie, “Watch the Kid.” He knew he would.
Lawton returned to Florida, and it wasn’t long before he decided that with all his other hustles, he didn’t have time for the pizzeria.
