Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “After Isabella, it would have been difficult for Angelo to fall in love with any other woman,” I said. “It would have been too hard for him to accept.”

  “He came close one other time,” Mary said, turning her back on me, content once again to search through the traffic passing by on the avenue beneath us. “At least as close to love as Angelo would ever allow himself to get.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, stepping closer to Mary, the morning sun warming both our faces.

  “Me,” Mary said, lowering her head, her delicate hands holding on to the edges of the radiator.

  Winter, 1966

  ANGELO WATCHED IDA walk along the side of the pier, stopping every few feet to stare out at the emptiness of the Hudson River. I was next to him, my hands shoved as deep into my wool jacket as they could go, the collar lifted to cover as much of my ears as possible. Angelo never seemed to notice weather, dressing the same regardless of the time of year. The pain from his lungs grew worse as he got older and no climate could help ease the torment each time he took a breath. His face had hardened with age, crease lines now wedged in along the eyes and lips, giving him a more lived-in look and adding to the threatening menace that could accompany an otherwise innocent glance. He was now in his third decade as a mob boss and, despite the millions he had accumulated, gave no indication of walking away from the life he had embraced.

  “Being a mob boss, especially one as big as Angelo was, is the same as being the king of a small country,” Pudge would tell me. “He ranked right alongside Luciano, Giancana, Trafficante and Genovese in terms of underworld power. When you are that strong, you find yourself with people around you willing to give up their life in order to save yours. Then you got those who would flip you over and work to have you killed, so they could look good for the next king that comes along. You got all this money coming in but, at the same time, you got soldiers working the streets griping about how little they get to take out of the big pot. People fear you until you’re dead and then they forget you as quick as yesterday’s breakfast. But no king ever walks away from it. However they die, on the throne or in the street, they do it with that crown still sitting tight on their head.”

  I stood next to Angelo as a large river rat floated past, both of us watching Ida bark down at the murky waters below. She was crouched on her rear legs, poised to make the leap and nab her prey.

  “Do you think she’s going to jump in?” I walked closer to the dog, trying to put myself in a position to reach out for her if she did.

  “If it were a cat, maybe,” Angelo said. “Then she’d have a chance. All she’s going to get chasing after a river rat is wet.”

  “Pudge says that the two of you used to swim these waters when you were kids.”

  “We did that and a lot more in this river.” He stared off into the horizon, the harsh winter wind turning his cheeks a shy red. “Ran our first whiskey boat out of this harbor and got our first taste of bootleg money. Almost got killed down here in a shoot-out with Johnny Ruffino’s crew right before the war. I got clipped in the leg and fell into the water. Pudge jumped in and dragged me out.”

  Angelo nudged me on and we continued our walk, Ida moving in step behind us, her nails making a scratching noise coming off the cobblestones. My Sunday morning walk with Angelo was part of my weekly routine and had been since I moved into the room above his bar. It was our time alone together and always culminated with breakfast with Pudge in an Eleventh Avenue diner. I think Angelo looked forward to the walk as much as I did, though neither one of us ever said anything about it. The ritual was always the same. I asked as many questions as I could cram in, looking to learn as much about him as possible. He gave up only as much information as he thought was needed and changed the topic whenever the subject touched an area he didn’t want to enter.

  “Were there really German submarines out here during the war?” I asked, stopping next to Ida and pointing a finger just beyond the edge of the pier.

  “If there were, I didn’t see them. The newspapers made a lot of noise about it back then and people got scared because they believed what they read. That made a few guys in the government nervous and when that happens they reach a hand out to us.”

  “What did you do?” I said, looking away from the pier and up at him.

  “We got together and we cut a deal,” Angelo said. He reached a hand into his pocket and pulled out a chew treat for Ida and tossed it at the dog’s paws. “The government left us alone to do whatever business we had out here and in return we told them we would get rid of any German subs that we found floating around the New York waters.”

  “But you said you never saw any subs,” I said.

  “So we made a lot of money without having to worry about the feds being on our backs.” Angelo ignored the strong gusts of wind that were whipping past the pier posts. “Besides, I never said there weren’t subs in the waters. I just said we didn’t see any of them.”

  “Did you even bother to look for them?” I asked.

  Angelo looked at me and shrugged. His slicked-back hair rested defiantly in place against the wind’s heavy onslaught and his handsome face was as rigid as stone. “It would’ve been a waste of my time,” he said. “Finding submarines was not something I knew how to do.”

  We crossed against the traffic on West Forty-fourth Street, heading uptown, when I saw the car move in place behind us. There were three passengers in the four-door black Ford Comet, two in the front looking forward and acting casual, the one in the back sitting sideways facing the street, wiping a hand against his face and forehead. I looked up at Angelo and knew he had seen them long before I had, probably when they first turned the corner, against the light.

  “You know where Pudge is, am I right?” He looked straight ahead, his body relaxed, his voice poised and in control. “Don’t turn your head. Just answer.”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice cracking from the cold and from fear.

  “When I tap you on the shoulder, you run to him and tell him where we are. Until you get back, me and Ida will try and hold these guys off as best as we can.”

  “Why can’t I stay and help you fight them?” I asked, ignoring his request and stealing a glance at the car that was creeping up closer to us.

  “I’ve done this before,” Angelo said. “So has the dog. You haven’t. On top of it, Ida doesn’t care to run from a fight. It goes against her bloodlines. So she’d be plenty pissed if I sent her out to get Pudge.”

  “Are they here to kill you?” I tried hard to stop my body from shaking.

  “That’s what somebody’s paid them to do.”

  The guy sitting on the passenger side and the one leaning against the door in the back both lowered their windows, replacing thick miniclouds of cigarette smoke with fresh gusts of cold air. The Comet had come to a slow stop just three cars down from us, its engine running in idle, all four of its doors unlocked. I turned away from the car and looked up at Angelo. “The diner’s only two blocks from here,” I said. “Why don’t you run with me?”

  “It’s not what I do,” he said in a soothing voice. “And not who I am.”

  I stared up into a pair of eyes that were as dark as a crow’s wing and nodded. Without another word, I turned and ran, sprinting up the street as fast as I could go, leaving behind Angelo and Ida to deal with three paid killers.

  Angelo and Ida walked toward the Ford Comet. He was close enough to see their faces, which were nervous and streaked with sweat in the winter air. His experience told him he wasn’t up against top-drawer professional talent. Prime shooters would not have wasted this much time getting ready to gun him down. They would have simply driven up, fired and sped off. So, whoever put up the money for these three did so in order to get Angelo’s attention, make him aware that he was out there. If, in the process, these three left him sprawled and dead between two parked cars, then so much the better.

  Angelo was several feet from the passenger side door when he saw his backup Cadillac tu
rn at the corner and come up behind the Comet. There were four of his men in the Caddy, each one of whom would kill at the simple nod of their boss’s head. Angelo glanced back at the three in the Comet. The two in the front had guns in their hands, the wild cowboy in the backseat had two cocked and ready. But they froze, their fear too strong for them to lift the guns and fire, the drugs and drink that had fueled their ride to this point not able to help them take it to the next step. Angelo looked into each of their faces, his eyes telling them what he already knew. They had left earlier that morning with pockets filled with money, eager for the kill and a chance to make a name in a business where murder is the fastest way to advancement. Back there, they were tough and hard and wanting nothing more than to be gangsters. Now, in the cold and the wind and the harsh light of reality, they were three scared young men, pumped up by bar talk and each other, confronting a man they had only read about in the papers or caught a glimpse of on television. They knew him the way a child knows about a baseball player after reading the statistics on the back of a trading card. He had been tagged Bones Vestieri by the tabloids, for all the bodies he left in his wake, and the name stayed as the decades passed. He was a mob boss from a time when wars lasted for years and only the toughest were left to stand. He was a real gangster standing in front of them, with a growling white pit bull by his side, neither one of them afraid to die.

  Angelo’s four men surrounded the Comet, their guns at their side, ready to be emptied into the bodies of the three shooters. Angelo leaned into the car and looked at each of them. He placed a hand on the car door, his jacket open and flapping in the wind. “I get a name,” he said into the smoky interior, “and you live. If not, then you’ll die wishing you had never made the deal that put you here.”

  “Marsh,” the one closest to Angelo, sitting on the passenger side, said. He tried to keep up his tough-guy front but was betrayed by the crack of fear in his voice. “Jimmy Marsh was the one who paid us.”

  Angelo looked into the young man’s eyes and saw a boy with a gun on his lap. He was dressed in black leather and jeans, smelled of whiskey and couldn’t control the shaking of his hands. “Who knows this Jimmy Marsh?” he asked his four men.

  “I do,” the tallest of the group said. He was young, handsome and had been with Angelo since he, too, was a child, abandoned in a tenement hallway by a drug-addicted mother on her last fix. “He’s a small-timer pulling meat market heists for quick cash. If he’s got himself a crew, they can’t be any better than the ones he sent here this morning.”

  “Find him before he has his breakfast, Anthony,” Angelo said. “And kill him before I finish mine.”

  “What about the three in the Comet?” Anthony asked.

  “Help them find the highway,” Angelo said, his eyes on the men in the car. “And if you ever see any of them in my neighborhood again, kill them, too.”

  Anthony nodded and led the other three back to the open doors of the Cadillac. They got in, slammed the doors shut and followed the Comet as it eased its way down the street and onto the ramp of the West Side Highway, filled with young men who thought they were heartless enough to want to be gangsters.

  • • •

  I SAT IN Angelo’s armchair, my feet curled up under me, watching Robert Stack as Eliot Ness put The Untouchables through their paces. Angelo and Pudge sat on the couch across from me, relaxed yet focused on the anticipated takedown of the television gangster.

  “They make this guy Ness out to be a one-man band,” Pudge said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “How good could he really have been? They brought him in from Cleveland.”

  “He was good enough to catch Al Capone,” I said, my eyes still on the large-screen black-and-white set.

  “Time caught up with Capone,” Angelo said. “A fed named Eliot Ness just happened to be there.”

  “You can be headline material for just so long,” Pudge said. “Sooner or later, people get tired of reading about you. They want to read about the next new gangster. That’s when the cuffs come out and the judge slams the hammer down.”

  “You want to make a career in this business, you do it quiet,” Angelo said. “The only people who know you’re in it are the only ones who need to know. Anybody can get their names in the paper. You don’t need talent to do that. But keeping your name out of them is a skill. You have that, you get to play in the game for a long time.”

  I loved to watch TV or go to the movies with Angelo and Pudge. Before they came into my life, I hadn’t watched much television and was aware of the popular shows only from what I picked up in passing conversation. Movies were my safety valve, as they are for most foster children. I would escape into the cool confines of an old movie house and find the solace I sought from the emptiness of a nonexistent home life. The movie theater also served as an avenue for safe adventure, where I could lose myself for two hours in the heroic exploits of others. Angelo and Pudge, as did every gangster I ever met, also had a love for the movies and the small screen. We more or less shared the same tastes in what we liked and in what we sought to avoid, which made it easy for us to sit through anything together, our viewing nights always ending with dinner in a back booth at Ho-Ho’s restaurant on West Fiftieth Street.

  Gangsters hate science fiction and romance. They would rather be shot dead in an alley than sit through a game show. “Tell me what a game show is?” Pudge would demand whenever I was brazen enough to turn one of them on. “Better yet, let me tell you what it is. It’s gambling, plain and simple. They take two people, put a mike in front of them and bet they won’t get the right answer to whatever it is they ask. If they do, they get paid. If they don’t, they walk away empty. So how come, when a guy in Hollywood does it, they call it a TV show, but when we do it here, without the cameras and the mikes, they call it a crime? That’s really The $64,000 Question.”

  Gangsters love stories that are set either in the Wild West or during the height of World War II and are avid fans of thrillers, silly comedies and high-class horror. Above all else, however, gangsters love crime movies and police shows. Angelo and Pudge both would get a big laugh as they sat back and watched Hollywood’s idea of what they did for a living, their every move glamorized and overdramatized. “Most of the time, the movies and shows are so far off base it’s not even worth the time it takes to sit through them,” Pudge the critic would often tell me between bites of an egg roll. “Rod Steiger as Al Capone goes beyond stupid. The same goes for that guy Neville Brand on The Untouchables. Now, Robert Stack, I’ll give you, looks like a fed, but so what? You still don’t pick up anything from watching any one of them work. Not like you did with somebody like Cagney. Him you could study, take what you saw him do and bring it out to the street with you and not have to worry about getting gunned down. A couple of the other old-timers had it figured out the right way, too. George Raft was one. Paul Muni and John Garfield were two more. But Humphrey Bogart didn’t make the final cut. None of us ever bought him as a tough guy. We never paid for his sell. To us, he always came across as a rich boy acting tough, which, from what I understand, is what he was in real life.”

  “I like M Squad better than The Untouchables,” I said, spreading my legs out and resting them on the coffee table.

  “Which one is that?” Pudge asked, pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee.

  “It’s the one with Lee Marvin,” I said. “He plays the tough detective.”

  “I go for that one, too,” Pudge said. “You believe a guy like that, ex-marine, war hero, wounded in action. I could see him slapping the cuffs on me and tossing me in the back of his squad car.”

  “I can’t blame you on that one,” Angelo said with not-so-subtle sarcasm. “If I had to make a choice, I’d much rather be arrested by an actor than a cop. It would make it a lot easier to deal with.”

  “You know who I don’t buy as a cop?” Pudge asked.

  “Who?” I smiled at him, enjoying what for us passed as family conversation.

  “That old f
at guy from Highway Patrol,” Pudge said. “Tell me his name again?”

  “Broderick Crawford.”

  “That’s the one.” Pudge sat up on the couch, animated and filled with a fan’s passion. “I mean, seriously, how old is that guy that they still let him drive around in a car chasing after people? He should be retired, sitting on a nice stretch of beach somewhere, scratching the chicken fat on his belly. If a cop that old were chasing me, I would never stop. Keep my foot pressed heavy on the gas and keep driving until his nap time came around.”

  “I wouldn’t complain too much,” Angelo said. “The older the cop, the better it is for us. Young cops want to go out and make a name for themselves. Best way for them to do that is to bring down either you, me or maybe both. Old cops just want to go home and put in enough time to cash a pension check. And the best way for that to happen is to stay away from trouble. Their mind is sitting on a condo down by the beach. It’s not on the next boost you and me have planned.”

  I sat back, happy to watch Angelo and Pudge link everything we saw on TV or in the movies straight back to the life they led, turning it all into yet another lesson for me to learn. I was now an accepted member of their family and with that came the burden of filling the void in my knowledge with their take on life and the honest, if skewered, view of the world they brought with them to even the most mundane of daily events. Angelo and Pudge boiled everything down to a basic scenario of black and white, right and wrong, profit and loss. They had fought off the challenges and survived and thrived for decades in a brutal business that was free of reasonable compromise and short on peaceful resolution. They did it by combining street savvy with a fearless determination that their will would not be thwarted, regardless of the odds and the opponent. They obeyed only a set number of structured commandments and never strayed far from those beliefs.

  Over time, their numerous lessons would eventually take hold and their strong theories would be very much a part of my thinking and way of looking at the life around me. I would become like them, a bona fide member of their small society. I knew that whatever path my life took, it would be determined by the formidable will of these two men I had come to see as parents. No other solution would be acceptable to them. They were not interested in raising just a son. Much like Ida the Goose and Angus McQueen before them, Angelo and Pudge were just looking to raise a gangster.