by Howie Carr
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
Bobby Bones said, “The reason I hear about it is—you remember that kid, the Fonz, Peanuts’ nephew?”
The Fonz was in for attempted extortion. He’d been collecting bad debts for one of his uncle’s bookies, and he’d left a death threat on some mark’s voice mail. I’m not saying he’s the only guy who’s ever done something that stupid, but most times, it gets straightened out, or pleaded out, before it goes to trial.
Bobby Bones said, “The Fonz checked out of here last week. He had some song-and-dance about a state grand jury after some motorcycle gang up in Beachmont that was running a meth lab and he was just gonna take the contempt citation ’cause it’s concurrent on the extortion beef. He tells us they’re sending him to Otisville to throw him in the hole. Like he’s a fuckin’ martyr, a stand-up guy, but that’s bullshit.”
“How can you be sure?”
Bobby Bones grinned again. “My brother Billy’s got someone in records up in Otisville there. I asked him to check, just to satisfy my own curiousity. The Fonz ain’t gettin’ thrown in no hole, he ain’t even going to Otisville, he’s going into WITSEC. He’s cooperating.”
Gonzo Ronzo had drifted back over. He was still standing up, listening to us talk.
“This is worse than I thought,” I said. Everybody who was anybody in Eastie appeared to be in jeopardy, which usually meant they would be ready to take some chances. They had to lay in some dough—not for lawyers, nobody paid for their own lawyers anymore. What was the point? If the feds get you on tape, you have a better chance of hitting the Lottery than beating the rap. It’s better to save the money and give it to your family. Indigent is one of those words that no wiseguy ever heard of until maybe ten years ago.
Nowadays, when you get pinched, the first thing you say is not “I want to make my phone call.” The first thing you say is “I’m indigent.”
Bobby Bones shook his head. “If Peanuts was wired, Bench, and I guarantee he was, it’ll be a giant cluster-fuck for all you guys up there. It’s almost enough to make me glad I’m in here for another thirty-two years. Almost.”
14
A TOUGH STREET KID FROM LINCOLN
Even though I’m in politics, sort of, I don’t buy the Globe anymore, me and 300,000 other former subscribers, and 450,000 on Sundays. Why support assholes who are trying to destroy me, and everybody like me? But I still read it, online, at least the stories they don’t charge for. If they try to force me to sign up for the “free thirty-day trial,” I’m outta there.
I always read the Herald first, but this morning, after making quick work of the “feisty tabloid,” I went over to bostonglobe.com. Nothing much struck my fancy there either, until I saw the headline on Ted McGee’s piss-poor column: “Underworld mayhem: casinos’ first casualties.”
So now it starts, the public-relations war against the casino bill. The Globe’s reasonable-doubt-at-a-reasonable-price columnist was making the pitch against casinos, on the grounds that the hoodlums were already littering the sidewalks with victims as they fought for control.
“The EMT looked down at the crumpled body of the young Dominican curled up in a fetal position on the floor of the front seat of his stolen SUV on Winter Hill in Somerville.
“‘Another gang war,’” the EMT was saying. “‘Comes as regular as clockwork around here. And this time you know what it’s about…’”
As always, the EMT—or cop, or hero jake, or whoever—had no last name. This time, he didn’t even have a first name. Because of course there was no EMT. Ted McGee was a fraud. He wasn’t a tough street kid from Boston; he was from Lincoln. He also wasn’t a Vietnam vet and he wasn’t a reporter; he was a shakedown artist. He was so damn authentic he called Boston Beantown at least once per column.
I went back to the column, where the EMT was delivering more salt-of-the-earth Joe Sixpack wisdom.
“‘These pols on Beacon Hill don’t care what happens on the streets. They’ve never been on the street.’” Neither had Ted McGee, as far as I could tell, unless maybe it was Brattle Street in Cambridge. Now it was time for some hard-boiled narrative to break up the made-up quotes, probably lifted from an out-of-print paperback collection of Jimmy Breslin or Jimmy Cannon columns.
“This double-slaying had all the earmarks of Bench McCarthy’s mob.” Funny, the way I’d heard it, the Dominican and his P.O. pal had been chasing Bench. “Bench is a guy who operates out of a Winter Hill bar, the Alibi, where the first shot is on the house and after that you have to use your own bullets.” If he were still alive, Johnny Carson could have sued for plagiarism. “They are merely the latest victims in what will be a long and bloody struggle to control the pols’ latest misguided boondoggle to generate more revenue. A few days earlier, Sally Cuarto, the plug-ugly who rules the North End with an iron fist, saw his nephew gunned down at an after-hours card game. Then his consigliere was blown up. This war is just getting started.”
Sally Cuarto? The tough street kid from Lincoln couldn’t even spell the underboss’s name right? And nobody on the city or the copy desk picked up on it? You can bet the Globe never misspells Barney Frank’s name.
I had almost reached the bottom of the page. That meant it was time for the nameless EMT to return with one final, jarring pearl of wisdom.
“‘Nobody’ll see Bench now until it’s over. He’s gone to the mattresses.’” Now he was lifting a line from The Godfather. “‘There will be a lot of mothers wearing black, a lot of funerals in Beantown before this casino war is over, but what do the solons care? All they’re looking for is their next payoff.’”
In other words, the “solons” were a lot like Ted McGee himself. I poured myself a second cup of coffee and called Katy Bemis on her cell phone.
“What do you want?” she began pleasantly.
“I want to know what the fuck is going on with Ted McGee’s column this morning.”
“That’s Ted McGee’s job, to make people ask what the fuck is going on with Ted McGee’s column this morning.”
“I know that EMT and he claims he was misquoted.”
“Very funny,” she said. “You know as well as I do there was no EMT.”
“That’s what I mean. How the hell does he get away with it?”
“What are you, the Columbia Journalism Review? He’s been doing this for thirty years. You must have some dog in this fight, and his name is Bench.”
“Not really,” I said without much conviction.
“I mean, I never knew you to care much one way or another what was written about you or anybody else, especially by the likes of Ted McGee.”
“I just got an idea,” I said. “You want to go to the game tonight? My treat.”
“I have a saying. Beware of Jack Reilly bearing gifts.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t trust you. What are you after?”
“If I show you something at the game tonight, will you help me out?”
She paused before continuing. “Jack, you seem to forget how well I know you. I remember helping you out one time, and it almost got me killed.”
“And it got you a job at that fine newspaper working with such distinguished scribes as Ted McGee.”
“What do you really want?”
Now it was my turn to pause. She knew what I really wanted was to have her back, but I couldn’t admit it. I could handle my own sleuthin’ at the State House, but cutting her on this story was a way to maybe start repairing the relationship. Working stories with her had been my entrée into her life to begin with, and maybe if I could show her I was on to something …
“The pregnant pause is duly noted,” she said. “I assume you’re trying to think up a good story.”
“Why don’t you just come to the game with me tonight? What have you got to lose?” I thought of adding, certainly not your virginity, but she didn’t seem to be in a playful mood this morning. I told her I’d meet her at the Eastern Stan
dard in Kenmore Square at 6:30. I offered to pick her up at the Globe, but she just sneered at my suggestion. Luckily, my Oldsmobile didn’t take it personally.
15
A MATURE INDUSTRY
I’ve got money problems. Not cash-flow problems, which would mean things would be okay once I tracked down a few deadbeats and put a gun to their heads and asked them if they wanted to play Russian roulette with a full chamber.
No, my problem was the rackets were coming apart at the seams. They already had come apart at the seams. In the financial pages they call these “secular” as opposed to “cyclical” changes in an industry, a mature industry if you will, in this case the rackets.
As I’ve told you, I’m into drugs, but I keep them at arm’s length. I need buffers, and the buffers cut into my end. But I can’t operate without buffers, because otherwise drugs are too fucking risky. Can’t trust anybody, especially once they get into sampling their own wares.
Unions are gone too, at least the kind of unions I grew up with: Teamsters, longshoremen, ironworkers and such. Nobody unloads ships anymore except with cranes. Then they put the loads on flatbed trucks. It doesn’t matter how quickly you can cut the fifth wheel, you still can’t get inside a cross-country load with anything less than a bazooka.
Nowadays the only real unions with any dough are in the public sector, like the Service Employees International Union, most of whose members are either illegals or hacks. From pinky rings to nose rings in less than one generation.
Gambling ain’t what it used to be either. The Lottery runs numbers nowadays. Football’s okay, but it’s only sixteen Sundays a year, plus play-offs, and unlike the daily handle at the tracks, you can’t fix games. Or at least I can’t.
I used to be a stick-up guy. That’s how everybody starts. I don’t count burglaries. In my neighborhood, even the National Honor Society students did B&Es. They were a gateway crime, you might say, to armed robberies. From the start, I planned every one of my stick-ups down to the most minute detail. One time Bobby Bones and I took a bank in downtown Malden across the street from a freight rail line. Every morning at ten, a mile-long freight train rumbled through the downtown, cutting off the bank from the police station for four minutes. Exactly four minutes. That was all we needed. You could check it out with the Malden P.D. It’s still an open case.
Problem is, for every job like that there’s ten others where every fucking thing goes wrong. It’s like they say about war, once the shooting starts, you can throw out all your plans. I used to front armored-car jobs. But no more, because you need so many guys, and these days at least one of ’em’s bound to be a drug addict, or have an itchy trigger finger, or both. You’re a hundred yards away sitting in a crash car and some Oxy zombie gets jumpy and starts shooting and your life’s over. Just ask Bobby Bones.
I don’t even bother hijacking local trucks anymore unless they’re carrying smokes or electronics, and even then I usually subcontract the heists to the kids from Southie. Everything has gotten too risky. I had a convenience store once in Union Square. I figured I could use a free load of groceries to cut down on the overhead, so we followed this truck out of the warehouse in New Bedford every Tuesday morning for weeks. Everybody’s a creature of habit, and every haul this truck driver pulled into a truck stop on Route 24 in Randolph for a piss and a cup of coffee. Simple—we didn’t even have to hit the driver over the head, or pretend to. Just wait ’til he got inside, and then hot-wire the truck.
It went smooth, perfect in fact, until we got the truck back to the garage, pried open the back and saw … two backhoes. Oh sure, I unloaded them eventually, but what I’d really needed were those dry goods. I finally sold the grocery store to an Indian.
So I’ve got the “Irish” rackets all locked up, for what that’s worth, and it ain’t much these days. Sally’s got a guy he needs straightened out, I straighten him out, and he pays me “expenses,” because we’re supposed to be partners and all that. Then there’s the Alibi, the garage and my little place in Allston.
In the cellar of the Alibi, I run my own Filene’s Basement, where I stock the stolen goods sold to me by the younger hijackers, the ones who haven’t figured out yet that, if you put it into hourly terms, trucks aren’t worth grabbing anymore. Fencing stolen stuff is okay, but you end up giving away half the stuff. The fucking cops are the worst, of course. Get a load of furs and suddenly every cop on the job has not only a wife but a girlfriend. The Southie and Charlestown crews I buy from don’t even grab furs anymore; it’s not worth it to them. The cops broke up the fur-theft trade not by any great police work but simply by stealing so much stuff off the hijackers and the fences. Now the cops have to buy their own fur coats. Serves them right, the greedy fucks.
I figured I’d be okay once football season started, but for the time being, I needed cash. So I called a loan shark. I could have gone to Sally, I suppose, but that would have altered the balance of power. I already told you Sally’s tighter than a frog’s ass. Loan-sharking’s another racket that ain’t what it used to be—how can you compete against Visa or MasterCard? There’s a few old-time loan sharks around, and I was on my way to meet one, Henry Sheldon. He’d started out in Roxbury, but had followed his clientele south to Weymouth years ago. He now operated out of a strip mall in a tired neighborhood where approximately ninety percent of the population was originally from Southie, Dorchester or Roxbury.
I pulled into a parking space in front of his office and walked in. He was the only one there—not much security considering he was supposed to have at least $25,000 on him at all times, which he was going to lend to me today.
I sauntered into his fly-specked storefront office and grabbed a chair in front of his desk. He was seated behind it, telephone in hand, haranguing a deadbeat client, threatening him with physical harm. It was an empty threat. Reddington had no muscle and he went maybe 320 pounds on a five-eight frame.
“Don’t make me get ugly,” he yelled into the phone. Too late Henry—not to get ugly, I mean. He was about fifty, a sparse comb-over matted across his skull by sweat. He smelled like he’d already made his first trip of the day to the mean shebeen two doors down.
Sheldon had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. After hanging up, he rose and leaned across the desk to shake my hand. His was clammy.
“Bench,” he said, “I don’t see you as much as I used to.”
I shook my head. “Weymouth’s not really my neck of the woods.”
“And Roxbury isn’t mine anymore either.”
“I got guys who handle Weymouth for me.” And they’re such good earners, I’m sitting in Henry Sheldon’s office, hat in hand.
“Bench,” he said, “remember the—”
“Henry,” I said, “I don’t do ‘do you remembers’? Nothing personal.”
“I understand,” he said, smiling, showing off some cheap MCI-Norfolk dental work from his last bit. “Do you talk about the paper? ’Cause you’re in it this morning.”
He tossed the Globe over to me. I’d gotten a couple of calls on my cell phone driving down, but the guys who had phoned me weren’t exactly rocket scientists, and they hadn’t been able to convey the gist of the piece. As soon as I saw the Ted McGee byline, I knew it had to be bullshit.
Some reporters are okay. Or so I’ve been told. Most of ’em, in my opinion, ought to be picked up as common nightwalkers. I can’t believe the shit they print, and I know where it all comes from, the police reports. As far as I can tell, they fucking believe that just because something’s in a police report, it’s true. Or maybe they realize at least half of it’s bullshit, but they don’t care, because it’s a public document, so they don’t have to worry about being sued. As if any wiseguys were going to sue them anyway.
I read the column over quickly and tossed the paper back on the desk. I said nothing. What’s the point of refuting bullshit from some guy who doesn’t even know how to spell Sally’s name? James Michael Curley used to say, “Never complain, never explai
n.” Words to live by. But Henry kept staring at me.
“So what’s going on?” Henry asked.
“Henry, I don’t do—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t do ‘what’s going on?’ questions.” He picked up a pack of cigarettes, tapped out a smoke and lit it. Then he reached into his top drawer and took out a thick business-sized envelope. Inside was the twenty-five grand, in one-hundred-dollar bills, judging from the heft of the envelope.
“Want to count it?” he said, and I shook my head.
“Vig’s three points a week, which is—”
“Seven fifty,” I said. “I know. I went to Somerville High.”
“You know what they say about Somerville. You learn how to add, but never how to divide.” He chuckled softly.
“Is that what they say, Henry? About Somerville, I mean?”
“Look, Bench, I didn’t mean nothing by it, it was just a little joke.” This guy was petrified of me. I liked that. “Just like asking you those questions about McGee’s column. It’s just, when it’s in the papers—”
“Henry, you asked me a question, you got a right to an answer. The answer is, everything in that column is complete bullshit, and that includes the ‘the’s’ and the ‘and’s.’ The cocksucker is just trying to stir up trouble, is all. That’s all you need to know. Your money’s safe. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Was that you that the spics shot at on Broadway?”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“One of ’em is, or so I heard,” he said. “I thought you were going to say, I don’t do ‘was that you’ questions.”
“Henry, you’re right. You know what? I don’t do ‘was that you’ questions.”
Henry Sheldon stood up. Jesus, he’d gotten even fatter lately. He hadn’t worn a belt for years, but now even the suspenders couldn’t hide his gut.
