Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family Read Online Free

suit with lapels so sharp you could get arrested just for flashing them. I was a kid. I was so proud. When I got home my mother took one look at me and screamed, ‘You look just like a gangster!’ I felt even better. ”

    At thirteen, Henry had worked a year at the cabstand. He was a handsome youngster with a bright, open face and a dazzling smile. His thick black hair was combed straight back. His dark-brown eyes were so sharp and bright that they glittered with excitement. He was slick. He had learned how to duck under his father’s angry swats, and he was a master at slipping away from the racetrack security guards, who insisted he was too young to hang around the clubhouse, especially on school days. From a distance he almost looked like a miniature of the men he so admired. He wore an approximation of their clothes, he tried to use their street-corner hand gestures, he ate their kind of scungilli and squid dishes though they made him retch, and he used to sip containers of boiling, bitter black coffee even though it tasted awful and burned his lips so badly he wanted to cry. He was a cardboard wiseguy, a youngster dressed up for the mob. But he was also learning about that world, and there were no adolescent aspiring samurai or teenage Buddhist monks who took their indoctrination and apprenticeship more seriously.

Two

    “I WAS AROUND the stand from morning till night, and I was learning more and more every day. By the time I was thirteen I was collecting numbers and selling fireworks. I used to get the cab drivers to buy sixpacks of beer for me, and then I’d sell them at a markup to the kids in the school yard. I was acting like a mini-fence for some of the neighborhood’s juvenile burglars. I’d front them the money and then sell the radio, portable, or box of sweaters they glommed to one of the guys around the cabstand.

    “Before big-money holidays like Easter and Mother’s Day, instead of going to school I’d go. cashing’ with Johnny Mazzolla. Johnny, who lived across the street from the cabstand, was a junkie horseplayer, and every once in a while he would take me out and we’d go cashing counterfeit twenties he picked up from Beansie the counterfeiter in Ozone Park for ten cents on the dollar. We’ d go from store to store, neighborhood to neighborhood, and Johnny would wait in the car and I’d run in and buy something for a buck or two with the fake twenty. Johnny taught me how to soften up the counterfeit bills with cold coffee and cigarette ashes the night before and leave them out to dry. He taught me to pretend I was in a hurry when I went up to the cashier. He also told me never to carry more than one bill on me at a time. That way, if you get caught, you can pretend that somebody passed it off on you. He was right. It worked. I was caught a couple of times, but I could always cry my way out. I was just a kid. I’d start to yell and cry and say I had to tell my mother what happened. That she’d beat me up for losing the money. Then I’d run out of the store fast as I could and we’d be off for another neighborhood. We’d usually get a couple of days in a neighborhood-until the twenties started showing up in the local banks and they’d alert the stores. Then the cashiers would have a list of the fake bills’ serial numbers tacked up right next to the register, and we’d have to change neighborhoods. At the end of a day’s cashing we’d have so many two-dollar purchases of doughnuts and cigarettes and razor blades and soap piled up in the back of the car we couldn’t see out the rear window.

    “At Christmas, Tuddy taught me how to drill holes in the trunks of junk Christmas trees he’d get for nothing, and then I’d stuff the holes with loose branches. I’d stuff so many branches into those holes that even those miserable spindly trees looked full. Then we’d sell them for premium prices, usually at night and mostly around the Euclid Avenue subway stop. It took a day or two