Chapter 1

Sure, you wanna know everything right up front.

Well, I don't blame you no way no how. That's exactly what I would do in your position and that's a fact you can take to the bank and cash it. Without getting into too much BS about why I am a stone cold killer and an egotistical prick to boot, I will just say my up-bringing left room for lots of improvement.

My name is Tony Esposito and before you start thinking it is Hispanic let me fill you in so there ain't no doubts. I am Italian. Well, yeah, I mean Italian American but I always tell anyone who asks me that I am Italian so there ain't no trouble down the line. Most of my friends in the neighborhood are Italian just like me but I don't make no bones about just being friendly with my own kind.

Talking about making bones, I made my bones on the day Don Alfonso asked me to stash his rod where the cops could never find it. I ditched it in the roof pipe of the vacant apartment building up on the Avenue because I knew the only time that would ever see the light of day was when they decided to demolish the whole thing and that didn't look anytime near because the old Jewish family that owned it refused to pay the taxes to the city and it would sit in limbo for a long, long time. I never told anyone that and the old Don was so pleased that his charge of murder disappeared just like his piece that he made me an honorary soldier in his organization.

I was only about sixteen that summer and not too many people in the neighborhood knew about my raise in the ranks of the Mafia and I sure as hell wasn't saying a single word.

I started running the numbers for Don Alfonso who was a tightwad with his wallet but he never failed to find something to help me earn. Me and the other Tony in my building called Tony Sorrentino used to do the candy store scam boosting the cigarettes and the other stuff the truckers brought in untaxed telling the City to go fuck themselves for the fucking taxes. It was strange how they always found plenty of cops to go fuck around with some shopkeepers just trying to make a living and jewelry store and liquor store stick-up artists were always able to make a clean get-away. Those pricks with the night-sticks knew enough to get there after the perpetrator had made his escape so they didn't have to go to the hospital with a stab wound or even a bullet hole if the guy was heeled.

The professionals all had their little deals with the cops and nobody thought anything about it. It was just a cost of doing business. Besides, we helped keep the riff-raft out of the downtown areas and made certain none of those goons tried to muscle into our territory without paying the Don for a license. The West side guys with their black buddies from Harlem knew enough to steer clear and we let them go about their business looking the other way. It seemed like the numbers was the real bread winner in those early days but soon the drugs started to take over the streets and the old guys like Don Alfonso knew it was time to retire to Florida.

I personally never saw what all the aggravation about the drugs was really about. The junkies that used and the pushers that sold all were fairly normal people except the stuff sort of ruined them for polite society. The females all paid for it with selling their pussy and the guys just naturally turned to a life of crime to finance their habit. In any event, it meant higher levels of earning for a wise guy and you had to be ignorant not to take advantage of it.

It was the greed of the high rollers that put the kibosh on the whole frigging thing when they started bringing in the hard stuff from down south and the ritzy crowd started using just to be "cool". I was pissed when my girlfriend Gloria stashed her smack in my place because that was all I needed if the cops ever decided to toss me for evidence for something or other. I really pounded her fat ass hard for that and she thanked me for straightening her out about the using of drugs. I constantly check her for tracks and told her if I ever found any again she was going get a red ass from my belt every night for a week. She must have learned her lesson because she never did it again and it made me proud of her when she finally graduated from the community college with a degree in Business. Her family was sort of stuck up thinking I was some sort of low-life scum but I knew if it wasn't for me their daughter would be walking the streets with a habit that would kill her before thirty.

When Don Alfonso retired, there was a sort of gang war in the city but I tried my best to stay out of it knowing that it didn't really matter who was in charge just as long as those pricks up in Harlem didn't take over the numbers. It was just at that time that I started to take high roller money on the college sport scene even though I didn't know shit from shinola about the crap. I had a couple of college guys with lots of inside scoop on the odds and stuff that kept me out of trouble and soon I was earning more from the basketball and the football than I ever made on the numbers even working 24/7.

My Gloria started taking care of the call-girl racket for me because she felt it was a lot safer and cleaner for the girls than standing out on some street corner like a written invitation for some cop to fuck with.

We were doing pretty well until the Chicago guys started getting rambunctious about expanding and came in with their Columbian hook-up to try and push us old-timers out of downtown. I call myself an old-timer but I was only 29 and really still learning the ropes compared to guys like Don Alfonso and the Torelli brothers who still ran the docks like clockwork. I never got interested in the docks because it was so Union conscious that I figured it would eventually just collapse from the sheer weight of pay-offs. My brother-in-law Ralph was a Union guy and he told me not to fuck around down there because it was all political and shit and guys just disappeared with no trace. I was glad I took his advice but he must not have taken his own because my tearful sister lamented the fact he disappeared into thin air less than a year later. The Torelli brothers swore up and down he probably just got tired of my sister and decided to make a new life somewhere. I almost had to laugh out loud at that because I figured his new life was about forty feet under the surface of the Hudson River with a block of cement around his ankles.