Chapter 8

During the next three weeks, we "reasoned" with some of the other pushers at school, and we were able to convince most of them that we were serious about coming down hard on drug pushers. The few that refused to cooperate and stop selling drugs were treated the same way that Ed Boson had been. When the word got around about just how painful it was to have your elbow broken, the drug supply in school dried up to the point that the only drugs brought in were by users who just had to have a fix during school. Those kids we let alone on the assumption that they were not hurting anyone but themselves.

Our one big problem turned out to be Guy LeFette. He agreed, maybe too easily, to stop selling drugs at school. He did quit, but he was just biding his time to catch us with our guard down. LeFette had hopped to find each one of us alone, but that never happened, so he was forced to deal with us together.

LeFette had talked to his gang leader and had arranged for us to be attacked by 10 gang members in the age range of 18-25 years old. The most notable difference in this attack was that they jumped us on our way to school, not as we were leaving. In that way, they did achieve some surprise, but we were able to react soon enough.

Their biggest mistake was in not hitting us at a place where we were vulnerable from all 10 attackers at once. They picked a site where we could put our backs into a cul de sac so that they could come at us only from our front. There were witnesses to the fight, but most New Yorkers can be as blind as the proverbial bats when there was trouble going on. Therefore, nobody called the cops when the fight started.

None of the attackers used knives or guns. I can understand the lack of guns, but the absence of knives must have been a personal choice among the thugs. The weapons were sections of chain and pipes, though some of the men had brass knuckles as well.

The attack started when we were rushed from both front and rear as we walked along the sidewalk from the subway station to the school. Tom was the one to spot the cul de sac and draw me in before the attackers reached us. It was a cold day, so we fumbled a bit as we drew our stingers, but our heavy coats helped to soften some of the blows from the pipes and chains. Our chain mail did the rest as far as keeping us free of broken bones was concerned.

The initial attack was by four men wielding sections of pipe. Amazingly, they tried to swing the pipe like bludgeons instead of poking them at us like short pikes. Not only that, most of the swings were overhand, and that left their bodies exposed to our countermeasures. We generally were able to block or, at least, soften a blow by using a raised arm as a shield. The heavy sleeve of the coat and the brass strips fastened to the mail caught the blow before it could do any real damage. Meanwhile, we were able to use the bone cracker ends of our stingers against almost unprotected ribs.

The attackers were also wearing heavy coats, but the small area of the bone cracker concentrated the energy into an area that was small enough not to be dissipated by the coat. Therefore, we produced a lot of broken ribs that were in danger of puncturing lungs. Generally, an attacker with a few broken ribs quickly withdrew from the fight, and another man moved in. Unfortunately for him, he was soon pummeled by stingers and had broken ribs to show for his efforts.

The men who came at us with the chain were at a real disadvantage. The space available for them to operate forced them into overhand swings. That let us capture a chain as it wrapped around an arm and pull the wielder very close. When he was close enough, a bone cracker was aimed at the solar plexus, and that put the attacker down. However, we never settled for that. We made a point of cracking a few ribs while the attacker was incapacitated.

The fight was over in an amazingly short time. It lasted less than 10 minutes, and we were able to break many bones and joints as we fought. We knew that these guys would never go to jail for attacking us, so we meted out our own form of punishment with as many broken bones and joints as we could reach in the short time we had available.

So much for Guy LeFette's plans. We never saw him at school after that. I wondered if his own gang had taken revenge on him for getting so many hurt for a fruitless struggle. Anyway, that was our last battle in that drug war.

Five months later, not much else had changed, and we were on our way home after the funeral and burial of Tom's father. It had been something of an affair with most of the monied crowd of NYC in attendance. Tom said, "I wish that I could have felt more at the loss of my father, but I can't help feeling that he is much happier now that he is with my mother. Mostly, before she died, he was a happy man who was pleasant to be around, but we were never close. He was just one of those people who could only deal with adults. Children only confused him. I tried to stay out of his way as much as I could.

"Oh, I have no doubt that he loved me in his own way, but he was never demonstrative about it. I wonder if I will find out just how much he did love me at the reading of the will day after tomorrow. Strangely, I am only mildly curious, and will not be disappointed if I find myself cut off from his estate. As long as I have you, I feel that I don't really need anything else."

"I have no doubt that he loved you, Tom. I can't imagine someone knowing you and not feeling some affection for you. You are the type of person who just unconsciously attracts other people because you make them feel good by being around you. Take me, for example!" I said that last to make him laugh, and it worked. He was getting too somber for my taste.

We showed up at the lawyer's office for the reading of the will. I was there at the specific request of Mr. Turner. Tom and I were the only ones in the lawyer's office to hear the will being read. That surprised me a little, considering the size of what I imagined the estate to be. Tom did not seemed surprised, so I didn't let it bother me.

I'll skip the legal language and get to the point. Mr. Turner left some of his money to various charities, but he left everything else to Tom. However, it amounted to only a little over $200,000, much less than I expected. After the legal formalities had been taken care of, the lawyer said that he was surprised that there was so little in the estate. Most of what was there was from the sale of Mr. Turner's house. The real estate market was so depressed that they got less than $1 million for the house and property.

The only other thing that we got from that meeting was a thick manila envelope from Mr. Turner which had both of our names on it. The lawyer said, "Mr. Turner gave me that envelope to pass along to you two without telling me what was inside. He also said that you were not to open it until you got home. I admit to considerable curiosity about the envelope's contents, but I bow to my client's wishes."

We took the envelope, thanked the lawyer for his courtesy, and headed home. It was not until after supper that we got around to opening it. My reaction when I saw the envelope's contents was simply one of "Oh ... My ... God!" I think that, by brute force, Mr. Turner had converted all of his money and property into cash which he then converted to gold through several Swiss banks. There was so much money there that we were instructed to divide equally that both of us were struck dumb by the total. There was $249 million there and change! Neither one of us could imagine being that rich, and we sat on the bed and stared at each other while we contemplated our fortune.

The envelope contained instructions on how to get control of the gold. There were a flock of account numbers and passwords; enough to make my head spin. Also, the envelope contained $20,000 in $100 bills. Mr. Turner hoped that would be enough to carry us until we figured out how we wanted to handle the gold reserve.