American Desperado (6 page)

I had no tolerance. I drank two or three beers, and I was history. Hours later I came to in the back of my stepfather’s Cadillac. One of my friends was driving. Route 4 was the road to my stepfather’s house. I was so drunk, when I looked out the window at the sign, I thought it read “Route 44.” I was seeing double.

I start yelling that it’s my car, I got to drive it. My friend pulls over. “Drive your fucking car.”

I nearly made it to my stepfather’s house, but when I reached his street, I drove on the sidewalk and hit a telephone pole. The pole broke over across the hood. We crawled out of the car laughing.

The next morning I woke up in my dog room. My stepsister Barbara was shaking me. “You wrecked my dad’s car!”

“Come on, I’m thirteen years old. I don’t even know how to start a car. Someone must have stolen it.”

I tried going back to sleep. Then I heard my stepsister in the next room, calling our parents in Europe. I ran in, grabbed the phone from her hand, and smashed it. She tried fighting me, and I knocked her over. That put some fear in her eyes.

I told that bitch how it was going to be. “Don’t make aggravation for our parents on their honeymoon. You let the car get stolen. You’re the asshole. You fix the car.”

For weeks and weeks my stepsister had thought she had the upper hand, that I was a dog living in the storeroom. Those days were done. She paid to repair the car and fix the telephone pole.

By the time my mother and stepfather returned from Europe, the car looked brand new. My mother was home a few days when she came into my room and said, “I’m going in the hospital tomorrow. I’m going to have an operation.”

I said nothing. I still was not talking to her.

J
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:
Our mother had become pregnant by Arnold Goldfinger, and she decided not to keep the baby. In those days doctors would say
they were doing a “hysterectomy,” but it was a euphemism. She went to Fifth and Flower Hospital in Manhattan and had an abortion.

J
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A day after my mom went into the hospital, my stepfather told me, “Your mother’s sick. There were complications. She has peritonitis, blood poisoning, and lobar pneumonia.”

My stepfather wanted to drive me into the hospital to see her. There was no way I would visit her with that piece of shit. In my group of Italian friends from Teaneck was a guy named Jack Buccino, who offered to drive me.

Jack had a red Ford Fairlane convertible that I’ll never forget. It was a nice day when we crossed over the bridge into the city. I had a very strange thought, a magical thought. My sister had told me the real reason our mother had gone to the hospital. Driving across the bridge, I thought maybe my mother had the abortion because she didn’t want to be with our stepfather anymore. She was going to leave him. I thought by visiting her now, I was going to change everything. We’d start talking again. Everything would be different. I’d stop going down the path I was on. I’d be a normal kid.

When the nurse took me into my mother’s room, I didn’t recognize her. There were tubes sticking out of her. Her face was caved in. She was out of it. I didn’t even try to talk. I went to a bar with Jack and got blasted out of my mind on beer.

A day later my stepfather came up to me. “Good news,” he said. “Your mother made a great improvement. She’s getting better.”

What I didn’t know—and what my stepfather didn’t know—is that sometimes when somebody is really sick, they give it one last fight, to try to live. My mother did that. Everybody thought she was getting better. Next day she was dead.

My mother’s death shook me for a long time. The last memory I have of my mother is a woman in the hospital with tubes in her who I could not talk to. That’s the picture of her that stays in my eyes today.

J
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Jon did not shed a tear when our mother died. His reaction was not natural. Instead of going through grief, he filled with more hatred.

For all the bad things I can say about our stepfather, he loved our mother. After she died, he took her ashes to Florence, Italy, and buried her there. That had been her favorite city on their honeymoon, and he showed his devotion by taking her there one last time.

He treated Jon and me terribly. He gave away her jewelry to my stepsisters. He threw out photographs. He made me buy the piano my mother got for me when I was little. The only item of clothing I kept of my mother’s was her plaid coat. It was red and black and had big buttons down the front. That coat was my mother: bright, bold, full of life. I don’t think Jon knew that woman. She adored Jon, but he didn’t see that. She died before he could figure her out.

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My sister was the one fucked up by our mother’s death. She went insane over the piano. It was her only bond with our mother. She dragged that fucking piano from place to place for decades. She was never the same after our mother died.

As I got older, I stopped holding a grudge against my mother. I saw she made decisions for reasons I didn’t understand as a kid. I don’t hate her anymore. I thank her. She gave me my life. I regret now that I never said, “Hey, Mom, I love you.”

But that new way of seeing her came years later. When my mother died, it reinforced the way I was. Her death made me stronger. I didn’t give a fuck anymore about anything. My philosophy was, fuck the world.

*
The Blue & Gold Tavern is still on East Seventh Street.

5

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Both my father’s brothers took an interest in me. My uncle Sam, from Brooklyn, was the only person on my father’s side who had any heart. He was younger than my father and looked more American to me. He’d come out to Jersey to visit me, take me for a ride in his car. I’d tell him about the trouble I was making at school and he’d laugh and tell me to knock it off. I used to wish he was my father, but then he’d go away and I wouldn’t see him for six months.

My uncle Joe, my dad’s older brother, was bald and had a beak nose that made him look like a bird that could eat you. After my mother died, he had a car pick me up and take me to a restaurant in Little Italy. He had bodyguards sitting at the tables around him. He didn’t laugh or smile like Sam. But as different as my uncles were from each other, both told me the same thing: I should stay with my stepfather because it was good to grow up in a rich man’s house.

My stepfather drank and drank after he lost my mother. He was a wreck. As broken up as he was, and as much as we hated each other, he let me stay in his home. He tried to make rules. He’d say, “It’s a school night. Be home early.”

My older friends would come over, and we’d set back all the clocks and go out. I’d come home drunk, fucked up on weed, at two in the morning, and my stepfather would stumble out to yell at me. I’d point to the clocks set to the wrong time and say, “Fuck you. I’m home early.”

My stepdad kicked me out of his house. My grandparents couldn’t handle me. My sister had gotten married and moved out of state. So I was sent to a boys’ home in Hackensack.

Being in the boys’ home just made me closer to the older kids I’d been running with. The reason Ivor never ratted me out after I shot him on the basketball court was because he was afraid of these guys.
^*
They were the worst kids in Teaneck.

They called themselves the Outcasts, but they were never a true gang. They were just a group of kids that ran together. They became my brothers. They didn’t make me who I was, but they put a lot of craziness into me. God Almighty, what a crew they were. These guys were maniacs.

There was Frank Messina.
^†
His father was a typical Mafia thug who weighed four hundred pounds. He owned a driving school. He had one of those cars with two steering wheels, but Mr. Messina was so fat they had to indent the dashboard and push it back so he could fit. His son Frank was a small guy who was so nuts he used to wear a cape, like he was a vampire. As we got a little older, Frank started to carry a sawed-off shotgun under his cape, so it came in handy.

Another Outcast was Rocco Ciofani.
^‡
Rocco was a tough, tough kid. His father was a straight Italian guy, a working man, who had an auto-body shop. I ran away from the boys’ home and slept in his
shop until Mr. Ciofani threw me out. He knew we were no good. Rocco was a shorter guy. He was a trained boxer, and he was crazy with a shotgun.

Not everyone in the Outcasts was Italian. Bernie Levine
^*
was a fat, spoiled Jewish kid who lived near my stepfather’s house. All the Outcasts hung out in Bernie’s basement because he got all the drugs—weed, speed, heroin. It’s at his house that a bunch of Outcasts started shooting heroin. I took lots of drugs, but I never got hooked on injecting them.

Bernie became very important later in my life. In the early 1970s, he moved to San Francisco and ran a recording studio for bands like the Grateful Dead. I was living in Miami by then, and Bernie got me started supplying his bands in San Francisco with cocaine. That’s how I first got big in the coke business. It started with an Outcast. These guys stayed with me through my whole life.

Jack Buccino, the kid who drove me to see my mother in the hospital before she died, was another Outcast. I stayed at his house after Mr. Ciofani kicked me out of the auto-body shop. What a weird family. Jack’s mother was a half-baked lounge singer. His father sold fake aluminum siding. He believed he was really good-looking and dressed like he was Dick Clark on
American Bandstand
.

From his parents’ stupid influence, Jack fancied himself an actor and a singer. That was his goal in life. Mrs. Buccino was a typical Italian mother who babied the fuck out of him and let him live in a fantasy world. Jack sang in bands and talked about being in the movies, but mostly he was a junkie thief who never moved out of his parents’ house.

When I was in middle school, all the Outcasts were high school age or older. They thought I was amusing because I would fight anyone. I still went to school sometimes, and the Outcasts would come by and look for kids for me to fight. They’d stand by the playground and point at a big kid and say, “Go fucking slap him and tell him to meet you by the dugout.”

That was the spot for fighting. I’d fight the kid, and if I started to lose, the Outcasts would all jump in and beat his ass.

There was a black kid at my school who had two first names—Herbert Peter.
^*
He was a real wacko, a bad kid like me. He had been held back a few grades, and his muscles were overdeveloped. To be king of the school, I decided to fight him. Even the Outcasts thought I might be overreaching, and they were right.

Herbert Peter gave me the fight of my life. He knocked me down, stomped me. He beat the stuffing out of me. The Outcasts didn’t stop that one. They stood back laughing their balls off.

A
FTER
I got my ass kicked, the Outcasts taught me how to really fight. The biggest Outcast was Dominic Fiore,
^†
who was over six feet tall. He became my teacher. We’d hang out in his basement. We’d push all the furniture to the side, and he and the other Outcasts would beat the shit out of me.

Dominic’s belief was: to give a beating, you got to learn to take a beating. I’d already been beaten by Herbert Peter. But Dominic believed I needed more. You learn to take pain so it doesn’t make you curl up or run. Dominic and the other Outcasts beat me with their hands, with pool cues, belts, chair legs. Then they taught me how to use those tools properly.

I’d seen my father give hundreds of beatings with a baseball bat, but Dominic taught me how to really use one. There is an art to everything. You think you just grab a bat and start swinging? It doesn’t work like that, bro. I mean, give a normal person a bat and give me a bat, and we’ll see who does what.

You don’t swing for the fences when you fight with a bat. I approach you carrying my bat pointed down so it matches my leg. You might not even notice it. When I come close, I bring my bat up, grip it in both hands, and swing it low at your knee. If I hit you near the knee with any force, I will put you on the ground. I don’t care
if you’re a guy who weighs four hundred pounds. A bat to the knee will drop Superman, and when you’re on the ground, I own you.

When you’re bat-fighting, as soon as you get your guy on the ground, you need to reverse your grip on the bat. Put your strong hand near the end of the handle and your weaker hand below it. Point the bat down like you’re grinding herbs in a mortar and pestle. You’re going to pump the bat up and down on the person underneath it. Focus on taking out the knees, elbows, and hands. After that they ain’t running nowhere, bro. Now you can take your time cracking their ribs, busting their balls—anything you want. When you got a bat, you’re king.

If you don’t have a bat, no matter what the other guy is doing, focus on his weak points. Take away his legs by kicking his knees. Take away his eyes by sticking him with your fingers or something sharp like a broken bottle. Work on his shins. Shins are very sensitive, and you can hurt a person real bad on his shins. The shinbone is the strongest bone in the body, but the front edge is tender if you stomp it.

Even though I just said the fronts of a person’s shins are sensitive, when I kick people in the balls, I will use my own shinbone. My shin hits with more force than my foot, and my shinbone won’t hurt me because I’m kicking balls, which are soft. You can break someone’s balls with your shinbone. When you’re fighting, look for every opportunity to hurt the other guy’s eyes and knees and shins. And no matter what, always be kicking his balls.