The Sixth Family Read Online Free Page A

and more businessmen found themselves suffering from the financial cancer of the Great Depression. As the economy melted, so did well-insured business premises under suspicious circumstances.

    Chirichello was invited to Simon’s printing plant for a discreet conversation.

    “I’m hooked up to my neck,” Simon told Chirichello, complaining of his financial straits. How much would it take to “make a good job” out of the newspaper’s printing plant, he asked, intimating he wanted it torched to the ground.

    “How much is it insured for?” Chirichello asked.

    “Between $30,000 and $40,000,” Simon replied. “I must have this place burned down. It’s the only thing that will save my neck.” For some reason Chirichello resisted, perhaps suspicious that Simon was drawing him into a trap. “I told Max I didn’t want to do this job because I had just got out of a scrap, but he pleaded and told me if I got into trouble, he’d help me out,” Chirichello later admitted to authorities. Eventually, Chirichello contacted his gangster buddy.

    “I spoke to Vito Rizzuto about the job and I took him down to the plant,” Chirichello recalled. There, Simon offered them 10 percent of the insurance money. “He paid me $300 as an advance payment,” Chirichello said. “This was to buy materials to set the place on fire.” With their front money, Chirichello and Rizzuto bought 100 gallons of liquid celluloid and 200 gallons of turpentine. “We put it into six barrels and moved it in my Chevrolet truck to the plant in Elizabeth,” he said. On the morning of October 17, 1931, the firebugs were ready.

    “Rizzuto and myself got tin pails and dipped them into the barrels and threw the stuff over the first and second floors. When we couldn’t dip any more, we rolled the barrels over the floor. We spread about thirty yards of gauze bandage around.” To the gauze wicks he tied a sulfur stick, the type used to purify wine barrels. Chirichello and Rizzuto then pulled a length of electrical cable from the wall; they shut off the main power so Chirichello could safely scrape the cable to bare the two wires inside. He put a nail between the wires and twisted them around it, making what would become an electrified spike when the power was turned back on.

    “I then threw the switch and lit the sulfur stick.” Calmly, the men left the plant and jumped onto a streetcar heading towards Newark. As they rode away they heard sirens and then saw fire engines racing towards the printing plant. Looking back, they could see flames emerging from the building. They knew their job was done.

    The operation seemed successful but Max Simon was unimpressed—or, at least, feigned disappointment. “It could have been a better job,” Simon complained when Chirichello and Rizzuto went to his office to collect their money. He then declined to pay them. Rizzuto was enraged.

    “Rizzuto was going to shoot him,” Chirichello said. Rizzuto was not making idle threats. Shortly after the meeting, Simon called a policeman he was friendly with and said Rizzuto was armed and stalking him. The officer tracked Rizzuto down and took away his gun. The disagreement festered. Simon was clearly able to make life in New Jersey uncomfortable for Rizzuto and he soon fled, hidden by Stefano Spinello, a gangland friend from the Bronx, in a shack near the Patterson Stone Quarry in Patterson, New York, about 80 miles northeast of New Jersey. At the quarry, Rizzuto spent his days carrying water from a deep hole that formed a natural pool in a nearby swamp to make cement blocks, working to fill an order of 200 for a local company. Rizzuto was to lie low until the problem with Simon could be settled. It was the perfect place to hide: he could keep busy, Spinello would visit him and Rizzuto could pass his time chatting with a friendly watchman. Best of all, only one man from his gang knew where he was—Spinello—and he was a trusted paisan .

    Meanwhile, the vindictive