Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family Read Online Free Page B

coffee and sandwich runs to AI and Evelyn’s delicatessen until I realized I could make a lot more money if I made the sandwiches myself. It was a lot of work, but I made a few more bucks. I had only been doing that a couple of weeks when Al and Evelyn caught me on the street. They took me into the store. They wanted to talk to me, they said. Business was bad, they said. Since I started making sandwiches they had lost lots of the card game business. They had a deal. If J went back to buying the sandwiches from them, they’d cut me in for five cents on every card game dollar I spent. It sounded great, but I didn’t jump at the opportunity. I wanted to savor it. I was being treated like an adult. ’Awright,’ Al says, with Evelyn frowning at him, ‘seven cents on the dollar!’ ‘Good,’ I said, but I was feeling great. It was my first kickback and I was still only thirteen.

    “It was a glorious time. Wiseguys were all over the place. It was 1956, just before Apalachin, before the wiseguys began having all the trouble and Crazy Joey Gallo decided to take on his boss, Joe Profaci, in an all-out war. It was when I met the world. It was when I first met Jimmy Burke. He used to come to the card games. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five at the time, but he was already a legend. He’d walk in the door and everybody who worked in the joint would go wild. He’d give the doorman a hundred just for opening the door. He shoved hundreds in the pockets of the guys who ran the games. The bartender got a hundred just for keeping the ice cubes cold. I mean, the guy was a sport. He started out giving me five bucks every time I got him a sandwich or a beer. Two beers, two five-dollar bills. Win or lose, the guy had money on the table and people got their tips. After a while, when he got to know me a little bit and he got to know that I was with Paul and the Varios, he started to give me twenty-dollar tips when I brought him his sandwich. He was sawbucking me to death. Twenty here. Twenty there. He wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met. The Varios and most of the Italian guys were all pretty cheap. They’d go for a buck once in a while, but they resented it. They hated losing the green. Jimmy was from another world. He was a one-man parade. He was also one of the city’s biggest hijackers. He loved to steal. I mean, he enjoyed it. He loved to unload the hijacked trucks himself until the sweat was pouring down his face. He must have knocked over hundreds of trucks a year, most of them coming and going from the airports. Most hijackers take the truck driver’s license as a warning. The driver knows that you know where he lives, and if he cooperates too much with the cops or the insurance company he’s in trouble. Jimmy got his nickname ‘Jimmy the Gent’ because he used to take the driver’s license, just like everybody else, except Jimmy used to stuff a fifty-dollar bill into the guy’s wallet before taking off. I can’t tell you how many friends he made out at the airport because of that. People loved him. Drivers used to tip off his people about rich loads. At one point things got so bad the cops had to assign a whole army to try to stop him, but it didn’t work. It turned out that Jimmy made the cops his partners. Jimmy could corrupt a saint. He said bribing cops was like feeding elephants at the zoo. ‘ All you need is peanuts. ’

    “Jimmy was the kind of guy who cheered for the crooks in movies. He named his two sons Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke. He was a big guy, and he knew how to handle himself. He looked like a fighter. He had a broken nose and he had a lot of hands. If there was just the littlest amount of trouble, he’d be all over you in a second. He’d grab a guy’s tie and slam his chin into the table before the guy knew he was in a war. If the guy was lucky, Jimmy would let him live. Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you. There was no