Djibouti “Jib” Bufera was one guy in the neighborhood of whom everyone was afraid. Roy was twelve when he first saw him, getting out of the driver’s side of a black Cadillac in front of Phil and Leonard’s restaurant on Bavaria Avenue. Jib was forty-four years old then, five foot eight-and-a-half, stocky, clean-shaven. He was wearing a black overcoat and a dark gray, medium brim Borsalino hat. Accompanying him was a shorter man about the same age who was very wide around the middle, had a mustache, also wearing a black overcoat but hatless, smoking a long, dark brown cigar. Bufera allowed this man to precede him into Phil and Leonard’s. The Cadillac was parked in a space next to a sign marked Fire and Police Only.
“You see who that was?” said Chick Ceccarelli.
“Who?” said Roy. “Guys got out of the black Caddy?”
“Yeah. Jib Bufera and some goomba. Bufera’s the guy tried to kill Castro.”
The two boys were standing across the street from Phil and Leonard’s. It was four o’clock on a Saturday in December and they were on their way home following a football game at Queen of All Saints, which boys from other schools called Queers of All Sorts.
“How do you know he tried to kill Castro?” Roy asked.
“My Uncle Paul, he’s a federal judge. He told my dad the government gave the contract to The Outfit.”
“Probably be impossible to get near Fidel in Havana.”
“Uncle Paul says nothing’s impossible, but Jib tried to hit him in New York, after he took control of Cuba and came to speak at the UN. Castro stayed at a hotel up in Harlem. There was always a big crowd outside and when he leaned out an open window to wave to people, Bufera took a crack at him with a rifle from a window in a building across the street. He missed and didn’t get another shot.”
Chick and Roy stood on the sidewalk with their hands in their coat pockets. The temperature was dropping as the sky faded from light gray to dark gray. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Phil and Leonard’s was where the wiseguys hung out. Most of the men who came in and out of there, or stood around in front when the weather was better, were friendly to the local kids, but not Jib Bufera. Roy heard that Jib’s muscle shoved aside anyone who was in their path and that Jib never spoke to strangers.
“My dad says Uncle Paul told him Jib has trouble with the American language,” said Chick.
“You mean he can’t speak English?”
“He only talks Sicilian, keeps someone around to translate for him.”
“How’d he get to be a U.S. citizen?”
“He ain’t. A lot of them guys come over on a lost boat, like Lucky Luciano.”
“I’m gettin’ cold,” said Roy.
A beat cop came around the corner by Phil and Leonard’s and saw the black Cadillac parked there. Roy and Chick watched him give the car a once over, then glance at the entrance to the restaurant before walking on down Bavaria Avenue.
“Okay,” said Chick, “let’s go.”
Roy only saw Jib Bufera once more. It was on a warm day about six months later. Jib was in the back seat of the black Cadillac, which was stopped for a red light at the corner of Sycamore and Racine. The window on Jib’s side was down and he was blowing his nose into a white handkerchief. Roy stood on the corner waiting for the light to change so that he could cross. Just as it did, Jib Bufera threw the white handkerchief out the window and his car sped away. Roy stepped around it. When he got to the other side of the street, he looked back and watched a powder blue Impala run over the handkerchief.
When he was fifty-two, Jib Bufera was killed. An eighteen-wheeler rear-ended the car he was riding in and sent it over an embankment on Interstate 55 halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. At the time of his death, Bufera was fighting a deportation order. At his funeral, Jib’s lawyer gave this statement to reporters: “Djibouti Bufera loved his adopted land and performed services on behalf of this country for which he should have been honored and decorated, instead of being deported. Despite the fact that he never did learn to speak our language, Jib was a great, if unofficial, citizen.”
At the request of his mother, Jib Bufera’s body was later disinterred from the Chicago cemetery in which he had been buried, and shipped to the little town in Sicily where he had been born and reburied there. Engraved on his tombstone, in English, were the words: He loved America more than she loved him.
Chick Ceccarelli died a month after Jib Bufera. He fell to his death from a balcony on the tenth floor of an apartment building on Marine Drive. According to his girlfriend, Loretta Vampa, who witnessed the accident, Chick was attempting to walk on top of the railing when he lost his balance. The apartment belonged to Loretta Vampa’s mother’s third husband, Dominic Nequizia, who had been Jib Bufera’s lawyer.