Chapter Four

Voted Most Likely to Die Before Twenty-one

My brothers and my kid sister, we had our fights. My older brothers didn’t pick on me too much. They yelled and stuff like that but basically when I grew up they were almost out of the house. By the time I was fifteen, sixteen, I was very much the uncontrollable guy. There was no one telling me where I was gonna go, what I was gonna do, or how I was gonna do it.

When I was about twelve I stabbed a guy for calling me a “motherfucker.” After that, anytime I got locked up it was for a violent crime like being in school with the Zip guns and the chains. I was voted “most likely to die before I was twenty-one years old.” In the streets, the men in the factory and other people said to me that by the time I was sixteen I’d be in prison for the rest of my life, and by the time I was twenty-one I’d be either in jail for life, or headed to the electric chair. I was very much the little terrorist. They used to call me “James Cagney.”

After they put the Prospect Expressway up here, a lot of the abandoned two-family houses had walls that would crack down the middle. I would get one or two other guys, put up big ropes and then pull the side of the house down just to watch the house collapse. It was exciting to watch it cave in, break all the windows, go in there and rob all the copper and stuff. They gave me the knickname “house wrecker.”

Money was a big deal to me ever since I was a kid. I always went around looking for ways and means to make money, whether it was stealing or collecting junk. I would get some of the guys to get up with me at four o’clock in the morning, go down to the junkyard and rent a wagon. I used to sneak out of the house, just walk right out the door, tiptoe. Most of the time my family members slept because they were drinking a lot on Friday night, so you could disappear for a while and nobody would miss you.

We’d go out with this big two-wheeled wagon, a pushcart and start going door-to-door collecting the stuff people would put out on the streets and yell: “Any old rags, old junk” because that’s what we heard an old man yell up in the halls. So we started doing it and they gave us kids a lot of stuff, old newspapers they’d save for us by the week. Wheeling up and down the blocks, by afternoon it was so heavy bringing it back to the junkyard. I had to find an older guy because I couldn’t sign to sell what I had. I would go out and make twelve or thirteen dollars for the whole day, from four in the morning to four in the afternoon, then split it with another guy and give the guy that rented us the wagon a couple a bucks. I had a lot of money, you know, I had like six bucks, six bucks for the whole day. There were days I made twenty bucks. I can’t remember making much more than that. Some days we would steal stuff, put it underneath the rags, stuff like copper, and we would make a little more money.

We would go to Greenwood Cemetery when I was doing a lot of stealing, actually sawing the brass bars off the graves and selling them for junk. We got caught and I got arrested. But they didn’t catch me with the stuff because I’d run away from it. They caught me a block away. I just said, “It ain’t mine, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and they said, “Aw, we know you.” I said, “It ain’t mine.” After staying up there all night sawing with a hacksaw and blades, thinking about the people that owned the graves, thinking about the dead, it would haunt me.

Always with the raggedy-ass clothes on until I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and I started working with the wagons, selling that stuff to the junkyards on Twentieth Street and Fourth Avenue. There was two junkies down there. One was 100 percent legit and the other guy, Joe, would take anything from you. He would do all the brass bars and stuff. I remember in the Ninth Street park, the big brass plates on the walls, I always wanted to take them, but I never did that. Basically we stuck with Greenwood Cemetery. We got in trouble for a lot of vandalism. Sometimes we would get really bad, nasty, like, “Yeah whatever,” we’d tip over tombstones and break some of them.

When I was a kid I developed a really bad reputation with weapons. That’s basically when the gang fighting started, when we were fourteen years old. By the time we were fifteen we had a gang and we were drinking. The Zip guns were a big fad. We got all the Zip gun stuff from the movies, James Dean and the Cagney movies. We learned how to make Zip guns from other people and from looking at books and magazines.

The first weapon was the bat, we always had a lot of stickball bats laying around. While we’d sit and play cards we’d have things put away in a certain spot in case anybody ever came on the block. Down in my cellar, behind the door, there were always baseball bats, my brothers had them down there because they were the building supers. At any given moment we could run to the lots and gather up bats or pipes. Anything was a weapon, a handful of rocks, anything. Much of the time we’d walk to gang fights with half a brick in our hands. I was always very scared of getting hurt. So scared that if you came after me I would hurt you. I was, in my own head, this legend that wasn’t supposed to get hurt so my greatest fear was that people would find out that I did get hurt, a number of times.

We had a car, Jackie had a car. I was about fifteen and he was eighteen. We had a convertible, a yellow Chevy, and we would ride around, just Jackie, me, and Junior, one of the guys that would hang out with me. We would ride around and look at other people’s cars, watch people with their dry cleaning. They would get suits at the tailors and put them in their car. We would follow the car and while they did more shopping we’d bust a window and take their dry cleaning and hock it. There used to be hock shops that would take suits, cameras, and stuff like that. We were out every single day. If we would pass a fruit store, even a bakery or anything like that, we would stop, look, go in, and take a cake or something, just take it, steal it. Sneaky. We would very seldom pay for anything, we were just a bunch of wise guys. Sometimes the guys at the fruit stores would yell at us, “Get out of here you sons of bitches, I’m gonna tell your mothers,” and we’d just yell, “Fuck you,” be nasty to them. Sometimes we wouldn’t be nasty if we liked them. We thought we’d treat them with respect. We’d steal their stuff and not curse at them.

Me and Petey sold firecrackers when we were fourteen to sixteen years old. We each started with twenty, thirty, forty dollars and we made thousands. The fireworks were down in Petey’s cellar and we’d be selling crates and grosses of rockets. We had the whole thing going and we made a lot of money and liked doing it. It gave me some kind of status. There’s a lot of power in having money because you get some respect. When I was able to go in the bar at eighteen and throw some money down on the bar and say, “Give the bar a drink,” that was cool. Just like the guys that used to walk into a bar with the coat draped over their shoulders and everybody would gather around—I knew they were somebody. I knew who they were and other people knew who they were: they were “the Man,” they were “made men,” the guys that did hits, the tough guys. I looked up to them. I always wanted to be a tough guy and I had a lot of respect for them.

Dottie was my first girlfriend. She was fourteen or fifteen, beautiful. There was a thing about Dottie that I liked, I liked who she was, I liked her personality. She was a very tough girl, nasty and rough, but a really good-looking blonde. I think she was Polish. A lot of the guys didn’t like her. I think she was just as lost as I was. I remember us having sex, she being the first girl I had, but I don’t think I told her that at the time. I told her I’d been with a whole bunch of girls because a lot of people thought that. I always thought of how nice my life was then, it felt so good being with her. I’ll never forget the birthmark on the back of her leg.

We had sex in Prospect Park, up on the hill where we used to drink. She wasn’t much of a drinker. We were making out one night, things just got heated up. It was like, “If you’re gonna be with me, you’re gonna have sex with me, what’s it’s gonna be?” Finally it’s a force thing. You say, “I’m not gonna be with you if this doesn’t happen,” and before you know it, it happened. It was great, I really liked her. I don’t know the reason Dottie and I broke up, I think her mother put a lot of pressure on her not to be with me. When I broke up with her she was really sad, she wanted to kill herself. She scared me, I thought she was gonna jump off a bridge.

The older guys used to take me in the bars and let me get served. I used to love a bar called the Hilltop ’cause my brothers and sister hung out there. I loved going in there all dressed up and sitting at the bar with a beer. I don’t even think I was five-five, probably about a hundred pounds and I looked about twelve or thirteen years old, well, fourteen at the most. And there I was sitting there with a beer and acting like I was a tough guy, a real tough guy. I was very well liked by the older guys, so-called racketeers. A lot of them were in the garbage business. They respected me for the simple fact that I was a little tough guy.

I was getting arrested and in trouble and going to jail for attempted murders. We beat a kid up in the park one time, me and Mikey, when we were seventeen, still hanging out in the candy store, still doing the gang fight thing. We went to court and the judge read off the charges. The DA read off the damage done to the kid, he had the Kneelite sign indented in his jaw from the heel of my shoe from stomping on his face. It said Kneelite across his face. We fractured his skull, multiple contusions, and the way they read things off in court, we were like, “Man, this guy’s almost dead!” It was a gang fight, there was a lot of bats, a lot of hitting, and a lot of stuff happening, and then we split, and for some reason my name came up and I was caught and identified. Me and Mike were identified by the guy. While we were waiting to go into the court, a cop came in, looked at us in the cell and said, “‘What are youse gonna do now?” and we said, “What are you talking about?” and he said, “Well the guy you beat up died.” But the truth was the guy didn’t die. I remember telling the cop, “Fuck you, take a hike.” We got cut loose with a couple more years probation.

I spent my whole adolescence going to court and being on probation. I’m not saying there aren’t good cops, but I’m still angry about some police officers. Sometimes they’d take twelve-year-old kids for a ride down to Coney Island and make them walk back. I’ve had cops that while I was handcuffed in a cell made sure they left me hanging three quarters of an inch off the floor on my tiptoes—just because I was a nasty little bastard, making sure that somebody didn’t come to help take me down.

You put a dog in a burlap bag and you beat him up and you take him out, and he sees somebody with a stick or something, he’s going to go after him. You’re gonna make him mean, is what I’m saying. You’re gonna make the dog mean. And that’s what I think happened to me. There was nobody around to calm me down and everybody that hit me, every cop that ever hit me, every person that ever beat me up and I got hurt, I just got more vicious and more angry at anybody and everybody around me.

I was out of school at sixteen and we were ordered by the court to get a job. I got a job in a print shop in New York called the Charles B. Young Company. Jimmy worked there, Frankie worked there, Brian worked there, all the guys. We all started as messengers and we liked it. It was down on Fletcher Street by the Seaport.

I wanted to make some money so I thought of a scheme of printing up chance books. I got a logo put on it, I don’t remember which logo, but you needed a logo ’cause you needed it to be a union logo. I would put that on the chances: five chances for a dollar and the winner would get a twenty-one-inch color TV. Color television had just come out so the color TV shown on there was the second prize, maybe the first prize was $1,000. I would sell all the chances and keep all the money. I would make hundreds and hundreds of dollars because I would have kids going around to all the bars selling the chances. When they would bring back the money, if they sold ten books of chances I would give them back ten bucks and keep the rest. I was a little hustler. I even sold the chances in the bar I hung out in, knowing that there was gonna be no winner. I used to sit there and laugh with a couple of other guys who knew what I was doing.

One night I came home drunk and fell asleep on the couch. The next thing I know my brother comes in, picks me up off the couch and throws me against the wall. He starts kicking me, and fighting and punching, beating me up for being drunk, then my kid-sister Lillian gets in the middle of it. I grab a jar of jelly out of the cabinet and am gonna hit him in the head with it but she steps in the middle and I hit her right in the mouth and knock out all her front teeth. Then I pick up a fork to try to stab my brother, I’m just wild after all my sister’s front teeth are knocked out.