Chapter Five
We never liked the heroin addicts when we were young. We did talk to them and hang out with them, but we said we’d never be like them. Everybody put them down. My mother used to call them “hopheads,” later on “junkies,” “dope fiends.” The name for heroin was “skag,” “junk,” “stuff,” “dugee,” “horse,” and “smack.” Some of the older guys in the gang were heroin addicts already. I looked up to them and modeled myself after them but I never thought I’d become like them.
I did think heroin addicts were the coolest people in the world. They seemed to be able to talk good, to know what they were doing, do crimes and get away with it. They always seemed to have a lot of money to buy dope. I never really understood how they did it, but they were doing schemes and scams, stealing, robbing, hustling. It seemed like they had a lot of balls. They never gave out dope—heroin addicts never give nothing away, never. They had this thing called “cattle rustling” where they would go steal meat at the supermarket and these guys would come on the block in their jackets with all the meats stuffed in their coats and pants. They would have thirty, forty, fifty steaks and roasts and you’d wonder how they’d got all this out of the store. They would make a bundle of money, they would do a burglary, and then they would do a robbery. When they didn’t have the money, they were out walking the streets, sweating and hustling. When they got high they would come back and talk shit to us, tell us not to do this stuff. “Don’t get hooked on this shit, stick to your reefer, stick to your drinking.” They would tell us to stick to certain things but sometimes people just used a little bag of dope every once in a while.
A lot of these guys died. I don’t think all of the addicts died from drugs, but I think they died due to the fact that they were heroin addicts: liver disease, car accidents, murdered, died mysteriously, found dead, OD’d, wild stuff. Whole families I knew, from the mother to the baby brother to the grandson—all dead from heroin. Thing was, we would talk about it for a while and then we just moved on. Somebody died, it happened and that was a shame, but there was no awareness of what was going on—nothing ever clicked. There wasn’t much grieving.
By the time I was eighteen we’re hanging out in the bars, taking a lot of drugs, smoking pot, drinking. I met Pat at a park dance. Pat was Irish, as short as me, maybe an inch smaller, with dark reddish hair. She was very cute, but didn’t have such a good complexion. Her father had left her mother and she was living with her mother, her little kid brothers and her uncle Gerald. I got to know her through the candy store on Thirteenth Street and we started hanging out.
Pat was from a rival gang in south Brooklyn on Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue. She used to go out with one of the guys from the rival gang, Vinny. Because they knew that I was seeing her, if I wanted to show I had balls, I had to walk Pat home every night past Ninth Street to Eighth Street, into her hallway and make sure she got upstairs. There was a few times I got caught when they were waiting for me and wanted to beat me up.
Having sex with Pat was a big thing. I’m not even sure when we first started having sex, if it took place in her house, or my mother’s house, or in the park. It was a really big deal at the time, having sex with a girl. I was always scared her mother or father was gonna find out or she would get pregnant, which we didn’t think too much about. Nobody was gonna go into the store and buy condoms, we just didn’t do it. Some of the girls had abortions at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. We were hanging out in the park, drinking, going to work, having gang fights and going to some parties.
Pat was my girlfriend but I was still seeing Dottie. Dottie was up in this neighborhood on Prospect Avenue but away from them on Fifth Avenue. She was young, fourteen, and couldn’t leave the neighborhood that much. Pat was sixteen and could do more roaming and stay out later. I’d be with Dottie until nine o’clock, then go see Pat because she could stay out till ten. I’d walk Dottie in and she’d say, “Are you going home?” and I’d say, “Yeah, I’m going home,” and then I would go see Pat. I always felt bad about what I did, being sneaky and all like that, but you know when you’re hanging out with the guys it’s a cool thing seeing two girls.
I always had these feelings for Dottie but I liked Pat too because she was a “one of the gang” girl. She could have a beer or two with us and came to most of our drinking parties, not that she was a big drinker. So I was actually with Pat more than I was with Dottie because she could be with me more and I wanted to always have a girl on my side. From the time I was sixteen I stuck with Pat, hanging out, then breaking up, on and off, it was a crazy four years. Once Pat was so jealous she pulled a knife out and tried to stab me in the back, saying I was seeing someone else. I was seeing Dottie. Then her hand closing on the knife and me saying, “What, are you fucking crazy?” I hit her. “What are you trying to stab me for?” I know I rattled her, but I wanted to hit her for doing that.
Pat was eighteen and I was twenty when we got married. I had my son Robert Jr. “Bengie” and after a year we had our daughter Carrie. It’s what everyone did. By that time we were having a lot of marital problems. I was drinking heavily and working nights. Then my wife started seeing another guy, cheating on me and going out. I followed and caught her. She did this with my sister-in-law Cathy a lot, my brother Frank’s wife. They were hanging out in bars while I was working every night overtime, trying to keep the apartment and just “make it big.” But my wife didn’t see it like that. I was never home and though we did try to love each other, to solve our problems, something was never right. I didn’t treat her nice although I tried very hard.
Pat was with her girlfriends and leaving me with the kids. I was having a hard time finding somebody to watch them while I was trying to work at the job. I was the type of guy that never took a day off but I started having to take days off because if Pat worked nights, she wouldn’t come home. She was supposed to be home by one o’clock in the morning, but she was going out to bars and wouldn’t come home till six or seven. By that time it was too late for me to go to work, I was supposed to be in at eight a.m. They understood it a little bit on my job. The company loved me, I grew up with the company. I would call them and they’d punch me in and try to help me. They took me to bunny clubs when I was about eighteen. We drank and went out. I liked it, going to bars. But going home at night and not having my wife home, just a babysitter, I would take the baby from the sitter and sit up all night waiting for my wife to come home. And I would drink. I would drink myself to sleep. I was jealous, angry, and very sad about what was happening. And scared because I had kids and didn’t know what to do.
My family wasn’t helping me, they took the attitude, “Well, you got yourself into this, now get yourself out of it.” Every once in a while I was wringing my hands: “What am I doing, who am I, where am I going?” And then I would distract myself by getting into a whole bunch of illegal shit.
One night I got a phone call. It was a female voice saying to me, “You better ask your wife whose baby she’s carrying and who’s Bill.” Then they said she was four months pregnant. What? What the fuck is this? And I got two kids in the house. It was two or three in the morning when Pat came home with half a bag on, she had been drinking. I got her at the door and said to her, “My God, are you pregnant? Take your coat off and let me see.” I remember her admitting that she was pregnant by somebody else. I didn’t know what to do. When she came home and was pregnant, it blew me away. It really destroyed me. Something happened inside that sent me on a rampage of anger and resentment about women, about who I was and what I was supposed to do. My fucking life was over, I was devastated and shocked. I threw her out of the house. I knew I didn’t want to be with her but I didn’t know what to do with the children. I tried to get different babysitters, my mother, my father. I finally got a woman who would watch them in the daytime until I came home from work. Later, the woman said to me, “Can I take the kids home and watch them at my house and you pick them up on the weekend?” I said, “Yeah, we could do that.”
I never cheated on my wife—I never went out with anybody. I probably saw a prostitute on the job where I was, that was part of what I used to do. We worked twenty-four hours around the clock printing for law and financial companies. I used to get prostitutes for the big lawyers and Wall Street bosses. I knew these madams and I’d be the one to call them up to bring the girls down to the firms. I also knew women because I’d hang out in the bars on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side. I could get what I wanted for nothing from the girls. It was a status thing. Yeah, I can have you, and I did. I was cool. I never felt good about being with a hooker, I was always a very shy guy, but I did do stuff like that.
At the bars they started to do a lot of pills and I started to do even more pills and use speed and smoke a lot of reefer. I thought, “I can make money doing this.” So while I was working in the printing company I took out a loan for a thousand dollars and started dealing drugs. I bought speed, pills, pot, mescaline, and LSD and sold drugs up on the parkside, better known as “Hippie Hill” in the sixties. It was a big festival, a small Woodstock.
I became a major drug dealer. Pat used to come every once in a while and take the kids out. Then I gave them back to her. She and her boyfriend Bill had the kids for a while until I saw what they were doing. I didn’t like the way Pat was treating them. I went over there one night with money to give her. We had become sort of half-assed friends. Like, “You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine, you’ve got the kids—here, take some money.” And I’d give her some money. One night I went over there and I saw that she was locking them in their room. Carrie was locked in her room and the latch was on the outside of the door. I said, “Why’s the fucking door locked?” and she’s like, “Well, you know, they come out and they bother me.” “What do you mean they bother you?” and I kicked the fucking door down and took the kids away from her and brought them back to the woman who’d been watching them. I hated Pat at this time. I really hated her.
When I’m up on Hippie Hill in the park, that’s my domain, that’s when I became “Bengie the drug dealer.” From the early sixties to 1970, I made literally like ten million dollars. People thought I had a lot of people behind me. I was dealing a lot of drugs, supplying the whole neighborhood with drugs. The cops weren’t so much a presence, they seemed to keep a blind eye to what was going on. They were there but they didn’t know what to do—they didn’t know how to handle us. We were flying on acid.
I was also hanging out in the after-hours clubs and “skin popping” speed. I didn’t mainline right away until one day John, a hairdresser who looked like Edward Scissorhands, said, “Let me try to get you off.” I stuck out my arm. He shot me in the arm but he missed, he fucked up the shot. Then I really wanted to find out what it was all about. He gave me so much that it fucking overamped me and I was shaking all over. He blew the shot but he also blew my brains out.
At first you’re scared, I was terrified, but then as I came down a little bit and I didn’t die, I started hallucinating. It was cool, wild, and psychedelic, weird. We were with girls, we’d be naked doing all this crazy shit. You had to do it in a safe place where nobody was going to bother you, knock on the doors, where nobody was going to bust in because then you’d get your head blown and the trip would go away. I had about eight locks on the door. I’d have girls up in my house, lay them on the table, and I’d put the speed in their belly buttons and then put the water in and mix it all up. Your whole body is saturated with speed. You’re almost fucking dead, close to dead.
Then I started shooting crystal speed and I became a lunatic, staying up for days. I was still working in the printing company. I would stay up for three or four days, go to work, stay up for twenty-four hours a day. Never tired. Super energy. Working on my job, making hundreds of dollars. I had people coming to my house buying drugs. I had money stacked away, I had guns all over the place. I sold guns, Junior did hijackings, we went out and stole cars, tagged them, and went with Cathy down to the Motor Vehicles to get them registered. We knew nurses and doctors that did abortions. We had another scheme with Cathy, who was the biggest con artist I knew: we would get these pills and would say they were pills for bringing on miscarriages. I can’t believe how many different illegal things we were into, anything that made money.
I became partners with my friend Ronnie. We would get rich families from Westchester or Montauk and we built up a clientele. I’m going to clubs in the city dealing speed, barbiturates, Tuinals and Seconals, we were making money. I had a drugstore that used to sell them to us. We used to threaten the guy that we’d kill him and he was so scared he’d sell us jars of thousands of pills. We went around terrorizing people. I became my own best customer and became a heroin addict as well. We ran out of speed one day, it was disappearing from the scene but I got a couple of bags of heroin and Eddie “got me off,” shot me up with heroin. Meanwhile, I’m still mainlining the speed when I can get it.
One of the best drugs I ever did was heroin because it calmed me down. Using speed I was eventually gonna go out there and kill somebody or myself because you become super paranoid on speed. I was in TriBeCa as they called it, with the vacant lofts where they were making and using speed on Chambers and Church streets. People looked like fucking zombies—skinny, eyes popping out of their skulls, skin like leather—people who were up for weeks on end. Not that I looked much better, but I always looked at people that were worse than me and said, “Wow, they’re fucked up.”
Meanwhile I was bad. I used to have a big handlebar mustache and a bandanna around my head, I looked like some of the black people I dealt with who used to call me “the devil with blue eyes.” I got into cult stuff and fucking speed raps that would drive people nuts to the breaking point. I had this aura that said I would hurt you.
Crystal meth. I made millions of dollars on the shit. A hundred twenty-five dollars an ounce and they were cooking it. In Queens I had a guy making it with vials of chemicals. We used to call the guy “Arnold Stang.” He was a little college guy, a chemist, and he was making drugs called “acid blotters.” They did this stuff up in Woodstock. We rented old farmhouses because of the odor. I was really alone in this, but I always took people in as partners because I didn’t want to be alone. If it wasn’t Ronnie, it was Cathy, or Junior, or this one or that one.
I had bodyguards and about twenty-five guys working for me. I had four apartments in the Brooklyn area: Forty-third and Ninth Avenue, First Street and Fifth Avenue, McDonald and Avenue I, Eleventh Avenue between Prospect and Windsor Place. I would deal drugs out of all these apartments. I took care of two children, or I thought I did. The woman who had them took care of them. She potty-trained them and did everything for them. It was a very hard time in my life. When I say hard time I was actually very lonely, but I did a lot of acid. I shot a lot of LSD, I liked to hallucinate. I took tabs of acid and would then mix it. I would cook up some heroin and then cold-shake some speed and I would mix them all together and then shoot it. I called it “frisco speedball.” A big shot. It would make me totally insane. I would go into this wild hallucinogenic trip and then I would come down and I’d be speeding and then I’d be nodding. I was an insane drug user.
Even in the drug game with as much money as I had, I still went out and robbed card games. I did stickups, I did burglaries. I didn’t have to, it was part of the whole ego trip. You feel better than everyone and that you can do anything. When I had a car and we were all on speed, we never got to where we were going. Our minds were so absorbed in what we were doing we’d make all the wrong turns. We’d make lefts, we’d make rights. Your mind drifts and the next thing you know you’re in a different part of town. One night we tried to get to Long Island for about ten hours. We couldn’t even get on the fucking Long Island Expressway.
Pat got out of New York. She moved to California with her baby, Laura. She didn’t stay with Bill, he was an alcoholic and disappeared somewhere into the night, just faded out of the picture. I took Pat and Laura in. I wanted to take her back. I was making a lot of money but I’d be using and Pat really didn’t like me using the needle. I had no time for her or the kids and all our lives wound up being a terrible disaster. It wasn’t working. We went our separate ways.
I was still dealing drugs and going and doing all these crimes. The cars, abortion stuff, watching people die, shooting dope with people, moving their bodies to different places so the cops wouldn’t catch us in the house. It was tough, very tough to do this. Looking at people and saying they died because they didn’t know how to use drugs right. Thinking that I was some kind of doctor or chemist or immortal that could do all this because of the way I mixed drugs, the way I shot drugs. People didn’t like to stay and shoot drugs with me, they used to walk out of the room. Junior and Ritchie got out, so many people wanted to get away from me when I shot drugs. I’d have card games in the house and play Monopoly on speed with four or five people, our guns out on the table to be sure no one was cheating.
The kids were living with the woman but I used to take them on the weekends. One weekend I was just coming down from a speed trip after four or five days and I brought my four-year-old son Bengie up to my apartment. I didn’t take Carrie because she was still a little baby. I fell asleep on the couch while he was walking around. When I woke up I couldn’t find him and my door was open. I lived on the fourth floor and the roof door one flight up was open. I panicked, ran up on the roof, looked down all four sides of the roof, ran down to the street, looked around the yard, looking if I could see his little body with a white T-shirt on it, thinking the kid walked up to the roof and fell off. I looked in the house, in the bedroom, under the bed. I couldn’t find my son. I said, “Fuck it. Somebody kidnapped him. One of the drug dealers came up and saw my door was open, walked in and took my kid. What am I gonna do, oh God, what am I gonna do? I can’t believe this.” Then I bent down on the floor and looked under the couch and there he was sleeping. He was sleeping under the couch. I pulled him out. I remember just hugging and kissing him and saying, “Oh my God, I’ll never let this happen again.”
But I could not stop using drugs. I could not stop using. I just kept using and using and using. It was really very frightening, I didn’t know about any detoxes. I didn’t know about any treatment, I just said, “I gotta slow down, I gotta stop, this can’t happen. I can’t let this happen. I have children, I have children.” I went around telling people about how I’m not worried about anything and meanwhile I’m always worried about everything. I just didn’t know who to tell. How do you tell people you’re scared or worried or anything like that? You could never do that, then you’d become vulnerable. It’s like a mysterious world you’re in: Kill or be killed. Be strong, just do it, be more aware, be more alert. I did a lot of speed and uppers and cocaine because the drugs kept me aware of people around me. The heroin made me nod out. I was robbed, beaten even though I would run. I would have six or seven people in my house, all with masks on bagging up the dope for two or three days. The fumes would roll off onto your skin and you’d get high. People were nodding out at the table for Christ’s sake while bagging this stuff up. I would tell them they didn’t have to steal, and yet I watched people steal, and other people ratted people out and then they would have to get hit—beat up—for that.
I had people working for me that robbed me and I told them they were gonna get fucking killed. Some of them left Brooklyn and got out of town because I was after them. One guy who was working for me stole from me, he lived out in Bay Ridge and one day I went to his house with a rented truck and a couple of guys. We emptied out his whole house and left his pregnant wife sitting on a kitchen chair. I took everything from him because he had to be taught a lesson. I took all his furniture and gave it to everybody on the block. I just didn’t give a fuck. I said, “I’m getting my money off of this guy. He’s a punk, leaves his wife to take his punishment.” I’d told him I was coming and would empty his fucking house. I didn’t want to do it to her, I wanted to do it to him. But she was part of it, she knew what he was doing. She used drugs too and it was part of the fucking game. I was just meaner.
When the cops busted me, they robbed me. There were cops that robbed drug dealers, it’s just the way it was. They’d rob me because I couldn’t do anything, but one time I did. I went downtown, got some of my so-called “wise guy friends,” and we cornered the cop in the bar. I got all my goods back, 125 guns, and I got to slap him in the face, take his off-duty revolver and say, “Now you go back and tell your sergeant.” He wound up getting thrown off the force.
I got heroin from these two hit men my biker friend, Chuch, hooked me up with, crazy guys who used to scare the shit out of me every time. Sometimes I did pickups for them. They would call, tell me to go to a certain bar in Manhattan by the Brooklyn Bridge. I would go like a secret agent, I always kept a jacket on so you couldn’t see my tattoos. I combed my hair and looked different than I normally did. I grew a beard, I shaved off the beard. I grew a mustache, I shaved it off. I gained weight, lost weight. You took precautions.
I was told to put two nickels, a penny, a quarter, and a dollar bill on the bar and ask for a beer. The bartender would know who I was and he’d give me the key to a car. He’d say, “It’s a Chevy, it’s on such-and-such block and this is the license plate number.” I would drink the beer, walk out and get in the car without searching or looking, drive over the Brooklyn Bridge to a certain place, leave it, put the key under the mat and go home. Then I would wait for a phone call.
I would never look back. You never knew who was looking at you, who was watching. They tested you. Might be an empty car, might even be nothing in the car. They just wanted to see if you were going to do as told. I would get paid a thousand bucks to drive the car, but then I would get a kilo of dope to deal or sell. That’s like a million dollars for Christ sake. I always paid them back because I knew they would kill me dead in a minute. I would never let anybody around this heroin, I kept it so secret. I would jump in a cab and take some to my mother’s house, some over here, some over there. Hide it. In one night I would put this stuff in six different places where I couldn’t get caught. In other words if you took an ounce off me, that was okay, you weren’t getting the rest.
The two hit men who were giving me heroin to sell were found wrapped up in a van out in Brooklyn with a lot of bullets in them. Then I was told to get the hell out of Brooklyn for a while, so I says, “I better get the fuck out of here.” I don’t know who was killing who or what it was all about. I found out later that one guy got high on coke and was fucking around with the wise guy’s niece and raped her in an after-hours club. That was the end of the hit men.
I had gotten fired from my job for not showing up and had marriage problems and two little children. I rented a U-Haul and I had a phony driver’s license. So we’re going to Woodstock, it’s 1969, I got fifteen or sixteen people in the van with the strobe light spinning and I’m ringing this siren because the roads were blocked. I ran off an embankment and the van turned over and we all crawled out. I left the van ’cause it was never in my name, it was always in somebody else’s name. I took my knapsack with all my drugs in it and what did I do? I shot speed, did LSD, and smoked reefer all through Woodstock. I got up in the front, saw Hendrix and a few other people. The rest of it is a blur, a muddy blur watching the naked girls in the mud. Woodstock was “free love” and “flower children,” but the place stunk. We were drinking out of fifty-five-gallon drums filled with water. There was no food for 400,000 people, the stores were empty. The farmers were giving us peanut butter sandwiches. It was crazy but nobody was fighting, not a single fistfight.
We went over to this kid Vito’s house in Monticello, he worked in the printing company where I worked and his parents owned a house up there. He had a whole bunch of girls there and I gave them all Tuinals and Nembutals and they all got wacky on three-grain Tuinals, better known as “gorilla biscuits.” They all started getting foolish and fucked up and then the lamp fell over and started a fire. The whole house burned down ’cause everybody was on barbiturates, meaning Tuinals, Seconals, and Nembutals. Vito was crying so much, all that was left was a screen door. I borrowed a guy’s car and drove down the hill to go get some stuff, there was five of us in this convertible. I remember hitting speeds about seventy miles an hour, then making a turn and the car hit the side of an embankment and the wheels and the axle busted on the car as we went off the road. I told the guy, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll pay ya.” I gave him a few hundred dollars and walked away from the car. I just went, “Shut up, don’t worry about it.” I never saw the guy again.