NEAR MISS?

I took the long route down to Joe Cheese’s place. I stayed off the main highways and continually checked my rear-view mirror to see if I had company. I knew I would have to find out who had been tailing me before I hit Squillante, because people who tail people have an awful habit of turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Cheese’s place was not very crowded when I walked in. “Where are all the broads?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s Monday night and it’s early. People are recovering from the weekend. We’ll do some business later on.”

“Fine, then you and I can do some business now. I got orders for cigarettes.” The Cheese was one of the biggest shylocks in New York City at this time. We had worked together on a number of things throughout the years, but lately all of our business was in the cigarette field. It was a straight cash deal. He would loan me $80,000 and expect that back plus $15,000 from the profits. If we were arrested, which was very unlikely, it was a straight wash, I didn’t owe him any money. My profits, for sending trucks to Carolina, bringing back about 40,000 cartons of cigarettes and distributing them, came to about $10,000. The Cheese made a bigger slice than I did because he was gambling with his money; all I was putting up was my freedom.

It is a profitable way of making a living. The obvious question is, if I’m making $10,000 on cigarettes and not really taking any chances, and $20,000 on a killing in which I’m risking my life, why bother with the killing? There are a few reasons.

First, the only reason I’m in a position to put together a deal like this is because I have a heavyweight reputation. That comes from pulling the trigger, everything else is secondary. When I stop pulling the trigger that rep is gone and with it go many earning opportunities.

Second, there is excitement involved in the doing. I pull the trigger for the same reason people who have become millionaires in the rackets continue to risk going to jail by running two bit bookie or numbers operations. It gets in your blood and becomes the most natural thing to do. I can’t imagine anything more boring than running a cigarette smuggling operation every week.

And third and finally, there is more security in pulling the trigger than hauling butts. There have been times when the state troopers and tax people made it too dangerous to bring cigarettes in and I had to stop. There has never been a bad time for killing.

I told Cheese I would need the money Thursday night, cash in full, and he agreed. He told me to meet him at the restaurant and he would have a shopping bag for me. That was his joke.

I told him if the horses I was betting didn’t pick up by then he could consider it a going-away present. That was my joke.

It was past 11:30 by this point and I figured the ladies would be getting tired of one another and I could return to my humble abode and get some work done. My timing was not quite right and I had to sit in the bedroom for a few more hands and the last round of coffee and cake. I tried to make the best use of the time by contacting a guy named Bobby Roach who I often did cigarette deals with. Bobby is an arranger, a hustler. He makes things happen. He gets goods and he moves goods, but he is more than a fence because he actively goes out and gets his items. Like cigarettes. And burglar alarms.

“Burglar alarms!” I screamed into the phone, laughing. “You have got to be shitting me.”

“No, honest,” he said. “There was this truck full of small home burglar alarms that anyone can install, and somehow the truck ended up in one place and the load ended up in another.”

Now I had heard absolutely everything. This crook was selling hot burglar alarms.

“Can you maybe get rid of a few for me?” he asked. “We got about six hundred pieces. I priced them and they sell for fifteen bucks and up. We want seven each.”

I told him I didn’t want anything to do with his hot burglar alarms. Then I told him I had orders for 40,000 cartons of cigarettes and cash to pay for them.

“Whattya want me to do?” he asked.

“Everything. I got some business going and I don’t have the time to do this thing right. I’ll give you the money and the orders. You get the trucks, pick up the load, bring them back and deliver them. I’ll give you five thousand bucks.”

“Sounds familiar,” he said. And that was it. The Roach could handle this operation because the thing was so smooth it practically ran itself. It didn’t require much brainpower, just time. And that is exactly what the Roach had: a little brainpower and a lot of time.

He agreed to start working on the operation and I made arrangements to meet him Thursday night with the money. I wanted the trucks to leave Thursday night so they could be back over the weekend, in time for Monday deliveries.

The house was finally clear when I finished with the Roach. “How’d you do?” I asked my wife and she frowned.

“I lost,” she said. The final tab was two dollars and change and she was the big loser. She was very grumpy about it.

“You big-time gamblers are gonna break us,” I laughed. At the time I didn’t know how lucky she was going to be. A year later she discovered the trotters and one night hit the superfecta for more than $5000. My old lady. It turned out later that there was some talk about the race being fixed, but she didn’t know it when she won. And the money still cashed.

But now she’d had a tough night at the table and was going to sleep. This was fine with me, I wanted to sit down and get a good, long look at my notes.

I now have Squillante’s routine down as good as I’m going to get it. He follows a very strict schedule every morning and then is somewhat irregular in the afternoon and totally unscheduled at night. That meant, unless I could draw him to me, I was going to have to hit him during his rounds in the morning, near his girlfriend’s project or the social club in the afternoon. There were a number of possibilities. I took a clean sheet of white paper and made a list of the places which had potential. In the column next to each place I listed all the possible problems. In this way I began eliminating different areas.

My major concerns were my ability to get him alone and in the open, the traffic flow in the area and the availability of public transportation. Because this entire job was going to take place in the Bronx where I had grown up and prospered, I knew the traffic patterns reasonably well. While chasing Squillante I had been taking careful notes about stop signs, lights, oneway streets and schools in the area. (You try to mix with a crossing guard lady when school lets out and you will have more trouble than if you get caught pumping bullets into your target.)

Finding a place that insures quick, easy and dependable movement is of the utmost importance. I know of more than one individual who blew a job because they didn’t think it through from beginning to end. One particular guy worried about the end, the getaway, more than anything else and worked out a very careful plan. His only problem was he forgot to worry about the beginning. He timed the job so he would be able to make the hit and then meet some people for dinner. His mistake was getting on the East River Drive. There was an accident and he was delayed 35 minutes and missed his target. So he had to have his dinner without the appetizer.

He could have avoided this by staying off main thoroughfares until late at night. Whenever possible I use side streets because I know I can always get through. But there are some things that you simply can’t plan for. I blasted a guy in Brooklyn one time, dropped the car I was driving, walked two blocks to the New Lots Avenue subway and got on a train to the Bronx. That should have been it.

But the train got stuck in the tunnel. This was in the middle of summer and I’m wearing a sports jacket because I’ve got a cannon tucked into my shirt. So I’m sitting on that train with a just-fired piece which I’m looking to dump, and it’s digging into my body. I’m sweating like a stuck pig but there is absolutely no way I can take the jacket off. There is nothing for me to do but sit there and wonder why the train was stuck. Naturally the first thing that popped into my creative mind was that someone had seen me pull the trigger and tailed me to the station and then called the coppers. And they stopped the entire New York City transit system just to get me. It was possible. Eventually the train started moving and there proved to be nothing to worry about. They had stopped for a body on the tracks or something. But my point is that there was absolutely no way I could have planned for that natural mishap.

In looking over my list of potential places to do my work, my first choice had been Hunts Point, but the more I thought about it the less I liked it. The place itself was good, the timing was bad. When he was in the area there was a lot of truck traffic and it was too congested for me to get out as quickly as I thought necessary. Still, a possibility.

His girlfriend’s house also had potential but tough problems. She lived on a one-way street which led almost directly to a stop sign and then onto a main thoroughfare. This means I might have to sit there waiting for traffic to let up. Also the Throgs Neck Expressway went right by there, which created much more traffic than I care for. The final thing, which just about eliminated the project from consideration, was the overabundance of kids living in the area. You can never tell when one of them is going to pop up out of nowhere and see something bad for his or her eyes.

The candy store is also a bad traffic area. You have to go down 174th Street which is particularly busy at that hour, and there are a number of one-way streets which cuts down on my choices if I should have to get away quickly. One problem I don’t need is the possibility of a head-on collision while I’m trying to leave.

I could have hit him easily when he came out of his apartment building, but I have strong feelings about violating a man’s home. I guess it goes back to my own personal experience. I believe a man’s home is his sanctuary and that includes areas around it. To me, there is not much difference between hitting a man in his living room, which is forbidden by organization custom, or on his front lawn, which is not.

That left the social club which seemed to have interesting possibilities. There was a good traffic flow. After dark there were not too many people on the streets. Those street lights that still worked were dim. The timing was good in that, according to Sweetlips, he usually left the place after dark. And there were dark doorways I could wait in.

But the negatives outweighed the positives. Number one, I couldn’t be sure exactly when he was going to be at the club or when he would leave. He didn’t seem to go there at any specific time or stay for any predetermined length. Number two, I saw him leave with another person. This may have been a fluke or Squillante may be a nice guy who drives people home. If it can be avoided you never make a hit when there is only one person with your target. That one person is going to be looking right at you. A restaurant or crowded area is different. There people will usually panic and give 15 different descriptions of you.

Number three, the thing that really eliminated the club was that I remembered it was owned by Jimmy “Blue Eyes” Alio. I don’t think he would be too thrilled if somebody got gunned coming out of his place. Bad for business, naturally. Even though he himself was in the can at this particular time, these were his people running the place and out of respect for him I crossed the social club off my list.

This did not leave me with much. In reality, each of these places had something to offer, as well as drawbacks. I’m positive I could have done the job in any of these places and gotten away with it, but none of them gave me the one thing I was looking for: the dependable edge. The advantage that made the job an unstoppable certainty. With his mundane existence, Joe Squillante was making my work difficult.

Squillante didn’t go anywhere alone on a regular basis at night. I would have loved that. Not that I can’t work in the daylight. I can and I have. I can work anywhere and anytime. But dark is better for all the obvious reasons. I had absolutely no way of predicting what he did at night. Unless I drew him out and had him come to me.

The more I thought about it the more appealing that idea became. Normally I don’t like to do this for two reasons. Whenever you set a guy up you force him to alter his schedule and this in itself may make him wary. Particularly an individual like Squillante, who had a lot to be wary about. And when a man is wary he is on edge and hence much more difficult to surprise.

Second, and worse, setting a person up usually means involving at least one other man and I did not like that at all. Particularly in this case. I don’t like other people knowing what I’m doing and, more importantly, when I’m doing it. Specially when those “other people” are Jackie Sweetlips.

Besides the possibility of the double-cross, other people are simply not reliable. I once had a man delivered to me in a vacant field and the jerk who dropped him off just let him out of the car, then drove away. The target took one look around, realized what was happening, and took off like a scared murder victim. I had to run the Kentucky Derby to catch him. When you work by yourself these are problems you just don’t have.

So I sat there for an hour weighing the advantages of different areas and different times. I would not really know if I had made the right decision until long after the job had been forgotten. That was always the key. If the job was forgotten I did it right. The wrong decision could cost me a long stay in the Graybar and a reputation amongst my employers that I was getting sloppy. Tentatively I decided to bring him to me. I wasn’t sure where, but the Bronx is chock-full of wonderful isolated little pockets that have been used as meeting grounds and body dumpings for more years than I’ve been around. The thing I had to be careful about was setting myself up for Jackie Sweetlips while I was busy setting up Squillante for the job. I decided to meet with Jackie on Tuesday and see if his fish would swallow my bait.

I called him about fifth thing in the afternoon: Tuesday was a busy day. First and most important on this day, I planned to service my bettors. When they lose I expect them to pay on time and when they win they have every right to expect likewise. Therefore, except on rare occasions, I do not miss.

Tuesday was almost a rare occasion. Very rare.

Before leaving my apartment Tuesday morning I debated changing cars to give me an edge over whoever was trailing me. It would take them some time to pick me up. But I realized I already had an edge: I knew they were there. So I decided to stick with my aging, but comfortable, automobile.

I walked out of my apartment and started toward my car. As I walked I was checking the cars parked up and down the road, seeing if the Chevy was waiting for me. It wasn’t in sight.

As I stepped out between two parked cars to cross the street, a yellow cab turned the corner and started down the block. I noticed that the driver had his light on, meaning he had no passengers, and that he was staring right at me. I waited.

He came closer and I took a step back, this guy seemed to be hogging the side of the road I was standing on. He kept coming closer.

He was looking right at me when I knew he was trying to run me down. He couldn’t have been more than 75 feet away and I would guess he was traveling about 40 miles per hour. My memory is that he accelerated that last 75 feet.

My reactions were good. I threw my entire body on the hood of the car just behind me, brushing my leg as I landed. I used the momentum of my leap to continue rolling across the hood, until I dropped off the car onto the pavement on the other side. I hit the ground and grabbed the loaded .38 I was carrying.

The cab screeched to a halt, leaving a trail of rubber in the street maybe 30 feet long. The driver came jumping out of the cab and ran towards me. I put my finger on the trigger and aimed.

“Hey, Mac, are you okay?” the driver screamed. Then he saw the gun resting on the hood of the car. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“Don’t make a move or I’ll blow you away,” I said as calmly as I could. He stuck his hands straight up in the air, like somebody had just rammed a broomstick up his ass.

“Hey, man, I’m really sorry. I’ve been …”

“Shut up!” I ordered. “Lean forward on the car, stretch both your hands out onto the hood.” He did just what I told him and then I walked around and gave him a quick shakedown. Nothing on him. I walked to his cab, still keeping an eye on him, and made a perfunctory and fruitless search.

“What the hell was that all about?” I demanded. “You’re very lucky to be alive right now.” He was in his late forties, I would guess, with graying sideburns and a weathered face. He still had his beret on.

He started to turn around as he began talking. “What happened was …”

“Don’t move,” I said. “I can hear you.”

“… was I’ve been driving since seven o’clock last night and I guess I just went into a trance. I’m lucky I didn’t kill you,” he said.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. “What are you doing in the Bronx?”

“I had a passenger. I just dropped him off.”

“Where?” He named a nearby street. It was a legitimate place. His story did seem believable, but he had come too close to killing me. It just would have been too convenient for Sweetlips.

I walked over to his cab door again, reached in and pulled out the hack license. The face in the photograph was lean, had a big mustache and a full head of hair. I looked at the driver. I looked back at the photograph. The driver had no mustache, but he could have shaved it. It could have been his picture. I reached over and pulled off his beret.

He was as bald as a cue ball.

I put the gun into his left ear. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I told you,” he said, “I was just …”

I pressed the barrel into his ear, twisting it just a touch. Quietly I asked, “If you’re the driver then who the fuck is this?” I shoved the license in his face.

He was really scared. “That’s my brother-in-law. This is his cab. I take it out some nights. That’s all, honest, that’s all, I swear.”

I just didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I stood there, doing nothing.

He kept talking. “Listen, buddy, if I tried to run you down, why would I stop? I woulda kept going if I was trying.”

“Maybe you wanted to shoot me.”

“Are you crazy? Shoot? Me? Man, I never fired a gun in my life. I don’t own a gun! Look, call my brother-in-law and he’ll tell you just what I told you.”

I released the trigger. He might be telling the truth. There was just no way I could prove it one way or the other. So I had to mark it down as a dangerous accident.

It shook me up a little. I was spending so much time thinking about what Squillante was doing and what Sweetlips might be doing that I was losing touch with what was actually going on. This served as a dangerous reminder.

“Go on,” I said testily, “get the fuck out of here. If there’s a next time, you’re dead.” I put the gun away. The cabbie ran to his cab and zoomed down the block. I looked both ways before crossing to my car.

This incident slowed me down a bit. If it was set up by Sweetlips, it was done damn cleverly, and I missed a few of my early customers thinking about it. I did my best to work my way down my sheet. I busted my hump paying and collecting.

And I saved my one problem, Sorry Solly from the garment district, for last. Solly had not been around at the beginning of the previous week for some reason, but he got on the phone when I called Thursday and guaranteed he would have the $3000 he owed me by Tuesday. Now it’s Tuesday and I’m calling and I’m being told he isn’t in. I knew I was getting the run-around, so I went visiting.

His place was on the third floor of an old building on 29th Street just off Seventh Avenue. He was standing right in the showroom, displaying some merchandise for a customer, when I walked in. When he saw me he was obviously unhappy but there was no great display of emotions. He just excused himself from his customer and took me into his office.

Physically, Solly was just what you would expect in the garment district. He was about five-feet six-inches tall, thin and had a full head of white hair. I would guess he was in his early sixties, but there was really no way of telling.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t like to come up to a guy’s place unless …”

He interrupted me. “It’s okay. Listen, I got a problem. I don’t have your money.” It was obvious he didn’t want to waste any time either. “See, I had to borrow money for my spring line which is doing well, but people just aren’t paying their bills on time.”

“You could’ve told me that three weeks ago. What the hell you been putting me off for?” Now I’m getting mad but I’m still trying not to lose my temper.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I kept expecting the money to come in. And it’s coming, but I’ve got to pay my suppliers too, you know.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But if you knew you couldn’t pay what the fuck did you keep betting for? You’re costing me time and money. What do I need you for?”

“If I knew why I kept betting I’d stop betting and then I wouldn’t owe you the money, right?” He paused. “Listen, you got to give me one more week. Next week …”

That was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I guess the strain of my near accident finally came out. “I don’t want to hear any more of that next week crap. I want my money and I want it now.”

“I don’t have it. What are you going to do, kill me for three thousand bucks?” All of a sudden he’s a wiseguy.

“Okay smartass. I ain’t gonna kill you. I’m gonna do you a favor. I’ll be back Thursday afternoon and I’m gonna take you to meet a man who is going to lend you the money you owe me. And then …”

He cut in. “You mean a shylock? I will not …”

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m telling you something. I ain’t askin’, I’m tellin’. I’m gonna take you to meet this guy and you and I are gonna settle up for good. I don’t want you betting with me no more.” I started to get up. “Let me tell you something else. If you had been a gentleman about this thing, if you had answered my phone calls today or told me the story three weeks ago, I woulda worked something out with you. Now you can go fuck yourself. You be here Thursday afternoon.”

Solly sat there sort of stunned. I don’t think he was used to having people give him orders. And we both knew I wasn’t kidding. I walked out and left him sitting here.

I drove over to Jackie’s lot and he wasn’t there. So I left word that a friend of Petey’s had been by to see him and wanted to talk about a possible deal, and that I would meet him at the Half Moon around 11 P.M.

Thus far it had been a very frustrating day and I really needed something to get my rocks off. I needed to fire a gun. So this was a perfect time to test fire the weapon that I planned to kill Squillante with. The test firing would take place in a safe basement in Yonkers. But before I went I decided to take a quick swing by Squillante’s place and see if my boy was home safely.

On the way I continually checked my rear-view mirror, but there didn’t seem to be anyone on my tail.

When I reached Squillante’s apartment I double-parked under a tree, hiding myself within its shadow so Mrs. Gibson couldn’t see me, and watched. I sat there maybe five minutes and then the door opened and someone walked out. In the shadow of the building it was difficult to see who it was, but for some reason the walk looked familiar. I watched as he got closer, feeling safe because my car was completely hidden. He came closer and closer, although he didn’t look in my direction. He didn’t have to.

He was about 30 yards away when I recognized him.

Jackie Sweetlips was leaving Squillante’s apartment!