We were armed with chains, bats, zip guns, and our newest, most dazzling piece of weaponry that I designed myself—homemade Molotov cocktails . . .
By senior year, KGL was a massive army.
We had nearly five hundred members and it was all my doing—I was a born leader. It was time for a hostile takeover. Eddy and I had a new sit-down with Dennis, the grand president, and told him how it was gonna be from now on.
“I’m the new grand president,” I informed Dennis, matter-of-factly. Eddy stood next to me, silent and huge. Dennis was quiet; there was nothing he could say or do about it. I’d turned his fraternity of jocks into a gang of thieves, and his original members were so afraid of me, they followed my orders. Now that I was to be the real capo of all the KGL chapters, they’d have even more to fear.
Every morning I swung my Chevy into the prime spot in the school parking lot—there was no name on it but everyone knew it was mine, including the teachers. I got a new bodyguard—Corky Quant, my most massive and menacing recruit to date. Corky was 6′6″ and 280 pounds, and everywhere I went, Corky was sure to go. When I had to bust up ABS’s Monday night frat meeting to challenge them to a showdown, Corky was by my side.
The tension between ABS and KGL had been building for months—especially after I found out they tried to steal our drug clientele. I stoked their anger by spreading talk around school that they were pussies and scared to fight us. I knew what I was doing; I knew how these games I was playing were going to end—with a knockdown, bloody war. It’s what I wanted.
In retaliation, the wusses took it out on Stan Parrot, my Woodstock buddy. Stan was a jock and played football with them. (One of their players, by the way, was Bruce Huther, later a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, the Cleveland Browns, and the Chicago Bears.) After practice in the spring of 1971, they cornered Stan alone in the locker room and smashed his face with a shot put, busting his nose and teeth.
They messed with Stan, so I declared war. I arranged for three hundred of our guys to wait on the hill by Manchester High with baseball bats, chains, knives, and zip guns—a cross between a sling-shot and a crossbow that shot nails. Meanwhile, Stevie and Corky came with me to bang on the basement door of the ABS meeting a few blocks away.
“You busted up Stan,” I said to a roomful of football players, “so now you gotta meet us down the street at the school. You think you’re so tough? We’ll be waiting for you. You better show up, you punk motherfuckers.”
Thirty minutes later they came up the hill, and like a scene out of Braveheart, my guys appeared from behind the crest and charged, taking them by surprise. When those scooch a menz jocks saw my armed militia running toward them, they turned around and fled. Like I said—pussies. Fucking meows. The cops showed up and made everyone disperse, which was too bad because I was looking forward to breaking some heads.
Our biggest gang war was with SKD—we called them “Skids.” They wore black and gold. Our two gangs were bitter rivals, like a teenage version of the Bloods and the Crips. And when I heard that they, too, were trying to hone in on our drug clients, I went berserk.
Danny and I and twenty of our guys crashed a dance at St. Teresa’s, where we knew some Skids would be, near the end of our senior year. Outside in the parking lot, I had 150 of my soldiers waiting. My plan: to lure the Skids out and beat the shit out of them, like we tried to do with ABS before they ran away like little girls.
Inside, though, there were hundreds of them and they swarmed us.
“Giacomaro, what the fuck are you doing here? We’re gonna tear your head off,” said one SKD guy, “and stick it up your ass.”
“Oh, yeah? Well I’m gonna kick your fucking dicks in!”
But we were outnumbered times ten. Even the band onstage could see that and struck up Black Sabbath’s “When Death Calls.”
In other words, we were dead.
We made it to the front doors and they followed, but outside we were greeted by dozens of squad cars surrounding my waiting army and shining their high beams on the sea of green, white, black, and gold sweaters pouring out of the school. Once again, the cops had thwarted my fight. But not for long.
“Meet us by the warehouses next Saturday at midnight,” I said to the SKD president, as we were being shuffled away. He nodded.
I was a volcano ready to erupt.
The police had been keeping an eye on me and knew I was the instigator of the thefts and fights in the area. Sergeant Healy of the Paterson Police Department lived on our street and paid a visit to my father.
“Your son is a bad kid,” he told my father. As if Dad didn’t know already. My father was humiliated, and Charlie next door felt a sense of impending doom around me.
It’d been years since I’d used Charlie and Midge’s kitchen as my safe house. After I stood up to my father and got my car, I was rarely home and didn’t need them anymore. What a cocky, ungrateful son of a bitch I was.
That week before the big warehouse showdown, Charlie tried to talk to me. He knocked on our back door when he saw that I was home.
“You’re going down the wrong path, Tommy,” he said, sitting at our kitchen table, full of concern.
“You’re hanging around bad kids, you’re stealing . . .” I saw something in Charlie’s eyes I’d never seen before—disappointment. And just like always, love. He was trying to warn me, trying to set me on a better road. But I was such an arrogant kid, I wouldn’t listen. All I knew was that he was telling me what to do, like my father.
“Mind your own business,” I told Charlie, and I got up and left the room—and Charlie’s life forever. I refused to talk to him after that day. He tried to approach me many times over the next year when he saw me coming or going, but I ignored him and left him standing in the driveway, hurt.
That moment when Charlie tried to help me could have been a turning point in my life, but I dissed it. Another turning point arrived that same week by certified mail.
“Tommy, did you apply to Princeton?” my mother asked, excited, as she handed me an envelope from that day’s mail. Inside were the results of my SATs—I had a near perfect score—and a letter from the College Entrance Examination Board:
Mr. Giacomaro,
We question the validity of your SAT scores because of your lack of academic performance at Manchester Regional High School. Please come to Princeton and take the test again under our watch . . .
Because I was getting Cs, Ds, and Fs at school, they didn’t believe I could get such high marks on my academic tests. So just like I retook my IQ test with the shrink, I drove to Princeton and retook the SATs. The second time, I got a near-perfect score again.
My parents didn’t understand what any of that meant, but I did: I was very, very smart, just like those childhood IQ tests showed. With these scores, I could go to Princeton or any Ivy League school of my choosing. I could get a scholarship. I could change my destiny.
Instead, I chose to fight down at the warehouse, sealing a different kind of fate for myself. I was too angry not to. And so was Eddy, especially after what happened next in his life.
On a sweltering hot and humid afternoon, he showed up at our front door, out of breath and terrified.
“What the fuck’s wrong?” I asked.
He motioned for me to follow him, and he led me back to his family’s garage, running. Eddy’s father, James, lay on the cement floor with a rope around his neck, dead. Eddy had arrived home from school and found him hanging from the septic pipe, and he’d cut him down using gardening shears. Mr. LaSalle’s face was blue and his body was rigid. Because of the heat, swarms of flies were already circling his puffy, decomposing corpse.
Eddy didn’t cry and I felt nothing. We were both in shock and barely said a word to each other about it then, or ever. My parents took me to the funeral, and my mother told me on the way home that Eddy’s dad was a kleptomaniac and had been caught stealing something at the grocery store and was going to be arrested, so he hung himself.
The details of Mr. LaSalle’s death would remain a mystery to many neighbors and friends. I had a big mouth—I could be a real chiacchierone—but in honor of my friend I never told anyone what happened in the garage that day. It might be the only secret I ever kept in my life. (Until now, that is.)
In that tragic moment, I suspected that Eddy’s fate was now sealed, too. I could have gone to an Ivy League college and Eddy could have been a pro basketball player.
Instead, we both needed to fight and believed we had nothing to lose.
The following Saturday night Eddy, I, and hundreds of our crew gathered in the warehouse district in Paterson. The barren area was made up of old dye houses and storage facilities that would ten years later be a broken-down, looted ghost town. We’d be its ghosts.
We were armed with chains, bats, zip guns, and our newest, most dazzling piece of weaponry that I designed myself—homemade Molotov cocktails made from empty Rheingold beer bottles from the frat house. We filled them with gasoline and lead BB pellets and stuffed rags in the bottlenecks. Before the Skids arrived, I choreographed the ambush, sending some of our guys to hide on the cobblestoned side streets.
“You got my orders?” I asked. They nodded.
When our enemies arrived, we started pushing and shoving, then I gave the signal to the hidden group and unleashed hell.
The flaming cocktails flew from the alley through the air like missiles, smashing onto the road and exploding with hot BB pellets shooting out like machine guns. The boys who were hit grabbed their burning clothing and looked up to the sky.
That’s when we attacked full force and charged. We beat the shit out of SKD that night until we heard the police and ambulance sirens on their way and took off into the dark alleyways.
That summer night my vision became a reality: KGL was now the biggest, most powerful high school fraternity in all of Jersey. As I ran, I took one last look behind me.
My fallen enemies were on the ground, bleeding and burning. I wasn’t sure if they were dead or alive.
I left them there like that, just as my father taught me.