My ego loved the power, fear, and respect I got being associated with mobsters.
We had ways of making them pay.
If someone was late paying the cocaine money they owed us, we started off nice. We charged them a vig—weekly interest on their debt amount. It’s a loan-shark industry term.
Then if the guy missed a few weeks on his vig, we were done with nice. We slapped him around a little. We had guys with names like Billy No Neck, Ralphy Balls, or Tony Scratch do the slapping around. Every week there was always some guy somewhere getting slapped around.
If that didn’t convince them to pay up, we sent two gorillas to their house at 3 AM to drag them out of bed, beat them up, and throw them in the trunk. That’s usually when people start to beg, when they go in the trunk. Sooner or later, everybody begs. They beg for more time; they beg you to believe them; they beg you for their lives.
We didn’t wanna hear it. We knew the guy probably spent the money he owed us on expensive, flashy shit—a new car, a Rolex, a fur coat for his goomah. Remember Johnny Roastbeef in Goodfellas showing up with his pink Coupe de Ville? Like that. Stupid, stupid, stupid. A little time-out in the trunk (Me: “Don’t get your fingerprints on the lid, I just had it waxed!”) usually convinced a guy to give us the expensive shit they bought with our money so we could sell it to pay down their debt.
Then there was the dumpster method. Some of the waiters who owed us coke money ended up in their own restaurant dumpsters. I always thought that was a little poetic. We had about twenty-five Colombian and Dominican guys at the high-class restaurants in the area buying coke from us to resell. I kept the books on who bought what and who owed what, so I knew. When too many of them were late, the total in arrears could be millions of dollars. Now that wasn’t fair to us, was it?
For the waiters, we offered the convenient dumpster method. It was a no-brainer—the dumpsters were right there! We still gave them a choice, though, like Monty Hall in Let’s Make a Deal asking what door you wanted.
“Do you wanna get put in the dumpster, or do you want us to throw you off a fucking bridge?”
I remember when a waiter at Archers was two months late. I told Frankie to subcontract two guys to rough him up when he came out of work at 2 AM. They grabbed him and duct-taped his hands and feet and smacked him around, then threw him in the dumpster with all the stinky vegetables and rotting fish. The dumpster was especially disgusting in the summer. They stuffed the guy’s mouth with lettuce so he couldn’t scream but could still breathe—lettuce is porous don’t forget. He was moaning in the dumpster all night until a busboy found him the next morning.
As far as I know, no one ever died from being dumpstered. And our victims never called the cops on us afterward. What are they going to say to the cops, “I owed them $200,000 for a cocaine debt”?
My all-time favorite way to make someone give us money was the fish tank.
At the office we had a five-foot-long saltwater fish tank filled with a dozen triggerfish and a moray eel. The triggerfish were like piranhas, with strong jaws and sharp, pointy teeth for crushing seashells. The moray eel had two sets of jaws like a raptor, to capture and restrain large prey and swallow them whole. Underneath the big fish tank I kept a small goldfish bowl. Several times a day I’d scoop up a bunch of goldfish, pour them into the big tank, and watch the triggerfish swarm them in a feeding frenzy.
“Come to the office to talk,” Frankie would say to a delinquent client.
Once there, I’d explain to the guy about the teeth and jaws of the triggerfish and eel, and demonstrate how they savagely devoured flesh by pouring in a scoop of little, defenseless goldfish and watching the triggerfish and eel rip them apart. That’s when Frankie would grab the guy, drag him to the fish tank, and stick his arm in, up to the elbow. Frankie was a former Golden Gloves boxer, I had learned, so he could drag anyone across a room.
I liked the way the tank water turned bloody, but Joe didn’t have a stomach for it. He didn’t have the same killer instinct as Frankie and me.
“If you don’t have our money tomorrow,” Frankie would say, after he took their arm out, “we’re gonna chop your hand off and feed it to the fish for dinner.”
All the above methods usually worked and we got our money, but once in a while, nothing worked. That’s when a guy would disappear. It happened to a waiter named Fat Mike who was late with his payments and driving around town in a new Cadillac. It only took one call to Freddy Minatola to get the details of his new purchase. Freddy, by the way, was buying and selling coke for us at the car dealership. Everyone at Brogan was high as a kite.
We gave Fat Mike the fish tank treatment, but that didn’t work. Then he was beat up in front of his four children in a restaurant parking lot, and still he didn’t pay. After that, he disappeared. Just gone. The Genovese Lodi crew was known to be dangerous killers and I’ll leave it at that.
Marty the Barber, whom I was still seeing every two weeks for haircuts, always knew the updates on who was alive and who was whacked.
“Hey, Marty, what happened to so-and-so?” I’d ask, as he clipped around my ears.
“Dead.”
“And what about . . . ?”
“Also dead.”
He was a man of few words, but they were essential ones.
It was a whole new regime working with Joe and Frankie, but the violence didn’t bother me. Maybe it was because I’d been training for it my whole life—from childhood beatings to high school gangs to bodies being dumped behind Maislin.
So I embraced the mob ways, and that changed everything. I was linked to a mob family now and everyone knew it. Most of the drug clients I’d had for years paid me faster and gave me more respect because I was “with the Lodi crew.” I got more freight for Deliverance because word went around that I was connected. My ego loved the power, fear, and respect I got being associated with mobsters.
I started smoking cigars—Arturo Fuente and Maduro—to look the part. I went to Frankie’s connect in the diamond district on Canal Street and bought a duplicate of his checkerboard diamond ring. I was reinventing myself from salesman to drug dealer to mob guy, and my association with Joe and Frankie put me in the major league. As Frankie once said, I was wit dem, now.
I was a family man, all right, just not the regular kind. I barely spent any time at home with Debbie and the kids and still, Lauren loved me like crazy. Our time together was on Saturday mornings when I’d lie sprawled on the couch trying to recover from a night of coke, booze, and strippers. Lauren would snuggle next to me, as close as she could get, and watch cartoons. I made her little sandwiches for lunch and the kid loved me; she really did love me. I didn’t deserve it.
A few months into Lone Star, in May 1983, my son Nick was born and again I was in the delivery room and held him and kissed him on the forehead. But soon after he popped out, I was out with Frankie, Kim, and Joe at the hottest clubs—Regine’s or New York New York—where we’d see Sammy the Bull or John Gotti across the room and they’d give me a nod. I was wit dem.
When the big mob guys weren’t there, we’d do coke out in the open at the table, not bothering to hide it. The staff didn’t dare tell us to stop.
“Hey, Frankie, hand me da ting that goes wit da ting to use da ting,” I’d say, when I wanted him to pass me more coke.
“Tommy! Listen,” Frankie would say loudly, grabbing me by the shoulders. “I can’t see dis fucking ting. I drank too much. My eyes are diluted. I can’t see, and I gotta circumcise my watch!”
Like I said before, Frankie wasn’t the brains in this outfit.
My office in Clifton was now a full-service business—we juggled drugs, travel, and trucking. Customers for Reiser Travel, Joan’s very legit domain, used the front door to reach the front office, and trucking people or drug deliveries came through the side door for the back office. Even though they’d been forbidden by Streaky, Joe and Frankie began buying coke from me “on the arm” or “on the cuff ” and selling it.
Joe was smart, as I guessed, and a quick learner. So I taught him about trucking and we worked hard and built Lone Star together. He taught me more about kickbacks.
“Why do you waste your time taking these trucking people to dinner and strip clubs?” he asked. “Give them cash! Watch how fast they give you their business!”
Frankie did fuck-all in our office and spent his days running numbers at another office and hanging out with Kim, taking her to fancy restaurants or shopping, spending the money Joe and I worked hard to bring in.
“Stick with me, baby,” he used to tell Kim, “and you’ll be fartin’ in silk.” Not a bad line, I thought. I stole it to use on my trucking clients.
Once in a while I passed by the office Frankie used for illegal betting. It changed locations every few months, but it was always over the George Washington Bridge in New York where betting was only a misdemeanor instead of in Jersey, where it was a felony. The office was always a one-bedroom apartment with a table, metal folding chairs, and a handful of people answering push-button phones with tape recorders attached.
Frankie and Joe were glad to have the Hudson River between them because they’d get on each other’s nerves. They were both running numbers in Jersey on their own when the local mob guys who ran the area paired them together, ordering them to consolidate and share their contacts. I was in their betting office the day Frankie found out Joe held back on some of his contacts. Frankie picked up Joe and threw him across the room into a bunch of chairs.
Frankie had one of the worst tempers I’d ever seen. It was worse than mine and it rivaled my father’s. Once when we were driving on the highway, I complained that a dump truck behind us was riding my ass. Frankie pulled a .38 from his briefcase, opened the sunroof, stood up, and fired at the truck—blowing the front to pieces.
“Is there something wrong with your brain?” I yelled at Frankie. “You crazy fuck! And besides, you wasted six bullets on a stupid dump truck!”
That was Frankie’s biggest flaw; you can’t fix stupid.
Joe and Frankie had to haul me out of bed on days after my all-night coke sessions. But even though I sank deeper and deeper into my coke addiction that year, Lone Star grew like crazy. We started doing $1 million per month in accounts, then $2 million. It was easy because I just took the overflow from my national accounts at Deliverance that they couldn’t handle and diverted them to us. Deliverance wasn’t losing anything, and my clients were happy to keep all their accounts with me. It was perfect!
Except the execs at Deliverance didn’t see it that way.
When they discovered I was behind this new trucking company that had burst onto the scene and become their rival, they were fuming. I was called to Indiana for a sit-down with the top brass, including my coke colleague Jeff Goldman. In the boardroom, they accused me of being disloyal. I told them they didn’t have the grand vision or ability to handle the magnitude of business that a Silver Tongue like me could bring in.
“We just bought one hundred new trailers,” said the Deliverance chairman. “How is that not enough for you?”
“I need two hundred more. And for your information, I just bought a hundred trailers myself—with cash.” I took out my pad and pen. “At $18,000 per truck, that makes . . . yeah, I paid $1.8 million. From my own pocket.”
The chairman and the other board members looked both stunned and in awe. I could hear my coke buddy in my mind, begging me telepathically: Please don’t tell them about the coke! The top execs were so insulted, they gave me an ultimatum—it was them or Lone Star.
I’d built Deliverance from a mediocre company to one that made more than one hundred million a year in general freight, but now I was done. I quit right there in the boardroom. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a businessman who thought small. Deliverance would be one of the last purely legit jobs I ever had.
The bigger Lone Star grew, the more Streaky wanted me to get made. He never asked me directly—they never did that. They didn’t want to look stupid if you turned them down, like when I insulted Streaky and Little Al at our first meeting at Vesuvius. But they kept strongly suggesting it. I didn’t understand why Streaky was so surprised at my refusals until I heard Frankie and Joe mentioning a name in my father’s family—“LaPlaca.” I asked them about it, and that’s when I discovered that I already was connected, since the day I was born.
I asked around and found out more. My family relative, Peter LaPlaca, was nicknamed “Lodi Pete.” He started out as a driver for an underboss and rose up the ranks to capo, where he remained for several years until Streaky took over. It all made sense now. Streaky knew my lineage even before I did, and so did Alex Maislin. It’s why they wanted me officially in the fold. I was “family.”
Streaky loved me because I was what the mob called a “big earner.” I wasn’t sharing my money with him, but every week Frankie met up with Streaky and Little Al at Sorrento Bakery to give them an envelope of $10,000 cash—Streaky’s cut from Frankie and Joe’s Lone Star earnings. After a while I started adding to the envelope, thinking it would keep Streaky happy enough to get him off my back about getting made. But it didn’t help much; the pressure was still on.
In the early to mid-eighties, the Mafia was peaking and diversifying, and while they’d always looked to recruit guys who could earn a lot of money or had no problem killing people, they were now on the prowl for guys who had legit businesses to be used for money laundering purposes. No wonder Streaky wanted me so bad: I pretty much fit all three categories they needed.
“Don’t get made,” Joe warned. “Once they get their hooks in you, you gotta pay them for life; they’ll lean on you forever.”
Even though Joe paid Streaky money every week, he wasn’t made. He didn’t want to be and they never asked him. He wasn’t the type. Frankie was a brute, and I was a tough motherfucker and big business earner. Joe was smart, but he was a bit finocchio—kinda gay, though no one said it. That wouldn’t do with the Lodi crew. But they took his money anyway.
Joe’s dad ran numbers and sports with another mob family, the Luccheses, and as I infiltrated my way into the Genovese crime family, I plotted to make contacts there, too. I knew that as long as I stayed unmade, I might be able to float from one organized crime family to another if I needed, or have them all at once—that was my plan. Frankie had a meeting set up with Michael Perna, a soldier in the Lucchese New Jersey faction, and he wanted to take me and show me off, like, Here’s my new trucking guy. We’re in the trucking business now, assholes! Michael’s brother, Ralph, was the current capo.
We met Michael and his crew at Casa Dante, a restaurant in Jersey City. They were no different than the other mob guys I’d met—they looked, talked, and acted just like the Genovese guys—cookie cutters, all of them. Frankie set up the meeting to offer Michael a chunk of our sports-numbers action. Our business got so huge we were worried we wouldn’t be able to cover the bets. Frankie’s idea was for the Lucchese crew to run some of it and give us a commission. They shook hands on it. It was a good deal among rival families that usually had no business doing business together, but sometimes it was allowed. You do them a favor and they owe you one. It gave you power to have another family in debt to you.
Back in Lodi, the old man was getting restless.
At our next sit-down at Vesuvius, talk drifted to the following week when they were gonna “open the books” for a few guys at someone’s house. Frankie was gonna go get made and once again, Little Al pressed me to go, in his vague way.
“We got dat ting happening next week,” Little Al said, “and youse gotta show up. You know, we’re doing da ting.”
“Yeah, the thing, okay, yeah, okay,” I said.
Streaky heard me waffle from across the table and couldn’t shut up about it any longer. His craggy, coughing voice drowned us all out.
“Ding-dong. Ding-dong,” Streaky yelled out, looking over at me. “Ding-dong. All you do is take the dings. But we don’t get no dongs.”
He sounded like a crazy person. What was the old man saying?
“He’s saying you’re like a pendulum,” Little Al translated. “You know how a pendulum goes?”
“No, Al. I don’t.”
Streaky rallied again from his seat.
“You won’t make a decision!” he yelled. “You’re wishy-washy, like a linguine when it’s been boiled too long. There’s no substance to you!”
“What did he call me?” I asked Frankie, who was sitting next to me.
“A linguini,” Frankie said, trying not to laugh. “He wants you to make up your mind and come next week.”
“You’re mushy!” Streaky yelled. “You gotta toughen up!” Then he went on a rant about certain crewmembers who didn’t know how to whack someone right.
“You don’t pull out a gun and say, ‘Stick ’em up!’ like you was in the movies! When you take a gun out, you kill the motherfucker. Don’t take your gun out unless you’re prepared to kill a guy!”
Everyone nodded.
“Frankie, do me a favor and tell him I’m not mushy.”
Frankie kicked me. I kicked him back.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Frankie. “Or we’ll both get whacked!”
A few days later Frankie took the oath of omertà. He did what was required before being inducted—every potential made man has to carry out a contract killing (“making your bones”) or at least be part of one before getting made. He did it, and that’s all I’m going to say about that. While he was getting made, I was out getting high and drunk and didn’t show up.
The next day the shit hit the fan. The old man was insulted again by me and sent Little Al to find out why I was a no-show. I wormed out of it, then Little Al brought up another problem: Streaky found out we’d been dealing coke, and we had to go back to Vesuvius for a sit-down about it.
“I know you’re doing that fucking white shit,” Streaky said at our meeting the next day. His grating voice was like little stones scratching against glass. “If you don’t stop, there’s gonna be a problem. By the way, where’s my money this week?”
Having a problem was never good. It could mean you were about to be beat up or whacked; who knew? Streaky only gave you one warning, if you were lucky enough to get that. He was a killer. But in our case, he was more interested in the money than the cocaine sitch. That was Streaky’s mantra: pay me, pay me, pay me. He wanted us to keep giving him a cut from the coke, trucking, sports, and numbers, but not be so obvious about our drug dealing.
Meanwhile, I was planning a con to get money out of Streaky and Little Al.
I’d been buying coke off the cuff from Frankie V, a limo company owner in Hackensack. I used his limos when I went out with broads and got coked up. He was a good guy to know because he had all the local politicians in his pocket.
I’d run up a coke tab of $100,000 with him and I didn’t want to pay it. I had the money, of course—I had $1 million in cash at home in my duct-taped shoeboxes. But I didn’t like Frankie V and I just didn’t want to pay him.
I decided in a stroke of brilliance that Streaky and Little Al were going to get rid of the debt for me. They wanted me so bad they’d do just about anything. So now I was going to fuck all three of them at once—Frankie V, Little Al, and Streaky.
I set up a meeting the following week with Little Al at La Couronne in Hawthorne. At the table, I put on my worried face and told him I’d been thinking about what Streaky had said, and I wanted to get out of the drug racket.
“Good, good. I’m glad,” he says.
But there was one problem, I told him.
“There’s this guy busting my balls for the hundred grand I owe him and I ain’t got it. I put all my money into Lone Star. Al, ya gotta help me. I wanna make Streaky happy and stop with the drugs.”
Little Al smiled. I knew what he was thinking. I was asking a favor, and then I’d owe one. Now I’m gonna get my claws into Tommy. I’m going to bring him in for Streaky, and it’ll look good on me.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Al. “Set up a meeting with the guy to come here and I’ll pay him. I got you.”
It was just like playing chess, and I was getting all my men into place.
A few days later, Little Al and I arrived early to the meeting and brought Frankie Cam as our muscle. When Frankie V arrived and saw Little Al, he looked quietly petrified.
“What’s going on?” he asked, sitting down.
“Listen,” Little Al began. “As you might know, Tommy’s wit us now. He’s a legit guy in trucking and we’re involved with him in the trucking business.”
Frankie V nodded and Little Al paused when the owner came to the table with menus, filled our water glasses, then quickly left when Al waved him away.
“Now, Tommy come to us and he says you’re busting his balls for this fucking money he owes you for the dope,” Al continued.
“He owes me a hundred grand.”
A couple came into the restaurant and the owner sat them as far away from us as possible. Little Al got up.
“Let’s go to the bathroom.”
We all got up and followed Al into the men’s room. Inside, Al took out a wad of cash from his coat pocket and handed it to Frankie V.
“Here, take this. It’s twenty grand. The debt’s cleared now.”
“Fucking Tommy owes me a hundred grand!” Frankie V said.
Frankie shifted his position by the sink, putting his hand on his gun. I leaned against a stall door and watched it all unfold like a scene in a movie.
“You’re not understanding me, Frank,” said Al, his voice getting tense. “The debt’s cleared up now.”
“But . . .”
No more words came outta Frankie V’s mouth because someone stuck his head in the toilet and held it there, under water, for almost too long.
“Take the fucking money and get the fuck out of here!” Little Al’s voice echoed against the tiles. “Or there’s gonna be a problem. Do you understand? Get the fuck out—now! He don’t owe you no more motherfucking money, you got it, motherfucker? He’s wit us now. Now get the fuck out of here!”
Frankie V was let loose and ran out of the bathroom, dripping toilet water in his path. Honestly, it was bee-oo-tiful.
My next move on the chessboard was to fuck Frankie Cam, because that’s what mob guys do. I wanted him out of Lone Star, and I was gonna use Little Al for that maneuver, too.
Joe and I were sick of Frankie never working but getting one-third of the Lone Star money while he played hooky all day with Kim. The next time he and Kim left in Kim’s car to go have fun while we worked, I took action. Through the window I could see Frankie’s disgusting, beat-up, silver Seville in the parking lot. Shitty, unkempt cars—now that offended me.
“Hey, Joe. Watch what I’m gonna do to Frankie’s car.”
We were at our warehouse that day and in the lot we had a forklift. Joe watched from the window as I climbed into the forklift, stabbed Frankie’s car with the blades and picked it up, then tossed it in the nearby dumpster—crushing it until it looked like a tin can.
“Jesus Christ, Tommy, Frankie’s gonna kill you!” said Joe, after I returned and went to my desk. “He’s gonna kill both of us!”
I took out $50,000 in cash from my desk drawer and put it on the table.
“Go buy him a brand-new fucking Seville,” I told Joe. “Fuck him and fuck that car. When he comes back, tell him he’s out and to get the fuck out of our office.”
Now, I already knew that the only way to get rid of a mob guy was to replace him with a bigger mob guy, and that’s where Little Al came in. Joe and I met up with Al at a posh country club for dinner, and I played to Al’s greed and need to impress Streaky. Before the meal was over, he’d agreed to take Frankie’s place as our business partner and force him to take a buyout. He didn’t like Frankie’s attitude, either, and he was salivating at the prospect of getting his hands onto Lone Star.
To seal our deal, Al took me to the men’s room and pulled out two wads of cash from his pockets, $50,000 each.
“Fifty for you,” said Little Al, “and give the other fifty to Frankie and tell him we bought him out and he’s thrown the fuck out.”
After that, it was World War III in our Lodi faction of the Gatto crew.
Frankie went berserk when we told him he was out. He yelled and broke shit and punched walls. Later, he sent a warning through Joe that he wanted to kill me for what I’d done, orchestrating his removal.
“Tell him to bring it on,” I told Joe. Later on, I’d feel bad about turning on Frankie. He was devastated, and in the long run, would end up proving more loyal to me than any of them. But that’s what mob guys do—we turn on each other. It’s greed. Get the other guy out of the way and get more money. That’s what Little Al was thinking.
After we turned on Frankie, he turned on us. He took the money we gave him and started his own trucking company, Camway, and tried to steal our clients.
“Tell him if he doesn’t stop,” Little Al said, “there’s gonna be a problem.”
Again with the problem. And more followed. Right after Little Al came on board, Joe arrived in the office with a list of fifteen names to add to our payroll at Little Al’s orders.
“They’re ‘no-show’ jobs,” Joe explained. “We’ll receive an envelope every week full of cash and then we’ll give these guys paychecks. We’re washing the money.”
I didn’t mind being a money launderer so much, but I did mind being leaned on and told what to do; it was the thing I hated the most. Now it was my turn to wanna kill Little Al and Joe. Everybody wanted to kill everybody, it seemed, so someone was bound to die; one night, I thought that someone was me.
I was seeing a cocktail waitress at the time, Suzanne—jet-black hair, bit tits, tiny waist. It was Halloween night of 1983 and I’d just finished banging her brains out at one of our safe houses in Little Falls when the doorbell rang. I was so fucked up from drugs and booze I answered without thinking. The street was filled with trick-or-treaters ringing doorbells so I assumed it to be kids looking for candy.
Two guys dressed as hockey players, wearing masks and carrying sticks and guns, busted in and knocked me backward to the floor. They dragged me to the bedroom where Suzanne was still naked and threw me onto the bed with her.
“Where’s the cash?” asked one, putting a gun to my head. “Where’s the coke?”
I pointed to my Hartmann briefcases on the counter—one was filled with $100,000 of coke and the other was filled with $250,000 in cash. They took the briefcases and Suzanne’s $80,000 diamond ring, on the table next to them. They didn’t bother with my Rolex sitting next to the ring.
Motherfuckers; it was an inside job. How else would someone know where I was and that I had the cash and coke with me, and to keep their hands off my Rolex? With a gun at my head, one of them stuck a knee into my ribs and forced me to watch as they put their hands all over Suzanne’s still-naked body. She cried, but there was nothing I could do.
They had ways of making me pay.
I left town soon after and went south to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to start anew with the mob guys there. I never paid Little Al the $20,000 for my coke debt or the $50,000 he gave me as our deal starter. But I had a feeling he got his money.
Don’t listen to what anybody tells you; there ain’t no honor among thieves.