I couldn’t figure out if I was cursed or blessed. All I knew was that in the eternal war between good and evil, the dark side inside me was winning.
I’m impossible to kill.
You can beat me, shoot me, drive me into a river, or throw me behind bars. It will never kill me; it only makes me stronger.
I found superhuman strength to shoot my way out of that car, a coffin in the water, using Frankie’s stolen gun hidden under the front seat. With a smashed hip I swam to the river’s surface. There was no way I was gonna fuckin’ die in that car that day, no way, not like that.
The two construction workers who pulled me from the river—big-muscled Italian kids yanking a mob guy from the swampy drink—were locals who recognized me.
“We saw everything!” they said. They’d been putting up cement barricades and iron guardrails when my car sped right by them and shot into the water.
“You didn’t see nuthin’,” I told them, coughing water from my lungs.
Someone called an ambulance and they laid me out on the river’s edge in my soaking wet Brioni suit. I reeked of rancid fish and garbage, the stink that would follow me around and haunt me forever no matter how expensive a suit I wore. My Mercedes was dead, swimming with the fishes. Above me, hundreds of motorists were standing along the curve in the highway cheering and clapping.
“Forget what you saw,” I repeated to the two guys. “The police are going to come and ask questions. You say nothing, you understand me? Stay wit me. Don’t let anyone come near me.”
They did as instructed, even coming to St. Mary’s General Hospital with me. I paid them well for their help and silence. I had to figure out myself who tried to kill me, without any interference or poking around by the cops.
Teddy my attorney was the first to arrive at the hospital, still buzzed from our shots of cognac and lines of coke. He immediately arranged for the top orthopedic surgeon in the area to be rushed in to tend to my shattered left hip, which had lodged into my rib cage in bits and pieces. I was bleeding from everywhere; it was pouring out of my ass and I was pooping it out. The doctors gave me blood transfusions, and they worried about toxic water I might have swallowed because the dye houses in the area all dumped their shit into the river.
“I’ll find out who did this, Tom,” Teddy said.
I didn’t tell him that he was one of my many suspects. Teddy started making inquiries right away. The construction kids remembered the license plate number on the van but after checking, Teddy discovered it’d been doctored. Not quite enough, though. The stupid bastards kept it as a Pennsylvania license plate. Zitani must be involved, I decided. He must have reached out to the Nicky Scarfo crew to whack me.
Patsy, my coke dealer who’d been drinking with us, arrived at the hospital next, and he brought me a little something medicinal, for the pain, and all three of us got coked up together.
When Zitani arrived from Cherry Hill, the look on his face was a combination of shock (that I’d survived a shooting and near-drowning), disgust (that I was snorting coke into my bloodstream during a blood transfusion), and disappointment (that he was still stuck with me). I gave him a look like You’re one of my suspects, too, motherfucker.
Everybody split when the priest got there. By that time, word had gotten out about my “accident” and my room began to fill with flowers. It looked like a fucking funeral, which was appropriate considering what the priest had to say.
“I’ve come to give you last rites, my son,” he said, sitting down next to my bed.
Jesus H. Christ. “Whattaya talkin’ about? Is there something the matter wit your brain?”
“Didn’t the doctors tell you? You have massive internal bleeding. They’re concerned you’re going to . . . to pass away.” He cleared his throat. “To die.”
“Look, uh, Padre. I know what ‘pass away’ means. But I don’t need no last rites. I’m gonna be fine. I heard a voice. I saw the light. All that touchy-feely, near-death shit.”
I knew that would get his attention. He moved his chair closer. I really did see a light when I was in the river, but it was a patch of sky when I looked up from inside the black water.
And there was Lauren’s voice.
“I thought I was dead,” I told him, “then I heard my daughter’s voice: Get out of the car, Daddy. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be without you.”
The priest ate it up. “She was your angel,” he said, with confidence. “She was looking out for you. The police told me it was a miracle you got out of that car and out of the river alive.” Or maybe I was just smart to remember about the gun.
He blessed me, said a few prayers, and left—certain that god had intervened to save my life that day and that I wouldn’t be meeting my maker anytime soon.
“But keep saying your prayers and going to confession, my son”—he smiled, as my mother entered the room—“just in case.”
When my mother saw the priest, she worried I’d taken a turn for the worst and had requested a deathbed confession. Ha! That’s a confession that would have taken forever; I pity the poor priest who ever gets to me in the end. My mother had left the Catholic Church years earlier and became born-again, and now she believed in rites, miracles, and divine intervention more than ever. When I told her about Lauren’s voice and what the priest said, she was elated. It was a new look for her.
“I told you, Tommy! You’re special. Ever since your bike accident I’ve known this! God or something or someone watches out for you!”
The doctors were shocked that time when I recovered so quickly after I flipped over on my bike and smashed up my face. And they were baffled again this time when I woke up the day after my dunk in the river and was completely healed. My internal bleeding stopped and my hip—which had been too wrecked to replace, so they put me back together temporarily with bolts, screws, and a plate—had already healed enough for me to stand up and walk.
Maybe the coke? Or maybe I had a pact with the devil. Either way, I was back to my old self, terrorizing the hospital staff and demanding to be discharged.
News of my so-called accident hit the local papers the day after my plunge. The item was slugged “Man Overboard!” and it described me as an “unidentified motorist” who’d lost control of his car and went over the guardrails. My construction-worker heroes did good keeping things quiet, while my father walked around the house saying, in loathing disbelief: “My mobbed-up son’s car was riddled with bullets.”
The day after the attempted hit, I signed myself out of the hospital against doctors’ orders and made Miguel drive me to the spot where I’d gone into the water. He parked on the highway, and I limped to the side of the road with a walker, hip cast, and an IV pole.
I looked down at the water and wondered: Was there really a force looking out for me? Did my daughter have something to do with it? I couldn’t figure out if I was cursed or blessed. All I knew was that in the eternal war between good and evil, the dark side inside me was winning. The coke was starting to make me feel possessed. At the side of the road, with cars honking at Miguel as he blocked traffic, I made a vow.
“Nothing’s going to stop me, you motherfuckers!”
I yelled it loud enough so they’d hear me in Philly. “Whatever I was before, I’m gonna be ten times worse now.”
Medical report eight years after my hip surgery, referencing the “accident”
A few months later, in January 1987, Nicky Scarfo was arrested on extortion and conspiracy charges and later that year, charged with two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. His own nephew ratted on him and had to go into witness protection or else he’d have been killed right away. We had no use for rats in organized crime. Rats should be dead, end of story.
If Scarfo and Zitani were the ones behind my near-death experience in the Passaic, I didn’t have to worry about them anymore. If they weren’t, the damage had already been done in my mind. I didn’t trust Zitani now, and I started giving my leftover freight to a company called A-Z Passage. They gave me monthly commissions of $100,000 while I kept working with Zitani and figured what my next move would be.
I did do one last big favor for Zitani, because he’d been good to me.
Zitani had bought a hundred computers on the cheap from a company in Cincinnati to update his office equipment, but like a stugatz, he didn’t read the fine print in his contract. When the shipment arrived, he realized why he only paid $1 million instead of the $3 million other computer companies asked for: the computers were secondhand.
The vendor refused to give Zitani his money back, so he called me to get it for him. He knew I could come up with a creative and devious plan, but he had no clue how truly devious that plan was.
First thing I did was hire a bunch of private investigators who were former FBI guys that I knew (I once hired them to follow an ex-girlfriend) to go to Cincinnati and trail this computer guy for a month.
“Take pictures of every move he makes and every place he goes,” I told them, “his home, when he takes his kids to school, where he goes on Saturdays and Sundays. I want pictures of the kids getting on the school bus in the morning. I want pictures of the kids getting off the school bus, pictures of his wife when they go to the movies. I want you to fill up a pretty photo album, like a wedding album, and I want to know everything he does for a thirty-day period.”
They asked for fifty grand to do the job and I doubled it to a hundred. I was going to need them again later, I told them.
Then, I called up Frankie Cam to help.
I crossed Frankie off my “suspect” list soon after the accident when we saw each other again and made up. We were in the same crew, he and I, and that was for life. Even if I did business with another mob family, I’d always be an associate of the Genovese crime family in the Gatto crew because it’s where I started. Later, when Frankie married Kim in the late eighties, I was there, stuffing money into the money box and draining all the champagne at the reception.
So I called Frankie to be my muscle on the Cincinnati sitch because I knew it was an assignment an ex-boxer with a temper would love.
Frankie’s assignment was to pretend to be a customer and tell the computer asshole he wanted to spend $1 million to set up his company with new computers. The computer guy came to Jersey to see Frankie’s Camway warehouse and confirm he was legit, then they set up an appointment to meet in Cincinnati two weeks later.
Frankie, Miguel, the private investigators, and I flew to Cincinnati for step three. I told the investigators to bring their old FBI badges and a bunch of walkie-talkies, and after we arrived, I sent Frankie out to Toys “R” Us to buy plastic guns that looked real.
Frankie was to meet the guy in our hotel lobby for breakfast, then bring him upstairs to the penthouse suite to go over the pretend deal points. I posted two PIs in the hotel lobby to let us know when they got in the elevator and two on the penthouse floor to let us know when they got out.
Miguel and I were in the hotel suite waiting. I gave Miguel one job:
“As soon as the guy gets in the room, shut the door. Make sure you shut the door.”
He nodded, scared to death. Miguel was a driver, after all, and this was way above his pay grade. He reminded me of Enzo the baker in The Godfather, standing watch outside the hospital with his hands trembling in fear.
I was sitting in the big dining room with two toy guns on the seat next to me and the walkie-talkie beside me when Miguel let in Frankie and a goofy-looking, geeky guy, whom he brought to my table.
“This is my assistant,” Frankie said.
I must have looked really, really evil because the guy took one look at me and turned to run. He bolted out the open hotel suite door and down the hall.
“Miguel, what the fuck? The door! Frankie, get him!! ”
The guy ran down the hallway yelling for help as Frankie and Miguel ran after him—tackling him to the ground just as the elevator door opened in front of a group of astonished hotel guests. Frankie and Miguel dragged the guy back to the room, punching and kicking him along the way. Back in the room we duct-taped his arms to his body and stuffed a washrag in his mouth, then sat him down at the dining room table and slid the photo album in front of him.
“I’m going to tell you something, you motherfucker. I’m a friend of Vito Zitani’s. See this photo album?” I started flipping the pages.
“Oh, look! Here are your kids getting on the school bus in the morning. And here’s your wife taking the kids to a baseball game. And here you are with your wife going out to the movies. Look how pretty she is in that dress. How’s she look under there? Nice?”
I waved around my toy gun for emphasis. The guy paled and gagged on the washrag.
“Let me tell you something. You see your kids? You see your wife? You can leave here and call the FBI, but my crew already has a copy of this fucking book. If Frankie or I go to jail, the first person we kill is your wife and then your kids. And you’re last, so you get to watch everything. You understand?”
Like I said, the dark side inside of me was winning. The monster inside of me that I kept down for a while was busting out, worse than ever.
I told the guy to get a cashier’s check for $1 million—plus $100,000 extra to pay for the PIs I hired—and bring it to me by 2 PM that day, which he did. The next day I flew to Cherry Hill and handed the check to Zitani.
In a way, it was my parting gift to him before I fucked him for good.
Soon after the Cincinnati incident, Frankie closed down Camway and we started up another trucking company together—City Lines Xpress—in direct competition with Zitani. I even gave it nearly identical call letters—CLX—just to fuck with him. All this because he might be the guy who put out the hit on me. Or maybe I had to destroy anything good in my life.
Why go into business again with Frankie Cam? It’s better to do business with the devil you know than the one you don’t know. I put my new girlfriend, Tina, in charge of the City office. She was an actress friend of Frankie and Kim’s whom I nicknamed “Spacey” because she was into New Age spiritual stuff, a real upside-down cake, and she claimed to be psychic. I didn’t believe in that shit, but I told her about hearing Lauren’s voice as the car filled with water.
Lauren, a few years after she saved my life
“I think Lauren protects you,” Tina said, “but it was also a warning for the future.” She looked worried, but wouldn’t say why.
City, like all my new businesses, went through the roof in sales, and Zitani was enraged. He knew it would take away from his company and figured I’d start stealing his clients, and he was right. One night as Tina rode with me from Cherry Hill to North Jersey, she asked me why I hurt people. She saw what I was doing to Zitani, whom she liked, and didn’t understand my unquenchable need for revenge.
“You’re an intelligent man who could have everything,” she said. “Why must you do this to Zitani? Why must you lure people into your web like this?”
“Because,” I told her, “the student must overcome the master.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked.
“You’ll see.”
By the end of 1988, Zitani had had enough of his student. I was to be the honored guest at his holiday party, and he had a speech ready to give his guests, about how we’d built up the company together, praising my talents. He was paying me a $1 million salary at that point, and for Christmas that year, he bought me two new Mercedes-Benzes. My help with his computer fiasco had given him renewed hope about me.
But I never showed up at his party. The night before, I got all fucked up on coke and booze in Jersey and never got out of bed the next day, never mind to Cherry Hill. Zitani was humiliated. When I made it to the office a week later, he had a few muscle guys around him when he told me that we were breaking up, and he was throwing me out of the company for good.
I didn’t care. I was already luring other new victims into my web.
In early 1989 I hooked up with a crew I’d had my eye on for a while, a crew more powerful than any I’d been with before. I was already providing A-Z at least half of their business—they had a gross revenue of $50 million—and my contribution caught the attention of one of the company’s owners, Alberto Lido.
Alberto was a Genovese associate, like me, and a big, powerful guy. Which didn’t impress me much ’cause I’d seen plenty of big, powerful guys. It also didn’t impress me that they were late paying me half a million in commissions, and that their last check bounced at the bank. They were in financial trouble, my favorite kind of company. My plan was to be their savior, as I’d done with Zitani, and bring them back to life.
We set up a sit-down at Alberto’s office to discuss how I could help them, and I took Frankie along to vouch for me as a made man, and to be my muscle in case I needed any. Miguel drove us to their offices hidden behind tall, electric iron gates in Newark. Alberto’s office inside was a dark cavern of carved wood, and at the center was a giant replica of an old-fashioned ship under glass.
Alberto introduced himself. Standing next to him was a good-looking guy in a black suit with dark slicked-back hair and biceps that gave Frankie a run for his money.
“Hi,” he said, putting out his hand. “I’m Sal Gigante.”
Frankie’s glance met mine for a fraction of a second. Sal, we knew, was the son of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the capo of the Genovese crime family and the Capo di Tutti Capi—the boss of all bosses—for all five New York crime families. The Godfather. What we didn’t know was that Sal and his brother, Andrew, worked with Alberto. We got the required handshakes, hugs, kisses, and How youse doin’? out of the way, and I went straight into my pitch.
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “You owe me nearly half a million dollars. I did some research on you and I know you got Teamsters problems because of their high rates. Well, I got a good connect there and I can make your union problems go away. There’s just one thing. I want to take over your company.”
Alberto looked shocked. “You want to buy it?”
“Yeah. I’m already booking half your freight and there’s more where that came from. I can fix all your money problems and make you richer than you’ve ever been in your life.”
Sal shifted in his chair. Frankie’s hand went to his pocket.
“How are you going to buy it?” Alberto asked. “How much are you going to come up with?”
“Why do I have to come up with any money at all? Youse owe me money and your company’s a failing mess. How much money are you going to pay me to take this disaster of a company off your hands?”
Alberto and Sal were so offended they didn’t say anything.
“First, I’ll take over as president,” I said. “And after I show you what I can do, you’re going to sell me the company.”
They needed time to think about it, Alberto said, and we set a time to meet again two days later with Alberto’s board members. Frankie came with me again, and we met a dozen guys in a boardroom a mile long. Sal’s brother, Andrew, was there and so were some New York mob guys I recognized. I sat on one end, Alberto sat on the other, and Frankie positioned himself in the middle.
I stood up and Golden Tongued them.
“I’m going to stuff this business with $200 million to $300 million in revenue from major Fortune 500 companies,” I said, “and it will be the most successful trucking company in this country. By far.”
I explained more and when I was done, Alberto asked us to step out of the room while the board members talked. In the hall, Sal pulled Frankie aside to tell him something and soon we were summoned back to the boardroom.
“I made my decision,” Alberto said from across the long desk. “Tom, you are the new president of A-Z Passage. Congratulations! Let’s take the minutes accordingly. The board appoints Tom Giacomaro as president of the company.”
Because when you’re a big earner, everybody wants you. And when you’re a big talker, you can con most of the people most of the time, especially when they’re desperate. In the car on the way home, I asked Frankie what Sal wanted with him alone.
“He said, ‘You know who we’re wit. You know who our father is. You better make sure Tommy don’t fuck nothing up or he’s going off a fucking bridge.’”
Frankie and I looked at each other and started laughing our asses off, and so did Miguel up front.
Not the fucking bridge line! Holy shit, ain’t these mob guys ever original? That was our fucking line!
And didn’t they already know I’d been there, survived that? You could throw me off any bridge in the world and I’ll rise up through a river of toxic shit and reach the surface, stronger and more ruthless and determined than ever before.