Two

There were two kinds of people in Canarsie when I grew up there. The neighborhood was home to scores of city employees, especially NYPD and FDNY personnel, but it was also Lucchese country. Originally based in the Bronx, the Lucchese mob grew out of a racket that controlled the horse-and-wagon ice delivery trade in the teens. With the support of Charley Lucky and under the leadership of Gaetano Reina, Gaetano Gagliano, and his underboss Gaetano Lucchese (“Tommy,” “Tommy Gun,” or “Three Fingers Brown” depending on which paper you read back in the day), the Bronx operation spread to Manhattan, Jersey, and Brooklyn. When Luciano created the Mafia “crime commission,” the Luccheses became one of the fabled Five Families that ran American organized crime for most of the last century. After Gagliano stepped down and Lucchese took over in the fifties, Canarsie became one of the family’s strongholds. The majority of the kids I went to school with, played sports with, and hung around with went home at night to households owned by cops or by wiseguys.

Growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was half NYPD and half mob was like a real-life version of the Looney Tunes cartoon with the wolf and the sheepdog. The episodes all began the same way—a big dog named Sam and a wolf named Ralph would walk through a meadow, each with a lunch pail in their hand.

“Morning, Sam.”

“Morning, Ralph.”

“How’s the missus, Sam?”

“Good, Ralph. Yours?”

The wolf and the sheepdog go to a tree with a time clock on it and punch in. Their workday boils down to Ralph stealing sheep by any means he can figure out while Sam tries to keep him from getting any. The whistle blows, the sun sets and the two of them punch the clock and head home together, lunch pails once again on their hips. In Canarsie, you were either in a sheepdog family or a wolf family. Both sides literally lived next door to each other. In the cartoon the sheepdog usually won, but in real life the wolves made out a hell of a lot better than the dogs. The Canarsie Lucchese crew is all over GoodFellas. They masterminded the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK and collected an eight-million-dollar payday. Nobody ever made a movie about the housing police. All my father ever got was a weekly paycheck and, eventually, a pension and a letter from the mayor.

My father and his kid brother Nick, better known throughout Canarsie as “Chickie,” grew up playing ball and hanging out with Vic Amuso. Chickie took a job with the Transit Authority, my father became a cop, and Vic began his career as an enforcer and foot soldier for the Colombo family and Crazy Joe Gallo. When Gallo was gunned down at Umberto’s Clam House for ordering the Joe Colombo hit, Vic jumped ship for the Luccheses. Vic made his bones in kickback schemes and narcotics, did time, got out, and went back to earning. The dope sold in Alphabet City in the eighties no longer came from Vic, but the Lucchese family was still profitable and Canarsie was still his.

Make a fist with your right hand and turn it toward you with the pinky finger at the top. If you picture that fist as Brooklyn, then Canarsie is the knuckle of your thumb pointing down. Long before they were packed off to the Midwest and Canada, the Algonquin Indians named a coastal wilderness on Jamaica Bay where they fished and hunted, “Canarsie” after their word for “fort.” The Lower East Side was the last stop on the L line in Manhattan, and Canarsie was the end of the line in Brooklyn. And like the Lower East Side much of Canarsie was originally swamp and tidal marsh. The borders that kept the Algonquin safe until the Europeans came also tell the story of how the neighborhood resisted change once the creeks and marshes were filled in and successive generations of immigrants claimed the new land there for themselves.

Fresh Creek and the upscale homes of the Flatlands section of the old neighborhood form the eastern border. Like Paedegat Basin, a polluted moat separating Canarsie from Bergen Beach and Coney Island beyond, Fresh Creek permanently and definitively buffers the old neighborhood from the new developments at Starrett City, a huge cluster of residential towers looming over the cattails and oily, brackish water to the east. The neighborhood ends at Jamaica Bay. Walking back from the water’s edge at Canarsie Pier you cross the Shore Parkway section of the Belt Parkway, then follow Rockaway Parkway past the Bay View Houses and inland to the crossroads at Flatlands Avenue, which was the heart of Canarsie.

It was over Canarsie’s northern border at Linden Boulevard that the Italians, Jews, and Irish arrived by wagon, truck, and eventually subway during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That same borderland yielded the neighborhood to families from neighboring Brownsville and across the marsh in East New York in the seventies and eighties. The Canarsie I grew up in bore little resemblance to the marsh and farmland it was fifty years before. New waves of immigration from the Ca rib be an and West Africa continue to transform the community I knew like the back of my fist into a place I barely recognize today. The children of the kids growing up there today likely won’t recognize it themselves in a few decades. That’s just the way things go.

Until Jamaica Bay got too filthy to eat from after World War I, Canarsie was home and livelihood for legitimate fishermen and a sanctuary for smugglers. When my father grew up there in the thirties and forties there were still working fruit and vegetable farms and open cook fires tended by off-the-boat Italians trying to get by the same way they had in the old country. But by the time my dad graduated from Franklin K. Lane High, and went into the service, most of the people he knew on the street were either in “the trades” as they used to say—carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, and the like—or they were city employees—sanitation workers like his father, ConEd employees, transit workers, fire fighters, and cops. Or they were mobsters.

My dad returned from his postwar stint in the submarine service onboard a diesel boat called the U.S.S. Blenny, a veteran of unrefereed fights with drunk Marines and the proud defender of a handful of official boxing titles in sanctioned bouts held on various naval bases throughout the States. After settling back home in Canarsie, he commuted seven days a week to a factory job in the garment district in Midtown Manhattan. Within a couple of years he was making the trip with his new bride, my mother, Emilia Privitera, a first-generation Sicilian-American who worked as a seamstress in the same shop. Pressing clothes in a fifty-pound steam iron every day gave him eighteen-inch biceps, but it wouldn’t support a family, and my old man took a job at sanitation like his old man. My sister and then I arrived and one afternoon he went to the local high school and took the police department test. He passed and became a housing cop.

I never gave what my dad or anyone else’s parents did for a living much thought until late into high school. Made-man families had barbecues and attended Little League games same as cop and fireman families and everyone else. Wiseguy or not, nobody talked about their business. Friends from my father’s Housing PD Command in Brownsville would come over, but my dad wasn’t much for war stories and neither were they. Except for the police radio squawk, they could’ve been any group of guys watching the Jets.

Once a partner of his gave me an old heavy bag to work out on when he got a new one.

“I bought this because of your dad, Mike,” he told me. “A guy in the Farragut Houses got tough with us on a family dispute and your dad dropped him without even taking a swing. I never saw anybody knock a guy down with a single left jab like that.” He pointed to a worn out part of the canvas bag, “I worked it hard, see? You want to hit as hard as your old man does, you’re gonna have to work it hard, too.”

Every once in a while I’d tag along with my father when he went to the Command to pick up his paycheck. Business was always booming there in the seventies. On weekends they’d handcuff the spill-over from the holding cells to a metal bar in the precinct lobby. My dad was big and he was known. None of the guys chained together ever so much as swore when we went down the line with me in tow. Cop or wiseguy, sheepdog or wolf, that was what it was all about in Canarsie—respect.

My father’s friends were a mixture of both sides and so were mine. The thing we all had in common was that we lived to raise hell. As far back as I can remember I’ve had a bone-deep craving for thrills and excitement—the real kind, the kind you get fighting, joking, and messing around. When I grew up that craving was often satisfied by doing takedowns and busts in the police. Kid or adult, I got a huge kick when things were close to out of hand. Not fucked up, just on the border. When you’re a cop that’s not picky about bending rules, chasing perps, and using your hands, you find other cops that see the job the same way, and when you grow up looking for that wild zone between safe and sorry, you fall in with other kids that do, too, no matter what kind of household they came from. Two of my closest friends growing up were the Flynn boys—Timmy and Tommy. Their father held court at a bar called the Nut on Flatlands Avenue. My dad’s old baseball teammate Vic Amuso also hung out there.

For Timmy, Tommy, me, and the other kids I grew up with, Canarsie in the seventies had plenty to offer in the having-fun-and-not-getting-caught departments. In elementary school my neighbor Sal and I would sneak in the back door of Grabstein’s Deli around the corner from my house and swipe hot knishes off the cooling racks just outside the kitchen. The only real risk we ran was burning our mouths on the hot potato filling inside. When we got older we’d climb the fences around the railyards at the end of the BMT 16 line (later the double L) where MTA janitors scrubbed huge graffiti murals and tags off the outside of subway cars. We’d break stuff and play chicken with oncoming trains, ignoring the blasts from their horns, hock loogies onto the shiny business side of the live third rail and watch our spit drip down, connect with the ground, and zap! go up in a crackling hail of smoke and sparks. When we heard a radio hiss or saw a flashlight beam heading our way we’d silently break into a sprint. Running across rail ties and tracks, doing the thirty-yard dash to the torn piece of fence you came through, physically wasn’t much different than the stutter step we did in and out of old tires in football practice. It was fun. We didn’t get caught.

As I got older, the games got hairier. And even more fun. Once we hit driving age, Timmy and Tommy Flynn, Mark Hedigan, Nicky Capp, Richie Gascon, and a few other guys, would head into Times Square in “the City” just about every weekend. We started out going there for the double features in the crumbling old opera house theaters. But the campy grindhouse gore and crime onscreen paled in comparison with the action in the audience and outside on “the Deuce.”

The movies ran all night, and a lot of the crowd more or less lived there in the flickering dark halls whose walls and balconies hadn’t seen a paint brush or a new sheet of wallpaper in decades. Junkies shot up, puked, pissed, passed out, and sometimes died in the seats. You never went in the men’s room of the Lyric or any of the other old derelict theaters. They were reserved for bums that looked like degenerate versions of Popeye the Sailor and hustlers in tight jeans to do God knows what to each other for money or drugs in the stalls. Times Square bars never checked IDs. Every dark flagstone- or linoleum-floored dive was equipped with a steam tray of inedible food, the stench of decades of spilled beer, a junkie stripper on a makeshift backroom stage, and a dozen guys scamming each other or ignoring everything but the drink and the ghost in front of them.

It’s hard to imagine now how lawless and crazy Times Square and Forty-second Street were back in the late seventies and early eighties. It was anything goes—drugs, whores, you name it. And all of it kicking back to Genovese family boss, Matty the Horse Ianniello, and the Gambinos’ porno king, Robert DiBernardo. Compared to lid-on Canarsie, it was like a degenerate’s Disney World. At first it seemed like there were no rules, and no matter what we did, we weren’t risking pissing off our cop or mobster fathers. My friends and I prowled the bars and the lobby and halls of the old Remington Hotel, a $10.40 fleabag (ten bucks for the room, forty cents tax), in search of trouble. If there wasn’t a whore, pimp, or john to hassle in the Remington, we’d scour the streets looking for action. It never took very long to find it. One night as we turned the corner from Forty-second Street onto Eighth Avenue my friend Mark pointed at a pimp we’d seen dozens of times in the Remington and on the sidewalk. He was a flash guy with a shitty attitude even for an asshole in his line of work.

We found out later his name on the street was Cat. “Stop the car,” Mark said. “Keep it running.”

Before we knew it his door was open and he was out on the curb and had Cat by the belt of his leather coat. The rest of us poured out and surrounded them, then all of us were hitting the guy—open-handed but with a lot behind it. For a crazy second it looked like Mark started stabbing him, too. But what I thought was a knife turned out to be Cat’s shirt collar torn loose in Mark’s hand. Cat fought us off at first, but we had surprise, numbers, and outer borough teen balls on our side. The ambush, disorganized as it was, worked. We pulled nearly four hundred bucks in neatly faced twenties and fifties that stank of sweat and perfume from the pimp’s coat pocket. He probably paid his girls in the tattered smaller bills. Cat the pimp swore that he was gonna kill us if he ever saw us again.

“I see your motherfucking guinea faces! I don’t need to know nothing else!” We laughed and shoved him to the curb. One of his shoes came off and a heel lift fell out. We drove home and bought pizza with his perfumed money. A racket was born.

After that, rolling Times Square pimps like Cat was like our paper route. The cops didn’t notice or didn’t care. We did it fast, mean, and clean. Brakes, door, grab, beat, frisk, shove, laugh, and split with the smell of British Sterling and Jheri curl still in our nostrils. We figured those guys were mostly lone wolves, and got shook down too often by the cops to pack guns. We figured wrong. Late one Saturday night, we were packed into Richie Gascon’s dad’s Buick, driving down Forty-second Street looking for action. As Richie turned the corner onto Eighth Avenue we saw a group of pimps on the sidewalk. The local men of leisure had had enough of a bunch of laughing Brooklyn cousines, helping themselves to the fruits of their whores’ labors, and they’d seen us first. Three of them pulled guns and fired point-blank at us as we passed. Cat was leading the pack.

“Fuuuuuuuck!!” You’ve never seen a Buick head for Brooklyn as fast as ours did after that first shot. The next day Richie Gascon told his parents he was too sick to his stomach to go to mass. He and I spent Sunday in a junkyard on Flatlands and Pennsylvania avenues looking for a replacement door and quarter panel to swap out for the ones that now had .38 slug holes in them.

As fucked up as that experience was, it still went into the win column. We didn’t get caught, didn’t get hurt, and it was fun. I didn’t really care about the money—I don’t think any of us did. We were addicted to the action. It felt like as long as I was having fun and getting away with something, I’d live forever. The only rules were the ones enforced in Canarsie. And those had to be learned the hard way.

The Flynn boys, they had juice. If they stayed smart their future was set. I had great times with the Flynns. They were up for anything, always had money, and usually drove a nice car. But as we got older they got sloppier. Every year I got a little clearer about how the world worked and what I could and couldn’t get away with. But the Flynns seemed oblivious to effects of what they did. It’s something that kids from all made families struggle with—mobbed up, rich, famous, politically wired up, whatever. Sometimes they seemed untouchable. Sometimes they just seemed stupid.

It was Friday night, I was seventeen and me and the Flynns and a few other friends were hanging out in front of a pizza place on Flatlands Avenue. We’d all walked past this joint a hundred times, but we never really hung out there. On this particular night we stopped and bullshitted in front of the place.

“Yeah, I’m telling you, I know you fucked that fat pig, I fuckin’ saw you kissin’ her,” Timmy insisted, knowing Tommy couldn’t take a joke.

“I wouldn’t fuck that girl with your dick and Mike pushin’,” Tommy replied making a face like he smelled something dead.

This kind of thing could go on for hours some nights. After us classing up the front of his place this way for about ten minutes, a high-waistbanded little Italian guy comes out.

“Get away from my store, goddamn it.”

“One minute, pops,” Timmy says without even looking at him. No one moves. Fuck him. The guy goes back inside and the macho teenage bullshit and arguments resume. We get louder and the little Italian guy comes out again—beet red. He’s pissed—Sicilian pissed—and begins cursing in a mixture of two languages.

“Putana diavolo, get the fuck outta here now you sons of bitches.” It was hard not to crack up.

“Go make yourself some nice fucking pies,” somebody told him. That didn’t seem like the right response, and anyway, it was his fucking store. I’d had enough. The fun was gone somehow. “Behave-a yourself,” you know? Richie felt the same way, I guess. We left together so we wouldn’t seem like total pussies to our friends.

The rest of the guys stayed put and continued doing what they did best, break balls. After I left Mr. Beet Red comes out again—this time swinging a baseball bat. Bat or no, one older guy against four pretty tough teenagers isn’t much of a fight. My friends took the bat and punched and kicked the guy into the ground. They knew enough not to seriously hurt him, and outside of a few bruises and a lost bat, he was okay. But the guy’s pride was destroyed, and wolf or sheep, pride was what 90 percent of the beefs in Canarsie were all about. It was only about nine at night and his pizza place was on the main drag. There were probably more people watching his beating in the neighborhood than tuned to the Mets that night.

It turned out that the pizza man was an old time capo who’d been around forever named Bruno Facciolo. He was one of the guys who escorted Tommy DeSimone to his death at the fake Cosa Nostra initiation reenacted in GoodFellas. Bruno’s brother was a soldier in the Gambino family and the Facciolo brothers served as intermediaries between the Gambinos and the Luccheses. This guy was a double untouchable. We’d all heard of him, but none of us recognized him when he came out to the sidewalk with pants up to his armpits and pizza sauce on his shirt.

Bruno healed up fast and made inquiries even faster. Usually as teenagers you’re pretty much off everyone’s radar. But he got everyone’s name. One of the bystanders could’ve ID’d the kids who beat him, but it’s more likely that one of my friends sold everyone else out.

My buddy Mark held Bruno down. Mark was a tough kid. His father was a working stiff who died when Mark was young. No one in the neighborhood ever stepped up to mentor Mark into either of Canarsie’s two main industries so Mark made do with a construction gig—the kind where you really had to show up and put in the work. Mark worked his way far enough up the ladder that he could borrow the company truck on weekends. He was on his way to work about five in the morning one Monday a few weeks after the pizza brawl, when two guys cut him off, get out of their car, and shot the truck’s doors and hood and Mark’s legs full of holes. The truck was a goner but Mark survived. He took painkillers and walked with a major hitch in his step to show for it for the rest of his life.

The Flynn boys didn’t sweat it. They figured that if their father’s juice wouldn’t get them out of the jam, a word or two from their father’s drinking buddy, Vic Amuso, would. Instead of an anonymous pullover at dawn, they received a personal invitation to have a sit-down and make things right. They didn’t have to say a word in their own defense. As they came in the door of the meeting, both Timmy and Tommy got whacked on the head with a baseball bat. It was probably the one they hit Bruno with. Their father had to just stand there and watch. Tommy was beaten so brutally, he was in the hospital for weeks. They say Timmy has a plate in his head, but he would never talk about it. I didn’t see either of them for the rest of that summer.

The last guy involved was the son of a connected guy, too. His dad probably had a little more juice or brains than the Flynns. Either he made good with cash, made his kid rat on the guys who beat Bruno down that night, or most likely both. Word was the kid’s brand-new Corvette was torched in his family’s garage, but no one I knew confirmed it.

Nothing happened to me. Not a talking to, not a dirty look, nothing. Leaving when I did helped. So did being from a sheepdog family. The wolfpack closed ranks to discipline their own. I wonder if those guys would’ve gone as far as they did if they’d been from cop households.

Maybe that brush with Canarsie “justice,” taught me a lesson about people and the laws and codes they create and uphold. You can only get away with so much. If you think that the world is yours to fuck with, you’re wrong. Maybe it didn’t. Either way I would eventually take the police exam and join the force with a few experiences under my belt that most of my Long Island and Rockland County native fellow officers hadn’t had. I’d been shot at, I’d shaken down pimps, and I’d eaten steaks grilled by the head of one of the most powerful mob families in America, all before ever putting on a badge.