4

MOTT STREET

The new couple took an apartment in Brooklyn, just down the street from Al’s family. The three-story brick house at 847 Kent Avenue between Myrtle and Park Avenues came with its own ready-made mob heritage: the landlord was Al Capone’s aunt. Rosa Lisena lived on the ground floor with her husband, Belfronte. Rosa was from the Fischetti side of the Capone clan. Two other nephews, Charlie and Joe Fischetti, had also gone west to make their gangster careers alongside their famous cousin in Chicago. Charlie became “Trigger Happy” Fischetti; Joe became close friends with Frank Sinatra.

Rosa’s life was less eventful. “She was a caterer, she’d make sandwiches for all the parties and weddings. A nice lady, she talked about how sweet her nephews were.”

Al still drove a truck occasionally for Theodore Ficci and Sons, the firm in lower Manhattan. But having passed muster with his father-in-law as a hard worker, he was focused now on trying to come up with money-earning scores. He lucked into one such opportunity after a cousin introduced him to an enterprising hustler who went by the name of Willie Dumps. The hustler hung out on Mott Street in the city and was expert at selling stolen merchandise. One of his hustles was the sale of pharmaceuticals like penicillin on the black market.

“This Willie Dumps put out word that he is looking for a connection to get hold of penicillin.” As it turned out, Al had just such a hook. The E. R. Squibb Corporation was one of the largest employers in downtown Brooklyn, operating out of a pair of towering manufacturing plants near the Brooklyn Bridge facing the East River. “I knew a couple guys from the neighborhood who were working there, and when I asked if they could get penicillin they said they could get as much as we wanted.”

The problem was how to get large quantities of the capsules, which were stored in five-gallon glass jugs, out of the plant. Entry doors were well guarded. But the north side of one wing of the massive Squibb complex was adjacent to a narrow cobblestone alley that ran behind an old brick warehouse once home to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Al hatched a plan that called for him to park his car in the alley, then casually saunter away. Several floors up, one of his pals in the plant used clothesline to lower the jugs to the street below. Another Squibb insider hauled them in, placing them carefully in Al’s trunk. When the coast was clear, Al strolled back to his car and drove away.

The scheme worked fine the first few times. No one spotted the jugs, containing more than four thousand capsules each, as they were gingerly lowered from an upper floor. Managers noticed that a chunk of inventory had somehow gone missing, but were mystified about how it had disappeared.

Meanwhile, Willie Dumps lived up to his reputation, clearing a profit of sixty cents per pill. One customer was a New Jersey fence named Peter LiButti, who was tied into Vito Genovese’s crime family, the city’s most powerful mob outfit. Known as “Hoboken Pete,” LiButti had a contact who was a legitimate pharmaceutical salesman for drug firms who was eager to buy all the cut-rate capsules he could get.

LiButti lamented that he wasn’t allowed to water down the drugs to boost his profits. There was a strict mob edict issued against it, he explained, after a group of thieves had adulterated stolen pharmaceuticals to hike their earnings. “They got stopped because a wiseguy’s kid or mother could wind up with the drugs. No bootleg medicine allowed. That came from the top.”

After a few weeks of the lucrative thefts, however, the thieves solved the mystery for the puzzled Squibb managers. One evening, as Al waited on the corner, a jug slipped loose of the line and plummeted seventy feet straight down, smashing on the cobblestones below. “It was like a bomb went off. The capsules go exploding everywhere up and down the alley.” Workers in the plant rushed to the windows to see what had happened. Al raced to his car and sped away.

*   *   *

The penicillin caper was Al’s introduction to a network of accomplished thieves friendly with Willie Dumps. One of them was Columbo Saggese, a burglar who operated out of a small café at 113 Mott Street in Little Italy. Saggese lived in a top-floor apartment, while his brother Moe, his legs crippled from birth, ran the café. While Moe worked the espresso machine, Saggese and his associates sat perched at the small tables discussing opportunities and strategy.

Their specialty was robbing commercial lofts in the garment and fur districts. The burglars tried to ensure success in their enterprise by bribing detectives in the police department’s Safe and Loft Squad, which was charged with protecting industrial spaces in midtown and lower Manhattan. Garment-shop owners also paid the cops for protection, upping the ante after major thefts.

“The detectives on the squad were always coming by Moe’s place looking for bigger envelopes. You couldn’t tell these cops from the gangsters. They wore flashy clothes and had big pinkie rings. They were like their own wiseguys. They had their own rules.”

Bribe-wise, the burglars were often outbid by the shop owners. At those times, the corrupt cops would deliver a stern lecture. “They’d say, ‘If we catch you up there, you ain’t coming out. We’ll kill ya.’ They’d do it too. Throw you right out the window, say you fell getting away. The message was that they’re getting their grease from the owners, and you’d better not embarrass them by pulling a job there.”

Al took to sitting in the café on Mott Street soaking up gangster lore with his new friends. The café actively discouraged paying customers. “Any time someone they didn’t know came in off the street to ask for a cup of coffee they were told the machine was broken. We could be sitting there, steam coming off the top of our cups, and Moe would tell them, ‘Sorry, no coffee.’ They got the idea.”

The rear of the café was an even more important locus for crime. Behind a narrow partition was an active bookmaking operation and organizational headquarters for some of the neighborhood’s most venerable gangsters. One of them was a distinguished-looking man in his sixties with dark hair graying at the temples. Slightly shorter than Al, he showed up every day at the café impeccably dressed in tie, jacket, and fedora. In whispers, Saggese informed Al that this was an important old-time Mafioso named Jimmy Alto. Al had never heard of him. Neither had most people. In a decades-long run, Vincenzo “Jimmy Alto” Altomari successfully kept his name out of both police blotters and newspapers while ranking in the highest order among Little Italy’s gangland fiefdoms.

Born in the city of Mangone in Calabria, Italy, in 1894 of Albanian parents, Jimmy Alto was a swashbuckling battler as a young man. Part of his legend was that after arriving in the U.S., he made his way to the Southwest, where he joined the Mexican rebel army of Pancho Villa, who at one point had crossed the border into New Mexico. If so, he was in good company. Giuseppe Garibaldi II, grandson of the Italian liberator, led a contingent of Italian volunteers who fought alongside Villa during major battles. Alto later joined the American Army during World War I. His soldiering experiences gave him bragging rights few other mobsters could match. “Mob big shots would come by the café asking to see him. Jimmy Alto would sit in the back and say in his heavy Italian accent, ‘Do they know him in Albuquerque? Let him wait.’”

In New York, Alto joined a Masonic lodge where he forged close connections with politicians and judges. Crime-wise, he was allied with the family headed by Vito Genovese. But his association went back to Genovese’s predecessor, Lucky Luciano, recognized as the founding father of the modern American Mafia. Luciano had operated out of his own social club a block away on Mulberry Street.

But from what Al could tell, Jimmy Alto answered to no other boss. His chief dominion was control over gambling in a choice swath of Little Italy. “He had the floating crap games, the faro card games, and the ziginette games that had hundreds of thousands of dollars changing hands every night.”

Despite his influence, Alto lived modestly. He and his wife resided in an apartment above the Fretta Brothers pork store on the corner of Hester and Mott Streets. His one indulgence was fine clothes. “He’d shop at Kaplan’s on Canal Street, buy expensive suits. If he got a spot on a necktie, it came right off. He’d tie it around a lamppost and leave it there.”

In the café’s back room, Alto surrounded himself with a small group of close associates. There was Sammy Chillemi, a big man of few words; Vito Truppiano, considered a tough guy in a neighborhood filled with them; and Paul Della Universita, who helped Alto brainstorm his schemes. Al already knew Della Universita, who was known as “Paulie Lefty.” “Paulie lived down the block above Vincent’s scungilli place with his wife, Anna. She was friendly with Dolores. They played bingo together at Transfiguration Church.”

Alto’s single most lucrative enterprise, Al learned, was the ziginette games. The game was wildly popular and the mob collected 25 percent of every winning pot, the biggest cut the house took on any of its gambling operations. “When the ziginette was running, all other dice and card games were shut down. If you wanted to gamble then, it was ziginette or nothing.”

Gamblers were still eager to play. To win a game was like hitting the lottery. Cards were dealt out of a faro box allowing players to see only one at a time. Bets were made as each card was dealt. There was no real skill involved, just luck. But the game drew big crowds. “The money builds up. You hit one card, then you pile the money on top. If you run nine hands, you’re rich.”

The right to operate the game was reserved for mobsters. “You couldn’t just open a ziginette game. If you did, the wiseguy who controlled that area would send one of his men to put his own faro box on the table. That meant you had a new partner. It was either that or a trip to the hospital, or worse.”

Games changed locations regularly to thwart the occasional stickup crews that preyed on gambling clubs. The police were less of a problem, since the nearby Elizabeth Street precinct was provided with a share in the winnings. Still, some detectives prowled Little Italy basements looking for signs of gambling. “You were supposed to sweep up all the cigarette butts after the game so the cops couldn’t spot where guys had been standing around.”

One evening Al and Saggese were at a crap game in an upstairs apartment around the corner from the café when detectives burst in from the fire escape. Others poured in from the hallway. “They crashed the door in and took a bunch of us to the precinct. But that was nothing. You wait for night court, it gets dismissed. The big thing was the cops took the bankroll on the table. It was more than ten grand including the house’s share. That was a problem.”

Federal agents were another headache. “They weren’t reachable the way the cops were. And if you had guys at the games driving in from Jersey and Connecticut or Pennsylvania, then they could nail you on interstate gambling, a federal charge.”

Jimmy Alto’s clout gave him control of all such games operating in a two-block stretch between Mott and Mulberry Streets, from Canal to Hester. It was the heart of Little Italy and prime gambling territory. Running the games required a string of clever and dependable assistants, and Alto soon singled out Al D’Arco as a potential recruit.

Al didn’t feel very clever at first. “One day me and Columbo are sitting in the café talking and one of us mentioned the word ‘combination.’ That’s what they called the mob in Chicago and it was a word—like ‘Mafia’—you were never supposed to say out loud.” They realized their mistake when Sammy Chillemi and Vito Truppiano stepped out from the back of the café to glare at them. “I froze. So did Columbo. You weren’t supposed to say those things.”

The lapse was forgiven. A few days later, Chillemi summoned Al behind the café’s partition. There, Jimmy Alto looked him up and down and asked if he would like to handle a few things for him. “Whatever you need,” said Al, thrilled to be asked.

The first task involved a visit to a Times Square shop called Ace Novelties. Alto introduced him to the owner, a Jewish craftsman named Abe who handmade the dice used in Alto’s crap games. “They weren’t just any pair of dice, they were ‘perfect dice’ because they were perfectly square on all sides with a special beveled edge you couldn’t get with machines.”

Al’s assignment was to go up to Ace Novelties every few weeks and pick up new sets when they were ready. The dice came in matching sets of five, tightly wrapped in tissue paper and sealed with tape. Al noticed that the color of the tissue paper changed with each delivery. He realized it was to spot any tampering and to keep him from switching the sets. “Jimmy had strict rules about the dice. I wasn’t supposed to bring anyone with me when I picked them up, or even tell anyone where they came from. After I got them, they were to go to Jimmy, no one else.”

Recalling the fate of the crap-game operator at the State Theater on DeKalb Avenue who went missing after loaded dice surfaced in his own game, Al understood Jimmy Alto’s caution.

Al would chat with Abe on his visits. The dice maker said that he crafted products for several Las Vegas casinos, as well as for mob-run gambling joints in places like Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. His connections, Abe told him, stemmed from his good friend Abner “Longie” Zwillman, the ex-bootlegger who had used his wealth to become one of New Jersey’s biggest political powers.

Al enjoyed the trips and the conversation. “I was attending la scuola delle strade, the school of the streets. I was a good student.”

*   *   *

School never recessed. One hot afternoon, Al stood on the sidewalk in front of Moe’s café, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He had a handkerchief tied around his neck and wore sunglasses against the glare of the day. It was a pose struck up and down the gangster boulevards of Mott and Mulberry Streets by young men trying to look both dangerous and idle at the same time. Jimmy Alto stepped out of the café looking annoyed. “What are you, an actor?” he snapped. “Take off those sunglasses.” Inside, there was a further scolding. “Don’t be standing out there like you got nothing to do in the middle of the day,” Alto told him. “Be low-key. Don’t stand out. Don’t do anything to get noticed.”

Low-key. It applied to everything Alto’s men did. Considering the amount of money hauled in from their gambling rackets alone, Al knew they could easily afford Cadillacs, the car he had hoped to get once he could swing it. But Chillemi and Truppiano both drove old heaps. Chillemi had a Buick older than the car Al bought when he got out of the Army. Truppiano, considered one of the toughest men in the neighborhood, drove an old Pontiac.

“Nothing flashy,” they explained.

*   *   *

Vito Truppiano handled another profitable gambling enterprise for Alto, one Al had never heard of before starting to hang out on Mott Street. Gee-far was a kind of Chinese lottery. Players bet on one of three dozen different symbols—frogs, rats, fire, even coffins. Like many of those who bet regularly on the numbers racket, bettors tried to interpret dreams and other signs to help them pick winners. Unlike the numbers, however, which were based on a single daily figure such as the handle at the racetrack or stock market volume, gee-far paid off nine times a day. All day long, runners raced through the streets collecting bets and delivering payoffs.

It was hugely popular in the Chinese community, located mainly south of Canal Street. But it caught on as well among their Italian neighbors, since the odds, 36–1 less the house percentage, were good. Bets were mainly nickels and dimes, but profits added up.

It was enough to make competitors jealous. “Vito and Jimmy Alto were making huge money off the gee-far, and some guy, they called him Feets, made a play to try to get a piece. Vito told him to mind his own business.”

The man named Feets continued to press. Truppiano, with Alto’s approval, pushed back harder. In a tense meeting over the game, Feets slapped Truppiano in the face. “Vito didn’t do anything. He just walked away. The next day this Feets is crossing Canal Street and a car goes by and someone gives him three blasts with a shotgun. Boom, boom, boom. Everyone in the neighborhood heard it. That was the end of Feets and no one bothered the gee-far game after that.”

At the café, no mention of the incident was made other than a comment by Jimmy Alto that Al often heard him offer in such situations. “All the tough guys are in the graveyard,” he croaked.

*   *   *

Al knew he was being watched by Alto and his crew to see how he handled himself, the same way the mobsters back in Brooklyn had tested him. A few months after he had started running errands for the gangsters, Al was again summoned into the back room. They were starting a new café and club a few doors down the block, Alto told him. It would be in the basement of Mike Lubrano’s drugstore at 109 Mott Street. “He says they are going to run a big ziginette game there.”

Alto asked if Al would like to be part of the operation and share in the game’s earnings. Al restrained his excitement. “Whatever you want, Jimmy,” he said. “I will be glad to help.”

He was honored to be asked, even though he knew he’d have to do most of the work, everything from keeping track of their earnings to making coffee for players and getting supplies.

It started with securing cards for the game. They had to be Bicycle brand only, red and blue decks, purchased from a friend of Alto’s in sealed cartons. He had to keep a record of the house’s cut of the winnings. When players wanted coffee, he would make black espresso in a Neapolitan Maganetta pot. It was served only at the counter. “If you give it to someone while they’re playing and it spills, then they’d say it messed up their hand.”

There were two dealers, a doorman, and someone to clean the café and the bathroom. “We called him ‘Filthy Pants Dom,’ or ‘Dirty Dom,’ since he was a mess. But he didn’t care, since he got tips, which came to quite a bit.”

Tips also went to the doorman, who was responsible for making sure no one got inside who wasn’t known. “His name was ‘Chuch’ and he was very valuable because he knew the name and face of every wiseguy and big gambler.”

Even before the space was ready to open, detectives from the Elizabeth Street precinct came to look the spot over. “They told Jimmy they’d be back in a couple of weeks, which meant everything would be okay as long as they were on the pad and collecting a payoff.”

The partners also had to pay homage to local mob politics. In a nod to the branch of the crime family based in Manhattan’s Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side, Alto put an old-timer from that group named Don ZaZá on the game’s payroll.

Rosario DiMaggio was a caricature of the fast-disappearing generation of the original Black Hand. Every day he dressed as if for a funeral. He wore the same crumpled black jacket, black tie, black vest, and pants with a Charlie Chaplin–style hat with the brim turned up. Although only in his late fifties, DiMaggio walked like a much older man, slowly and bent over, as though the earth were already calling him to ground. He was also less than helpful. “Don ZaZá would sit in a chair inside the door, smoking the stump of his stinking cigar. He’d toss the matches on the floor and then spit. When he went to the bathroom he’d piss all over the seat and the floor.”

The old man made a point of goading Al. “He’d tell me to bring him a box of matches when he’s got a box sitting right in front of him. I know he’s waiting for me to tell him that so he can scream that it’s none of my business, and to shut up and bring him what he asked for. He was looking to bait me into saying something out of line to a made man.” The way Al figured it, the aging gangster was scheming to get him removed from the club so he could fill Al’s slot with one of his own cronies.

Al wasn’t the only one annoyed by the antics. “Gamblers would use the toilet after Don ZaZá and come out complaining that someone had pissed all over everything. This happens one night when Jimmy Alto is there. He goes in the bathroom to take a look and comes out steaming. I told him I’d handle it and got Filthy Pants Dom to clean it up fast. But I see Jimmy sitting at the bar eyeing Don ZaZá.”

DiMaggio didn’t seem to notice or care. “He just sits in his chair, throwing matches on the floor and spitting like he did every night.” After a while, Don ZaZá rose. He stepped to the counter and told Al to make him a cup of espresso, “forte e dolce”—strong and sweet. Al nodded and proceeded to make the brew in the Maganetta pot. He carefully warmed up the demitasse with boiling water to make sure the coffee wouldn’t get cold. He placed it in front of the old man. “Favorita, Don ZaZá,” he said. Enjoy.

The gangster reached for the cup, then flicked his finger out, knocking it over. Hot coffee splashed Al and spilled down the counter. Al tried not to flinch. He told DiMaggio not to worry, that he’d make him a new cup. But as he reached for a rag, Jimmy Alto exploded.

“Don’t clean that bar,” Alto shouted. Then, eyes bulging, he turned to DiMaggio and yelled. “You come in here and spit on the floor, piss all over the toilet, and throw your matches everywhere. Enough. You are barred from the game. I will send Al to you with your pay, but don’t come around anymore.”

The gamblers in the room went silent. It was the first time Al had heard Jimmy Alto raise his voice, much less at a fellow member of the mob. “Go ahead,” Alto added as he waited for Don ZaZá to respond. “See what you have to do about it.”

After a moment Don ZaZá heaved a loud sigh. “Songano stanza,” he said. He was tired. Turning to Al he said, “When the game is over if you would drive me home I would appreciate it.” Al looked at Jimmy Alto, who seemed embarrassed to have lost his temper in public. Then Alto nodded. “I would be glad to,” Al told the old man. DiMaggio lived on Madison Street, in Knickerbocker Village, near the East River. Neither said a word on the drive over.

Don ZaZá stayed away from the ziginette game. But a few days later, when Al arrived at Moe’s café, he was surprised to find the old man in his crumpled black suit sitting on the wooden bench out front. Don ZaZá motioned Al to sit down next to him. Al sat. “Como te chiama?” the old man asked. DiMaggio wanted to know his name. He told him. “Ah, I have a brother Alfonso in Sicily. We had a lemon grove together. You know,” DiMaggio said, “I have never been home to see my brother or my lemon grove.”

Al sat there not saying anything, wondering what the old man wanted. “Alfonso, I would like you to take me home,” he continued, “but please stop at the fruit stand. I want to get some fruit.” Al went to get his car and then helped DiMaggio, who seemed more bent over than usual, get in. At the fruit stand, the vendor quickly filled a small bag with grapes and peaches and handed it to Don ZaZá, who didn’t offer to pay. Al noticed that the vendor didn’t seem surprised.

At DiMaggio’s apartment building, Al helped him out of the car and walked him to the door, his hand on the old man’s elbow. Don ZaZá turned toward Al and straightened himself as much as he could. “Alfonso, you are a good young man,” he told him in Sicilian. “You have learned well the lessons of the school of the streets.” He started to go inside, then paused and turned back. “Ricordo Don ZaZá con na buona cuore,” he said as he kissed Al on both cheeks. “He told me to remember him with a good heart. I didn’t see him again after that.”

*   *   *

Al’s ability to keep his rage in check with the abusive gangster won him more high marks in Jimmy Alto’s school. Not long after the incident with Don ZaZá, Sammy Chillemi asked Al to help him with a different scheme, one that was a few grades higher up on the mob curriculum.

Chillemi explained that he was an official of a union representing workers who made toys. This was news to Al, who couldn’t imagine how Chillemi found time to run a union, since most of his days and evenings seemed to be taken up with the bookmaking business and other crimes being hatched in the back of Moe’s café.

The union job didn’t require that much work, Chillemi told him. In fact, it wasn’t much of a union. Its labor contracts were tailored to suit the needs of employers, not members. What it did require, however, was making regular rounds of the city’s toy manufacturers to collect payoffs and find out if there were any problems. Al was fascinated. It was a level of crime he’d never seen in action. “Anything I can do for you, Sammy,” he said.

The job entailed driving around the city with Chillemi to the various firms. Many of the manufacturers had offices in the Toy Center on West Twenty-Third Street across from the Flatiron Building. Al would ride the elevator to the top floor and stop off at a half dozen or more companies on his way down.

In between pickups, Chillemi explained the economics of the arrangement. “The way it worked, he told me, was that they’d have a contract that says the employer is supposed to pay pension, welfare, etcetera for all their workers. But if they had maybe a hundred workers, they’d pay for like ten of them. So they’d give Sammy a cut of what they were saving. There was a lot of money in that.”

The agreement with the bogus union was even more important, Chillemi explained, if a legitimate labor group came around trying to organize the workers. “The owners get to say they’ve already got a union, so get lost. Everyone knows it’s a sweetheart deal, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s the law. You can only have one union.”

Even better, the seasoned racketeer explained, it was hard to get caught. As long as you weren’t exceptionally greedy, employers were glad to go along. The workers, most of them among the city’s poorest, rarely questioned things. If they did, they were usually easy to intimidate.

Al listened carefully. The labor racket seemed promising.

*   *   *

It was a good time for finding new earning opportunities, since his own responsibilities were growing. On July 4, 1956, Dolores gave birth to a son. They picked Joseph as the baby’s name. It was an easy call. Following the same Italian tradition that Al’s father had practiced when he was born, the new baby was named after his father’s father.

The baptism was held at St. Lucy’s, a Roman Catholic church down the street on Kent Avenue. Afterward, family and friends celebrated at a club next door to their apartment. “We had a big party, we went late that night.” Everyone complimented the food. The chef was Rosa Lisena, the landlady with the famous nephew.

*   *   *

The new father took his work seriously. He occasionally rolled the dice at a game of craps, but when his luck ran bad he stopped before digging himself into a hole. He wasn’t much for drinking either, taking a glass of wine and an occasional brandy, but that was it. As much as he could, he stayed out of bars. “That’s where trouble starts. My father taught me that. Guys get drunk, your friends become your enemies. I stayed away.”

Instead, he was home most nights on Kent Avenue for dinner with his wife and baby boy. Some friends poked fun. “You sure you’re a gangster?” Columbo Saggese asked one night when Al begged off a night of gambling.

He focused on learning his trade.

“Every day was crime day. You got up, it was ‘How you going to make money today?’ It was a job you went to, and you couldn’t slag off.”

Some crimes weren’t to his taste, however. A tip from a gambler at the ziginette game led him to a Lower East Side butcher-shop owner who was cashing checks for people. “He was an old German guy and he kept the money in a shoebox behind the counter. Him and his wife were in there, and I went in and stuck them up.” The shop had a walk-in refrigerator. Al pointed his gun at them and told them to get inside. “The guy got all afraid. He’s shaking. He says, ‘Please, don’t hurt my wife.’ I said, ‘I won’t hurt your wife.’ I felt bad, the guy was really scared. And then I realize if the guy fights back I’m going to have to hurt him. And some of these jerks, they just shoot the guy. That was it for me with stickups.”

*   *   *

There were plenty of other opportunities.

One of Al’s new acquaintances was a moonfaced young man from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn named Albert Gallo. He and his brothers Larry and Joe were part of an ambitious crew affiliated with Joseph Profaci’s crime family. Al didn’t much care for Joe Gallo’s nonstop chatter, but he liked Albert, who, in sharp contrast to his older brothers, was a man of few words. “I knew him as ‘the Blast.’ They said he was so quiet he wouldn’t blast a mosquito.”

Together with the muted Blast, Al embarked on a series of hijackings and warehouse burglaries around Brooklyn. “We stole everything: TVs, dresses, meat trailers. Whatever we could get.” Some paid off nicely, others not. One tip Gallo relayed was about a garage on Franklin Avenue. He had learned that trucks were loaded there with merchandise the night before they headed out to department stores around the city. “It was supposed to be a place filled with expensive stuff. We could get in easy, snatch the truck keys, and just drive right out.”

They drove the load to an isolated spot by the East River where they climbed in the back to examine the loot they’d grabbed. “The whole back was filled with cartons of these new chrome kitchen trash pails made by Beautyware, the ones you step on to lift the lid. They were pretty popular items, but still, they were trash pails. We figured, What the hell? We sold what we could and spread the rest around. Everyone in our families got one.”

*   *   *

While Al was risking life and liberty for a stolen load of shiny trash cans, a bloody battle for control was being waged in the upper echelons of organized crime. In May 1957, a gunman followed Mafia boss Frank Costello into the lobby of his fashionable Central Park West apartment building and fired at him almost point-blank. He missed, just creasing the gangster’s skull.

The attempted assassination wasn’t discussed openly in Jimmy Alto’s crew, but there was no hiding the jitters on the street. Costello was Lucky Luciano’s closest ally. After Luciano’s deportation to Italy in 1946, Costello had taken his spot as the leader of his crime family. With it came the de facto leadership of the Commission, the assembly of Mafia bosses created to smooth out intramob disputes and enhance profits. Costello was such a strong influence in New York politics that he was perceived as having made one mayor, William O’Dwyer, and helped control his successor, Vincent Impellitteri.

“It was like they’d tried to kill the president. Everyone was keyed up. There wasn’t a lot of hanging out for a while.”

There also wasn’t much mystery about who was behind the attempted rubout. The bullet that nicked Costello’s head was fired by one of Vito Genovese’s chauffeurs and enforcers, a lumbering ex–light heavyweight prizefighter named Vincent Gigante, known on the street as “Chin.”

Al often saw Genovese walking in the neighborhood. “You always knew he was coming up Mulberry Street to the Alto Knights social club on Kenmare where he hung out because he’d have wiseguys on each side of the street guarding him. There’d be gunmen posted on the corners.”

It was like watching a general on military parade. Genovese’s own reputation for violence preceded him. In order to marry his wife, he’d had her first husband strangled, the body left atop a six-story building on Thompson Street. “People were very afraid of him. They knew he’d kill you for anything.”

Around the same time, Al got a chance to see the other big name in New York’s gangland, another five-star Mafia general who made his own headlines a few months after the Costello hit attempt.

“It was at a big crap game on Columbia Street in Red Hook. I was there with Al ‘the Blast’ Gallo. The game was run by Aniello Ercole, Mr. T they called him, a big man in the Anastasia gang. There was a lot of money on the floor, guys were losing $50,000 in a roll.”

Al was impressed with the layers of secrecy required to gain entry. “You met them in a café and then they’d take you in a car to the game. They kept the location secret because they knew the cops would steal the money if they could find it. Then when you got there, you had to slide the card of the day under the door, like the ace of spades.”

When Al and the Blast finally gained access to the game, the room was dark, smoke-filled, and noisy. “The place is packed and we’re watching the action. There’s a bunch of guys shooting dice and going wild. They had on long leather coats went right to the floor. One guy hollers, ‘Ah, we lost again! Who the fuck we gonna kill now to get some more money?’ Then one of them looked up and he goes pale. There’s Albert Anastasia leaning against the wall right across from him, staring.”

Anastasia didn’t do anything, but his look of irritation at the gangsters publicly bragging about murder was enough. “Those guys cleared right out of there, and they were tough guys too.”

The chief of what became known as Murder Incorporated was then heading the second-biggest crime family in New York, rivaling Vito Genovese’s fiefdom. But the rivalry wasn’t to last. On October 25, 1957, a few months after Al spied the mob boss through the haze at the crap game, Anastasia was gunned down in the barbershop inside the Park Sheraton on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He was just sitting down for a morning shave when two men in suits and fedoras walked in and opened fire. The shooters got away. No one was ever prosecuted. The word on the street was that the Blast’s brother, Joe, was part of the hit team. Actually, he had nothing to do with it. The killers were gunmen from Anastasia’s own crime family. But Gallo relished the notoriety just the same, dropping broad hints that he had been there.

“It went around that Joe Gallo was part of the hit. But you didn’t talk about it.” The next time Al saw his friend the Blast, they acted like nothing had happened.

The friends stayed similarly mum a few weeks later when headlines blared about the police discovery of a secret meeting of nearly a hundred top mobsters in upstate Apalachin, New York. It was a dramatic and public confirmation of the Mafia’s existence. Al tried to read Jimmy Alto’s reaction. The old man didn’t say a word.

*   *   *

Al was hunting for new moneymaking opportunities when he first met another future mob chieftain, one who was to play a major role in his own future. At the time, Vittorio Amuso didn’t look anything like a boss.

“On Mulberry Street I ran into Archie Mannarino, who is from my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He told me he knew about some guys who were doing a bust-out on a grocery wholesale outfit on Flushing Avenue near the Navy Yard. He said, ‘Come down. Maybe we can make a few bucks.’”

The bust-out was already well under way. A pair of brothers had gotten hold of a firm doing business out of one of the stalls in the old Wallabout market. Trailerloads of groceries were being ordered, filled with butter, eggs, and meat. “Waldbaum’s supermarket was their big customer. They were selling so much merchandise that the vendors were giving them all the credit they wanted. They’re ordering more and more, and it’s all going out the back door while they get the cash. Then they stick the company with the tab.”

While Archie was introducing Al to the brothers and discussing ways they could participate, Al saw a young man his own age pushing a hand truck. “One of the brothers turns to him and says, ‘Kid, go get us a cup of coffee.’” The young man dropped the hand truck and went next door to a luncheonette. When he returned with the coffee containers, he was introduced. “Al, this is Vic Amuso,” he was told. The young man was slightly shorter than Al, with a wide jaw and a crop of curly hair. They shook hands. Al didn’t give him another thought. “He was like a lobby boy, a gofer.” A few years later, he got to know him better—in prison. “I didn’t even remember anything about him till I ran into him in Sing Sing.”

*   *   *

He remained an attentive student of “the Life,” as Jimmy Alto and others referred to their chosen calling. He also took lessons from a new tutor. At a family wedding he met Joseph Schiavo, the cousin by marriage who was the co-owner of the garment factory where his aunt Mildred had worked. Tall and totally bald, Schiavo was an imposing figure. “He reminded me of that actor, Erich Von Stroheim. He had that look.” Schiavo’s connections were equally impressive. His partner in the garment plant was Thomas Luchese, the crime boss whose nickname of “Three Finger Brown” had made Al snicker when he was a boy.

The boyhood snickers were long gone. The name Luchese, he now understood, ranked alongside Luciano, Costello, Genovese, and Anastasia in the Mafia pantheon. Even more impressive, his cousin Joe was a top member of Luchese’s family. Known among wiseguys as “Joe Reese,” Schiavo lived in the Canarsie neighborhood of south Brooklyn near the Queens border.

When Al met him, Schiavo was in his late forties. He was partners with Luchese in more than a dozen garment shops, as well as trucking firms and supply companies. Each had its own favorable union contract and a market niche that no competitor dared challenge. Another part-owner in the shops was an old man of the mob named Torrido Curiale, who presided over the family’s Brooklyn crew with Schiavo as his top lieutenant.

“I learned a lot from Joe Schiavo. He knew the whole history of the mob. He could trace back the families to where they started and the wars they had.”

Among the history lessons he imparted to the young student was that the first American-based mob family had originated in Newark, not in New Orleans, as is generally believed. “It was called La Chiesa, the Church. The family that Tommy Luchese headed was the descendant of that first group.”

The American mob had fought its own war of independence, Schiavo told him. “It was decided back under Luciano that the old Italian crime gangs, the Camorra, the Sicilian Mafia, and the ’Ndrangheta from Calabria, wouldn’t have any control over the American mob. They killed a lot of old-timers, Mustache Petes, who didn’t want to go along with that.”

The revolution was viciously enforced. “They had killers who went around the country taking out the old guys who wanted to stay aligned with the Italian families.”

One of those traveling executioners, Al was fascinated to learn, was Leo Lauritano, the smiling baker at the Navy Street café he’d visited as a small child with his grandparents. Another was his other mentor, Jimmy Alto, who had also been a traveling hitman, enforcing the new regime’s rules, he was told.

Schiavo imparted tips as well as history lessons. “He knew a lot of places we could knock off if we were careful and smart. We started making good scores through him, hitting dress rooms, and factories.”

Schiavo never asked for a share of the proceeds, Al noted, even though he was rightfully entitled to one. “I’d bring a couple cases of good olive oil as a thank-you. He never asked for more than that.”

But the older mobster did stake his claim. He informed Al that he was now “with” the Luchese family. It was like putting the family brand on the budding mobster. Any future criminal enterprises Al launched would be under the Luchese umbrella.

Al had no objections. In fact, he was delighted.

*   *   *

In his workaday crimes, he was trying to be careful, steering clear of deals that sounded too good to be true or too dangerous, and hoodlums too loud or clumsy to be trusted. But there were so many heists and hijackings with so many partners that he had to trip up. And he did. Not once, but twice.

The first time was a load of stolen men’s overcoats. They were cheap coats as well. Initially, that made the foul-up even more embarrassing. Later it proved a blessing.

It started by trying to help out a neighbor.

“Tony Billeci ran the butcher shop across the street from us on Kent Avenue and he kept telling me he wanted to get into the action. I told him, ‘Hey, stay a butcher, it’s safer.’ But he kept pushing.”

Billeci excitedly reported that he’d met a crew of burglars who were looting stores in south Brooklyn. “He tells me these guys have a load of coats they took from a Robert Hall store in Bay Ridge. They wanted someone who could help sell them.”

Al did know someone he thought might be interested. “Buddy Garaventi had been coming around Mott Street and he was pretty active as a fence.” Al knew that Garaventi, a swaggering, outgoing man, was someone he could trust. For one thing, Garaventi had endless opportunities for moving stolen merchandise through his job running a crew of longshoremen on the docks in Hoboken for a major freight company. It also didn’t hurt that he was a first cousin to Frank Sinatra. “Buddy didn’t brag about it, but he seemed to be pretty close to his cousin. I know he could get guys tickets to shows anytime.”

On February 17, 1961, Al and Tony Billeci rented a small van at an Avis car rental in midtown and drove out to Union City, a couple of miles north of Hoboken on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. There, they met Garaventi and a shop owner named Louis Parisi who dealt in stolen merchandise. After agreeing on a price, they returned the next night with the coats loaded in the back. There were 260 of them, all with labels for Robert Hall, the cut-rate clothing store where the “values went up, up, up, and the prices went down, down, down,” according to the chain’s incessant TV jingle.

“First thing, we had to strip out all the labels so there wouldn’t be any proof they were hot.” They were working away inside the store on Hudson Boulevard when police burst in the door.

“The cops are all over the place before we can do anything. They had to be tipped because it was the middle of the night.”

At a Union City police precinct, Al was handcuffed to a chair, his arms tethered to the bottom rung. A detective stood behind him. Another sat atop a desk in front of him, thumbing through Al’s wallet. He pulled out a driver’s license. “What’s your name?” the detective with his wallet asked.

Al told him.

“Where do you live?”

“Brooklyn, New York.”

“What were you doing in there?”

“I got nothing to say,” said Al. The detective behind him slammed him in the neck.

“Where’d those coats come from?”

“Nothing to say.” The detective in front lifted his leg and kicked him hard in the chest. The blow knocked Al over backward. He lay on the floor, pinned to the chair. The detective who had been standing behind him aimed a kick at his head. Al swerved and the blow landed on his shoulder. The detective moved closer and stomped him in the ribs. Then the cops propped him up again and it started all over.

The beating and questioning continued much of the night. When the detectives gave up trying to get him to talk they told him to sign a statement. Al refused that too. “Boom, the same detective starts hitting me from behind.”

He was arraigned late the following day. A bail bondsman from Centre Street in Manhattan, one used regularly by Alto’s crew, rushed over to post bond.

At home, Al limped upstairs, where Dolores put him to bed. The next morning he couldn’t move. “It was like I was paralyzed. My neck was killing me, I couldn’t move my head.” Dolores called Columbo Saggese, who drove out to the house from Mott Street. They draped a blanket around Al, who was only half-dressed, and took him to Brooklyn Hospital on DeKalb Avenue.

“What happened?” asked a nurse.

“He fell,” answered Saggese.

The nurse looked him over. He was covered in dark bruises. “That was some fall,” she said.

*   *   *

It was Al’s first major arrest. It felt like a badge of honor. At Moe’s café, there were slaps on the back. Several friends counseled him not to worry, that so many cops and judges were on the take in Hudson County, New Jersey, where the arrest had taken place, that the problem could probably be taken care of with the right bribes to the right people. That might’ve been true, except the case was quickly taken over by federal prosecutors.

“The FBI got into it somehow and it became a federal case. They wanted to make it into a big deal, interstate trafficking in stolen goods.”

With Jimmy Alto’s help, he got a local New Jersey lawyer who went to work finding out how the cops had been tipped off to the meeting.

Al went right back to work. “I figured, Why should I slow down? I’m going to need more money for legal bills.” He was also by now feeding a family of four, a daughter, Ava Marie, having been born in 1958.

As penance, he vowed once more to steer clear of crimes involving people he didn’t already know and trust. The resolution lasted less than five months. The rule quickly went out the window when someone approached him with a scheme worth a lot more than a pile of overcoats from a discount clothing store.

“It was $500,000, that’s what turned my head.” The tantalizing offer came from a gangster in the Profaci crew who went by the name of Paulie “Guns” Bevacqua. “I knew him from Albert the Blast. He told me that they had these stolen stocks and bonds lifted from a big brokerage company worth half a million dollars. They were looking to unload them but they couldn’t line up a fence who could handle that much.”

Al was more than glad to help out. “I knew Tommy Kapatos, this Greek guy from the West Side, had been around a long time and understood about fencing stocks and bonds.” Known as Tommy the Greek, Kapatos was forty-six years old and, despite his nickname, half-Irish. That was enough to make him a senior member of a mainly Irish gang that ruled Hell’s Kitchen, midtown’s far West Side near the Hudson River waterfront. Kapatos was out on parole having served twenty-two years for killing a rival hood named Albert “the Ape” Dillulio in a fight on Tenth Avenue. Excited about the stock deal, Kapatos pulled in three other friends. “Next thing I know this Irish kid, Jimmy McKay, from Tommy the Greek’s neighborhood, is in it, along with two other guys.” The added gang members included Robert Raymond, another ex-con from Brooklyn who had done time for murder, and a stickup man named Armand “Frankie” DeCicco. The expanded group made Al nervous, but he figured there would be plenty to go around once they pulled off the sale.

After a few days of nosing around, Kapatos and McKay announced they had a buyer. Al asked what they knew about him. “His name was Spiro and they said he was legit, meaning he wasn’t a cop or a snitch. They said he had dealt with people they knew in Jersey who vouched for him.” Al let it go at that. The would-be buyer wanted to see the stock certificates to assure himself they were genuine. That sounded reasonable enough to the partners. Since Al was holding the stocks for safekeeping, it was agreed that Al would conduct the show.

It was his first mistake. He had the stocks hidden at home in Brooklyn in a hiding place he considered secure. “There was this walk-in closet and I had built this trapdoor in there where I could hide whatever I needed. No one knew it was there but me.” As for hiding the loot at home, it seemed eminently sensible to him. “Where else am I going to hide half a million bucks in stocks? I couldn’t take them with me and I didn’t want to put it on someone else to hide.”

Mistake number two came when he invited Spiro to visit him on Kent Avenue to see the securities. He thought he was covering his tracks by instructing him to sit in a single spot at the dining-room table and to touch nothing else in the apartment. Al retrieved the certificates and fanned them out on the table. It was a dizzying array of corporate riches: There were hundreds of shares in blue-chip stocks in firms like Gulf and Western, National Steel, Sperry Rand, and Trans-Lux. Each was embossed with an official seal designating its bona fides. Spiro examined them closely and announced himself satisfied.

“Soon as I got him out the door, I wiped down the chair where he sat, the table, and anything else I thought he might’ve touched.”

The next step was to make sure the buyer had the money. A date was made to meet a few days later. Spiro said he would bring someone with him, his “investor,” he called him. Al agreed but insisted on a public spot. “We wanted it out in the open in case anyone tried to pull something.” They chose the Taft Hotel on Seventh Avenue and West Fifty-First Street, then a bustling 1,400-room mecca for tourists near the old Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. The meet was scheduled for late Friday afternoon, July 14.

The five partners waited upstairs in the hotel’s mezzanine seated at a table overlooking the lobby so they could see who was coming in the door. Al nudged Kapatos when he spotted the buyer with another man carrying a briefcase. The two men came upstairs and joined them around the table. The briefcase was opened. Kapatos and McKay both inspected the contents and nodded to the others, indicating the cash looked right. As a good-faith offering, Al had brought $40,000 worth of the stock certificates with him in a zippered airline flight bag. Trying to look inconspicuous, the group sat chatting for a few minutes. Then Kapatos got up and walked a few feet away to make a call from a nearby telephone booth.

“Soon as he steps into the booth we see this big guy charging at us with a revolver in his hand. He lets loose a shot at Tommy the Greek.” Al was stunned to see the shot hit the phone booth, just missing Kapatos’s head.

Bedlam erupted as gang members tried to flee. Detectives surrounded them, pointing drawn guns. Jimmy McKay made a break for it. The detective who had fired at Kapatos now leveled his revolver at McKay as he tore down a mezzanine corridor. “He fires another shot. I’m thinking, These guys are trying to kill us. So I don’t move. I just stand there and let them grab me.”

It made the front page of the next day’s New York Daily News. “HOTEL SHOOTING: NAB 5 IN 45G HOT STOCKS DEAL,” ran the headline. Journeyman reporter Joseph McNamara wrote about how when McKay took off, veteran detective William McCartin calmly pumped a couple of warning shots into the ceiling to stop the fleeing felon. McCartin then “flushed McKay from under a bed in one of the rooms.”

It wasn’t the way Al saw it go down. He heard several shots, not two. From his view, the guns were aimed straight ahead, not up. “The way they were shooting,” he thought, “they were looking to take one of us down.”

But there was no disputing the rest of the facts as to how the gang had been snookered: In all, there were a dozen plainclothes officers from the district attorney’s squad posing as tourists in the hotel lobby that afternoon, three of them policewomen. Spiro and his investor were also detectives. They were on the case of more than $200,000 in securities looted in April from a brokerage firm on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan.

It was a big story. “It was on the radio all that night and the day after. They made out like we were John Dillinger or something.”

The hot-stocks quintet were first taken to the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street. Then they were brought over to police headquarters, on Centre Market Place, just two blocks from Moe’s café. On the Broome Street side of the elegant Beaux-Arts building, they were led down a ramp once used for horse-drawn police wagons. “They took us into the cellar where they had the holding pens. Walking in, we scared all these hookers down there waiting to be let out. They went, ‘Ooh, gangsters!’ Like we were real dangerous criminals. We got a laugh out of that at least.”

Al was placed alone in a cell for several hours. Then a pair of detectives led him in cuffs outside to an unmarked sedan. He rode in the back, a detective beside him. The car headed across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. The detective in the back asked him where the rest of the stocks were stashed. Al looked at the floor of the car, waiting for the beating to begin. He was surprised when they pulled up in front of his apartment building on Kent Avenue. No one had laid a hand on him.

“They took me out and I said, ‘Do you gotta walk me down the street in cuffs?’” He was surprised again when they took them off. “If you take one step we’ll shoot you,” the detective assured him. Al believed him.

Dolores was ironing when they came in. Joseph, five years old, was playing with toys in the living room. Ava Marie was in a high chair. “Dee just froze. She looks at me and she looks at the detectives. She didn’t know what to do.” The police told Al he should just tell them where the stocks were. Al didn’t say anything. They began tearing the house apart, pulling out drawers in the kitchen, tossing over chairs and tables.

Terrified, Dolores went into the living room and sat down with Joseph and Ava on her lap. She had no idea what was going on.

Al tried not to look as they neared his stash. “Almost right away, the cops went straight to the closet. The guy Spiro must’ve seen me. They started banging on the walls and floor, and found where the stocks were hidden.” So much for that, Al thought.

He was in jail for two weeks before he made bail. It was $10,000. Again, a bail bondsman pal of Jimmy Alto’s helped him out. He went home thinking about how he now had two lawyers and two bail bondsmen to pay. At home, there was worse news: Dolores had been pregnant with what would have been their third child. Instead, rattled by the raid, she’d had a miscarriage.

“It was my fault. I kept apologizing. She said, ‘Just leave it alone.’ I felt terrible.”

*   *   *

Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan took the stock case to a grand jury. It quickly returned indictments for burglary, grand larceny, and criminal concealment of stolen property. Even for someone like Al, who had no prior convictions, it was enough to win him a ten- to twenty-year sentence. For convicted felons like Kapatos and Raymond, both of whom were on lifetime paroles for their murder convictions, it likely meant life in prison.

Al’s Mott Street friends brought him to a criminal defense attorney then making a name for himself among organized-crime figures in need of talented legal help. Maurice Edelbaum had won an acquittal for Vincent Gigante when he was charged with putting a bullet through Frank Costello’s hairline. It helped, of course, that Costello testified he’d never seen Gigante before. But Edelbaum didn’t hold out much hope for this one: Al had the stolen stocks with him at the hotel, and more hidden at home. “It’s going to be very tough,” he told his client.

If that was the case, Al decided, he didn’t need to spend a fortune on legal help. Thanking Edelbaum for his honest assessment, he found another, less pricey attorney. For the next few months, the defendants tried various delaying tactics. Tommy the Greek had his own lawyer file a motion for dismissal, claiming he had just run into Raymond, an old friend, at the Taft. The two friends were catching up on old times when the detectives opened fire. Motion rejected.

Kapatos, desperate to avoid a life sentence, next turned to Al. After one of the court hearings, he leaned over and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Tommy says, ‘Can you help me out kid? I’m looking at life here. Would you cop out and say I had nothing to do with this?’”

Al looked at him, slightly stunned. Kapatos wasn’t a close friend. But he also understood. Tommy the Greek was almost twenty years older than Al. He’d already done more than twenty years in prison. The evidence against Al was dead-cinch certain. Kapatos had a chance, with some help, to beat the rap. Al wondered: Would I ask the same favor if the tables were turned?

On January 9, 1962, Al stood up in General Sessions Court in Manhattan. The judge presiding was Thomas Dickens, a former state assemblyman from Harlem and one of a handful of black judges on the bench at the time. Dickens owed Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine where organized crime still retained strong influence, for his judgeship. But no one Al knew had a clue about whether Dickens would be amenable to a bribe.

And it might not even be necessary. Al’s new lawyer told him that as a first conviction, he was, at worst, looking at a year in prison. With luck, he could get even less.

*   *   *

At home he assured Dolores that they’d be okay. And he tried to explain things to his son. All the five-year-old boy picked up was that his father was leaving him. It was an early painful memory for Joseph. “I remember him tying my shoe and telling me that he was going away and that I wouldn’t see him for a long time. That was it. I got really upset and started crying.”

In court, Al confessed to the judge that he was guilty of criminally buying and receiving stolen property. He added that it had been his idea, that Kapatos and the others had just happened into it. The judge sentenced Al to two and a half to five years at Sing Sing.

“I wasn’t sure I heard right. I looked at my lawyer, he doesn’t look at me. And there’s this loud whistle behind me. I turn around and there are some guys from Tommy the Greek’s gang in court there to support him. Sonny ‘Machine Gun’ Campbell, the boss of that outfit, was shaking his head saying, ‘Wow.’” The gangsters were amazed at the length of Al’s sentence.

Al was immediately remanded into custody. Dolores was in court with her father. He waved. “My father-in-law says, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll be here for you when you get out.’”

*   *   *

There was one reprieve. Back in Newark, in federal court where the stolen-coats case was still pending, Buddy Garaventi’s lawyer, himself a former United States attorney, had been working hard on the matter. Several months after Al was sent up the river to Sing Sing, federal marshals came to fetch him for a court hearing in Newark.

On the drive to New Jersey, Al braced himself for another stiff sentence, one likely to be consecutive to the state term he was already serving. A marshal turned around from the front seat to ask if he wanted something to eat. “No,” Al snapped.

“How about a cigarette?” said the marshal affably.

“I don’t want nothing from you,” he shot back.

“What’s your fucking problem?” said the marshal. Al didn’t respond. He just stared out the window.

In court, however, the scenario that played out was dramatically different than he’d expected. He listened with growing amazement as he heard the judge accept a motion from the federal prosecutor to dismiss the charges.

Al thought Garaventi must have bribed the U.S. attorney’s office and the judge. But that’s not what had happened. It turned out the Robert Hall jingle was correct: the store’s prices really had gone down, down, down. The wholesale value of the 260 stolen overcoats, Garaventi’s attorney had adeptly proved, was less than $5,000, the statutory minimum needed to prove a violation under federal interstate commerce laws. “Case dismissed,” said the judge.

On the way back to Sing Sing that night, Al couldn’t stop humming. “Knock it off,” snapped one of the marshals. Al grinned.