American Desperado (5 page)

I spat in his face, and the guy hit me.

There was a mate on the boat, a teenager who liked Poppy. When
he saw me get punched, he started beating on the guy. I picked up a grappling hook and began swinging. All hell broke loose.

When we got home, Poppy didn’t talk to me. The man wouldn’t raise his voice. He showed his anger with silence. I couldn’t understand him. He’d shown weakness, and I’d tried to back him up.

Poppy took me fishing again, and I got us banned from the boat. The men on the boat had a betting pool. Each man would put in a dollar, and whoever caught the biggest fish won the pot. I watched everybody putting in their money one morning, and I remember looking at these jerks, thinking,
I’m going to take their money
.

There was $52 in it that day. I caught a fish. He was big, but there were other fish equal to my fish. So I took some lead sinkers, stuffed them down my fish’s stomach, and made him the winner. I got the $52, and I tossed my fish in the bucket. Poppy was proud. He told the mate, “Filet our fish, because we’re going to eat it tonight with his grandmother.”

I didn’t pay attention. I got my $52. I’m happy.

Then the mate came back and said, “Gee whiz, we’re going to have to disqualify your grandson. Jon cheated.”

Poppy put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Give back the money.”

I looked him in the eye. “I don’t give a fuck. The money is mine.”

I knew Poppy wouldn’t do anything. He’d backed down at the poker game when the guy called him a cheater. He wasn’t going to fight me. He paid back the betting pool out of his own pocket.

A
FTER
I saw how weak Poppy was, there was no controlling me. I’d come home with lunch money I stole from a kid at school, and Poppy would ask where I got it.

“None of your fucking business.” I knew how to handle him.

My school was Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Teaneck. When I didn’t want to go, I’d call in bomb scares. Eventually some idiot ratted me out. The police took me and my mom to the fire station so they could lecture me about the consequences of my actions.
One of the cops said, “All these firemen have to get on their fire engines and drive to the school because of what you did.”

“Why am I supposed to feel bad for making firemen get in their fire trucks? Isn’t that their job?” I thought I was hilarious.

At thirteen I was already hairy. I started to shave. I looked older. I felt older. I played basketball with older kids in the city court. I thought I was going to be a professional basketball player. I was not tall, but I was fast. I liked playing kids who were bigger than me and beating them.

There was a high school boy I played whose name I’ll never forget: Ivor Swenson.
^*
He was a Swede or a German, over six feet tall, a star on the high school football and basketball teams. No matter how cold it was, he’d always take his shirt off when we played because he liked to show off his muscles. He always beat me.

Then I got better and finally beat him. That day I could see in his eyes it bothered him that a small kid beat him, so I rubbed it in by laughing in his face. He lost control and punched me. One pop, and I had a bloody nose. I looked at the blood streaming into my hands and became angry.

Ivor believed he was so big, he could get away with hitting me. He was technically correct. I wasn’t afraid to fight him. I would fight anyone. But there was no way I could take him. He was 180 pounds. I was maybe 100 pounds.

I would make my point to him a different way. After he hit me I acted apologetic. I said, “Ivor, maybe your game was off. Let’s play again.”

He agreed. The asshole wouldn’t shake my hand, but that was okay. I had a plan.

There was a group of older Italian kids from around Teaneck that I was starting to hang out with. They were bad kids, and I went to them and asked if they could get me a gun to give somebody a little scare. They thought it was comical helping an eighth grader
get a gun, so they gave me one. A few days later I met Ivor at the court. I carried the gun wrapped in a towel.

“You ready to play?” I asked.

It was a cold day. But it didn’t matter. Ivor was going to take his shirt off to show off how big he was, and as soon as his shirt was over his head, I shot at his leg. It wasn’t as easy as my dad made it look when he killed the guy on the bridge. I was only two or three feet away, and I shot a few bullets without hitting Ivor. He danced around with his shirt stuck over his head, yelling while I fired away. It was like a scene in the cowboy movies where they make the guy dance by shooting at his feet. Finally, the big kraut fell over. He’s crawling around, his shirt still stuck over his head. I saw a red spot in his warm-up pants where I shot his calf. I put my foot on his back and told him I’d shoot again if he didn’t stop moving. I watched the blood spot grow. It reminded me of a science-class film strip they showed in school of a flower opening up. It was beautiful. Ivor was shaking and crying under my foot. I will admit to you I got excited watching him suffer. I wanted to say something to him. Finally, it came to me like a line from a movie: “Let’s see how much basketball you play now, you prick.”

I kick him in the head, walk away, and throw the gun in a sewer.

That night, I went home, turned on the TV, and that was it. Nobody came after me. I never got charged with a crime. Nothing happened.
^*
I felt nothing. It did surprise me that I shot Ivor. I wasn’t sure I would actually shoot him. I had proved something to myself. I didn’t have a father anymore. But I was a man. I had my dad inside me.

*
Now called the Park Central Hotel on 870 Seventh Avenue.

*
The Apalachin Meeting raid on November 14, 1957, was a seismic event in the annals of American crime, prompting congressional hearings and a restructuring of the FBI, which for years under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover had denied the existence of a nationally organized Mafia.

*
“U.S. Taking Steps to Deport Aliens at Gang Meeting,”
New York Times
, November 24, 1957.

*
The fictitious ranching family on which
Bonanza
centered.

*
Ivor Swenson is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s victim.

*
There is no record of this shooting. One of Jon’s friend’s from that era, Peter Gallione, whom I interviewed, recalled that Jon was involved in several shootings, but he did not remember this incident. Gallione added that Jon and the friends who gave him the gun had assaulted and terrorized so many kids, they were often afraid to report them to the police.

**
Jon’s own records from this era are incomplete. He has not produced a birth certificate, and his sister Judy’s birth certificate, while it shows her birthplace as the Bronx, bears a Jewish surname. Jon states that his father acquired false birth certificates for both children. I interviewed many sources who knew Jon in his youth as “John Riccobono.” In published accounts of Jon’s criminal activities in the late 1960s, he is called “John Riccobono.” But one source I interviewed claimed that Jon’s father was a Jewish gangster affiliated with the Riccobonos named “Epstein”—a name that Jon also used as a criminal alias in the 1980s. Law-enforcement officials I interviewed who were involved in the 2005 arrest of Mafia capo Gerard Chilli—who Jon claims is his maternal uncle—believe that Chilli is indeed an uncle of Jon’s and that he is Italian.

†
On October 25, 1957.

†
Joseph Riccobono had been in the center of a few media storms ever since Thomas Dewey indicted him in connection with Murder Inc. in the 1930s, but his arrest at Apalachin gave him a degree of infamy that culminated in his being named as a top boss in Joe Valachi’s testimony to the U.S. Senate in 1963. His name would surface again in 1978 congressional hearings exploring the assassination of John F. Kennedy, though no evidence was presented that connected him to the death of the president.

‡
“Apalachin 5 in U.S. Plea,” United Press International, August 28, 1958.

§
Texts of Opinions Reversing Conspiracy Convictions at Apalachin Meeting,”
New York Times
, November 29, 1960.

4

J
.
R
.:
My mother took a job at Revlon. She went to different stores in New York and showed makeup products. She told me, “I promise you, you’re going to have a good life.”

Her way of trying to improve our lives was dating rich men. For a while she was involved with one of the top guys at Revlon. Then along came this other man. His name was Arnold Goldfinger, like in the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
. He had a lot of money. He drove a new Cadillac and lived in a big house in West Englewood, which was the rich area near Teaneck. My mother had hit the jackpot.

J
UDY
:
Our mother married Arnold Goldfinger in 1961. He owned a radio tube factory and was very wealthy. My mother believed having a better life would help Jon. Unfortunately, the marriage did not have a good effect on Jon. He felt betrayed by our mother.

J
.
R
.:
I never liked my mother being with that guy. She changed. All of a sudden she had a halo around her head. When my dad was putting furs on her back, getting her the nice car, she never stopped him. Now he was that terrible man, and Arnold Goldfinger was our savior. She told me, “Arnold is going to be your father. He owns a factory, and someday it will be yours.”

The first time I met Goldfinger, he told me I shouldn’t turn out like my father. God, I hated him. He got rich because he made a special radio tube that had to go in radar machines used by the military. My mother took me to his factory, and he showed me all the people working for him. My mother kept saying, “You see how smart he is? You should be just like him.”

I looked at Arnold Goldfinger and said, “Who fucking cares about your money?”

Everybody kissed his ass. I wanted him to know I was never going to like him.

The feeling was mutual. When my mother told him how much I liked the Harlem Globetrotters, he offered to buy me tickets. But there was a catch. I had to write one thousand times on paper: “Please, Mr. Goldfinger, let me see the Harlem Globetrotters.”

I wrote it, because I loved the Harlem Globetrotters. But it made me hate his guts even more.

J
UDY
:
Excuse me for saying this, but when it came to Jon, our stepfather was a prick. He had money up the kazoo. He lived in a mansion. When we moved in, I was given my own bedroom. You know where he made Jon sleep? In a storeroom downstairs, where they had kept dogs.

J
.
R
.:
When they put me in the dog room, that’s when I knew my mother had literally thrown me to the dogs. I decided, “Fuck my mother, fuck everybody.”

I didn’t talk to my mother. I didn’t look at her anymore. A few weeks after we moved into the house, she and Arnold went to Europe on a honeymoon. Judy had graduated from high school and
was dating a guy, so she was gone most of the time. I was in the house alone with my two older stepsisters. Barbara, the eldest, was nineteen, and she was put in charge of me. She worked in a bank and already had the attitude of a classic ballbusting Jewish broad. Her main rule was that I stay downstairs in my dog room.

The one bright spot of moving to West Englewood was a girl who lived down the street named Nancy. I was at the age where the stuff was pumping in me. Nancy was a couple years older than me. She was a blond bad girl who was into rock and roll. Her thing was teaching me to play doctor. She let me feel her titties, her ass. She showed me how she liked to be kissed. We were doing this one day, and suddenly it felt like the walls were moving. My pants got wet. I didn’t know what had happened, but it felt good. All she’d done was use her hand, but it gave me an inkling how good a girl could make you feel. I never looked at girls the same way after that. One hand, and they could take you into a different world.

I still was hanging out with my older friends who’d gotten me the gun. These guys were seventeen and eighteen. They’d come over at night and drink beer in my little dog room. One night one of them said, “Hey, let’s take your stepdad’s car into Manhattan.”

My stepfather drove a 1961 silver-blue Cadillac. It was a beautiful car. While he and my mom were in Europe, my stepsister Barbara had the keys. I waited until she went to sleep and took them from her purse. I met my friends outside, and I got into the driver’s seat.

“You don’t know how to drive,” my friends said.

“Guess I’ll learn real quick.”

I’d driven around with my father and Mr. Tut for years. Driving was no big deal. Next thing I know, I’m on the highway driving across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. My friends are laughing. “You better let us drive home, because we’re going to get you fucking drunk tonight.”

Even though I was thirteen years old, my friends knew a shithole on the East Side called the Blue & Gold Tavern
^*
where the
bartender didn’t care. I walked in and sat at the bar, and he said, “You want a beer, kid?”