Made Men (9 page)

“Fucking Giuliani with his new laws,” Joey O fumed. “Speeders, kissing, cursing—it’s all fucking illegal.”
The two men were stuck in lower Manhattan in order to watch a man walk out of 17 Battery Place and get into his car. For more than an hour they parked in different spots near where they believed the man would come out of the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of his face. The man was involved with a jewelry business, and on this day his job was to deliver a bag filled with jewels to a spot in midtown Manhattan. Joey O and Ralphie were following him because they planned on ripping him off.
Just like Ralphie, Joey O was a knock-around guy. He talked about criminal acts the way normal people discussed buying a minivan. He was always trying to get over on some unsuspecting dupe. The life of getting up in the morning, putting on a white shirt, taking the subway to work with a little bag of lunch—this was a life Joey O could not imagine. He was saying to Ralphie how he was thinking about opening up a car wash on Staten Island with his brother-in-law from New Jersey, the big vice president of some paper company over there. But maybe not. Maybe he would just stay in the knock-around life. Even if it had turned out to be not quite what he had originally thought it would be.
Joey O’s Mafia was most definitely not the Mafia portrayed in the movies.
Joey O did not have a guy to get out of the car first to open the door and hold Joey O’s coat for him. He did not eat lunch gratis in the back rooms of the best Little Italy restaurants. He did not own a diamond pinkie ring or drive a new black Lincoln with tinted windows. He did, however, own a beat-up late-model BMW with mechanical troubles. He had diabetes. He had two wives—an ex who’d run off with a plastic surgeon and left their daughter with him, and a new wife whom the daughter ignored in front of him just to make him crazy. His mother-in-law lived at home with him. He had a girlfriend, but she smoked too much weed and Joey O had got it into his head that her breasts needed to be bigger. He was going to fund the necessary surgically implanted enlargements. This would mean yet another expense for a guy whose liabilities overwhelmed his assets. He owed everybody—the Gambinos, the Colombos, the Lucheses, and, naturally, the DeCavalcante crime family that gave him his status. Everybody said he owed these people $100,000 or more, but nobody knew for sure.
As they drove around lower Manhattan looking for the jewelry guy’s blue Pontiac, Joey O and Ralphie began to talk about something they often talked about—getting and keeping money. Joey O’s new boss, Vinny Ocean, had lots of it, while neither Ralphie nor Joey O seemed to have any at all. Joey O had just been “put with” Vinny Ocean, a capo, after his former boss, a capo named Rudy Ferrone, had died of natural causes.
As they crawled through city traffic, Ralphie had quietly triggered the FBI recording device hidden inside his car. He was aware that he had to get Joey O to stop talking about Joey O and start talking about all the illegal activity Joey O was performing for his boss, Vincent Palermo. His FBI handlers had made it clear to him that doing undercover work involved knowledge of “biology.” By beginning with the species of mafioso at the bottom of the food chain, you can work your way to the top of the food chain. Ralphie has been trying for some time now to get Joey O to talk about Vinny, so he brought up one of Vinny’s many business ventures, a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens. The owner owed Vinny a lot of money, so Vinny decided to make himself a secret partner in the restaurant. The owner’s name was Frankie and he was Korean. Ralphie was asking Joey questions designed to illicit the exact nature of Vinny’s ownership, but Joey was having none of it. Instead, Joey decided to let Ralphie know his opinions regarding Koreans in general.
“They are very funny people. You can’t say ‘fuck’ in front of them,” Joey O explained. “One day he wanted to be needled. I told him, ‘All you want to do is fuck.’ He said, ‘Joey, please don’t be offended, but we don’t talk like that.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? What do you do?’ He said, ‘You can say anything you want but “fuck.” ’ ”
“He told me the same thing,” Ralphie said.
Joey O had clearly been perplexed by this behavior. He recounted for Ralphie the time he casually threw money onto a table for Frankie, and Frankie offered up what Joey perceived as a “Korean” response. “I had to give him back fifty dollars. I took the fifty dollars out of my pocket and I threw it on the desk. He picked it up and handed it back to me. He said, ‘Did I throw the money at you?’ I said no. So he says, ‘Please, we are very easily offended people, hand it to me.’ So I handed it to him.”
“He’s right,” Ralphie said.
This was a typical conversation with Joey O. Days would pass, Ralphie would find himself again and again trying to get Joey O to provide the government handlers probable cause to keep the tapes rolling. Then he hit on an idea—Joey O’s former boss, Rudy the capo, had always cut Joey some slack, forgiving his debts, getting Joey out of scrapes with other gangsters. Vinny Ocean did not have the same bottomless reserve of patience for Joey O’s many problems. This was a source of much concern to Joey O, and Ralphie decided he could exploit it to learn more about Vinny Ocean. He asked Joey about the good old days with Rudy.
“When that guy—Rudy—died,” Joey O said, “my life went with him.”
Ralphie asked, “Why?”
“They ain’t gonna make them like that anymore,” Joey O said. “I would trust him with a hundred million dollars of my money.”
Ralphie was curious about Joey O’s relationship with Vinny as opposed to Rudy. “You don’t have that trust with your goombatta, huh?”
Joey said, “Nope.
“Is he that bad with money?”
“It’s fucking greed.”
“Really?” said Ralphie. “I mean, how could he be where he is if he’s greedy? He can’t be greedy. You got to be able to give and take.”
“He’s got a lot of people bullshitted. I know the real him. I’ve seen him rich, I’ve seen him broke. And I’ve seen him rich again.”
To Joey O, Vinny Ocean was changing from a knockaround guy to a guy who didn’t want anything to do with his roots. He told Ralphie about the days when Vinny acted like a real wiseguy.
“He’d spend money like a wiseguy. We walked in elevators; the kid was in there with the papers and we would give the kid a hundred dollars. Like a paper route. Here, this is for you. I would see him blow fucking money unbelievable.”
But Joey O also saw Vinny Ocean when Vinny ran out of money and had to scramble to support his growing families. “He would fucking run bad and he got like a crazy man,” Joey recalled.
As soon as Vinny Ocean started making money again, Joey O claimed he forgot all the people who helped him get where he was. “He started making it again and fucking greed took over. Maybe he was afraid that he would go broke again, I don’t know. You know what I mean? He fucking changed unbelievable. I know him all my life. I mean, I know things about him that fucking wiseguys don’t know.”
They spotted the blue Pontiac in a parking lot with only one exit, so they double-parked on the street nearby and waited for a spot to open up. From where they sat, they thought they might be able to make out the jewelry man’s face, but they weren’t sure. Ralphie decided to push a little harder to keep Vinny in the talk.
“Thank God that you’re very close to Vinny, you know what I mean? ’Cause you’re going to go right to the top, you know that.”
“He’s a maneuverer.”
“You see Vinnie’s young. He’s alive. You know, I mean, there’s still a lot of earning power in him.”
“I was with him yesterday,” Joey O said. “I met him eleven-thirty. I left him at a quarter to four. I went home, showered, shaved. He was going to the city. He called me eight o’clock. I was in the city. He was in Queens. ‘Do you want to go for dinner?’ I says, ‘Nope. I’m going the fuck home.’ ”
Ralphie pushed a little harder. “I guess he’ll come and hang out.”
“Yeah, he’ll come. He’ll hang out. He’ll pass by!” Joey O said. “He never hangs out nowhere. You don’t see him by the club. Never.”
Ralphie: “What, he drives around all day?”
“He drives around all fucking day,” Joey O said. “He don’t stay nowhere. You’ll never catch him in a club.”
Ralphie went all the way, asking questions not usually asked. “Not in a club? I was talking about the office, the apartment, the back room, right?”
“Very rare,” Joey said. “Very rare.”
Now Joey—who was born without any evidence of a gift for patience in his DNA—began to get distracted sitting in the car all morning with nothing to do but talk to the always-patient Ralphie.
“You want to sit here all fuckin’ day?”
“I don’t care,” Ralphie said. “We just see him get in the car. I just want to see. You know what I mean? You’re right, I don’t want to sit all day, but I mean, things don’t come easy, Joey.”
“Yeah, I know that. But I got fucking things to do.”
“Oh, you got things to do.”
Joey said, “Well sure.”
Ralphie pointed out the window at the World Trade Center across the street, scene of much embarrassment and humility for Ralphie. “Do you know how long I sat in those buildings down the block? Six fucking months. You know what? I see this, this is nothing for me.”
“You want coffee? I’ll get a cup there.”
Joey O got out of the sedan and went into a deli on the corner. The minute he walked inside, the jewelry guy they were waiting for and a woman companion walked out of 17 Battery Place and got into a blue Pontiac. Joey came out of the deli with the coffee just in time for Ralphie to pull away from the curb and begin to follow their mark.
“I didn’t see what he was carrying,” Ralphie said. “Did he open the trunk? Did you see anything?”
“He drives like a fucking Hebe,” Joey replied.
“You go out for coffee, the fucking guy gets in his car,” Ralphie said.
“All right, fuck him,” Joey said. “If he gets out for coffee, goes into a restaurant, whatever the fuck he does, we hit the car.”
“What’s the name of that wine you wanted?”
“It’s not an Italian wine,” Joey said. “I don’t know what the fuck it is. Old Mary she drinks.”
“Old? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it’s Old Mary, some shit. Peno agretio is good.”
“Peno,” Ralphie said. “You want a case of peno agretio.”
“Yeah, Santa whatever-the-fuck-it-is.”
The men inched through the traffic, trying to keep far enough away but not too far. Their plan was to wait until the man parked the car and went into a restaurant or anyplace, then walk over, pop the trunk, and walk away with the bag of jewels. The hope was that the woman who was with him would go inside as well, so they would not have to do anything that would attract attention. That was the plan.
The man with the jewels drove across town, uptown, downtown in no apparent direction. Soon he pulled over and dropped the woman at curbside. That was one less problem for Ralphie and Joey O. He pulled back into traffic, still unaware he was being followed. Soon he pulled over again and walked inside a restaurant.
Ralphie parked a few cars back, walked over to the blue Pontiac, and returned to his car with a bag from the Pontiac in his hands. He headed for the Battery Tunnel leading out of lower Manhattan back to Brooklyn.
Paying the toll at the Battery Tunnel plaza, Ralphie steered the sedan into the streets of Red Hook driving toward a building he owned on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace. It was a typical three-story walk-up with a commercially zoned first floor just a few feet away from the perpetual thrum of traffic on the Prospect Expressway. A junior high school was across the street. When they arrived, Joey O used the phone inside to beep Vinny Ocean. He wanted Vinny there when they got the jewels appraised. They dumped the contents of the bag on a table. Inside there were twenty-five diamond set pieces, eighteen emeralds, thirteen sapphires, and six rubies. They figured they had $200,000 in their hands but would take $65,000 if they could unload the whole thing at once.
Soon enough Vinny Ocean showed up and all three of them piled back in Ralphie’s car. Ralphie suggested having some guy named John the Gypsy give them an estimate on the stones, but Vinny had his own guy. They headed toward Third Avenue and deeper into Brooklyn.
In the car, Vinny was clearly in a good mood. Lately all he talked about was the problems he was having with this Giuliani and the mayor’s insistence that all strip clubs should be driven out of New York City. That would include Vinny’s club, Wiggles, which at the time was making Vinny rich. It was depressing to be around Vinny when he started talking about Wiggles. But now Vinny was talking giddily about opening up a new strip club where Mayor Puritan could not touch him because it would be located across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
“My brother said he found a beautiful fucking disco that’s doing really bad,” Vinny said. “I’ll turn it into topless. Beautiful. Forget about it. Five million, ten million . . . What a fucking place, Joey.” Vinny directed his conversation to Joey, whom he knew better. He was just getting used to Ralphie.
“It’s ten thousand square feet, commercial area,” Vinny said. “Parking for fucking one thousand, fifteen hundred cars, three big rooms, two big bars, plus it’s a regular disco. Just walking around, I spent a half hour in there. The fucking ideas what I could do with that.” He said he has reached out to the DeCavalcante crime family members in New Jersey to see who the landlord of the disco “[was] with.” Vinny was going on and on about the strip club when Ralphie felt it was time to talk about Vinny’s guy, the guy who was going to look at the stones. Ask some questions, but not too many.
“These guys, are they stonecutters?” he asked. “They still cut stones?”
Vinny said, “Yeah, he cuts stones.”
“Like he does it himself?”
“Yeah, they got their own cutter, oh sure. He would chop them, you know, the big ones, take it off a little bit, two points, two percent, just to change it. It’s amazing.”
Ralphie acted like a babe in the woods for a day, making everybody else sound smarter than him. “Oh, that’s what he meant by taking off two points,” he said. “I didn’t know what he meant.”
“Yeah,” Vinny said. “This way nobody knows. These fucking things are like taking a car. They all look the same. These motherfuckers, I don’t understand it. They know. They’ll cut them all down a little bit, you know? So you ain’t getting no headache.”
Ralphie said, “Change the look?”
“Yeah, but he buys lots of this and that, sells them. He does very, very well. I mean, I was setting up a deal with him to buy, ah, stuff. A guy wanted two million dollars, he said no fucking problem.”