Rude Boy USA (2 page)

Bernie associated with the other Mafia groups, whom he considered lesser to Chimera in their innovation and style. He also dealt with law enforcement, making sure that he kept in good standing with them by paying off large sums of money to keep himself and sometimes his associates out of jail. He also made deals with judges and those involved in the courts. Obtaining funds from the public was not an easy feat, so Bernie had to go through other channels to get money. While the other three men kept their trail clean by working with the mostly legal aspects of Chimera, Bernie headed the illegal part, which included forced protection services, labor racketeering, loansharking, extortion, money laundering, illegal gambling, and, in extreme cases, an occasional robbery. Bernie made sure to inform whoever worked for him that robbery was not a tactic to use unless necessary because it would result in more payoffs to law enforcement for cleanup. That would mean less money for the company.
The employees of Bernie’s three junior associates split the robberies and other petty crime. Those guys had nothing to lose if they did not complete the assignments; they were the uninformed scapegoats. Those people consisted of young men in their twenties who had no other direction to go but the military. For many of them, it was a choice of organized crime, jail, or Vietnam. Most of them did not do much but sit around all day, play cards, smoke, and drink before they started working for Bernie. No women were working in Chimera. Bernie and the others felt that this setup was no place for a woman, as the environment was incredibly misogynistic and the guys could be assholes with their daily conversations about the opposite sex. Chimera was a male culture based on power.

Due to their unique racial makeup and financial success, Chimera became so successful and popular that people in the underground began to refer to the group as the Rude Boys. Their style was a tribute to the most sophisticated subculture of the young street gangsters popular in the United Kingdom and Jamaica. The States had seen nothing like them before now. They were clean-shaven and debonair, with their Ray-Ban sunglasses, immaculate loafers, and sometimes porkpie or trilby hats. When trends turned more to longhaired, Afrocentric, and club flashy, they kept their suited style. Visually, Chimera comprised the coolest people in town. In name recognition, they were second only to the Ambrosino family in New York, the highest ranked crime family. The Ambrosinos had thirty crews and over
a thousand members. They ran a dangerous operation. To them, murder was just part of the business and life. To date, it was rumored that the family as a whole had committed over one hundred and fifty murders, all ordered by their boss, Enzo Ambrosino.

Ben Berardi, a second-generation Italian American, joined Chimera because he just needed a job. He had served in Vietnam briefly before coming to work at Chimera full time. Ben was a tall, slim, but muscular man with dark hair, thick brows, blue eyes, and a classically handsome face with a faint scar down his cheek. He got that scar as a child when he fell off a bike and cut his face. Ben’s grandparents adopted him because his mother was mentally ill and admitted to an institution, where she could not keep custody of him. His father decided he was not ready for a family and abandoned Ben’s mother and him. The details of their relationship were kept secret, but Ben knew that both of his parents had the same last name. When he asked his grandparents about this, they would not give him a clear answer except to say it was a coincidence.

Ben was Chimera’s number three man. Bernie considered him special because he had been raised in very similar circumstances, losing both parents at a very young age. Bernie had a way of sympathizing with other people’s plight, as his family persecuted his mother. Her sin lay in not being the obedient Jewish woman that her parents wanted and in having a child out
of wedlock with a Greek immigrant. Ben idolized James Bond and Al Capone. He saw himself as a hybrid of both men. His job at Chimera involved elements of both. Ben walked like Bond, attempted to act like Bond, and had the mobster ambition like Capone. In his mind, he nailed it, but in reality it came off as trying too hard. The guys would tease him and tell him that he should be Scarface instead because of his old injury. He would quickly correct them and make sure they referred to him as Capone instead because he was the greatest ever to do it, according to Ben. He was sensitive to their taunts, and he felt at times as if he was being bullied.

Bernie also served as a counselor to Ben, who had substance abuse problems. Ben had attention issues as well as mood swings. His grandparents never sought help for these matters when he was a child. They did not want to come to terms with the fact that his mother may have passed on some of her mental-health issues to him. Ben never received a medical diagnosis, although most would consider him bipolar. He dealt with these problems unmedicated. His grandparents felt that seeking divine intervention would better help him. He used alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism for his frustration, as he claimed that they made him concentrate and calm down. Bernie kept an eye on him, knowing a drug user would not make good snap decisions when it came to business affairs and bookkeeping. Bernie considered drugs a nasty business despite other families’ active partaking in those activities. Bernie wanted him to succeed, but Ben needed a lot of guidance.

Ben had been jailed for drug dealing, robbery, and petty larceny, which supported his drug habit, and he also got into trouble while serving in the Army. Ben would claim innocence and say that he was just being profiled by law enforcement because he looked like a typical gangster. Bernie had to pull strings to have him released. One such incident involved Ben being arrested for sticking up a shopkeeper in lower Manhattan and beating him with a pistol. The case made it all the way to a jury trial. Bernie had to give kickbacks to several jurors to make sure they found Ben not guilty. Bernie paid some of them off immediately, and others he promised to pay off later. Ben was in charge of making sure the people who helped him maintain his freedom received compensation.

Ben shadowed Bernie in many of his actions on and off the field. Ben was very sensitive about Bernie’s criticisms of him. Bernie was not mean to Ben, but if he thought Ben’s drinking or actions became a distraction, he would curb him. If Bernie thought Ben was falling off the wagon, he would scorn him. The comments hurt Ben, but he understood why Bernie was criticizing him. If anyone else told Ben something in the same realm, even if it were for his own good, he would tell them to go fuck off. Ben treated Bernie like a father. Ben’s desire to inherit Bernie’s empire provided the driving force behind his work at Chimera. He wanted to be the one to bring the group to the number one spot. He had always admired the well-known Mafia groups in New York and other cities, and he felt that his Italian heritage was the key to bringing the group higher. The Cosa Nostra
in New York was heavily embedded in Sicilian culture and history. They viewed outside groups as frauds and invaders of their culture. Bernie wanted to see Ben succeed, and he would often pull Ben aside for talks. Bernie used his past experiences as a way to get to Ben.

“Benjamin, I want you to listen to me. Stop fooling around. It’s time to straighten out. Start planning your future. I won’t always be here to bail you out,” Bernie would often tell him.

“I know, I know,” Ben would answer.

“You are causing too many problems, unnecessary problems, all over the place. Here is how you will fail. Control yourself. Jail isn’t Neverland,” Bernie told him.

“I’m listening. I promise. I am not going back to jail. I cannot fail. I’m here,” Ben said.

“Make your promises count. Bernie knows; don’t argue.” Bernie ended.

Ben walked with a sense of entitlement, and he felt that his fellow associates were secretly holding him back. Because of this, Ben continued with his drug use but hid it cleverly from the others in the group. He went from using lightweight drugs such as cannabis, which was popular at the moment, to taking harder narcotics when he enlisted in the army. When he utilized them, he timed each hit so it would not affect his day job. He graduated from smoke to needles. Despite these issues, Ben was a team player for his protection, and he would be until it was no longer convenient for him.

The number four man was Jerome Dexter. Jerome was a tall, dark-brown, slim black man from Harlem, New York. Jerome came from a two-parent home of respected members of the local community. Optimistic about his future, his family had sent him to college. His parents started saving for his education once they learned that his mother was pregnant with him. When other black middle-class families were fleeing Harlem for Queens and other boroughs with better education and housing, the Dexter family stayed and saved their money for their investment in Jerome.

Jerome was smart enough to succeed, but he felt that his overbearing parents pushed him into things that he did not want to do. He never had a say in his future. They wanted him to be a scientist because his father, James Dexter, who worked at the Freedom National Bank, felt that the community needed representation that resembled them, and science was the future. He could be a great inventor, they hoped. Jerome was bored with furthering his education by the time he graduated from high school, of which he was valedictorian. He attended Fisk University, but because of a lack of discipline and a penchant for the southern women in Tennessee, he flunked out.

Disappointed in his outcome, Jerome’s parents made him leave the family home to fend for himself, and he had to do so until he got his act together. Jerome slept on various friends’ and relatives’ couches and maintained odd jobs to support himself. At one such job, he worked as a busboy at a diner on 116th Street, where he met John, a gentleman who
was already working for Chimera. They hit it off immediately, and John, feeling that Jerome could be a good subworker for Chimera, sent him to drop off a package. John promised that if he did so and made it back safely, he would receive a generous reward. Jerome did not know what John meant by that, but because he needed the funds, he decided to do the job. That package turned out to be a bomb, which he delivered at a rival’s doorstep. It was a Trojan-horse attack. Bernie had friends that were connected to the Weathermen, and he asked John to find someone to do the job. Bernie did not want to put any of his people at risk.

The Weathermen were a group of people whose supporters stretched nationwide. They took their name from a Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” They consisted of advocates of the black-power movement and individuals strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. The FBI also knew them as the Weather Underground. The nationwide group was small, no more than five hundred people, but the smaller groups spread throughout the country. They intended to create their separate political party to overthrow the government. They considered themselves the new left. This group was known to use aggressive tactics to get their message across to the media and government. The group felt that America needed to change its values. Male hegemony, white supremacy, fascism, high unemployment, inadequate education, and terrible treatment of blacks and poor women were the real issues, not some unjust war overseas.

The Weathermen also organized some of the anti-Vietnam War protests that occurred on college campuses throughout the country. They bombed a few high-profile government sites as a way to protest the United States’ actions in several parts of the world. A private sector of the Weathermen was located in Greenwich Village, where Bernie would go and get help with weapons if necessary, including guns and sometimes bombs if they needed to send a stern message to a rival. Bernie also had a younger girlfriend, Gina, who was active in the Weather Underground. Gina was a five-foot-eight redhead with feathered shoulder-length hair. Her face had faint signs of freckles, and she kept her eyes lined and lashed heavily and her lips glossy. Gina stood out in not only looks but also personality and skill. She was the local Weather Underground chapter’s chief bomb maker. She had a dominant personality, and she idolized Fidel Castro. She was Bernie’s direct connection to the group, in which he charmingly referred to her as “Red.” The Weathermen and Chimera were secret allies in the local area, and they often used each other’s services. Gina partook in her separate activities separate from the underground, and these helped serve her and Bernie’s personal agenda. Gina organized a couple of bank bombings and armored truck robberies to obtain funds for the both of them. She had been successful, as she was never caught in these activities. Gina and Bernie dated casually, and he enjoyed her company and sex, but Gina saw Bernie as
something to do for the time being. In her mind, he was too old for them to consider having a future as a couple.