The Best American Essays 2015 (19 page)

One of the dominant organized crime figures on Long Island during the 1970s and '80s was a former garment manufacturer named Salvatore Avellino, and Avellino's story is an example of the crooked ladder in action. It is a good bet that Ianni's Lupollos dealt with Avellino, because they were in the garbage business and Avellino was the king of “carting” (as it was known). He was the de facto head of a trade association called the Private Sanitation Industry Association; it represented a cluster of small, family-owned carting companies that picked up commercial and residential garbage in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Each carter paid membership dues to the PSI, a portion of which Avellino dutifully passed on to the Lucchese and Gambino crime families.

Avellino was a gangster. He would burn the trucks of those who crossed him. He eventually went to prison for his role in assassinating two carters who refused to play along with the PSI. But in other ways Avellino didn't behave like a thug at all. He worked largely by persuasion and charisma. As the economist Peter Reuter observes in his history of the Long Island carting wars, Avellino's mission was to rationalize the industry, to enforce what was called a “property rights” system among the carters. Individual firms were allowed to compete for new customers. But once a carter won a customer, he “owned” that business; the function of Avellino's PSI was to make sure that no one else poached that customer. Avellino was essentially acting as an agent for the garbage collectors of Long Island, inserting himself between his membership and the marketplace the way a Hollywood agent inserts himself between the pool of actors and the studios.

Ordinary thieves act covertly. They hide their identity from the person whose money they are taking. Avellino did the opposite. He ran a public organization. The ordinary thief is outside the legitimate economy. Avellino was integrated into the legitimate economy. When it came to his PSI members, Avellino acted not as a predator but as a benefactor. By Reuter's estimates, Avellino's cartel enabled PSI members to charge their commercial customers 50 percent more than would otherwise have been possible.

On one federal wiretap, Avellino was recorded speaking about a PSI carter named Freddy, who, Avellino says, drove up to his house in a brand-new Mercedes, “the fifty-thousand-dollar one.” Avellino goes on: “So I walked out. It was a Sunday morning and I said, ‘Congratulations, beautiful, beautiful.' He says, ‘I just wanted you to see it, 'cause this is thanks to you and to PSI that I bought this car.'”

In his economic analysis, Reuter marvels at how scrupulously Avellino defended the interests of his carters. Avellino allowed the bulk of that 50 percent margin to go to the carters and the unions—not to the Luccheses and the Gambinos. Reuter reports, with similar incredulity, about Avellino's personal business dealings. He ran a carting company of his own, but as he expanded his business—buying up routes from other companies—he never demanded discounts. Here was the representative of a major crime family, and he paid retail. “Ya see, out here, Frank, in Nassau, Suffolk County . . . we don't shake anybody down, we don't steal anybody's work, we don't steal it to sell it back to them,” Avellino says in another of the wiretaps. “Whenever I got a spot back for a guy because somebody took it, never was a price put on it, because if it was his to begin with and he was part of the club and he was payin' every three months, then he got it back for nothin', because that was supposed to be the idea.”

This restraint was, in fact, characteristic of the late-stage mobster. James Jacobs, a New York University law professor who was involved in anti-Mafia efforts in New York during the 1980s, points out that the Mafia had every opportunity to take over the entire carting industry in the New York region—just as they could easily have monopolized any of the other industries in which they played a role. Instead they stayed in the background, content to be the middlemen. At New York's Fulton Fish Market, one of the largest such markets in the country, the Mob policed the cartel and controlled parking—a crucial amenity in a business where time is of the essence and prompt delivery of fresh fish translates to higher profits. What did they charge for a full day's parking? Twelve dollars. And when the Mob-controlled cartel was finally rooted out, how much did fish prices decline at the Fulton Fish Market? Two percent.

In the mid-eighties, when Jacobs worked for the Organized Crime Task Force in New York, trying to rid the construction industry of racketeering, he said that the task force's efforts “had no interest from the builders and the employers.” Those immediately involved in the business rather liked having the Mafia around as a referee, because it proved to be such a reasonable business partner. “This was a system that worked for everybody, except maybe the
New York
Times
,” Jacobs said dryly.

“This is one of the most interesting things about the Mafia,” Jacobs went on. “They did business and cooperated. They weren't trying to smash everybody. They created these alliances and maintained these equilibriums . . . You'd think that they would keep expanding their reach.”

They didn't, though, because they didn't think of themselves as ordinary criminals. That was for their fathers and grandfathers, who murderously roamed the streets of New York. Avellino wanted to be in the open, not in the shadows. He wanted to be integrated into the real world, not isolated from it. The PSI was a sloppy, occasionally lethal, but nonetheless purposeful dress rehearsal for legitimacy. That was Merton's and Ianni's point. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago we permitted that evolution. We don't anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

“The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard's School of Business Administration,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, fifty years ago, in a passage that could easily serve as Goffman's epilogue:

The early settlers and founding fathers, as well as those who “won the West” and built up cattle, mining and other fortunes, often did so by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America's destiny and their own—or were themselves the law when it served their purposes. This has not prevented them and their descendants from feeling proper moral outrage when, under the changed circumstances of the crowded urban environments, latecomers pursued equally ruthless tactics.

MARK JACOBSON

FROM
New York

T
HROUGHOUT MY LIFE
, there has always been a number that sounded old. When I was sixteen, it was twenty-seven; at twenty-nine, it was forty-two; at thirty-eight, it was fifty-two. At sixty-five, however, it was sixty-five.

After all, sixty-five is a longtime bullet-point mile marker along the Interstate of American Life, the product of uncounted hours of congressional backroom dealing and insurance-company probability charts. Sixty-five is when you're supposed to retire, put your feet up, smell the roses, to bask in the glow of a well-spent life in the land of the fee. This lovely neo-utopian vision has largely been replaced by the ethic of work-work-work until you drop, but sixty-five still remains the top of the stretch, where, like a creaky claiming horse in the sixth race at Aqueduct, you're supposed to be turning for home.

For me, sixty-five was an onset of pure panic, an ingress of cold claustrophobia. My father died when he was seventy-five, but he was sick. Years of kidney dialysis and he keels over from a heart attack. My mother made it to eighty-four, full speed ahead to the last breath. If the DNA holds up, that gives me another nineteen years, but what's nineteen years? Only yesterday I was twenty-six, a strapping Icarus, soaring on the drunken tailwind of my own infinity. Or was that last week?

Time! Marches On!

You know where it's going. Shortly following my sixty-fifth birthday, I decided to tidy up my “home office.” A little fall cleaning, so to speak. Under a pile of carefully curated possessions (you couldn't quite throw out a collection of vomit bags snatched from the seat pockets of such regional carriers as Cebu Pacific, Biman Bangladesh, and Air Namibia, could you?), I found a forgotten piece of correspondence from Beth David Cemetery, which is where several dozen of my relatives, the ones who managed to escape the Nazis, lie in eternal rest just over the city line in Elmont, Long Island. Dated December 27, 1999, and signed by “Warren Rosen, Vice President,” the letter advised me of the “following burial reservations: Mark Jacobson . . . Plot 101, Grave #8.”

It was Mom's work, no doubt. Child of the Depression, she was always such a planner.

Old. I was having a problem accommodating myself within the format. Until quite recently the main boon of growing old appeared to be not dying young, not perishing when I got this scar across the right side of my face, not being blown up in Vietnam, not going through the windshield after hitting that black-ice spot on Highway 117 in New Mexico. When I was growing up, it was always easy to recognize the old. They were the dry and brittle-boned, the silver-eyed and liver-spotted, sitting on woven plastic beach chairs beneath buzzing fluorescent lights on the porches of decaying hotels before coke money, haute deco, and LeBron James's talents came to South Beach. If these predeceased had anything more on their minds than lining up for tomorrow's early-bird special, who cared? Old people were all basically the same, weren't they? Like, you know, old. On the verge of joining the shadowy ranks of these tattered sticks, I was seized by a hitherto unfelt fear. Back in the day of Youth, us hippies would sit around reading the Walter Evans-Wentz edition of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
(none of that rationalist Robert Thurman stuff for us), digging on the Roger Corman spook-house descriptions of the blood-drinking “Wrathful Deities” encountered by all nobly born so-and-so's on their trip through Bardo to the next womb door. How fun it was to learn that these beasts were nothing but “projections” of the harrowed human mind, no more genuine than the “Atomic Man” we used to mock at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus on Forty-Second Street.

Now, however, standing at the mouth not of a passage between lives but rather to the end of this one was to feel the hot, seething, very real breath of the health-care monster upon your face. If the Greeks had Charon, boatman across the River Styx, we have a recorded message saying “Death will not end your financial obligation.” There are a lot of levels to beat in life's endgame. Dodge cancer and here comes Alzheimer's, nature's payback for living too long. If
Alien
was once a scary movie, now it was
Amour.

“Beats the alternative”; that's what you're supposed to say about getting old. Yet a strange thing was happening. As I trod ever deeper into the outer ring of oldness, my fears, nightmares I've nurtured the bulk of my life, began to lighten. I began to look upon my venerability not as a state preferable only to death but rather as an opportunity of a lifetime.

This new paradigm took hold as a scattershot succession of time-specific mini-epiphanies. One of these realizations came while thumbing through a book titled
A History of Old Age.
In addition to detailing Aristotle's distaste for the aged, whom he thought to be excessively pessimistic, malicious, and small-minded owing to their extended interface with life's grinding “disappointments,”
A History of Old Age
featured a number of Enlightenment-era drawings titled “The Stages of Man's Life from the Cradle to the Grave.”

In this scheme, life is depicted as an eternal staircase; the steps ascend, reach a topmost platform, then go down. The traveler begins on the ground floor as “a lamb-like innocent,” then climbs upward, each step signifying a ten-year interval. The “eagle-like” twenties lead to the “bull-like” thirties, nearing the apex in the forties, when “nought his courage quails but lion-like, by force prevails.” (A companion chart notes a woman's peak to be thirty, when she is said to be a “crown to her husband.”) From this upper perch, it is all downhill, through the grasping, Scrooge-like sixties; the languorous, ineffectual seventies; and ending in the largely symbolic “one-hundredth year,” when, “tho' sick of life, the grave we fear.” In a French version of “The Stages,” called “Le Jugement Universel,” the final downward phases are known as
l'âge de décadence
and
l'âge décrépit.

Probably even Anna Karina in
Vivre Sa Vie
couldn't make
l'âge décrépit
sound sexy, but it was no great task to create a personalized, modern-age version of “The Stages.” A pattern of whiplash upheaval emerged. I was born in 1948; my “lamb-like innocence” was spent learning how to be a Cold War kid, schooled in the nuances of 1950s preteen reality,
Have Gun—Will Travel
and
Gunsmoke
on the tube every Saturday night. Then, just as I mastered my kidlike state, becoming a King of Kids, the rug was pulled out. Without warning I was thrust into a hormone-laced universe of spouting pubic hair and the Rolling Stones. It was back to square one, a whole new playing field to navigate. The ensuing “eagle-like” adolescent-cum-teen quake lasted through the lionization-canonization-commodification of youth culture during the 1960s and early '70s, during which time I would grow to become an exemplar, warts-and-all specimen of my burgeoning bunch, who were on the cover of
Time
magazine every other week. This period also ended with unprecognitioned abruptness when I became a husband, a father, and a simulacrum of a grown-up. It was one more Sisyphean moment, a brand-new rock of unknown size and density to roll up the hill. This was the structure, a repeating push-pull of stasis and change requiring periodic recalibration of self.