THENASTYBITS (9 page)

professional criminals. I'm interested in crimes where you know from the get-go
why
they did it: because it was
their job
to do it. As in the case of the mob-style execution of Gambino capo Paul Castellano, shot to death out front of a popular Midtown restaurant, it's the little things I want to know about: Before the killers loaded their weapons and dressed themselves in identical raincoats and hats, before they set out separately from their modest family homes in Staten Island and Queens, did the killers kiss their children, jot down brief shopping lists of groceries to bring back on their return? (One box Cheerios . . . half gallon milk . . . dozen eggs . . . tampons, large . . . two cans tuna, chunk style.) Did their voices tighten at all at the breakfast table when they told their wives that they might be a little late tonight? Did they program the VCR to tape their favorite sitcom? And what sitcom was it? It's the jargon of crime—the characters, the rituals, the workaday details—that fascinate me.

Crime is hard work, after all.

As a red-blooded American child, I always wanted to be a criminal. My heroes, like those of so many American children, were an unlovely assortment of back-shooters like Billy the Kid, bank robbers like John Dillinger, racketeers like Legs Diamond, capitalist visionaries like Bugsy Siegel, and innovators like Lucky Luciano. These were guys who did what they wanted,
when
they wanted, said whatever the fuck they felt like saying, and, in general, avoided the restrictions of societal convention—attractive qualities to a young kid weaned on the MG5 and the Stooges. Later, when I actually
became
a criminal of sorts, trying to support myself through a variety of harebrained drug-dealing schemes, sneak thievery, petty burglary, and fraud, I found to my dismay that a life of crime was difficult and unglamorous. It required that most dreaded trait, discipline, as well as a closed mouth and a lot of downtime, where money was going out and none was coming in. My coconspirators at the time were an unreliable lot, either talking too much or making dangerously stupid improvisations on our carefully hatched plans, and in my case, anyway, our few ventures into felonious activity were—at the end of the day—decidedly unprofitable.

Which is how I became a chef.

But that's another story.

Suffice it to say, when I finally buckled down to a life of legitimate toil in the restaurant business, I began to meet some
real
criminals, guys connected to organized crime, and I recognized right away that while
they,
apparently, had what it took to live a life outside the law, / did not. And I was curious about the differences between myself and these full-timers. What remained with me from my early, heady days of surreptitious entry was the love of conspiracy, an appreciation of clandestine meetings, the comfortably familiar phrase book, long ago codified and set down in Hollywood films, of the hard-core, professional bad man. La Cosa Nostra and, to a lesser extent, espionage, became obsessions. I wanted to know, for instance, how Kim Philby kept his mouth shut for all those years. How could a kid in his early twenties, still in college, keep quiet about his true loyalties? Especially when he was doing something as exciting as spying for the NKVD? How could he
not,
after a few beers, blab to his friends about his secret work for the Workers' Paradise—especially when he'd been loudly espousing unpopular political views to all and sundry? How could young Kim
never,
while trying to bed some breasty Marxist sophomore, have boozily confided that, "All this right-wing twaddle is a
sham
baby . . . I'm down with the International, bitch . . . and doing some serious motherfucking undercover shit! Now take off those panties!"

Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies, these are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie—and my fiction. Bank robbers, spies, enforcers, contract killers, loan sharks, confidence men, and racketeers . . . it's their consistency over time, their relentless adherence to the requirements of the job, that makes me, in my way, love them. Take a guy like Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the former boss of the

Genovese crime family, who I used as an inspiration for a character in
Bone in the Throat.
Here's a guy who, for
thirty years,
played the public role of a doddering, schizophrenic old man, appearing on the street for walk-talks with his soldiers in bathrobe and slippers, talking to himself, behaving erratically, moving his eyes and head in such a way as to indicate insanity— and all the while was running with an iron grip the largest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the country. This crazy act kept him out of jail for most of his life—though the Feds did catch up with him in the end. You have to admire that kind of work ethic. They never caught The Chin on tape, telling a subordinate to "whack somebody out" or "put a rocket in his pocket." You never heard The Chin's voice playing over the courthouse speakers, talking about how he was going to "sever [somebody's] motherfuckin' head off" (one of my favorite Gotti-isms). The Chin played his part to the end.

Gotti, to his detriment, surrounded himself with those other fascinating creatures of the criminal netherworld: informers. Listening to recordings of the embattled don in his Little Italy social club, berating his crew, bemoaning his gambling losses, contemplating the machinations and intentions of his rivals, there's a poignancy to the experience: Not only was the poor bastard being secretly recorded by the FBI, but sometimes three out of four of the close associates in the room with him were, or later became, government informants. It's hard these days, it seems, to get good help.

So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don't? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy's disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction.

And of course, crime can be funny.

The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have
seen The Godfather,
One, Two, and maybe Three. They've
seen Good-fellas.
And these films made a powerful impression. Recently I visited my favorite Web site,
gangland.com
—an online repository for up-to-date organized crime arcana—to find a transcript of New Jersey's De Cavalcante crime family members enthusiastically speculating on which among their number had provided inspiration for the Tony Soprano character on
The Sopranos.
Real-life gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo, prior to falling down dead into his linguine with white clam sauce, is said to have practiced his Tommy Udo imitation in front of the mirror every morning. (You remember Tommy, the Richard Widmark character in
Kiss
of
Death}
The famous scene in which the giggling Widmark binds and gags an old lady into her wheelchair, then pushes her down a flight of stairs? "Heee-heee . . . heee . . . heeee"?) And there
must
be scores of aspiring Joe Pescis out there, taking the occasional break from the daily grind of extortion and murder to do dead-on impressions of Joe: "What? I
amuse
you? I'm a clown?"

There is a powerful element of pure comedy, of classic
schtick
in the business of crime. With so many natural wordsmiths, mimics, movie fans, and practitioners of a century-old oral tradition, is it any wonder? And as Monty Python so astutely demonstrated many years ago, the basic elements of comedy
all
come down to the unexpected head injury, repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull. Whether it's Oliver Hardy getting a good smack upside the nut with a mishandled ladder, or a Colombo loanshark getting his brains spattered all over the dashboard of his shiny new Buick, the principle is the same—and it spells
funny.

Joe Pesci, thinking that today he's gonna be a "made guy," looks down at the floor, sees that the carpet has been rolled up— and has time only to say, "O/?
shit!"
before getting two behind his ear. Classic! Just like Oliver Hardy
should
know that a ladder will soon be bouncing off his face—because it bounced off his face in the scene before, and in the scene before that— Pesci's character
should
know that when a close personal friend invites you to a sit-down with the bosses, or says that
you
can have the front passenger seat ("That's okay . . .
you
sit in front"), there's every likelihood that a fatal head injury is imminent. There's a historic inevitability to both comedy and organized crime, and the punch lines are often the same.

Times, sadly, are changing. Traditional criminal groups like New York's Cosa Nostra, Boston's Winter Hill Gang, Chicago's Outfit are being replaced by newer and less amusing stylists, clever mobs of ruthless Russians, Serbs, Israelis, Asians, Jamaicans, Colombians, and Nigerians whose appreciation of the classics seems lacking. Their crimes, for the most part, are so sophisticated and so
boring
that simply reading about them induces coma. Notoriously close-mouthed, even by professional standards, these recent arrivals to America's shores are less likely to provide the kind of recorded admissions that thinned the ranks of their predecessors and entertained generations of readers and moviegoers. Some of these guys, I don't even know if they've seen
The Godfather
—much less
Mean Streets
or
Good-fellas^.
I doubt sincerely whether they will honor the tradition of amusing movie audiences.

The bad guys of the future will probably look and sound and act more like Bill Gates than "Fat Tony" Salerno . . . and the world will be a bleaker place for it. No more "Gentleman Jimmy" Burkes hijacking loads out of Kennedy airport. Tomorrow's criminals will simply move tiny blips from place to place on their computer screens, theoretical felonies that take place somewhere in the ether. Monies from the Bank of Smerzsk will somehow find their way to another account in the Grand Caymans, or to a shell corporation in the former Soviet Republic of Torporistan. And the man who presses the "enter" key will have all the seething menace and dangerous charisma of a certified public accountant.