I Heard You Paint Houses Page 9
The Italian guys I worked with at Food Fair who pushed money for him didn’t even know how big the guy was that they called Skinny Razor.
Shooting the breeze over a bottle of homemade red wine, I bragged to my Food Fair buddies about the deal I had going with Dusty on the chickens and they put me wise to more money that could be made. After your truck was loaded with hindquarters the yard manager where you loaded your truck would put an aluminum seal on the lock and off you’d go. When you got to the Food Fair store with your delivery of hindquarters the store manager would break the aluminum seal and you’d load the meat into the store’s refrigerator. Once the seal was broken it could never be put back together again, so you couldn’t break the seal on your way to the store with the meat delivery. Only the store manager could break the seal. But on cold bitter days the yard manager who was supposed to put the seal on after the meat was loaded onto your truck would get a little lazy and hand you the seal to put on for him. If you palmed the seal, you could deliver, say, five hindquarters to a guy waiting for it at a diner. He’d deliver it to restaurants and split the money with you. After you gave this guy at the diner his five hindquarters, you’d put the seal on your lock. When you got to the store your seal would be intact and would then be broken by the store manager and everything would be copacetic. Then you’d be a nice guy and tell the butcher you were going to pack the meat for him in his icebox. You’d go in and there’d be hindquarters on hooks on the right rail. You’d take five off and put them on the left rail. Then instead of delivering twenty-five hindquarters you’d add the twenty you had left to the five you already had put on the left rail. The store manager would count your twenty-five and sign off on it. At inventory they’d see that they had a shortage, but they wouldn’t know who was responsible or how it happened. The yard manager would never admit he handed you the seal to put on yourself and that he was too lazy to go out in the cold and do his job the right way.
That’s how it worked in theory, but in reality nearly everybody was in on the deal and got a little piece of the pie for looking the other way.
Before the war I earned everything I ever had. During the war, you learned to take whatever you want, whatever you could get away with taking, not that there was much over there worth taking. Still, you took wine and women and if you needed a car you took it, too—stuff like that. After the war, it just seemed natural to take what you could take wherever you could take it. There was only so much blood you could sell for $10 a pint.
I got a little carried away one day and sold my entire load of meat on my way to a delivery in Atlantic City. I put the seal on my lock after the whole load of meat was transferred to the guy. When I got to Atlantic City the seal was broken by the manager and there was no meat inside and I was mystified. Maybe the guys who loaded the truck forgot to load it. The store manager asked me didn’t I realize I was driving a light truck? I said I thought I had a good horse. After that incident Food Fair put signs up in the stores for all managers to keep a sharp eye on me. But then, like I said, a lot of them were in on the thing anyway.
The signs didn’t stop me. They knew things were missing wherever I went, but they had no proof against me. They knew I was doing it, but they didn’t know how I was doing it. And under the contract, management couldn’t fire a Teamster unless they had certain grounds. They had none. Stealing was grounds only if they could prove it. Besides, I worked hard for them when I wasn’t stealing from them.
But on November 5, 1956, they decided to take a shot with what they had, and they got me indicted for stealing in interstate commerce. My lawyer wanted me to take a plea and turn on the people who were in it with me. But I knew that all the people in it with me were the witnesses the government planned on using in their case against me. If they put me in jail they’d have to bring a wagon to court to cart away their own witnesses. If they had me, they had everybody. All they wanted me to do was name names and they’d let me go. I put the word out to the witnesses against me to be stand-up, that I wasn’t going to rat anybody out. They should keep their mouths shut and act like they don’t know anything. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to break into the office and swipe the records about all the things Food Fair could not account for besides the meat I delivered.
The government witnesses, one after another, couldn’t pin anything on me. I got my lawyer to put in the Food Fair records about all the things they had missing all the time, all the shortages. The government objected because they said I swiped the records. I said some anonymous guy swiped it and left it in my mailbox. The judge threw the case out and said that if he owned stock in Food Fair he would sell it. Food Fair then made an offer to me through my lawyer that if I would resign they would give me $25,000. I told them I couldn’t afford the cut in pay.
We celebrated downtown, and I could see that Skinny Razor and some of the other people he sat with were most impressed that I didn’t rat anybody out. Not ratting was more important to them than winning the case.
Somewhere in that time period when I started hanging out downtown we went into the Villa d’Roma on Ninth Street for dinner. One night I spotted this guy and I recognized him as the old guy who got my horse started at the truck stop. I went over and paid my respects, and he invited me to sit down with him and his friend. It turned out that his friend was Angelo Bruno, and I would later learn that Angelo Bruno was Skinny Razor’s boss and the boss of all of Philadelphia and that Angelo Bruno was a silent partner in just about everything downtown, including the Villa d’Roma.
I had a glass of wine with them and Russell told me that he comes down to Philly a lot to pick up prosciutto bread. That’s bread made with prosciutto and mozzarella baked in it. You slice it down and eat it like a sandwich. It’s almost like a sandwich, but it’s not. I thought he was serious that that was the only reason he came to Philly, and the next time I had a delivery up his way I brought him a dozen loaves of prosciutto bread. It shows you how much I knew. He was very gracious.
Then I began seeing Russell in different places downtown, and he was always with his friend Angelo Bruno. Whenever I was up his way, I started bringing him Roselli’s sausages, because he said he came to Philly for them, too. Meanwhile, the more prosciutto bread and sausages I’m dropping off to him the more I keep seeing him in Philly. He always invited me to sit down and drink red wine and dunk bread in it. He loved the fact that during the war I had been to Catania, the town where he was born in Sicily. I told him about the macaroni hanging out on the line like laundry to dry on Sunday in Catania. Sometimes he’d invite me to eat with him and we’d talk a little Italian. He’d actually buy a two-dollar football lottery ticket off me and play the card. It was just social.
Then my plans to become a permanent partner in the Food Fair chain came to an abrupt halt. They put Globe Detective Agency to watch a certain restaurant they suspected, and they caught the guy who brought the meat to the drops. He didn’t work for Food Fair. He was just a guy who hung around downtown at Skinny Razor’s place. He used a pickup truck and it was loaded with Food Fair meat I had given him. Once again they had nothing on me, because they couldn’t identify the meat as being meat that any particular driver ever had on his truck. All they had me for was wishful thinking. But they knew it was me and they came to me and said that if I resigned they would let that guy go. I asked for the $25,000 if I resigned and they laughed at me. They figured I wasn’t going to let that guy go down, and they were right. I resigned.
Next thing you know when I’m in the Villa d’Roma I run into Russell and he knows all about it and says I did the right thing. He says that the guy has a wife and kids and I did the right thing saving him from jail. Meanwhile, I’ve got a wife and kids, too, and I’m out of a job.
I started picking up jobs out of the union hall. You’d work your turn for companies where their driver was out sick. You shaped up like the longshoremen in On the Waterfront. Some days you worked, some days you didn’t, and all the time you’re hoping to pick up a steady job. I st
ill had the ballroom jobs. But I lost my Food Fair routes, and without my routes it was hard to push money for Skinny Razor and sell lottery tickets for Joey McGreal.
Being out of work meant I had more time on my hands to hang around downtown and try to earn a buck here or there. My Italian Food Fair buddies would brag about how I could bench press 400 pounds and how I would do reps of straight presses of 275 without jerking when we worked out at the gym. One day a numbers writer named Eddie Rece came up to me and wanted to know if I wanted to earn some money. He wanted me to take care of a little matter for him. He gave me a few bucks to go see a guy in Jersey who was messing around with the girlfriend of one of his relatives. He gave me a gun to show the guy, but he told me not to use it, just to show it. That’s the way it was in those days. You showed a gun. Now they don’t show you the gun, they just shoot you with it. In those days they wanted their money today. Now they want their money yesterday. Half of them today are doing drugs themselves, and it makes them impulsive. It distorts their thinking. More than half of them. Some of the bosses, too.
I went over to Jersey and talked to the guy. I told him not to be cutting somebody else’s grass, to cut his own grass in his own yard. I told him this one’s spoken for. I told him to go get his own trim—which is what we called it in those days, getting trim. I told him to look for your trim elsewhere. Right off I could tell Romeo wanted no trouble from me, so I never even bothered to show him the gun. He knew what it was.
That little errand for Eddie Rece turned out all right and that led to more errands for people. Maybe some guy owed one of the men downtown some money and I’d go collect it. One time Skinny Razor told me to go to Atlantic City and bring back a guy who was late paying his vig on a loan. I went and got the guy. This one I had to show the gun to in order to get him into my car. He was peeing in his pants by the time we got to the Friendly Lounge. Skinny Razor took a look at him and told him to come back with his money. The guy asked Skinny how he was going to get back to Atlantic City to get his money, and Skinny told him to take a bus.
No doubt I was getting a reputation for being efficient, but also for being somebody you could trust. Quitting the job at Food Fair to save that guy from jail kept being brought up by people as proof that I was a stand-up guy. They started calling me “Cheech,” which is short for Frank in Italian—Francesco. They started inviting me into the Messina Club at Tenth and Tasker, which is a members-only joint where you get the best sausage and peppers you ever ate. You’d play cards there; just hang out without the public citizens being at the next table. It’s still there, and it still has the best sausage and peppers in all of South Philly.
A couple of times when I ran into Russell on a Wednesday he’d tell me to go home and get my wife. Then he and his wife, Carrie, would meet us at the Villa d’Roma for dinner. Wednesday night was the night that you went out with your wives, that way nobody was seen out with his cumare, his mistress, whatever you want to call it. Everybody knew not to be out with their cumare on Wednesday night. It was like an unwritten rule. Mary and I would have a pleasant evening on many a Wednesday with Russ and Carrie.
Automatically I started going downtown if there was no work out of the union hall. It was comfortable down there. I always had a glass of red wine in my hand. I started staying out later and later and sometimes not going home at all. On Sunday nights I’d go to the Latin Quarter, a fancy night club in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where I’d see everybody that hung out downtown during the week. Frank Sinatra would play there, all the big stars would. I’d bring Mary once in a while, but it wasn’t her kind of crowd, and a baby sitter was a luxury we couldn’t afford too often with me out of work. Mary was lighting candles that I’d get a steady job. I began sleeping late on Sundays after Saturday night at the Nixon Ballroom with Dusty, and Mary would go by herself to mass and the kids would go to their mass.
Once in a while Russell would call me from upstate and ask me to drive up and take him someplace. He had business all over, from Endicott to Buffalo in New York; from Scranton to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; and in north Jersey and New York City. He seemed to know where I was during the day when he would call me to come up and get him. I enjoyed his company, and I never asked him for a dime. He knew he was doing me good by my being seen with him. I didn’t know how good until one day in November 1957. He asked me to drive him to a small town across the border in upstate New York called Apalachin. He told me that when he got done in Apalachin he was going to Erie, Pennsylvania, and then to Buffalo and that he had a ride lined up to Erie and Buffalo and back again to his home in Kingston. So I took him to this house in Apalachin and dropped him off. I didn’t see anything unusual.
The next day this meeting at Apalachin is the biggest thing to ever happen to Italian gangsters in America. All of a sudden they had arrested about fifty gangsters from every part of the country, and one of them was my new friend Russell Bufalino. It was front page every day for days. It was the hottest thing on television. There really was a Mafia, and it covered the whole country. All these individual gangsters had their own territory. Now I understood why Russell would ask me to drive him to different places and wait for him in the car while he did a little business in somebody’s house or in a bar or a restaurant. They did all their business in person and in cash, not over the phone or with banks. Russell Bufalino was as big as Al Capone had been, maybe bigger. I couldn’t get over it.
I read every article. Some of these guys wore silk suits, some others dressed plain like Russell. But they were all powerful men with big criminal records you could brag about, not just fighting with cops after a brawl that started on a trolley, not lifting a little meat from Food Fair. These partners of Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno were involved in every type of crime from murder and prostitution to drugs and hijacking. Loan sharking and gambling were described as big business for these men. So was labor racketeering. Russell had not been coming to Philly just for prosciutto bread and sweet and hot sausage from Roselli’s, not even extra-hot sausage. He had business interests with Angelo Bruno, their own kind of business.
And Russell Bufalino was one of the biggest bosses in their business, and I was his friend. I was seen with him. I drank wine with him. I knew his wife. He knew my wife. He always asked about my kids. I talked Italian with him. I brought him prosciutto bread and sausages. He gave me gallons of homemade red wine. We would dunk the prosciutto bread in the wine. I drove him places. I even drove him to that meeting in Apalachin.
But after all this hit the paper I didn’t see him downtown anymore for a while and he didn’t call me to drive him anywhere. I figured he was avoiding publicity. Then I read where they were trying to deport him because he was forty days old when he arrived in America from Sicily. The deportation proceedings and appeals would last for fifteen years, but they were always hanging over Russell’s head. In the end when he lost his last appeal and had packed his bags and had his tickets, I recommended a lawyer to him who went through the Italian government, spread a little lira, and got it so the Italian government refused to take Russell, and that was that. America had to keep him. Russell was very grateful for my recommendation on that deportation thing, but when I first read about it in the paper, who could have imagined I would have worked my way that far up the ladder to be helping save Russell Bufalino from deportation.
Another thing is that downtown people were saying that it looked like Russell was the boss who had called the Apalachin meeting to prevent a gang war over the whacking of the New York waterfront boss Albert Anastasia in a barber’s chair the month before. Russell Bufalino, the mechanic who started my horse for me at a truck stop in Endicott, New York, was getting bigger and bigger every day in my eyes. And I’ve got to say, if you’ve ever met a movie star or somebody famous, there was an element of that. Although he hated it, Russell was a tremendous celebrity, and anybody who was seen with him downtown or wherever had some of that status rub off on them.
Then one day this guy, Whispers DiTullio, cam
e over to my table at the Bocce Club and bought me a glass of wine. I had seen him around, but I didn’t know him too well. He had the same last name as Skinny Razor, but they were not related. I knew he pushed money for Skinny Razor, but way bigger money than me and my friends pushed. He pushed money to restaurants and legitimate businesses, not just to waitresses at White Tower joints. Whispers told me to meet him at the Melrose Diner. So I went around there. You wouldn’t expect to see any people from downtown at the Melrose Diner. It’s more for the crowd grabbing a bite to eat before they go to a Phillies game. You get a nice piece of apple pie there with hot vanilla syrup on it. Whispers sat down and asked me if I could use ten grand. I told him to keep talking.”
chapter ten
All the Way Downtown
“Whispers was one of these short Italian guys in his early thirties that you’d see all around South Philly, just trying to get by with one hustle or another. This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers. I didn’t know the one they blew up; I just heard about it.
I didn’t know anything about “made men” back then. That’s a special status in the alleged mob where you go through a ceremony and after that you are then untouchable. Nobody can whack you without approval. You get extra respect wherever you go. You are part of the “in” crowd, the inner circle. It only applies to Italians. Later on I got so close to Russell that I was higher up than a made man. Russell even said that to me. He said, “Nobody can ever touch you because you are with me.” I can still feel him gripping my cheek with that strong grip of his and telling me, “You should have been an Italian.”