The Good Guys Read online

  “The Professor” is a pretty common tag, although the one thing every “the Professor” had in common was that none of them were actually professors. It was a nickname usually given to people who thought they were smart guys. People who acted like they had all the answers, sometimes even when nobody asked the questions.

  When all this took place, I was already retired from the family business, but I still had friends. So I know this story from the people who know the people. The people who were there.

  I have to admit that when I first heard about this search, I got very curious. I wondered why it was so important to some connected people that this college professor get found. The professor wasn’t a made man, he wasn’t an associate, he wasn’t even really connected. What was known was that he had gotten himself involved with Tony Cosentino and for whatever reasons he needed to be found. There wasn’t necessarily anything ominous about it. He just needed to be talked to and apparently was making himself hard to find. One thing for absolute certain in this business: The less somebody wants to have a conversation, the more important that conversation usually is.

  Little Eddie sighed. “This is bullshit. Who got time for this?” Without turning his head to get Duke’s attention he said, “Duke, give me some more coffee, please.”

  Duke continued washing the dishes, oblivious to Little Eddie’s request. Georgie laughed loud and deep. “It ain’t ever gonna work, Eddie. The guy can’t hear you.”

  Little Eddie had never trusted the Duke and was always laying traps for him. The day the Duke responded, proving he really could hear, would be his last day on earth. Eddie stamped his foot on the floor a couple of times; Duke picked up the vibration and turned around. Eddie practically yelled, “Gimme coffee, you fucking prick.”

  “Caw-fee,” the Duke agreed.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Little Eddie replied, “cawfee. But the prick part, that he don’t hear.” He shook his head in disbelief, then turned to Bobby. “So where do we start with this thing?”

  Bobby Blue Eyes and Little Eddie weren’t exactly partners—the family didn’t work that way—but they had done a lot of things together and had become close friends. Eddie knew Bobby was a mover and had decided a long time ago to swim along in his wake. So unless Bobby told him different, Eddie just assumed he’d be helping him out on this job. “I don’t know. I guess we go up to Columbia and see what’s going on.”

  Georgie laughed out loud. “Jesus H. Christ, that’s all the world needs. Little Eddie goes to college. That’s like me sending my wife to cooking school.”

  “Yeah,” Little Eddie agreed enthusiastically. “If my mother heard I was going to college, she’d have a cow.”

  “Eddie,” Bobby said matter-of-factly, indicating Eddie’s huge frame, “I think she already did.”

  Everybody laughed again. That was the kind of insult that only someone like Bobby could get away with, because everybody knew he wasn’t serious. “What are you talking?” Eddie responded. “You saying that diet book I’m following ain’t working? Fuck you, I lost about two pounds yesterday.”

  Mickey Fists walked in just in time to hear Eddie make that claim. “Yeah, sure you did,” he said.

  “I did,” Little Eddie insisted, “swear to fucking God.” And added with perfect timing, “I threw away that fucking diet book.”

  Fast Lenny tossed down his cards in frustration. “Fuck this shit. You guys wanna play some cards or you wanna be fucking comedians? I’m dying here and it ain’t that funny to me.”

  “Yeah, me too, I’m out,” Tony Cupcakes said.

  “Hey, Eddie,” Bobby asked, “what do you say, you ready to go up to Columbia? Let’s see what this thing is all about.”

  “Columbia?” Mickey Fists said. “I thought that was a fucking country.”

  Bobby explained, “Yeah, well, it is, but I’m talking about the college. Up in Harlem.”

  Mickey paused in front of the refrigerator and turned down the radio. “What’s going on up there?” Mickey had been made more than two decades earlier. He was a man who commanded great respect, so when he asked a question, it got answered.

  “The Hammer wants me to find some guy, a professor. He worked up there. We’re just gonna go ask some questions.”

  Eddie stood up. “College broads, right? You kidding me? Boola fucking boola.”

  “Anybody else wanna take a ride?” Bobby was being polite. He knew that nobody was going to get involved in a job that didn’t have the possibility of money at the end.

  It definitely didn’t occur to anybody that this might turn out to be something important. It wasn’t that kind of job. It was just another favor being done in a business that functioned on favors being done. The way it worked was simple: You do this for me, then when you need something done, come and see me. It worked the same way whether it was an immigrant who needed three bucks to see a doctor or a boss who needed a missing college professor found.

  What mattered was that it didn’t interfere with the important business. And the important business was anything that earned a profit. The world of organized crime as portrayed in the books and the movies since The Godfather isn’t entirely accurate. For most people working in this world, it isn’t particularly glamorous, it isn’t that exciting. It’s a job. It’s a hard job. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on every member of the organization to earn a living. Nobody gets paid a weekly salary. There’s no health plan. You are what you earned last week.

  The organization in organized crime is structured like a pyramid, meaning that a percentage of every penny earned by people at the bottom finds its way to people at the top. In essence that might be considered a franchise fee, because it is the existence of this vast support group that in many cases enables individuals to earn their living. People who otherwise probably wouldn’t pay too much attention to a certain individual are careful to pay him the respect he has earned when they find out he’s a member of this organization. It isn’t about him, it’s the people standing behind him.

  Most soldiers in this world, people like Bobby Blue Eyes and Little Eddie, spend their days and nights looking for the next score, the big opportunity. At any time a soldier will have several deals in the works. Some of them he’ll initiate himself, some will be brought to him by people needing the power and prestige he brings to a situation, and some will come from other members of the crew paying him a piece for doing some work. The range of opportunities is endless and indescribable. It’s anything where there is the chance for money at the other end.

  Bobby and Little Eddie took the West Side Highway uptown, although calling that particular traffic jam a highway was like calling John Gotti shy. At that time the road below 57th Street was a pothole-marred mess. The raised portion of the highway had been closed to traffic, but much of it hadn’t been taken down yet, so big chunks of concrete still occasionally fell off onto the street. Personal-injury lawyers used to send people driving under it and then pray. But Bobby took the highway because he had a couple of stops he needed to make. When he got off the road on West Street, Little Eddie asked, “Where you going now?”

  Bobby was one of those people who smile with their mouth closed. “Hell,” he said.

  “Right,” Eddie said, “you’re a regular fucking comedian.”

  “I’m not kidding you, Eddie,” he said, “this is for real. I got a little piece of hell.” About ten minutes later he parked in front of a seedy four-story building. Obviously to fit the property on which it had been built, rather than being rectangular, this building was constructed in the shape of a ship, with one square end and the other end of the building tapering to a point. The street floor was constructed of cement, which appropriately had been painted a battleship gray, while the upper stories were brick. A vertical neon sign affixed to one of the square corners identified the building as the Terminal Hotel. The Terminal was working its way down from fleabag. It was one of those short-stay places—two-hour minimum—a hot-sheet hotel, a place for street hookers to
take their johns so they didn’t have to work in cars or alleys. The only thing different about this place was that it was primarily for homosexuals.

  There were two doors. A glass door with the hotel’s name in an arc of gold lettering opened onto the lobby, but Bobby and Eddie went down a flight of steps and through the open second door, a windowless red steel door with no name or identification of any kind on it.

  The door opened onto another world. The place was very dimly lit, the walls were painted either a deep red or black. As they walked in, Eddie said, “Gees, Bobby, this is a nice cheery place.”

  Sex has always been good business for organized crime. Nobody had any problems with it. There was a lot of money to be made in passion pits, and nobody was getting hurt, so what was wrong with it? Hurt? This was the business of providing pleasure. The mob, the Mafia, Cosa Nostra, call it whatever you want, has always been a service organization. We made available to people those things they desired but couldn’t get legally, everything from playing a daily number to kinky sex. Little Eddie knew his way around this world. One of his first jobs—literally while he was still in high school—was working nights as a bouncer at Mello’s on Seventh Avenue, an expensive strip club that catered to Garment District executives and their expense accounts. Through the years Little Eddie had seen a lot of interesting things in sex clubs and hooker havens—like he’d never forget the bachelor party in which the groom had been rushed to the hospital gasping for breath after being nearly smothered by a pair of 44 triple Ds—but almost all of it was the typical red-blooded American stuff. Tits and ass. But as he looked around Hell, he realized he was seeing things he had never seen before. “Jesus,” he said disgustedly, “what kind of sick place is this?”

  Even in the middle of the afternoon the place was busy. Many of the men in the club were dressed in black leather pants, and most of them had the crotch cut out. Eddie concentrated on keeping his eyes looking straight ahead at shoulder level and above. He wasn’t embarrassed, exactly, but he knew there was something fundamentally wrong with men who wanted to be with men rather than women. When a man whose shaved head reflected the blue bulb hanging from the ceiling walked past, Eddie just couldn’t help noticing that the guy wasn’t wearing anything under his black leather chaps, his not-so-privates hanging right out there in public. As the man passed him, Eddie involuntarily reached up and tightened the knot on his tie. That was his way of reassuring himself that he was still completely dressed.

  In one dark corner two men were having oral sex—they were actually doing it in public—and worse, one of them was dressed as a nun. “Ah, Bobby, this ain’t right,” Eddie said, following San Filippo through the quiet kitchen to a room way in the back. And as he did, he thought to himself, I don’t care if I’m gonna bust a motherfucking gut, no fucking way am I going into the men’s room.

  Bobby knocked on a door marked “Private,” and after being identified, he and Eddie were buzzed inside. A squat man with perfectly combed white hair was sitting behind a small wooden desk. Eddie took his post at the door and folded his arms on his chest, the traditional “don’t fuck with me” pose. Bobby shook hands with the white-haired man but did not introduce Eddie. That was one way of making his point that this was not a social visit. “Hey, Bobby,” the man said with obviously false enthusiasm, “I got it ready for you right here.” He reached into the top drawer of the file cabinet supporting the desk and pulled out an envelope.

  “What do you got for me?” Bobby asked, taking the envelope.

  “Twenty-two,” he said softly.

  Bobby smiled that closed-mouth smile again. But this time there was no warmth behind it. “Gees, Mikey, that’s not so good. I was looking for more than that.”

  The white-haired man frowned. “I know, but I couldn’t help it. There was this big thing going on in town this week.”

  “What?”

  “The fucking Village People were at the Garden. You’d think it was some kind of fucking holiday.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Look, Mikey, you gotta do a little better than this. I got bills, you know.”

  Mikey knew. “Look, I can throw another four hundred in there, Bobby, but you know I gotta pay for things here too. I mean, c’mon, I got expenses.”

  “Listen to me, you got a good thing going here. I’m telling you, as a friend, don’t fuck it up.”

  Mikey understood the warning. “Bobby, Bobby, whattya talking? You think I’m fucking nuts? You think I’m gonna hold back on you? I’m telling you, the Village fucking People come to town, it’s like the circus. It’ll be better next week, watch.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. And I don’t want to hear no ‘Liberace’s in town’ shit either. Capisce?”

  “Yeah, Bobby, I got it.” Taking his wallet out of his back pocket, he removed four hundred-dollar bills and handed them to San Filippo.

  This time Bobby didn’t have to force his smile. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said, and turned to leave.

  “Hey, hey, wait one second,” Mikey said, as if he suddenly remembered something important. “You ever see one of these?” He held up a plump kid’s doll made of fabric.

  Bobby shrugged. “Yeah, sure. It’s a doll. Big fucking deal.”

  Mikey waved off that answer. “Oh no, no way, José. This isn’t a doll, this is a Cabbage Patch Kid. Every one of them comes with like its own name and birth certificate. The kids are going nuts for ’em.” He checked the doll’s name tag. “Meet . . . Penny Nichols.”

  Little Eddie finally spoke. “He’s right, Bobby. My little nieces, they got ’em last year and they won’t put them down. They treat ’em like little babies.”

  “They’re going for more than the prices in the stores,” Mikey added, handing the doll across his desk to Bobby. “They can’t make them fast enough.”

  Bobby hefted it, bouncing it in his hand a few times. “And? So?”

  “And so I got about sixty of them. Cost me six hundred bucks. I need a grand for ’em. You interested?”

  “What the fuck am I gonna do with dolls?” Bobby asked, turning to Little Eddie. Eddie kept his mouth shut, which was the correct thing to do, but inside he was about to burst a vessel.

  Mikey said, “You don’t want ’em, you don’t want ’em. I’ll get rid of them.”

  Little Eddie nodded firmly.

  “All right,” Bobby said, turning back to Mikey, “I can go nine hundred.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Bobby, I need the grand. Do it for me this one time.”

  “Nine hundred,” Bobby said, shrugging, “that’s it.” The deal was made. Everybody went home happy. Mikey was getting rid of the counterfeits from Taiwan that he’d bought for $350, and Bobby guessed he could get $1,500 from a guy he knew who sold whatever he could get his hands on out of the storefronts on Canal Street.

  Go in to pick up some cash from a rough-trade gay bar and come out with five dozen kid’s dolls. Actually it wasn’t that unusual. This was a business with very little predictability. It was impossible to figure out what was going to happen next. It was a world where a big surprise wasn’t so surprising.

  When they got back to the car, Bobby tossed Penny Nichols into the trunk. Then he took the cash out of the envelope, handed two hundred-dollar bills to Eddie for the pleasure of his company, and put the rest in his pocket. The $2,600 was his cut of the previous week’s business. In relationships like this the size of the cut depended on the extent of the individual’s involvement in the business. Payment was always in cash—organized crime doesn’t take credit cards. And Bobby would have to deliver a substantial piece of his end to Franzone, who would keep some of it and pass the rest of it along up the ladder.

  Bobby had a nice piece of Hell. He hadn’t had to put up any of the start-up money. But what he had done, which was even more valuable, was introduce Mikey to the banker who approved the loan needed to open the doors on slightly less than sufficient collateral. The banker was so cooperative because Bobby held his note for $23,000, which he�
�d borrowed to pay off some overdue gambling losses when he found himself on the edge of a broken arm. Bobby’s association gave Hell a license to operate safely. Anybody came around learned quickly that Bobby Blue Eyes was in this place, and then they would walk away.

  Bobby wasn’t greedy; he wasn’t one of those guys who squeezed every nickel from their joints. Bobby took the long-range view, as he did in the other aspects of his life. It was better that his places be successful, that the owners had a few dollars extra to keep growing, than for him to milk them dry. If he was short one month, he was known to declare a special dividend, but most of the time he got along just fine. Eddie hadn’t noticed anybody looking real unhappy when Bobby walked through the place.

  By the time they got out of Hell, it was getting late and the traffic to the George Washington Bridge was already starting to back up. Bobby took a shot anyway, but he wasn’t a guy gifted with patience. After inching along for a few minutes he decided, “Fuck this shit, we’ll go up there tomorrow,” and hung a U-turn.

  Eddie agreed. “Fugetaboutit,” he said, “there’s too many fucking cars in this city. They ought to get rid of the traffic so people can get somewhere.”

  One of the few things in New York over which the Mafia had no control was the traffic.

  TWO

  Fuck that no-good motherfucking fucker. I ain’t kidding this time. I swear to God, I see that fucking guy come around here again, I’m gonna fucking rip out his heart and stuff it down his throat till he’s shitting it out. I’m fucking pissed off.”

  “Listen to me, kid. You can’t hold back like that. You got something to say, you gotta say it right out loud. Holding your feelings inside like that, it ain’t good for you.”