In the World

by Richard Stratton

  Ivan also brings up Jack Henry Abbott. It seems that I am forever destined to be compared to Abbott despite all apparent dissimilarities. Ivan represented Abbott after he was captured and stood trial for manslaughter in the death of Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old actor and playwright, who worked as a waiter in a restaurant called the Binibon on Second Avenue. Abbott, who had been out of prison for six weeks at the time, had a dispute with Adan over use of the toilet. They took the beef outside, where Abbott stabbed Adan to death. The next day, the New York Times ran a glowing review of Abbott’s prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast.

  “Prove yourself to be the better man,” Ivan tells me.

  “Oh, by the way,” he says as I am about to leave his office. “We won the suppression motion in Tampa. The judge agreed there were no exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless search. Two million in cash and postarrest statements made by the defendant are not admissible. The government is appealing, of course. But for now, at least, we are winning.”

  “That’s great, Ivan,” I say, and we shake hands. “Congratulations.”

  “And to you, your first win—no, not your first; your first win for me. . . . Oh, and one other thing. . . .” Now he can’t resist a big smile. “I heard back from your parole officer and her supervisor. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from them as well. Congratulations, boobie. They approved your working here.”

  Hah! My criminal monkey perched on my shoulders chortles: No dishonest deed shall go unrewarded.

  Chapter Three

  A VIOLATION FOR REAL

  I’M ON THE subway on my way from Brooklyn to the office in Manhattan, now officially approved to work for Ivan, when I look across the aisle and see this old guy sitting between two burly characters who look like bodyguards.

  The old man gazes back at me. “Richie,” he rasps and gets to his feet.

  No, could it be? Yes, it is.

  There is no mistaking the man. It is Joe Stassi, the octogenarian original gangster, cohort of such criminal luminaries as Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Abner “Longy” Zwillman, to name a few. Joe occupied the cell next to mine for over two years at the FCI in Petersburg, Virginia. He had been locked up for more than twenty years on multiple narcotics violations when, having learned of my reputation as a jailhouse lawyer, he asked me to look into his case.

  As I read through the documents in Joe’s central file (known as his “jacket” in prison parlance), I discovered an irregularity in his sentence computation. He’d been locked up so long his internment predated the computer-based sentence monitoring system known as SENTRY. Joe had been denied parole for a third time after having served almost twenty years. He was told by the parole board to “bring it all,” in other words, max out the thirty-eight-year term he was serving.

  By statute at the time, prisoners in federal custody could earn two types of good-time: statutory good-time at a rate of ten days per month just for being there and not violating the rules and regulations of the institution; and meritorious good-time, an added five days per month for working at some bullshit job if the convict’s work supervisor saw fit to authorize the request. Joe had been locked up in the Hole at the maximum-security penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. He was under investigation following a failed escape attempt from the MCC in Manhattan. Once it was determined that Joe had no part in the escape planning or attempt, he was released from the Hole at Marion back into population, and he went to work in the prison bakery. At that time, he was entitled to have resumed receiving both statutory and meritorious good-time. As well, he should have been credited for the statutory good-time he would have earned during the ninety days he spent in the Hole. But Joe would have been required to bring this failure to receive his good-time to the attention of his case manager, as Federal Bureau of Prisons functionaries will do nothing to aid a convict unless they are forced to abide by their own rules and regulations. When I told Joe this and asked him if he had requested his good-time, he told me, “I don’t ask these people for nothing.”

  So I did. With Joe’s permission, I wrote up and filed what is known as a BP-9, requesting that the old man be credited with what amounted to nearly two years of good-time. I also requested that he receive a new sentence computation to reflect the credited good-time, and to determine a new release date based on the added good-time credit. With the number of years Joe had already served, we figured that if he were to prevail and get credit for all the good-time he deserved, he would have been very close to his mandatory release date. Ordinarily, BP-9s are rejected outright no matter the merits. In order to get any relief, if the convict has a valid issue, it takes a judge in federal court under a writ of habeas corpus or writ of mandamus to compel the Bureau of Prisons to grant the prisoner relief. But one is required to exhaust all administrative remedies before a judge will consider issues brought in a habeas writ.

  Joe got lucky. As it happened, the warden at Petersburg when we filed the BP-9 had been Joe’s case manager at Marion, and he was familiar with Joe’s case. Around this time, I was transferred from Petersburg to the federal prison in Ray Brook, New York, near the Canadian border. Some months later, when another busload of prisoners came to Ray Brook from Petersburg, I learned that the old man—this infamous mobster Joe Stassi, a.k.a. Hoboken Joe, a revered and feared mob hitman—had received credit for all his good-time, and he had been released straight to the street.

  Wow! Nice, I thought, I got this aging mafioso out of prison so he could return to his wife of over sixty years—a former Miss America, no less. True, Joe was a serious gangster in his day, a major Mafia figure, and a highly skilled professional assassin who murdered, in his own words, more men than he could remember—including his best friend under orders from his bosses in what was the Genovese Crime Family. But the law is the law. Joe had served his time, he had fulfilled his obligations to the government, and I figured that, going on ninety years of age, perhaps he would mend his ways and live out his days as a law-abiding citizen—or at least without committing any more mob assassinations. Even hitmen retire.

  And now here is Joe riding on the Number Four train from Brooklyn into Manhattan. We stand up and embrace. Joe is practically in tears. He can’t believe it; I can’t believe it. We are in a city of ten million inhabitants, riding on a mass transit system with hundreds of thousands of passengers, and we end up on the same subway car sitting across from each other. Surely this is no coincidence. There is a God, and He has a fine sense of timing, and an even better knack for how to craft a good story.

  I ask Joe what he’s doing riding on the subway. “It’s these fuckin’ FBI,” he sneers. “They follow me everywhere I go. So I jump on a bus. Then I get off the bus and run down to the subway to try to lose them.”

  He says he heard I had some success as a writer. “Well, you sure know how to write a brief, that much I know.”

  I tell him I work for a criminal defense attorney, and I hand him one of my business cards. He pockets the card and says, “I’m gonna look you up, Richie. I got a story I want you to tell.”

  A WEEK OR so passes, and I get a call at the office. Joe invites me to join him for lunch at Docks on Third Avenue. As we enter, Joe tips the hostess with a crisp C-note. He peals off more hundreds to pay the check, and he leaves a big tip. Either he had a healthy stash of cash put aside when he went away, or the old mobster is back in action.

  “I got a story to tell, Richie,” he says. “I’m not gonna say nothing, you understand? But it’s all there—it’s in the papers, the documents. I got boxes and boxes full ’a papers and letters and pictures, everything from my life. And I’m gonna turn it all over to you so you can write the story—my story. What I seen with my own eyes and what I know to be true. What I personally done! Not some made-up nonsense. The real story. How it all began . . . and what it really was, this thing of ours.”

  I already knew a good deal about Joe’s history as a central figure during the origins of organized crime in New York,
North America, and eventually Cuba. I’d read the government’s version of his long criminal career in his Bureau of Prisons central file. I’d also read about Hoboken Joe in a book on Abner “Longy” Zwillman, a Newark, New Jersey, bootlegger who was an important figure in the national crime syndicate. And I knew details Joe confided about his case. Stassi grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the century. His father was an immigrant from Sicily who went to work as a street cleaner. Joe was one of nine kids and out in the streets stealing and running errands for neighborhood gangsters at an early age. He was there from the very beginning, when the Mafia was known as the Black Hand. Joe was a childhood friend of Charlie Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the men who formed Cosa Nostra in America and who established the ruling body of the national criminal organization of Italian and Jewish gangsters known as the Syndicate. Joe was there, in the room, when Luciano unveiled the plan for the Five Families and ruling Mafia Commission to oversee organized crime on the national level. Joe was especially close to Longy Zwillman, whom the government called the Al Capone of New Jersey. Though nominally grandfathered in as a member of the Genovese Crime Family, Joe served as a kind of ambassador-at-large to all the different groups. Due to his Sicilian heritage and close ties to Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Longy Zwillman, Joe acted as the liaison between the Italians and the Jews. His specialty was setting up, planning, and overseeing high-profile mob hits. He hired the shooters, he chose the location, he was often instrumental in luring the target to the spot, and he stuck around in the vicinity to make sure everyone did what they were supposed to do until the target was dead. He was like the producer and director of the killings of, among others, the infamous public enemy number one, Dutch Schultz, murdered by gunmen in a chophouse in Newark. And, though many so-called mob experts dispute it, Joe confirmed that he also planned and oversaw the hit on Albert Anastasia in the barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan in October 1957. He was a partner with Tampa, Florida, mob boss Santo Trafficante in the Sans Souci Hotel and Casino in Havana when Fidel Castro and his men came down from the mountains and drove the mob from Cuba. Joe was close to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, and he came under intense suspicion after the Kennedy assassination. Joe claimed his arrest and subsequent lack of relief from the Parole Commission had been orchestrated by Bobby Kennedy to try to force him into revealing what he knew about the murder of JFK. Joe and Jack Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, once shared the same girlfriend. Joe claimed he and Kennedy Senior hated each other.

  For a writer with an interest in the history of organized crime and the government, to have someone with Joe’s firsthand, encyclopedic knowledge and his high-level participation in major historical events in the formation of the American criminal syndicate from the earliest days up through the Kennedy killing was a rare opportunity indeed. Access to his boxes full of mob memorabilia, that was a rich bonus. We make our deal on the spot. Joe wants nothing but to tell his story. “My story, the way it happened to me. You understand me, Richie? I’m not gonna talk about nobody else. I’m just gonna tell you what I know, what I did, what I saw with my own eyes, and what really happened. Not all this crap you read in books by people who know nothing about what they’re writing. People who were never there. People who only heard stories from other people who were never there. This book will be the truth.”

  We part outside the restaurant. Joe says he will be in touch, and that I should be prepared to come to his home in Brooklyn and sort through his archives, go through his collection of letters and legal papers, transcripts, memos, and reports, photographs and mob mementos, and then choose what I will need to document his story.

  “It’s all right there,” he assures me. “It’s in the papers. You understand? You got everything you need to tell the real story right there in them papers.”

  I’m excited as I leave Joe and walk back to my office. Still, I can’t help but wonder what my parole officer, young Ms. Lawless, will have to say if I tell her about my lunch meeting and planned collaboration with a major organized crime figure.

  “Ah, well, Mr. Stratton. I don’t think so. . . . I’m not sure we can approve that.”

  DAYS, WEEKS, MONTHS, and eventually years go by, and I hear nothing from Joe Stassi. The old mobster just seems to disappear. It isn’t until the fall of 2000 when I am directing a short film about parolees and parole officers that we are shooting in the parole offices in Brooklyn that I learn from one of the parole officers what happened to Joe. Not long after our lunch date, Joe violated his parole. He was caught consorting with other known organized crime figures, and he was sent back to prison at the age of eighty-nine.

  “We knew he was back in the narcotics business,” the parole officer tells me. “But we couldn’t catch him dirty. The old guy was too sharp. So we violated him for association with other known LCN members. We had photographs of him meeting with half a dozen made wiseguys, and we locked him back up.”

  This, however, was not to be the last I would see of Joe Stassi. The man and I had some obscure karmic connection. We were destined to meet again through an even more remarkable and seemingly coincidental sequence of events.

  Chapter Four

  A MAN HAS GOT TO GET HIS TEETH FIXED

  (With respect, Edward Bunker,

  December 31, 1933–July 19, 2005)

  AS I RECLINE in the dentist’s chair in the offices of Dr. Noah Eisenberg, DDM, on Fifty-Eighth Street, just down the block from my old stomping grounds at the Plaza Hotel, something else is happening. I’m getting more than my teeth fixed.

  I met Doc Eisenberg a few years before I was arrested through a mutual friend, the actor Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss had just had a breakout role as Curt in American Graffiti when we met in Los Angeles. I was in LA doing research for Mailer’s book on Marilyn Monroe. Dreyfuss and Eisenberg played poker together in New York, and Eisenberg would occasionally hit me up for an ounce or two of the best reefer I had at any given time. He was a dentist to the stars, and even to the stars’ dogs; he did dental work on Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s Doberman pinscher.

  There is virtually no dental care available for prisoners serving time in federal prison. You got a toothache, too bad. If it becomes abscessed, tough shit. They might set you up with some poor schmuck who got busted selling pain pills and is doing his community service bid by yanking out a convict’s rotting teeth. I had already had my front teeth chipped and broken in a bicycle accident as a kid, with more damage later when I got punched in the mouth in a fistfight. My front teeth are in need of laminates to repair my smile. Eisenberg X-rays my teeth, he draws up a treatment plan, and then he turns me over to his lovely young assistant and dental hygienist for a thorough cleaning.

  So it happens. The hygienist becomes the singular subject of my attention. How could it be otherwise? There she is, her face mere inches from mine, within kissing distance. She is a petite, striking young Colombian woman whose name I learn is Paloma. As I lie back in the chair with my mouth wide open, I’m thinking, Paloma, hmm, the Spanish word for dove. Paloma in my mind becomes a little bird, and she is like a lovely little dove whose delicate hands flutter like wings all up inside my wide-open mouth. I could eat her, this little bird, just gobble her up. All I can see is her big dark brown eyes peering into my head over the mask covering her mouth and nose. Yes, something is happening here beyond having my teeth cleaned. I’m having my senses reamed of all prior sentiments. A connection is being formed at a sensual and emotional level. The thought crosses my mind: Is there something sexy about going to the dentist? No, how could there be? Is it a turn-on? All this oral activity. . . . I recall a scene from Roger Corman’s classic movie Little Shop of Horrors. Young Jack Nicholson is in the dentist’s chair and he screams for more. More pain! More drilling! Obviously getting off on something. There is no question what I am getting off on—Paloma’s gorgeous brown eyes, her delicate touch. . . . As I go deeper, I sense she feels it too—we are both feeling the in
visible force, the yearning that built up inside me over eight years of enforced celibacy and internalized desire that still has not been depleted no matter how much fucking I have done. Paloma is curious; she asks why I have neglected my teeth. “Well, you see,” I explain to her in my passable Spanish, “I was only recently released from el cárcel—prison.”

  If she’s shocked, she doesn’t show it. “So, you speak Spanish?”

  A little, I say. I ask where she is from in Colombia.

  “Medellin,” she says.

  “Ah, then you are a paisa, una Antioquiania.”

  “You know Colombia?” she asks.

  I let the question go unanswered as the doc returns with my treatment plan.

  “It looks like we will be seeing a lot of each other,” I say to Paloma as I am leaving.

  “That’s nice,” she replies and smiles. “I like that.”

  A FEW DAYS and a couple more visits to Eisenberg’s office, and Paloma and I make plans to meet after work. She asks me not to let Eisenberg know that she agreed to see me, as she is not allowed to date the patients.

  “I’m good at keeping secrets,” I tell her.

  We dine at Victor’s, a Cuban restaurant on Fifty-Second Street, and drink mojitos.

  “How long were you in prison?” Paloma asks.

  “Eight years.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes widen. “That’s a long time.”

  “Yes. Don’t you want to know what I did?”