Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  Joey O told Ralphie that during the Seaside visit he stopped by Pino’s restaurant and sampled some of his homemade wine. Then Pino went next door and picked up some Mohegan cigars for everybody from the movie guy. Vinny Ocean smoked his and was not happy.

  “He got sick as a fucking dog,” Joey O told Ralphie as they drove. “He said, ‘I’ll never smoke a cigar again.’ ”

  “It goes right to your brains,” Ralphie said.

  “I can’t smoke that cigar,” Joey O said.

  “If you inhale it too much, it goes right to your fucking brains.”

  Joey O the name-dropper mentioned that the guy who owned the cigar store that nearly did in Vinny Ocean was an actor in movies that guys like Joey O liked to watch.

  “This guy was in the movie Carlito’s Way. You ever see that movie with Al Pacino? Where he sold the drugs? A Spanish guy. It was a good movie. Well, this guy”—the one with the cigar store—“was a big fat fuck. He was Colombian. He ended up shot at the end of the movie.”

  Joey O was obviously very impressed. “He was in a lot of parts. He’s an actor; he opened up a cigar place right next to Pino’s down in Seaside. He’s got pictures all over the place of him and Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. He says whenever you wanna come down, you come down.”

  By now Ralphie had gotten used to listening to Joey O and his stories. Mostly Joey O’s stories consisted of the many problems of Joey O. Ralphie noticed Joey was look

  ing more slumped over than usual. Joey had once been a strong, wiry guy, deeply tanned, with a certain kind of rough charm. Now his belly protruded under his black silk shirt and he had to make do with a cheesy comb-over to hide his thinning hair. He smoked too much, his diabetes was killing him. Driving down Flatbush, he had trouble managing Ralph’s cell phone. “How do you use this fucking thing?” He called his doctor about something called Protac that Ralphie thought was Prozac.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Ralphie said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you got to do with this fucking Pro—”

  “Diabetic.”

  “Oh,” Ralphie said. “I thought...”

  Joey O was forty-nine, headed rapidly toward fifty. “I’m driving a car with no muffler,” Joey O said. “The fucking thing is shimmying.”

  Ralphie knew Joey O’s problems by heart. He also knew they were becoming legendary among the nylonjogging-suit set. He’d been talking with Joey Cars, another DeCavalcante associate, who let him know that Joey O was now stealing from his own friend and boss, Vinny Ocean. Joey O was going around telling people that Vinny Ocean was putting money out on the street at two points per week interest, which was not true. Vinny was actually putting the money out at a point and a half, and Joey O was pocketing the difference. This he was doing in violation of just about every rule of La Cosa Nostra. Joey Cars said he borrowed $4,000 from Vinny and paid back the money to Joey O. Joey O, however, neglected to give the money to Vinny, which put Joey Cars in a bad spot.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” Joey Cars said, “I don’t wanna embarrass him.”

  “Like my father used to say,” Ralphie offered. “When you feel sorry for sorry people, they make you sorry. And guess what? He is making everybody sorry.”

  Ralphie was now in the middle. If Vinny Ocean found out that Joey O was stealing from him, that could be the end of Joey O, and Ralphie needed Joey O to get close to Vinny. The FBI was clearly interested in Vinny Ocean quite a bit and interested in Joey O Masella not at all. Therefore, it was important that Ralphie get more information on Vinny. The problem was that six months into his role as a secret informant for the FBI, Ralphie had not done so well getting Vinny Palermo to say things that could get him in trouble. He’d given him free cell phones and the FBI had plenty of hours of Vinny Palermo on tape, but Vinny was smart. He rarely talked about illegal business on the phone, and when he did, the conversation was usually too cryptic to understand.

  Ralphie took another approach. He had noticed that when Vinny discussed Joey O, he had a tendency to fly into a rage. Rage implied lack of self-control. The FBI figured that during one of his tirades about Joey O, Vinny Ocean might slip up. Ralphie was instructed to take advantage of this weakness by keeping the two men in constant contact.

  The two men found the Wiz, did their business, then got back in Ralphie’s FBI-wired car and cruised into Manhattan toward Canal Street and Chinatown. They needed to fence some stolen watches.

  Canal Street used to mark the northern border between Chinatown and the old Mafia neighborhood of Little Italy. This was the Little Italy where John Gotti strutted down Mulberry Street, where Crazy Joey Gallo was shot inside Umberto’s Clam House, and where the Genovese crime family controlled the Feast of San Gennaro every September by charging mob tax on everything from the scungilli stands to the water guns. Now Canal Street marked the center of Chinatown, and Little Italy was a shadow of its former self. Chinese immigrants had continued pouring into this country. Italians did not. The Chinese drifted north into Little Italy. The Chinese who flooded the city year after year took over the Italian neighborhood, and most of the Italians fled to Staten Island and New Jersey. Gotti’s social club, the Ravenite, had been sold off to somebody who was planning on putting in a trendy shoe store. The old Umberto’s Clam House where Joey Gallo got shot in the head over his scungilli had shut down and moved. Most of the Italian restaurants that were left had become tourist traps. Most of Little Italy was now owned by the Chinese. Only one fact remained constant over all the years—Canal Street was still the best place in New York to buy and sell stolen goods.

  As Ralphie and Joey O drove over the Manhattan Bridge and into the mess of traffic that was Chinatown, Ralphie (and the FBI) began to get a clearer picture of Vinny Ocean’s illegal behavior.

  Joey was happy that Vinny picked him to shake down the owner of a Long Island bus company called Manti Transportation. The setup was good. The capo put in charge of collecting, Joe Pitts, was gone. Vinny Ocean took over and put Joey O into the company in a no-show job. This was not a legal thing to do. This was more “probable cause.” Joey O put the company in the name of Joey’s daughter. He talked like a big businessman about borrowing money from his wife so he could get a $3 million line of credit from a bank to buy more buses to drive customers to Great Adventure theme park in New Jersey. He told Ralphie that every Wednesday Joey would show up at Manti Transportation and pick up a paycheck. He would cash it and kick a percentage up to Vinny as tribute. He needed the money desperately.

  “The more you want, the more you need,” Joey O said.

  “The more you got, the more you want,” Ralphie said.

  But Ralphie could see that the more Joey talked, the more Joey wanted to talk about himself. All of a sudden, with Joey trying to keep himself upbeat about making money scheming, he dropped the F-word into the conversation.

  “The FBI,” Joey said.

  This could have given Ralphie a heart attack. He could have suddenly felt extremely self-conscious about the casual mention of the people he was really working for who had planted a bug in his car. Then again Ralphie could have felt Joey O would never have mentioned the FBI so casually if he ever suspected Ralphie. And it would seem that the latter was true, because Joey just prattled on and on about some agents in a boat taking photographs of him hanging out at Vinny Ocean’s hundred-foot dock on Long Island Sound.

  “There was a degenerate taking pictures of us while I had my bathing suit on,” Joey O said. “They were agents. The guy on the left would make a call, the guy on the right would pick it up. They were talking to each other, these fucking agents. Taking pictures of me while I’m taking my clothes off. Cocksuckers.”

  Ralphie said nothing, and Joey went on. Other FBI agents had come to Joey’s home in Staten Island, where he lived with his ancient grandmother. “My grandmother answers. She says in Italian, ‘Who’s this?’ I say, ‘The cops.’ She says in English, ‘Get the hell outta her
e!’ So the cop is saying, ‘I have a subpoena for you.’ He says, ‘Here,’ and he gives me a subpoena.”

  Ralphie cautiously ventured back in: “For the grand jury.”

  “My lawyer told us just give your address and phone number. They ask, ‘Do you know a Vincent Palermo? How long do you associate with Vincent Palermo?’ They ask you four or five questions.”

  “Then they let you go?” Ralphie asked, but Joey ignored him.

  “So the Justice Department came down and they put on about seventy-eight people. They got neighbors.”

  “Neighbors?”

  “Everybody,” Joey O said. “You want to write a book? I can write a book.”

  June 17, 1998 The Marriott Harbor Beach of Fort Lauderdale sat on a street called Holiday Drive in a state named after sunshine. It sat on the edge of the Atlantic on a huge private beach of powder-white sand and palm trees that clicked and rustled in the warm ocean breeze. It was one of two dozen hotels that dotted the very strip where Concetta Franconero sang “Where the Boys Are” using the name Connie Francis. This was also the very beach upon which thousands of college students descended during spring break to frolic and drink alcoholic beverages and enjoy such American pastimes as the “wet T-shirt contest.”

  The Harbor Beach was set away from all that, a fifteenstory concrete high-rise with a huge outdoor swimming pool that lit up at night. On this day, two of its 637 rooms were booked by a group of men from New York City who were down for the weekend on business.

  The most expensive rooms faced the ocean, the cheaper ones faced the pool, the cheapest ones faced the Intercostal Waterway behind the hotel. Joey O Masella and Ralphie Guarino—two guys who spent most of their time lamenting how broke they were—booked two of the most expensive rooms in the hotel: Rooms 1411 and 1417, two suites on the fourteenth floor looking out on the white sand beach. They were typical Florida hotel suites, with seashell-pink sofas and black lacquer furniture and balconies looking out on the Atlantic. The TV had all the cable channels and there was a huge vase filled with fake flowers. There was also a video camera secretly installed in the wall by specially trained FBI agents.

  It was set up to capture most of the room with a wideangle lens but specifically anybody who happened to sit on the sofa in the main room. It faced the sofa directly, slightly tilted toward the ceiling so anyone caught in its focus would be presented in the slightly menacing camera angles of Citizen Kane. Its microphones were not terribly sophisticated, so that if the TV set was on, it was sometimes easy to hear Oprah but difficult to hear what people in the room were talking about. The FBI agents listening in a few rooms away did the best they could.

  On this day in the middle of a working week, Joey O and Ralphie were supposed to be meeting with Vinny Ocean and a lawyer named Kenny Weinstein. Later Anthony Capo was supposed to show up. On this first day, Joey and Ralphie and Vinny sat around in the middle of the afternoon when most taxpaying citizens were out working for a living, making fun of Anthony. They made fun of the fact that he liked golf. They made fun of the fact that he stole nearly everything not nailed down from hotel rooms. Meanwhile, Vinny was on the phone with his daughter Danielle, asking her about school. Then he was on the phone with somebody else, talking about stocks. Outside, the Florida sun blazed down; inside, the airconditioning was cranked all the way up.

  They ordered coffee and dessert. There was some discussion about whether anybody wanted cookies, and everybody did. Ralphie was flipping through the TV channels, checking it out. He found a movie with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

  “He thinks he’s so good-looking,” Vinny Ocean said while still on the phone.

  “Who is she?” Joey O said.

  “This is ah . . . Alec Baldwin’s wife,” Ralphie said.

  “It all depends on what she’s wearing,” Joey said.

  “I’m telling you,” Vinny said, off the phone but still on stocks, “that Viagra stock is gonna go big.”

  The movie was The Getaway. It was a new version of an old movie starring Steve McQueen as Doc McCoy. Alec Baldwin portrayed a prison inmate with some redeeming qualities. The men in the hotel room seemed familiar with the entire plotline, but were mostly concerned about why a woman who looked like Kim Basinger would be married to a guy who behaved like Alec Baldwin.

  “I mean with the cigarettes, with the dirty underwear on the fuckin’ chair,” Joey said. “No wonder his fuckin’ wife wants to throw him out.”

  The cookies and pot of coffee arrived. They switched the TV to football and began discussing a strip club called Rachel’s in West Palm. They discussed Michael Jackson and Dan Quayle. Joey O said, “He can’t spell potato,” and Ralphie replied, “And he wants to run for president.” Inside the room a few doors away, the FBI agents were getting frustrated.

  This was not the stuff of probable cause. This kind of talk about Kim Basinger and cookies and potato would surely make the federal judge they needed to keep the bugs up and running shake his head in dismay. The agents also were now sure someone else had entered the room and they couldn’t tell who. In their notes, they scrawled the acronym UM for unidentified male.

  UM suggested going to the Gap to buy clothes. They fought over who would have to drive to the airport to pick up Anthony Capo. Still no probable cause on the menu. Somebody mentioned doing something that might be illegal, although it was hard to tell—smuggling bootleg Absolut vodka into Europe.

  “Sixty dollars for a bottle of Absolut in Norway,” said UM.

  “Yeah,” Joey O said, “but who the fuck wants to go to Norway?”

  Somebody paged through the cable listings and found yet another movie.

  “Kiss the Girls,” Ralphie said. “Channel Forty-two.”

  This was a new movie with Morgan Freeman as a Washington, D.C., detective with a doctorate in psychology. He believes his niece has been kidnapped by a psychotic killer who commits atrocities but is portrayed as intelligent. Morgan Freeman the detective must travel to North Carolina to rescue the niece. He brings with him one of the psychotic killer’s intended victims, played by Ashley Judd, the one who got away. The members and associates of the DeCavalcante crime family who are supposed to be conducting a “business meeting” in Room 1417 at the Marriott cannot seem to get away from the silver screen.

  “Kiss the Girls Good-bye,” Ralphie said. “What was the other one, Kiss the Girls Hello?”

  “Hello and Good-bye,” Joey said. “It’s a good movie. Ya see it? What is he, a cop?”

  “He’s a professor,” Ralphie said.

  “He’s a psychologist,” said the Unidentified Male.

  “This is like a preview of the story,” Ralphie explained. “This is a different case.”

  The gangsters discussed plot development and analyzed motive. One of the female characters attacks her husband with a knife after years of abuse. Joey O summarized this aspect of the movie by stating, “If you’re beatin’ the dog every day, sooner or later he’s gonna attack ya.”

  They discussed Morgan Freeman’s acting career. “Ya ever see Shawshank Redemption with him? When he’s in jail?” Joey O volunteered. They argued about how cold it was in the room. They critiqued the movie.

  “That’s North Carolina now?” Joey O asked. “What’s he do, he tied her to the tree?”

  “He chops her head off,” UM said.

  “The hair,” Ralphie corrected. “Not the head.”

  The FBI agents sitting in the other room are now in deep trouble. Instead of recording the inner workings of a nefarious organized crime family plotting to take over the world, they had instead a lengthy analysis of a mediocre serial-killer movie. And it was about to get worse.

  Here sat a group of alleged and reputed gangsters, any of whom could have been involved in violent criminal behavior. Joey O just the previous week had had a long discussion about “giving somebody a beating.” The intended victim owed Joey Cars a lot of money. Joey Cars had torched the guy’s van, so the guy bought a new van. Joey Cars then sla
shed the guy’s tires and put sugar in his gas tank. Joey O had suggested he simply visit the victim and beat him senseless every day until the guy paid all he owed. “Every time you see him give him a fucking beating until he comes up with the money,” Joey O had said.

  Now he was in an air-conditioned Florida hotel room, discussing the terrible effects of movie violence on the youth of today.

  “See things like this really happen, that’s the shame of it,” he said. “People make movies like that, you know? There’s some serial bastards that are in the movie theater, they think about it. And then they’re copycats.”

  “You never know, man,” Ralphie said.

  “Who had strawberry cake?” UM asked.

  “Just put it down,” Ralphie said. “We have to fight for it.”

  But Joey O was not finished. His sense of moral outrage was building. “I’m saying people really do things like this,” he said. “And that’s the fucking shame of it, you know?”

  “They go to the movies,” UM said, “and they just get ideas like that. In school. The shooting with these schools.”