Six Years Inside the Mafias: how I worked my way through college: a true story

by Yari Stern

  “Shopkeepers patted little Frank’s head and gave him free samples.” Sam, out of character, put his arm around Yari’s shoulder as he continued. “The only blacks he saw had brooms in their hands and never looked up, totally submissive in their attitude and actions toward white police officers. That’s the world Frank grew up in and those are the images he carries with him. He’s a product of those experiences and no present day reality is going to change that.

  “Besides, he loves to break heads and he can only do that when somebody responds to his provocations. Rizzo’s like Nero but swings a nightstick instead of playing the violin,” Sam concluded.

  “Inspector, there’s a call for you from a Sergeant Riley,” Corporal Dennis, his nameplate read, said as he approached cautiously.

  “Can you take a message, patrolman? We’re busy here.” Sam turned back to the captain and Yari.

  “Sir, Sergeant Riley says it’s urgent. Chief Inspector Rizzo is on the scene at Ridge and Diamond and just ordered him to take two men, go up on the roof and push an intoxicated rioter off.”

  “Tell the sergeant to stall him.” Sam nodded for Yari to get in the squad car, pulled open the door for himself, slid in, and turned back to Captain Jameson. “He’s going to accomplish his aim, Saul. Rizzo’s the straw on the camel’s back. There’ll be too much contempt bearing down.” Sam’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel, his face slumped with dejection. “This fire’s going to burn out of control.”

  Just as they were about to drive off, a frail, elderly man approached the Studebaker, halting the slow progress of the squad car with a gentle hand on the hood of the vehicle.

  “Reverend Cummings,” Sam acknowledged. “I thought I saw you marching with the protesters. I’m sorry about the treatment your people were handed.”

  “Mista Stern,” he began, disregarding Sam’s offer of apology, “ya’ll better close up the store early ta’night. They be comin’ ta git ya. Dat hate be movin’ ‘cross Girard Avenue.”

  “Those rumors have circulated forever, Reverend,” Sam replied. “But even if it’s true, that’s not going to change anything as far as I’m concerned. Our business has carried the family through the depression and two wars. Anyone who wants to take what our family’s built will have to go through me to get it.”

  Yari watched Reverend Cummings walk away, his head hanging in sadness. “You believe that old fool?” he asked Sam as soon as the man was out of earshot.

  “That old fool, as you call him, knows the pulse of this city better than a surgeon knows any of his patients,” Sam replied, trying in vain to maintain a cool disposition. “I’m going down to the store tonight right after dinner.”

  “Not without me. After dark, I know those people better than you.”

  “You don’t know those people. You only know the goniffs. And they don’t represent the whole city. If you want to come, you leave that temper right here. We’re trying to keep it from spreading, not make it worse, right?” Sam stared squarely at Yari. “There’s more at stake than your little enterprises.”

  * * *

  As Yari swung the station wagon into the parking lot around the corner from Stern’s Specialty Shop, he looked out onto a sad scene: the city pulsed like a patient on a respirator. Philadelphia was in its death throes, battered by a band of insatiable forces tearing at the heart of the community with corrupt and selfish interests.

  Yari slid open the gates to the store. Sam walked past, turned on all the lights, set up two chairs in the alcove facing the street, and began unzipping a heavy canvas bag he pulled out from under the cash register. He then padlocked himself and Yari behind the accordion bars, providing a buttress from any threatening action. They stared into the abyss, a street devoid of light, where most every lamp had been smashed.

  Just a moment after settling in their chairs, and as if to confirm Reverend Cumming’s assessment, a voice from the street threatened, “Betta git on home, whitey.”

  Yari could see only grinning white teeth hissing out an anonymous warning on pitch-black night. He got up and stepped in front of his father to deflect the threat.

  Sam lifted a powerful arm and backed Yari into the folding chair. “I am home,” Sam responded. “I was born right here in Strawberry Mansion and raised my children on Corlies Street. This store’s been in my family for forty years. We’ve provided linens and clothes to this neighborhood for three generations and employ local people.” Sam got up to impose his form as well as his words on the man. “What have you been doing brother? Helping empty wine bottles? Grabbing two or three welfare checks in different names?”

  “Motherfucker. Nobody talk ta me like dat. I’m gonna--,” the scrawny young man threatened as he came closer to the gates, exposing himself to the light.

  Sam reached into the canvas bag, pulled out a shotgun, slid the pump action back, but kept it pointed at the ground.

  “We be back for y’all. Ah be savin’ some gasoline for ya, mista smart mouth.” The black man jumped up on the gates, his wasted frame almost slithering through the narrow bars.

  “I’ll be here waitin’ for you, friend,” Sam replied confidently.

  “Fuck you, man. Just fuck you,” the man screamed as he shook the gates that separated him from Sam and Yari. His reward for all the effort was a handful of rust from the weathered iron. He strolled away with feigned pride.

  “Why didn’t you waste him?”

  “Because there’s going to be a future for the city after all this, no matter how bad it seems right now. And what that future’s going to look like will depend on the actions of a few individuals over the next couple of nights.”

  “All I see is a cesspool,” Yari insisted. “How can you believe there’s a future in a place where everybody is out for themselves and nothing gets done unless the fix is in?”

  “That’s not true. That’s what you believe because you’re dealing with people who are outside the law.”

  Yari contemplated his father’s words as they sat in silence. Undetermined time went by. Then with a deep breath, Yari smelled burning rubber permeating the air. The Gates Tire plant is on fire, he immediately concluded. If locals could break through the security that protected a plant that housed several thousand workers, then the entire city was at risk. A couple of revolvers and a shotgun were no match for what lay ahead.

  Overwhelmed by the sense of circling doom, Yari could not regain his calm. Instead, he questioned himself as to what part he had played in the unfolding tragedy: a fence who enticed people on both sides to break the law.

  As the night progressed, Yari watched the crowd shuffling past. Locals, people he recognized immediately, paraded down the street with their new possessions. It was the middle of the night but it looked to him like Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Even regular, hard working individuals carried, pushed, and pulled TV’s, stereos, boxes of shoes, dresses, suits, barber chairs, cash registers and more…much more, with their children in tow.

  “Dis here’s payday, Mista White Man,” a passerby said as he looked into Stern’s and saw a store that hadn’t been hit yet.

  “No,” Sam assured him. “This here’s an excuse for taking something from someone else who had the balls and the backbone to work and save rather than piss it away on new cars, old girlfriends, and cheap booze. Besides that, Slick, the tools you’re carrying came from Ridge Avenue Hardware, which is owned by Daniel Iverson, a black man.”

  “Any brotha that got heself a store is an ofay cracker anyhow.”

  “Boy, you can make up excuses fast, faster than you can run in those sneakers you took from Aaron’s Shoe store.”

  “Suck my dick,” the man cursed, then stepped toward the gates.

  Sam couldn’t see Yari pull the .45 out from under his windbreaker, but the black man facing in clearly could. Given that incentive, the brother walked off, seemingly not quite as satisfied with his new toys as before.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Williams.” Sam’s greeting held a sembla
nce of civility. “What brings you out this time of the evening?”

  The forty-ish lady with gray streaks in her hair was pushing a shopping cart filled to the brim with ‘33’ and ‘45’ records. The woman looked back into the alcove in shock and embarrassment. “Ah, Mista Stern. Uh. I just be doin’ what everybody else be doin,” Mrs. Williams muttered as she picked up her pace.

  Yari and Sam sat until the transitional hours of the morning. Sam with his shotgun on his lap smiling and nodding to every growling brother and sister who passed spewing their venom, while Yari envisioned unimaginable tortures for those confronting his father.

  Together they watched as almost every store on Ridge Avenue, from the thirteen hundred to the twenty-two hundred block, was picked clean. Sam never showed his temper but as sure as the rising sun, Yari knew his dad would stop anyone who sought to take what he had worked to build.

  At 5:00 a.m., patrol cars took back control of the streets. Fire trucks snuffed out the smoldering remains of burned out buildings. The crowds of people dissipated, and a quiet returned to the neighborhood.

  “It’s time to go. We need to get back before your mother wakes up.” Sam handed Yari the keys to the car. “Take the West River Drive. There’s no sense going through Strawberry Mansion, or what’s left of it.”

  Yari drove across Spring Garden Street toward the entrance to The Drive.

  “Turn on the radio so we can hear what’s happening in the rest of the city,” Sam instructed.

  Yari quickly flipped past sports results, weather forecasts, and advertising, until he found a news station. “Steve Finnley, what do you see? What’s going on out there?” John Fancenda, of Channel Three News, was interviewing the on-the-scene reporter.

  “It looks like a war zone, John. Entire neighborhoods have been burned to the ground. Flames silhouette the rooftops of four-story homes in every direction you look. I can hear sirens calling out with the intensity and frequency of a newborn baby. It’s been confined to the poorest sections of the city so far, but no one can stop this much hate till it’s satisfied.”

  Yari listened while the reporter tried to relay to the radio audience events that could only be comprehended in person. As they crossed over the Schuykill River and gained a high perch from which to observe the city, the sky lit up like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Yari leaned out the side window to try to gain a better perspective of the carnage. He saw the river below now turned into a bog of debris. Furniture, baby carriages, car tires, charred bits and pieces of homes floated buoyantly on the slow-moving current - a silent testimony to the willingness of man, after festering with rage for years, to lay waste.

  “It’s pitiful, John. There’s going to be thousands of people homeless - men, women and children severed from their roots.” Steve Finnley’s voice choked with emotion as he spoke.

  “We’re supposed to feel bad now that their homeless when they burned down their own homes?”

  “They’re people just like us. They’ve got families they want better for, and hopes and dreams of escaping the ignorance and violence they’re trapped in.”

  Yari had never heard his father go on like that; espousing truths that clashed harshly with his own self-serving rationalizations.

  “But you saw what they did. We were sitting in the middle of all of it, watching them pillage like something out of Sodom and Gomorra. How can you care about them or their property? They ought to make looting a capital offense. Shoot ‘em on the spot and save trial money for extra ammunition.”

  “You can’t prevent riots that way,” Sam replied, his voice filled with outrage. “In all my years on the force I’ve never seen harsh methods lessen crime or better human behavior.

  “You can only stop it before it starts, by treating people with compassion and giving them some hope for the future.” Sam shifted his weight in order to reposition the revolver clipped to his belt. “You put enough burden on anyone, or temptation in front of them, and they’ll crack.” Sam’s voice rose with conviction. “During the Depression I met out-of-work school teachers that resorted to stealing, and mothers who prostituted themselves in order to feed their families. There are no color lines when it comes to survival; at that basic level we all act the same. It just so happens it’s the blacks that are the oppressed this time around. Next time it will be us or the Irish again.”

  Suddenly, a naked black man charred by fire and carrying a screaming baby, ran in front of their car. Yari jammed on the brakes, catching the man’s panicked eyes in headlights before he moved across the street.

  In response to the close call, Sam asked, “How would you react if you were kept in a cell for a few hundred years and treated like a leper? Think about it!” he insisted. “I’m tired of everyone, especially the newspapers, pointing the finger only one way. “I’ve worked with cops who beat heads to a pulp with no provocation at all. And I’ve met blacks who’ve sacrificed everything for their children and grandchildren.” Sam turned a heated face away from Yari.

  Justifications based on personal expediency that had worked so well for Yari in the past now clashed with irrefutable facts. And the facts spoke clearly of good and evil, ridged lines of right and wrong, not areas of gray as Sylvan had fashioned. Yari’s saw clearly now the world that he had created – a world bound together by threads of confusion, forming a spider’s web that cloaked and colored circumstance: an endless labyrinth where every path led back to the beginning.

  “The riots have spread all the way down to the Delaware, John. There isn’t any part of the city that hasn’t been touched by the hatred and frustration of this night.”

  Yari stared at his father while the blood drained from his body. “Is that possible?” The realization that all the guns, appliances, clothing and TVs he and Slim had stored in the rented warehouse might be gone consumed him. This rioting was supposed to be their problem, not mine.

  “I’m certain it is. You can see the fires along the river.” Sam pointed to a wall of flames emanating from the waterfront. “But why all the concern? I thought you didn’t give a damn what happened to those people or their possessions.”

  Yari slammed on the brakes and whipped the car around.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Sam asked. “We’ve got to get back home before your mother gets up.”

  “I’ve got to try and save whatever I can.”

  “You can’t risk your life just for some stolen property.”

  “It’s everything I’ve got, my ticket out of here.”

  “Only for you,” Sam replied, then acquiesced, slumping back in his seat. “Not the rest of us.”

  Several minutes later Yari pulled over across the street from a burning warehouse.

  He bolted out of the car and raced toward the building. Sam jumped out and chased after him. Yari halted as the heat of the fire acted as a wall. Sam grabbed his arm and pulled him back to a safe distance as Yari cried out to the clouds of smoke,

  “Gone…everything’s gone.”

  Yari and Sam walked back in silence to the car and got in. Yari rotated back to face the charred remains of the warehouse, purplish fingers frozen onto the steering wheel in front of him. He felt like he was about to throw up onto the dashboard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Philadelphia, Pa

  “You’ve got to come,” Irene insisted. “Myron’s your first cousin and it’s his bar mitzvah.” She didn’t ask much of her youngest, which made it tough for Yari to turn down the infrequent request.

  “No ceremony on this planet’s going to make him a man. Not after his parents hung his rubber sheets out the window, so all the neighbors would know that their kid still wets his bed at age thirteen. Besides, I’ve got to recoup.” Sitting at the breakfast table, reading the morning paper and surrounded by cereals and fruits, Yari contemplated how to come up with twenty-five thousand . . . again. The local news confirmed that all the warehouses along the waterfront were destroyed during the riots, and with them, all his property waiting to
be fenced.

  “I’m not starting again from scratch,” he said aloud as he read on. “I’ve already done my penance.” Every-thing’s gone, including Slim. No word for days; just one more con artist out for himself.

  “Money isn’t all there is.” Irene banged down the quart bottle of milk she was setting out for Yari. “Nothing’s more important than family and tradition. Besides, Bennie and his children came to your bar mitzvah.”

  Yari was momentarily taken aback by his mother’s outburst, but quickly recovered. “Tradition is for morons and movies. I haven’t got time for that.”

  “How dare you! Tradition is the only thing they’ve never been able to take away from us.” Irene’s voice gathered strength and momentum as she went on. “Six million people died so we could carry on our heritage. It’s not just words and ceremonies, it’s bonds to a past that go back five thousand years.”

  “That’s your way, not mine,” Yari responded. “’Following others is for sheep. They’ll never force me into one of those pens.”

  “Following others,” Irene retorted, “we rise up on the backs of those who have gone before us. My father came to America alone in 1909. He lived in a cellar with rats and worked for five years to save the money for ocean passage for the rest of us.

  “When we arrived, Mom, my four brothers and sisters and I lived in a two-room apartment for almost a decade while your grandfather went without lunch and walked to work so he could set aside money for a down payment on a house.”

  “That’s not dedication, that’s dumb! That’s the old, slow way.” Yari brushed off his mother’s history. “If anyone did that now, they’d be thrown in the nut house.”

  “Your uncle, Louie Resnick, thought a job and hard work were crazy, too. Did I ever tell you about him?” Irene asked.

  Yari shook his head while trying to digest a mouthful of cereal.

  “Louie married a seamstress named Rosie who worked for my mother in the old country. Rosie had a bad childhood; her family was very poor. She had to go to work at an early age. Her two brothers couldn’t even go out at the same time because they only had one pair of shoes between them.” Irene sat down at the table across from Yari and narrowed the gap. “Louie and Rosie lived with Rosie’s mother, Sarah, in a cold flat outside of Budapest. They came home one day to find Sarah dying of starvation - chewing on a leather shoe. She had given all the food to the children as a sacrifice.