by Betsy Poole
All I am is the knuckles at the end of a fist.
But I’m no killer.
Part I:
I've never gotten used to saying it:
I'm Larry McGee, and I'm a private investigator.
It just sounds so damn cheesy, especially since I fit the cliche dead to rights. I'm tall, dark, handsome, and carry around a slight hint of scumbag entitlement that you normally associate with cops. I'm a booze and coozehound and I think pretty damn highly of myself. Trust me, it's hard not, too.
Go ahead and hate me, I deserve it.
But chances are you wouldn’t hate me. Chances are if you met me at the bar, you’d love me. You’d buy me drinks and talk me up for hours. You just wouldn’t want to take me home to meet the wife. Because guess what? The wife would like me even more than you do. She’d like me so much that she’d probably end up divorcing you and go all stalker on me, and I don’t want nothing to do with some obsessed broad breaking into my place at three in the morning wearing nothing but six inch heels and fishnets. It sounds sexy, but it’s kind of scary, especially if you have another woman staying the night with you, and then it gets weird and violent.
I became a PI because I really wanted to be a cop. I come from three generations of them, so I have nothing but law enforcement in my blood. But because of certain “habits” I enjoy and just my overall lifestyle, I knew I'd end up in prison for being on the take, or on the hook, or using the evidence room as my own personal Wal*Mart. There’s lots and lots of temptation when it comes to being police. My old man knew it, and he held out for thirty years being a good, solid cop. But in one moment of weakness, he flushed his entire career down the toilet and is spending his golden years in Joliet doing nothing but looking over his shoulder.
The other reason I went the private route is I work when I want to work, and I don’t have to put up with none of that six am roll call bullshit.
The downside of my profession is I tend to get mixed up with the wrong crowd once in awhile. Okay that really has nothing to do with being a PI. Honestly, most of the people who come to me are just your run of the mill folks. They’re wives who are worried that their husbands are having an affair; they’re parents looking for their lost children; they’re companies looking to have background checks done on future employees(That’s my bread and butter, and they’re also who I juice the most for extra billable hours). It’s my habits that get me mixed up with the seedier set.
Along with loving booze and women, I also have a bit of a gambling problem. I wouldn’t say I’m a gambling fiend, just like I wouldn’t say I’m an alcoholic or a sex addict. People who say they’re addicted to different behaviors or habits are just folks who’ve finally become ashamed of their drinking, or gambling, or whatever. Me, I have zero shame when it comes to liking what I like, and I just happen to really like winning and I really like money. But like most gamblers, I know you can’t win all the time, as a matter of fact, you don’t win most of the time. The rare rush is what you live for, but the dull ache of loss is what you live with.
I’m a sports betting kind of guy. Cards, dice, this is for suckers who don’t realize the odds are always stacked against them, and fool themselves into believing they can develop full proof systems to buck the numbers. But there’s too much of a chance of losing your shirt when you play the tables, and the tables are usually nothing but penny ante stuff. The real money is betting book, plus you can actually develop a system. And the system works, as long as you don’t bet Chicago teams. The system works like gang busters if you don’t bet Chicago teams.
But I’m your usual Windy City sucker. I love my home teams, and no matter their line-ups or records, I stick behind them to the bitter end. Don’t get me wrong, I bet other teams, too. Like I said, I have a system. But I always seem to bet the biggest and with the most ridiculous point spreads when it comes to the Bulls, Bears, Cubs, and White Sox, and over the years, it’s gotten me into a bit of trouble.
I’ve been betting book with my but Sal since high school. He’s always been a stand up guy, and he’s great about running you a line of credit when your chips are down. Over the years, I’ve had my ups and downs, and Sal has always stuck it out with me because despite my losers, I have a way of picking the winners right when I need it most. Sal’s a hell of a bookie and a great friend on top of that.
But over the past few years, I’ve really been sucking eggs. I mean, I was only paying out one game out of every ten, and all those kind of numbers were only covering my vig, and barely covering it at that. But Sal being Sal, he just sucked it up with a smile, a slap on the back, and a better luck next time champ. Well, at least until six months ago when I dropped a hard dime on a Bears game. Ten grand ain’t nothing to scoff at, and most bookies aren’t going to let that kind of debt slide, including Sal.
After the loss, the big guy sat me down, poured me three fingers of Maker’s Mark over ice and said:
“Kid, I’m going to sell your debt, I can’t afford to float ya no more.”
I bet you didn’t realize bookies did that I kind of thing, but they do it all the time, particularly bookmakers like Sal. See, sports betting ain’t exactly illegal. In fact, I’m pretty sure the internet would up and disappear if you took down all the sports betting sites and porn. But old school guys like Sal, he’s not interested in moving his business online, and he’s sure as hell not interested in paying the state big, big bucks or pay taxes to make his operation legit. His whole operation is run out of his bar with a wink and smile, and the only taxes he pays are to the local gomba’s who’ll smash in his head if he doesn’t pay “tribute” to the bosses.
When it comes to selling off debt, most bookies will just sell you to other bookies. Guys who have enough capital that if their patrons drop five or ten grand they can shoulder the debt and collect the interest on the vig. But with gamblers like me, who’ve accumulated debt that’s in the tens of thousands (It might be a little closer to a hundred grand for all I know, I stopped keeping track of it years ago. I know, I’m a schmuck.), even the big money bookies wouldn’t touch me with a hundred foot pole. In fact, the only guys willing to take on my kind of debt were the guys Sal had to pay “tribute” to every month.
Sal sold me to Anthony Vecchio Jr., Chicago’s last great Italian American gangster. Okay, great’s a bit of a stretch, because he’s pretty small time, but he’s still not the kind of guy you want to owe money to.
Chances are you’ve never heard of Vecchio, but you’ve probably heard of his dad, Anthony Vecchio Sr. The guy was an absolute legend. Like most Italian gangsters, Vecchio Senior started his life off in Scilly. He was the son of a baker and sometime heroin dealer. Well, the old school Italian gangsters weren’t into anybody selling drugs, even if it was just to American GI’s and the occasional French tourist, and when they found out Vecchio Senior’s old man was selling the big H, they snuffed him out toot sweet and then started going after his family members so none of them would come looking for revenge. Vecchio Senior’s mama sent him on his way to her brother’s place in Chicago before the hometown grease balls decided to put the kid under the knife.
Here’s the thing with Vecchio Senior’s uncle, all the dope that his father was killed over, it was coming from his uncle and his connections in France, so Vecchio Senior was sent to live with the man who had essentially killed his father, and that said uncle immediately took Vecchio Senior under his wing and started teaching him the dope trade. Vecchio Senior’s uncle was a cold hearted bastard and didn’t take shit from anyone. If he found out you were dealing in his neighborhoods, he’d kill you. If other gangs and crime families tried muscling in on his action, he’d kill you, your goons, and then your entire family so that they wouldn’t come looking for vengeance. Vecchio Senior’s uncle wasn’t exactly what you would call a mover and shaker in the world of organized crime, he kept things small and tight, and was happy with his piece of the pie.
But Vecchio Senior, he had bigger ideas.
At the tender age of fifteen, V
ecchio Senior had already been working for his uncle as a dealer and muscle for five years. Rumors had it that he killed his first man at age eleven with a tire iron. He was just as cold and ruthless as his uncle, but even more so. Two weeks before his sixteenth birthday, he proved how cold he was by slashing his uncle’s throat and taking over the family business. But it wasn’t for the way he was running things, it was over his old man’s death. Yeah, the little bastard could hold a grudge like no other.
As time went on, Vecchio Senior’s power grew and grew. The 60’s were a boom for the Unions (There were even whispers that he was in on the JFK assignation along with Carlos Marcello and Jimmy Hoffa, but you know how that goes, it’s just a rumor.), the 70’s were a boom time for heroin and he bought a piece or two of Vegas. The 80’s were all about coke, so he established himself with the Columbians. In the 90’s heroin came back bigger than ever, but the Feds were cracking down heavy on the Italian American mob. Hell, they’d been on a crack down since the 80’s, but Vecchio Senior was so paranoid that any time he thought one of his guys was whispering in the ears of a rival or law enforcement, he’d have him whacked. But the older he got, the sloppier he became, and of course he didn’t do himself any favors by bringing Junior and a few of his friend’s into the family business.
Junior wasn’t really the issue. Sure he was your typical mob brat who thought he was indestructible and could get away with anything he wanted because of who his old man was, but his buddies were a whole other ball of wax. Junior’s buddies thought they were just as ironclad and would run small time rackets. You know, nothing huge, just shaking down low-level dope dealers and pimps, pulling off small heists for a few bucks. But it was one of these small heists that took down Vecchio Senior.
The kid who brought down Vecchio Senior was named Paul Stanza. He was a lifelong friend of Junior’s. They went to elementary school, had their first communion together, all of that crap the Italians make such a big deal out of. The long and short was that he seemed like a loyal and good friend. The type of guy who would never turn on you, or drop a dime if their back was against the wall. And he was, at least until he got picked up for robbing a liquor store out in Gary, Indiana. Now for a kid like Stanza, taking a pinch for a robbery isn’t that big of a deal. You take the pinch, you keep your mouth shut, and you call a lawyer. The problem with the robbery is that when Stanza was running out the front door, the clerk ran after him with a shotgun, fired, and then Stanza fired back.
The clerk couldn’t aim worth a damn and all he managed to do was pepper a wall with buckshot and break a few windows. But Stanza fired back without even looking, and the bullet from his little piece of junk .38 revolver took the clerk’s head off. Stanza didn’t know any of this when the Illinois state troopers pulled him over because his car matched the description of a couple of eye witnesses who saw it speeding away from the scene. Stanza was just a dumb kid and hadn’t bothered to ditch the gun he did the shooting with or even take of the knit snow mask he was wearing.
When the troopers got him booked and they told Stanza what he was being charged with, rumor has it that he turned into a tear eyed mess and started blabbing to the troopers about his connections to Vecchio Senior, and how he’d do anything to get out of the murder charges. The troopers had already called the Feds because the kid had crossed state lines after committing the murder, and when they got wind of all the blabbing the kid was willing to do, they jumped on him like a pack of wild dogs.
At first, he only gave the Feds details about what Junior was up to. They knew Junior was nothing but small time, and they let Stanza know that they had zero interest in him, and the piddly little information wasn’t going to save him from the gas chamber. They wanted Vecchio Senior. They’d been trying to nail the old man for thirty years, but he kept himself so well insulated that they’d never been able to build any kind of case, or even implicate him in a single crime, but now they had a golden goose.
The Fed’s plan was simple: Stanza was going to rise up in the ranks of Vecchio Senior’s family. He was going to do crimes and prove his worth. He was going to become a made guy, and become one of Senior’s most trusted soldiers. And everything that Stanza did for the old man, he was going to report in detail to the Feds. Once they had enough evidence, Stanza would be let off the hook for the murder and the Feds would stash him in the Federal Witness Protection program. The Feds knew it was going to take years and they would be putting Stanza in constant danger, but they didn’t give a shit, all they cared about was getting at Vecchio Senior.
The Fed’s little plan worked out perfectly. It took seven years, and them ignoring the one man crime wave that was Stanza, but it worked.
Stanza started moving his way up the ranks along with Junior. They kept pulling their small time scams together and paying tribute to Vecchio Senior, making sure that he got a cut of every single dime they made. Vecchio Senior took notice and gave them more and more responsibility, both of them becoming soldiers, then made guys, then lieutenants, then Capo’s both running their own separate crews. Both Junior and Stanza were feared throughout the mid-west and the pockets of the west coast Senior managed to control from his Chicago throne. But then, finally, they dropped the hammer, and busted Senior, Junior, and Stanza in one fatal swoop while they were discussing the shipment of nearly three tons of heroin.
Father and son thought they were safe. They knew the rules, keep their mouths shut and call the lawyer. Of course, neither of them knew about Stanza. Neither of them knew that he was paying his way out of a murder beef. (By the way, during Stanza’s time as an informant, it’s rumored the guy clipped over two dozen guys, all of which he was immune from thanks to his little agreement with the Feds. But screw it, I’m sure the Feds figured the guys who Stanza took out had it coming.) When their bail hearings came up, they thought that they would all be standing side-by-side, loyal and untouchable. But when it was just Junior and Senior standing in the courtroom in front of the judge and about a million reporters, they knew something was up. They knew that the Feds had flipped Stanza, and that he was going to walk away scot free while they rotted.
They tried Senior and Junior separately, mostly because they were hoping that one of them would flip.
Senior has his day in court first. His trial went on four nearly three months, with most of it featuring Stanza up on the witness stand telling his life story and spilling every detail about Senior’s business. I remember reading the paper every day hoping for some juicy detail about a rival gangster that Senior ordered wiped out, or some drug deal. Personally, I was hoping Stanza would maybe drop a bomb shell or two about the JFK assignation, or where Senior buried Jimmy Hoffa. But, nope, all he spilled was grisly details about the murders of nobody’s and the tons of dope Senior flooded the mid-west with.
At the end of the trial, the jury found Senior guilty on every single one of the seventy-four counts he was brought to trial on, and the judge sentenced him to two-hundred-and-fifty years in Joliet. Senior was seventy-nine-years- old. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the old man was going to die in prison. But here’s the thing, despite being one of the most ruthless men in the history of crime, Senior was as clean living as they came. He didn’t smoke, drink, or partake in any of the product that he littered the ghettos and school yards of Chicago with. He didn’t even whore around and remained loyal to Junior’s mom until the day she died. Even after that he kept it in his pants. So ten years after the trial, Senior is still in Joliet, healthy as an ox and working out twice a day. My old man’s in there with him, and the times I’ve gone down to visit him he’s told me that Senior is one of the most feared men in the yard, and not because of his former lofty position, but because he’s two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of stacked muscle who ain’t afraid to throw down with even the biggest and baddest multi-murdering-tattoed-from-head-to-toe skinhead in the place. Chances are Senior will still be around and kicking ass twenty-five years from now.
You can’t say the same for Stanza
. You see, Stanza was the exact opposite of Senior. Seven years of living a double life had turned him into a bit of a basket case, and the guy has developed a few crappy habits over the years. Stanza was a doper, boozer, and coozehound supreme. The man was nothing but vice. He smoked three or four packs a day, kept himself pickled 24/7, and was a vacuum cleaner when it came to coke. The guy was a burnout, and despite being in federal custody, he still partook in all of his free man vices. And between the trials of Senior and Junior, Stanza’s lifestyle choices dropped him like a sack of potatoes. He dies of a massive stroke at age thirty-five, and because he was the Fed’s only witness against Junior, well, they didn’t have much of a case other than a ton of hearsay, so they ended up having to cut Junior loose.
But the Feds didn’t care, they’d caught their white whale and managed to keep Junior under wraps and off the street for over three years. When he was released, the family business was still in place, but now it was a mere shadow of what had once been. Over that three years, the Russian mob and the Mexican cartels (Particularly the cartels, those guys are Ruthless with a capital R.) had been chipping away at Junior’s empire. Pretty much all of his holdings and business relationships on the west coast was swallowed by the cartels, and the Russians tried their damnedest to get at everything else. But fortunately for Junior, the Russians had become the Feds organized target of choice mostly because the Russians would do anything for a buck, including smuggling Uranium and human beings. Post 9/11 America has been a boom time for organized crime, because most goodfellas may be scumbags, but they’re patriotic scumbags, and as long as they kept their noses out of Muslim countries, the Feds more or less left them alone.
So when Junior was back on the street, he pretty much had zero eyes on him, but almost zero power. Of course, he still had more money than most third world nations, and he had the business know how, so he started to rebuild, and within five years of his father’s conviction, he may not have controlled half the United States anymore, but he did control Chicago, and for Junior, that was enough.