by Betsy Poole
There’s your history lesson kids—Chicago Mob 101.
So you can probably understand why I wouldn’t want to be involved with a guy like Junior, because despite the loss of power, he’s still downright ruthless, and because of the betrayal he experienced at the hands of his lifelong best friend, he doesn’t give a damn about loyalty. If he thinks you’re going to rat him out, he’ll kill you. If he thinks you’re using dope, he’ll kill you. If he thinks you’re going to try and skip out on a hundred-thousand-plus dollar debt, yeah, you guessed it, he’ll kill you.
And me, I ain’t a fan of being killed, so when Sal told me he sold my debt to Junior, I decided right then and there I would try my damnedest to pay it off as quickly as possible.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do alright as a PI. It keeps a roof over my head, the refrigerator full, and a few bucks in my pocket for drinks and nice dinner or two with lady friends. But Chicago’s expensive, and it’s becoming pricier everyday, so even though I do alright, my extra bucks was only going to go so far in paying off my debt to Junior. In fact, it really only covered the interest, and just barely at that. So the fact was, I needed to make extra money, and a lot of it to get out from under Junior’s thumb, and the only way I know how to make that kind of extra dough is by gambling. But, of course, the issue with that is Junior owns or has a piece of every book maker in Illinois, so I had to find some other avenue, some other activity that Junior didn’t have a piece of and that wouldn’t put me in harms way or be arrested.
And I found it—or at least I thought I did—in cock fighting.
I know what you’re thinking, what kind of lowlife son of a bitch would fight chickens for money? Now, I should probably start by saying that I had nothing to do with making the chickens fight. There are owners and handlers for that, all I was was a spectator. But you know what? Every time I hear people gripe about having animals fight, it kind of gets under my skin. I mean, they’re animals, they’re bodies are basically designed to fight and defend themselves. That’s why they have beaks and claws. That’s why dogs have teeth, they’re made to rip and tear. But what really gets my goat is that the folks who complain about cock fighting or dog fighting the most are usually fans of boxing or mixed martial arts or pro-wrestling, and basically all those “sports” are is human cock fighting. If you’ve never seen a mixed martial arts fight, I actually think they’re worse than cock fighting. Two guys go inside a cage and then pound on each other until one of them is broken and bleeding on the ground, and the guy who comes out on top usually doesn’t look much better than the guy on the ground; his face and body is undercooked hamburger.
Yeah, you’re not buying this line, are you?
To be honest, I don’t buy it either. But it’s something every non-hispanic spectator of cock fighting tells themselves. The very first time I hit one of these things up on the southside, I heard a half dozen guys all say it, and say it with conviction. It almost becomes a mantra of sorts, a mental shield, a way to justify—or moderately accept—the carnage of seeing one living thing rip apart another, all the while cheering your cock on.
After the first time I saw a cock fight, I threw up out of the window of my car six or seven times. Sure, I didn’t mind the eight-hundred bucks I’d won, but all that blood, feathers, and suffering. The second time wasn’t much better than the first, the only difference was that I walked away with two thousand dollars. The third time, well, by that point I started using the mantra, and suddenly it didn’t seem all that bad. Of course, I was making some serious money betting against and for these poor birds. By the time I hit my fifth cock fight, my roosters hadn’t lost once and I was up ten grand, and to be honest, I was starting to enjoy the camaraderie of the fights.
The thing with cock fighting is this, most of the caucasians who go to them are just like me, they love to gamble. They’re also just like me because they’re not welcome anyplace else in the city except for where they have cock fights, dog fights, and bare knuckle boxing. (And most of them aren’t welcome there, either, because bare knuckle fights are usually run by gangsters like Junior, or one of his more blood thirsty competitors.) They’re gamers who’ve run into a bit of bad luck and can’t go back to their bookies until they pay up a wad of cash that they don’t have.
What’s great about being around these guys is while the fights are going down, you don’t have to watch, you can just hang out by the makeshift bar and down cheap Mexican beers and talk stats. You talked about who’s on the injury list this week, who’s being picked up in the draft, who your teams are in the final four. All of the usual bar chatter, the only difference is instead of the sonic blare of a dozen different TV’s, you have hundred or so Mexicans screaming at the top of their lungs and the squats and cries of dying birds.
After a while, I was just another face in the crowd, a regular, and a well liked regular at that. The kid who ran the fights, Pablo, was a good guy who comped me at the bar anytime I walked in the door. Pablo was Spanish, not Mexican Spanish, but actual from Spain Spanish, and he looked like he could be a male model. 6’2, maybe 180 lbs, blonde hair, blue eyes. He was the type of kid Hitler had in mind when he talked about the “master” race. He told me that his father used to think that his mother fooled around and that his real father was most likely an American tourist. His old man would mention it at least once a week until Pablo turned sixteen and knocked his teeth in and stole a couple of thousands bucks from him so he could head to the states.
In a lot of ways, Pablo reminded me of Sal before he sold me to Junior, quick with a smile and a story, and more than willing to spot you some cash if you wanted to bet big on one of the fights. Unfortunately, this is what got me in bigger trouble than I already was.
I’d been going to the cock fights for around four months, and I’d only ever had one loser in the entire time. All totaled, I’d won thirteen thousand dollars. I was rolling and I was a natural when it came to betting the roosters. On my last night, I’d brought the entire wad and I was planning on either doubling it or tripling it and then handing the whole wad over to Junior and seeing if he would take a deal on a lump sum of cash for my debt. I doubted he would do it, but I was hopeful. But my biggest hope was that once he had the cash he would start letting me place bets on my teams again. Because even though I was a natural at betting the cockfights, it still made me a little queasy when I heard a bird in its death throes.
The reason I was feeling so confident was because of a two-year-old rooster named Coco. The thing was a giant among birds. It was nearly two feet tall and weighed twenty pounds. It was the Andre The Giant of Roosters, and he was going up against a five-year-old bird named Tandy. Tandy was a longtime veteran, had one eye and had been fighting three years, which is ancient in cockfighting. Most birds lasted six months at best, but Tandy had survived and had become something of a legend. Despite the advantage of age and weight, Coco was the 9-to-1 underdog. But I’d won a couple of grand off of Coco’s first fight, and the bird was absolutely vicious. He moved like rooster half his size and had crazy cannibal bloodlust.
I hit the bar up before placing my bet, and as usual Pablo was working it. He plopped a cold one in front of me and waved off my $5 bill.
“Are you betting tonight, Larry?” He asked.
“What kind of question is that?” I said. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Pablo leaned in close and nodded for me to do the same.
“Tandy has a broken leg,” he whispered. “Juan has it taped up tight, but there’s no way he’s going to win tonight.”
When a bird get injured before a match, most trainers won’t pull their bird from competition because of the two grand Pablo made them put down to be in the ring. Owners and trainers operated on a shoestring, so two grand was a big deal. Sure, their bird may be hobbling around, but there was always the chance that they might fight through the pain and win, and if the odds are high enough against the bird, the owner looks to quadruple the ring stake and pull in huge on any side be
ts they’ve got going on. Considering Tandy’s age, Coco was pretty much a 100% win.
“No, shit.”
“Yeah, and the thing is, nobody knows about it, and Juan plans on keeping it that way. Tandy’s ranked 12-to-1 right now.”
My eyes turned to saucers and I’m not ashamed to say that I started drooling a little bit. 12-to-1 on twelve grand was huge; I’d have enough to pay off Junior, plus a little on the side so I wouldn’t have to worry about picking up PI work for at least a couple of months. But as I slugged back my beer, my lizard brain was going into overload. Imagine what I could make if I put down twenty or fifty grand? I’d be set up for four or five years if I played it right. The idea of it sent me into orbit, and then I opened my stupid mouth and said to Pablo:
“How much can you stake me?’
He ended up being able to front me only thirty grand, but Pablo knew it was a sure thing, and the whole reason he told me about the injury was because he was hoping I would hop at the chance to go big. Usually the house can’t put money down on a fight because the house usually knew the little ins-and-outs of what’s going on with the cocks. Plus, you’re taking food out of your partners mouths if another owner placed a bet, so they put money in the hands of shills like me. Yeah, Pablo would take a huge chunk of the take, but I would still get a big greasy hunk of it. The only downside was if Coco lost, because if that happened, I would expected to pay the mark plus its weekly interest. Yeah, it’s a screwed up little system, but you know what they say, if you want to win big, you’ve got to play big.
Pablo handed me the marker when the first fight started and the bar cleared out, and I went and laid down the cash, and then went ringside to wait for my easy money fight.
You don’t have to hear the rest, because you already know how it went, so there’s no reason you need to hear a blow-by-blow description of the fight. All you need to know is that good old Tandy came hobbling out of his corner and he tore Coco to shreds, and I mean to shreds. It was so brutal people were throwing up over the carnage, myself included. But I was barfing because I was screwed six ways to Sunday. I now owed two HUGE markers, and considering that I didn’t know who Pablo’s partners were, I was completely in the dark on money owed or how long I would have to pay it back, or what would happen to me if I didn’t pay it back when they wanted it.
But believe it or not, I was actually very well acquainted with Pablo’s partner.
After the fight I headed back to the bar, and Pablo—who was a couple of shades whiter than a hospital pillow case—had a beer ready for me. After I slugged it back in three long gulps, I asked about the particulars of paying back the marker, and that’s when he dropped a bomb on me.
The fight belonged to Junior. The whole thing, Pablo was just an employee.
I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, I knew what I was getting into when I asked for the marked and placed the bet, and chances are I wouldn’t do anything differently even if I knew the outcome because that’s just how I’m wired.
Pablo felt pretty bad about the whole situation and said he would help me pay it back, which is help I readily accepted. But it was only a couple of grand a month, and my two debts to junior would be combined together and the interest from my existing debt would be applied to the new chunk of cash that I owed, so two grand wasn’t going to put much of dent on the monthly vig. I was screwed, plain and simple, so I did what I do best, I went on a bender before Junior found out about the new wad.
It took only three days for him to find out, and it was an epic three days on my end. I started drinking at the cockfights and then barhopped until my pockets were turned inside out. After that, I charmed my way into drinks and into the panties of a few of the women who were kind enough to front my bar tab. It was a wonderful, slightly mind blowing good time. But then Junior sent his muscle to track me down and bring him back to his office to make an offer to me that I wouldn’t be able to say no to.
And his offer was this: I belonged to him for the next two years. I could still do PI work and pay into the debt if I wanted (Of course I would need the money from PI work to keep a roof over my head, so you can bet your ass I wasn’t giving a dime of it Junior), but I could consider myself a full time employee of the Vecchio family. Whatever they needed to have done, I would do it. For the next two years, I was going to become a full fledged, honest-to-God gangster. The three generations of cop in me turned my blood to acid.
To be honest with you, though, I kind of took to the work. You know that line from Goodfellas about how gangsters are just cops for wise guys? Well, it’s actually a true statement.
Gangsters pretty much only deal with scumbags, and I mean real scumbags, not the kind the police have to deal with. When you’re a gangster, you don’t have to deal with belligerent drunks, or domestic disturbances, or pedophiles or any of that sicko stuff. I mean, you do, but you don’t. Gangsters are far more single minded in focus when it comes to dealing with degenerates. The long and the short of it is, gangsters don’t care about what you do in your private life, because they only want their money. As long as you have their dough, you can be married to seven goats and shoot up drano into your eyeballs for all they care. They just want the cash, but if you don’t have it, well, they’re going to do some damage. They’re going to kill all of your goats and they’re going to make sure you don’t get your hands on another drop of Drano until you pay up.
I worked almost exclusively as muscle in Junior’s organization. When you’re muscle, it’s kind of a catch all position. You collect money from drop off points, you collect from various pimps and dope dealers who are on the payroll, same with the various games the boss had going on across the city. There was even a few times when I collected from Pablo’s cockfight.
The other part of the position was being actual muscle. Along with my pick ups, it was my job to get mean if somebody was short, and get really mean when they didn’t have any cash at all. If that happened more than once, I was under orders to put whoever stiffed in the hospital. Unfortunately, this happened quite a bit. I always had help, Junior had a seemingly endless supply of faceless gorillas who went with me on my runs, and if things got nasty, they broke bones and crushed teeth right alongside me. The only difference was is the goons seemed to enjoy it a lot more. Okay, I’ll admit I kind of enjoyed it, too. Remember, gangsters deal with the scum of the earth, so every person I kicked the crap out of, I knew they had it coming. But once in a while, I run across a guy just like me. Someone who liked to play the ponies or play cards or bet on the Bears. They weren’t bad guys, they were just unlucky and too stupid to figure out that you don’t borrow money from a gangster.
There were sometimes when I would go solo on a job. Usually it was when I had to deal with the college set.
The college set was the nickname Junior used for anyone we did business with who was under twenty-five, and there were a lot of them. And there were a lot of them who didn’t do business with us, but should’ve been. Kids who were going behind Junior’s back and scoring from one of his competitors, or kids who had no idea Junior even existed and were just trying to score a few extra bucks and some free dope. I never liked dealing with these kids, and it happened a lot more than I’d like to admit.
If Junior got wind of some trust fund hippie who was floating a few dime bags in one of his neighborhoods, he’d have me go by and pay them a visit. I would knock on their doors, decked out in my standard issue Italian gangster suit (I usually wore Italian on my own accord, but when I was out on my runs for Junior, I kept my suits extra sharp. Usually I’m pretty rough on my clothes, like I fall asleep in them or I forget to change out of them for two or three days. But on the job, I always wanted to look professional.), and the bulk of the kids I dealt with would go ghost pale thinking I was one of two things: Either a cop, or the white boy equivalent of Jules from Pulp Fiction getting ready to recite Ezekiel 25:17.
Most of the kids who thought I was a cop were usually the ones who would give into me right awa
y. Most of the time they would promise me they would never sell dope again and then give me the money they’d made along with the rest of their drugs. I liked these kids because you knew they were just playing around with being a dirt ball and they would be on the straight and narrow for the rest of their lives, and I would get to pocket the money and the dope. All Junior ever wanted was for them to knock of the shit, but if they wanted to keep doing what they were doing, they needed to kick back to him, and with most of them just wanting to be left alone and never having to see my face ever again, Junior didn’t ever expect for anything to be coming back to him. God knows I needed the extra cash, because my position with Junior was indeed full time, and I had zero time to pick up any PI work.
But occasionally when I dealt with the college set, there were guys who didn’t want to hang it up, or become partners with Junior. It was a couple of dipshits like this who got my ass sent to Arizona.
The kids were operating a couple of blocks north of the University Of Chicago. They lived in a real nice place that was obviously being paid for by their parents. They lived on the ground floor, and when I knocked I knocked, it took somebody practically ten minutes to make it to the door. While I was waiting, I pressed my ear to the door and all I could hear was the television turned up to 11 and what sounded like a couple of monkeys cackling at the top of their lungs.
When they finally opened up, I was greeted by a young kid wearing dreadlocks and laughing so hard his face had turned blue and he’d pissed his jeans. I followed a few feet behind him and shut the door behind me. The kid lead me into the living room, which was littered with fast food wrappers, crushed beer cans, cigarette butts, and shattered glass pipes. From the looks of the place it looked like I was dealing with tweakers. The kid flopped down on an equally filthy couch next to another guy who looked like his twin brother. The only difference was that this kid had crapped himself instead of pissed.