Then, there was Uncle Franny. Uncle Franny was a carpenter, and a good one. He went his own way as soon as he left high school. He lives about three blocks from us on a triple-lot, and he grows anything with a seed, in his garden. One time Uncle Franny threw a handful of Cheerios in a corner of his garden. The next morning, hand-to-God, there was a dozen donuts. Franny can grow anything in that garden.
Anyway, neither he, nor Uncle Tony, was going to help my dad with the business, they’d done their time all through high school and didn’t see a future in it. So Pop needed me to work with him, and thus he was willing to compromise. So we agreed. I could stay off the smelly trucks and be home every night at five. It was a good deal and I took it.
In June of 1987 I graduated from High School, and in August I went off to college, where I majored in communications and literature, and minored in business. I spent that summer splitting time between the office and the routes, Monday through Friday, and on the weekends I went to the beach. Me, Mark, Tommy Fallone, Skip O’Brien, Mikey Baldino and Joey Fanucci would pile into a couple of cars and head to Wildwood, or Margate, or Ocean City, Maryland, or Dewey Beach, Delaware.
We all had nicknames, because, well...that’s what Italian kids do. Even Skip O’Brien had a nickname. He was Irish obviously, but his maternal grandmother was from Naples, and so we let him call himself Italian. Me? Well they called me “Joey Trucks” because I was always talking about not wanting to work on those garbage trucks. Mark was “Monk” and he was my closest friend on earth. I loved him like a brother. Which is good, since my brothers came later in life and we weren’t that close. Mark and I did everything together. He spent more time at my house than his own. It was that way all through high school.
Tommy Fallone was “Tommy Felonious.” We started calling him that in grade school and as it turns out, it was prescient. Tommy just did fifteen-to-twenty in Holmesburg for robbing an ATM machine. That’s always a stupid move because those things are built better than most bank vaults. But what made it even more stupid was that Tommy and his partner, Nicky Farvoli, thought it would be somehow better to knock off an ATM in Atlantic City. Yeah, that ATM heist. You probably read about it.
We went to visit him not long after he was sentenced, and I asked him, “Tommy, stealing an ATM is stunod as it is, but you try one at The Sands? You tried picking the mob’s pocket for God’s sake! What the hell is wrong with you?” Tommy said he and Nicky Farvoli, (whose last name we had mangled into “Farfalle” which is actually bowtieshaped macaroni. After a while, we just called him “Nicky Bowties”) thought that nobody would suspect the ATM heist in Atlantic City.
They’d posed as repairmen and walked right into the service area behind the big row of ATM’s in the lobby of The Sands casino. Nobody asked them a thing, and they might have gotten away with it except that generally, ATM servicemen service the ATM on-site. They don’t remove it from the building on a pallet and try getting it into a borrowed U-Haul truck. It was a stupid plan. ATM’s weigh like seven thousand pounds and these two mooks were both under 5’ 8”. The machine tipped over as they were trying to load it into the van, spilling cash everywhere, and nearly killed them. They only made it worse when they ran. It was a stupid plan, made even more stupid by trying to get away through the lobby of the busiest casino on the boardwalk. The security guys caught them, and made an example of them in between the slot machines. Then the cops got hold of them. Then the mob sent a couple of guys into the jail to let them know they had really screwed up. It was ugly in an ugly kind of way. But they survived it and Tommy got out a few months ago.
Nicky Bowties got out after seven years because he’d rolled over on Tommy and blamed him for the whole thing. I remember telling Tommy to do the exact same thing to Nicky, because I knew Nicky was a weasel, and he was going to take whatever offer the D.A. gave him. The truth is, neither one of them was smart enough to have been the brains of the crew. Heck, the two of them together thought it was a smart idea to grab an ATM from a casino in Atlantic City in broad daylight. And that was after talking it out between them for weeks. Neither of them, at any point in time, stopped and said; “Maybe we should pick a different ATM, like a WaWa or an Acme.” Somebody actually convinced some grand jury that one of these two morons was the ringleader? That’s even scarier than the plan they came up with.
Then there was Skip O’Brien. Skip was one quarter Italian and that was enough for him. He was constantly playing the role of the “South Philly Tony,” wearing black turtlenecks and a gold Italian Horn medallion. He worked every summer and every weekend during the school year for his uncle at the Italian Market. His uncle owned a fish stand on Ninth and Passyunk. This was his uncle on his mother’s side...the half Italian uncle named Eccole. Eccole was an enormous man with more hair on his back and shoulders than Bigfoot. The family called him “Uncle Squatch” as in “Sasquatch.” Skip worked the fish market with his hairy uncle and saved every penny. The summer we graduated he bought himself a year-old Camaro IROCZ. Just like every South Philly Tony in the Tri-State area. Skip always seemed to have money in his pocket. When we were little, we called Skip “The Caviar Kid” for obvious reasons. I asked him if the females ever dumped their eggs on him when he was throwing the fish to his uncle from the back of the truck. I asked him if that’s how he’d squirreled away so much money in such a short time, “By selling the fish eggs to Polocks and telling them it was caviar?” My dad overheard me asking Skip this, and he roared with laughter from the next room.
The next time Skip came over, my dad called out to him: “Yo! It’s the Caviar Kid!” Skip didn’t like it at first, but he liked my dad a lot, and having a nickname given to him by my old man was something special for Skip. His dad had left town when Skip was about two years old. Skip loved my dad and my dad loved Skip. So my dad bestowing a nickname on him made him feel like family. In fact he was. My folks essentially adopted Skip, and he all but lived with us until college. He’s a big-time seafood broker back home in Philly. He’s a heck of a successful guy. He got married and named his firstborn son after my dad. My dad cried when Skip told him. I did too. I was happy for my dad, plus it got me off the hook of having to do it myself. Let somebody elses kid get teased for being named “Giuseppe IV” It sounds like a frickin’ fishing boat. But then “Giuseppe O’Brien isn’t much better, now is it?
Mikey Baldino lived next door to my grandfather. My grandfather could have bought himself a new house, years before, but he stayed in the old neighborhood and lived in the same row home. In fact, he and Nonna had the same sofa and living room furniture they’d bought the year I was born. Like all South Philly grandparents, they’d had every stick of furniture in the living room covered in custom made plastic slip covers. Their sofa looked like it was still sitting in the showroom at Levitz. It had endured forty-two years of grandchildren, and dogs, and homemade-wine spills, and it still looked pristine. Those plastic slipcovers played hell on your legs in the summer. I’d go visit Nonna and plop down on her sofa wearing my cutoff jeans. It was hot and humid and she never ran the air conditioner until night time. You’d forget about the humidity and the sweat on the back of your legs and after an hour, you went to stand up and the suction ripped off a layer of skin. “Nonna, Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You gotta turn on the air conditioning down here!”
But she never listened. There was a huge fan in the parlor blowing wet, humid summer air around the house. I tried telling her once that a fan doesn’t help with the humidity. Nonna spoke pretty darned good English, except when you wanted to discuss spending money with her. Tell her she needed to turn on the A/C for an hour in the afternoon, or try borrowing her silverware, and you’d think she’d just arrived at Ellis Island after stowing away in steerage on an Italian freighter. Any other time and she’d be correcting my English.
Anyway, Mikey Baldino lived next door and I met him when I was little and we lived two doors down from Nonna and Grandpa Guiseppe. We eventually moved a few blocks away, but Mikey and I remained
close. When I would spend the weekend at my grandparent’s house, he would come over and spend the night with me. We used to take my grandfather’s handkerchief and make parachutes for our green plastic army men and dropped them out the second-floor back window.
Mikey was an amazing stickball player. He could hit anything at all. You could shoot BB’s at him, at night, and he’d hit eight out of ten. He loved baseball. Loved it. We’d walk over to the Vet with a dollar in our hand and each get a ticket in the seven hundred level. The Phillies were terrible back then and the place was half empty. So after an inning or so, we’d sneak down to the club level and watch the game from seven rows back. The security guys never bothered us, and even if they did, I’d drop my grandfather’s name and they’d smile and walk away. A few minutes later the hot dog guys would come by and give us a couple of dogs and Cokes and some peanuts. I’d look up and say “I don’t have any money, sir.” The guys would smile and say “Naah, you’re Giuseppe Mezilli’s grandson, you don’t pay here. Just make sure you tell your grand pop we took care of ya, okay kid?” “Yes sir.” I’d say, and me and Mikey would chow down on Phillies Franks and watch our game and be home by nine PM.
So, Mikey Baldino got his nickname from his love for baseball. His nickname was “Mikey Baseball” as in Mikey Base-Baldino. Mikey loved that name. We used to have this little cheer we’d call out on the little league field: “Here comes Mikey Baldino, the Big Bambino!” Eventually it just stayed Mikey Baseball. He went on to play in the Padres farm system for a few years and now he runs an insurance agency in Voorhees N.J. and coaches Little League. He keeps himself in amazing shape and every winter he goes to Florida to a Phillies Fantasy Camp. You know, where old guys spend a week playing baseball against the guys they grew up watching? Mikey takes it very seriously. He works out all year and even had a batting cage installed in his back yard. He went to Florida a couple of years ago and was especially excited when he found out that Curt Schilling was going to be there. He was riding Schilling pretty good at dinner the night before the big scrimmage game that ends the week. Mikey was working on Schilling pretty hard, telling him how he was sure he could hit him. Mikey likes to talk big sometimes. The next morning, Schilling “spun his cap.” He hit the bill of Mikey’s batting helmet with a fastball at about ninety MPH. Mikey picked himself up off the ground, glared out at the mound and said “Yo Curt! Losing your control, or what?” Schilling paused a long time, stared a hole right through Mikey, and finally said; “I hit just what I was aiming at.” Mikey shut up after that.
The last of the guys I grew up with was Joey Fanucci. Now, poor Joey had a double whammy. He had the same first name as me...and as I was the accepted ringleader of our little crew, this was never going to work, so he couldn’t use his first name. And his last name was constantly being butchered into a slur. People were always calling him “Joey Fanook.” If you don’t know what that means, Google it. But suffice it to say it isn’t nice. Joey couldn’t share my name, (although I hadn’t been called “Joey” since the sixth grade) so we called him Domanucce. (You pronounce it “Dom-anootch”) His middle name was Dominic. Joseph Dominic Fanucci. So we took his middle name and blended it with his last name, and we got Domanucce.
To say it correctly, you say it fast... “Yo! Domanucce!” Joey loved it. It was very Italian and so was he. His parents were immigrants, the only parents in my circle who were from the old country. The rest of us were second generation American, but Joey was the first in his family born here. His mom and dad were wonderful people. They made me laugh all the time. His mom made homemade wine out of frozen Welch’s grape juice and his dad had a cousin with a farm in New Jersey. Mr. Fanucci had a big stake-body truck and he would haul horse manure from his brother’s farm to homeowners all over the Philadelphia suburbs. When business was slow with residential customers, he’d haul loads to Kaolyn and Avondale, the two towns west of Philly known as “The Mushroom Capital of the World.” He had a full-time job with the township, working for the water department, and the manure hauling business was a side job for him. It’s a good thing too, because the way Mrs. Fanucci kept cranking out kids, he needed to sell as much poop as he could.
When Joey and I graduated in 1987, he was the oldest of nine. Three more came before he graduated college. Twelve that made it, plus four or five miscarriages. Mrs. Fanucci always said of the twelve kids who made it into the world that the “Cream, rose-ah to de top!” and she’d brag in Italian about her big family. She was an amazingly good natured lady for being perpetually pregnant for almost 13 years.
That was my “crew”. Those were the guys I’d grown up with and that was what I knew I’d be leaving behind that day I decided to sell Mezilli Trash Hauling and Cartage and move my still-young family to Forest, Virginia.
And that’s where the fun began...
I didn’t move to Forest for two years after selling the business. I had agreed to stay on in the transition for one year. After that I had to deal with the never-ending guilt being laid on me, like bricks in a wall, by my grandmother. Like I said before, Nonna spoke darned good English, except when discussing money. The only other time she would lose her ability to speaka-de-English was when she was trying to guilt you into, or out of something. In this case, her first grandchild moving five hours away. The same grandson who just did a business deal that made her a millionaire a couple times over at eighty-six years old. That grandson.
She would sit in the living room all day. In the dark. On those sticky plastic slip covers, talking to the picture of the sacred Heart of Mary that hung over the sofa. “Mah-doan” “Mah-DOAN!” “Mah-DOAN! Why? Why do I’m have such a broken heart? Mother Mary...help-a dis pain!” It was worthy of an Oscar, I swear to God. Finally I said “Nonna, just come with us. You’d love this place. It’s near the mountains and it reminds me of the Campania. It’s even got vineyards like Campania.”
This was a mistake. Because my grandfather was born in
Montecassino, which sits right at the south end of the Campania range in Italy. My grandmother’s eyes glazed over and she pulled her shawl over her head and started weeping and saying his name over and over. “Giuseppe...Giuseppe! Il mio amore è morto” (IL mio amore e morto means “My love is dead.”) Now, my grandfather had been gone five years by this point, and when he was alive, he and Nonna would argue a hell of a lot more than they would speak kindly to each other. They were legendary on our block for having screaming matches in the summer with all the windows open. Arguments over things like how my grandfather liked his macaroni cooked. Or why she couldn’t “Turn on-ah de air-a condit-chin.” If my grandfather had it his way, it would have been cold enough in their living room to hang sides of beef. But Nonna held the purse strings and she lived her whole life like an impoverished immigrant. She never grasped that they had become pretty wealthy, which was true even before I did the deal with Waste International. She’d lived through the Depression and never forgot the growl in her stomach.
So I suggested she move with us and she burst into tears. “Leave dis-a house? Dis-a house that your Nonno built-a with-a his hands? No! Never! I’m-a gonna die here.” Then she paused and turned on the eye-faucets and with a hoarse whisper said “I’m-a guess I’m-a gonna die alone here.” She didn’t shoot me the horns, but I saw her right hand twitching nervously...she wanted to.
Then she turned to the picture of the Sacred Heart and wailed “Mother of Jesus-a. I’m-a gonna die here of-ah the broken heart. The broken heart like-a the mother of-a Jesus!” I told her I’d pay for those snazzy aluminum awnings she always wanted over each window and she smiled again. I knew my Nonna. She has a price, like everyone else.
So I stayed in Philly for two years. I worked that one final year with Waste International, and then I just piddled for another year. I spent a lot of time down the shore. I hunted and fished, (something I love) I played in the men’s hockey league. I took my kids to school every day and eventually...I drove my wife nuts.
Angie looked at me o
ne morning at breakfast after I had rushed her to get done so I could wash the lone dish she was using and I knew I was in trouble. I’d seen that look before. Mostly it was when I came home with a dead deer in the back of her Escalade. “It’s a Cadillac, Joseph! You have a truck, but you have to put a dead, bloody deer in the back of my Escalade? I swear if you stain that leathuh!” Angie and I had both been double majors in college and graduated with degrees Communications and English. She enunciated perfectly. But she reverted back to a “Princess of Little Italy” whenever I pissed her off, which thankfully was almost never. She didn’t fall back on the street talk very often, but she was a master of the Maloik…the evil eye. Her grandmother was even better at it. The Maloik is what Italian women do when they get to a certain age and they realize the power they have. They don’t say anything, they just stare at you. They stare the way a butcher stares at a side of beef just before he goes to work filling a freezer order. If they combine this with the “Death Horn” (closing the fist and extending only the thumb and first finger, like a horn) pointed at you, you are pretty much living in your final days.
Anyway, Angie shot me that look. The time I remember seeing that look the longest, was after we had three boys and she decided her life was incomplete without a little girl. Getting her pregnant evolved from something pleasurable that I looked forward to, to a grinding full-time job. “JoZEPH!” She would call upstairs to me. “We are going to have a little Italian princess or die trying!” I was beginning to believe she was hoping for the latter. But in the end, we had our little angel and I was glad she was so adamant about it.
But that morning as I scraped her uneaten scrambled eggs into the disposal she stared a hole through my skull and said “Giuseppe Francesco Mezilli if you don’t find something to do and get out of this house, I’m going to turn you into two-hundred pounds of fresh sausage!” Angie had a way with words.
The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster Page 2