Hit #29, page 3
“You don’t,” I told him.
The Half Moon is a Bronx restaurant just off 187th Street east of Arthur Avenue. The food is good and the people leave you alone, which is better. Most meetings of the type I was attending are held in restaurants or public places of some sort, unless there is a specific reason why two people should not be seen together.
I had absolutely no idea who I was supposed to meet there, so I just walked in and started looking around. I didn’t have to look too far. Sitting at a table by himself was a very well-known buttonman by the name of Jackie Sweetlips. The “Sweetlips” part came from the fact that he was constantly running his tongue across his lips and, when he was nervous, his tongue would dart in and out, around and around very quickly, like a snake. He had worked as a bookmaker, a banker and now a buttonman for the Fat Man. There is a rumor that he had pulled the trigger on occasion, but I never saw anything in his character to make me believe that. For a front he ran a used-car lot on Jerome Avenue, and I don’t have to mention what some of his cars were used for. I took one look at him and looked no further: I knew he was the man I was supposed to see.
I was very surprised. I had known Sweetlips off and on for maybe ten years. The last few we have not been so friendly, not since I hit a man known as Bats. Bats turned out to be Jackie’s best friend. They had evidently grown up together, and gone into the mob business together. I never knew exactly what Bats had done, I was just hired to do my thing and I did it. But what I didn’t know then was that friend Jackie was maneuvering to get the contract canceled. In fact, he thought he had just about settled the beef when I did Bats.
So, a few weeks later, I hear a rumor that Jackie Sweetlips is telling people he is going to “ice” me. (That’s when “ice” was a very popular word.) I didn’t know then and I never discovered how he found out that I was the individual who did the work. That is one fact he has no reason for knowing.
The way I found out he was looking for me was that people started asking me what I had done to him, because he wouldn’t tell anybody. For a long time I didn’t even know the reason. It turns out Jackie had asked somebody to see me and ask me to give Bats an extra week, so Jackie could cement his reprieve. I never got the message. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had—unless it came from the man who hired me—but I really never did get it.
Jackie didn’t believe that. He thought I got the message and ignored it, so he was going to “get even.” This is considered highly unprofessional. Organized crime has certain rules and regulations, and “getting even” is outlawed except in very special circumstances.
It never bothered me at all. “Let him try,” I said. But he never did. Never, And there he was, sitting in the Half Moon, waiting for me. I thought it was very strange, and I began to wonder why I had been asked to do the job.
Jackie looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I think it is possible he might have been confused. I’ve gone under so many names that it’s possible he never made the connection between my physical appearance and the name the person who hired me to kill Bats knew me by. Possible, not probable.
More probably, my name had been brought up at a meeting and the Fat Man okayed it. When the Fat Man says something will be done, it’s Jackie’s job to make sure it happens, no matter how distasteful he might personally find it. Anyway, I was only there because of Petey.
Without Petey setting this meeting up I wouldn’t have even walked into the men’s room with Jackie. As soon as I saw him I would have turned around and walked out. The guy doesn’t like me and I don’t like him, so why antagonize each other. But I trusted Petey completely. The only way I’m going to do this type of business is through somebody who knows me and knows what I do, and who I trust. And that is Petey. After all, there are lives at stake.
All this was running through my head as I walked up to Jackie’s table. “Hello Jackie,” I said to him just as nicely as I could. “How are you?”
“Fine,” he says.
“How’s the used-car business?”
“Fine,” he says. So far, as you can see, this is not such a thrilling conversation. But neither of us is one-hundred-percent-positive-sure that we are talking to the right party, so there is no sense jumping into details.
“What’s doin’?” I asked him.
“Not too much.” He was at least putting on a good show of being friendly.
“You bookin’?”
“Yeah, a little of that. I got a piece of a numbers bank. I got some money on the street. Those people up on Jerome Avenue go through a lot of cash, you know.” I would guess he probably had close to half a million, not all his own cash, on the street. Besides having his own used-car place, he was the backbone of a number of other dealers on the block. Finally he asked me if I had eaten dinner yet and I told him I hadn’t. We ordered. “What brings you up to this neighborhood?” he asked as we waited.
“I come up to see a friend of a friend about a little business.”
“Yeah?” he says. “S’funny, I’m here to meet a friend of a friend also.”
“Whose friend are you supposed to meet?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
He hesitated just one split second. Then he was quite definitive. “Petey.”
I nodded in affirmation and smiled. My tone changed. I didn’t have to be friendly any more, just do business. “Okay, whattya want Jackie, what’s on your mind?”
His tongue came shooting out of his mouth and smacked across his lips. “We’ve got some heavyweight work. Interested?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
He nodded as if this were the most logical thing in the world. “Then I got a contract for you.”
As with Petey, I didn’t want any mistakes. I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same work. “What kind of contract?”
“I want somebody hit.”
“You want somebody hit?” I said, emphasizing the you.
“No,” he corrected, “the Fat Man wants him hit.” I tried to catch something in his voice or his mannerisms that would tell me what he thought about me, but it just didn’t seem to be there. He looked me pretty straight in the face as he talked. There didn’t seem to be any personal feelings involved.
The first few times I sat in on meetings like this I felt a sort of excitement, a sort of exhilaration. No more. Now it was business. How much. How quickly. And who. The only answer that usually made any difference was the first one.
“What’s the story?”
“It’s one of our controllers. He’s been setting up other controllers to get jammed.”
I didn’t understand what he meant by, that. Books and movies always show hoods talking in slang words that everybody understands. It doesn’t work that way. Everybody doesn’t understand everything. Of course, there are certain words that everybody in the business uses, but when a contract is being discussed there is very little flashy language. It’s cut and dried and laid out on the table. “Jammed?” I asked him.
“Yeah. He’s been having them heisted.”
Heisted I understood. “You’re kidding. What kind of prick would do something like that?”
He laughed. “A stupid one.” The conversation was getting more comfortable now. As much as he might have disliked me, it was obvious he liked the individual we were discussing a whole lot less.
I laughed too. “You sure about this guy?” I didn’t want to go any further if this was an iffy thing. But I really wasn’t overly concerned, I knew the organization would not be going ahead unless everything had been thoroughly checked out. One important factor that helps keep organized crime healthy is that so few mistakes are made. Things are checked and double-checked.
“We got the guys who were doing the heisting. They told us the whole story. Then we set up the guy and watched him take a payoff.” He paused. “Yeah, we’re dead sure.”
This was an interesting story. “Does he know you’re on to him?”
Sweetlips shook his head no. “He’s sitting like a duck floating on a pond!”
At this point I had to make the decision: commit myself or take a hike. Normally I would have said thanks for the offer but so long, because I don’t like to do heavyweight work too often. You get careless, like I said. But this job seemed so easy, and the money smelled so good, and there hadn’t been even the slightest tremor about number 28. After considering these things, and deciding to break a personal pattern this one time, the only thing that would have made me refuse was if I thought the designated hittee was somebody I knew and liked, or somebody that I owed something to. There are few people in this business that I am close to. And if they’re up to something I usually know about it. So when he said controller and I knew there was nobody I cared about working that way, I decided to take the job. All this went through my mind before I asked the one question that binds me to the job. “Sounds alright. Who’s the guy?”
“Joseph Squillante.”
I started laughing.
“You know him?” Jackie asked.
“Know him shit,” I said. “Raised in the same neighborhood.”
Jackie’s tongue came darting out of his mouth again. Friendships have been known to cause complications. It was, after all, a friendship that caused him to start hating me. “You got any qualms?”
Jackie had nothing to worry about. “He don’t mean nothing to me. I’ve known him all my life but I don’t think I’ve ever been inside his house. If I’ve had three cups of coffee with him in our lifetime that’s a lot.”
Actually I knew him a little better than that, but I didn’t see any reason to go into it. Joe Squillante and I were raised on the same block in the East Bronx. We lived about half a block, five buildings, away from each other. Because we were about the same age we played stickball, we played softball, we played ringolevio. We would even go down to the corner with a bunch of other kids and steal food and fruit together. But it was always with other kids. We weren’t close at all.
I stopped to think about Squillante. I could not understand how he had gotten himself in this situation. He was never what I would call a ballsy type of guy, much more of a follower than a leader. When I became a controller at the age of 15 he was just starting to move his ass running numbers for somebody. I never kept track of him. I mean, I would never go out of my way to ask somebody, “Hey, what’s Joe Squillante up to?” but his name would pop up in conversation now and then. So I kept track of him in the sense that I would hear about him or I would run into him periodically and we would catch up with each other.
I had nothing against the guy. And I was surprised that he turned out to be somewhat of a success. A guy who works at this business can do alright. They go out, they work, they earn. That’s what he did. I knew he was no dummy. I believe he graduated from James Monroe High School and then went on and had one year at City College. I knew his parents to see them, but I didn’t know them to go into their home. I even met the girl he married.
I didn’t go to the wedding, although I heard about it, and one day my wife and I were out shopping and there he is with his new wife, Cindy. She came from the Fordham section of the Bronx. Actually, she was pretty attractive which didn’t surprise me, because Squillante was a decent looking guy. He was about 5’9” tall and 165 pounds. He had long, wavy black hair like most Italian singers do. After they were married they lived in the neighborhood for awhile and then they moved up to Fordham. They stayed there awhile and, after Cindy had a few kids, they moved over to Pelham Bay.
Jackie didn’t say anything while I was thinking. “Listen, you got any bad feelings, that’s okay. We’ll just get somebody else.”
“I ain’t got no bad feelings, Jackie. I know the guy, that’s all.” And that was all. He really didn’t mean a thing to me. Nothing. But I just couldn’t understand how he could get himself in a situation like this one. It didn’t make any sense. Squillante was a guy who started out as a numbers runner and worked his way to the top. He probably had the usual scraps but he was not what you would call a violent individual. He had something like 50 runners working for him. Figure each of them is making $150 a day. He’s getting 10 percent of $150 times 50 runners, which is $750 per day. Plus he’s got his own customers off who he’s getting 35 percent. You figure he is doing maybe $250 a day with his own customers. Every fucking day. That’s $1000 a day, $6000 a week. What is he ripping other people off for? I wanted to find out, so I asked the man who knew. “Jackie, I don’t understand it. What the fuck is he doing it for? This guy is making a nice living.”
“He went bad. For the last eight months he’s been betting like the sun isn’t coming up tomorrow. We’ve been checking with the books. We got hold of some of their runners and they tabbed Squillante as a heavy gambler. Since these robberies started though, he’s been paying his bills very quickly.”
“How much is he down?”
“We stopped counting at two hundred gees.”
“Poor old Joe. He shoulda stayed in college.”
Jackie shook his head no. “He should’ve stayed smart.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
He changed the subject. “What’s your figure?” This part was more of a formality than anything else. There is a going rate for heavyweight work. The only time the price varies is when somebody big is going to be done. Squillante was nobody big. This was not going to be a bargaining session.
“Twenty thousand.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “Here’s the cash.” I always get paid in full, in advance, in cash. What else am I gonna do, take a check? There are other unwritten clauses that go into every hit contract. Jackie and I didn’t bother discussing them because we both knew what they were: If I got caught the Fat Man would be responsible for all my legal fees, including lawyers’ fees and bail bonds if I could get bail. He would also see that I was comfortable in jail, that my wife was comfortable at home, as well as do everything possible to get me out. Finally, when I did get out, he would have a bundle of cash waiting for me.
This is done to insure silence. As long as all obligations are taken care of, I’m not going to say a word to nobody. I am certainly not going to involve Sweetlips or the Fat Man or Petey. All I can do by that is lose.
“I need all the information you got on him,” I said. “I want his stops. I want a list of every runner he’s got and where he meets them. I want his girlfriend if you got it. I want to know where he hangs out. Everything you got.”
“You’ll have everything you need tomorrow afternoon. We’ve been putting it together for the last week.”
“Wonderful,” I said, putting the envelope away. “I’ll be at Aqueduct tomorrow. I’ll be at the hundred-dollar window before the sixth race.” I knew I would be there because there was an animal with whom I was deeply in love. “Make sure the party who brings the information is well known to me.”
Jackie said, “He will be, because it’ll be me. I don’t want no goofs and I don’t want no hassles.”
“Any chance he’s going to run?”
“No way. He thinks he’s sitting on a gold mine.”
“Yeah, but Jackie, this guy is not stupid. He must know you’re gonna get on to him eventually,” I said.
“What can I tell you? We just told his boys to tell him they can’t do any jobs for two weeks. They agreed.”
“Nice of them.”
“Isn’t it,” he agreed.
Although I had been told this was to be a dinner meet, I didn’t want to stay with this man. Just before I got up I asked him the one question that, in view of what he thought of me and what I thought of him, was bothering me.
“How come I got the contract?”
Sweetlips shrugged his shoulders. “Beats me. Petey told the Fat Man you’re an angel. The Fat Man told me to get you.”
I nodded. It sounded good enough. I got up to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“All right,” he said. As I started walking away he said one more thing. “Joey?” I turned.
“Yeah?”
“This time,” he said, “you follow what I tell you, huh?”
I didn’t say a word, I just walked out. Jackie Sweetlips had not forgotten.
SWEETLIPS GIVES ME THE ENVELOPE
If everything went according to plan—my plan—Joseph Squillante would become the 29th man I killed. Twenty-nine. That number in itself did not make me feel proud, and it didn’t make me feel sad. Just cautious. The fact that I had killed 28 men and never been convicted of anything is no guarantee that I won’t make some stupid mistake the 29th time and end up growing a long beard in the Graybar. In fact, one of the real problems with having done a lot of hits is that you can easily become overconfident.
The toughest moment in any hit man’s career is pulling the trigger on number one. But that is much more of a mental thing than a physical thing. It takes almost no strength at all to pull a trigger. Anyone can do it. Kids women old people, everyone. But pointing it at someone’s head and then pulling it is a different matter. There are simply not that many people in the world who will do that. (I’m not including the hysterically angry ones shooting their wives and like that.) But once you’ve done it, once you’ve seen a bullet disappear into someone’s skull and watched with fascination as the whole pineapple opens up, once you’ve experienced how easy and quick it is, then there is absolutely nothing to it.
It actually becomes too easy. You begin to think of yourself in a different way. You feel you are somehow protected, that nothing can ever go wrong, that you are a very special person. This is a wonderful feeling if you know how to use it. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know how to use it. They become too cocky. They get the idea they are untouchable. And so they get stupid and they get touched. But real professionals, people like me who treat this work as nothing more than a job, we rarely get this way. We stay careful. That way we stay in circulation.
Before I make a hit I go into every possible detail, every potential difficulty. I plan even the easiest job down to the final minute. I take notes and I make alternate plans. I work at my job the way a matador or dynamite truck driver works at his. Very carefully.
