January 8
Jake Leibowttz, sitting in the back seat of his mother’s Packard, was already bored with the New Jersey landscape. It was nothing but houses, dirt and trees. How could anybody live in a place like this? Why would they want to? That’s what he’d ask Steppy Accacio if Joe Faci ever got around to introducing them.
Accacio had moved himself and his family out to Montclair more than two years ago.
“Wake up, Jake,” he muttered to himself. “You’re here on business. This ain’t the guided tour.”
“You say somethin’, boss?” Izzy Stein asked, without turning his head. Izzy was as down to earth in his driving as he was in everything else, a fact Jake Leibowitz greatly appreciated.
“Nah, I’m just thinkin’ out loud.”
Jake liked sitting in the back seat. True, the move from riding shotgun to perched like a big shot, had been forced on him. Just like the wop who was riding shotgun in his place.
“I got a kid,” Joe Faci had said. “He needs a job. Maybe you could take him with ya.”
The ‘maybe,’ as Jake understood it, had meant ‘do it or get the fuck out of here.’ Well, what cannot be cured, must be endured, right? Life had a way of dumping on you and if you didn’t learn to shovel in a hurry, you’d be buried up to your neck. The kid had turned out to be Santo Silesi, eighteen years old and just out of reform school. Santo seemed eager to please, but Jake understood that the kid’s first loyalty would always be to the guineas. Jake Leibowitz was just a rest stop on the road to becoming a made man.
What it is, Jake decided, is that I’m never gonna turn my back on Santo Silesi. Because maybe Santo will become a made man by making Jake Leibowitz disappear. Like Jake Leibowitz made Abe Weinberg disappear. Which was most likely part of Joe Faci’s plan for good old Jake, anyway. Faci hadn’t exactly ordered Jake to eliminate his buddy, but he’d made his position perfectly clear. There was no way Steppy Accacio would continue to do business with a man who couldn’t control his employees.
“So, do what ya think is right, Jake,” Faci had said. “Then get back to me.”
They were driving south along the Jersey coast on Route 9, making their way from town to town. Their target was a SpeediFreight tractor-trailer heading up from Virginia tobacco country to a warehouse near Matawan. The driver would be using the turnpike for most of his ride through New Jersey, but at some point he’d have to transfer to smaller, local roads. His final destination was twenty-five miles east of the turnpike.
There were any number of ways for the driver to go. (SpeediFreight encouraged its drivers to mix up their routes, especially when they carried cigarettes.) But in this particular case the driver would exit the turnpike near South Brunswick. He’d take Route 617 to a large truck stop outside of Old Bridge and go to lunch, making sure to leave the doors unlocked. When he came out, Jake would be waiting.
“This ain’t the way I like to do things,” Jake had informed Joe Faci. “I mean I don’t have any control, here. Suppose I gotta get out in a hurry? One wrong turn and I’ll be wanderin’ through Jersey ’til the tires fall off. Or suppose the driver gives me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do. Where do I dump the body? What do I do with the truck? No disrespect intended, Mr. Faci, but I wanna work as an independent.”
“Please, call me Joe.” Faci, unperturbed, had sipped his espresso, then added more sugar to what was already a cup of black mud.
“Okay, Joe.”
“I could understand ya reluctance, but I need ya ta do me this one favor. Because I’m in a bind. I got a regular crew for the job, but they had an unfortunate problem in Hell’s Kitchen last week and they ain’t available. So what I’m askin’ ya to do is help me out this here one time. If it goes good, which I’m sure it will, I could set you up permanent. I could introduce ya to one of the dispatchers at SpeediFreight. After that, you’re on your own.”
Faci hadn’t bothered to add “as long as we get our piece,” but Jake had gotten the message. What Faci was doing by setting Jake up with the SpeediFreight dispatcher was putting another layer between his boss and the operation. Jake could be trusted to do his time like a man if he got busted, but the dispatcher was probably some greedy citizen with a big family and a bigger mortgage. If the feds grabbed him, he’d roll over before they put on the cuffs.
“So tell me somethin’, Santo,” Jake asked, “where’d ya learn to handle a truck?” The plan was for the kid to drive the rig to a warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons would be counted. Jake’s cut was twenty cents per carton. The first thing he’d thought, when Faci had announced the price, was that he could get a dollar a carton if he sold them to someone else.
“Hey,” Santo replied, “call me Sandy. I ain’t in the ‘Santo’ generation.” He turned to face Jake. “See, no mustache.”
Jake unconsciously touched his own mustache. “You don’t like mustaches? Well, a blond kid like you shouldn’t grow a mustache, anyway. Blonds gotta have thick beards to make a mustache look good. It ain’t for kids. Now why don’t ya tell me where ya learned to drive a truck?”
Sandy Silesi turned away, concealing his face, but the tips of his ears, much to Jake’s satisfaction, flamed red.
“My uncle had a trucking company. In the Bronx. I worked there in the summer. I used to move the trailers around the yard.”
“Ya got a license ta drive a semi?”
“Nah.”
“Then take it easy. Real easy.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t mouth off to me.”
“I didn’t mean nothin’.”
“Because if ya mouth off to me, I’ll pull ya baby ass outta this car and send ya back to Joe Faci in pieces.”
The truck stop in Old Bridge turned out to be so big that Jake thought he’d turned into an army base. There must have been forty or fifty rigs parked in the truck lot and another fifty cars on the other side of the restaurant. Unfortunately, none of the tractor-trailers bore the name SpeediFreight, much less the number 114. Which is not to say that Jake was caught off guard. The drive up from Virginia took nine hours under perfect conditions. Which meant Jake had to be in Old Bridge nine hours after the rig was scheduled to leave Richmond. But suppose the driver ran into a bad accident? Or it was raining in Virginia? Or snowing in Pennsylvania?
“Me and Izzy are gonna go inside and get some lunch,” Jake announced. “You wait in the car. If ya spot the rig, come and get us.”
“Whatever you say.”
Jake took his time getting out of the Packard, trying to decide if the kid was being sarcastic. He couldn’t make up his mind, but then he figured it didn’t matter, anyway. Maybe he would have to teach the kid a lesson. That didn’t figure to be a problem. But this wasn’t the time or the place to do it.
When they got inside, Jake asked the lady with the menus for a table close to the door. The lady dropped the menus on the first table she came to and walked away.
“I can see they like us already,” Jake said.
“This kid is a piece of shit,” Izzy replied. “Santo Silesi. He’s gonna screw us first chance he gets.”
“Jesus, Izzy, not again.”
“It’s meshugah, Jake. It’s like carrying a snake in your pocket. Sooner or later, you gotta get bit, nu?”
“Don’t talk that Jew talk, all right? This is 1958. Ya sound like a Lithuanian rabbi. Next thing I know you’ll be growin’ a beard.”
“How I’m talkin’ ain’t the point.”
Jake shook his head in disgust. “The point is that we already talked about this. Three times. Get it through ya head: we got no choice.” Why was it that Jews never knew their place? Why couldn’t they take no for an answer? It was a curse. The curse of the big mouth. “The point is that there’s fifteen thousand cartons of cigarettes in that truck and we’re gettin’ fifteen cents a carton. That comes out to twenty-two fifty, our end. Ya wanna go back to gas stations and liquor stores? I could fix it.”
“That ain’t it, Jake. That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I just don’t wanna be a slave to some wop who can’t write his own name.”
“It ain’t slavery. We give a piece to Steppy Accacio and he gives a piece to someone else and they give to someone else. I figure there’s gotta be a big boss at the top, but I don’t got the faintest idea who it is. Maybe it goes on forever. Maybe it goes in a circle. Whichever way, if ya don’t give up that piece, ya can’t operate. Ya might as well go out and get a job.”
“C’mon, Jake, I ain’t …”
They were interrupted by a tall, middle-aged waitress in a yellow uniform. The wad of gum she was chewing made a huge lump in her right cheek. It looked like she had a toothache. “What’ll it be, folks?”
Santo Silesi appeared in the doorway behind the waitress. He nodded at Jake, then spun on his heel and disappeared. “What it’ll be,” Jake said, “is some sandwiches to go.”
“Take-out is at the counter.”
“You couldn’t get it for us?”
She walked off without bothering to answer. Jake grinned at Izzy, then stood up. “Must be an anti-Semite.”
They found Santo in the parking lot. He nodded toward a SpeediFreight trailer parked off by itself in the back of the lot. “The driver’s inside the restaurant.”
“All right, you and Izzy go back to the car. And when we get movin’, stay close. If I run into a problem with the driver, I want you right behind me.”
He watched them walk away, then turned his attention to the SpeediFreight trailer. The way the driver had parked his rig, it could be seen from anywhere in the truck stop. If this was a set-up (and there was always that possibility-you couldn’t ignore it), he, Jake, would be spotted before he got within fifty feet of the rig. And it might not be the cops, either. A company as big as SpeediFreight had to have its own security. For all Jake knew, the driver had been involved in a dozen heists.
The walk across the asphalt reminded Jake of the first time he’d walked across the yard at Leavenworth. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that everybody was watching him. Just waiting for an opportunity to put a shiv in his back. Well, he’d survived that walk and he’d survive this one, too. He was sure of it, despite the fact that he was sweating, despite the fact that it was twenty-two degrees and windy. By the time he pulled himself into the passenger’s side of the cab, he was breathing heavily, the icy air cutting into his chest like broken glass.
Jake took the.45 out of his waistband, laid it in his lap and immediately felt better. His little jaunt across the parking lot wasn’t going to lead him back to prison. It was the road to Park Avenue. Once he got his hands on the SpeediFreight dispatcher, he’d squeeze the bastard until his toes bled. SpeediFreight was one of the biggest outfits on the East Coast. They hauled everything-TV’s, hi-fi’s, clothing, furniture, appliances.
Six months of good luck. That’s all he was going to need before he put a few goons (Jewish goons, naturally) between himself and the actual heist. Hijackings didn’t really interest him, anyway. At best, they were no more than a means to an end. The end was the drug business, specifically heroin. Dope, horse, skag, doogie-no matter what they called the stuff, it came to the same thing. It came to profit margins that hadn’t been seen in the criminal world since the end of Prohibition. Best of all, the industry was just getting off the ground. There was still room for an ambitious ex-con named Jake Leibowitz.
Jake didn’t let himself become so lost in his plans for the future that he failed to keep an eye on the front door of the restaurant. He spotted the driver as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The man was tall, middle-aged and nearly bald.
Hatless despite the cold, he walked with his head down, flashing his shiny dome. He came directly to the truck, then hauled himself up and into the cab without looking at Jake.
“Ya know what this is all about, right?” Jake said.
“Yeah.”
“I want ya to make ya way over to Route Nine, then head up toward the city. Any problems?”
“Naw.” He pressed the starter button on the dash and the engine roared to life.
“What’s ya name?” Jake asked as the rig began to move.
“Dayton. Dayton McNeese.”
“You from down south, Dayton?”
“Mississippi.”
“I guess that explains it.”
“Explains it?”
“Explains why ya don’t like hats.”
Jake Leibowitz was so happy at the way things had turned out that he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that he couldn’t see the mustache he was attempting to trim.
“I’m movin’ on dowwwwwwn the road,” he sang in imitation of every colored inmate he’d run across in Leavenworth. “Movin’, movin’ movin on dowwwwwwn the road.”
But the truth, as he saw it, was that he was moving up the road. And it wasn’t a road, either, but a goddamned turnpike. They’d dropped off the SpeediFreight driver a mile from the Bayonne Bridge, then hotfooted it through Staten Island to a trucking warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons had been unloaded and counted. The count had come out exactly as advertised, fifteen thousand cartons straight from the R. J. Reynolds factory. The payoff had been a little tricky, because Jake had told Izzy and the wop he was only getting fifteen cents a carton when he was actually getting twenty. But Joe Faci had been smart enough to hand over the money in the privacy of his office.
“Three grand,” Joe Faci had said, “like I promised. And this here is the name and the phone number of the dispatcher at SpeediFreight who’s been working with us. Call him and arrange a face to face. You should be aware that he sometimes needs a little encouragement.”
Izzy’s cut had been 30 % of twenty-two fifty. Silesi had settled for 20 %. Which had left Jake with a very satisfying eighteen seventy-five.
“As in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars and no fucking cents,” Jake said, straightening his tie.
The first thing Jake had done was stop off in Mrs. Pearlstein’s Ladies’ Garments on Norfolk Street and pick up the largest rabbits’ fur coat on the rack. Not that he was stupid enough to actually tell his mother it was rabbits’ fur when he handed it over.
“It’s raccoon, mama,” he’d said. Then he’d broken into a sweat when she tried it on. If the goddamned thing hadn’t buttoned over her fat gut, if she’d had to have her raccoon coat altered, if the equally fat woman who ran Mrs. Pearlstein’s had laughed in Mama’s face … But it hadn’t happened. The coat had fit loosely enough and neither his mama nor her old-country girlfriends could tell the difference between mink and cat.
Jake hadn’t forgotten about his own reward, either. He’d gone uptown, to Leighton’s on Broadway, and bought himself a pearl-gray, double-breasted overcoat and a matching homburg. The homburg, with its softly rolled brim, made him look older, more mature. It made him look established. Which was the whole point, really.
“Ya beggin’ days’re over, Jakie-boy,” he said as he dressed. “Time ta show the world where ya comin’ from.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was down on Pitt Street, stepping out of the Packard and walking up to a familiar door. He knocked softly and waited until it opened, until he was face to face with Al O’Neill.
“What could I do for ya, mister?” O’Neill asked.
“Ya don’t remember me?” Jake took off his hat and leaned forward. “I’m insulted.”
“Hey, mister, I see a lotta guys …” Then it hit him and he staggered back. “We’re payin’,” he said. “We’re payin’ everything. We’re payin’ on time.”
“Relax, Al, I ain’t here on business. I’m here on pleasure.”
“Yeah?” O’Neill took another step back, then his face brightened. “Yeah?”
“Everybody gotta get laid, right? If it wasn’t fa that, where would you be?”
O’Neill managed a laugh. “Can’t argue about that one. Now, whatta ya intrested in? Ya got anything special in mind?”
“Young and willin’, Al. That’s all that matters.”