"In other words, Tommy Morton only began to see a dollar after he had paid the wiseguys and they'd gotten theirs off the top. That's one of the reasons why Morton hated Lenny and me so much. First, he didn't need a couple of wise-ass kids tike us ruining his business. He had to pay us two hundred a week apiece, and for that he could have hired a real maitre d' and bartender. Also, we were stealing him blind. Everything we stole or gave away came out of his pocket. I know that we used to drive him nuts, but he couldn't do a thing about it.
"But by the end of the summer we were bored. It was around Labor Day weekend. A tough weekend. We decided to take off. Lenny and I hadn't seen Lucchese for about a month. Everybody was on vacation except us. But we knew our future was secure. Lucchese had said that he had something for us in the garment center after the summer.
"Unfortunately, Tommy Morton had this old German chef. If possible, that guy hated us more than Tommy did. He kept feeding us rice and chicken every night as though we were regular employees. He must have sensed or been told how much Morton hated us, so he was going to twist the screws. Finally, on the Thursday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, we were late getting to work. The chef started screaming and yelling at us the minute we walked in the door. He's yelling at us in the dining room. There were people standing around. Early dinner customers. I went nuts. I felt like he was insulting me. The miserable fuck. I couldn't stand it. I ran right at the guy and grabbed him by the neck. Lenny comes over and we picked the guy up by his arms and legs. We carried him into the kitchen and began to shove him into the oven. It must have been about 450 degrees. We couldn't really get him inside, but he wasn't so sure. He screamed and jumped and wriggled until we let him fall out of our grip. The second he hit the floor he was flying. He ran clear out of the joint. He just kept on going, and he never came back. Then Lenny and I walked out and never went back either.
"Paulie was pissed. Tommy Morton must have told him about what we did. Paulie acted as though we had embarrassed him in front of Lucchese. He was so pissed that he made me burn Lenny's car. It was a 1965 yellow Bonneville convertible. Lenny loved that car, but Paulie made me burn it. He put a hit on his own kid's car. He got Tuddy to drive it down the 'hole.' The hole was a body-compacting and car junkyard in Ozone Park that belonged to Jerry Asaro and his son, Vincent. They were with the Bonanno crew. Then Paulie grabs me and he says, 'You go burn the car.' It was crazy. He had given Lenny the car himself. So while he and Tuddy watched me from their own car, I poured half a gallon of gas in the front seat and lit a match. I watched it all burn up.
"The summer was over, but I was already into a million things. A day never went by without somebody coming up with a scheme. We had a neighborhood girl who used to work for the company handling the MasterCharge cards. She used to bring us office memos about security checkups and credit checks. We also bought lots of cards from people who worked in the post office, but then the companies started sending letters to their customers asking if they had received a card yet. But having somebody inside the bank was the best. We had one girl who used to get us duplicate cards, and we'd know the amount of credit attached. Before a card got into an envelope to be mailed, I had a duplicate. If a card had a $500 credit line, for instance, we'd go to stores where we were known or places we had. I'd punch out ten credit-card slips. The guys we knew in the stores would call and get authorization for a $390 stereo, a $450 television, a $470 wristwatch— whatever. The person waiting for the card never got it, and we had about a month before the card was usually reported stolen. I'd try to do all the heavy purchases as soon as I got the card. The guys in the stores didn't care, since they were getting their money. They would just take the authorized slips to the bank and deposit them like cash.
"These days they have traps for this kind of thing in the computer system, but back then I was making a lot of money. If I wanted to, I could have run up $10,000 worth of merchandise in a day. Even working strange stores was easy. There are a hundred items in every store, and you've always got your fake driver's license all typed out and your backup ID. We used to get fake IDs from Tony the Baker' in Ozone Park. He was a real baker. He had a bakery that made bread. But he'd also make up fake driver's licenses for you while you waited. He had all the forms. You couldn't believe how good he was. Somehow he had the code from Albany, so that even a state trooper couldn't tell it was wrong. He charged fifty dollars for a set, and that included a driver's license, Social Security card, and voter registration card.
"When I finished with the cards I'd sell them to 'under the limits' people, who would take the banged-out card and go out and buy things that were under the authorization limit. For instance, on some cards the store will call up for authorization if the item being bought is over fifty dollars or over one hundred dollars. 'Under the limit' buyers always make purchases below the call-in figure. They'll go into department stores or shopping malls and bang out forty-five-dollar items on a fifty- dollar card all afternoon. You can go out and buy blenders, radios, cigarettes, razor blades—the kind of stuff that's easy to sell off at half the price—and in two hours make a good payday for yourself. Stacks Edwards, who was a tall, skinny black guy who hung out with the crew, was an 'under the limit' master. He'd do a day at a shopping center with a panel truck until he ran out of room. Then he had an army of people who used to go out and sell his stuff in factories, or he'd take it to small mom-and-pop stores in Harlem, or places in New Jersey that would buy his whole truckload.
"It was Jimmy Burke who put me into cigarettes. I knew about them from having been in North Carolina. A carton of cigarettes was $2.10 in the South at the time, while the same carton would cost $3.75 just because of the New York taxes. Jimmy came by the cabstand one day with his car full of cigarettes. He gave me a hundred cartons and said I should try and sell them. I wasn't sure, but he said I should give it a try. I put the cartons in the trunk of my car and drove over to a nearby construction site. I sold every carton I had in ten minutes. The working guys were saving about a buck a carton. It was worth it to them. But I saw I could make twenty-five cents a carton in ten minutes for my end. That night I went to Jimmy's house and paid him for the hundred cartons he had given me and asked for three hundred more. I took as many as I could fit in the trunk. The next day I sold them in ten minutes again. I said to myself, 'Ain't this nice,' and I went back and got another three hundred for my trunk and two hundred more for my backseat. This was adding up to a hundred twenty-five bucks for a couple of hours' work.
"Jimmy came by the cabstand one day with a skinny kid who was wearing a wiseguy suit and a pencil mustache. It was Tommy DeSimone. He was one of those kids who looked younger than he was just because he was trying to look older. Jimmy had been a friend of Tommy's family for years, and he wanted me to watch out for Tommy and to teach him the cigarette business—help make him a few bucks. With Tommy helping me, pretty soon we're making three hundred, four hundred dollars a day. We sold hundreds of cartons at construction sites and garment factories. We sold them at the Sanitation Department garages and at the subway and bus depot. This was around 1965, and the city wasn't taking it very seriously. We used to sell them on the street, and we'd give a couple of cartons away to the cops just to leave us alone.