I passed on that, told Jilly I didn’t think I could move it.

There wasn’t any sense in buying anything expensive that I couldn’t identify, couldn’t eventually trace back to the owner. If you can’t trace an item back to the owner, you can’t prove anything in court. Jilly didn’t tell me where he got the coat, and you don’t ask somebody where they got something like that. Unless he had, say, seven or eight of them—a really big score. Then you might say, “Hey, where’d you make a score like that?”

At that point the only reason I had for buying the stuff was to establish credibility, as I’d done with the perfume. But I didn’t need to spend $2,500 for credibility.

The crew was either talking about, or bringing in, loads every day. Price isn’t always negotiable. Even if a potential buyer feels that the price is too high, that doesn’t mean the sellers will drop the price. The high price probably means that they have to give somebody else an end of it: Whoever they got it from wants x amount of money, so for these sellers to make anything they have to put a few bucks on top of that, and they can’t really drop the price. No deal is ever really dead, it just keeps being shopped around.

Tommy the Chief was a fat hood, probably in his fifties. He brought in a case of crushed salted almonds, the kind used in making ice cream. He told Jilly he had fifty-eight more cases in his cellar, stolen from Breyer’s Ice Cream in Long Island City. He had a list of other stuff he said he could get—cocoa, dried milk, and so on, from Breyers. “We got it set up with one of their guys that works as a roaster inside,” Tommy said. “And we also got the security guard who will be on duty when we go in next week. The haul will be worth a hundred G’s.”

Jilly decided to go for it, to rent three twenty-two-foot trucks to haul the stuff away, and a garage to store the swag in over the weekend, until it was moved to the buyer. They brought one truckload of cocoa to the club. They just parked the truck right on the street, and I helped unload it. In that neighborhood, who’s going to say anything about what goes on at the Acerg store? Two days later the load was sold to some guy in Yonkers.

One night Guido took a crew to burglarize a warehouse. They were going to heist four thousand three-piece men’s suits. They had some kid with them to be the outside man, the lookout. While they were inside, somebody tripped a silent alarm. The owner arrived at the warehouse. The outside man panicked and took off without notifying anybody inside. The crew heard the owner coming in and managed to sneak out the back.

When Guido was telling Jilly this the following day, I wondered what the punishment might be on the kid. The crew boss had a wide range of options. Punishment depended on who the boss was and what kind of mood he was in. If Jilly was really ticked off, they might do a bad number on the guy.

Jilly decided they would go back in the next night. As for the lookout, all he said was, “I don’t want that cocksucker with you when you go back in. He can’t come around no more.”

They went back into the warehouse. They didn’t get all four thousand suits. They got about half of them.

I was always on the lookout for an opening to get to the bigger fences, the guys Jilly’s crew was selling to. But whenever I’d suggest that I might be able to use a couple of contacts, they’d say something like, “Give it to us, we’ll bring it to the guy. Don’t worry about it.” And if I said I might have some big score coming, their reaction would be, “Hey, you got a big load, we can get rid of it for you.” They weren’t about to give up their fences.

There was no acceptable reason for me to push to meet the bigger fences, except by coming up with bigger swag to sell.

I wasn’t spending all my time in Brooklyn. I kept poking around in other directions. While bouncing around the Manhattan night spots with the Colombo guys, I met Anthony Mirra. I was introduced to him in a disco then named Igor‘s, which later became Cecil’s, on Fifty-fourth Street.

I knew who Tony Mirra was. He was a member of the Bonanno crime family. He had done about eighteen years in the can for narcotics and other convictions, and he had only gotten out a year or so earlier. I knew that he was involved in anything and everything illegal to make money—gambling, drugs, extortion, and muscle of the type that leads to “business partnerships.” I knew that he was a contract man, with maybe twenty-five hits under his belt. He was mean, feared, and well connected, a good guy for me to know.

I started hanging out with Mirra while I was still running with the Brooklyn guys. Through Mirra I met a good thief. I needed some more potent swag to bring to Jilly’s crew. This thief had a haul of industrial diamonds. I decided to take a shot with these diamonds. I asked the thief if I could take a few samples on consignment to see if I could “middle” them—be the middle man for selling them off. He agreed and gave me ten diamonds.

Selling stolen property like this would not have been sanctioned by the Bureau. I didn’t want to argue with anybody about it. I decided it was worth the chance.

The diamonds I had were worth about $75,000 on the street. I didn’t really want to sell them to Jilly’s crew, I just wanted to show them what I could do. I decided on a price that would be higher than a good street price—to discourage the sale—but not so high that it would look like something was wrong or I didn’t know what I was doing.

I brought the pouch of diamonds into the store and showed them to Jilly and the guys.

“I hit a cargo cage out at the airport,” I said. “I got a guy inside. I give him a cut. I got a buyer already, down on Canal Street. But if you could sell them, I’ll give you the shot. All I want is a hundred grand out of the deal—seventy—five thousand for me and twenty-five thousand for my inside man.”

“That’s kind of high,” Jilly said, “a hundred grand.”

That price would force them to ask for $150,000 to $200,000 in reselling them.

“Hey, what can I tell you?” I said. “My inside guy that set it up wants twenty-five grand. The guy on Canal Street is willing to give me a hundred grand. I’m giving you a shot because I’m with you guys. I need seventy-five grand. So if you could sell them for more than a hundred, anything over that is yours.”

Jilly said to give him a couple days to check with a guy who was out of town. I did. He checked with the guy and said to me, “He’s willing to go for seventy-five.”

“I can’t do it, Jill. I would only get fifty thousand out of the deal, and it’s not worth it. I’ll just off ‘em to the guy down on Canal Street.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Jilly understood, which was just what I wanted. I had made some moves, got some stones—no cop is going to come up with $200,000 of diamonds to sell—showed them that I knew what I was talking about. If Jilly had come back with an offer of, say, $125,000, I couldn’t have backed out of the deal. I would have had to keep my word and sell them to him. That was the chance I took.

It gave me a jump up in credibility, up from the ground floor.

When I first met Jilly, he wasn’t made. Nobody in that crew was. He told me he had grown up in Brooklyn, had been stealing all his life. His dream was to get made, become a true member of the Colombo family.

One morning in early May, I arrived at the club to see Jilly all dressed up—pin-striped suit, dark tie, the works. You don’t usually hang out in a suit and tie. He looked excited, strutting around. He also looked nervous.

He was just leaving when I came in. “Jill,” I said, “where you going dressed like that?”

“I gotta go somewhere,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it later, when I get back.”

He left, and I turned to Vinnie. “What the fuck’s going on?”