“He’s getting his badge today,” Vinnie said. “He gets made.”

We waited all day for Jilly. When he came back, he was ecstatic, as proud as a peacock. “Getting made is the greatest thing that could ever happen to me,” he said. “I been looking forward to this day ever since I was a kid. Maybe someday you’ll know how it feels. This is the fucking ultimate!”

“Hey, congratulations!” I said. “Who you gonna be with?”

“Charlie Moose.”

Charlie Moose was going to be his captain. “Charlie Moose” Panarella was well-known to law-enforcement people. He was a mean guy, an enforcer. He was a high-ranking captain, and Jilly would now be a soldier in Charlie Moose’s crew, and Jilly couldn’t have been prouder.

That night we all partied together for his celebration. But now everybody treated him with more respect. He was a made guy now.

To become a made guy, to a street crook who is Italian, is a satisfaction beyond measure. A made guy has protection and respect. You have to be Italian, and be proposed for membership in the Mafia family, voted on unanimously by bosses and captains, and inducted in a secret ceremony. Then you are a made guy, “straightened out,” a wiseguy. No one, no organization, no other Mafia family can encroach on the turf of a made guy without permission. He can’t be touched. A Mafia family protects its members and its businesses. Your primary loyalty is to your Mafia family. You are elevated to a status above the outside world of “citizens.” You are like royalty. In ethnic neighborhoods like Jilly‘s, nobody has more respect than a made guy. A made guy may not be liked, may even be hated, but he is always respected. He has the full authority and power of his Mafia family behind him.

One Friday, Jilly was keyed up over a big score he was setting up for the weekend. He had a man inside a trucking company who was going to give him the keys to three trailers loaded with furs and leather jackets. That same inside guy was going to deactivate the Babco alarm systems in the trucks.

Monday morning, Jilly was pissed off with everybody. On Sunday night they had gone into the truck yard. They had opened two of the trailers. When they opened the third, the alarm went off. The whole crew panicked and took off from the scene without grabbing a single item.

It drives the guys crazy to miss a score like that when they were so close, just because somebody fucked up. It also makes them look bad. Jilly had had to get permission to take those loads. On a big score like that, when you’re a low-echelon made guy, a soldier, you have to get permission to make sure you’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes—and also to put the higher-ups on notice that some money will be coming in.

For permission Jilly had gone to his captain, Charlie Moose.

Your captain gets a piece of the action on whatever you do. So you go to him and tell him you’re going to pull a big job. If you don’t tell him ahead of time and he finds out about it, or you tell him after the fact, the captain might start thinking, They got more out of this job than they’re telling me, and that’s why they didn’t ask me up front.

Because that’s what happens all the time. It’s all a big bullshit game. You go to your captain and tell him you’re going to pull off a job worth a hundred grand. Usually the split is half with your captain. So right off the bat you have to give him fifty percent. The captain in turn has to kick in, say, ten percent upstairs, to the boss.

Captains are greedy, just like everybody else. And each captain sets the rules for his crews. He can set any rules he wants. So maybe a captain says, “I want sixty percent, instead of fifty.” Because what he will do is keep fifty and give the other ten percent to the boss. Instead of taking it out of his end, he’s taking it out of yours. Some captains demand that each one of their guys give them a certain amount of money per week, say $200, like a rent payment. That insures they get some money. Plus a percentage of the action.

And that’s because everybody’s playing this same bullshit game, trying to keep as much as they can, pass along as little as they can get away with, regardless of what the rules say. They always fudge. They figure they’re out doing the job, who wants to give up half of what they get to somebody that’s not even there?

So you never told anybody the whole story with money. If you made $100,000 on a score, you might tell your captain you came out with $80,000. That was the standard. It goes that way right up the line. That’s why nobody totally trusts anybody.

Later on, when my position became a connected guy, I had to split whatever I supposedly made on scores with the soldier I was under. He kicked in to his captain. That shows the captain two things: that the soldier is out earning; and that he’s loyal in kicking into the treasury. Same thing with the captains; they keep in good favor by throwing a piece of the action to the boss and the underboss.

Simply put: When you’re operating within the mob, for every score you do, you know that you’re going to split it with somebody at one point or another; you’re going to give some of your earnings up. Everybody plays the game of holding something back. Just so you don’t get caught.

Now, the thing is, it’s a dangerous game, because if you get caught, you’re liable to get whacked—killed. Holding out money from partners, captains, and bosses is, in a business strictly based on greed, a serious offense. If you did get caught, the questions are: How much did you skim and who did you keep it from? Some captains or bosses would have you whacked for withholding $5,000. The thing to remember is, no amount of money is insignificant to these guys. You might get whacked for $200—if it wasn’t your first time skimming, or if other guys needed to be shown a lesson, or if your captain or boss just felt like having you whacked.

So the practice of skimming, from your own family, was common, and so was the result of getting whacked. It would be nothing to have these guys whacked, the guys in Jilly’s crew. They weren’t even heavyweights, just underlings.

So in this case, Jilly and the failed score on the loads of leathers and furs, he had gotten permission from Charlie Moose to take the load, and then he had to go back to Charlie Moose and tell him that the score fell through. Nobody likes to be in a position of having to give his captain such news because, first of all, Charlie Moose would be very disappointed to hear that the money he counted on will not be forthcoming; and second, it would be obvious to Charlie Moose that this crew of Jilly’s fucked up like nitwits.

That was why Jilly was pissed off that particular morning.

Charlie Moose squeezed his crews. That was a subject of common complaint among Jilly’s crew. They’d bitch and moan about Charlie Moose. They’d complain that they couldn’t do anything without his say-so and that he was taking too big a cut of every score. They were all agreed that they’d short him every chance they got.

“What that lousy son of a bitch does,” Guido told me one day at the store, “is whenever anybody in the crew makes a score, you have to take all the money into him, and then he divides it up. He don’t trust us, then we don’t trust him. Fuck him. We pull in a hundred grand, we tell him we got seventy-five. How the fuck’s he gonna know the difference?”

Jilly said, “You better shut up with that stuff. You’ll get us all killed talking like that.”

One way Charlie might know the difference was if somebody there was a snitch, a rat. But that was unlikely. The mentality of these guys is: Once a snitch, always a snitch. So if a snitch rats out these guys to Charlie Moose, even though it might be to the captain’s benefit, Charlie is thinking, “These are the guys he’s with all the time, his own crew, and if he’s willing to rat them out, how do I know that if he gets caught in a box sometime, he’s not gonna snitch to the cops?”