I wait for his reaction. We keep walking.

“Ah, you’re okay with me,” he says at last. “I like you.”

“Then don’t embarrass me. As far as I’m concerned, right now everything’s forgotten, nothing ever happened, we have a new start.”

That was the end of the conversation. He peeled off and went back to his luncheonette. He never mentioned anything about it, but there was an edge between us after that. He never forgot.

He offered me a job. Mirra wanted me to handle his slot-machine route, make the collections. “I’ll give you three hundred bucks a week,” he said.

That was strange. I knew he respected my abilities, but I couldn’t be sure what was cooking in that off-the-wall mind of his. There was no way I could take the job, because if I did, I’d be married to the guy, under his thumb, like an errand boy—which is what everybody was to Mirra. I’d be looking over my shoulder all the time.

I said, “Look, Tony, I’d be happy to help you now and then, you know. But I got some things going, and three hundred a week just wouldn’t be worth my while to get tied up.”

“Fine,” he said.

I told Lefty about the job offer. “You did the right thing, Donnie,” he said. “Anybody that gets hooked up with that cocksucker ends up getting fucked over or whacked.”

Not long after that, Mirra went on the lam. He snuck out of town in a Volkswagen. He was wanted by the state on another narcotics rap. They caught up with him after about three months, and Mirra was back in the can.

He was sentenced to eight and a half years in New York’s Riker’s Island Prison. Lefty said, “See how tough he is with those niggers out there.”

I was through with Mirra—for a while.

Besides the bookmaking operation, there were all kinds of scams and schemes around. Little ones and big ones. These guys might pull off a $100,000 score one day, rob a parking meter the day after. Anything where there’s a dime to be ripped off.

The key was in the number of scams. Two hundred dollars isn’t a lot, but if you’re hitting up fifty scams for $200 apiece, you’re making some money. We had counterfeit credit cards and stolen credit cards. You could always beat those once or twice before it got hot. They would go in with these cards and buy a lot of electronic equipment that they could sell.

A guy named Nick the Greek regularly supplied Lefty with manifests of cargo ships docked over in Jersey. Lefty would have stuff stolen to order. He showed me the manifests so I could check through them and see if I wanted to buy anything—radios, luggage, clothes. He and his crew could provide all kinds of phony documents. He had a guy in the Department of Motor Vehicles who supplied him with blank drivers’ licenses. You just had to type in the information. One guy paid Lefty $350 for six phony New York State drivers’ licenses and six phony Social Security cards.

For settling a beef between owners of a company at the Fulton Fish Market, Lefty and two of his associates were given twenty percent of the ownership, plus a salary of $5,000 a month. “It’s a shame,” he told me after meeting with the other owners at his club, “that my shares couldn’t be put in my name.” Wiseguys didn’t like to show income or ownership of anything. The cars they drive are almost always registered to somebody else. Lefty didn’t file tax returns.

A typical scam was how we worked cashier’s checks. Lefty told me he had access to cashier’s checks from a bank in upstate New York. “We got a vice-president up there that will authorize cashing the checks when anybody calls him up,” he said. The checks would be used to “buy” merchandise, which we could then resell.

He introduced me to a guy named Larry, who used to own a bar on Seventy-first Street. Larry was the contact on the deal. Larry said he had sat down with some friends of his in the banking business and figured out the best way to work the scam.

He had the stamp machine to certify the checks. He had several guys besides me to pass them. He had eight checks and provided us with a list of eight names, which were the names to be used on the checks. He provided New York State drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards for IDs on the eight names. Bank accounts had been opened in these names. There just wasn’t money in them to cover these bogus checks. When a business would call the bank for verification, giving the name on the check, this vice-president would okay the check. In order to pull this off before the bank caught up with the scheme, all the checks had to be cashed within one week. If we worked it at maximum efficiency, the checks could be worth $500,000.

Larry had a list of stores where we could buy merchandise with the checks, stores innocent of the scheme but places Larry knew could accept cashier’s checks. I was supposed to use the name and ID papers of “John Martin,” and be working for a company named Outlet Stores. In case the merchant wanted to verify that Outlet Stores existed, Larry gave me a number for him to call, where someone would answer “Show-room, Outlet Stores.”

I was to go into a store and select the merchandise I wanted to buy, then tell the merchant I would be back with a cashier’s check in the proper amount. Then I would call a number to reach a guy named Nick. I would give Nick the name of the store and the amount, and Nick would fill in the check and stamp it “certified.”

The guys passing the checks would be spread out in the New York-New Jersey area. I was directed to go to a certain store on Orchard Street, in New York’s lower east side, and buy around $4,000 worth of clothes.

I went to the store, picked out $2,660 worth of men’s clothes, and told the salesman I would be back shortly with a certified check. I left the store and called Nick.

Nick said to meet him at Lefty’s club in an hour. Nick handed me the check, marked with a blue “certified” stamp.

We went back to the store, picked up the clothes, and loaded them in the trunk of his car. Other of his guys would take care of selling the stuff from all the purchases of all the guys.

A week later Larry met me at Lefty’s. He said that he had had trouble getting rid of the clothes I had bought and that he had finally gotten $1,100 for them. After expenses he had $600 left. “I had to give the banker his cut, see,” Larry said. “And then the other two main guys, they hammered me for a bigger cut. You know.”

Lefty was disgusted. “Forget about it,” he said. “Just give us what you got for us, and don’t come back around here no more.”

Half of the $600 was Larry‘s, so he gave me $300. I had to split my end, as always, with Lefty.

I came out of this whole big deal with $150, which I passed on to my contact agent.

After the operation the FBI reimbursed the stores.

Lefty introduced me to a guy named “Fort Lee Jimmy” Capasso (because he was from Fort Lee, New Jersey), a capo in the Bonanno family and a partner of Nicky Marangello. One day I was waiting around in front of Toyland when Fort Lee Jimmy came over and said, “Donnie, like to talk to you.”

He was in his fifties, always seemed like a decent guy.

He took me aside. He says, “Donnie, you seem like a pretty sharp guy. I just want to give you a piece of advice. This business we’re in, you get old fast, and a lot of things you do now you can’t do when you get older. Lot of these guys you see around make a lot of money, then they get older, fifty or sixty, and they’re broke because they didn’t save anything. And now they can’t make so many good moves anymore. So my advice is, Donnie, find somebody you can really trust. Every time you pull a score, take some of that money and give it to that friend and have them keep it for you. And make the rule with that friend that he won’t give you any of that money until you like retire. You can’t go to this guy tomorrow and ask for a grand or two, because he won’t give it to you—that’s the rule you’ve set up. Just keep doing that over the years, so when you get older and can’t be out stealing every day, you got yourself a nice little stash. You don’t have to worry about being old and broke, like a lot of these guys.”