Made Men by Greg Smith

Author:Greg Smith [Smith, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2003-02-03T23:00:00+00:00

Around 7:30 on the morning of September 11, 1989, three big American sedans with stolen license plates cruised softly through the awakening streets of Staten Island. This was the one New York City borough that had no subway, and most of the people who lived there wouldn’t get on a subway car anyway, so even at this hour the streets were filled with the one tool essential for life on Staten Island—the automobile. Even though it was early, the three cars fit right in as they cruised past the huge Staten Island Mall and turned onto Richmond Hill Road. They climbed the hill past one condominium development after another, jammed up next to one another like boxes of shoes on a shelf. This was a neighborhood that desperately wanted to be suburban but somehow could not escape its urbanity. Here one found lawns green as a golf course next to abandoned trucks covered with graffiti. The three sedans turned right onto a dead-end street called Wellington Court, the type of Anglophile name commonly applied to low-rent condos. The sedans drove past a series of complexes dense as tenements, but with nice landscaping. One sedan parked curbside almost immediately at the entrance to Wellington Court. This was the crash car. If the police arrived, the crash car would pull out in front of the cop and cause an accident.

The two other sedans continued until they passed 121 Wellington, a four-story redbrick affair with a glass-brick-and-black-marble entrance that looked like it was built in 1970. It was clearly a place that wanted to be something it could not ever be. They pulled to the end of the road, which emptied into acres of tangled woods pocked with abandoned cars and laced with dirt paths where teenagers went to smoke and drink. On Wellington Court, there was only one way out—past the sedans filled with men.

The sedans turned around to face the way back out and edged close to 121 Wellington. Inside the car closest to 121, Anthony Capo sat at the wheel. It was his wife’s car, but he had switched the plates. In the car with him were Jimmy Gallo and Vincent Palermo. Both were making sure the guns they held in their hands were fully loaded and that the safeties were off.

They waited.

At a few minutes past 8:30 A.M., a middle-aged man with a silver pompadour and a rumpled businessman’s suit emerged from 121. He had a briefcase in his hand. He was a real-estate developer of questionable reputation named Fred Weiss. He had just spent the night at the condo apartment he shared with his girlfriend. He walked toward his two-year-old dark green four-wheel-drive Jeep parked curbside. He got out his keys.

At that time Fred Weiss was known as a marginally sophisticated hustler who lived at the edge of legitimacy. For a while he worked as city editor of the Staten Island Advance, where he was viewed as an up-and-coming hustler who seemed to know everybody on the island.

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