Mob Boss by Jerry Capeci

Author:Jerry Capeci
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

11

CLEVELAND PLACE

It was never about the money. Some weeks, thanks to the loan shark interest collected by Danny Cutaia and other scores that now drifted his way as the new captain, he was taking in as much $10,000. He was glad to have it. He wasn’t about to give it back. But it had never been about the money.

He was satisfied to live in the two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood where his wife had grown up, walking the same streets where he’d learned most of what he knew about being a gangster. If the family traveled, which they did on occasion, they went to the Miami Beach condo Dolores’s parents had left her. It was a small place, not far from the water, but it was fine with him.

He didn’t lust for expensive cars, big or small, like the sporty little job that Hickey DiLorenzo had been driving the last time he had seen him alive. In fact, he didn’t even own a car. Other men drove him around these days, Pete Del Cioppo or Dom Truscello. If his men needed an auto, he bought them one. “Nothing cheap, I didn’t want them in old heaps. But nothing flashy either.”

He didn’t gamble anymore. He’d once enjoyed the toss of dice in a crap game, but that pleasure had ebbed. He’d never cared much about the horses, a passion of many of his pals.

He’d given up smoking. At dinnertime, he still enjoyed a single glass of wine or cognac, but that was it. And there were no girlfriends tucked away in their own apartments. He still had eyes only for the woman who had swept him off his feet that night at the Town & Country Inn out on Flatbush Avenue in 1953, the mother of his five children.

In many ways, Al D’Arco wasn’t much of a mobster. At least he didn’t aspire to be the new neon-light-flashing model that John Gotti was then putting on display to the world as he swaggered through the city’s nightclubs in designer suits.

So what was the point? His special parole status guaranteed him another prison stretch if he was found to have violated the rules, as he did every waking day. A third conviction on any one of the crimes he actively pursued would be likely to send him to prison for most of the good years that, at the age of fifty-six, he could rightfully expect.

Not that he thought much about it, but when pressed Al D’Arco’s answer was that status in the gangster life was every bit as important to him as the family he loved. And respect from those around him was probably even a little bit more so. Money was one key measure of that respect. And at the end of the day, he said, that was probably the one thing that mattered to him most in his life and his chosen line of work. “Yeah, respect. From whoever I had to deal with.”

* * *

He still needed to do something with the money.

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