after a cup of coffee, it was time for a three-hundred-and-thirty-mile drive: I was due to meet another group of potentially terrifying men.
Italian Americans.
Taps side of nose.
Wise guys.
Winks conspiratorially.
GoodFellas.
Bad-a-bing!
The Middle Village Social Club
Middle Village is an area of Queens, New York mostly inhabited by Irish and Italian Americans, two ethnic groups which traditionally get along with each other pretty well.
I have been invited to say hello to the boys of a particular social club. I have seen these places before, in gangster pictures like Donnie Brasco, GoodFellas and Casino. Not to mention in real footage of FBI stings and wiretappings on the Gambino family clubs of John Gotti and Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano. Am I really going to hang out with organised crime hoods, with mobsters? Is that an ethical thing to do? To contribute to the glamour and status of violent criminals?
Well, this social club is largely different. It is – how can I put it nicely? – a home for failed gangsters. For guys who didn’t quite make it. Possibly because they were too nice. The old ones are really very old indeed and the young ones, like Mikey who wears a Godfather t-shirt under the obligatory leather jacket, have earned more money from doing bit-parts in The Sopranos than from anything illegal.
At least so I am led to believe.
I am welcomed inside this little two-room house by Mikey and the boys. The back room is given over to card games; the front room has a big screen TV, sofa, a bar and walls that are covered with sporting photographs and posters. Betting seems to play a large part in the life of this club.
I am not surprised Mikey has found work in TV and movies, he has a central-casting low hairline and a ‘you talking to me?’ posture and gait. He cannot stop smiling. He cannot stop telling stories. He cannot stop talking. I have not been in there half an hour before he tells me a story he has already told. The others all meet my confused gaze and roll their eyes. ‘Good old Mikey, he don’t know when to shut up,’ an old boy whispers to me. I suppose that is why he has failed to make it as a button man or whatever the phrase is. That and the fact that he just seems too, well, too good-natured, too lacking in guile. He is like a great puppy. He tells twice a story about chasing a thief through the neighbourhood, tackling him and punching his lights out before the police arrived, so perhaps I am being a little naïve. He is anxious for me to know that he would only ever show violence to someone ‘nasty’. The thief had stolen a child’s bicycle. ‘And dat,’ he says, ‘youse do not do.’ You will think ‘youse’ is a bit old hat, a bit Damon Runyon, but I promise you that is how he said it.
I sit down on the sofa with Dave, who tells me tales about ‘da old days’. An immensely complex story about cocking up a horse-nobbling takes ten minutes and is filled with the kind of colour and splendour that fiction cannot match. Some time back in the forties, when Dave was young, he had ‘a sure ting’, he had inside knowledge of a horse which would win a race ‘on account of how he had dis drug, dis whatchercallit’.
I am stared at through Dave’s one good eye and nudged quite violently to provide the name of this drug, as if I am an expert. This puzzles me. I had no idea that there was a drug which could guarantee a horse winning a race. ‘Um, a stimulant of some kind maybe …’
‘Dat’s it! Stimu- like you said.’
I get an even sharper dig in the ribs for having solved the mystery of what the drug might have been. I am beginning to revise my opinion of the non-violent nature of these people. Anecdotal Assault may not carry a heavy sentence, may not even be recognised in law as a crime against the person, but by the time I rise from the sofa I am more or less black and blue. Dave told me tales of his days running numbers, laying bets and serving time in prison (only on-track betting, OTB, is legal in America, so all street bookies are liable to arrest). ‘We always ordered dinner from Giovanni’s restaurant to be delivered to our cell. The sergeant would let us make the call so long as we included a linguini for him. It was a good arrangement. Worked well for twenty years till they rebuilt the station house and moved the sergeant to another precinct. What are you gonna do?’ All his stories seemed to feature him in a disastrous situation where, as a small-time bookie’s runner, he lost money for someone, forgot to lay off a bet, got in trouble, ended up in prison. The speed with which he can still shade odds and rattle through the 13–5, 11–4-type ratios made my head spin. He may have liked to present himself as one of nature’s losers, but he was clearly not a fool.
Whenever I press these old boys and use words like ‘Mafia’ or ‘cosa nostra’, they smile and raise their hands in innocent bewilderment. I am beginning to think they are simply charming senior citizens who just happen to have the same accents and ethnicity as Mafiosi.
Then I spot the bullet holes.
You can see one in the group photograph, in the metal door upright, just next to the Star-Spangled Banner. There are more inside.
‘Yeah, that was a drive-by. We was playing cards. A bullet just missed Don’s head. So much.’ Mikey brings his forefinger and thumb very close together.
‘But why?’ I ask.
‘Sheeesh. What are you gonna do?’
Which is no kind of answer.
The guy who really owns and runs the club turns up. A barrel-chested fellow about five foot tall. There is something in his eye which compels me to stop asking questions. He too is friendly, but it is impossible not to notice when the mere presence of someone in a room shuts everyone else up.
He has the extraordinary ability to silence Mikey. I smell power.
John the Cabbie
My guide in New York City has been a cabbie called John. He lives round the corner from the Italian social club and he is the one who effected my introduction. John is of Irish stock; indeed he quite proudly tells me how he had worked hard for Noraid, the ‘charity’ that funded the IRA, back in the days of the Troubles.
As we drive to his yellow-cab garage, which is like a scene out of the seventies sitcom Taxi, I ask him how he feels about the new accord in Northern Irish politics.
‘I fought for thirty years to let Ian Paisley rule?’ he says. ‘How do you think I feel?’
Mm. In a short while I have met deer-hunters, Mafia criminals and a man who raised money for the IRA. And I liked them all. I saw their points of view.
What is happening to me?
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
