The King of West Brooklyn

By David Alexander

"The Mezzatestas, David Alexander's fictitious crime family in The King of West Brooklyn, are the new Corleones." -- USA Today.

"If mob-related hits haven't already put Gravesend, the crime capital of West Brooklyn, on the map, The King of West Brooklyn is destined to do so." --

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Alexander Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692715796

David Alexander

David Alexander was a founder of Lion Publishing, and for 28 years a Director of the company. He spent much time researching and taking photographs for books such as The Lion Handbook to the Bible. Helping people to understand the Bible and communicating its message was a key factor in his work. David died in 2002.

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Prologue

Breakfast at Santo’s

Breakfast at Santo’s

At seven o’clock in the morning the lobsters in Santo’s tank were whistling Sinatra tunes to each other. Dominick de Venise could hear them through the glass. They couldn’t sing but they could whistle. He’d read that somewhere. They broadcast through their antennas like miniature radios.

They whistled Sinatra tunes because they were all doomed and they knew it. Strangers in the Night was their favorite.

They recognized de Venise too. Every morning, on the early side, when he had breakfast at Santo’s, he scrunched up against the glass and they stared at him with their stalked U-boat periscope eyes. There were about twenty of them, their big claws tied, lying piled one atop the other, feebly waving their feelers, twitching their jointed legs; weak, dying, trapped and hopeless.

Jeez, de Venise thought, the fuckin’ things are in prison. It’s a death sentence.

He studied their shells. They were tinged with beautiful pastel blues, yellows, purples and other subtle shades of natural color. No way you could just call these giant sea bugs. They were animals, like a cat or a dog.

Imagine throwing Boots or Fido into a pot of boiling water then eating him on a plate, de Venise thought. Che infamita!  Che mala imbroglia! This was bullshit of the first degree. Bullshit beyond redemption.

De Venise knew what they were trying to tell him. De Venise, get us the fuck outa here!

But he couldn’t help them. De Venise was shouting the same thing to God, and God wasn’t listening to de Venise either. Maybe God was in a diner looking into a fish tank and inside was a Dominick de Venise lobster singing out for a lifeline, and God stood there thinking, Babes, I wish I could help you out, but I got problems of my own.

De Venise straightened up and saw Santo standing behind the small bar against the back wall that doubled as the cashier’s desk. Santo, short and big and round, in blue satin baseball jacket over white mock turtleneck shirt, was shaking his graying head. De Venise knew exactly what he was thinking. Still watching them lobsters. This de Venise he’s pazz’.

De Venise waved to Santo and sat down at the usual booth. He slid across to the window side where he could keep an eye on his ‘Cuda parked on the gravel in the apron lot outside.

Thieves everywhere in Bensonhurst, even this early, even in the rain. You always had to be on the lookout. He’d spotted some boost artist tailing him for weeks already. It happened every so often. A customized 1973 Plymouth Barracuda, fire-engine red with a set of heavy Dunlops on rear coilovers with chrome headers was a beautiful score. A car like that could bring seventy, eighty grand in the US and  twice that much in Japan. Twenty minutes after they boosted it, the car would be already packed in a shipping container at the Sunset Park docks waiting for an ocean voyage to sayonara-land aboard some Yokohama-bound smuggler tub.

Whoever was tailing de Venise didn’t know who he was dealing with. De Venise put the word out through Bolly the Boost that the fuck had better look elsewhere for a score. The fuck didn’t listen. So Bolly the Boost and de Venise paid him a visit one day. They dragged him into a van the Boost had stolen in the Bronx and drove the kid out to the Boost’s Arthur Kill Road haunts in Staten Island where they beat the living shit out of him. The cops found him the next morning on the front lawn of an 18th century Queen Anne farmhouse in Old Richmond Town with nothing on except the strips of silver duck tape around his arms and legs and covering his mouth. De Venise hadn’t seen the punk around for a week. He hoped the kid had been paying attention.

De Venise was running on a short fuse. He didn’t have time to fuck around. He had his mind on arson. The de Venise lobster was thinking fire as the only possible way out of his watery grave. For weeks already de Venise had known he'd have to torch the place. There was no other way out. He should have seen it coming from a mile off, but he hadn't. So now he had no choice but arson to get himself even.

The rain had given him an alibi for awhile. The crazy rain, the anormale rain that had been coming down for weeks and had the New York weather forecasters foaming at the mouths to outdo each other in predicting when it would end and give the five boroughs a friggin' break. Because it was so heavy, that rain had meant a stay of execution for the building, and to torch a place in a rain like that meant dealing with more x-factors than de Venise was willing to juggle.

So the building still stood, the Place still survived. For the moment at least it stood. But it was going to go sooner or later anyway, just like the lobsters in the big tank that Santo kept across from the cash register near the entrance to the diner on 84th Street and Bay Parkway in which de Venise was having breakfast. Like those pathetic giant sea-roaches, with thick red rubber bands immobilizing their handcuffed claws, crawling through the mucky gravel at the bottom, the Place lived on borrowed time.

And just like he always somehow hated himself about not doing something to save at least one lobster whenever he ate at Santo’s diner, de Venise would hate himself for what he would soon have to do to the Place. But the Place was doomed. Just like Santo’s lobsters were doomed. Just like so many other things in this lousy world that managed to wind up on the wrong side of the balance sheet.

Once upon a time, a fabric sponging operation like the family's shop on the West Streets of Gravesend, Brooklyn would have been a surefire money maker, like the restaurant business or the undertakers. But those days were long gone. The textile mills in this country were closing left and right, and even the ones in Europe were going under. Mostly dry goods now came from Singapore, Korea and China, and those people had their own operations. They didn't need de Venise's shop in West Brooklyn. He'd begun to diversify ten years before to stay in the black, but a couple of years later he was right back to square one.

About five years ago, when de Venise had first seen no option but to burn the place down, he'd saved the business by going to Primo Toto. That, he’d soon learned, had been a big mistake, although it had looked like the only way out at the time. Primo had done de Venise a favor because they had come up together in the neighborhood, because he was de Venise's old cugine, and especially because he was the second cousin of Sina de Venise, de Venise's ex-wife, and Sina was the sister of Primo's boss, or capo, Tony Pug, who was padrino of the Mezzatesta crews.

Primo had given de Venise the standard deal which effectively made Primo a silent partner in the business. Because Primo's mother and father had Sicilian blood and de Venise's father came from Lucca, he could have taken practically everything. Those were the rules of the game, at least back then. In the Mafia, a Sicilian outranked anybody else. You had family from Lucca, Milan, Genoa, anywhere else in Italy, you were second-class, an outsider. You could never be made, you could be killed like a dog and nobody could get the guy who did it. A pazzeria grossa, but that's how it was.

Aside from this, de Venise was also half-Jewish, a mata Crist’ to some. His mother being the former Roberta Plonski, whose Viennese great grandparents had fled Austria on the last boat out of occupied Holland in 1940. De Venise was the only kid at Benson Avenue’s own Lafayette High who could curse you out in German, Yiddish and Italian in addition to old-fashioned Brooklynese -- forget about it. These days it was different than it used to be. Since the seventies if you had an Italian father you could still be made, no problem. But there still were prejudices, and even when a guy who was half-Italian made his bones he had to look over his shoulder because the rest of the Guineas would point a finger at the mata Cristo -- the Christ-killer -- to save their own asses by branding him as a rat.

So in effect Primo had done de Venise a favor when he became a silent partner in Venice Italy Fabric Sponging and Finishing International Inc. for twenty-five percent of the gross. He could have gotten away with fifty or sixty.

The cash injection had cured the patient. At first, anyway, but the shot in the arm didn't last long either. The monthly tribute, the points de Venise paid to Primo, was fast bleeding him dry. A couple of times he had seriously debated holding out and not paying for a month, but he'd never gone through with it. Friend or no friend, holding out on Primo would have wound de Venise up getting sawed in half and stuffed in two gasoline drums off South Conduit Avenue, Queens, near the expressway turnoff onto nearby JFK airport where several similar gasoline drums had been discovered over the years.

Not that torching the place was a much better option, but at least this way de Venise would have some room to maneuver. Primo's people wouldn't believe his bullshit, but they might have to put up with the fire just, as they said, fuckin' happening. This way de Venise would hand over half the insurance payout to Primo and he'd leave de Venise in peace.

De Venise's father Mario had overinsured the place and he'd never changed the policies, paying the inflated premiums through the schnozzol'. Now de Venise would cash in. With his split de Venise would still retain nearly half a million dollars. That would be enough to set him up somewhere else, free and clear. Anyway, he had no alternative. It was either torch the shop or sell his share to Primo and lose every penny. In the end Primo would torch the Place anyway.

Still, it would be rough. Like killing a childhood friend. The old man had slaved to build the business when he'd gotten out of the Army with a government loan. As a kid de Venise had hung around the Place, learning everything about the business. The smell of virgin milled fabric would never leave him. To this day he sometimes even smelled it in his dreams.

A lot of that was real too. The fibers had killed Mario de Venise. Asbestos -- forget that shit: this stuff is ten times worse than asbestos. Thirty-nine years of breathing that garbage air put him in an oxygen tent. De Venise had it on the lungs too, but he didn't give a crap. He still smoked a pack of Luckies a day. Let them carry him out, he figured. When he died, he died. That was it -- bing, bang, boom -- end of story. In the meantime, de Venise wanted to live life as a man, not as half an invalid.

It's funny how things you thought were permanent turn out to be made of nothing after all. First de Venise's marriage went, now the shop would go too. If you'd have stopped de Venise on the street two years before and told him he'd lose his wife and his business in twenty-four months he'd probably have smacked you right in the mouth.

True, he still had the house. Nobody was taking that away. Thank Christ Sina hadn't gotten her way and forced him to move to Staten Island like she'd wanted. Che mala infamita that would have been! The two-story brick building on West 10th off Highlawn Avenue in Gravesend meant something to de Venise he could never put into words. It was a part of him, a part of Dominick de Venise, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, brick of his prick. If nothing else it connected him to the best time of his life, when he was a kid in Gravesend, growing up on the streets, playing games like stickball, Skelly, and Co-Co-Caleevio.

In a lot of ways de Venise's whole life was there in a nutshell. He hadn't realized it then, but life had turned out just like those street games as a kid. There was the guy who threw the ball against the iron bracing of the curb, and that guy’s aim was to make the ball go high or low, fast or slow, to psyche you out, prevent you from catching it. The other guys in the field had to catch the Spauldine or the Pensy Pinkie on the fly to score. Each was in competition with the other. You called the ball on the fly. You claimed it as yours. But that didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t muscle you. You caught it on the fly, then you scored. You could throw up your hands and yell, Co-Co-Caleevio!

Bing, bang, boom -- you had made yourself a score, you were the Man. Catching the ball on one bounce was good, but no winner. Two bounces you barely made it. Three you were out. Then and later de Venise had tried to catch all the balls on the fly. Sometimes he made it, sometimes he didn't. If some other kid tried to muscle his action, he shoved him hard, tried to knock him on his ass. But de Venise always caught them on at least two bounces, never three. That much he could honestly say; sometimes he'd barely scraped by, but nobody could call de Venise a loser.

■

De Venise snapped out of his reverie over a plate of brown toast smeared with salted butter. He went off like that sometimes, in the middle of things, just ditzing out. Lately, that is. What with all the shit on his mind. It was still raining, he saw, as he peered through the plate glass window, looking his 'Cuda over with an eye out for thieves.

As he raised the thick-rimmed China cup to his lips, he felt a hard thump between the shoulders.     

How ya doing, de Venise? Everything OK? Want more coffee?

Santo had just come by with a pot of coffee, interrupting de Venise's thoughts.

Yeah, just a drop, de Venise answered.

Wait, I get you a fresh cup.

Santo signaled to the Mexican bus boy to come over and take the old cup and saucer away.

Santo sat down across from de Venise.

De Venise knew Santo from years back when he'd owned a pizzeria on Fort Hamilton Parkway. Santo was a Napolitano, and proud of it. When de Venise had first asked Santo what part of Italy he was from, he'd simply turned, showed de Venise his Roman profile, and asked, "A-where you t'ink?"

Santo was the salt of the earth. He'd not only give you the shirt off his back, but the shirts off his sons' backs too.

"So how you like this stupid rain, huh? E mala figura, eh? Stupid, this rain," Santo went on.

Yeah, it's stupid all right, this rain, de Venise agreed.

Must be bad for business, huh de Venise?

Santo offered this observation as the bus boy came back with a fresh steaming cup, straight from the bottom of the urn.

Everything's bad for business these days, Santo.

Yeah, tell me about it.

Hey, Santo, de Venise returned, changing the subject, how much you charge me for that whole lobster tank over there?

What are you, crazy, de Venise? You telling me you want the whole tank?

Yeah, that's what I said. How much for the whole fuckin' tank?

I don't know, de Venise, Santo answered, "Nobody ever ask me before and I never t’ink about it. Those lobsters cost me maybe forty bucks apiece, that's like two hundred bucks. What you want it for?

I don't know, de Venise said. Maybe I just want to throw 'em off the Canarsie Pier or something.

Eh, what are you now, de Venise, some kind of whacko animal lover? Santo said back.

"You wanna save the whales maybe too now, eh? Look, de Venise, even if I sell you the whole tank full of lobsters, what happens? I tell you what happens -- I just pick up the phone and order another load from Sal the fish man. That’s what happens. The customers they want to eat the lobsters, so I feed them the lobsters. It's that simple. Don't be no fuckin’ coglione. You got other worries than the lobsters, okay?"

Yeah, you're right, Santo, de Venise reluctantly agreed.

He sipped some of the coffee which wasn't hot enough, then checked his watch, even though he still had plenty of time, and got up.

It would definitely be a waste of time.

De Venise said so-long to Santo and headed for the cashier, then out into the rain-swept streets of Bay Ridge – or was it Bensonhurst, he’d never figured out which was where on these border streets. He took one last look at the lobster tank.

De Venise, get us the fuck outta here, he still heard them broadcast through their antennas.

Shaking his head ruefully, De Venise walked out into the rain. It was late September and still dark out. Pieces of bark from the old elms and sycamores lining the street had shaken loose and fallen from the trees. They littered the gleaming sidewalks. De Venise had never seen so much bark come down all at once. The pieces crunched beneath the soles of his Gucci loafers as he walked toward his ‘Cuda.

No fucking thieves had come near. Good for them.

And now a car alarm, distant yet shrill, suddenly broke the morning stillness. Blocks away, from somewhere beyond brick walls to muffle its cries, it wailed in the morning twilight.

It was a rainy Tuesday morning in West Brooklyn. The start of a week of steady rain as Dominick de Venise left Santo’s Diner and headed for his car.

BOOK ONE:

Tough Luck

My name is Dominick de Venise. A lot of people just call me Dee. I am a professional criminal, a career criminal, a gangster. I do it because I like doing it. Not out of any sick compulsion, bad genes, personality disorders or other bullshit like that. You got a problem with that, fuck you. We don’t need to pursue this shit any further. Because in that case you are not going to believe a lot of this shit that will be described here in these pages. Such as that there is a war being fought in the streets, a war with real guns and real bodies. A war where cops are bought and the law is a joke. A law where only the players stand a chance of coming out alive, and where only the cugines, the wise guys -- call it the Mafia if you want -- are players.

I also do it because I’m good at it and it’s always made me money. And one more thing – I don’t owe nobody gotz. Don’t even expect me to be reasonable. I was through being reasonable a long time ago. You know what my definition of being reasonable is? You hit them first, before they hit you. My motto is Get away with whatever you can. Your only sin is to fail to get what you want, or to be outwitted by your enemies. My first commandment is Thou shalt not be poor. The less money you have, the less you exist, because to be without money in the United States of America is to be become a ghost, to become invisible, to be without rights of any meaningful kind whatsoever.

Sometimes I hate doing things but I know I have to do them, but that’s just the way it’s gotta be. This was the case when it became necessary to commit arson on the family business. Still, sometimes I do entertain doubts, I’ll admit it. This was one of those times.

For weeks I'd known I'd have to torch the place. There was no other way to get my ass out of the hole I was in. Dumb shit, stunaz'. I should have seen it coming from way off. But I didn't. So now I had no choice but arson to get myself even.

Once upon a time, a fabric sponging operation like the family's shop across from the subway yards on Stillwell Avenue off the West Streets would have been a surefire money maker, like the restaurant business or the undertakers.

Those days were long gone. The textile mills in this country were closing left and right, and even the surviving ones in Europe were going under. Most of the shit was coming in from Singapore, Korea and China these days, and those people had their own operations. They didn't need my shop in West Brooklyn. We'd begun to diversify ten years ago to stay in the black, but a couple of years later we were right back to square one.

About five years ago when I first saw no option but to burn the place down, I saved the business by going to Primo Toto. That was a mistake I know now, but it looked like the only way out at the time.

Primo, who was il capo bastone, or underboss to Don Antonio Pugliese, did me a favor because we came up together in the neighborhood, because he was my old friend. He gave me the standard deal which made him a silent partner in the business. Because his mother and father had Sicilian blood and my people came from Lucca, he could have taken practically everything. Those were the rules of the game when we did the deal.

In the Mafia, a Sicilian outranked anybody else. You had family from Lucca, Milan, Genoa, anywhere else in Italy, you were second class, an outsider. You could never be made, you could be killed like a dog and nobody could get the guy who did it. A fuckin' pazzeria gigante if there ever was one, but that's how it was, and still is today.

So like I said, Primo was doing me a favor when he became a silent partner in Venice Italy Fabric Sponging and Finishing International Inc. for twenty-five percent. He could have gotten away with fifty or sixty. That bailed us out. At first, anyway, but the shot in the arm didn't last too long either. The monthly tribute I was paying to Primo was bleeding me dry. A couple of times I seriously debated holding out and not paying for a month, but I never went through with it. Friend or no friend, holding out on Primo could wind me up sawed in half and stuffed in a gasoline drum in the ass-end of Bergen Beach out near JFK.

Not that torching the place would be that much better, but at least that way I'd have some room to maybe maneuver a little. Primo's people wouldn't believe my bullshit, but they might have to put up with the fire just … you know … happening. This way I'd sign over half the insurance money to Primo and he'd leave me the fuck alone.

My father Mario had overinsured the place and I'd never changed the policies, paying the inflated premiums through the nose. Now I'd cash in. With my split I'd still walk with about half a mil. Not much these days, sure, but it might be enough to set myself up somewhere else. Anyway, I had no alternative. None. It was either torch the shop or sell my share to Primo and lose everything in paying off the markers he held on me. In the end Primo would probably torch it anyway.

Still, it would be rough. A real bitch, in fact. Like killing a childhood friend. The old man, he’d slaved to build the business when he'd gotten out of the Army with a government loan and a soldier’s pension. As a kid I'd hung around the place, learning everything about the business. The smell of fabric would never leave me. Sometimes I even smelled it in my dreams.

A lot of that was real too. Those fibers --- they’d killed Mario de Venise. You heard of asbestos? Forget about it. This shit is ten times worse. Thirty-nine years of breathing in the air wound him up in an oxygen tent. I had it on the lungs too, but I didn't give a crap. I still smoked a pack a day -- let them carry me out. When I died, I died. That was it. Bing, bang, boom. In the meantime, I wanted to live life as a man, not as half an invalid.

It's funny how things you thought were permanent turn out to be made of sand. First my marriage, now the shop. If somebody would have stopped me on the street two years ago and told me, "Hey, cugine, you're losin' your wife and your business in twenty-four months," I'd have whacked him one.

Thankfully, I still had the house. Nobody was taking that away from me. Thank Christ Sina didn't get her way and force me to move to Staten Island like she'd wanted. Fuckin' infamita. The two-story brick building on West 10th and Highlawn meant something to me I could never put into words.

Gravesend Brooklyn, the West End of the Borough of Kings. Here they called it West Brooklyn. It was a part of me, a piece of Dominick de Venise. It connected me to the best time of my life, when I was a kid in Gravesend, growing up on the streets, playing games like stickball, off-the-point and Co-Co-Caleevio.

In a lot of ways my whole life was there in a nutshell in those schoolyards we played ball in. I didn't realize it then, but it was just like those games as a kid. You had to catch the Spauldine or the Pensy Pinkie on the fly to score. Then you could throw up your hands and yell, Co-Co-Caleevio. Bing, bang, boom -- you made a score, you were the man. Catching it on one bounce was good but no winner. Two bounces you barely made it. Three you were out. Then and later I tried to catch all the balls on the fly. Sometimes I made it, a lot of times I didn't. But I always caught them on at least two bounces. Never three.

What it is, the old neighborhood had changed a lot since those days. The Lung family now lived next door where my childhood friend Tommy Tombone used to live. The Chinese and Koreans had practically taken over. The Russians too. And the Italians? The Italians were an endangered species in Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge and everywhere else in Brooklyn.

Forget about it. Ten years from now, who knew what things would be like? But I didn't want to think about that. Fuck everybody and everything. Fuck the world, and mala infamita on the Guineas, the Chinks and the Russkies. Dominick de Venise had some real bad and real immediate shit to contend with.

Later for the stroll down memory lane. Much later, in fact.

Your Heist or Mine?

"’Ayy, ciucc’, whaddaya got for me?"

Somethin' sweet, babes.

Nitto Bubbles touched thumb and forefinger of his right hand and kissed the tip of the o the fingers formed.

De Venise pulled back a chair, sat and eyed Nitto Bubbles over the rim of his pony glass of J&B on the rocks. The table was front row, center stage at Jigglers, a topless bar on Knickerbocker Avenue in North Greenpoint, a few blocks from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass and a stone’s throw across the Bushwick border, at nine twenty-seven on a rainy Tuesday night in late September.

That border was Snyder Avenue, running north into lower Manhattan. On one side, blonde hair and kielbasa, on the other dreadlocks and Saturday night specials. Smack in the smelly middle, a hard brown piece of Palermo dumped on the dingy sidewalk, was all the fat old Italian section had left behind.

It had been raining all week, and all of the week before. Sometimes hard, sometimes soft, but always coming down and usually in buckets. All over the borough of Brooklyn, fourth largest city in the USA, it was raining.

Nitto Bubbles was an aspiring stage actor who did occasional scores to pay the bills. As an associate of the Mezzatesta crime family, he cleared iffy jobs with the family’s capo bastone, Don Antonio Tony Pug Pugliese, and paid him a tribute -- the Pug’s taste of the action. De Venise knew most of his acting gigs so far were limited to porn loops and occasional voice overdubs of foreign fuck videos he did for Shike the Sheenie's sex mill across the Kosciuszko Bridge in Long Island City.

On the large stage directly in front of their table, two pole dancers flaunting extra-large racks did the bump and grind to an old Isaac Hayes disco number. The bar served Italian specialties, so there was a big plate of fried calimar’ on the table, eaten with greasy fingers and dipped in red salsa piccante. A bottle of house sangiovese was also on the table, untouched so far. They talked loud to be heard above the blaring, pounding music and they ate the batter-fried and breaded day’s catch of the Long Island squid fleet.

De Venise put the glass down and smiled across the small table at Nitto Bubbles. The smile was tight and dangerous. Although he kept a low profile, he was still a Mezzatesta family soldato or soldier, and a uomo d’onore, a made man.

"First of all, don't ever fuckin' call me cugine again, you got that?"

"Hey, de Venise. I di’n't, I di’n't mean it --