Lee Hacklyn 1970s Private Investigator in Mafia and Pafia: Lee Hacklyn, #1

By John Leister

New York City. 1973.

 

Mob boss Guido Testa, and his wife, Sophia, run the Big Apple.

Their next target?  Our boy, Lee.

And his family, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Leister
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215829288

Book preview

New York City.  December 1st, 1973.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF GUIDO TESTA

Why am I doing this?

If this, as they say on tv, falls into the wrong hands, what most people would consider, the right hands, it could bury me, well, depending on what I write.  And how open I am.

I’m sixty-one.  What the fuck.  I’ve always enjoyed writing, but I’ve never really done it in a meaningful way, until now.

Better late, than never.

If Sophie ever sees this, she’ll flatten my face with it and toss in our fireplace.

And I can forget about sex for a few nights, too.

My parents, Angelo and Maria Testa, immigrated to America in 1900 on a cargo ship from Genova, Italy, to Ellis Island.

Mom once told me that the toilet facilities were so overwhelmed and stinking, they had no choice but to do their business overboard.

Angelo was a tailor and a suit designer, a trade that’s run in our family for the last five generations, or so I’ve been told.

Maria was engaged to a gangster named Giovanni Santaro.

Maria’s father was another gangster named Anthony Greco.

Their marriage was intended to create peace between the two families, which had been murdering each other, for, you guessed it, Dear Diary, five generations.

Maria had no interest in Giovanni.

The night before the wedding, Angelo spirited her away—she was all too keen to go—and they arrived at Ellis Island three months later.

It wasn’t long before they began to refer to themselves as Americans.

My father soon got a job as an assistant tailor.  He saved his money and a year later, he was running his own shop, in Bensonhurst.

In 1929, the first year of the Great Depression, when so-called men threw themselves out of their office windows because their money had less value than toilet paper, what a bunch of losers, Dad, Angelo, had established a chain of tailor shops, located throughout the Five Burroughs:

Angelo’s—Tailor Made For America!

Mendings, Sewings and Custom Made

Suits!

My brother, Tony, the clean-as-morning-snow angel of our family, was born in 1910.  Harriet, soon to be known as Harriet the Harridan, our sister, was born in 1911.

Then came me, in the Year of the Lord who exists only in the minds of those who blindly accept what they’re told and are too afraid of their own minds, the black sheep.

If I’d been physically capable of doing it, I would’ve decked the face of the doctor who slapped my bottom.

Mom’s told me many times over the years, that was the only time she ever saw me cry.

I believe her. 

Anybody who doesn’t?

Doesn’t know me very well.

CHAPTER TWO

FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF GUIDO TESTA...Continuing...

Tony was a reader.

He wound up with enough books to open his own bookstore, which he eventually did.

He loved Jules Verne, H.G. Welles and the comic strips of Alex Raymond and Lee Falk.

I liked to read, too, but I had no patience for fiction, of any kind, including the so-called classics.

What a colossal waste of time!

As a family, we often went to the movies together.

Sitting in cold theatre with hundreds of imbeciles, laughing and gasping and pointing at make-believe and artifice, even when I was as young as five, filled me with loathing and contempt for the human race.

What easily controlled lemmings this so-called God created!

And they wonder how it was that a pipsqueak named Hitler rose to power.

It’s because his self-belief was on the level of magnificence.  It’s because the average human being doesn’t believe in himself.

The average man is an insecure fool.

We did one other thing as a family, every Sunday, we went to church.

Church!  Religion!

My feelings towards these institutions, which three quarters of the world, it seems, take for granted, were even more hateful and venomous.

My parents were strict Roman-Catholics.

I loved them, but they were easily led by the nose, like most people.

When I was ten, I had this conversation with my mother, after she’d read me some ridiculous passage from that piece of mind controlling propaganda called the Bible.

"Let me get this straight, Ma.  When Father Mancuso gives me a stale cracker, I’m eating the body of the man who allowed himself to be nailed to a cross when he should have fought back.  He gives me some grape juice, and it’s the blood of this same guy, the martyr.  So, I eat and drink this stuff and then I’m off the hook for whatever sins I’ve committed?  And then I can be a total schmuck for the rest of the week?  I can steal Ted Baker’s lunch money and then all I have to do is eat another cracker and drink some more grape juice and everything’s right as rain?  And that makes