Find Big Fat Fanny Fast (4 page)

And if anybody did question the validity of Tony B's grades, he had an ace in the hole in Seward Park High's principal Herman Gluck.

Was Gluck a degenerate gambler? No. As far as Tony B knew, Mr. Gluck never placed a bet in his entire life.

But Mr. Gluck did have an obsession with picture books that graphically showed young boys having sex with other young boys, which Tony B quickly provided for his esteemed principle.

Luckily for Mr. Gluck, or maybe for Tony B, the rest of his teachers fell in line, giving Tony B passing grades, either out of respect, but most likely out of fear.

This fear was the result of what happened to sophomore English teacher Manny Perez.

Tony B felt Mr. Perez was basically an educated Spic, who had a hardon for anyone whose last name ended in a vowel. Mr. Perez tortured Tony B and all of his Italian crew, with anything from nastily correcting their defective speech patterns, to questioning the validity of their parent's marriage.

One day, after being the recipient of a tirade from Mr. Perez, on about how Tony B pronounced the word “oil,” Tony B decided he had had just about enough of Mr. Perez' crap.

To Tony B, the correct pronunciation was “earl”, like, in “ give me some freakin' spaghetti with garlic and earl. And make it snappy.”

But Ok. You say it your way and I'll say it my way. Just don't freakin' embarrass me by calling me, in front of people no less, a “birdbrained Philistine.”

Tony B wasn't exactly sure what the word “Philistine” meant. But birdbrained was not a good word to precede almost any word, that wasn't associated with freakin' birds.

One day, Mr. Perez inexplicably disappeared from the face of the earth for an entire week. When he finally did re-appear, he did so in the emergency room of Mount Sinai Hospital, with his head shaved, his eyebrows burnt off his face, and no teeth in his mouth, except for one tooth in the middle of his erstwhile smile. The funny thing was, the emergency room doctor said it didn't seem like Mr. Perez had suffered any major blows to the head, but instead it looked like his teeth had been pulled out one by one from his bloody mouth.

Fortunately, Mr. Perez' legs and arms were in good working order, and after he absolutely refused to say anything about what had happened to him, he licked his wounds and walked out of the front door of the hospital under his own power.

Before you could say “Si Senor,” Mr. Perez mailed in his letter of resignation to Seward Park High School and took the next flight out of Idlewild Airport to his native Puerto Rico, never to be heard from in the Continental United States again.

Rumors reached Mulberry Street, that Mr. Perez had retired from the teaching profession and had taken a government job as a census taker in a San Juan slum. Right where the bastard belonged.

So as luck would have it, Tony B graduated from Seward Park High School in the required four years, with a solid B average, which made his father Sally Boy very proud indeed.

Yet college would never be in Tony B's future. In fact, college never was even in Tony B's vocabulary, because as we shall see, Sally Boy had already mapped out his son's entire future.

CHAPTER 5

The Fulton Fish Market

For the next few decades, Tony B's work address was in the smelly confines of the Fulton Fish Market, located on and adjacent to South Street in Lower Manhattan. The Fulton Fish Market was controlled by the mob since the 1920's, when men were men and a bottle of booze was always empty.

The Fish Market Mob, as they were called, made their best score during World War 2, when the French Luxury liner “The Normandie” suspiciously sank at its berth on a west side pier. New York politicians and lawmakers were aghast.

“How could German spies possible infiltrate our great city and bomb a ship resting in our fine harbors?” the pols screamed.

Only it really didn't go down that way. Not even close.

One night, a couple of the downtown guys, playing cards in an after-hours joint on South Street, got a great idea. Their big boss Big Bobby Braggadocio was cooling his heels in an upstate prison and not likely to get out in his lifetime, or possibly the lifetime of anyone presently living on Planet Earth.

The Boys came up with the perfect plan to spring Big Bobby B.

They thought, just imagine if persons unknown blew up a big boat anchored in New York harbor. What a shame that would be. What could we, the Fish Market Mob, do to make sure this could never happen again in our wonderful city?

We, as patriotic Italian-Americans and honest, hard-working citizens, could offer our services, free of charge, to the New York City District Attorney, to help police and Naval Intelligence (two oxymorons if there ever was one) protect the fish market and the docks all over the city from enemy saboteurs.

We could help the law set up listening and communication devices in fishing boats, waterfront bars and restaurants, and any other places the DA wanted us to bug.

And if we did this, what would the law do for us in return?

We wouldn't ask for much, now would we? We wouldn't ask for money. Or ask the heat to look the other way when we did what we had to do, to make a tough buck in an even tougher town.

No indeed. All we would want is one very small favor. Just a tiny example of their good will, in return for us making the New York City docks safe from any more war-related treachery.

All the law had to do to satisfy our wants was to give Bobby Braggadocio a “get out of jail free” card, like the ones used in that Monopoly game all the kids are playing.

So after the Normandie went down like a rock on a west side pier, with a little help from Big Bobby's crew, arrangements were made with the law to protect the entire New York City waterfront. Soon afterwards, Bobby Braggadocio flew the coop and things were nice and snuggly down on the New York City waterfront for the rest of that annoying freakin' war.

Now ain't that a miracle?

Springing the boss aside, you had to give the mob credit, for always figuring out a way to make an illegal dime, when it was easier and safer to make a legal dollar.

Say you were an out-of-town fish company, who needed to have their fish unloaded in the Fulton Fish Market.

No problem, right?

No problem, as long as you paid what the mob ingeniously called “parking fees” to park your truck anywhere near the Fulton Fish Market. If you refused to ante up, at worse, terrible things could happen to your truck. At best, your fish stood unloaded on the truck and eventually smelled like ammonia capsules that boxing cornermen snapped between rounds under their wretched fighter's noses.

Then the mob came up with the ingenious idea of forming its own “security force”, which would protect the trucks of the people who paid and un-protect the trucks of people who didn't pay.

Woe to the fish monger who decided not to play by mob rules. If he dare park his truck anywhere near the Fulton Fish Market and not pay the proper tribute, when he returned he might find a few flat tires, a couple of windows busted, or sugar in his gas tank. Or maybe no truck at all.

In addition, under mob rules, none of the crew members of the fishing vessels docked near the fish market were allowed to unload their own catches.

“We do all the unloading of fish, otherwise there could be trouble,” Sally Boy told Tony B.

Sally Boy charged each boat ten bucks a pop for his union's “benevolent fund.” If the ten bucks was not paid on time, the waters around the fish market could be downright un-benevolent for certain seafaring simpletons who forgot, most likely on purpose, to pay the damn ten bucks.

Of course, mob employees and mob-controlled companies received special privileges. But that's why it's always a great idea to have good friends in the right places. Especially when these friends were more than willing, and certainly capable, of cracking a few skulls for the good of the common cause.

Right off the bat, Sally Boy figured the parking concession in the Fulton Fish Market was a good way to get Tony B started in the family businesses.

When Tony B first started in the fish business, cobbled Peck Slip, a wide, two-way street in the heart of the Fish Market, was Tony B's base of operation. During the daytime business hours, Peck Slip and the surrounding Fish Market streets was basically a ghost town. There were a few landmark restaurants, like Sloppy Louie's and Sweets, that financial district workers frequented for lunch and dinner. The Paris Bar and Grill, whose former customers included everyone from Thomas Edison, to Diamond Jim Brady, to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had stragglers slipping in and out at all hours of the day and night.

Right about 11pm, the entire dynamics of Peck Slip changed. Men with grappling hooks hung over husky shoulders started trickling in for work. In the frigid days of winter, fires were started in dirty garbage cans, so that the workers could warm their mitts between trips to and from trucks and cold storage lockers.

Tony B usually arrived at work around midnight, with a crew of about ten guys. He immediately pitched a tent on Peck Street, twenty feet from the intersection of South Street. This tent was Tony B's office, so to speak.

All workers who shaped up for work, meaning showed up in hope of finding work and sometimes got it, carried bailing hooks, which they used to hook the boxes of fish and flip them onto carts for transportation. Tony B felt he looked much tougher if he lugged around a bailing hook too. But he never needed to use that hook, except for one time and it wasn't for hooking a box of fish.

Manny the Mook was a small time gambler who had gotten in the hole bigtime with Tony B, first as a gambling customer and then as the recipient of a loan from Tony B to cover his gambling debts. Tony B charged Manny the Mook the customary three points a week, which meant, on his loan of five hundred bucks, Manny the Mook had to cough up fifteen clams a week, the vig, or vigorish, just to stay straight and up to date. That fifteen dollars a week was not deducted off the five hundred dollar principal, so Manny the Mook still owed Tony B the five hundred bucks, ad infinitum, or until he made a score and paid the five hundred bucks back to Tony B all at one time.

This was standard operating procedure in all mob transactions, betting, borrowing, or otherwise.

Which was fine for everyone involved, until Manny the Mook decided, or maybe someone gave him the idea (which was more likely, since Manny the Mook was dumber than a rock), to tell Tony B to take a hike about the loan, or Manny the Mook would tell his cousin, a freaking rat cop, that Tony B was guilty of the criminal offense of usury.

Tony B knew right away that Manny the Mook didn't have the slightest idea what the word
usury
meant, and had certainly had never uttered that word before in his entire life.

Manny the Mook was threatening to become a canary; a cheese-eating, rat bastard and Tony B, according to the code of the streets, could not let that go unpunished. That's when the bailing hook finally came in handy.

Tony B had a few of the boys get Manny the Mook involved in a craps game in the hallway of a tenement on Front Street. Manny the Mook was rolling hot dice, when Tony B entered the tenement, bailing hook hung over his shoulder. Manny the Mook was on his knees facing the wall. He picked up the two rocks, shook them behind his right ear and yelled, “Come on pretty momma. Come to papa.”

The rocks hit the wall and a second later they formed four dots and three dots, lucky seven. But things got unlucky real fast for Manny the Mook.

Before Manny the Mook could scoop up his cash, Tony B smashed the point of the bailing hook on top of Manny the Mook's melon head. The crooked spike dug three inches deep into Manny the Mook's skull and he fell face first onto the tiled hallway floor.

The rest of the dice players rushed out of the building and Tony B picked up Manny the Mook's winnings, then casual strode out of the building, like he had nary a care in the world.

Amazingly, Manny the Mook survived to gamble another day.

He was spotted a few weeks later in a wheelchair on West 14
th
Street, with a turban around his head. Manny the Mook was none too bright to begin with, so whatever brain damage he had suffered, would hardly be noticed by anyone who actually knew him.

Manny the Mook never set foot in the Fulton Fish Market again. Nor was he ever seen anywhere near the 4
th,
or 6
th
Wards.

But from that point on, Tony B had a much easier time collecting money that was owed him in the Fulton Fish Market. Whenever he was there, Tony B religiously carried the bailing hook on his shoulder, as a sign to all, saying, “Screw with Tony B and I'll split your freakin' skull with this Goddamn bailing hook.”

CHAPTER 6

Greenwood Lake

Thus went the very prosperous career of Tony B. He made enough money in the Fulton Fish Market to live a very comfortable life. In 1961, when a new housing development called Chatham Green was built on Park Row, Tony B got himself a nice two-bedroom, 12
th
floor apartment. He also bought a lakeside house in Greenwood Lake, New York, fifty miles north of the George Washington Bridge. With its majestic mountains, snake-like roads and nine-mile lake, the tiny town of Greenwood Lake was light years away in style from New York City.