Writers Tricks of the Trade MARCH-APRIL 2015 | Page 38

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I'VE GOTTA BE ME (Cont’d)

So I stood beside the guard and puffed away on my cigarette. Neither of us spoke.
Then I heard sirens. I think, maybe he called the cops. Good for him. I wasn't running. I was
giving myself up. At least for now. It was time to pay the piper. It was time for a change.
The sirens got closer and louder. They were coming for me for sure. And I was going to let
them come. But first I was going to finish my cigarette.
Almost instantly, it seems, I was in the police station being questioned-but not about the
punk. There was no question about that. I did what I did. They were asking me about other
stuff. Bigger stuff. And they weren't regular cops or even detectives. They had brought in the
feds. I knew they were the feds because they're a little smarter Not much, but a little morethan the regular cops.
They had been trying to get me to talk for years about my father, his business and all his
associates. And for years I had been telling them the same thing: shove it up your ass. They
wanted to flip me. They obviously didn't know me too well.
"You're going away for a long time this time, Tony," one of the agents told me. "Now's your
chance to talk. Tell us what we want to know. Tell us all about your friends. About Vincent
Gigante and the Genovese crime family. About your association with the Bonannos. The
Gambinos. And the other New York crime families. Tell us what we want to know, Tony. And
we'll forget what you did to this two-bit punk in the school. We'll have a limo pick your wife
up at home right now and it'll take you far away. We'll give you fifty thousand dollars ... "
"Fifty thousand dollars?" I interrupted him. "If I ever talked for fifty thousand dollars, my
father would come back from the grave to give me a slap."
"This is your last chance, Tony."
"Listen to me, popcorn, don't waste any more of your precious breath. I never talked before,
I'm not talking now, and there's nothing you or anybody else can do to make me talk. You
could throwaway the key on me first."
I went to trial for what I did to the punk. I did my penance. And everything about my life
changed from that point. But it changed the way I wanted it to change. My way. Not the way
they wanted it to change.
I did my talking eventually, but it wasn't to them. I'm not a rat. My father didn't raise a rat.
A rat is the worst thing anybody could be. I did my talking, but it wasn't in a courtroom, or
to some salaried G-man, who wanted the names of people I spent my life with; people who
were family to me. I was a lot of but I wasn't a fool, and I wasn't a stool pigeon.
The only talking I ever did and will ever do is here, on these pages, to you. I will tell you the
story of a wild man, a son of a capo, at times a son of a bitch, who made life crazy for his
father and for everyone else aroun