The Exceptions

THREE


Crime is like a cult. If introduced early and with determined rhythm, it morphs into a way of life with rules one accepts and lives by without question; it becomes the only way to conduct one’s existence. That Sunday at Vincent’s served as my first inkling that the Bovaro lifestyle was not right, and that I had to escape a cult I happened to love because the damage was far too great, not just for me or my family but for the business owners we protected and the people we employed. But violence is a difficult drug to surrender. When used appropriately, it captures the essence of everything, cuts to the core of any dispute, finds and delivers truth. There is a tangible beauty in violence. People are typically not willing to embrace it, but sometimes you must appreciate violence for what it is. Reduce it to its simplest form and see. It starts with rescuing a fair maiden by killing a spider; she gets such peace and satisfaction in its death. Graduate to the bully who gets the tables turned, his life altered to where he might never again hold his head high. Show me a pedophile and I’ll show you a hundred people who’d pay a week’s wages to see him fall prey to crimes exponentially more vicious as his own. Every movie with a villain—how unsatisfied we are unless the comeuppance is delivered. God Himself displayed the most impressive and stunning displays of violence and vengeance on record; consult the Old Testament. But in order for violence to work, it requires one component: passion. You need to be behind it or your ambivalence will lead to inaction. You have to want it.

This concept came shining in Technicolor shortly before I turned twenty-one, when I was handed my first assignment. I was no stranger to trouble, though I labored to avoid it more than my siblings, particularly Peter, who seemed to seek it out and languished in its absence. But I was now an older Bovaro, and my place in the organization required a greater contribution. The McCartneys had not dropped off the radar, but they weren’t nearly the biggest blip on the screen; Arthur and Lydia had become useless to the Justice Department, nothing more than a taxpayer expense. Where a few years ago every single person in our organization was aching to be the one to gun them down and care was taken to devise the most cunning plan, now the McCartneys were simply running from themselves, from their own resident fear that we were on their trail every step of the way.

But remember the mantra: no loose ends.

The McCartneys became a topic of conversation in our house the way most folks discuss cleaning out the gutters or getting an annual exam, an unavoidable task that can be repeatedly delayed. My father was no longer troubled by their potential testimony once his attorneys verified that everything the McCartneys witnessed could never again be allowed into a courtroom; the concern now was showing the world (mostly our peers and those under our influence) what happens when you cross a Bovaro.

The first time I truly appreciated my oldest brother, Peter: One winter afternoon he and I were shooting baskets against a rusty backboard and netless rim in what was arguably a rougher section of our neighborhood near Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, before the renaissance got a foothold. We were halfway through a game of one-on-one when three kids started moving down the sidewalk in our direction. I knew there would be trouble for no other reason than all three were looking right at us. They were sizing us up. By the time these kids made their way around the chain-link fence and onto our lonely court, words were exchanged between the leader of my two-person gang (Peter) and the leader of what appeared to be three big Russian kids. I don’t remember the interchange, though it certainly would have been inane. Of the five of us, I was the smallest, and while looking at my brother and listening to him berate the leader of the other gang for being, essentially, not like us, a fist connected with my eye, knocked me to the ground, then out. A few seconds later, my head limp on the cold sidewalk, I opened my good eye and watched through a haze as Peter wiped out the entire group. Two were already on the ground, crawling in opposite directions, though clearly their collective destinations were away. Peter seemed to be taking his time kicking number three, the mouthy leader, while the kid begged him to stop. As the sirens approached, Peter gently scooped me up and we dashed down a nearby alley, our worn Spalding resting at the feet of the big Russian.

The first time I truly despised my oldest brother, Peter: a few days before my twenty-first birthday. On a journey to Yankee Stadium in our blackened-out Suburban, my father, my siblings—Peter, Gino, and younger brother Jimmy, the kid fated to have been named after a guy whose blood can still be spotted in the grout between the tiles of Vincent’s kitchen floor—and I chatted about what I should be getting for my upcoming birthday.

Gino, my older brother by two years and possessing the most practical personality in the family, offered up the tried and true. “How ’bout a convertible—or better yet, you always liked mine. Take it and I’ll get a new one. Got my eye—”

“Nah,” Jimmy interrupted, “what Johnny wants is Connie Cappelletti.”

“Pass,” I said. “I don’t consider syphilis much of a present.”

“Jimmy just wanted you to have a gift that’ll keep on giving,” Gino said.

“Isn’t Connie, like, thirteen?”

“Seventeen,” Jimmy said, “going on twenty-five.”

“The only thing Connie’s going on is penicillin.”

Gino threaded his fingers together, cracked four knuckles at once. “This world needs guys like you, Jimmy, otherwise skanks like Connie Cappelletti would live lonely lives.”

My father drove with a half-smile on his face, which to the unknowing eye might appear as fleeting contentment; I recognized it as a look of concentrated thought. Peter, riding shotgun, just stared out his window. Not a word.

So there you have it, the offerings of my family as directed by their individual long-term interests in keeping the Bovaro dynasty in a flourishing state: Gino thrived in the materialism and Jimmy in the increased availability of female attention and companionship. My father offered his standard fare of aloofness and disinterest; unless reputation could be incorporated into the picture, his mind was elsewhere. Peter’s silence was more confusing, though. His particular interest would have only rested in one place: power. And sure enough, it was on his mind; he was perfecting the spin.

As we sat at a red light, the gentle vibration of the engine the only sign of life, my father continued his unfocused gaze out the window.

Then, with his eyes still out and away, Peter said quietly, “Pistola.”

Pop finally snapped out of it. “Eh, Pete?”

Still speaking to the window, he said, “Pistola for my little brother.”

The entire cab of the Suburban went quiet, and here’s why: There could be absolutely nothing significant about giving me a gun as a birthday present. We had them tucked away in our house the way most people store ballpoint pens. If you opened a drawer to get a pack of matches, you’d probably have to move a .22 out of the way to get to it. Our world is one where guns are, far and wide, disposable. After a hit they’re usually left at the scene, clean of fingerprints and serial numbers—anything that might trace them to a buyer or shooter—because it’s the safest place for them to be. Once a gun’s been used to take someone down, the last place it should be is on you. “Maybe,” he said, “we give Johnny his manhood this year.” He glanced at Pop like he might get a congratulatory chuckle out of him, but Pop merely focused on getting us to 161st Street.

Peter had helped me to become a man in many significant ways: my first cigarette, to which I developed a fervent addiction; my first taste of hard liquor at age eleven; the way to take someone out at the knees; a comprehensive inventory of profanity that may have sounded weirdly amusing coming from a seven-year-old boy but stinks like sulfur from an adult; countless ways to use girls and misuse masculinity.

And now, the crown jewel: Peter intended on introducing me to the value of killing.

Gino turned to me, broke the silence. “Wouldn’t you rather have a Mustang?”

I stared at the headrest that blocked the back of Peter’s head. “Your point, Pete?”

He turned in his seat and offered his answer to my father. “Johnny’s old enough now to clean up his own messes, yeah?” Then to me, “Our family’s been embarrassed long enough.”

These were the first years where Peter made it clear that he viewed himself as the coming replacement for my father, the heir to the empire, the chosen one to lead the Bovaro organization into a new generation. The decision to take a life—anyone’s life—was never made lightly in our house. It served some specific purpose: righting a wrong, teaching a lesson, balancing the scales. Like farm kids who learn to butcher pigs as a regular responsibility, so were the bloody duties of our home; the gore is never questioned.

But the embarrassment comment was pointed to the McCartneys, crafted specifically for me, for there was one final item in the list of things Peter taught me in the pursuit of becoming a real man: the power of humiliation.

So where did my interests rest within the Bovaro power structure? Perhaps the answer shines brightest in what I really did want for my twenty-first: my mother’s food, my family’s congregation, and a time of celebration—didn’t even have to be about me. I wanted everyone to be there. The cousins and aunts and uncles, the associates, the nut jobs. Guys like Tommy Fingers and Paulie Marcone who could rip out your liver and fry it up with peppers and onions, but they understood the value of family. When I was eight, Paulie spent four straight hours one summer night teaching me how to play poker, how to gauge the table, how to bluff. No matter how many times I got it wrong, the guy never lost his cool, would just smile and slap my back and say, “Let’s try it again, Johnny.” It might be best explained as a matter of culture, but to exist around these men and women is a warm thing. Tommy Fingers, a near-illiterate man of girth and fury, used to spend most mornings making breakfast for whoever would break bread with him, a culinary artist of notable capability in any other setting. All you’d have to do is casually say to yourself, “Man, I’m hungry,” and the next thing you know Tommy is sliding a steaming bowl of pasta fagioli in front of you—unless he’s out muscling some guy into submission. (Tommy got his nickname from his calling card, what we routinely called a souvenir, something to act as a permanent reminder of our power and the related event; Tommy’s was the snapping of the middle finger of whoever he assailed.) I wanted Tommy to celebrate with me, put his thick arm around me and talk food. I wanted Paulie to argue with anyone who would listen about what Steinbrenner was doing to the Yankees. I wanted Peter to be my older brother and my dad to be my father and my mother to be my mother, just for one day. I wanted a room full of laughter, glasses filled with beer and wine, and the simple excuse to eat to the point of discomfort.

The silence that continued in the Suburban hinted at one of two things: Peter’s suggestion was either being considered or completely ignored. We circled the block before entering the Gerard Avenue lot. Disregarding the valet, my father snaked our monster into a tight spot in a lot where the lines were readjusted year after year into slighter spaces. All four doors opened and slammed into the Benzes on either side of us, then Pop chucked the keys in the general vicinity of the nearest valet, over the hoods of two rows of cars, and the valet dove for them like he’d been tossed a handful of diamonds; no return ticket was handed our way, never was.

I remember thinking that day was going to be great—the Yankees were playing the Orioles, after all—but I’d become jammed up, leveled by the reminder that I was a Bovaro and that that meant something the way it meant something to be a Kennedy, a Rockefeller, a Du Pont; the expected legacy is expected for a reason, and fulfillment a near requirement.

Peter set me up, the bastard. There would be no way to avoid accepting the task. To back down would be weak, to let—continue to let—others clean up my childhood embarrassment and not feel some sort of anger over what happened. The McCartneys had dared to testify against my father, and for that reason I should have been incensed myself, insulted to the point that retribution served as the only natural course. But I knew as my family did—they were the ones to educate me—that the fear we perpetrated upon the masses was only bolstered by the stories told by the feds to encourage, to frighten, people into testifying.

I had to take whatever assignment they asked of me, lest I become the standout. The loser. I had one hope only: that my father would ignore the entire suggestion, that his pride and reputation regarding a matter of many years prior was rightly no longer an insult, that he would never consider asking his almost twenty-one-year-old son to empty a clip into the bodies of innocent people.

My father’s decision had been concealed right up to our entrance of the cheer-filled stadium. He put his arm around me, tightened it around my shoulder as we walked together toward our seats, Bovaro men, and said to me gently, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you the car, too.”



The first time you hold a gun is like the first time you hold an infant. You’re not sure what to do with it. You watch the people around you for some signal that you’re holding it correctly. You bounce it a little and comment on its weight. You’re amazed at how beautiful the thing is. You prefer it to remain in a state of deep sleep. And ultimately, you wonder what it would be like to have one of your own.

No one ever gets a gun and thinks, I wonder what it would be like to kill someone. Unless you’re a hunter, most balanced people never want to discharge a firearm in the direction of another living thing, including everyone in my family—even Peter, who’d prefer a fisticuffs over a gun battle any day of the week. On the scale of weapons, the gun is the weakest form of power. After all, how did my father take care of Jimmy “the Rat”? A knife to the man’s gut, a gesture that read not only to Jimmy but to his peers, This was personal, and I was not afraid to take his life with my own hands. When people compare the Mafia to drug gangs, I’m baffled. In the early twentieth century, our types may have killed with great disregard, but when was the last time someone from the Mafia drove into a neighborhood and unloaded a half dozen automatic weapons into the side of a building, killing countless people? We are surgeons picking the particular cancer running through a system and carving it out, disposing of it, allowing life to resume like the disease had never even taken hold.

My first gun had strings. It had a purpose. They could have loaded the thing with just six bullets—two for each McCartney. All that remained was to find the targets.

It never occurred to me, as I’d previously searched the list of psycho killers in our family, running fully through the roster of men in my father’s organization for the sociopath who might be able to level the barrel at a young girl and pull the trigger, that the spinning dial would slow, tick gently in my direction, and come to rest at my name. I was the selected nut job.