Miles ran his tongue over his teeth as his eyes took on a dangerous quality. Wrapping his fingers around the bars of his cell, Miles Capadonno demanded attention.
“Here’s all you need to know. Number one… I was framed. Number two… I’m not a rat. Number three… vengeance belongs to me. I can hear the Boss’s voice in my head loud and clear to this day, preaching about suicide raps, hitting the open road, and bolting from the town that intends to slay you. I should have listened to the message that the Boss preached. I should have run. I look back often and think, what if I would have packed up Letty and hit the road in my Charger. Things would have been different. Right?”
Shaking his head slowly, Miles sighed heavily as his eyes darted to the floor.
“She’s long gone, along with my freedom. Now here I am, doing this interview with you through the bars of my cell at the Franklin Correctional Facility, where I’ve spent half my life rotting away. I took the fall for another guy. The men I once called brothers were nothing more than bloodthirsty cowards. They were spineless swine wearing the guise of a made man. I wear no such disguise. I say what I mean, I mean what I say, and God help the fucker that stands in my way.”
Smacking his lips, Miles continued, “I grew up in Carrion, New Jersey. Set deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Carrion is a town with a unique setting. Founded in 1922, Carrion is in a coastal forest along the Jersey Shore. The City Council named the city Carrion. They were sadistic sons of bitches. Who names a town after the rotting flesh of an animal? Did they know what would happen to the town that stood in the shadows of New York and Philadelphia? It was an epicenter of crime, and it just so happened to be the halfway point between the two busiest mob cities in the United States. New York was where the kings sat on their thrones and called the shots, but Philly was where shit went down. South Philly is where the action was. I knew the towns all too well, but none as well as Carrion. It was a town that lived up to its namesake. Organized crime families with ties to the five boroughs of New York and the bloodthirsty demigods of South Philly rocked this town. It didn’t matter that the boss was a man that I called uncle, and my father was the enforcer for the Capadonno crime family.”
Shouts from the other inmates distracted Miles for a moment. As he refocused his attention, Miles continued.
“My uncle, Sonny Capadonno, is half the reason I am locked up in this shit hole to begin with. The other half belongs to my father, Michael. If you want the whole story, you’ll have to ask around. I’ll never tell. Around here a snitch is a rat, and rats get killed. Omerta. It’s a code of silence. An oath of secrecy. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
Miles laughed darkly. “Ha. If only I was joking…”
Miles pivoted on his chair as he tapped three times on the cement wall of his cell. The words La Cosa Nostra were etched onto the wall some time ago by another hand with a pencil. The words translated from Italian to English as This Thing of Ours. Tapping his finger at the words, Miles laughed facetiously.
“I ain’t worried about La Cosa Nostra no more. I’m worried about this thing of mine. All I want is to pick up where I left off. Find Letty and pick up the pieces. The creeps that put me in here will get what’s coming to them. I’ll go up against Carrion. I’ll wage war against the foot soldiers of South Philly. I’ll rage through the five boroughs until everybody remembers my name and my face. There is just one thing that slows my stride. The mob couldn’t kill me. Prison couldn’t break me. Going home threatens to do both.”
A somber expression takes over Miles’s face.
“I shouldn’t have expected her to wait around for me. It’s not like we were married. We were kids. But when she didn’t return my letters, I felt burned. Say what you want. Think what you will. I know we were young, but it wasn’t just some summer fling. Yeah, we were irrational, but what we had was real. She could be married now, for all I know. She could have a family of her own. Shit, living in Carrion, she could be dead. I have no idea what happened after I went on the inside. Thoughts about Letty have plagued my nights for seventeen years now.”
Miles glanced up at his prison wall again. Strike marks filled up the empty spaces on the wall. Each day Miles Capadonno has served as an inmate earns a check on the wall. Grabbing a pencil out of his back pocket, Miles strikes the wall one last time.