Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi

brothers, who were also my close friends, were happy I was taking their kid brother off their hands. Still, I needed a job. I didn’t want to go back to running errands and doing stuff around the cabstand for Tuddy and the crew. And Lenny became my ticket. Nobody said it that way, but Paulie knew I could watch out for Lenny, and so whatever Lenny got, I got. The next thing I knew, Paulie got Lenny a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. Lenny’s sixteen years old at the most, and Paulie got him a man’s job. But Lenny says he won’t go without me. So now I got a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. I’m just about twenty. Paulie, remember, is in jail during all this, but he can still get us the kinds of jobs that grown-ups from the neighborhood couldn’t get.

    “Later I found out that Paulie made Bobby Scola, the president of the bricklayers’ union, put the muscle on some builders to put us on their payrolls. Bobby then made us union apprentices and gave us cards in the union. I had drifted away from my father during the army years, but he was very happy about my bricklayer’s job. He loved union construction work. Everyone he knew was in construction. Lots of the people from the neighborhood worked in construction. It was what people did. But I wasn’t expecting to lay brick for the rest of my life.

    “Looking back, I can see what a pair of miserable little kids Lenny and I were, but at the time what we were doing seemed so natural. We thumbed our noses at the job and at Bobby Scola. Puck him. We were with Paulie. We didn’t do any work. We didn’t even show up regular enough to pick up our own paychecks. We had guys we knew who were really working on the job bring our money to the cabstand or to Frankie the Wop’s Villa Capra restaurant, in Cedarhurst, where we hung out. We’d cash the checks, and by Monday we’d blown the money partying or buying clothes or gambling. We didn’t even pay our union dues. Why should we? Finally Bobby Scola begged Paulie to get us off his back. He said we were creating a problem. He said there was heat on the job and the builders were getting worried.

    “Paulie relented. At first I thought he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and that was why he took us off his hands, but I soon realized differently. Overnight, instead of working as bricklayers, Paulie had us working at the Azores, a very fancy white stucco restaurant next door to the Lido Beach Hotel, in the Rockaways, about an hour from midtown. In those days it was a prime summer eating place for rich businessmen and union guys, mostly from the garment center and construction industry. One phone call from Paulie and Lenny has a job as a service bartender-he isn’t even old enough to be in the bar, forget work there-and they got me a tuxedo and made me the maitre d’ hotel, a twenty-year-old kid who didn’t know the difference between anything.

    “In those days the Azores was owned, off the record, by Thomas Lucchese, the boss of the whole family. He used to come in there every night before going home, and that’s why Paulie got Lenny the job. It wasn’t because he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and his union problems. He wanted Lenny to get to know the boss. And Lucchese had to love us. I mean he got treated beautifully. He walked in the door and his drink was being made. His cocktail glass was polished so hard that a couple of times it broke as Lenny was shining it. The place at the bar where Lucchese liked to stand was always kept empty and it was glossed dry. We didn’t care if there were two hundred people in the joint; everybody waited. Very few people in the place knew who he was, but that didn’t matter. We knew. He was the boss. In the newspapers he was caned Gaetano Lucchese, ‘Three Fingers Brown,’ but nobody called him that. On the street he was known as Tommy Brown. He was in his sixties then, and he always came in alone. His driver used to wait outside.

    “Tommy Brown was the boss of the