Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi Page B

going to twist the screws. Finally, on the Thursday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, we were late getting to work. The chef started screaming and yelling at us the minute we walked in the door. He’s yelling at us in the dining room. There were people standing around. Early dinner customers. I went nuts. I felt like he was insulting me. The miserable fuck. I couldn’t stand it. I ran right at the guy and grabbed hint by the neck. Lenny comes over and we picked the guy up by his arms and legs. We carried him into the kitchen and began to shove hint into the oven. It must have been about 450 degrees. We couldn’t really get hint inside, but he wasn’t so sure. He screamed and jumped and wriggled until we let hint fall out of our grip. The second he hit the floor he was flying. He ran clear out of the joint. He just kept on going, and he never came back. Then Lenny and I walked out and never went back either.

    “Paulie was pissed. Tommy Morton must have told hint about what we did. Paulie acted as though we had embarrassed hint in front of Lucchese. He was so pissed that he made me burn Lenny’s car. It was a 1965 yellow Bonneville convertible. Lenny loved that car, but Paulie made me burn it. He put a hit on his own kid’s car. He got Tuddy to drive it down the ‘hole. ’ The hole was a body-compacting and car junkyard in Ozone Park that belonged to Jerry Asaro and his son, Vincent. They were with the Bonanno crew. Then Paulie grabs me and he says, ‘You go burn the car. ’ It was crazy. He had given Lenny the car himself. So while he and Tuddy watched me from their own car, I poured half a gallon of gas in the front seat and lit a match. I watched it all burn up.

    “The summer was over, but I was already into a million things. A day never went by without somebody coming up with a scheme. We had a neighborhood girl who used to work for the company handling the MasterCharge cards. She used to bring us office memos about security checkups and credit checks. We also bought lots of cards from people who worked in the post office, but then the companies started sending letters to their customers asking if they had received a card yet. But having somebody inside the bank was the best. We had one girl who used to get us duplicate cards, and we’d know the amount of credit attached. Before a card got into an envelope to be mailed, I had a duplicate. If a card had a $500 credit line, for instance, we’d go to stores where we were known or places we had. I’d punch out ten credit card slips. The guys we knew in the stores would call and get authorization for a $390 stereo, a $450 television, a $470 wristwatch-whatever. The person waiting for the card never got it, and we had about a month before the card was usually reported stolen. I’d try to do all the heavy purchases as soon as I got the card. The guys in the stores didn’t care, since they were getting their money. They would just take the authorized slips to the bank and deposit them like cash.

    “These days they have traps for this kind of thing in the computer system, but back then I was making a lot of money. If l wanted to, I could have run up $10,000 worth of merchandise in a day. Even working strange stores was easy. There are a hundred items in every store, and you’ve always got your fake driver’s license all typed out and your backup ID. We used to get fake IDs from ‘Tony the Baker’ in Ozone Park. He was a real baker. He had a bakery that made bread. But he’d also make up fake driver’s licenses for you while you waited. He had all the forms. You couldn’t believe how good he was. Somehow he had the code from Albany, so that even a state trooper couldn’t tell it was wrong. He charged fifty dollars for a set, and that included a driver’s license, Social security card, and voter registration card.

    “When I finished with the cards I’d sell them to ‘under the limits’ people, who would take the banged-out card and go out