On a car-theft beef, an average kid with the average things—family, home, school, job—is usually cut loose by the parole board in a year or eighteen months. I did three years and two months in four different institutions: The National Training School for Boys in Washington, DC, Natural Bridge Honor Camp, the Federal Reformatory at Petersburg, Virginia and the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. It seems none of the good of these places rubbed off on me, only the bad. My heroes weren’t the movie stars or the headline-making sports figures, but the guys who got away with the biggest bank heist; the Al Capones, the Mickey Cohens, all the mobsters who defied the system that was keeping me locked up.
When I was at Chillicothe I met Frank Costello. When I walked down the halls with him or sat at the same table for meals, I probably experienced the same sensation an honest kid would get out of being with Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle: admiration bordering on worship. To me, if Costello did something, right or wrong, that was the way it was supposed to be. One morning Costello and I were seated at the same table for breakfast. He was reading the morning newspaper and a new guard walked over to him and started to take the paper, saying, “You read in your cell or the library.” Costello removed the guard’s hand from his paper and replied, “Sonny, when I’m at home it’s my habit to read the newspaper while eating my breakfast. The government has made this place my home for a while. You’re here to see that I stay, not to tell me where and when I can’t read.” The guard hesitated for an instant, then looked around the dining room, left our table and started hassling one of the younger guys on some infraction. Anyone without the status of Costello would have been on his way to the hole after confronting a guard that way. Yeah, I admired Frank Costello, and I listened to and believed everything he said.
In May of 1954 I was finally paroled. I was nineteen, and it was the first time I was legitimately on the streets since I was twelve years old.
The parole stipulated that I return to McMechen and live with the same aunt and uncle who had taken care of me while my mother was in prison. I loved them for giving me my chance on the outside. It was through their efforts, not Mom’s, that I ever got released at all.
I doubt that the average person could ever relate to the sense of freedom I felt. It was more like a dream than something good really happening to me. Each morning—no, not just each morning, but each breath was like being born again. I wanted to sing, dance and shout, “Hey, I’m free, I’m out, I’m one of you!” Hell, I didn’t want to ever go to sleep. Being awake, so as not to miss a single thing that was going on in my new world, was too important. When I did go to sleep, waking up and being able to lie in bed was a treat. The smell of breakfast being cooked by my aunt, with my choice of anything I wanted, instead of powdered eggs or soggy pancakes, was as rewarding as being a millionaire. One of my biggest pleasures was just walking—in the city, in the country, going anywhere or going nowhere. Just appreciating that there were no fences, no boundaries. Being able to watch people and hear them laugh, seeing children playing in the park, looking at pretty girls in short skirts and tight sweaters. Above all, no one was demanding that I do this or that. I didn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to see if “the man” was coming, or if a bunch of inmates were up to something that I ought to check out. I was my own person. The feeling was so pure, and it was so wonderful to be free, that if someone had said to me then, “You’ll be back in jail one of these days,” I’d have bet my life the person didn’t know what he was talking about.
Still, with all the joys of being free, it wasn’t long before I realized that there is more to life in the free world than just walking around taking in the sights, especially when seven of perhaps the most important years in a person’s lifetime have been spent in reform schools. In jail I was glib and aggressive and knew everything that happened from the hole to the chapel, but out on the streets I couldn’t even hold a decent conversation with my aunt and uncle, let alone a stranger. All I knew was jail. I couldn’t talk about what school I’d graduated from, or even gone to. There weren’t any yesterdays or last months that I could refer to without exposing my past. For employment, I had to look for jobs no one else wanted. I did janitor and busboy work, weeded gardens and worked in a service station or two. I even shoveled shit and fed the horses oats at Wheeling Downs.
When it came to girls, my heart throbbed and I ached with desire but I couldn’t think of the proper things to say. I didn’t know the first thing about finesse, so I’d revert to some of the bullshit I had heard laid down by some of the older guys in reform school. It didn’t work for me; in most cases that kind of conversation sent the girls packing instead of impressing them.
The first girl I ever made it with I ended up marrying. I’d worked all day at the race track and had stopped by a card room in Steubenville to see if I could run my day’s wages into a small fortune. After a couple of hours at the poker table, I had a pretty healthy pile of money in front of me. The cocktail waitress and some of the other girls were giving me and my roll some attention. Across from me, looking over the shoulder of a coal miner, was this pretty girl who gave me an occasional smile but wasn’t putting on the hustle like some of the other girls were. When I cashed in I was a big winner. I would have shared my winnings with any of those girls for a night in the sack, but a certain pride in not wanting to be some whore’s trick helped me walk right by the obvious advances and single out the pretty girl I’d noticed on the other side of the table.
She had come into the place with her coal-miner father. Since he was still wrapped up in the poker game, I had no problem getting a few words in with her. She told me she worked as a waitress in a cafeteria at McMechen. We didn’t make it together that night, but after visiting her at her job and dating a couple of times, we were in love.
She may not have been the most beautiful girl in the world but to me she was Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor and Lana Turner all rolled up in one. She was a healthy, smooth-skinned Irish girl who stirred things in me I’d never experienced. I didn’t get her cherry, but she damn sure got mine. The first time we made it together, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Beyond concentrating on the sex act, all I could think of was, “Wow, it’s happening, I’m really making it witji a girl.” I trembled with excitement and anticipation; so much so, I came before my prick touched her box. But that didn’t kill anything for me, and when I got inside her—our arms around each other, her smooth soft body in contact with mine—I really didn’t care if I ever took another breath. I was in heaven and I wanted to stay. She whispered, “I love you,” and goose bumps tingled all over my body. I was loving someone and she was returning my love. A huge void was being filled. For the first time in my life, I felt I could conquer the world.
We were married in January of 1955. It was a good life and I enjoyed the role of going off to work every morning and coming home to my wife. She was a super girl who didn’t make any demands but we were both just a couple of kids. We didn’t know how to budget our income. We were constantly broke and neither of us had the maturity to sit down and make plans based on what we were earning. Being broke and wanting things can build up a lot of pressure. That pressure grows even greater when you haven’t got the money to pay routine bills, like rent, gas, lights and transportation. Sometimes we couldn’t even buy groceries. It’s too bad I didn’t know how to handle it. Trouble was, all I knew was reform schools, stealing and not trusting anyone. The patience, the willingness to struggle and earn that normal life demands wasn’t part of my make up.
I started looking for ways to get things in a hurry. With all my jail-house connections, getting back into crime was no problem. My wife also had a little bit of the outlaw tendency in her nature, so she didn’t try to restrain me—not that she could have.
The larceny consisted of small time burglaries and several stolen cars. One theft was at the request of an older gangster friend: the deal was for me to steal a late model Cadillac and deliver it to an acquaintance of his in Florida. My friend put enough dollars in my hand to pay the expenses and the other guy would pay me five hundred when I got there. I stole the car and drove it to Florida. The guy at the other end took it all right, gave me a hundred,