‘What’s the matter?’ I asked (of course).
His answer startled me again. Not only because of what he said, but the way that he said it. He actually started to cry.
‘Oh my God,’ he sobbed in a lowered voice, ‘I hope I didn’t kill him.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘THAT STUPID FUCKING BASTARD!’ he screamed. ‘WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE’S TALKING TO? I WAS IN ’NAM, I DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!’
‘What happened?’
And then he began crying again.
‘I think I killed him,’ he sobbed as he covered his face in his hands. ‘Oh God, I hope I didn’t kill him.’
To say that this guy was upset would be more than an understatement. He was riding on a wave of emotion that went up to anger and down to grief like a yo-yo, back and forth, and was literally inconsolable. It took the full ten minutes of the two-mile trip to Astoria for me to piece together what had happened.
He had been sitting in a bar, alone, just minding his own business, having a couple of drinks, and brooding to himself about his own troubles. Three rowdy young men entered the bar and sat nearby. One of these guys decided it would be a good time to have some ‘fun’ at my passenger’s expense. He began making belittling comments to him while his buddies laughed. He wouldn’t let up and it led to a brawl.
The fight was no shoving match. It became an outright slugfest which ended with the other guy collapsing on the floor from a chop to the neck which may have crushed his windpipe. He gasped desperately for breath before finally slumping over, unconscious, and possibly suffocating. My passenger ran out of the bar to the street and jumped into my cab which happened to be approaching on Northern Boulevard.
What the moron in the bar didn’t know when he decided to forget his manners was that he had finally met ‘the wrong guy’. His object of ridicule was an ex-marine who knew martial arts and was in no mood to take crap from some punk.
When we arrived at his place, I gave him this advice: talk to no one else about this incident other than a priest. Don’t let your feelings of guilt put you in a jail cell. The guy muttered something that might have been a thank you, got out of my cab, and disappeared into the night.
I found it a bit odd in myself that, although my passenger had just committed a serious crime in the eyes of the law, I felt sympathy for him and was actually rooting for him not to get caught. This was partially because I had seen how remorseful he was and I did not deem him to be an evil person. But it was also because the person he may have killed represented to me an aspect of humanity that is begging for correction – the psycho who takes pleasure in intimidating strangers. This person, in my mind, is more of a danger to society than the guy with a short fuse who strikes him down.
Of course, New York, the city which prides itself on its variety, also has great variety in its types of criminals. There’s the overt bully mentioned above; marauders who commit impulsive crimes like grabbing pocketbooks and running away; husbands who commit adultery; wives who put nail polish in their cheating husband’s soup; and even the occasional sociopath who doesn’t clean up after his dog (although this is rare, indeed).
But the one type of criminal we seem to be endlessly fascinated by, the one we can’t get enough of, is, of course, the professional. Grouped together, they are the subjects of countless movies and TV shows.
You know who I mean…
They were hit men
These people don’t go around telling you who they are. You have to figure it out for yourself. One Friday afternoon in February, 1985 I had two of them in my cab taking a trip to Newark Airport.
They didn’t tell me who they were.
I figured it out for myself.
I’d been cruising lower Manhattan in the late afternoon when they hailed me from the street. One of them was tall and thin, the other shorter and a bit on the chubby side. They told me immediately that they had to go to Newark Airport in New Jersey; that they wanted me to take the Holland Tunnel; that they were getting a 5.30 p.m. flight to Chicago; and that they did this trip every week on Fridays. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these bits of information were to become pieces of the puzzle needed to understand exactly who they were and what they did for a living.
I was glad to get a fare to Newark Airport – it was about a $25 run at the time – but I was concerned about the traffic. From where we were in lower Manhattan I would indeed have to take the Holland Tunnel and the rush hour congestion in the tube can be a nightmare, both leaving and returning to the city, and especially on a Friday. So I turned the radio on to the news station so I could learn as much as possible about road conditions in the area.
My passengers were engaged in continuous conversation, going back and forth from English to Italian. I found there was something about them which stuck my attention on them and aroused my curiosity. It wasn’t just the Italian – it was a certain demeanor they had. When you do a job continuously over a long period of time, the types of particles you deal with fall into familiar categories. These two guys didn’t quite fit. There was something about them.
I found myself wondering if maybe they were Mafia and I immediately scolded myself for even thinking that. I’m not the kind of person who goes around making bigoted assumptions. Still, I just couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that they seemed like they could be Mob. It was not a thought I would normally have had.
Of the two of them, the one who really grabbed my attention as I glanced at them in the mirror was the taller, thinner one. He appeared to be in his late forties and had slick, black hair that was combed straight back. His face was noticeably pale and tight. This was a man who could have been cast as Dracula if he’d been an actor – he had a vampire kind of look. His companion was much younger, a bit heavy-set, with sleepy-looking eyes, brown hair and a protruding lower lip.
I engaged them with some small talk about the traffic. The younger one had some feeling in his voice, I noticed, but the older one had a voice and a manner in the way he spoke which I found disturbing. There was a hollowness and a solidity about him that wasn’t quite like anyone I had encountered before. I couldn’t seem to get free from an intuitive feeling that this guy was the real thing.
We approached the Holland Tunnel in traffic that really wasn’t as bad as I’d expected and, as we entered the tube, the sound waves of the cab’s radio went temporarily dead, not returning again until we were nearly at the end of the tunnel on the Jersey side. Then, as the radio kicked in, a story started to come on about a criminal trial which was taking place in Manhattan at the time and had been receiving quite a bit of publicity. It was called the ‘pizza connection’ trial because pizzerias were said to be laundering drug money. About twenty Mafiosi were being tried together as a group on various charges. As the broadcast began, the older one heard what it was about and jolted forward in his seat.
‘Turn that up, please!’ he blurted out in his heavily accented voice.
I turned the volume up. The latest details about the trial, which had been going on for several weeks, were given. For the twenty seconds or so that the story was being broadcast, my passengers both listened intently to every word. Then, when the piece was over, they sat back in their seats and began talking to each other with great animation in Italian.
As I turned the volume back down, there was something akin to a lump in my throat. I had suddenly realized exactly where it had been that I had picked them up – it was in Foley Square, the very place where all the courthouses were located. And they’d gotten in my cab at four o’clock, the time of day when a trial would be recessing. And they had told me that they make this trip to Chicago every Friday. They were going back home for the