The Old Turk's Load Read online

  GREGORY GIBSON

  The Mysterious Press New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Gregory Gibson

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  Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States of America

  first edition

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-2113-4

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  NOT FOR RESALE

  For Fred Buck

  The Street Brothers

  T

  he Street Brothers weren’t really brothers.They were from LA, and they always worked together, and their names happened to be Woody and Vince. It was their East Coast colleagues who, for reasons known only to gangsters with ninth grade educations, had given them the “Brothers”handle. In the summer of 1967 they spent a long afternoon on the New Jersey piers producing documentation, dealing with brokers, paying fees, and filling out customs forms in order to take possession of a custom-built Porsche, “straight from the factory,” via Marseille.

  Woody passed the time by thinking about cars he had owned in the thirty-five years he’d been alive. His father had worked for the phone company and, what with the war, it wasn’t like his family got a new car every year. He had childhood memories of a black ’39 Packard—the way the trunk humped up in back—combined, somehow, with ice-cream cones and gas rationing coupon books. Then the ’52 Chevy Fleetline—used but cherry, with full trim and Powerglide—his first car. The ’55 Mercury Monterey, back to a Chevy in ’57, Mercs again in ’61 and ’65, then his current ’67 Lincoln with the tinted glass. It took a while to sort through the succession of models, with their accessories and combinations of tans, canaries, burgundies, slates, and leather, chrome or wood-grain finishes— interior and exterior. Woody had a habit of thinking in lists.

  Vince, on the other hand, was adept at not thinking at all. Sometimes after a long silence Woody would say, “Vince, what are you thinking?”and Vince would reply,“Nothing.” Woody liked that.

  What Vince did was whistle, a thin, curling, barely audible stream of air. He’d hear a song on the radio and it would stick in his head, so he’d blow the first few bars over and over, for days on end, until another song replaced it. Right now he was on the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.” He’d get as far as “Still I’m gonna miss you” and start over. Invariably, Woody would be relieved when Vince picked up a new song, then annoyed for a few minutes at the prospect of hearing its beginning notes over and over. Soon he wouldn’t hear it at all. They were made for each other.

  The Street Brothers were in the compliance industry. They’d come east from Los Angeles fifteen years earlier and spent their entire careers in the employ of Mr. Angelo DiNoto of New Jersey, enforcing discipline among the loan sharks, bookies, whores, crooked cops, and compromised government officials who comprised DiNoto’s empire. There’d always been drugs, of course, but things had been changing throughout the sixties. Now Mr. D’s operation was more . . . refined.

  Under pressure from the American government, Italian officials were cracking down on Corsican and Sicilian entrepreneurs. In Turkey, facing similar pressures, growers slowed poppy production to a trickle. Through the malign inadvertence of the CIA, the centers of opium production shifted to Southeast Asia. Yet the Turkish trickle—stuff that used to be referred to as “Druggist’s Opium”—was prime shit, the raw product yielding up to 20 percent morphine, nearly twice what was expected from Golden Triangle exports.

  Accordingly, each season, on a remote Anatolian plateau at the farthest reach of Mr. D’s influence, an old farmer set out a field of high-octane poppies—a million rapture factories. At harvesttime he and his people would move through the field, collecting the latex the plants gave up, licking the metal tool’s edge to lubricate it, working in patient bliss, sunrise to sunset, day after day. The sticky brown goo would be carried by mule back to Izmir, by ship to Marseille. There it was boiled, limed, filtered, seared by acid, pressure-cooked in nasty pickle-smelling chemicals, chloroformed, carbonated, and squeezed till the god-stuff was tricked out, whored up. The old Turk’s crop would be smack by then. Horse. Junk. Ten kilos of blindingly pure heroin.

  They’d installed the 1967 load in the body of a customized Porsche specially ordered by an American businessman, and shipped it as a private consignment via United Marine Transport to Newark, New Jersey, USA.

  It was nearly six p.m. by the time Woody got the keys and backed his baby carefully out from among the dozens of vehicles parked on the dock.Then he spent an eternity going over every inch of the car, inspecting it for scratches and nicks. In Vince’s considered opinion, the guy had balls of steel.

  When Woody finally gave the okay, they left the piers and drove slowly up Doremus, through the strange harsh odors of the industrial wasteland fronting Newark Bay. It was a long, straight road, and there was more than enough daylight for them to take careful note of anyone behind them. They stayed on Doremus over Passaic to Market Street where they stopped for a leisurely dinner in a Mr. D.–owned joint with a window seat that gave them a view of their shiny new car. Then, when the evening was sufficiently advanced for downtown traffic to have abated, the Street Brothers headed west on Springfield Avenue, planning to take Route 124 straight up to the factory in Morristown where the goods would be cut and packaged. It was a milk run, but it merited every precaution because it had a significant potential downside. Their cargo, by the time it hit the retail trade, would yield $5 million.

  Springfield Avenue runs uphill as it approaches the center of Newark from the east. The two men were cruising sedately up this hill when they encountered a crowd of people running full tilt down toward them.

  There was only one car in front of theirs. Vince saw its taillights go on and said, “Now what?”

  Then the crowd swallowed them. A trash can cracked the rear window. People began rocking the car. Woody drew his gun but the car rolled and in the chaos of being upset there was nothing to shoot at. Black arms hauled them onto the street. Angry eyes saw the suits and the gun, mistook the men for undercover cops. They were lucky to escape with concussions and bruises.

  Earlier that evening, while the Street Brothers had been eating their dinners, the pigs had been making a rough and very visible bust on a cabdriver named John Smith. He was hauled into the Fourth Precinct station house where, as the rumor ran, further beatings led to his death.

  In Newark, against a backdrop of poverty, unemployment, decayed housing, and discrimination, racial tensions had been ramping up all summer, and the locals were seething with frustration. The cops, while aware of this, were not sensitive to it. In fact, they didn’t give a fuck what the niggers thought.

  As it happened, the Fourth Precinct was just across the street from Hayes Homes, a large and particularly dysfunctional welfare housing development. When the residents at Hayes got wind of what was happen
ing with their brother John Smith, they went into the streets. The cops responded by pouring out of the station like angry bees, maybe a dozen of them in riot gear, laying around them with batons, aiming to put people down.

  However, to their considerable surprise, this time the people did not go down. After the first few heads got busted, bricks began to fly. More brothers and sisters came out and the infuriated crowd swelled—the papers said four hundred, but it was more like a thousand—pushing the pig back into his pen, then spilling down the scabrous blight that was Springfield Avenue, a single ragedrunk organism out to avenge three centuries of rotten history. That shiny bauble, the Porsche, with its two nattily attired honkies, was irresistible.

  Smoot

  S

  moot made the papers twice that week.

  The first time was on July 15, 1967—the third day of the Newark riots. There was a photo in the New York Times, widely reprinted, of looters carrying televisions and toasters through a broken department-store window. Its protective grate had been torn down and thrown on the sidewalk in a wavelike curl, adding an interesting design element to the left side of the photo. On the right side people stood and watched. Some wore looks of disapproval. They, presumably, were the good Negroes, the ones white America desperately hoped outnumbered their looting brethren. Smoot was in this crowd of onlookers, wearing his signature tight pants, white shirt, snap-brim hat, and shades. If you knew him, you’d right away recognize him in the photo. He was checking things out, hanging back and watching like he always did.

  Three days earlier he’d been doing the same at the edge of the crowd laying the beating on Woody and Vince, and he’d stayed behind after the mob moved on, to inspect the bloodied victims rolling in a heap in the gutter.Those two guys weren’t cops, he realized. Not in those clothes, not in that car. And though he didn’t get a very good look at the gun before the swarm ate it, he could tell it wasn’t no stubby .38 like the pigs used. He went to a pay phone in the Hayes and dropped a dime.

  He got hold of his man, Julius Roth, who happened to be in town attending to accounts receivable on behalf of his boss, an independent New York real estate operator named Richard Mundi who had substantial holdings in the slums of Newark. Smoot told Roth there was something funny about this pair of white cats and their car. They looked mob, and the car was foreign, with foreign plates. So what was it doing in Newark, anyway? Roth thanked Smoot and told him to scram, to get lost and stay lost. Then he called Mossman. The two men put on monkey suits, borrowed a truck from one of their garages in the neighborhood, and hauled the Porsche away themselves, unnoticed and unchallenged in the desolation that followed the first wave of rioting, as if the bounty on whites had expired. They agreed with Smoot’s assessment, and they took the car apart piece by piece until they found the ten plastic sacks of smack. The rolled-over car was dumped in a deep quarry in Pennsylvania and the old Turk’s load put in a safe in Manhattan. Waiting.

  Its rightful owners were pissed.They were out a quarter million dollars up front and twenty times that in the long run. Vince and Woody were beat up, but they could talk okay. Their story made it clear this had been nothing but a horrible accident. Still, someone had that fucking smack. The wise guys tore the town apart but couldn’t find anyone who knew a thing. So they waited. Sooner or later, the shit would turn up or someone would squeal.

  Roth was waiting, too, for something he hoped would never come to pass. He liked Smoot. The kid was different from the rest

  8 GREGORY GIBSON

  of those street spades. He sent Smoot $500, hoping he’d just fucking disappear. Without a word. Would realize what the deal was and pack his bag. Head to Oakland and join the Black Panthers. Do the Muslim thing. But far away. Put some distance between him and Newark.

  It wasn’t to be. For all his smarts, Smoot was missing a piece, like the missing “h” in his nickname. Roth figured he was just that short of Smooth.

  The call came on July 17, the last day of the riots. Smoot asked how the deal with the fancy car went down. Very good, Roth told him. Smoot said he thought as much, seeing the way the Guineas was tearing up the town, musta been something they wanted bad in that car. Roth was silent. Musta wanted it bad, Smoot went on, ’cause they making it hot for everyone. Roth asked him why he didn’t just get the fuck out of town if it was hot. Smoot, indignant, wanted to know how could he ax him that shit when he knew he’d be leaving his momma all alone in the Hayes like that? Roth asked him how much? Smoot, cool and confident, said five. Roth said next night at Riverbank Park.

  But he had no stomach for it. He dutifully reported the conversation to Mundi and said he didn’t want any of the action after that. Neither did Mossman. So Mundi sent Seamster, a soft-spoken, sandy-haired sadist with a taste for boys, who happily shot Smoot— though he wished he could have done more—and pushed the body into the Passaic.

  The cops found the corpse after a couple of days, which was the occasion of Smoot’s second newspaper appearance. Roth read the brief article in the Star-Ledger. He tried to tell himself that it was just the funny thing about the name that was hanging him up. The kid actually was DiShaun Smoot. That was how they printed it in the paper. “DiShaun Smoot, age 23.” And he really did have a mother. He’d lived with her in the Hayes. In truth Roth was sick at heart that the kid had turned greedy and then had to die. He was sick of the whole business. Burned out. Smoot was the beginning of the end for him.

  John Smith the cabby, who had not been beaten to death by the cops, appeared on the cover of Time the next week, and was featured in the cover story, “Anatomy of a Riot.”

  Smoot didn’t make it in that one.

  The Situation with the Mailman

  T

  he way the Mailman figured it, taking that physical was the biggest mistake of his life.The grand scheme, as he’d originally conceived it, had been to start young at the post office, cash out early with a pension, then commence a free and easy life as a man of means. But after his twenty years of blood time were up, he’d had to submit to a physical exam to qualify for his discharge. It was his first visit to a doctor in decades, and the sudden intrusion of medical science ruined everything. They discovered that he had throat cancer and, after toasting him with radiation, they gave him a total laryngectomy with bilateral neck dissection. His oncologist, a man with a cancerous bedside manner, told him he had a 66 percent chance of making it to five years, and after that it was anyone’s guess. The Mailman reckoned that if he hadn’t taken the physical he’d have lived and then died. Like everyone. Now he was a Dummy, a Larry, a Neck-Breather—talking, when he was forced to, in his “bucco-esophogeal voice”—ghastly prolonged burps. No more Pall Malls, either. He’d always had a dark disposition, inclined to morose introspection, and the diagnosis confirmed everything.

  He might have guessed what was in store for him; his father had died young of cancer, leaving him more or less on his own. In the excitement following VJ Day he’d drifted up to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was sucked into a temporary position as a special delivery messenger for the post office. To his surprise, he liked the job and performed it well. It had a structure as foursquare as the city blocks he walked, and structure was important to him back then. The sadism, cruelty, and numbing bureaucracy of postal culture were bad, but no worse than what the world had already shown him. He moved up to substitute letter carrier, then floater, servicing the routes of five regular carriers on their days off, which allowed for a certain amount of planning. He started screwing Faye Thursday afternoons, then moved in with her—to the envy of the regular carrier, whose compulsive womanizing occasionally got him beaten up by irate husbands, boyfriends, and fathers.

  In those early post-office years discipline had been looser. There was always time for small talk, and the Mailman visited other kitchens than Faye’s. When it got hot, he’d leave a pair of cutoffs in the green relay box on Puritan Court, and stash the bag and his uniform in the back room of Cap’n Bill’s underneath the Puritan Hotel.
He’d sneak through the side lot of the Tarrantinos’on Beach Court, down Woody Curhan’s cinder driveway, and slide into the cool green murk of Gloucester Harbor. He’d swim around Fort Point to the pump house in front of Cape Ann Fisheries, where Cominelli, the crippled oiler, would spot him and yell, “Hey, Mailman! Where’s my fucking disability check?”

  That was then. Now he couldn’t even take a bath because there was no way to close the blowhole they’d cut in his throat. Two tablespoons would drown him.

  After a few years the regular carrier retired and the Mailman got his route, which took up about twenty-five square blocks in the middle of Gloucester, extending from tony rich folks’ houses on Middle Street to gritty squats on Columbia, two blocks over from Faye’s place. At this point the Mailman conceived the grand scheme regarding his postal career.

  Scheme or no, Faye eventually grew weary of his dark moods and took up with Schultzie, scion to Schultz Brothers, the local trash barons. Schultzie was a much nicer man.The Mailman moved across town, into the basement apartment of a four-family tenement on the back side of Portugee Hill. The basement suited him fine, though he’d occasionally stop in at Faye’s for lunch or a visit, since the route was still his. Sometimes he’d even have a beer after work with Schultzie. It was amiable, subdued. They would’ve let him farther back in, but he kept his distance, like a waterfront cat. The route satisfied whatever need he had for attachments.

  There were 630 souls on his route. He’d once saved Mrs. Alves who’d fallen in her living room, even though her family thought he should’ve let her die there. And he’d witnessed, helpless, the fatal heart attack of Cummings, the ward councilor. He knew where Sammy the Rat slept it off, and could follow Sammy’s slime trail at eight a.m. down to the Dugout, where he’d take his first, trembling drink with the night shift fish packers from Gorton’s just getting off work. The Mailman hadn’t delivered a baby, but he’d witnessed Dickie Lufkin being born in the backseat of a car that never even got started for the hospital. And kept a watch out for the Old Gal who got her daily beating from her boyfriend till she finally moved out, only to have him start beating her at her new place. The cops found him dead one night in the parking lot, but they declared he’d slipped on the ice as he was getting into his car.The Mailman knew the truth, and the Old Gal knew he knew.The whole route was like a spiderweb, and when a gnat hit the sticky the spider knew, and when the spider moved the gnats knew. “Mailman! You fucked my girlfriend/saved my mother/saw my brother die/help me/get lost/ where’s my check?” These connections were fulfilling in a certain way, but they were also intense—which, perhaps, was why people in his line of work had been known to go postal.