Made Men by Greg B. Smith

with “Bob.” He dropped in conversation numerous times that he had Bob’s home number, that he had visited Bob’s enormous town house on the Upper East Side with its built-in swimming pool and Icelandic goat pelts covering marble floors. Vinny claimed he was hoping to put together a club with Bob that would attract Wall Street guys, with door-todoor limousine service for convenience.
“He said, ‘Vinny, you feel it is good,’ he says, ‘you got it.’ Swear on my kids. Forget about it. ‘You got it,’ he says.”
Ralphie asked, “I wonder how much this guy makes a year.”
“Ah, forget about it,” Vinny said. “Fucking unbelievable...He even says he is so far ahead of Playboy. Forget about it. Playboy ain’t even in the same fucking class.”
Ralphie: “I think Penthouse is a nice magazine, actually.”
“There is no comparison,” Vinny said, claiming the Penthouse Web site got more hits on the Internet “than anybody in the world. Right now.”
“Does he really work anymore?”
“No, he doesn’t go into the office, no. He was telling me a story, that he went to his office and the girl in the front there says, ‘Can I help you?’ Didn’t even know who the fuck he was.”
Vinny mentioned that Guccione’s “right-hand man” was a lawyer named Gene, which made Ralphie light up like a game-show contestant with the right answer.
“I know him,” Ralphie says. “I was in the can with him.”
“You’re kidding me,” Vinny says.
“Old man Gene,” Ralphie says. “You know what he does? He loves to knit. Swear to God.”
Vinny: “He does what?”
Ralphie: “To knit. He used to knit.”
Vinny—who apparently knew nothing about knitting— got uncomfortable and tried to change the subject. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“I’m serious. In the can, that’s what he did. He was a lawyer, he got caught up in a swindle.”
“Yeah.”
“A stock swindle. Gene Bo. I can’t believe that.”
Vinny was beginning to like this Ralphie. Here was a street guy who was known as an earner. Vinny had heard that Ralphie was in a bit of a jam with the World Trade Center heist, but he was still impressed. It was true that the three guys Ralphie had picked to actually go inside and do the job turned out to be Moe, Larry, and Curly, but it appeared as if Ralphie had successfully insulated himself from their foolishness.
Ralph had told Vinny he was confident the three were not competent enough to link him to the scheme. And it had been a bold scheme. It had taken place in the middle of a weekday morning in a building that had more security than a nuclear weapons factory. This was, after all, the World Trade Center, the place that a mere five years before had been attacked by a band of dedicated and none-toostable Islamic terrorists in a rented Ryder truck. Here were three of Ralphie’s guys actually getting in and out of the building without getting caught, and walking away with who knows how much cash. How much of it was still missing nobody knew for sure. This was the kind of bold plan that Vinny admired, and hoped it would inspire his second-rate crime family, the DeCavalcantes. This kind of thinking would, perhaps, result in added respect. Perhaps, if Vinny was lucky, the term farmer would go out of fashion.
Vinny made a managerial decision that he would one day regret: he decided to put Ralphie with his driver and longtime friend, Joey O. That way he could keep an eye on this up-and-coming kid Ralphie.
And Ralphie could keep an eye on him.

4
    By the time the FBI knocked on Ralphie Guarino’s front door, much had changed in La Cosa Nostra regarding the ramifications of becoming a dreaded rattus norvegicus.
    In the autumn of 1963, the ramifications were simple. You talk, you die. When sixty-year-old Joseph Michael Valachi sat in a roomful of United States senators and television cameras and became the first made member of the American Mafia to publicly reveal the corrupt inner machinery of his