THENASTYBITS by Anthony Bourdain Page A

a criminal of sorts, trying to support myself through a variety of harebrained drug-dealing schemes, sneak thievery, petty burglary, and fraud, I found to my dismay that a life of crime was difficult and unglamorous. It required that most dreaded trait, discipline, as well as a closed mouth and a lot of downtime, where money was going out and none was coming in. My coconspirators at the time were an unreliable lot, either talking too much or making dangerously stupid improvisations on our carefully hatched plans, and in my case, anyway, our few ventures into felonious activity were—at the end of the day—decidedly unprofitable.
Which is how I became a chef.
But that's another story.
    Suffice it to say, when I finally buckled down to a life of legitimate toil in the restaurant business, I began to meet some real criminals, guys connected to organized crime, and I recognized right away that while they, apparently, had what it took to live a life outside the law, / did not. And I was curious about the differences between myself and these full-timers. What remained with me from my early, heady days of surreptitious entry was the love of conspiracy, an appreciation of clandestine meetings, the comfortably familiar phrase book, long ago codified and set down in Hollywood films, of the hard-core, professional bad man. La Cosa Nostra and, to a lesser extent, espionage, became obsessions. I wanted to know, for instance, how Kim Philby kept his mouth shut for all those years. How could a kid in his early twenties, still in college, keep quiet about his true loyalties? Especially when he was doing something as exciting as spying for the NKVD? How could he not, after a few beers, blab to his friends about his secret work for the Workers' Paradise—especially when he'd been loudly espousing unpopular political views to all and sundry? How could young Kim never, while trying to bed some breasty Marxist sophomore, have boozily confided that, "All this right-wing twaddle is a sham baby . . . I'm down with the International, bitch . . . and doing some serious motherfucking undercover shit! Now take off those panties!"
    Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies, these are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie—and my fiction. Bank robbers, spies, enforcers, contract killers, loan sharks, confidence men, and racketeers . . . it's their consistency over time, their relentless adherence to the requirements of the job, that makes me, in my way, love them. Take a guy like Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the former boss of the
    Genovese crime family, who I used as an inspiration for a character in Bone in the Throat. Here's a guy who, for thirty years, played the public role of a doddering, schizophrenic old man, appearing on the street for walk-talks with his soldiers in bathrobe and slippers, talking to himself, behaving erratically, moving his eyes and head in such a way as to indicate insanity— and all the while was running with an iron grip the largest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the country. This crazy act kept him out of jail for most of his life—though the Feds did catch up with him in the end. You have to admire that kind of work ethic. They never caught The Chin on tape, telling a subordinate to "whack somebody out" or "put a rocket in his pocket." You never heard The Chin's voice playing over the courthouse speakers, talking about how he was going to "sever [somebody's] motherfuckin' head off" (one of my favorite Gotti-isms). The Chin played his part to the end.
    Gotti, to his detriment, surrounded himself with those other fascinating creatures of the criminal netherworld: informers. Listening to recordings of the embattled don in his Little Italy social club, berating his crew, bemoaning his gambling losses, contemplating the machinations and intentions of his rivals, there's a poignancy to the experience: Not only was the