Free Nothing But Money by Greg Smith

Bobby Lino’s funeral like a rock star, all the sycophants lined up to kiss his ring.

    Outside, across from the parking lot, the FBI had brought along plenty of film.

    The family of Bobby Senior—what was left of it—was assembled in grief. His wife was gone, and so was his eldest son, Vincent. All that was left was Grace Ann and Robert—a drug addict and a wannabe gangster. There were many ways to view this. Some might say Bobby Senior was a lousy father, maybe even the worst ever. He was a drug dealer whose eldest son died of a drug overdose and whose daughter was now deeply involved in destroying herself with the substance he’d sold to make money. He had shot Sonny Black and helped bury Bobby C and Gabriel Infanti. He had cheated and lied and made these choices while raising a family. But sometimes, when you thought about him, it was tough to suppress a smile.

    Robert Lino believed his father had tried—in his own way—to be a father. Sitting here at Cusomano’s Funeral Home, with the organ music and the flowers and the silk-suit parade passing by, it was easy to look back and smile at just how crazy his father could be. It was way back in 1979, Robert remembered, that the incident with his sister and the guy everybody knew as Mikey Bear occurred.

    Back then heroin was king in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, thanks in part to Bobby Lino. Some of that heroin wound up with a guy associated with the Colombo family everybody called Mikey Bear. Mikey had been selling drugs all over Brooklyn, and one of his customers wound up being Grace Ann, Bobby Senior’s little girl. Sometimes they would use drugs together. It was an ugly time, and the two would spend days inside Mikey’s run-down apartment near Avenue C off Ocean Parkway in Flatbush. They’d cook it up and shoot it up and go off into that Alice in Wonderland world, unaware of anything or anyone around them. Bobby Senior got wind of Mikey Bear and didn’t see the connection between the fact that he personally smuggled kilos of this stuff into his own neighborhood and the fact that his daughter had wound up hooked on it, spiraling into a self-destructive, claustrophobic state of permanent pain. The issue wasn’t heroin. The issue was Mikey Bear. As Bobby Senior saw it, if Mikey were removed from the equation, there wouldn’t be a problem anymore. The solution was that simple.

    One of Bobby Lino’s partners in Pizza Park was a guy named Nicky Black. Nicky was a Colombo soldier and professed to disapprove of drugs, although he was in favor of extortion, loan-sharking and, on occasion, murder. Bobby told Nicky all about Mikey Bear and his daughter and the drugs, and Nicky, too, agreed that the solution was simple. From that moment, Mikey Bear was no longer an associate of the Colombo organized crime family of Brooklyn. Bobby and Frank Lino had permission and so they set to work.

    The lesson of Mikey Bear was this: clipping someone you don’t really know is much more difficult than clipping someone you do know. The Lino cousins had to figure out Mikey Bear’s schedule, which often consisted of scoring drugs and then spending weeks at a time holed up in his rancid apartment. They watched him to learn his patterns and discovered he had none. The only way to get him was to lure him outside. Two of Mikey’s friends, the guy Kojak with the bald head and another guy named Vito, made some calls and a meeting was arranged. Mikey would emerge from his hellish little hole and hook up with Kojak and Vito on the corner of Avenue C and Ocean Parkway. It would be safe because it was a well-trafficked area with working people coming and going.

    The day of the job there were three cars filled with guys and guns cruising along Ocean Parkway. Bobby Senior was in the crash car, the car that pulls in front of the cops if they show up. Cousin Frank was a backup shooter in the car a few parking spots away from the sidewalk meeting locale. The third car contained the two