Free Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi Page A

cleans the joint? I mean a wiseguy can make a buck off every part of the business.

    “And if he wants to bust it out, he can make even more money. Bank loans, for instance. A place has been in business say twenty, thirty years. It has a bank account. There’s usually a loan officer who can come over and give you a loan for some improvements. Of course, if you can, you take the money and forget about the improvements, because you’re expecting to bust the place out anyway.

    “Also, if the place has a line of credit, as the new partner you can call up suppliers and have them send stuff over. You can call up other new distributors and get them to send over truckloads of stuff, since the place has a good credit rating. Wholesalers are looking for business. They don’t want to turn you down. The salesmen want to make the sale. So you begin to order. You order cases of whiskey and wine. You order furniture. You order soap, towels, glasses, lamps, and food, and more food. Steaks. Two hundred filets. Crates of fresh lobster, crab, and shrimp. There is so much stuff coming in the door, it’s like Christmas.

    “And no sooner are the deliveries made in one door, you move the stuff out another. You sell the stuff to other places at a discount, but since you have no intention of paying for it in the first place, anything you sell it for is profit. Some guys use the stuff to start new places. You just milk the place dry. You bust it out. And, in the end, you can even burn the joint down for a piece of the insurance if it doesn’t make enough. And nowhere does Paulie show up as a partner. No names. No signed pieces of paper. Paulie didn’t need paper. Back then, in the sixties, aside from busting out joints, I know Paulie must have been getting a piece out of two, three dozen joints. A hundred here, two or three hundred there. He was doing beautifully. I remember once he told me he had a million and a half cash stashed away. He was always trying to talk me into saving a buck, but I couldn’t. He said he kept his in a vault. I said I didn’t have to save it because I would always make it.

    “And I wasn’t alone. Everyone I knew was into money schemes, and almost nobody ever got caught. That’s what people from the outside don’t understand. When you’re doing different schemes, and everyone you know is doing these things, and nobody is getting caught, except by accident, you begin to get the message that maybe it’s not so dangerous. And there were a million different schemes. You didn’t have to sell swag or stick up anybody. One of the guys from the neighborhood was the manager of a local supermarket, one of those giant chain places with ten check-out lanes and a half-a-percent profit margin. He was always very straight, and nobody gave him much credit for anything until the week he went on vacation and the main office sent carpenters to install new check-out lanes. The carpenters got to the supermarket with their blueprints and charts and thought they were in the wrong place. It seemed that the market had eleven check-out lanes instead of ten. It didn’t take long for the main office to catch on that someone had created his own check-out lane and that everything rung up on the eleventh register went into somebody else’s pocket. When our pal got back from vacation the cops were waiting for him, but he was a local hero. He was fired, but because he dummied up and denied everything he never spent a day in jail.

    “Also, hanging around and hustling means gambling. A day doesn’t go by without bets going down on this or that. When I had it, I’d bet a thousand dollars on the point spread of a basketball game, and I wasn’t just betting one game. I could have ten thousand dollars riding on the wide, wide world of Saturday afternoon sports. Jimmy bet thirty, forty thousand dollars on football. We were at the track, shooting craps in Vegas, playing cards, and betting on anything that moved. Not a thrill like it in the