Free Made Men by Greg B. Smith

this.”
    Mike, the FBI came to believe, had interpreted this as approval.
After Joe Pitts was gone, Vinny Ocean could rightfully say that he had nothing to do with the chain of events. He could not say he had nothing to do with Joe Pitts. As a result of Joe Pitts’s death, Vinny Ocean wound up making a lot more money. When a wiseguy dies, somebody has to figure out what to do with all the money he’s taking in through various schemes. In this case, it was decided that Vinny would get Joe Pitts’s payments. He did this by putting his driver, Joey O, on the payroll of the victims’ companies in no-show jobs. Each week Joey O would get paid and kick his share up to Vinny Ocean.
Immediately.
Besides the weekly paycheck Joe Pitts had been extorting from Mike at T&M Construction, Joe Pitts had also been shaking down a man named Al Manti for $1,000 a week. Al Manti owned a bus company on Long Island called Manti Transportation. He was not a very good businessman, and as a result, his company was about to sink under a sea of debt. Still, a business is a business, and some business owners in New York City have been known to turn to subsidiaries of La Cosa Nostra for a little fast cash. Manti Transportation was such a company, and Joe Pitts had sunk his hooks into Al Manti for months. Now that Joe was gone, Vinny Ocean took over the task of collecting $1,000 a week from Al Manti to protect him from being exploited by some other unfeeling, unscrupulous Mafia family.
Thus, on one rainy January night, Vinny Ocean got himself an extra $52,000 a year for doing exactly nothing. Each week Joey O would show up at T&M Construction and Manti Transportation and pick up his “paycheck.” He would keep half and send the other half up to Vinny. Of course, this arrangement was never called “protection.” It would be called something else.
Salary.
At one point Al Manti was not happy about this and actually complained in person to Vinny Ocean. “Why,” he asked Vinny, “do I have to pay protection to Joey?”
Vinny Ocean frowned and shook his head sadly. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “You don’t ever mention that word in front of me. You’re not paying for no protection. I’m your partner. That’s my salary every week. Like your salary. Don’t ever ask that again.”
Manti immediately backed down. “I was just kidding,” he said, handing over yet another envelope stuffed with ten $100 bills toward Vinny Ocean’s “salary.”
In January 1998, that was how it was going for Vinny Ocean. The money was rolling in. Life was good. He was an experienced capo with a crew of both old-timers and newcomers. The strip club he secretly owned, Wiggles, was still up and running, having so far survived attacks from all sides by the politicians of Queens County and beyond. The city had passed a law shutting down all businesses that traffic in “adult entertainment” in residential neighborhoods or within five hundred feet of schools, churches, or day-care centers.
“Wiggles” was within five hundred feet of just about everything. But the strip clubs of New York had hired a lawyer and banded together under the American flag, waving around the First Amendment and taking their case all the way through the New York courts. So far, they’d been losers. The courts weren’t buying the sex industry’s claim that the city was denying exotic dancers the right to express themselves through the medium of lap dancing. City officials, in fact, could legitimately state that they were not shutting strip clubs down. Instead, they were simply packing them off to urban Siberia, allowing them to relocate to industrial waterfront neighborhoods and other out-of-theway locales hard by the Fresh Kills Landfill and the Coney Island Cyclone. But the state’s top court had yet to issue a final decision on the question, and as a result, all the clubs were allowed to remain open for business three years after the strip-club law first passed in 1995. During