Free The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas

feel like a real knock-around guy. They used to charge $5, but we always gave them $10. They were the only girls I saw because I didn't care to settle down. It was no time to start falling in love and worrying about a family.
    I must explain that we were called Minute Men because we always got away in a minute's time or less. This gave us all the time we needed. Even the store that had what we called Holmes protection took from five to seven minutes to bring anybody. I know because I threw a brick through a store window on 125th Street to see how long it would take. The only thing we had to worry about was if the bulls were already in the neighborhood.
    That's what finally happened on this job on Tremont Avenue and
    177th Street in the Bronx. It was a store full of silk. We had been looking it over for a couple of weeks, and it looked like a cinch. It didn't even have a Holmes alarm system. We were in a Packard touring car when I pulled up in front of the store on the Tremont Avenue side. I forget what we used to break the window—I think it was a milk can. Anyway, one of the fellows went into the store to start handing out the bolts of silk. Two others were carrying them out to the car. The fourth one was standing on the corner so he could see down 177th Street. All of a sudden the guy on the corner comes running over to me, saying that there was a car coming down the side street. As he is telling me this, I see another car coming slowly down the avenue towards us, and I tapped the horn to warn the fellows in the store to get out. Then, just as they were all back in the Packard, I see another car creeping up right behind us. Gee, I said to myself, somebody must have tipped the bulls. All of a sudden I felt a gun against my head. It was a cop. I found out later it was this Captain Stetter who had been after us. He said, "I finally got you after three years."
    Of course, I kept the motor in the Packard running, and this was where all my practice learning how to drive came in handy. When Captain Stetter told me to take the car out of gear, I said, "Okay," and pretended to start getting out of the car. But I was doing this to turn the steering wheel so I could get the car away from the curb and out onto the avenue. All at once I dove down on the floor under the dashboard, got my right hand on the gas pedal, and held the wheel with my left hand. You must understand that all this was done in a couple of seconds. I pushed down on the pedal as hard as I could with my hand and took off. Naturally the cops around us started shooting, and all the fellows ducked down. They shot the whole windshield off. Believe me, there wasn't any glass left in it.
    When I looked up, I saw I was in the middle of Tremont Avenue. All
    I could think of was to get the hell out of there. The cops had been getting some new Cadillacs, and one of them was about two blocks behind us. Then what do you think happened? Just as I was coming to a corner, a trolley car pulled out and stopped right in the middle of the avenue. I don't know what to do. If it starts to go forward again, we are dead, as I was going too fast to make a right turn. If it stays where it is, I could make it to the left. But to do this, I have to go across the sidewalk, jumping the curb. Well, the trolley stayed still, and that was all I needed, so I did it.
    By now I'm hitting eighty miles an hour, which was a lot of speed in those days, and the cops are way behind me. They had to slow up when they saw the trolley car. For the first time I see some blood running down my wrist and I realize that I am hit in the arm, but I figured this isn't the place to stop and look at it. I turned down the Grand Concourse and kept heading for Harlem. At that time they had police booths along the Concourse, and as we came tearing down it, they blazed away at us. Don't forget we were in a touring car, and as we had been speeding all this time, the top finally flew up and was hanging over the back end. When we