Free Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion by Gianmarc Manzione

shot—especially when Richie came back grinning from the horse track.
    Looking at the other “team” that fateful night, the opportunity to bowl in a place where no one had any clue of his talent, and to partner with one of the greatest action bowlers in the world in the meantime, proved too tempting for McGrath to resist. He took Johnny up on the offer, and off to Avenue M Bowl they went. The thought would soon occur to them that it might be the last trip they would make in this world.
    That night, an Avenue M regular challenged Richie to a singles match, and Richie promptly accepted. A loan shark got wind of the match and figured he would bet on bowling the way he bet on the ponies: Why put your money on the favorite when you can put it on the underdog and count on an upset? Several hundred dollars down into the match, the loan shark found, like so many before him, that he had bed against a guy who did not lose. Hornreich’s opponent kept at it for a while but eventually called it quits. The Horn was just too good. And that was when the loan shark let the gun in his waistband help everyone understand how he felt about that.
    “What d’ya mean, ya quit?” the shark said before taking a bowling ball in his hands, standing before the front doors of the place, and gently suggesting that the action continue.
    “Nobody leaves this building until that guy bowls one more game,” he said, the bowling ball clutched in one hand by his side.
    “Take it easy, take it easy,” someone from the loan shark’s posse advised.
    Those were the evening’s final words of reason. The shark dropped the ball and raised a gun.
    McGrath, seated within terrifying proximity to the shark and his gun, began slinking away, seat by seat, until he reached the other end of the bowling alley and tried to figure out a way toclimb inside the wall. All those rumors Johnny told him were not true about Brooklyn had turned out to be truer than he had imagined. This would be one of those nights when rumor and reality got a little too cozy with one another. Hopefully, it would also be a night McGrath would live to tell about. Right now, he was not so sure.
    The kids bowled another game, all right—a couple of terrified 120s riddled with open frames as they attempted to master the underappreciated skill of bowling while simultaneously pissing themselves.
    “Ya little prick,” Black Sam’s bodyguard told the shark, shoving the mouth of a gun in the back of his head. “For what you did to those kids, I should take that gun and shove it up your ass.”
    The bodyguard turned to Black Sam and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
    “Just give me the piece,” Black Sam advised before looking up at the shark and taking his gun. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
    “You said we were gonna be safe,” McGrath squeaked on the way home from the back of Black Sam’s Cadillac. “I will never come back here again.”
    Black Sam turned to McGrath, his bodyguard behind the wheel.
    “If you open your mouth again, I’ll leave you out in the street right here and you’ll really see what it’s like!”
    It was four A.M. in a part of town where a west-coast kid like Mike McGrath might have looked like food to the locals. He shut his mouth, a precocious act of wisdom to which he probably owed his life.
    Sadly, that sort of wisdom might have helped preserve the life of a local tough guy known as Mattie. Mattie lacked as much in wisdom as he possessed in brawn, and this flaw in his character soon spelled the demise of the action at AvenueM. Mattie ran with a bike gang out of Coney Island that had a reputation for robbery and the guns and fists they used to carry it out. People knew him as the type of guy who could slap your back and laugh one minute and crush your face with a single blow the next. So when he broke in on a card game at Al Rosa’s apartment one night with a mask and a shotgun looking to clean the place out, nobody uttered a word of protest, even