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  GANGSTER REDEMPTION

  How Ex-Con Larry Lawton’s Life Has Inspired Thousands of Kids To Stay Out of Prison

  GANGSTER REDEMPTION

  HOW AMERICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS JEWEL ROBBER GOT RICH, GOT CAUGHT, AND GOT HIS LIFE BACK ON TRACK

  LARRY LAWTON

  Gangster Redemption - Copyright © 2012 by Lawrence Lawton. All rights reserved

  Published by LL Research & Consulting, Inc. 2550 Palm Bay Rd. Palm Bay, FL 32905 Published simultaneously in Canada

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copy­right Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to LL Research & Consulting, Inc. or Lawton911 2550 Palm Bay Rd. Palm Bay, Florida 32905 or (321) 327-2921, fax (888) 588-4616.

  Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, some names, characters, places, and incidents have been changed or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any harm, loss of life, profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

  For information about other products by Lawton911 and the Reality Check Program and for special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Lawton911 at (321) 327-2921, fax (888) 588-4616 or [email protected].

  Larry Lawton is available for speaking engagements, one-on-one consulting, expert witnessing, and other services. For more information or to book an event contact (321) 327-2921, email: [email protected] or visit our website at www.Lawton911.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data – Lawrence Lawton

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-0-9854082-0-6

  ISBN 978-0-9854082-1-3 (ebook)

  This book is dedicated to my son Larry Jr.

  and daughter Ashley, we were physically apart,

  but you were always in my heart.

  “Gangster Redemption”

  How Ex-Con Larry Lawton’s Life Has Inspired

  Thousands of Kids to Stay Out of Prison

  A Goodfella Becomes a Good Guy

  How America’s most notorious jewel robber got rich,

  got caught, and got his life back on track

  By Larry Lawton, Founder of Lawton911 and the Reality Check Program

  and

  Peter Golenbock, 7 Time NY Times Bestselling Author

  C2012

  Table of Contents

  Preface:

  CHAPTER 1 Who Wants To F*ck Miss Armellino

  CHAPTER 2 Earner For The Mob

  CHAPTER 3 Loyalty

  CHAPTER 4 The Daytona $800,000

  CHAPTER 5 Diamonds Are a Guy’s Best Friend

  CHAPTER 6 The Single Life

  CHAPTER 7 The Last Heist

  CHAPTER 8 Journey to Atlanta

  CHAPTER 9 The Worst of the Worst

  CHAPTER 10 An Atmosphere of Violence

  CHAPTER 11 Coleman and Jessup

  CHAPTER 12 The Abu Ghraib of America

  CHAPTER 13 Yazoo and Forest City

  CHAPTER 14 Free At Last

  CHAPTER 15 The Beginning of the Reality Check Program

  CHAPTER 16 The Reality Check Program Takes Off

  CHAPTER 17 Spreading the Word

  CHAPTER 18 The Reality Check Program

  CHAPTER 19 It Works

  Afterword: Larry Lawton

  Biography of Peter Golenbock

  Acknowledgments:

  PHOTOS

  Larry Lawton December 1961

  Larry 7 years old

  Larry 12 Years Old

  Bronx NY - Throgs Neck Little League 1970

  Lawton Family Picure 1972

  Grandmother 2003

  St Frances De Chantel Report Card - Mrs. Armelleno 1972-73

  Larry Coast Guard 1979

  Coast Guard Sandy Hook NJ - 1981

  Angela Cusano childhood date 1979

  First wife Roselyn 9-11-1987

  Coast Guard Sandy Hook NJ - 1981

  Lukes Piano Lounge - Queens NY 1987

  Tommy, Louie, Me 1992

  Louie, Cruiser Weight Champ Mark Randazzo, Larry 1992

  Joe Fraumeni 1993

  Uncle Louie Constantino 1993

  Joe Fraumeni and me golfing 1994

  Larry Lawton & Tom Ferrara with his wife -1996 Larry’s Block Party

  Larry with sisters Lynne and Debbie 1993

  Second marriage to Missy 1994

  2nd wife Melissa visiting in prison1999

  Larry Jr. age 11

  Daughter Ashley age 4

  Parents visting 2000

  Joe and Louie visiting 2002

  Wife & Daughter visit 2003

  Federal Prison ID’s

  Me at my sister’s pool 2007

  John Oliver Daily Show 20

  Doing RCP 2010

  Huckabee Show 2010

  Tommy Chong 2010

  Parenting Program 2011

  Governor Huckabee 2010

  Fox Anchor Keith Landry, Larry, Judge Babb and Lt. Governor Kottkamp Orlando Matters 2011

  Theresa and Me 2011

  Today

  Preface:

  As a man who is not an author by profession, but a man who loves to have his opinion expressed, this book came about after developing the Reality Check Program DVD. People kept saying I needed to write a book to expose the wrongs with the prison system and also explain how people can change.

  I blame no one for the wrongs that happened to me. In fact, I blame myself and myself alone. I also feel for the victims of my crimes. Although I never hurt anyone in a jewelry store robbery or other crime against a civilian (A person not in the criminal world) I do understand that there were emotional harms I caused. I could never change that and work with victim advocates all the time.

  Life takes you on an emotional ride and mine was, and is, very emotional. The hurt I caused the victims, my family and society in general is a scar I live with everyday. I ask for no pity or help in dealing with my own emotions.

  I also understand that redemption is part of life. You have to forgive yourself before you can move on and help others in anyway. I have moved on and developed the #1 program to help teens and young adults understand that the choices they make will affect the rest of their lives. The Reality Check Program’s success rate is well documented.

  I met Peter Golenbock through my agent at the time Adam Leibner from N.S. Bienstock. I met Adam in a roundabout way through Michael Kay the sports announcer for the New York Yankees. The stars truly aligned because Peter was able to get things out of me that nobody else could.

  After a lot of encouragement from numerous people who I will acknowledge in the next section, and many ups and downs emotionally, financially and personally the book, Gangster Redemption was born.

  CHAPTER 1

  Who Wants To F
*ck Miss Armellino

  From his jail cell in the hole, he could hear the tier door open. The sound of footsteps was getting louder.

  They’re coming for me, he thought.

  “Cuff up, Lawton,” he was ordered.

  He knew better.

  “What did I do?” Lawton wanted to know.

  The four huge guards the size of gorillas opened his cell door and charged at him. They jumped him and beat him. His face bled. His body hurt. They didn’t care.

  After they beat him they carried him out of the cell, put him in a room, stripped him naked, and strapped him down in a four-point position so he was spread-eagled. They cuffed each leg and arm to a post.

  His eyes, half-closed from the beating, saw the hulking figure of one of the guards standing over him. He could see the guard unzip his fly. He took out his penis, and he let loose a stream of urine that splashed against Lawton’s face.

  As the guard was peeing, he said tauntingly, “Lawton, you keep writing senators. You think you’re going anywhere?”

  Lawton closed his eyes, and he could taste the salty urine running down his face. One of the guards then spat out a large gob of spittle on him as he walked past.

  “You think you’re bad, Lawton,” said one of the guards. “Keep writing senators.”

  Strapped down, immobile, naked, and covered with pee, he was left there alone with his thoughts for more than three and a half hours.

  This may well have been the lowest point in Larry Lawton’s life.

  At one time he had been tight with the Gambino mob. He had been a big earner for the mob, stealing over $15 million in jewels in a string of jewelry store robberies. His take was millions of dollars. He lived like a king.

  I was a millionaire, thought Lawton. I owned a limo, horses, homes, expensive cars.

  Once he had a family, a beautiful wife and two beautiful children. He had lost it all.

  Woozy from the beating, strapped naked to a steel bed frame, the smell of urine in his nostrils, he thought to himself, How did I end up like this?

  *

  When Larry Lawton was growing up, he lived at 5565 Hatting Place in the Bronx in the shadow of the Throgs Neck Bridge. From the back of his modest two-story bungalow home he could see the trucks and cars going over the bridge toward Queens, and he could hear the horns and the sounds of the traffic.

  His Locust Point neighborhood was Irish, German, and Italian. It was a neighborhood with its fair share of bookies and gangsters, but it was also a place where if you were a kid the old ladies would watch out for you. If you did something wrong on the block, your mother somehow would find out about it.

  It was also a place where strangers weren’t tolerated and blacks and Puerto Ricans could get hurt.

  “You couldn’t come into our neighborhood,” said Lawton. “This was the Seventies. If somebody we didn’t know came down to the jetties to go fishing under the Throgs Neck bridge, we’d take Molotov cocktails and throw them at their feet. The fire would be on the rocks all around them, and that would make them jump in the water. Nobody was allowed in our neighborhood.”

  One family that lived near the Lawtons was the wacko O’Reillys.

  “It was a big old, Irish family with six kids. They were all crazy. A psycho family. I loved them. They had this old station wagon with the muffler dragging, and the dog chasing the car. They had a rough time of it with money. Billy Joe, who was my brother’s age, once went into the local bowling alley, the Fiesta Lanes, and he left wearing the bowling shoes. My buddy Dennis said to him, ‘Billy, you have the shoes on.’

  “He said, ‘These are better than mine.’ So he took the shoes.

  “One time Billy Joe was playing football with us, and his mother Wilma came out and yelled to Billy, “Come home and put up the Christmas lights.”

  “Fuck you, Wilma,” he said.

  “Billy, go home.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She said to me, ‘Larry, give me that football.’

  “Don’t give her the football,” Billy Joe yelled. He turned to his mother and said, ‘I’ll break every window in the fucking house.’

  “I didn’t know what to do. I threw the football up in the air.

  “One time Wilma broke a stickball bat over son Eddie’s shoulder.

  “He said, ‘What are you going to do now, Wilma?’

  “She came out with a metal pipe, hit him with it, and he was down for the count. Another son broke his arm and didn’t even bother to get it fixed. He played sports left handed and became ambidextrous. They were so nuts, but they were tough—and loyal as the day is long.”

  Another neighbor was Joannie Schmidt. Her father, who had swum in the Olympics, was a heavy drinker. Larry and his friends called him “Have a beer, Bob.” “He actually put a beer tap in the sink in his house,” said Lawton.

  One of Larry’s closest friends was Michael Kay, now an announcer for the New York Yankees.

  “Michael’s father was a bookie back in the old days, a Jewish guy and a real nice guy. He was very old and had emphysema. He’d sit on the stoop and watch us play sports. He liked to tell us stories and loved the tough kids.”

  One of the neighborhood mobsters, Joey Maccia, would pull up in front of the Lawtons’ home in his fancy Cadillac. In the trunk would be swag – stolen merchandise. Larry’s father would buy underwear or steak knives or whatever was the hot item of the day all the time talking gambling and the latest sports line.

  Larry, like a lot of the kids in Locust Point, grew up a latch-key child. His mother, a nurse, worked the night shift from eleven at night until seven in the morning. She would come home and sleep, and the kids had to be quiet. Larry, relatively unsupervised, would come home from school and be out playing until he heard his father whistle. The whistle was a call to be home in five minutes.

  “You didn’t want your father looking for you,” said Lawton. “That was big trouble.”

  As a pre-teen Larry and his friends would go to the local candy store on the corner they called “The Wop Shop,” and they would wait for an older boy to come along, and they’d have him buy sixty-nine-cents-a-quart beer for them. They would then go to “the field,” an acre of patchy grass near the Throgs Neck Bridge toll booths. They drank the beer and played sports all afternoon. On weekend nights they’d use the field to party. All year long, whether it was ten degrees or summertime, when they got older they’d go with their girls and buy a quart of vodka and packets of ice tea mix, and then they’d get water from the spigot near the bridge toll booth and whip up a mixture of vodka and iced tea. They’d play basketball up against the bridge wall, where the maintenance workers had a basketball hoop. Their clothes and sneakers would be black from the grease and soil on the concrete.

  There were two places where they all hung out: at the field near the toll booths or the bridge near the jetty.

  Larry and his friends would swim in the East River under the Throgs Neck Bridge. On the other side of a long jetty was a sewer, and sometimes raw sewage would float by, but they paid it little attention.

  “We thought we lived in a country club,” said Lawton. “We felt we were living in high cotton.”

  Larry’s dad was a sheet metal worker from Local 28, part of the civilian army that built the World Trade Center. In charge of two hundred sheet metal workers, his father ran the job, which was to install all the duct work in the hundred-story twin towers.

  His boys, David and Larry, would sometimes tag along when he went to the job site. He’d take them to his trailer on the grounds. Even at age ten Larry was captivated by the scantily-clad girls on the calendars on the trailer’s walls. Before the World Trade Center job was done, his father took them a hundred stories up to see the top of the world.

  As part of his job each week Larry’s dad was entrusted by the owner o
f the Brooks Construction Company to take bribe money and deliver it to the various mob bosses who demanded it. Paying off the mob was what allowed the massive World Trade Center to be built in only four years. The mob controlled the unions, and without the payoffs, there might have been walkouts, scab laborers, or perhaps a truck pouring concrete might be turned away, accused by inspectors of having the wrong density of concrete – and if they couldn’t pour the concrete, the entire job would come to a halt. Anything could stop it. Each floor had to be completed before the next floor could be constructed. It was a huge jigsaw puzzle, and every piece had to be placed in order. If the sheet metal work was stopped, then the dry wall specialists couldn’t work, and so the most efficient way to make sure everything went smoothly was to pay the mobsters who controlled the unions.

  For ten years the city of New York had attempted to build a skating rink in Central Park. The mob-controlled unions kept it from happening. Donald Trump took over the project. The scuttlebutt was he paid off the mob. The rink was built in six months.

  The owners of the companies building the World Trade Center knew that paying off the mob was part of doing business, so when they bid for the job, the mob money was included in the bidding. No one stiffed the mob. There was a steep penalty if you did. A construction company owner could find himself wearing cement shoes.

  “The Transit Authority built the World Trade Center,” said Lawton. “Each company got millions from them. My father used to take the transit authority supervisor to a city-run bookie joint called Off Track Betting and let them bet for free. There was one supervisor who was getting paid to add in phony hours and fake overtime. Everyone was paid off. What a fucking racket it was.

  “In the four years it took to build the World Trade Center, there wasn’t a single union walk out. The mob goons made sure of it.”

  Larry was 12 when he accompanied his father making his weekly payoffs. His father would say, “Hey kid, get in the car,” and off they’d go to the Triangle Bar in the Bronx or to the Q Lounge on Gun Hill Road.