Gangster Redemption Read online

  “The Q Lounge was a pool hall, a gangster hangout where you’d see shady characters. We’d park right in front of the place. No one paid meters back then. My father wore construction clothes, a flannel shirt. He’d always have a pen on him, and he’d always have that envelope in his pocket. The envelope would be folded up, and it contained cash. My father would walk in, pay, and leave.”

  Larry’s father’s favorite watering hole was the Triangle Bar, located on the corner of Buerre and Westchester avenues in the Bronx. On some nights his father would take him along for the drops, and on other nights he’d go with him when his dad just sat at the bar and drank Dewars and water. Larry loved the energy of the place.

  “We’d go in there,” said Larry, “and the guy my father was going to meet would be sitting on a bar stool. I didn’t know who he was, but I could always tell if he was a mobster. He had the nice clothes and a pinky ring. My father would drop off the envelope, and the guy would leave. I never knew his name. He’d say, “Hey kid, how ya doin’?” and he’d rub my hair, like I was doing good.”

  “Listen to your father,” he’d tell the kid. “He’s a good man.”

  “Because I went with my dad often, the guys in the bar got to know me. One guy was a steam fitter. They called him Joe Steam. Another guy was named Dudley, and there was Tony the Butcher, who was of course a butcher. They were friends of my father. They were in the bar all the time.

  “The wise guys would give me cokes and coins to go play the pinball machines. These were the real pinball machines, not all this electronic crap.”

  The Triangle was a bar where patrons came to drink and to gamble. There was a television set behind the long bar that featured whatever New York team was playing at the time. This was before the age of ESPN and up-to-the minute score results. There was no cable, only the basic network fare. The Yankees were on Channel 11 WPIX, the Mets and Knicks on WOR 9, and the football Giants on CBS, channel 2. The local betters had to wait impatiently to hear the scores, and when they were announced you could hear the murmuring of the elated and the distraught.

  Vinnie Tramamuno, a large fat man with a cigar and a grunt, was the bar’s bookie. He was right out of the Sopranos. He’d grunt, “Wha da ya want?” and wait to hear which team you wanted to bet on and how many times. The basic bet – one time --was five dollars – plus fifty cents vigorish to the bookie for taking the bet. A five-time bet was for twenty-five dollars, plus two-fifty vig. The vig was how the bookie made his money. Vinnie would write the bet on paper that would easily disintegrate – flash paper they call it – a protection against getting caught with evidence by the cops.

  When Larry was 12, he made his first bet.

  “Making a bet with a bookie was a big deal,” he said. “You were a big shot when you made your bets with your own bookie. We were in the Triangle, and one day the Giants were on TV, and I begged my dad, ‘I wanna bet. I wanna bet.’

  “He nodded, and I decided to make a one-time bet on the Giants, and I can remember walking into the bathroom with Vinnie, and we closed the door, as though no one knew what we were doing. .

  “What da ya want, kid?” He had the cigar hanging from his mouth.

  “Give me one time on the Giants.”

  He gave me the line. “Minus three.”

  “All right.”

  And he wrote it down on that flash paper.”

  It was around this time that Larry began doing some bookmaking of his own. The Bono family lived around the corner from the Lawtons. Louie Bono Sr. was a powerful mobster, and when he got sick, Lawton’s mom, a registered nurse, took care of him. Sometimes when Larry stood at the bus stop waiting to go to school, Mr. Bono would come by in his Cadillac, pick him up, and take him to school. Mr. Bono wanted his son Louie to begin hustling, and he set him up selling sports tickets. Louie, who at age 17 was five years older than Larry, would sell them to Larry’s father. The idea was for the bettor to choose any three teams on the card. You bet a dollar, and if your three teams won you got five dollars back. If you picked four winners, you’d get ten to one. But picking four winners, it turns out, is very difficult. They do it in Las Vegas today. It’s a sucker bet.

  One day Louie came over to the house to sell Larry’s father the sports tickets, and when Larry found out he could earn a quarter for dollar he sold, Larry begged Louie to let him sell tickets too.

  “I can get Mr. Duffy,” Larry said. “I can get Mr. Ziel,” his next door neighbor. “And Mr. Knapp. I can get them all to bet.”

  Said Lawton, “Where I lived everyone bet a lot. I was only a kid, but it sounded like a gold mine.”

  Louie Bono right then and there handed Lawton the neighborhood franchise. He sat down with him, explained which boxes on the cards had to be marked, told him he should make sure to write his own name on the back of the card, and reminded him he’d get twenty five cents for every dollar sold. He also let him know that winners would tip him when he went to pay off.

  “My parents were all for it,” said Lawton. “Everyone played sports tickets.”

  Every Monday Louie would come over and deliver his stack of tickets.

  “I would take the tickets and go up and down my whole neighborhood,” said Lawton. “It didn’t take me long to know who the big bettors were. I always made sure to wait for them to come home. My father was one of my biggest customers. Mr. Duffy, a school principal, used to bet twenty bucks every weekend. I’d always get him. Mr. Giordano, who was in the rackets, used to bet thirty, sometimes forty dollars. If he spent a lot of money, I knew he had a good week with the numbers.

  “As a young kid I wanted my customers to win, because they’d tip you. I didn’t care if I had to pay off a bet. It wasn’t coming out of my pocket. If a guy won fifty bucks, he’d throw me five. Almost no one was cheap.

  “I was very organized. I’d collect the money and attach it with a paper clip to each slip. I was smart enough to write down all the numbers that everyone bet, so I also could find out if they won without having to wait for Louie to come and tell me.”

  At age 12, Lawton’s take was seventy five to a hundred and fifty dollars a week, a hell of a lot of money for a young kid, but most of it he would fritter away gambling. This would become a pattern in Lawton’s life. With Lawton it was always easy come, easy go.

  “The smart ones kept their money,” said Lawton, “but at that age who was smart with money?”

  *

  When the World Trade Center job was finished in 1972, his father was laid off, and money became scarce. “Our family had five children and no money. Things were so bad I had to play basketball in my slippers,” said Lawton. “It was embarrassing, but you did what you had to do.”

  At this point Larry’s life consisted mainly of going to school, selling sports tickets, and playing whatever sport was in season. Larry was small for his age. At age 12 he was barely five feet tall, but he was an excellent athlete. He would play tackle football with his brother David, who was two years older, and with his brother’s friends. The boys would spray paint the concrete and make a football field. They played without helmets or any other gear. Larry was fearless. He felt the need to prove himself, and he would rush in and make the tackle against much larger opponents. He suffered from concussions, and for a while his headaches were so fierce that he would slam his head against the wall of his bedroom in an attempt to make the pain stop. When he finally went to the hospital, x-rays revealed a hairline fracture at the back of his skull.

  In the spring Larry played baseball on a team in the Throgs Neck Little League. The field not only had lights, but it had water fountains in the dugouts. The field was right across the street from St. Frances de Chantal, where Larry went to Catholic school.

  Since he was ten Larry had been an altar boy at St. Francis de Chantal Roman Catholic Church. Larry attended confession regularly.

  “Alt
ar boys had to be good,” said Lawton. “You took communion. You were supposed to be good. I guess I was good. I don’t know. I was a little kid growing up in the Bronx. You played. You went out and did the little things kids did.”

  He was a favorite of one of the two priests, a man whose name he can no longer remember.

  “It was a nice church. When you walked in there were two confession booths, one on each side of the entrance. The priest sat between them. He’d open the little window. You’d go in and wait while you heard him talking to the person in the other booth. When you knew it was your time, you’d be on your knees, hands folded. ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been….I’ve done this, this, and this.’ There were two priests, and you never knew which one you’d get, but this one priest was always nice to me. He knew me. I was one of his altar boys. And I would want to get him, because I would only have to say two Hail Marys, or two Our Fathers, and he’d forgive me.”

  One time when Larry was 12, after a funeral had ended he was in the back of the church taking off his robe when the friendly priest walked over to him and said, “You can take everything off if you want.”

  Larry didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but he became extremely nervous.

  “I don’t want to take everyone off,” Larry said, but before he knew what was happening the priest grabbed him, pulled down his shorts, bent down, put the boy’s penis in his mouth, and started to give him a blow job.

  “I was helpless. I couldn’t understand what was going on,” said Lawton. “I started getting excited. I started shaking, not knowing what to do. I remember to this day his black, curly hair and his black robe. People might say, You knew that was wrong, but I didn’t know anything, and there was no way you can say, ‘Stop that’ to a priest. He was holy. After he was through, he got up, and I’ll never forget what he said to me:

  “‘Have you been good this week?’

  “‘Yes father,’ I said.

  When the priest started taking off his robe Lawton, shaken, made a beeline out the door.

  “I didn’t tell anybody. You can’t say anything. Back then, in the early ’70s, no one blew whistles on priests. I hadn’t even gone through puberty, and you’re wondering what the hell happened, and you don’t know if it’s normal or what. Now you look back and you want to shoot him. Later when I went to prison I would look up the records to see which inmates were child molesters. We’d beat them half to death, and I loved it. One guy had a floor buffing machine dropped on him from the second floor of prison. He didn’t die, but it crushed his head and shoulder. I never felt any remorse.”

  But as a 12 year old all he did was tell his father the next week that he no longer wanted to be an altar boy.

  “I don’t want to do it,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I want to play sports.” His father never questioned him again.

  “Over the years I read all the stories about priests and young boys, and I can tell you they’re all true,” said Lawton. “Does it affect your life? You look back, and you had this little weenie with the little mustache hairs on it, and you don’t understand. But though I still believe in God, I no longer believe in the Catholic religion. Can you blame me if I have doubts about priests and everything that goes along with them?”

  On Sundays thereafter Larry would tell his parents he was going to noon Mass. His mother would give him a dollar for the collection plate. He was supposed to put the money in the basket, but that’s not what he did.

  Said Lawton, “I would run into the church, grab the weekly mass pamphlet to show my parents I went to church, and we’d look to see who the priest was in case my mother asked me, ‘Who was the father?’ It was often the priest with the black, curly hair. Maybe I don’t want to remember his name. But we’d take the dollar, go directly to the Whop Shop to buy beer, and go to the field.”

  What is true is that after being molested by his priest, Larry Lawton changed. He no longer was a nice kid. His edges turned hard, perhaps in an attempt to prove his manhood to himself. The first indication that he had turned bad came when he was kicked out of Catholic school. Though he had one of the highest IQs in the school, he became incorrigible. He became disruptive in class. He cut school. He started fights.

  “When I was in the seventh grade we had a young, lay teacher. She was beautiful. In class I wrote a note asking, ‘Who wants to fuck Miss Armellino?’ I signed it, Scott Gariola signed it, and a third kid signed it. As the note was being passed around, Sister Mary Stanislaus caught us passing the note. We were sent down to the office of the principal, Sister Mary Claire. We waited all day for our parents. The other two kids were crying.

  “My father came in, and he said, ‘Get in the car.’ He didn’t say another word. We lived in a bungalow house, and I was sent upstairs to my room. I could hear my parents down below. My father was laughing.”

  But Lawton’s behavior was no laughing matter, and in May of 1973 Larry and his younger sister were kicked out of Saint Frances de Chantal. They now had to go to IS 192 and then Lehman High School. It was at this point that his life turned. He no longer had any interest in school. He turned to a life in the street.

  “I went about half the time,” said Lawton. “To get there we had to go by city bus. My friends and I used to go to a music store where they sold bongs and had pinball machines. We bought little pipes. Some kids were into weed back then. I wasn’t into it as a kid. It was a place to hang out. We’d go to Westchester Square, where they had a Woolworth’s, and that’s where Louie Bono, the mob guy in our neighborhood, had a candy store.

  “We’d cut school, get on the subway, and go to games at Yankee Stadium. My brother and I made the back cover of The New York Post. The stadium had been refurbished, and it had a new Jumbotron scoreboard, and we jumped over the wall and got the first homerun ever hit by a Yankee in the new stadium. Chris Chambliss hit it, and we got the ball, and we were on the big screen and in the papers.

  “We would bet on the games. We’d bet on individual batters, whether a batter would strike out. We’d bet the over and under. ‘I bet you he grounds out.’

  “By this time I was making money hustling. By age 15 my main activity was gambling. I became a big gambler.

  “I’d go to OTB. I just didn’t care about school. I had zero grades. I never applied myself to school. I applied myself to the streets, and that’s what made me smart -- hustling.”

  Larry and his buddies gambled regularly. In the streets they played the game acey-ducey. Every player put a dollar in the pot. One player was dealt two cards. Say the cards were a three and a queen. The player had to bet whether the next card would fall between the other two. You could bet up to the limit of the pot.

  “I was crazy,” said Lawton. “Even if I was dealt a three and a seven, I’d still bet the pot. My friend Dennis Broderick was like that too.”

  They also pitched pennies, throwing coins against the wall to see who could come closest. They would bet on two cockroaches climbing up a wall.

  “We were all crazy,” said Lawton.

  His group had drinkers, druggies, and gamblers. Larry was one of the gamblers. He was constantly in need of money to feed his gambling addiction.

  “I stole money in order to be able to play in card games,” said Lawton. “We’d go in Woolworth’s and other stores, and lift things. I didn’t just steal to steal. I stole to convert the items into money. There was a hot dog man on the corner, and I would go into the supermarket and steal mustard, red onions and sauerkraut, and I’d trade them for hot dogs. My friends Dennis and Johnny, who worked at Pathmark, stole all kinds of food – lobsters, steaks – and sold it up and down East Tremont Avenue for money. That was our crew. Everybody was doing stuff like that. It was normal. Everyone I knew was a hustler.”

  At times Larry and his friends would hail a cab for the ride home. They would
pick a random house near where they lived and order the cabbie to take them there.

  “We knew what we were going to do – beat the cabbie out of his fare. The guy sitting in the front had to be quick. When the cab stopped, we’d all just fly out of the cab. We’d jump a couple of fences and get the fuck out of there.”

  Larry and his friends continued to play sports, but now Larry’s temper was getting the best of him. One time during a street roller hockey game, Larry and his brother David got tangled in the net. Larry extricated himself, grabbed a two by four, and smashed his brother over the head, splitting David’s head wide open. Another time he stabbed his brother with a pair of scissors. For fun Larry and David shot their BB gun out the back window of their home breaking the windows of neighbor’s cars. They never got caught.

  Larry’s first real job was at age 16 working as an usher at the Interboro Movie Theater. Larry had snuck in a six-pack of beer, and during the playing of the movie Americathon, he sat in the back of the theater watching the movie and drinking beer. The theater manager caught him, and he was fired.

  At night his father would take him to the Triangle Bar. He got to know the wiseguys there while his dad drank and placed bets. Larry then would drive his father home, even though he wasn’t old enough to get a driver’s license.

  “You have to picture me behind the wheel,” said Lawton. “I was 16, but I looked like a baby. I had blond, curly hair. I was a good-looking kid, and my relatives called me ‘Loverboy.’ The girls loved me. Anyway, my father would drink, and I would drive him home.”

  One of the characters Larry habitually saw at the Triangle bar was a man in his forties with salt and pepper hair who was whispered to be a member of the Purple Gang, the notorious gang of Jewish killers from Detroit.

  “All the guys would say to me, ‘Stay away from him. He’s in the Purple Gang.’ But he was a nice guy. He’d buy me a drink. In New York everybody buys everyone else a drink. That’s how they get to know you. I was a kid, and he knew I was a bounce-around kid. I was hanging out at the bar, selling sports tickets, gambling with a bookie. They all know.