Gangster Redemption Read online

  “One time I was sitting at the bar with the guy from the Purple Gang. The guy always carried a brown paper bag, and I asked him what was in it. He showed me a pistol. The only other pistol I had ever seen belonged to John Fenton, a cop who was dating my sister. Back then you didn’t see guns. You fought with sticks and knives. I saw the gun, and of course I was impressed with the guy. He didn’t show it to be a big shot. He showed it because I asked him. Whenever I saw him, we’d talk. One time he said to me, ‘Do you know how to rob cars? Because there’s a good chop shop over near the Pelham Split Rock golf course.’

  “He was probably involved in a car-stealing ring. I never asked him. You don’t say to a guy like that, ‘Are you a car thief?’ But you knew. Why would he introduce me to a chop shop unless he was involved? So he told me where I could get rid of cars.

  “There was good money in that. You got five hundred bucks a car in one hundred dollar bills. You dropped it off, they did everything, and they gave you five hundred in cash.”

  Stealing cars was becoming a burgeoning industry in the Bronx in the 1970s.

  “There were a lot of abandoned cars left alongside the roads in the Bronx. We’d help strip them. If we wanted something off a car, we’d stop on the highway and grab what we wanted. We wanted a radio? We’d take it. Tires? We took them. I knew how to take tires off a car without a jack. Sure thing, you put a cinder block underneath the car, and you’d get two or three guys to lift it up, and when you loosen the nuts, you lift it as much as you could, and you kicked the tire out – you might snap the lug nuts, but you didn’t care. You got the tire. It was pretty easy.”

  Lawton, who badly needed money to feed his gambling habit, was instructed to steal only newer cars. At seventeen years of age he soon became adept at it. His first attempts involved breaking into the car, hot-wiring it, and driving off.

  “You use a hanger and pull the little knob that locks the car. You get in there, punch out the ignition switch, put a screw driver in there, turn it on, and go. Then at night I’d take the car to the chop shop in the Bronx over near the Split Rock golf course.”

  Lawton had to keep an eye on the rear view mirror in case the owner, or the cops, came along, and he had some close calls, where he had to duck down as a patrol car drove past.

  A thief had to be quick stealing a car by punching out the ignition. Lawton wasn’t, and after stealing a couple cars this way, he looked for an easier MO. It didn’t take him long to find one.

  “I knew guys who could rob a car in thirty seconds. I wasn’t one of them, so I used to wait on the street in front of the candy store in the mornings or at nights, and guys would drive up in front of the store and run in and buy the paper, and they’d leave the car running. I’d jump in the car and go. Or I’d wait and watch for guys who would get up in the mornings during the winter and heat up their car. I’d watch for the exhaust coming out the back of the car. People did that in New York all the time. They’d go down to the street, heat up the car, go back in their house and wait, and while they were waiting, I’d steal the car.”

  After stealing the car, Lawton would drive it to another part of the neighborhood, drive it around the block two or three times to make sure he wasn’t followed, and park it on a side street. He would enlist the aid of a buddy to ride behind him when he took the stolen car to the chop shop.

  For Lawton the scariest part of the job was taking the stolen car at night to the chop shop, which was out in a deserted field in the middle of nowhere in the Bronx at the outskirts of the local golf course.

  “There’s a wooded area over near City Island. It’s funny, because the Police Academy is right there. The guy from the Purple Gang told me how to get there. He told me, ‘There’s a little dirt road on the side, take it, and a guy will step out and wave and point to an area.’ I was worried because it was pitch black, and I was always looking over my shoulder. I wondered, Are they going to kill me? But they just wanted the car.

  The chop shop was open for business seven nights a week. The shop consisted of a truck with a compressor to strip the car and a lift to pull out the engine. A car would be stripped in less than an hour.

  “There were as many as fifty car carcasses in that field. It looked like a field of dead cars. They’d take what they wanted off the car. Back then bumpers were big money. Batteries, radios, seats would come off the car. Tires would come off. They made big money on these items. They took engines. In no time the car was a carcass of metal.

  “I didn’t hang around. They gave me five one-hundred dollar bills, and I’d take off. You start asking questions, and you’re dead.”

  As much money as Lawton made, he would quickly lose it to his gambling habit.

  “I knew eventually I was going to get caught,” said Lawton. “We were opportunists. Anything we could steal, we would. But we never robbed from old ladies on our block. We never beat anyone up to rob their money. That comes from the respect you have from your father, or what the guys in the mob taught you. Remember, The Godfather came out in 1972, and we thought that was cool. Now, looking back, you realize what a scumbag everybody was. But as a kid I didn’t know that. You think that’s the life. So we robbed to gamble.”

  Toward the end of his junior year at Lehman High School, Larry Lawton started a fight that turned into a riot.

  “We were drinking beer at school. They used to sell little nip beers, eight-ounce pony bottles. I’d take an eight-pack of beer to school.

  “I was throwing glass beer bottles. Lehman High is built over a highway. What moron would build a high school in the Bronx over a highway? We would throw beer bottles and other things at the passing cars below. We would hang people by their feet over the highway to scare them. We were crazy.

  “On this day I was throwing glass beer bottles, and I threw one near a bunch of students, and they said, ‘Fuck you,’ and we said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ They came over, and a fight erupted. There were five of us, but we knew all the football players, all the cool people. Friends came running over, and before it was over we had a mini-riot. The cops came on horseback. We all ran. Everyone took off. Then you go home, and everyone talks about it. No one cared. After it’s done, it’s done.”

  When his junior year ended, Lawton decided he was finished with school. He knew he was smart enough. He never took notes, and if he ever went to class, he knew he could pass any course. But school was not his forte. The streets were his forte. Each day at school he took with him one piece of loose-leaf notebook paper, but that was for taking bets.

  *

  At age seventeen Lawton was aware enough to realize that he needed to get away from this dead-end existence. In August of 1979 he entered the United States Coast Guard.

  “I needed to get away from the life,” said Lawton. “To get away from the neighborhood and maybe that priest.” But, as it turned out, the pull of “the life” would become too strong. Anything else was too boring and much too tame.

  CHAPTER 2

  Earner For The Mob

  As Larry sat on the plane headed for basic training at Petaluma, California, he couldn’t believe how free he felt. He was on his own for the first time, though in a very real way he had been on his own pretty much his whole life. He may have entered the Coast Guard as a 132-pound, baby-faced kid, but looks are deceiving. He was strong and tough. He could do a hundred push-ups without breaking a sweat, and it wasn’t long after arriving in California that he started growing and putting on muscle.

  Boot camp lasted ten weeks. During that time he turned eighteen on October 3, 1979. Lawton loved the regimen. An early bird, he enjoyed getting up at five thirty in the morning and doing calisthenics as the sun was coming up.

  The only part of military life he didn’t enjoy was the bad vibes he and other New Yorkers got from the Southerners and Midwesterners. Lawton never got into a fight, but he enjoyed taki
ng on some of his detractors in push up challenges. The two would go face to face to see who could do the most. Lawton almost always won as the loser sank ingloriously into the dirt.

  After the ten weeks, he returned to the Bronx on leave. When he arrived home on a fourteen-day leave he was thinking he had returned a man.

  His first duty station was Cortez, Florida, near Bradenton. He was a seaman apprentice, and he was assigned to a 41-foot, three-man, search and rescue boat. Most of his duties revolved around towing disabled boats back to shore and putting out boat fires. Not long after he began duty, his crew discovered several bales of marijuana floating in the ocean toward shore. The skipper hid two of the bales under a bridge on a catwalk and turned in the rest. Not long afterward the boat captain handed Larry a stack of hundred dollar bills.

  Said Lawton, “The other two guys did it. I was a go-along guy. I was loving it. With that money I ended up buying my first car, a big, maroon Mercury Marquis. They gave me three grand. That was big money.”

  During his time with the Coast Guard Lawton was witness to three historic tragedies in Florida maritime history. The first came on January 28, 1980, when the 180-foot long Blackthorn, a Coast Guard buoy tender, collided head-on with a large tanker. The anchor of the tanker ship was embedded into the hull of the Coast Guard ship, and as the tanker sailed on, the Blackthorn turned over and sank in ninety seconds, killing all twenty-three men on board. It took thirty days to raise the Blackthorn, and Lawton’s Coast Guard station was part of the salvage operation. Lawton helped carry the body bags from a barge to a ship that took them ashore.

  The second event, which began in April of 1980 and lasted for several months, was the desperate rescue of the Freedom Flotilla from Cuba. Ten thousand Cubans had stormed the Peruvian embassy asking for asylum, and when the Peruvian ambassador refused to force them to leave, Fidel Castro announced that anyone who wished to leave Cuba could. Cuban Americans then flooded the Port of Mariel with small pleasure boats, commercial shrimp and fishing boats, unsteady rafts, and even inner tubes tied to pieces of wood to bring their relatives and anyone else who wanted to leave Cuba to Southern Florida. President Jimmy Carter announced that America would welcome them all. Before it was over, 125,000 Cubans fled to the United States.

  Hundreds of small crafts made their way toward Key West, but not all of them made it. Lawton, who was part of the largest Coast Guard operation in peacetime in American history, was part of an armada of ships that struggled mightily to save as many of the refugees as they could.

  “I was sent to the Coast Guard station down in Key West called the Navy Mole. We were among the first people sent there. We were rescuing those Cuban people coming in, and we got a lot of joy and satisfaction from helping them, but at the same time it was very sad.”

  The official count of those who drowned was forty, but Lawton knows for a fact the casualties were in the hundreds.

  “If not thousands. And you can ask anyone who was there. There were dozens of boats that left Cuba that never were seen again. I saw many dead people floating on inner tubes. Many times I saw boats on fire with the people on board dead.”

  For the Coast Guard men who had to dispose of the bodies of those unfortunate not to survive, the scene was gruesome and unsettling.

  “We saw dead bodies. We stacked bodies at the back of some boats. One boat had thirty people on it, and it caught on fire, and many of them died. Some of the Coast Guardsmen had to go to psychologists for counseling. I was okay. I had a tough stomach.”

  The third tragic event occurred in the early morning of May 9, 1980, when the 600-foot-long freighter Summit Venture, riding in a violent rain squall with near-zero visibility and fighting wind gusts up to eighty miles an hour, struck a piling of the southbound span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, knocking down 1,200 feet of the roadway. Six cars and a Greyhound bus traveling from Chicago to Miami fell a hundred and fifty feet into the water below. Thirty-five people, including twenty-three passengers on the bus, died.

  Lawton’s boat patrolled the waters during the thirty-day rescue operation and assisted the salvage crew. They recovered debris, victim’s belongings – baby shoes, kids’ toys, suitcases, and purses and handbags -- and bodies.

  Lawton, not content to be a seaman, applied and was accepted to boatswain’s mate school in Yorktown, Virginia. He graduated with the rank of petty officer third class.

  His next assignment was at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. A boat captain, he was assigned to a small search and rescue ship. He rescued a lot of people and earned medals. But because Sandy Hook was a short car ride to his old haunts in the Bronx and Brooklyn, he had easy access to his mob friends.

  Being in the military didn’t curb his excesses. One time on a bet he drove naked from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to the Bronx, New York, on his motorcycle at speeds of a hundred miles an hour.

  “I flew through the toll booths,” said Lawton. “I won my bet. It was a hundred bucks. In 1981 that was a lot of money.”

  His next stop was Hawaii, and from his base in Honolulu he was assigned to the 378-foot Coast Guard cutter Jarvis, which patrolled the waters of Alaska. The Jarvis was sent to enforce the two-hundred mile Fisheries Conservation Act, protecting America’s seas from Japanese and Russian boats fishing illegally.

  One of Lawton’s jobs on the ship was ordering supplies, and he would divert some of those goods all the way to his mob friends in the Bronx and in Brooklyn.

  “I had fifty guys on that ship working for me, and I used to order all the supplies, the rope, the paint, and paint brushes, and I could send it anywhere I wanted. I sent it back to Brooklyn. I didn’t get paid a dime. I was getting on the ‘in’. I did it because I could, and because I knew down the line the favors would come back in spades.”

  Lawton’s plan was to stay in the Coast Guard twenty years, but during one of the cutter’s stops of a Russian factory ship, made during stormy weather, he fell and was badly injured.

  Lawton was standing on the deck of the Russian ship, when it was struck by a powerful wave. Lawton lost his footing and fell twenty feet into one of the ship’s fish holds, landing on his back.

  “I was lucky I fell on the fish and not steel, but it still hurt. They pulled me out of there, but right away I could tell I was hurt. My back was all messed up. I couldn’t walk, and I had numbness in my legs.”

  The Coast Guard doctors discovered he also had scoliosis, curvature of the spine, and he was sent to the Coast Guard base on Governor’s Island. Lawton would then travel back and forth to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

  He was assigned to Fort Totten, on the Long Island side of the Throgs Neck Bridge, not far from his Bronx home, but because of his medical condition he didn’t have to live there. Lawton remained based there for eight months while the Coast Guard decided what to do with him.

  “I was on the payroll of the Coast Guard, but I had no one to report to, nowhere to go, nothing to do. I was living in Brooklyn with my brother David in an apartment.”

  While still a member of the Coast Guard, Lawton took advantage of his mob connections and became an associate of the Gambino crime family. The Gambino clan was run by Paul Castallano until December of 1985, when he was gunned down while eating at Sparks Steakhouse by men hired by John Gotti. Lawton became a bartender at one of the mob-owned lounges with the blessing of made man Dominick Gangi, who was close to Castillano.. While there Lawton began his education in the bookmaking business.

  “While I was still in the Coast Guard I was told by Dominick Gangi, ‘Go to Luke’s Piano Lounge on Union Turnpike in Queens, and you’ll be taken care of. They are expecting you.’ I then started bartending and really learning the bookmaking business.

  His teacher was one of the best, Mac the Bookie, the biggest bookmaker in all of New York.

  “Mac set up shop at Luke’s Piano Lounge,” said Lawton, “and all the
bookies from around New York City would lay their money off with him. A bookie doesn’t gamble. A bookie takes bets on any game in any sport and doesn’t care who wins. He takes money on both sides and he makes his ten percent from the vig. But if the betting is running $50,000 on one team and $20,000 on the other, he better lay that difference off, otherwise he ends up becoming a gambler. Who do you lay it off to? Vegas won’t take that big of a bet. You negotiate the line and lay the difference off with Mac.

  “Mac was a Jew who had a lot of juice because all the big bosses respected him for his brains and his ability to make money. He was an older guy with white hair. Whenever I was here I’d run next door to the deli to get him a toasted English Muffin with cream cheese and jelly.

  “Mac was highly respected, but he was tough. The guys who used to take bets from John Gotti, who was a big gambler, would call him, and he’d say to them, ‘I don’t give a fuck if John is betting. You better pay me.’ Because who’s going to call up Gotti and tell him he has to pay? What if John Gotti didn’t pay? What are you going to do? So Mac would say, ‘I don’t care who it is. I’m coming to collect from you.’

  Lawton’s bookmaking operation was small. Most of the bets he took were for a thousand dollars or less. He learned how to take bets and how to get the line. A customer would call and say, “Give me a nickel on the Giants.” That meant he wanted to bet five hundred dollars. “I want to bet a dime.” A dime is a thousand dollar bet. “Give me a twenty-time parlay.” That’s two teams. One time is five dollars, so a twenty time bet is one hundred dollars. Plus the vig, of course. “Give me a round robin.” That’s a bet on three teams. Lawton would take the action from twenty-five to a thousand dollar bets.

  After his apprenticeship at Luke’s Piano Lounge, Larry moved his bookie operation from Queens to Brooklyn, where he set up shop at another mob-controlled bar called The Homestretch, an old-time bar on Kings Highway and West 10th Street. The bar was one long room. On the left was a juke box, and there were a couple of tables where the boys would play cards. On the wall a big painting of horses racing was known to all who went there. In the back of the bar was a Skittle game and a Joker Poker slot machine that paid off.