Gangster Redemption Read online

  The Homestretch was home base for Dominick Gangi and the bar owner, Willie Ventura, whose nickname was Willie the Weeper. He was called that because Willie was always bitching about something or other.

  “Willie was my mentor,” said Lawton. “I looked up to him. He had a loan sharking operation, ran the numbers, bookmaking, broads – he ran the place. He owned the whole building, including two apartments above the Homestretch bar. He worked directly for Dominick Gangi.”

  Larry needed the protection of the Gambinos to do business.

  “You had to be connected to one mob or another, because if you weren’t, and if you were making good money, other mobsters in New York would know about you, know you were a big-time earner, and they would kidnap or torture you for your money. One way or another they’d find out where you hid the money. But if you were connected with one of the mob families, then you were protected because you were kicking upstairs, and everybody wants to protect their own interests.

  “Some guys were associated with the mob just because they liked to be involved. A mob boss might say to him, ‘Go do this.’ These are flunkies or hangers-on, and there were a lot of them. I was an associate of the Gambino crime family. I wasn’t a made man, but I was protected. I was what you called an earner. For every dollar I made, I kicked something up to my boss, Dominick Gangi. I always paid him something. Greedy guys might have tried to get away with less, but I didn’t want to risk Dominick finding out I was shorting him. If he thought I was screwing with him, I’d have bad vibes, and bad vibes can shorten your life.”

  The Homestretch bar, like all mob-owned bars, was a world unto its own. Almost every day someone would walk into the place with hot merchandise.

  “Guys who used to rob tractor trailers full of stuff always had a way to get rid of the merchandise. Some of them had outs up and down the avenue, selling to stores. They might have ten guys selling the stuff out of their trunks on consignment. Those guys would then come into the mob bars.

  “If a guy walked in and said, ‘Johnny from 18th Avenue sent me,’ okay. He wouldn’t lie about Johnny, because if I go back and say, ‘Johnny, thanks for the hit,’ and Johnny says, ‘Send what fucking guy down?’ then the guy’s in big trouble, because then Johnny didn’t get his kickback. Everybody involved gets a kickback.

  “A couple of times a guy came into the bar who wasn’t connected, and we’d rob him. He’d come in and say, ‘Hey, I have something to show you,’ and we’d say okay and take the guy inside, and while they were talking, we had another guy emptying his trunk. Because he wasn’t connected.

  “I was violent, and I was smart. A lot of guys were just stupid violent, and these were the guys who never made it. They ended up going to jail or getting whacked. Eventually everyone in the mob either goes to prison or gets killed, but the smart ones last a while.

  “I grew up with no money. I learned how to hustle to make money. John Gotti had nothing, and he learned and he was smart. But today the sons of the fathers who made millions are spoiled. They didn’t learn how to hustle from the street like their fathers. They don’t have a con game, and they aren’t smart criminals. That’s why the mob today is not what it used to be. The younger generation isn’t hungry, and therefore they never learned how to be a real gangster.”

  *

  In addition to bookmaking, Lawton became a loan shark, lending money at an exorbitant interest to those who desperately needed it.

  “Let me explain loan sharking,” said Lawton. “It’s exactly like what credit card companies do today. When you borrow money, you have to pay back three points a week. It doesn’t sound like that much, but it is. Say I lend a guy $10,000. He would have to pay me $300 a week. Every week he has to give me $300, and that doesn’t come off the principal. That’s three percent weekly.”

  Lawton’s customers were those who couldn’t get a loan from a bank. Often they were customers with cash businesses.

  “It might be a candy store owner or a bar owner or a business where they get a lot of cash and they don’t pay their sales tax. They need money to pay the sales tax, but they can’t go to a bank and get a loan, because they’re making a lot of that money under the table, and they aren’t showing much of a profit. So they come to me.

  “Or my customers might be drug dealers, who are the best, because eventually I know I’ll get my money even if they don’t pay me right away. The only way I get beat is if they go to jail or get killed.

  “A lot of them are also gamblers, and gamblers lose, and too often at some point they no longer can pay. I’d loan shark $20,000 to a business owner because his sales tax was due. He’d tell me, ‘I’ll give it back in a month.’

  “I’d say, ‘Here’s $20,000. I want $600 a week every Friday. You know what happens in six months, right?’ ‘Oh yeah. You got it.’

  “Some guys pay on time, and if they pay in a month I’ve made $2,400 on my money and get my $20,000 back. Where can you make interest like that in a month? But what if he couldn’t pay? After six months I would increase his points to five percent, and this guy who owes me $20,000 now is paying me $1,000 a week.

  “I’d say, ‘I’ll give you six more months, and then I want my fucking twenty grand.’

  “He’s paying me $1,000 a week. In 26 weeks I make $26,000, and he still owes me twenty grand. Then I’d say, ‘Now we have a problem. I want your business. Or I want something. I once took a guy’s boat. I had a guy hook it up to a trailer and drive it off. ‘You’ll get your boat when I get my money.’ He found the money. They all do, or I sell their stuff.”

  Lawton was very effective at collecting from his own debtors. As an associate he also had the job of collecting from those who owed his mob bosses. He provided muscle for the card games, the dice games, and the rest of the gambling operation at Luke’s Piano Lounge. When someone owed money and didn’t pay, Larry got the call.

  Lawton had entered the Coast Guard at five foot six and 132 pounds, but after seven years of service to his country he had grown to almost six feet and 200 pounds of solid muscle. He was a force to be reckoned with. His first gambit was to send a message to pay up by throwing a cinder block through the windshield of the debtor’s car. That usually worked, but if it didn’t, the next step was blowing up the car.

  “One guy didn’t pay for a while, and I wanted to show him what was going to happen,” said Lawton. “His car was parked in the neighborhood. At night, when no one was around, I took a cinder block and put it under the car’s gas tank. I put a can of Sterno on the cinder block and lit it. After a while, depending on how much gas is in the tank – less gas, more fumes, quicker explosion.”

  Another time a bettor who owed Lawton five hundred dollars made every excuse imaginable in addition to making the mistake of trying to duck him.

  “You didn’t want to owe me money,” he said. “I caught the guy outside the Homestretch, and I beat him down and laid his arm on the curb. I snapped it like a twig. His bone was sticking out of his arm. He was screaming, and the guys in the bar took him to the hospital. He didn’t say anything. He knew better.

  “I got in trouble with Dominick for doing that. Not because I broke his arm. Because I did it in front of the bar.

  “Dominick said, ‘You fucking idiot, what are you doing? You’re going to bring heat around here. What the fuck are you doing? I don’t give a fuck, shoot the motherfucker. I don’t give a shit. But don’t do it in front of the bar.”

  *

  In September of 1986, while technically still in the Coast Guard, Lawton was sitting at the Turquoise Bar on Third Avenue in Brooklyn when in walked a “hot-looking” girl by the name of Roselyn Giordano. He was 26. She was 19.

  “She was a good-looking girl, had the Italian look, and was well respected. She came from a good family.”

  Lawton also liked her because she worked in a bank.

  “She w
as a teller at the York Savings and Loan on Third Avenue. At night I would dream about how I was going to rob it.”

  A year later, on September 11, 1987, they were married at Regina Pace Church, a beautiful edifice on 65th Street between 13th and 14th Avenue in Brooklyn in an old Italian neighborhood. The priest informed Lawton the church was booked on the Friday he chose to get married.

  “You want to talk about corrupt Catholic priests. I gave the priest two thousand dollars, and he switched the date for the other couple.”

  They had a typical extravagant mob wedding, which was attended by members of both the Gambino and Columbo crime families. The bride’s father, who worked as a foreign exchange broker for Noonan, Ashley, and Pierce, arranged to rent the limousine owned by Carmine Persico, head of the Columbo family.

  Lenny, Lawton’s future father-in-law, knew the people at Romanique, a mob-owned limo business in Brooklyn on 11th Avenue and 67th Street.”

  After everyone sang “Ave Maria,” the bride and groom took off in Carmine Persico’s limousine. On the way Lawton ordered the driver to take him to the Homestretch. While his bride stayed in the car, Larry and his brother David got out and had a few drinks with the guys at the bar. They then got back in the limo and proceeded to the reception at the Oriental Manor, another notorious mob-owned business. Standing guard at the door were two brutes named Bruno and Netti, muscle for the Gambino mob.

  Lawton was partying with Lenny, his new brother-in law, doing coke in the bathroom when Lawton’s father-in-law walked in on them.

  “He never said a word, and I always had a lot of respect for him for that,” said Lawton. “He knew I was wrong, and I knew I was wrong, but words didn’t have to be said.”

  During the reception one of Lawton’s pals from the Coast Guard became drunk and out of control. Bruno walked over to Lawton and in a heavy Italian accent asked him, “Do you wanna me to take care of him?”

  “Bruno, a stone-cold killer, loved me,” said Lawton. “He could barely speak English. One time he took me to his house and showed me all his guns taped up with wrapped handles so they didn’t leave fingerprints. Another time Bruno was losing at the poker machine at the Homestretch, and he shot it. We got Bruno a job at the Diamond Exchange, and he got mad and shot his boss in the ass. So when Bruno wanted to know if I wanted him to take care of my Coast Guard buddy, I immediately ran to my boss, Willie the Weeper.

  “Willie, will you please take care of this fucking nut?”

  Bride and groom honeymooned on a cruise to the Bahamas. After they returned, Larry decided he owed it to his new bride to get away from his wise guy life and go straight. He moved to Fort Lauderdale, near Miami on the east coast of Florida, where his aunt got him a job with the phone company as a 411 operator. People called for information, and he gave it to them. He lasted at the job six months. The lack of action drove him crazy.

  His father in law had given the newlyweds $30,000, money Lawton spent to buy and open a pizzeria in North Lauderdale. The pizza business also was too tame.

  “I tried to lead a legit life, but I couldn’t do it. It was too boring. I needed action.”

  The action he craved came from the boys at the Homestretch. Though he was living in Florida, anytime Dominick Gangi or Willie the Weeper beckoned him back to New York to perform a service he came running.

  “I lived in Florida, and I would often get a phone call from New York,” said Lawton. “Often it involved my strong-arming someone who owed Dominick or Willie money. One time I was called to get a kid who robbed one of our bookies to tell us where the money was.

  “Willie said, ‘Larry, this guy robbed $75,000. We know he did it. He’s 21 years old. His friend told on him. He was with another guy. His friend knew somebody, so he definitely did it.’”

  Lawton said he’d take care of it.

  “Get that fucking money, Larry,” Willie said. “I don’t give a shit. Get that money.”

  Lawton and another Gambino flunkie grabbed the kid off the street and brought him back to the Homestretch. They lifted up one of the steel plates on the sidewalk in front of the bar, and walked the kid down the steps leading to the basement under the bar. They dropped the plate. The room was soundproof. Lawton could work his charm without worry that anyone could hear what was going on.

  “I tied his hands and legs behind him to a chair,” said Lawton. “I unbuckled his pants, and I pulled his pants all the way down to his ankles. I took the tee shirt he wore, and I pulled it up over his head and off. He was sitting there naked with his dick hanging out.”

  Lawton said to Joe Cap, his accomplice, “Go get an iron and an extension cord.”

  The kid began screaming, “I didn’t do it. “I swear to God.”

  Listen to me,” Lawton said to the kid. “We know you did it. Just tell me where the money is. I’ll give you one warning. Trust me. My word is everything.”

  “No, I swear to God,” said the kid. “You have the wrong guy. The guy who told on me doesn’t know.”

  “Listen to me,” Lawton said, “I’m telling you we know it was you.”

  The plugged-in iron was getting so hot Lawton could feel its heat. He picked it up and looked into the kid’s eyes.

  “Where is the fucking money?”

  “I swear….” The kid started to say, and before he could say another word Lawton took the iron and pushed it onto the kid’s stomach right below his breasts.

  His scream was horrific.

  Said Lawton, “To this day there’s a guy running around with the shape of an iron on his chest.”

  Lawton could see the fear in the kid’s eyes. Lawton stared down at his dick, and he looked back at him, and he said, “I’m going to ask you one more time.” Lawton was holding the iron and looking back down at his dick.

  Lawton looked at him and said, “Where’s the money?”

  Frantically the kid said, “Sixty eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. It’s in my apartment behind the bureau in my bedroom.”

  “You got the keys?”

  “I got the keys.”

  Joe, grab his keys,” Lawton said to his accomplice. “I’ll wait with him.”

  Twenty-five minutes later Joe Cap returned with the money. There was $70,000 left. The kid had spent the other five thousand.

  “Now let me ask you,” Lawton said to the kid, “was it worth you having that nice fucking iron mark on your chest? Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to let you go, and you tell all your punk friends that anyone who ever fucks with one of our guys around here, they won’t come out alive.”

  “Let him go, Joe,” Lawton ordered.

  “The kid was crying,” said Lawton. “He was really, really scared, and he had every right to be. And we let him go. And we never had another problem.”

  Another time Lawton was called up to New York because Willie the Weeper had bought a brand new 1991 Cadillac with the fancy chrome bumpers, and while he was visiting his mother down near Prospect Park, someone had stolen the bumpers off the car.

  Unfortunately for the thief, a lady on the street saw who did it and left a note on Willie’s windshield saying, “I saw this guy taking the bumpers off your car,” and she wrote down the thief’s license plate number.

  Said Lawton “We could find out who belonged to the car because we had cops on the payroll. This cop ran the plate, and we found the guy who did it lived right around the corner from the Homestretch Bar. He probably knew Willie. He had to be nuts to rob that car. Everybody knew Willie’s car.

  “We got the guy, and we brought him down to the cellar. We could see he knew he had fucked up bad. This kid almost shit in his pants. We didn’t do anything to him. We made him put Willie’s bumpers back on, and we made him a deal where whenever he robbed a bumper, he paid us two hundred dollars per. We turned him into a robber for us. Why hurt him? The guy
was good at robbing bumpers. He cut them clean as a whistle. He didn’t scratch them. He knew never to screw with us, because we knew all the chop shops he was selling the bumpers to. That’s where smarts come in.”

  Wise guys can recognize other wise guys. Not long after Lawton opened his pizzeria in Fort Lauderdale, a man on the fringes of organized crime by the name of Paulie sought him out. Paulie, who drove a Delorean, owned a store that sold cell phones. He was also a small-time jewel robber. They were both New Yorkers, and they got to talking, and Paulie wanted to know if Larry was interested in buying some diamonds. Larry didn’t know the first thing about jewelry, but he figured he was smart enough to figure it out. Paulie several times brought him diamond rings which he bought cheap for cash.

  “I started running hot diamonds out the back door of the pizzeria,” said Lawton. “I’d look at a ring, and look at the Zales jewelry ads. ‘Hey, this looks good.’ Robbing a diamond or two is what punks do. These guys are smash and grabbers. They go into a jewelry store, bust a display case and run off with a handful of jewels. My guess is that Paulie or one of his guys was breaking into homes and taking private jewelry, and he’d bring it to me.

  “Other people were also coming to me with jewelry they stole, and with my connections in New York, I was able to get rid of it. Sometimes the jewels would come from house robberies – three diamond rings. I didn’t care where. I wasn’t a petty guy. But I would take the jewels to Willie at the bar, and I’d make a little money. I’m talking small, a few dollars.”

  Seeing that Lawton was involved with jewels, one day while he was at the Homestretch, Willie the Weeper told him, “Hey, we got something going down in Florida for you.” Here was a can’t-miss scam right in his own back yard. They informed him that a jewelry store owner in Sunrise, Florida, wanted to be robbed so he could collect on the insurance. Willie the Weeper told him, “We want you to rob it. You give us the diamonds, and we’ll give you a cut.”