Bad Guys Read Free Page B

start up with, no connections, no cash, no credit, nothing. So with no family affiliation, Vinnie Clams found himself out on the street again, an ex-con scrounging around his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Gravesend, fencing hot VCRs and TVs. But that’s when he got a call from a certain interested party, someone who wanted to invest in Vinnie Clams’s drug expertise, someone who was getting in touch with a lot of the poor schlumps who were left high and dry without the families.
    This interested party told Vinnie that he was taking in the best men left from the three families so that he could start up his own family. He told Vinnie that he could put him in touch with reliable suppliers and that he could provide him with seed money, just as long as he pledged his allegiance and, of course, agreed to cut the new family in for a piece of his action. He told the Clam that if things worked out, down the line there might even be something better for him in the organization, something safe without so much risk, like gasoline hustling or insurance scams. That certain interested someone was Uncle Sam’s little rat, Richie Varga, who said he was going to run the whole thing by remote control from the Justice Department’s Witness Security Program. It was fucking beautiful. The Clam heard opportunity knocking, and he accepted Varga’s offer gratefully.
    With the seed money he got from Varga, Vinnie bought himself some inventory—cocaine, heroin, dust, crack—both to sell and to pay the help with. The Clam set himself up in a newly renovated apartment building on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, a building full of upwardly mobile types, people with small noses and good posture, the kind of people Vinnie hated. It was a very good place to be, though, because it was convenient to his men working the streets in the East Village and on the Bowery. All Vinnie did was sit on the couch, set up the deals on the phone, give his junkies their assignments, then collect the profits. His only afternoon chore was making out the “payroll,” measuring out what he felt his employees deserved for their labors—he even doled the shit out in brown payroll envelopes—rewarding some guys with purer doses, punishing the ones who got out of line by stepping on their dope a few more times than he normally would. Now and then a bagman would OD on him, but so what? The way Vinnie figured, the average dope fiend normally doesn’t have a very long life expectancy, and who gives a fuck about a junkie anyway?Besides, there was always an unlimited supply of applicants drooling all over themselves for an entry-level position in his company.
    And yet, with all the money he had coming in, Vinnie Clams was still nervous. He had it easy, sure, and he was making it up the wazoo, but he still had nightmares about being locked up in that cell. He knew that no matter how cautious he was, there was always a good chance that he could go back there—and for a whole lot longer than six months. He knew that the only way to eliminate that risk was to stop handling shit altogether. That’s when he decided to promote a few of his junkies and make them handle all the dope.
    Ramon Gonsalves, for example, was a coke freak and his best bagman. He ran a small bodega on Avenue C and sold shit out of the store, which kept him going, since not even his own spic neighbors would buy the rotten plantains those people eat, not from that pigsty. But despite his crummy store, Ramon was okay and Vinnie Clams trusted him. But he didn’t trust him enough to handle a sizable portion of his inventory. Not yet. The Clam needed some insurance first.
    Ramon had a family: Teresa, his wife, and two kids, Ramon Jr. and Wanda, ages eleven and nine. Vinnie Clams started getting chummy with the Gonsalves family. He’d drop by with a couple of six-packs and throw little parties behind the bodega, meet the kids after school and give them rides home