Getting Even Read Free

an easy life, most criminals actually must work long hours, frequently in buildings without air-conditioning. Identifying criminals is up to each of us. Usually they can be recognized by their large cufflinks and their failure to stop eating when the man sitting next to them is hit by a falling anvil. The best methods of combatting organized crime are:
       1. Telling the criminals you are not at home.
       2. Calling the police whenever an unusual number of men from the Sicilian Laundry Company begin singing in your foyer.
       3. Wiretapping.
       Wiretapping cannot be employed indiscriminately, but its effectiveness is illustrated by this transcript of a conversation between two gang bosses in the New York area whose phones had been tapped by the F.B.I.
     
       Anthony: Hello? Rico?
       Rico: Hello?
       Anthony: Rico?
       Rico: Hello.
       Anthony: Rico?
       Rico: I can’t hear you.
       Anthony: Is that you, Rico? I can’t hear you.
       Rico: What?
       Anthony: Can you hear me?
       Rico: Hello?
       Anthony: Rico?
       Rico: We have a bad connection.
       Anthony: Can you hear me?
       Rico: Hello?
       Anthony: Rico?
       Rico: Hello?
       Anthony: Operator, we have a bad connection.
       Operator: Hang up and dial again, sir.
       Rico: Hello?
     
       Because of this evidence, Anthony (The Fish) Rotunno and Rico Panzini were convicted and are currently serving fifteen years in Sing Sing for illegal possession of Bensonhurst.

The Schmeed Memoirs
        The seemingly inexhaustible spate of literature on the Third Reich continues unabated with the soon to be published Memoirs of Friedrich Schmeed. Schmeed, the best-known barber in wartime Germany, provided tonsorial services for Hitler and many highly placed government and military officials. As was noted during the Nuremberg Trials, Schmeed not only seemed to be always at the right place at the right time but possessed “more than total recall,” and was thus uniquely qualified to write this incisive guide to innermost Nazi Germany. Following are a few brief excerpts:
     
       In the spring of 1940, a large Mercedes pulled up in front of my barbershop at 127 Koenigstrasse, and Hitler walked in. “I just want a light trim,” he said, “and don’t take too much off the top.” I explained to him there would be a brief wait because von Ribbentrop was ahead of him. Hitler said he was in a rush and asked Ribbentrop if he could be taken next, but Ribbentrop insisted it would look bad for the Foreign Office if he were passed over. Hitler thereupon made a quick phone call, and Ribbentrop was immediately transferred to the Afrika Korps, and Hitler got his haircut. This sort of rivalry went on all the time. Once, Goring had Heydrich detained by the police on false pretenses, so that he could get the chair by the window. Goring was a dissolute and often wanted to sit on the hobbyhorse to get his haircuts. The Nazi high command was embarrassed by this but could do nothing. One day, Hess challenged him. “I want the hobbyhorse today, Herr Field Marshal,” he said.
       “Impossible. I have it reserved,” Goring shot back.
       “I have orders directly from the Fuhrer. They state that I am to be allowed to sit on the horse for my haircut.” And Hess produced a letter from Hitler to that effect. Goring was livid. He never forgave Hess, and said that in the future he would have his wife cut his hair at home with a bowl. Hitler laughed when he heard this, but Goring was serious and would have carried it out had not the Minister of Arms turned down his requisition for a thinning shears.
       I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I finally did find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything, as I had made