“You’re a crazy bastard,” Mirra says to me.

With a guy like Mirra, you had to allow yourself a little fun every once in a while, otherwise you would go wacko.

I was sitting at the bar at Cecil’s. A friend of Mirra‘s, a guy I didn’t know well, came up behind me to pat me on the back and say hello. He ran his hand down my back.

“What the fuck you doing?” I said as softly as I could manage. He grunted and walked away. I knew what he was doing. He was checking me for a wire. I saw him talking to Mirra.

Later I was in the men’s room washing my hands. When I turned around, I bumped into this same guy. He quickly slid his hands down the sides of my jacket. I pushed him away. “I think you got the wrong guy, pal,” I said. I just left him standing there.

Nobody could get close to Mirra. The only family he was close to was his mother. You could never get him to talk about anything personal. One day you might ask him, “How’s your mother, Tony?” He might say, “Okay.” Another day you ask him, and he might answer, “What the fuck you so nosy about?”

He was always hustling broads. Women were attracted to him, even though he treated them like dirt. He was never married, but he had a load of girlfriends, everything from bimbos to movie stars. When he wasn’t hustling them, he was abusing them. He was just totally obnoxious. When a woman at Cecil’s complained that her umbrella had been stolen out of the coatroom, he said to her, “You think I care about a fucking umbrella? The thing for you to do about it is to get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”

Then there was a time down at the South Street Seaport restoration project when one of the many street vendors, an old woman selling jewelry, was waiting to use the pay phone Mirra was tying up. Wiseguys spend their lives on the telephone. Mirra had been tying up the phone for about a half hour, making one call after another. When this old woman asked him politely if she could please use the phone, because that was the only phone in the area for the vendors to use, and they used it for business, Mirra said, “Listen, you fucking cunt, I’m using this phone. When I’m finished, I’m finished. Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll cut you.”

He was telling a bunch of guys about this very big movie actress he was seeing. “I got her to give me a blow job while another guy was fucking her and she was jerking off another guy,” he said. I must have winced or groaned or something, because he said to me, “Aw, what’s the difference? She was so strung out on dope, she didn’t know what she was doing. Don’t act like a fucking fruitcake.”

The Feast of San Gennaro is the biggest annual street festival in Little Italy, taking over Mulberry Street for two weeks in September. It’s a big tourist thing; people come from all over the country. It’s a religious festival, but on the street it’s all controlled by the mob. All five families are involved. Different captains each have a certain portion of a block that is his, where there may be five or six booths. You can’t just go to the church and say you want a booth at such-and-such a place. That is controlled by the mob captains. Anybody that puts a booth in your section has to kick back to you. The more powerful captains control the sections closer to the center of the feast. And captains control the supplies. One captain might have control of all the sausage that comes in, another controls the beer. In other words, if you have a booth and want to sell beer, you go to the captain or his representative and say you want beer at your booth. He’ll send a guy to you that will provide beer. So they get a cut of everything. You have to pay for the space the booth occupies, and you have to pay a certain amount off the top as a nightly fee.

During the Feast of San Gennaro everybody goes down and hangs around on the street, all the wiseguys. That’s the big thing to do. Eat food from the various carts. Some of the people with the carts and booths were itinerant carnival types, but a lot of them were neighborhood people that had had booths there for years.

The day before the feast began in 1977, Mirra had met this girl who had a merchandise stand at South Street Seaport adjacent to the Fulton Fish Market, and he was hustling her.

“I got her a slot at the feast,” he told me. “Drive me down there. I told her I’d help carry her stuff over to the feast this afternoon so she could set up.”

I drove him down to South Street. She was nice-looking and pleasant. But there was something about her. We helped her pack up and drove her to Mulberry Street.

Mirra says, “I’ll see you tonight, hon,” and we left.

I say, “How well you know that lady, Tony?”

“I just met her. I figure I’ll grab her tonight after the feast, spend a hot night.”

“You sure?”

“Who the fuck you talking to?” he says.

Later that night Tony took off for his date. I was in a coffee shop when he came stomping in.

“You knew she was a fucking lezzie!” he hollers. “And you didn’t tell me, you cocksucker! Son of a bitch. I went through all the trouble of getting her a booth at the feast. Know what I told her? I told her,

‘Don’t come back to that fucking booth tomorrow!’ “

Psychologists could probably have had a field day with Mirra. For my part, he was a dangerous and necessary pain in the ass. He got on me for not hustling broads myself, or bringing any around. I just said I had a girlfriend in Jersey and one in California, but I kept that part of my life separate.

Married mob guys typically have girlfriends. They’re not discreet about it. Other than that, there was much less skirt chasing than I expected. Women were always around and available, because they gravitated to these guys. Maybe they’d hook up with them later. But most evenings they just wanted to go out and have some drinks and talk over schemes with the other guys.

My personal rule was that under no circumstances would I have anything to do with any women hanging around the mob. Regardless of morality, that kind of thing will come back to haunt you when you testify in court against these guys. By saying I had a girlfriend someplace else, the heat was off me. Occasionally, just so I seemed normal, I would bring somebody around for dinner, a woman who I had maybe met in my neighborhood. I’d show her a nice evening with the mob guys, take her home and drop her off, and that was that.

At that feast in 1977, a bunch of us were sitting in a coffee shop on Mulberry Street at one A.M., Lefty and a couple other guys and a couple local girls. One girl was sitting next to me. Suddenly she’s rubbing my leg under the table. She says, “Where you going when you leave here?”

“Over to see my girl in Jersey.”

“Why don’t you stay in the city tonight?”

This girl is the daughter of a wiseguy, and her father is in the coffee shop. I have to be careful not to insult her because she might tell her old man that I’m grabbing her leg or something, and then I’m history—you don’t do that to a wiseguy’s daughter.

“I’m pretty true to my girl,” I say. “I promised I was coming over. I’d rather not lie to her.”

“How come you never bring her around?”

“No reason to.”

“Well, if you ever get the urge to go out, give me a call.”

“Okay, I will. Sometime when I don’t have to lie.” I squirmed out of that one.

One of Mirra’s operations was coin machines. He dealt in slots, peanut vending machines, game machines, pinball machines. He had them installed all over the city in stores, luncheonettes, clubs, after-hours places. Slot machines, since they were illegal, would be installed in back rooms. He would take me along on his route when he collected the money from the machines and when he got new business.