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ich businessmen and union guys, mostly from the garment center and construction industry. One<br />
phone call from Paulie and Lenny has a job as a service bartender--he isn't even old enough to be in<br />
the bar, forget work there--and they got me a tuxedo and made me the maitre d' hotel, a twentyyear-old<br />
kid who didn't know the difference between anything.<br />
"In those days the Azores was owned, off the record, by Thomas Lucchese, the boss of the whole<br />
family. He used to come in there every night before going home, and that's why Paulie got Lenny<br />
the job. It wasn't because he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and his union problems. He wanted Lenny<br />
to get to know the boss. And Lucchese had to love us. I mean he got treated beautifully. He walked<br />
in the door and his drink was being made. His cocktail glass was polished so hard that a couple of<br />
times it broke as Lenny was shining it. The place at the bar where Lucchese liked to stand was<br />
always kept empty and it was glossed dry. We didn't care if there were two hundred people in the<br />
joint; everybody waited. Very few people hi the place knew who he was, but that didn't matter. We<br />
knew. He was the boss. In the newspapers he was called Gaetano Lucchese, 'Three Fingers Brown,'<br />
but nobody called him that. On the street he was known as Tommy Brown. He was in his sixties<br />
then, and he always came in alone. His driver used to wait outside.<br />
"Tommy Brown was the boss of the whole garment center. He controlled the airports. Johnny<br />
Dio, who ran most of the union shakedowns at Kennedy and LaGuardia, worked for him. He owned<br />
the town. He had district leaders, He made judges. His son was appointed to West Point by the East<br />
Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio, and his daughter graduated from Vassar. Later she married<br />
Carlo Gambino's son. Hundreds of million-dollar cloak-and-suiters would drive all the way out to<br />
the Azores just because they hoped he might be there so they could kiss his ass. It gave them a<br />
chance to nod or say hello. And when these big-money guys saw that I talked to him direct, they<br />
would start kissing my ass. They would become real cozy. They'd smile and give me their cards and<br />
say if I ever needed anything in ladies' coats or handbags or toppers or better dresses, all I had to do<br />
was call. Then they'd stick me with a brand-new twenty or even a fifty that was folded so sharp it<br />
felt like it would make my palms bleed. That's who Tommy Brown was. Without trying, he could<br />
make the city's greediest rag-trade sharks give money to strangers.<br />
"We first went to work in the Azores in the middle of May. We had an apartment across the<br />
street. For a while we lived in Paulie's house in Island Park, about fifteen minutes away, but our<br />
own place was more fun. The Azores was ours. The place closed at ten o'clock, and there was a<br />
swimming pool at night. We had our friends come in and eat and drink for nothing. It was like our<br />
own private club. It was my first taste of the good life. I never had so many shrimp cocktails. After<br />
work we went from one night spot to another. I got to see how the rich people lived. I saw the Five<br />
Towns crowd from Lawrence and Cedarhurst, mostly all of them wealthy businessmen and<br />
professional guys who had lots of cash, wives who looked like Monique Van Vooren, and houses<br />
the size of hotels spread out along the south shore, with powerboats as big as my own house tied up<br />
in their backyards, which was the goddamn Atlantic Ocean.<br />
"The Azores' owner of record, the guy who ran the place, was named Tommy Morton. Guys like<br />
Morton were front men for the wiseguys, who couldn't have their names on the liquor licenses.<br />
Front men sometimes had some of their own money in these joints and essentially had the wiseguys<br />
for silent partners. Morton, for instance, was a friend of Paulie's. He knew lots of people. He must<br />
have fronted for lots of wiseguys. But he also had to pay back a certain amount every week to his<br />
partners, and they didn't care whether business was good or bad. That's the way it is with a wiseguy<br />
partner. He gets his money, no matter what. You got no business? Fuck you, pay me. You had a<br />
fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning and World War Three started in the lounge?<br />
Fuck you, pay me.<br />
"In other words, Tommy Morton only began to see a dollar after he had paid the wiseguys and<br />
they'd gotten theirs off the top. That's one of the reasons why Morton hated Lenny and me so much.<br />
First, he didn't need a couple of wise-ass kids tike us ruining his business. He had to pay us two<br />
hundred a week apiece, and for that he could have hired a real maitre d' and bartender. Also, we<br />
were stealing him blind. Everything we stole or gave away came out of his pocket. I know that we<br />
used to drive him nuts, but he couldn't do a thing about it.<br />
"But by the end of the summer we were bored. It was around Labor Day weekend. A tough<br />
weekend. We decided to take off. Lenny and I hadn't seen Lucchese for about a month. Everybody
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