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By Root 1018 0

he didn’t want to appear out of shape to them. Like Jimmy, Stevie felt that if you look formidable, there is less chance that people will challenge you. Stevie had a juice machine where he made himself all sorts of weird concoctions out of fruits and vegetables. He even bought me my own juice machine, which I used for a while. When I saw how hard it was to clean out every time I used it, I stopped using it. But Stevie never gave up on his. He was also big on vitamins, which he kept at his mother’s house and tried to convince me to use, too. Occasionally I would take them, but never as faithfully as Stevie. Like Jimmy, Stevie bought most of his food at the health food store, Bread & Circus, and didn’t smoke, gamble, do drugs, or drink much.

All three of us were big readers and talked about the different books we read. Like Jimmy, Stevie particularly liked books about World War II or Korea or Vietnam. He was close with his kids, especially his two sons, Billy and Stevie. Although, like Jimmy, he wasn’t big on professional sporting events, he made it to most of Billy’s wrestling matches. Stevie Jr. ended up straight, but even though Stevie didn’t want his kids involved in crime, Billy got mixed up in some criminal activities. It’s sort of interesting that the Italian mob most often replicates and goes on and on with family members joining, but the Irish gangs seem to last just one generation per family.

Stevie and I certainly didn’t work anywhere near as closely as Jimmy and I did. And we never ran in the same social circles. Like Jimmy and most of the guys, he didn’t bring a woman to my wedding, but had a great time. He always acted respectful and friendly to Pam and the boys. Like a regular friend, he was concerned with anything that came up in my life and offered to help in any way if he could.

Jimmy trusted Stevie, but he always said that he never knew what Stevie was thinking. The two of them had respect for each other, and even though they might have had disagreements, they were never heated. It would have been dangerous for them to have cross words with each other. On a typical day, Jimmy and I would spend an hour a day with Stevie, walking around doing business. I mean, we weren’t doing crimes every day. We weren’t animals, and except for the business aspect of our lives, we led boring, regular lives. But depending on what was going on, if we had an extortion or were collecting tribute from established rackets, we’d spend more time together. Stevie was exceptionally smart business-wise, paying attention to all aspects of business and always staying on top of things. I have little doubt that Stevie could have been successful at anything he tried to do. If he’d gone legit, he could have easily figured out how to let his excessive greed work for him, having people work for him and make him rich. But crime was his field and he did it brilliantly. He was a master criminal, involved in all aspects of crime, in loan-sharking, drug dealing, extortion, everything. I never realized till much later just how good he was at what he did, how adept he was at working both sides.

Like all big-time criminals, Stevie was involved in a network with other criminals in all facets of crime. Everyone he dealt with was a criminal to one degree or another. Even legitimate people who were around him were like groupies, people who wanted to be able to tell others they knew this guy or were connected to him. No matter what it cost them to be able to do that, they found it advantageous just being able to say that Stevie was a friend of theirs. That went for Jimmy, too. These wannabes thought they could ask Jimmy or Stevie for a favor at any time. They wanted to be able to say they knew wiseguys, that they had friends who would do anything. I still don’t know why legitimate people feel that way about wiseguys. Maybe it’s for the same reason, whatever it might be, that girls want to be around rock stars.

While Stevie and I spent most of our time together with Jimmy, the two of us did handle a few situations together. One involved the transfer