Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [15]
“Nicky was there and so was Paul’s relative Pay Phone. He had a couple of guys with him, but they were okay. Pay Phone hugged Nicky and thanked him and us for doing the right thing. There was even one thing that got a chuckle from everybody. That was when we told Pay Phone the cash was ten dollars short. He was running the Mercedes on empty when we took it and we had to put gas in it to get it back to him. We figured that was his expense and not ours.
“Mike, Anthony, and I were a little pissed that all we got was a thank you. The next day we had our Saturday meeting at the club. Nicky said he’d gotten a phone call. Paul Castellano told him we’d earned a feather in our cap for doing the honorable thing, and we had personal favors coming if we ever needed them.
“I said to Nicky as a joke, ‘Favors don’t pay the bills. Maybe he can give us that eighty-seven thousand back.’ A couple of days later a fruit basket was delivered to my house. The card said, ‘You did a very honorable thing. Your friend Paul.’
“Although I would have preferred the money, there were a few times over the next several months that having that connection with Castellano came in handy.”
BUSINESS SUFFERS
As the year passed, the intense focus by Andrew and his crewmates to find and kill Todd Alvino eventually hurt them in the wallet.
“When you’re not out there stealing, you’re not earning,” Andrew explained. “We were spending more time looking for Alvino than we were working. It came to a point that the lack of income was noticeable.”
In order to compensate, they changed how they shook down the pot dealers. Rather than handing over $500 a week, the dealers now gave them two pounds of marijuana. A friend of Andrew’s stood in Utica Park at Utica Avenue and Avenue N, selling dime bags of marijuana. Pretty soon he was making $500-$600 a day. His cut was three bags out of every 20 he sold, $30 out of the $200. Andrew also got permission to have another friend deal in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.
“I was making four or five thousand a week. But I shared that with Mike, Anthony, and Richie, and I had to send Nicky an envelope every week. The four of us ended up with about eight hundred a week each. But we were still extorting money from some of the big drug dealers. We kept that as kind of a slush fund, in case we needed bail money or something. Nicky got a piece of that too, only it was on a monthly basis.”
As 1984 drew to a close, Andrew, not yet 20 years old, was keeping his head above water financially. But the frustration over not being able to locate Todd Alvino was growing by the day.
6
1985
As a rule, criminals aren’t overly fond of being stopped and questioned by the police, especially if they happen to be in possession of items that are illegal or difficult to explain away. Andrew was confronted with that exact situation in January.
Anthony Gerbino, Mike Yannotti, and Andrew were driving to a friend’s nightclub in Mike’s 1983 Fleetwood when a squad car pulled them over. Andrew was carrying two illegal guns and Mike had one. It was Super Bowl weekend and Andrew was also carrying about twenty thousand dollars in bets. As the officer was approaching the car, they decided they couldn’t afford a search. Mike handed him the registration and insurance card, then sped off. The chase was on. They had enough of a head start that they were able to ditch the guns. Andrew hid the money.
By that time, several more police cars had joined the pursuit and it turned into a regular demolition derby, the Cadillac against New York’s finest. They ran a couple of cruisers off the road and smashed fenders with another one. When they got behind a car stopped at a red light, they went right through, pushing it in front of them. It ended when a police car T-boned the