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“I asked Dina who in the hell he was. Did he work for her uncle? Now the tears and the truth came. She told me that Ralph was the guy she bought the car from, not her uncle. She’d been afraid to tell me that.

“I asked her how much she paid for it. She said she hadn’t actually given him any money yet. He was letting her use the car for a while. The more I heard, the less I liked the arrangement. The lies had me pissed off. And I knew deals like that usually come with strings attached.

“Dina drove me back to my house and I called my buddy Sammy [Karkis]. I told him I had a situation that was buggin’ me. I wouldn’t get my own car back until later and asked him to drive me around to look for this Ralph guy, so I could get to the bottom of what was really going on. Sammy picked me up and we drove back over toward Dina’s. As we drove down East Second Street, there was Ralph, walking down the block.

“I got out of the car, walked up to him, and told him we had to talk. I said we had to get the car business straightened out. Dina didn’t need favors from anybody. If he wanted to sell the car, we’d buy it. That’s the way it had to be.

“Ralph had a bad attitude right from the start. He said that was a matter between him and Dina and he wasn’t going to talk with me about it.

“I said, ‘You’re telling me that what goes on between you and Dina is none of my fuckin’ business? I’ll tell you somethin’ right now. If you want trouble, you’ve got the right guy. This is your lucky day.’

“Ralph wasn’t impressed. He said, ‘I don’t give a shit who you got in that car or who in the fuck you think you are. I’ll give you a beatin’ and him too.’

“Now I was really pissed off. This motherfucker thinks he’s going to tell me that what he does with the mother of my child is none of my business and get away with it? I didn’t want to back off and I couldn’t have even if I did. Here I was thinking about getting made and I’m gonna let this prick back me down? If I couldn’t handle a guy trying to make a move on my woman, where in the fuck was I goin’ in the family?

“Ralph started to take off his windbreaker to be ready to fight. As he did, he turned his head slightly. I pulled the thirty-eight out of my pants and shot him behind his ear. Lucky for both of us the bullet struck bone and splintered. He went down, but he was alive and conscious. I squatted next to him and was ready to fire a second round into his head to finish him off. Before I pulled the trigger, I looked around and this old woman was looking right at me. I stood up, put the gun back in my pants, and jumped in the car with Sammy. We drove past the woman and made our getaway.

“After a couple of blocks, I had Sammy pull over. I got out of the car and threw the gun on the roof of a body shop. Then he dropped me off at the horse room.

“I borrowed a car and drove around for a while. I called Nicky’s future son-in-law Vinnie Dragonetti and Anthony Gerbino and told them what happened. Then I went to a friend’s house, took a shower, and changed clothes. After that I returned the borrowed car and got my own car back. I called Dina, picked her up, and drove to her father’s home in New Jersey. I figured I’d be safe there until I could find out if the cops were trying to find me. At that point Dina knew something was up, but I hadn’t told her the whole story yet. By the time we got to her father’s, the police had already been to Dina’s mother’s place looking for me.

“I found out later that the reason the cops got onto me so quick was because Ralph was in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he told them he didn’t know what happened to him. The last thing he remembered for sure was talking with somebody named Andrew. He didn’t know my last name, but he described me as Dina’s husband. He also told them that I had been in a car with a kid named Sammy. I was totally unaware that Ralph had met Sammy previously. He didn’t know his last name either, though. With all that information, they figured me to be the Andrew guy pretty fast and the search was on.

“When the cops