Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [44]
But for better or worse, Andrew was only at Sing Sing for a few hours before his final transfer. He was placed on a bus to the Coxsackie Correctional Facility, 27 miles south of Albany. On the trip he made a friend.
“I was shackled to an Irish kid named Patty O’Keefe. We hit it off right from the start. He was tough and seemed to know his way around. He told me this wasn’t his first rodeo [trip to prison] and schooled me about what would happen when we got to Coxsackie. He said that first and foremost, we had to stick together. If we did, we’d be a force to be reckoned with.
“His words proved true within our first few hours at Coxsackie. We were in a reception unit where transfers in and out of the facility were processed. We were locked down awaiting our first recreation period, which in the reception unit lasts two hours. As we waited, I overheard a black inmate who was being transferred out of the facility telling a group of new black prisoners about how to extort the white convicts. I’d gotten a taste of racism in the House of Detention, so what I heard didn’t surprise me. It did piss me off, though. I knew I had to cut the problem off at the knees, just like I did in Brooklyn. If I didn’t, I’d be in for a real bad time.
“No sooner did I come to that realization than I looked out the window of my cell door and saw Patty O’Keefe staring back at me from his cell across the corridor. I could see the rage on his face and knew he’d heard the same things I did. Using sign language, we motioned to each other that when the gates opened for recreation, we would attack the racist bastard. He was too fuckin’ arrogant to see it coming. Somebody like him would never think a couple of new white guys would have the balls to come after him.
“When the doors opened, I got out of my cell fast and waited for the extortionist to show his face. When he stepped from his cell, it was pretty obvious he’d been upstate for a while and spent a lot of his time lifting weights. As he walked by me to get to the rec room, Patty came from behind and tapped him on his shoulder. When he turned around Patty hit him a shot and he landed on the floor right at my feet. That’s when I started putting the boots to him. Patty joined me and we hollered, ‘Extort us, you motherfucker!’ as we beat him unconscious. The other blacks froze, not knowing what to do as they saw their fearless leader beaten and kicked to a pulp by two white guys—the same whites they’d been told they could victimize. Now their teacher was a victim himself. A victim of his own methods.
“Seconds later, the response team rolled in, pinning me and Patty to the wall and cuffing us. I was kept locked in my cell until the next day. Then an officer came and told me I was released from lockup. Patty wasn’t, though. He took all the weight for the beating. I figured he might have been pissed off about that. But when I looked across at his cell, he was standing there smiling at me. That moment cemented our friendship. At least for the time being.
“Within a day or so, I was out of reception and into general population. I hit the main yard and was immediately greeted by Joey Urgitano, whose father was a wiseguy with the Harlem crew of the Lucchese crime family. He said he’d spoken to Teddy Persico’s girlfriend on the phone. She told him I was coming, so he was there to extend the olive branch. He told me I missed Teddy by a week. He was serving twenty years for a drug-related offense and had been transferred to Elmira [Correctional Facility] for disciplinary reasons. Joey was a great kid with a heart as big as any I ever saw. He was kind and had courage and we soon became the best of friends. Within days we both got permission to correspond with Teddy.
“After about a month in Coxsackie, I learned the politics of the place—who was who, where I was welcome, and