Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [53]
“Under the circumstances, I tried to help Billy out as much as I could. But the work program prevented me from giving him all the time he needed. Parole officers stopped at the airport every so often to verify that I was at work. The beauty of it was that my work was in a secure area and they couldn’t just pop in unannounced. They were stopped at the gate until my boss cleared them to come in. Sometimes I’d be hangin’ around the office playin’ cards, so everything was okay. But if I was out taking care of business, the boss had to beep me to come in. I’d get my ass there as fast as I could and tell the parole officer I’d been working in hangar so-and-so and came back to the office as soon as possible. That story always worked, but I had to stay within a reasonable distance of the airport to pull it off.
“Finally, Billy got permission from his father to hire me at the Gregory Hotel on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, which Wild Bill owned. This was a real score for me. I think I was gettin’ six hundred a week and all I did every day was sit in Billy’s office with him and brainstorm ways for the two of us to earn. Within a few months, we developed a healthy shylock book by loaning money to guys I knew. We also made a few dollars selling marijuana with another member of Billy’s crew. But above all, Billy’s idea of the quick buck was to bet on sporting events. I’ve gotta give it to him: He was a ballsy gambler. He’d bet four or five games a night, sometimes at five thousand a game.
“During that summer, all the time I was spending with Billy, bouncing around the city, and going to mob-related meetings got me some unwanted law-enforcement attention. It started when a kid close to Billy’s father was subpoenaed to a grand-jury hearing. After the hearing, he came back and told Billy and me the FBI had all these photos of us. They wanted to know who I was and my relationship to Billy and the Colombo family. This is what I loved about the FBI in New York City. They never shared the information they had with other agents. If they’d shown my pictures to the other organized-crime units, the Gambino agents would have identified me. But they didn’t. It took months for them to get my name when they could have had it in minutes.
“It just so happened that at that same time, I was dating a stenographer in the federal courts in Brooklyn. I mentioned the hearing and my photos to her. When she went pale, I knew she’d worked that particular hearing. Oh, how I tried to get her to give me the inside scoop. But she was a company woman and wouldn’t budge. She was a great girl and I liked her very much. I didn’t want to get her into any trouble, so I backed off.
“A couple of weeks later, a Lebanese guy, one of Billy’s shylock customers, came into the Gregory while Billy and I were having lunch. The guy was looking to get out from under his loan and wanted to do a trade. He said he was in possession of two hundred thousand dollars worth of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. He offered to give Billy several thousand dollars of them for free. And he’d sell him the rest cheap; I think he wanted twenty dollars each. In a matter of days we had our hands on the whole lot.
“I immediately called my friend Robert Arena and his partner and asked if they’d be interested in buying thousands of the counterfeits at a time. A few hours later they were at my apartment and our first sale was made.
“To celebrate, we took a few thousand dollars of the bogus money and went out to a sports bar. The first round of drinks came to thirty dollars or so and I paid with a fake hundred. Now we had a new earn. We’d go from club to club buyin’ drinks and breakin’ the bills. I took ten thousand in phony money and turned it into a full-time job to cash as many bills as possible each day. We made a killing.
“These bills were top-quality counterfeits. They were so good that when Billy got in debt to a bookie for fifteen grand on bad baseball bets, he paid the guy off with three thousand of real money and the other