The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [116]
His first cell mate, Kenneth Getty, was the former mayor of the Illinois town of Lyons. He’d been convicted of bid-rigging town contracts. His second cellie, a big-time credit-card scammer from L.A. who faced $1.8 million in restitution, had been neighbors with Marvin Gaye. Prison had always been a likelihood in the world where Art grew up and in the life that he had chosen. Most of the boys from the Bridgeport Homes had done hard time in much worse places. A cynical reality of Art’s life is that, compared with many he grew up with, Waseca could almost be interpreted as a sign of success.
Word travels fast in prison. A few weeks after his arrival, Art was jogging around the outdoor track when a fellow Chicagoan named Louis Bombacino approached him. Bombacino was an Outfit man, convicted for loan-sharking fifteen years earlier.
“You’re from Chicago, right?” he said. “Taylor Street and Bridgeport?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t get a lot of young guys from the neighborhood here. There are a few of us, but we don’t get much news. We’d like to talk to you.”
“Okay,” Art said, waiting for a question.
“The only thing is, we can’t really talk to you until we look into your past and who you are and what you did, you know? So don’t take offense, but until then we probably won’t even speak.”
“That’s cool, whatever,” Art said, and started running again, perplexed and at the same time painfully cognizant that, after all those years of successfully hiding his operations from the Outfit, they’d finally discovered him in federal prison.
Art was heading out to the rec yard when Bombacino approached him again two weeks later.
“Hey, Arty. We just wanted to let you know that you’re a good kid,” he said. “You never said anything about anybody. We’d like you to come to breakfast tomorrow, if you don’t mind. We’d just like to catch up on the neighborhood.”
Now Art was truly mystified. Who was the “we”? And for a bunch of guys who didn’t get much news from the neighborhood, they had tapped into the lowdown on him pretty fast. Art wondered whom they’d contacted. Giorgi? The Chinese? He’d never know.
The next morning at breakfast he brought his tray up to a table occupied by three old men. There was an empty seat just for him. Before he sat down, Louie introduced him to the two other men: Bobby Ferrare and Jerry Scalise. Art was awed. He had heard both of their names before. Ferrare was a well-known boss from Kansas City who was doing time for a vending-machine scam, while Scalise was nothing less than a legend. A longtime thief for the Outfit, in 1980 he and a cohort named Arthur “The Genius” Rachel had robbed a London jewelry store of more than $1.5 million in gems, including the famed Marlborough Diamond—a forty-five-carat stone once owned by Winston Churchill’s cousin. Although Scalise was later convicted of the heist, authorities never recovered the diamond, and rumors were that he had buried it on his property in DuPage County. Scalise also had a famous nickname—Wither-hand—due to the fact that he was missing four fingers on his left hand. Having already done his time in the UK for the jewelry heist, he was now serving a nine-year sentence for participating in a drug-running ring.
“I sat down, and we just started talking about the neighborhood,” remembers Art. “They’re asking me things like ‘What changed here?’ et cetera. And then the awe kind of fell off me, and I just started listening to them tell stories about the old days, about how when they’d steal shit everyone in the whole neighborhood would be wearing Armani suits or something. I’d get a real kick out of it.” Art became a regular at their table,