The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [37]
Long after his childhood, Mikey would learn that he suffered from attention deficit disorder. But what was truly bizarre about Pepitone was that although he showed definite strains of geek, he was one of the fiercest boys on Taylor Street. A lifeguard by day, he spent his nights working as a debt collector for independent bookmakers, who knew him as Mikey “Bad to the Bone” Pepitone, one of the most successful amateur boxers in the city. At six two and 175 pounds, he had a nasty left hook and would end his amateur career with a 19-2 record. The bookies took notice and offered him thirty to fifty percent of everything he could collect, depending on the age of the debt. He’d show up at a debtor’s doorstep, try to gab his way to the money, and if that failed he’d go from zero to Nero almost instantaneously. “I wouldn’t say I liked roughing people up,” explains Mikey, “but you have to understand where Arty and I came from. If somebody gets over on you and you let it happen, that’s on you. When I was collecting, those guys knew why I was there. Once he paid, a guy might invite me to sit down and have a coffee with him. Yeah, that was weird, especially if he had bandages. But they didn’t blame me. They blamed themselves.”
Williams and Pepitone actually met during a street fight. One day while Art was walking down Taylor Street, two kids from the nearby Jane Addams Homes stopped him and demanded his shoes, a brand-new pair of high-tops. Art immediately started swinging, and as he struggled to hold his own, he suddenly found Mikey fighting alongside him, whipping his fists with such speed and ferocity that the two assailants quickly backed off. Pepitone’s fearlessness earned tremendous respect from Williams, and as the boys came to know each other better they discovered that they had more in common than the ability to use their fists. Mikey was yet another paternal amputee. He had never met his dad, who had abandoned his mother before he was born, and she’d raised him with the help of a stepfather who came along later. “Arty’s life and my life were very similar, and we recognized that right away,” says Mikey. “The only thing I was thankful to my dad for was that he made me a hundred percent Italian.”
Unlike many other street criminals Art knew, Mikey rarely boasted when it came to his exploits as a shakedown man, and Art sensed that the older boy was cautious and enterprising when it came to crime. It had been all these factors—Pepitone’s street smarts, his courage, cautiousness, and spiritual brotherhood—that led Art to break his second promise to da Vinci and tell Mikey that he was learning an esoteric criminal art.
“We’d been shooting some hoops at Sheridan Park and afterwards Art pulls me aside,” Mikey remembers. “He told me he had learned this new trade, then he showed me one of these hundred dollar bills, and my penis became erect. I couldn’t believe it. That was a rare thing he was learning, and he was just a kid. Where we come from, learning something like that was almost a privilege. We call the stuff he made by its Italian name, fugazi, and guys who can do it well are rare. I said, ‘Don’t be a jagoff and pay the fuck attention to everything this guy is showing you.’ ”
Now three years on, Art approached Mikey at the basketball courts once again, this time handing him a bill made entirely by him. Pepitone’s nose for profit immediately kicked into overdrive.
“How much do you have?” he asked.
“Twenty thousand.”
“That’s it?” was Mikey’s response. Art would hear similar complaints