We had a gang that started in high school. We called ourselves the Italian Dukes. We were so fuckin’ broke, we had six jackets and maybe 30 guys. So every day somebody else would wear the jackets at school. We went to Seward Park High School, and it was mostly Jews. They were all afraid of us. We didn’t even have to do anything. It got to a point where a gang called the Fordham Baldies—who were like the biggest Italian gang in the Bronx—heard about us and came down and made us a brother club. They were like, “Who’s the president?” and a couple of guys went over, and we had this truce. They talked about it, shook hands, and then we were brother clubs. If anything happened to one of us, we had all of these guys. So from being 30 guys with six jackets, we became a thousand just by hooking up with them. It also made us brother clubs with the Redwings, who were in East Harlem. They were a big crew—white gang, mostly Italian.
We’d hang out in the park at night. All the gangs were there: The Sportsmen, that was a big black gang, pretty tough guys, and the Dragons, that was the Puerto Rican gang. They heard that the Italian Dukes were brother gangs with the Fordham Baldies, so if you were walking around with an Italian Dukes jacket, they didn’t fuck with you. And I tell you, it was a great fuckin’ scam.
Nobody would fuck with us. Italians were Italians in those days. No matter where you went, even the toughest gangs—fuckin’ Puerto Ricans, blacks, whatever—they wouldn’t fuck with us. Our gang was the wiseguys, you know what I mean? And nobody could fuck with that.
It was a sanctuary, this rectangle here. Houston Street down to Canal, and Bowery over to Lafayette. Little Italy was strictly Italian. There was one Irish kid, I think, and one black kid. His father was a building super. He wanted to hang out so bad that he let us call him Snowball.
They had another Italian neighborhood, down on Cherry Street and Madison that was just the same as ours. If we had a problem between us, we’d all go meet over at City Hall and wear different color bandanas so people knew where you were from. The two toughest guys would fight it out, and that was how it worked. You weren’t even allowed to kick the guy once he was down. Two friends of mine once had to fight at Coney Island because that’s where the argument happened. They fought on the handball court with no shoes on. And I tell you, that was a fuckin’ fight. At the end they looked like gladiators.
You had to have respect. For everybody—especially our people but even for strangers, what we called Merigans, like “Amerigans”—we had respect for all of them. We didn’t shake nobody down or hurt nobody. In fact, we protected people. We protected women. If two women came into a bar, they never paid for a drink and nobody even went over to talk to them.
Before the pill, you mostly just had blowjobs. That was it. From the Jewish girls mostly, not from Catholic girls—not when I was a kid. Now all girls think giving a blowjob is nothing. They had some young girls on like Oprah or something who said that. They were like, “Oh, it’s not bad. If you don’t do it, you’re not part of the crew.”
But back then, if you had a girlfriend, if you were getting laid, you were the king of the mountain. When the pill came, everything changed. Before that, date rape was the usual. I mean, I could have been arrested for date rape a million times. Any girl that wasn’t a virgin, if you went out with her you couldn’t let her get away, because there weren’t many around. There was hookers too—hookers is what we mostly fucked. I lost my virginity at like 14. Me and a couple friends of mine went to a hooker. I gave her two bucks and I came in about two seconds, then went home and jerked off ten times thinking about it.
Oh yeah, and if you went down on a girl then, you couldn’t walk around the neighborhood afterward. I swear to God. I mean, I know I never did it.
I was a heroin addict from the age of maybe 13 to 17, but not like a falling-down addict. I snorted it, sometimes I shot it, but not often. I would buy it from Italian guys over on Avenue D, but not guys that we actually knew. That was like Jersey to me, Avenue D.
There were opium dens down in Chinatown. We ran out of a restaurant without paying one time, ran down into this building, and they had like catacombs. They still have them down there, these buildings where the cellars have all these different rooms. I was trying to find my way out, and I went into this room and there was an opium den. All these people laying down on cots and shit, with these pipes, and one guy tending them. That freaked me out. I didn’t do that. Only Chinese guys did opium. But down in Chinatown, you could buy a tin of cocaine snuff for 25 cents. I think snuff is much worse than cocaine. I’ve snorted a lot of cocaine in my fuckin’ life, but these guys I know who used to do snuff, their noses used to fuckin’ bleed. It’s much harsher than coke. It’s cheaper than coke, and you get whacked on it. You get high.
Anyway, we weren’t vicious kids. We were just crooks, you know what I mean? You lived in an apartment with four rooms and four people, and it was so close that you really lived in the street because you had to get out of the house. And then when you’re like 13 or 14, you start to hang out a little bit and the older guys start to notice you and start to talk to you and before you knew it you’d been groomed into what they were.
There were some crazy kids, though. Anybody who had a “Boy” after their name—Johnny Boy, Frankie Boy—they were always in trouble, cause they were always trying to prove they were a man. This guy Frankie Boy was my best friend because he was really tough and I wasn’t. Me and him got along because there was no competition and we really loved each other. He died in a tragic fuckin’ condition. He got hit in the head with a two-by-four, and it numbed him. It made his brain all fucked-up. He lived like that for a long time. He used to shake when he walked and shit like that. His mind was OK, but he’d be talking and he’d start laughing cause he couldn’t help it. His laugh reflex got fucked-up.
It was a black guy who did it to him, in a fight over a girl. They were on the highway, and the guy said something out the window to his girl, and they went back and forth, then finally pulled off the highway up by Bryant Park. I think Frankie got the best of him, and they got back in the cars, and Frankie chased him. Then they got out of the cars a second time and the guy ran away and Frankie ran after him. He was so fuckin’ mad he didn’t pay attention, and the guy went around the corner and when Frankie came after him, he was waiting, and hit him with a two-by-four—wham—right across the head.
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