GoodFellas by Nicholas Pileggi Read Free Book Online

man’s arm, cracking his ribs with an inch-and-a-half-diameter lead pipe, slamming his fingers in the door of a car, or casually taking his life was entirely acceptable. It was routine. A familiar exercise. Their eagerness to attack and the fact that people were aware of their strutting brutality were the key to their power; the common knowledge that they would unquestionably take a life ironically gave them life. It distinguished them from everyone else. They would do it. They would put a gun in a victim’s mouth and watch his eyes while they pulled the trigger. If they were crossed, denied, offended, thwarted in any way, or even mildly annoyed, retribution was demanded, and violence was their answer.
    In Brownsville-East New York wiseguys were more than accepted – they were protected. Even the legitimate members of the community – the merchants, teachers, phone repairmen, garbage collectors, bus depot dispatchers, housewives, and old-timers sunning themselves along the Conduit Drive – all seemed to keep an eye out to protect their local hoods. The majority of the residents, even those not directly related by birth or marriage to wiseguys, had certainly known the local rogues most of their lives. They had gone to school together. A great many of them shared friends. There was the nodding familiarity of neighborhood. In the area itwas impossible to betray old friends, even those old friends who had grown up to be racketeers.
    The extraordinary insularity of these old-world mob-controlled sections, whether Brownsville-East New York, the South Side in Chicago, or Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, unquestionably helped to nurture the mob. These were the neighborhoods where local wiseguys felt safe, where racketeers had become an integral part of the social fabric, where candy stores, funeral parlors, and groceries were often fronts for gambling operations, where loans could be made and bets placed, where residents made major purchases from the backs of trucks rather than from downtown department stores.
    There were other marginal benefits bestowed upon those who were raised under the protective umbrella of the mob. Street muggings, burglaries, purse-snatchings, and rapes were almost nonexistent in mob-controlled areas. Too many eyes were watching the street. The community’s natural suspicion was so great that anyone who did not belong in the area was immediately the focus of block-by-block and even house-by-house attention. The slightest change in the street’s daily rituals was enough to send a quiver of alarm through every mob club and hangout. An unfamiliar car appearing on a block, a panel truck filled with utility workers no one had ever seen before, sanitation men making pickups on the wrong day – these were precisely the kinds of signals that pressed silent neighborhood alarms.
    â€˜The whole neighborhood was always on alert. It was just natural. You were always looking. Up the block. Down the block. No matter how quiet it looked, nobody missed anybody. Late one night, right after my seventeenth birthday, I was helping in the pizzeria and dreaming about the paratroopers when I saw two of Paulie’s guys put down their coffee cups and walk toward the pizza counter window. I went over.
    â€˜Outside, Pitkin Avenue was almost empty. Theresa Bivona, who lived down the block, was walking home from the Euclid Avenue subway. There were three or four other subway people, all familiar,people we knew or at least had seen before, walking toward Blake or Glenmore avenues. And then there was this black kid in a sweat shirt and jeans who nobody had ever seen before.
    â€˜All of a sudden the kid’s got eyes all over him. He was walking very slow. He walked along the curb for a while looking in car windows. He pretended to be looking in store windows, even though the stores were closed. And the stores – a butcher shop and dry cleaner’s – didn’t have anything a