The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin Read Free Book Online

need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away, too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender, and at the bar, Jules Podell, who ran the place, was talking to Jiggs Forlano and Ruby Stein, who were the two biggest shylocks in the country.
    “You’re in the papers too much,” Jules told them. “Jiggs and Ruby. Jiggs and Ruby. It sounds like an act. The federals see it and start foaming. They got to get you. Give it up, this Jiggs and Ruby.”
    “Ruby and Jiggs,” Ruby said.
    Ruby Stein even started calling me at the office to get his name in the paper. I met him often at the Pompeii Room on Park Avenue, where the mob was hanging out then. “Ruby and Jiggs!” he called out when he saw me. Of course Jules was right about the publicity. One night Ruby was coming out of a place called the Kiss, and the Gallo mob had a couple of people there to kidnap him. Ruby hooked his arms around the canopy poles and screamed,and they couldn’t pull him off so he lived. Lived to call me up and ask me to write something about it.
    Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why this dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.
    I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”
     
    Then it was 1968, in Chicago, when they were trying Paul “the Waiter” Ricca and a roomful of others on charges of extortion and misuse of lead pipes, knives, guns, and stout ropes. I was in town for a speaking date, but I still needed a column, so I went to the federal courthouse. They were picking the jury and broke for lunch as I arrived. Paul the Waiter went for a walk. I went right with him.
    “You’re from New York,” he said. “I used to go there to the track.”
    “How did you do?”
    “I used to go behind this trainer, Fitzsimmons. ‘Sunny Jim,’ they call him. When he went to the window, I’m behind him. He was all hunched over. I looked over his shoulders to see what he bets. I did very good,” Ricca said.
    I knew for a fact that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons of Chicot Court, Ozone Park, never went to the pari-mutuel windows, because he never bet. He trained the greatest horses in the world, but only once or twice in a year would he say, “Give me a dollar,” and he put up his own dollar and sentsomebody to place the wager. His creed was, “If I knew anything, do you think I’d be out here at five in the morning looking at horses?”
    I wrote all this as a column, saying that Paul the Waiter didn’t have any truth in him even in casual conversation. It ran in New York, and it also appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. Next morning Paul the Waiter’s lawyer rushed up to the judge waving the paper. “The jurors saw this! They’re contaminated!” he cried. As they were talking, in came the Chicago’s American newspaper, with a column by Jack Mabley, who hated gangsters. He had a piece on Ricca that called him a mad dog. That did it. The judge, Lynch, ordered a recess. He was an old reliable with the Chicago guys. He declared a mistrial in the afternoon. He said it was a sensitive moment, picking jurors, and you couldn’t have inflammatory stories going around. All jurors were sent home.
    I was gone on an early plane and didn’t hear what had happened. “The judge made such a splash when he went into the tank that even the boys got wet,” Mike Royko told me later. The story of Paul the Waiter’s mistrial because of news stories was printed in New York.
    Now I am back in my house in Forest Hills one morning when in comes a retired detective who had been good and helpful to me in the past. He said that Junior Persico was going on trial in federal court in Brooklyn, and he had given the detective a couple of mob murders that nobody knew about. “He’s in for heavy time, and he don’t want todo that anymore,” the retired detective said. “You could write about the murders when they pick