Crime Fiction: Ruggerio Reimagined

 Ruggerio Reimagined 

By Paul Davis

I was a bit taken aback when I read about Ruggerio Martino in the local paper. 

I was smoking a cigar and drinking a cup of coffee in my booklined basement office, flipping through the newspaper that carried my weekly crime column, when a photo of Martino caught my eye. 

I had not thought about Martino in years. I knew him originally from the South Philly neighborhood where we both grew up. He was an oddball. A big guy, but soft and sloppy. The guys on the corner called him “Baby Huey,” after the cartoon giant baby character. 

Martino was a quiet kid, but he was teamed up with Edward “Eddie Crow” Esposito, a fast-talking and annoying skinny kid. They were not part of our crowd, but they often came into the luncheonette where our street corner gang hung out. We thought of them as square, goofy guys, as they didn’t drink or get high or do the other things street guys generally did in the late 1960s. 

I left the corner at age 17 when I enlisted in the U.S. Navy and sailed to Southeast Asia on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. When I returned home two years later, I found that my crowd had moved exactly one block north from the luncheonette to a corner bar. Martino and Esposito also drank in the bar, but we didn’t have much to do with them. 

I broke away from the crowd in my late twenties when I began to date a beautiful woman whom I eventually married. I later began working as a crime reporter, which led to my having a crime column in the local paper. 

As I smoked my cigar and looked at Martino's photo, I thought back to the year 2000. I recalled having a drink in a corner bar where I knew the owner, Mike DeLisi. I liked DeLisi, a former boxer and a great cook. His Baked Ziti reminded me of my late Italian mother's Baked Ziti.   

On the night in question, DeLisi was behind the bar talking to me when Martino and Esposito came in. I saw that Martino’s baby fat was gone, replaced by an overly muscled body. Esposito was still a scrawny guy, and he still had a big mouth. 

Esposito saw me and rushed over to shake my hand. 

“Hey, Paulie. Do you remember me? I'm Eddie Crow?” 

“Yeah,” I replied. “I remember you. How are you?” 

“I’m good. Fucking good. Hey, Ruggerio, come over and say hello to Paulie Davis from the old corner.” 

Martino walked over slowly and shook my hand and nodded. 

“Hey, Mike, we knew this guy from the corner before he was a big-shot newspaper guy.” 

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m hardly a big-shot.” 

“I read your articles every week in the paper. I love it. I tell everybody I knew you from the old corner." 

Esposito asked DeLisi for a beer and turned back to me.

"I could tell you some things, you know, confidentially like," Esposito said. "What do you call it, off the chart?” 

“Off the record,” I replied. 

“Yeah.” 

Martino poked Esposito and turned his head towards a guy drinking at the end of the bar. 

“Hey, Paulie, I got business I have to take care of. Good to see you again.” 

Esposito walked down to the guy at the end of the bar. 

“You know those assholes, Paul?” 

“I knew them from the neighborhood.” 

“They’re potato chip gangsters. Esposito is a collector for Big Rocco. You know him?” 

“No.”     

"He runs a gambling and loan-shark operation. When these two clowns started coming in here, I asked Rocco if they were with him, because they were throwing his name around, acting like big shots,” DeLisi said. “Rocco told me Eddie Crow collected small time for him, but he’s a nobody. I don’t like him. Ruggerio is always trying to look tough. He’s big, but I don’t think he’s so tough. I don’t like him either.” 

From that night on, DeLisi and I got a kick out of watching the two would-be-gangsters act out in the bar. 

One night Esposito was trying to impress a young girl at the bar. We heard her ask him why he was called Eddie Crow. 

“They call me Crow because crows are wise birds.” 

I leaned over to Mike and said he was called Crow as a kid because his black hair and hooked beak nose made him look like the cartoon crow from Disney’s Dumbo movie. 

DeLisi laughed. 

“You know, last year he was parking cars for Longo’s restaurant, and I slipped him a five,” DeLisi recalled. “He followed me to the door of the restaurant and kissed my ass. Now he’s a gangster. Wise bird, my ass.” 

But as funny as Eddie Crow was, Martino, the once quiet Baby Huey, was even more amusing. 

Martino was always speaking awkwardly to the girls and trying to impress them. One night in the bar, DeLisi and I heard Martino say in his half-mumbling, half-stuttering way that he had served in Vietnam. 

“I was a tunnel rat in Vietnam.” 

“Oh, really,” the girl replied politely. “What’s a tunnel rat?” 

“I used to crawl into the Viet Cong tunnels and go after them Viet Cong.” 

“I’m glad to see you came home safe,” the girl said as she slid away from the hulking man at the bar. 

“Bullshit,” I said to Delisi. “He wasn’t even in the service, let alone a tunnel rat. Can you imagine that hulk crawling through a tunnel?"  

“Yeah. That pisses me off,” said DeLisi, a genuine Vietnam veteran. “I ought to say something.” 

“Well, you saw the girl wasn’t impressed. She didn’t care if he was in the war or not.” 

Delisi agreed to let it go. 

Another night in the bar we watched and listened to Martino tell two girls that he was a street tough. That image was not aided by Martino drinking a “Dirty Shirley,” a fruity mixed drink.   

“South Philly has changed, so you girls got to be careful. Back in the day, we were tough guys on the corner and we was always fighting each other in gang fights, but we didn’t bother no girls or rob old ladies.” 

DeLisi and I laughed. 

 “I'll bet the biggest fight Ruggiero ever had was with a banana sundae,” DeLisi said. 

“I don't think the big doofus ever had a fight in his life,” I said.   

On yet another night, Martino worked his so-called charm on a young woman. 

“I been with a lot of girls in my time, but ah, you got the prettiest eyes. What color is they?” 

DeLisi and I covered our mouths to prevent us from laughing aloud, as the young woman made her excuses and bolted for the door. 

“I never saw him talk with a girl when I knew him,” I said. 

We laughed as we watched and listened to Martino as he struck out with girls night after night. 

 

One night, I overheard Esposito talking to Martino at the bar. 

“You’re a big guy, Ruggerio. Look at you. Are you going to let that fucking guy talk to you like that?” Esposito said. “You ought to go down there and straighten him out.” 

Martino nodded and downed his fruity drink like it was rotgut whiskey from a Wild West saloon. He stepped off his bar stool and headed down the bar. 

I called DeLisi and warned him that there might be trouble. 

“Fuck off, ya big slob,” I heard the guy at the bar tell Martino. 

The man at the end of the bar was Billy Leto. I could see that he was drunk. Leto was of average height, but he didn’t look like he was afraid of the massive guy towering over him. 

“Knock him out, Ruggerio,” Esposito said, taunting his friend. 

"Yeah, try it, Fatso,” Leto said. 

“Hey, hey,” DeLisi called out. “Take that shit outside. There’s no fighting in here.” 

“Ya want to go outside, Fatso?” 

Martino’s face reddened. No one had called him fat in years, and it stunned him. 

“Let’s go, motherfucker,” Esposito said to Leto 

The men went outside to the sidewalk. The bar cleared out to watch the fight. I stood with DeLisi on the steps as the two men went into boxing stances. Martino stepped in and swung a wild hook at Leto, who stepped back easily to avoid the blow. Leto countered with a series of blows to Martino’s head and body. Martino was unable to block any of the blows and he began to bleed from his nose. 

Esposito, like a corner man in a movie, pushed Martino towards Leto with instructions to punch his opponent in the jaw. Martino swung again, and again he missed his target. Leto then delivered several combos to Martino's face and head. It looked like Leto was pounding on a punching bag.

Esposito, seeing that his friend was clearly outclassed, pulled a .38 revolver out of his pocket and pointed it at Leto. 

“Whoa, whoa,” DeLisi yelled. “No fucking guns here. Put that fucking thing away or I’ll shove it up your ass.”

Esposito saw the anger in DeLisi’s face, and he slipped the gun back into his pocket. 

Martino fell back against a parked car as the blood flowed from his nose. Leto laughed and looked at his bloody hands. 

“Look how I fucked up my hands hitting this fucking refrigerator,” Leto said to his friends. 

They all laughed and then they climbed into a car and drove off. 

“You and Martino are barred from here,” DeLisi said. “I don’t want to see your ugly fucking faces again.” 

“Yeah? We’ll see what Big Rocco says about that,” Esposito replied. 

"I’m going to call him right now and tell him what a pair of clowns you guys are.” 

With that, Esposito took Martino’s arm and they walked down the street. 

Everyone else went back into the bar. 

“Not much of a fucking fight,” DeLisi said. “Ruggerio is still a Baby fucking Huey.”            

                              

It was the year 2000, a new century, so I suppose Martino felt that he had to adapt from a Baby Huey doofus to his reimagined persona as a street tough and hardened Vietnam veteran. But that persona was crushed brutally in the fight outside the bar.   

As I reread the piece on Martino, I felt bad for him. The piece reported that Martino attempted to stop an armed robber from holding up a store. According to the piece, Martino advanced on the armed robber, and when the robber saw this big man moving down on him, he opened fire and shot Martino in the chest. The robber fled as Martino bled out on the store’s floor.  

Esposito was quoted in the piece, stating that Martino was a true hero. He told the reporter that Martino was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, so the headline read, “Decorated Vietnam Veteran Murdered Preventing Robbery.” 

I picked up my phone and began to call the reporter to set the record straight about Martino. But I paused, and then I laid my phone down.

© 2022 By Paul Davis

A Look Back At The Life And Crimes Of Ralph Natale: My Philadelphia Weekly Crime Beat Column On The Late Philadelphia Cosa Nostra Crime Boss

Philadelphia Weekly published my Crime Beat column on the life and crimes of former Philly mob boss Ralph Natale.

You can read the column via below:

You can read my Q&A with Ralph Natale via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: My Q&A With Ralph Natale, The Former Boss Of The Philadelphia Cosa Nostra Organized Crime Family 

Crime Fiction: Crime Boat

 Crime Boat 

By Paul Davis

Back in 2009, I called the bold bank robbers in South Philadelphia the 'Cook Crooks' in my crime column in the local paper.  

I called them the Cook Crooks, as the armed bank robbers wore a mask and a tall, white and pleated chef’s hat as they held up bank employees at gunpoint in a series of bank robberies in South Philadelphia. 

I interviewed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Michael Virgillo at the time, as he headed up the task force committed to capturing the armed criminals. He agreed that the chef’s hat threw off witnesses. 

“They all described the chef hats in great detail, but they could not describe anything else about the bank robbers,” Virgillo told me. “The hats were an attention grabber.” 

Two weeks ago, I received a call from a local defense attorney who told me he was calling on behalf of his client, who was serving a long federal prison term at FCI Fairton in Fairton, New Jersey. He said his client read my weekly newspaper column and wanted to talk to me about the series of bank robberies in the mid-2000s. 

I ventured from my South Philly home to Fairton, New Jersey and entered the mid-security level federal prison. I was escorted to an interview room, where John Kelly was waiting for me. He was younger than me, but he looked older, as he was rail-thin, gray and had a long, creased face. I shook his hand, took out my pen, notebook and tape recorder and laid them on the table between us, and then sat down. 

Kelly was one of the Cook Crooks. He said he read my weekly column, and like me, he was from South Philadelphia. Also, like me, he served in the U.S. Navy, although his service was some years after mine. 

Kelly wasted no time and went right into his story. 

Kelly, Pat Collins and Bob Reilly were boyhood friends and '2 Streeters.' While in high school they belonged to an Irish American street corner gang on Second Street in South Philadelphia. Kelly was a lean teenager with sandy hair, Reilly was short and wiry with light brown hair, and Collins was tall, dark and muscular. 

Kelly was a quiet, unassuming young man and Reilly was good-natured and funny, but their leader, Collins, was a tough, vicious, and intelligent teenager. Collins planned the small-time burglaries and armed stick-ups that the trio committed in their last year of high school. They committed the crimes as much for fun and excitement as they did for the money. They were never caught and none of the young men had a police record. 

After the three graduated high school, Kelly joined the U.S. Navy and served as a coxswain (pronounced cox’s’n) in charge of the captain’s small boat, called a 'gig,' on a guided missile frigate in the Mediterranean Sea. Reilly joined the Carpenters’ Union and Collins worked odd jobs until he was old enough to join the Philadelphia Police Department. 

After leaving the Navy, Kelly became a bank guard, Reilly worked as a carpenter on construction sites in Philadelphia, and Collins worked as a patrolman, cruising the streets of South Philly’s 3^rd District. 

Collins remained a crook, even though he wore a policeman’s uniform. He took bribes, stole money and drugs from crime scenes, and extorted money from low-level criminals. When he felt Internal Affairs investigators closing in on him, he resigned abruptly from the police department. 

Collins rekindled his friendship with Kelly and Reilly. He was pleased that Kelly was a bank guard. He asked Kelly for the best time and day to rob the bank where he served as a guard. 

On the day of the planned robbery, Kelly called in sick and sat behind the wheel of a stolen car as Collins and Reilly went into the bank, waving handguns and shouting while wearing masks and the tall chef’s hats. 

They gathered up the money from the tellers and walked calmly out to the car. They climbed in and Kelly drove off. 

The bank robbery went off smoothly, just as Collins planned, and Collins’ idea of wearing chef’s hats made them all laugh. The trio went on to rob several more banks, and the TV news and newspapers made them out to be something of a curiosity due to the chef’s hats. 

The Philadelphia Police and the FBI were not amused. 

With his share of the illegal money, Collins bought a house with a dock in Wildwood, New Jersey and a 42-foot Silverton white fishing boat. Reilly, the carpenter, built a secret compartment in the boat’s cabin to hold the bulk of the trio’s stolen money.  

Collins named the fishing boat 'Crime Pays.' Reilly thought that was funny, but Kelly was concerned that the name would draw unwanted attention towards them. Collins replied that as an ex-cop, he could get away with the name. 

Collins loved to go to sea with his partners, although he knew nothing about boats or the sea. Kelly urged Collins to take the Coast Guard's small boat course, but Collins never did. He used Kelly, the former sailor, to take the boat out and Collins learned the basics from watching Kelly. Once out at sea, Collins would discuss their robbery plans as they drank beer and downed shots of whiskey.   

Things went on smoothy for several years, until they robbed a bank on Oregon Avenue in South Philadelphia. Exiting the bank, Collins slammed into a uniformed policeman who was coming in. The young policeman saw the mask and the chef’s hat on Collins' head, and he pulled his Glock service firearm out of its holster. Collins, who had his gun in his hand, shot the police officer in the head, killing him. 

Although Collins was a former cop, he felt no guilt in killing the police officer. As he later told his partners, it was kill or be killed. 

The TV news and the newspapers no longer treated the bank robbers as a curiosity, as they were now vicious cop killers. Kelly and Collins headed to Wildwood, New Jersey to hide out, and Reilly headed to his cabin in the Pocono Mountains to lay low until things calmed down. But even after several months, things did not calm down for the cop killers. 

In Wildwood, Collins asked Kelly to take Crime Pays out to sea. Collins cut the engine and told Kelly that he wanted to sell his South Philly and Wildwood houses and then take the boat to Florida, where he had a third home. He wanted Kelly and Reilly to join him in Florida.  

Kelly objected, as he had a wife and young son in South Philly. Collins, who had already sent his girlfriend to Florida, told Kelly to leave his family and then send for them later. 

Kelly, the usually quiet and compliant one, said no firmly. He said they should contact Reilly and they should evenly split up the money and then go their separate ways. 

Collins, stone-faced and silent, pulled out a .25 semi-automatic Beretta from his pants pocket and shot Kelly in the chest. Kelly’s hands gripped his chest, cried out in pain, and then collapsed on the deck. Collins placed the Beretta back in his pocket, lifted Kelly up and slipped him overboard into the ocean. Collins started the boat and headed back to shore. 

Once back at the boat dock, Collins cleaned the boat thoroughly. He got on the phone and told a friend in real estate to sell his Philadelphia and New Jersey homes. He then called Reilly and told him to meet him in Florida. 

“Oh, by the way, John’s dead,” Collins told Reilly. 

“Shit. What happened?” 

“He died of heart failure.” 

“He had a bad heart?” 

“No. His heart failed when my bullet pierced it."

“What?” 

“Just an old joke. Meet me at my Florida house next Tuesday.”

But the meeting never took place, as Kelly, a fit and healthy man, survived the gunshot wound and several hours floating in the ocean. He was discovered bobbing in the sea and rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. 

While recovering in the hospital, Kelly asked to see the FBI. He confessed to the FBI agents of his involvement in the bank robberies and explained that Collins murdered the police officer and tried to murder him.

He told the FBI where they could find Collins in Florida and Reilly in the Poconos. 

Now sitting in the prison in Fairton, Kelly told me he felt bad about informing on Reilly, but he thought he was saving his life. Surely, Collins would have shot him as well. 

“I always knew Pat was a cold-hearted prick, but I didn’t think he would try to kill me,” Kelly said. 

As for Collins, Kelly asked me if I remembered what happened in 2012. 

“No, what?” 

“Hurricane Sandy,” Kelly replied. “Pat owned a boat, but he was no fucking sailor. The dummy sailed Crime Pays right into the path of Hurricane Sandy." 

Kelly said that according to the Coast Guard, the boat went down somewhere off Cape May, New Jersey during the powerful and devastating hurricane. 

"Pat washed up ashore dead, but Crime Pays sunk with all that money aboard.” 

“Well," I said. "I guess crime doesn’t always pay.”  

© 2022 By Paul Davis 

Crime Fiction: The Small Timer

The below short story, my first published short story, originally appeared in The Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2002:

The Small Timer

By Paul Davis

The shooting victims were discovered at 9 o'clock that night in an old warehouse along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia.

I had been on a "ride-along" with a Philadelphia police sergeant when his car radio alerted us to the triple homicide. The sergeant, Bill Francini, was the subject of a column that I was writing for the local paper. Not wearing a seat belt, I braced myself as Francini raced for the river.

Arriving at the crime scene some ten minutes later, Francini pulled into a vacant space among a dozen hastily parked police vehicles. Francini ushered me around to the side of the warehouse bay, where I would not be violating the official crime scene, yet I could observe Philly’s finest do their work.

Francini called out to his lieutenant and introduced me. The lieutenant looked at me sharply, perhaps placing me from the photo that ran with my column, and then simply nodded. He took his sergeant by the arm and they entered the warehouse. From my vantage point I was able to see the three dead men in the center of the warehouse bay. All were dressed casually. A short, elderly man lay crumpled with his squat legs twisted under his torso. A snarl appeared to be etched across his face and a gunshot wound was visible just above his right ear.

The second victim had been a big and heavy man. I’m no little guy, but this guy was truly big. He lay face up and stretched out across the ground. He died with a dumbfounded expression on his face, just below the large wound on his forehead. The third victim sat in an upright position against a wooden crate. Like the other two, he had a gunshot wound to the head. His face retained a goofy grin that looked familiar to me.

I heard one of the crime scene investigators from South Detectives tell the newly arrived homicide detective that an anonymous caller had dialed 911 and reported the shooting. The scene looked like a professional execution, organized crime style, so the detectives called the city's organized crime intelligence squad and asked for someone to come and help ID the bodies.

When a detective named McCollum from the squad arrived some 15 minutes later, he quickly walked among the three bodies, sidestepping the spent shell casings and blood puddles. He immediately identified the short, older man - the one the detectives with their usual black humor had nicknamed "Grouchy" - as James "Jimmy First Nickel" Martin. Martin was a known associate of the local mob in his capacity as a receiver of stolen goods.

McCollum identified the second victim, nicknamed "Dopey," as Joey Aurelio, a strong-arm enforcer for Martin. The third victim, nicknamed "Happy," was dismissed as some small timer, as McCollum, the organized crime expert, had never seen him before.

"Hey, McCollum," one of the detectives shouted, "This guy should be happy – he’s still alive!"

A month later I entered the Federal Building in Center City Philadelphia and rode the elevator up to the 8th floor. I stood before the FBI’s receptionist, who was securely housed behind a sheet of protective glass. I told her that I had an appointment with Special Agent Frank Kaplan. I had come to interview Kaplan’s protected witness, Harry Sullivan - a.k.a. "Happy."

I had been granted an exclusive interview with the sole survivor of the warehouse murders, who was now a star witness for the prosecution in the upcoming federal trial of Francis "Frankie Raven" Ravelli, a particularly vicious mob captain of a particularly vicious crew of thieves, extortionists and hit men.

Sullivan had granted me an interview, as he liked my column on the warehouse murders and we knew each other from the old neighborhood.

I had joined the Navy on my 17th birthday and traveled to Southeast Asia about the same time the 20-year-old Sullivan was heading to state prison for the first of his many periods of incarceration. Years later, I would see him at neighborhood bars and clubs and he would play the criminal insider, feeding me tips for my column. He liked to show me off to his cronies.

He was quite impressed with the notion that I had become a writer. Of course, the only other writers he knew were number writers.

Kaplan came out to the reception area and directed me to a vacant office where I saw Sullivan sitting at a conference table. Sullivan’s head was adorned with a turban bandage and he used a cane to navigate his way back to his chair after he stood and came forward to shake my hand. I sat on the other side of the table, laid my tape recorder down and took out my notebook and pen. I threw out some obligatory questions about his health and his family before I launched into asking him a series of questions about the events that led up to the warehouse murders.

Harry Sullivan was a small time thief. He was in his early 50s, slightly built with a drawn, pock-mocked face that was framed with longish, unruly and scruffy blond hair. Despite his looks and his profession, he was not a drug addict. Sullivan barely managed to make a proper living from his small time stealing and he often had to supplement his illicit income with a straight job. Despite his failure, he yearned to be an arch-criminal, like Willie Sutton the old bank robber.

Sullivan wanted to be respected.

Sullivan’s graduation to the big time came on the day he happened to witness a head-on collision between a Volvo and a city trash truck. The driver of the Volvo was killed instantly and the city workers were unhurt but badly shaken. Sullivan was one of the first to come to the aid of the Volvo driver, but seeing that he was beyond it all, Sullivan's criminal instincts kicked in and he lifted the man’s brown leather satchel from the front passenger seat.

Sullivan slipped away and sprinted the two city blocks to his apartment. Once there, alone in his kitchen, Sullivan broke the lock on the satchel and dropped the contents on the kitchen table. He cried gleefully at the sight of the assortment of diamonds spread across his table. The accident victim must have been a diamond salesman or courier.

Later, after he calmed down, he placed his haul into a large paper shopping bag and walked three blocks to Jimmy First Nickel’s appliance store. Even though Martin had a reputation of being somewhat tight with his money – hence the nickname that indicated he retained the first nickel he ever earned – Sullivan knew that he was mobbed-up and he was the man to see.

Martin was sitting behind the counter, talking to his much younger and pretty girlfriend Gloria when Sullivan walked in. He handed Martin the bag and told him how he came to be in possession of the diamonds. Martin, a short, heavy man in his 70s, breathed hard as he rose from his chair and came around the counter to lock the door and hang the closed sign.

Martin ran his hand through the sparse gray strands of hair that were slicked back across his head as he looked into the bag. Sullivan stood there feeling awkward, smiling a goofy smile at the strikingly beautiful, dark-haired girl. She returned his smile with a cold look of boredom.

"I’m impressed Harry," Martin said. "This is some piece of work here. Lemme make a call and see if I can unload it tonight."

Martin mumbled into the phone for a few minutes and then announced that he had arranged a meeting with "the Man." Sullivan felt a surge of the perverse pride of a professional thief, but he was also felt fearful of entering the world of big-time crime.

"I don’t know, Jimmy," Sullivan whined. "I think its better wit you as the go-between."

"Harry, this is the big time! There must be $100,000 in this bag," Martin exclaimed. "The Man wants to meet you personally."

A few hours, a few beers later, Martin and Sullivan drove in silence to a riverside warehouse. Inside, Martin introduced Sullivan to a large man named Joey, who lumbered towards them, his hand placed on a gun in the waistband of his slacks. Sullivan knew instantly that this was no major league buyer. He knew that Martin had gotten a bone crusher to help steal his diamonds.

In desperation, assuming Joey had planned to kill him, Sullivan scooped a handful of the diamonds from the bag and flung them towards Joey’s face. Sullivan then dove for some stacked crates half-heartily, fully expecting to be shot and killed.

The blast sounded like heavy artillery in the open warehouse bay. Sullivan, surprised not to be dead, scampered up and saw that Joey was stretched out. He also saw two young dark guys, neat dressers, who looked like a hundred guys Sullivan knew from the bars and clubs of South Philly.

One held a large semi-automatic handgun, a Beretta, Sullivan guessed. The other held a shotgun, which was now trained on Martin. Getting a better look, he realized that the one with the Beretta was Frankie Raven.

Ignoring Sullivan on the ground, Ravelli smiled cruelly as he held his Beretta to Martin’s head.

"We’re your life-long partners, Jimmy. Didja think ya could cut us out of this deal?"

"No, no, please," Martin cried. "I was jes introducing a couple of guys, its small time."

"That’s not what Gloria told me, ya fuckin’ weasel," Ravelli said as he fired into Martin’s head.

Martin dropped like a hangman’s weight bag. Ravelli then walked slowly with a South Philly strut to where Sullivan rested against a crate.

"I know you. You’re a small timer from Donny’s bar," Ravelli said.

"I’m no small timer," Sullivan scoffed. "This was my job."

"When you’re right, you’re right," Ravelli said coolly. He shrugged, lifted the Beretta and then pulled the trigger.

Kaplan brought us another refill of coffee just as we were finishing up the interview. Sullivan sat in his chair puffing on one of a long string of cigarettes that he had smoked while telling his story to me.

"You know why I really want to testify against Ravelli?" Sullivan asked.

"Well, for starters, I would think his shooting you," I said in response. "And I know Frankie, he will certainly finish the job if given the opportunity."

"Yeah, yeah, sure. But I really want to get up in court and put that bastard away," Sullivan said. "I want him and everybody else to know that I’m no small timer."

Frankie Raven received a life sentence. Quote the judge, Frankie Raven, nevermore. Sullivan was booked into the federal witness protection program and was moved out west somewhere.

As he wished, Sullivan received his moment of glory, his 15 minutes of fame. But I had to laugh when I spied what my editor placed over my column about the trial.

"Small Timer Testifies Against Mob Boss."

© 2002 By Paul Davis