on the list of likely suspects, a thing Richard was intent upon avoiding. He turned away, went to a nearby gas station, bought a quart of gas, and quickly made his way back to the sleeping Doyle. The driver’s window was open. Without a second thought, Richard quickly and silently poured the gas into the car, on Doyle, struck a match, and threw it in the car. A fireball exploded. Doyle was quickly consumed and killed by the ferocious flames and intense heat. Richard stayed nearby and actually enjoyed hearing Doyle scream, the smell of his burned flesh coming to him on a strong breeze off the nearby Hudson River. Satisfied, actually smiling, Richard made his way home; he never said a word to anyone about what he had done, not even his Coming Up Roses cronies.
Richard had grown into a very tall, handsome young man. He had light blond hair, honey colored almond- shaped eyes, wide Slavic cheekbones, and heart-shaped lips. He looked like a young Jimmy Stewart and had a beguiling shy way about him that women were drawn to. In most all the bars and pool halls where Richard hung out, there were older women, as he had come to think of them, and they soon found their way to Richard and invited him home with them, and thus Richard lost his virginity. It didn’t take him long to realize that women found him attractive, which he enjoyed, and he began dressing to please women, but he was still painfully shy and unless a woman approached him he was hard-pressed to strike up a conversation.
Often, however, women approached him.
One such woman, a twenty-five-year-old named Linda, took Richard home when he was sixteen, and he began to live with her. She always wanted to have sex and he was always happy to accommodate her. She was short with black hair, attractive in a simple way. But she was always “in the mood,” it seemed, and Richard gave her what she wanted, when she wanted it—and how and where she wanted it. He had a particularly large member she couldn’t seem to get enough of.
By now Richard had come to hate his mother and visited her less and less. His sister, Roberta, had acquired a reputation as a loose girl, easy to have, and Richard didn’t like that. He warned her several times to “keep your drawers on,” to no avail. His younger brother, Joseph, like him, was tall and thin with a thick mop of blond hair. Joseph did not do well in school, was always in fights; he had punched out a teacher. At Anna’s urging Richard spoke to Joe, tried to get him to behave, but it was like talking to a wall.
Joseph, like Richard, had an antisocial personality, was clearly a budding psychopath…would think nothing of breaking a bottle and cutting someone’s face wide open. Richard’s father, Stanley, was a short man with black hair, five foot seven or so, yet both Richard and Joseph were well over six feet and still growing. This sometimes caused Richard to wonder if Stanley was really his father. Richard had come to think of his mother as an unkempt, slovenly whore and had little use for her. However, when he found out that Stanley came around the house, yelling at and slapping Anna, he went and found his father, put a .38 to his head, pulled the hammer back, and warned him through tight lips and clenched teeth that if he ever went near his family again, he’d kill him and dump him in the river. After that, Richard didn’t speak to his father for many years, and Stanley never troubled Anna again. Truth is, Richard was heartfelt sorry he didn’t kill Stanley and often thought about going back and finishing the job.
Even now, so many years later, Richard regrets not having blown Stanley away. He confided:
6
The De Cavalcantes
The Coming Up Roses gang, under Richard’s leadership, committed more and more crimes: broke into warehouses, held up liquor stores and drugstores, burglarized rich people with nice homes in Jersey City Heights and Lincoln Park, the most exclusive areas in Jersey City. Because Richard was cautious and carefully planned all their jobs, thought about them from numerous angles, they were successful. In all his short life Richard excelled at three things: playing pool, sudden violence, and crime.
Richard began making good money and usually walked around with a large roll of bills. He soon acquired a penchant for gambling, playing cards and going to the racetracks, and as quickly as he made money, he pissed it away. He said he was “nigger rich,” and had no comprehensive concept of money, how to manage it, save it, and parlay it into more. For him, money was for spending, when and where and how he wished. Easy come, easy go.
Wanting to look good—
Richard took to drinking more than he should, and when he drank he, like his father and more than likely his grandfather, became mean and belligerent. He and the Coming Up Roses often got into bar brawls, and they rarely, if ever, lost a fight, because all of them were vicious in the extreme and were always sending people to the hospital with gaping knife wounds, cracked heads, broken bones. Richard and his friends became notorious, not an easy feat in the tough blue-collar cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, each filled with the notorious. It didn’t take long for members of the De Cavalcante crime family to notice the Coming Up Roses gang.
His name was Carmine Genovese, no relationship to the infamous Vito Genovese. Carmine was a made man, a cunning individual who had his sausage-thick fingers in many juicy pies. He was short and round like a meatball, with a large round head that was also round like a meatball. Indeed, his nickname was “Meatball.” Carmine heard about the Coming Up Roses crew many times over the years, that they were very violent, stand-up and fearless, all neighborhood kids who had come up the hard way, looking to earn. He invited them to his home one afternoon and sat them down in the kitchen as he prepared a meat gravy sauce for pasta. With his heavy tough-guy accent, talking out of the left side of his mouth, he said, “I’m hearing all the time about you and I like what I hear. I got a piece a work for you. You do this good, I’ll make sure you earn big.” He added some hot sausages to the gravy pot. “There’s this guy in Lincoln Park. Here’s his address and his picture. He’s a problem. He’s got his head up his ass; he’s gotta go. You do a good job, I make sure you earn, capisce? I did everything for you already—just finish the work. He’s gotta go…understand?” With that he handed Richard a black-and-white photograph of a man getting in his car, a black Lincoln. Richard passed it to the others. They all looked. Richard knew this could be a golden opportunity for his crew, that the door was opening to a bona fide in with organized crime—a thing they had always hoped for. Because four of them were not Italians, they could never be made, but they could become “independent contractors.”
The mob, they all knew, controlled New Jersey commerce, had an absolute stranglehold on the unions, the piers, all vices, hijackings, robberies, shylocking, and murder.
Carmine then added a pile of neat, round meatballs to the gravy. “You want the work?” he asked, looking at them out of the corner of his reptilian eyes.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Richard said.
“Good. This gotta happen quick, understand? Anything goes wrong, you call me. We own the cops here, okay?”
“Okay,” Richard said as the others nodded in solemn agreement.
“You guys stay. Eat lunch with me,” Carmine said, and soon they all sat down to a simple though hearty meal of spaghetti, meat sauce, and salad with big green Sicilian olives that Carmine had cured—one of his hobbies, he explained.
When the Coming Up Roses left Carmine, they went to a Hoboken bar near the waterfront called the Final Round. There they sat down to discuss this sudden opportunity, all of them except Richard nervous and unsure. Barroom brawls were one thing, but cold-blooded murder was a horse of another color. The baddest of the group was a tall, bull-like guy named John Wheeler. He was an amateur heavyweight boxer, tough as nails. Despite his anxiety he said, “I’ll do it. I’ll pull the trigger. No problem.”
