different Mafia families, not only the Ponti and De Cavalcante Jersey families, but New York crime families as well. Because he hadn’t been “made,” he was able to work as a giovane d’honore, an independent contractor, without trouble. He carefully planned each hit, and scrupulously followed instructions.
Still, most of the money Richard earned he lost gambling. His pockets would be bulging with hundred-dollar bills, then he’d get into a few high-stakes card games and lose it all. Easy come, easy go. That was his attitude. One time he not only lost all the cash he had, he lost his car in a card game in Hoboken and actually had to take a bus back home.
13
Independent Contractor
Linda gave birth to a second male child and they named him David. Richard was still completely indifferent to his sons. He viewed them as though they were someone else’s kids. The relationship with Linda had become more and more strained, and they weren’t even having intimate relations anymore. Richard gave her some money now and then, but that was the sum of it.
However, he was protective of Linda and the boys in the extreme. He viewed them as his personal property —her especially—and became enraged if anyone abused or took advantage of either Linda or his sons.
In the low-income housing complex where Linda and the boys lived there was a superintendent who was sweet on Linda and kept making overtures that became more and more bold. She kept ignoring him. After a time he became abusive, loud, vulgar. She wanted to tell Richard but didn’t want any trouble. She knew Richard had a fiery hair-trigger temper, could be extremely violent, had all kinds of guns and knives and terrible weapons, so she kept quiet about the abusive superintendent.
But one day the superintendent slapped both of Linda’s children, claiming they were making too much noise. This was too much for Linda to bear, and she called Richard at a bar he hung out in, the Final Round in nearby Hoboken. When Richard heard that the super had slapped his kids, he slammed down the phone, jumped in his car, and sped to the house. His sons confirmed that the super had hit them for playing in the hall. Richard went looking for him with violence on his mind, planning to kill him and dump his body somewhere no one would ever find it; that would become one of Richard’s noted specialties: getting rid of bodies.
The super, he soon found out, was in a bar just across the street that Richard sometimes went to. It was nearly four thirty in the afternoon and the bar was crowded with men having a drink after work before they went home to their families or to empty apartments. His lips twisted to the left and making that soft clicking sound through his clenched teeth, Richard opened the door and walked in. The smells of whiskey, cigarettes, and hardworking men drinking hard liquor greeted him. He spotted the superintendent standing at the bar. He was a large man with a chip on his shoulder—a bully—the kind of man Richard hated most.
Calmly, Richard walked up to him. “What right you got hitting my kids?”
“They wouldn’t shut up—,” the super began, but before he could finish, Richard hit him so hard he seemed to fly across the room as in a cartoon. Richard went after him and beat him to a bloody pulp. The bartender, Richard knew, was a moonlighting cop, but he didn’t care. As Richard was making his way to the door, the bartender showed him his badge and demanded to see his ID. Richard answered him with a vicious roundhouse right that knocked him out cold. Richard would surely have killed the super right then and there if there hadn’t been so many witnesses.
It didn’t take long before angry-faced detectives came around looking for Richard because he had punched out the bartender-cop. Richard went to Carmine Genovese and told him what had happened, Genovese reached out to some friends in the PD, and Richard had to pay three thousand dollars for the matter to be over and done with. The super was in the hospital for three weeks, had a broken cheekbone and jaw. Upon release from the hospital, he quit his job and hightailed it the hell out of Jersey City. Smart move. Richard was planning to kill him.
Some months later, Richard was leaving the Final Round when his brother Joe called to him from across the street.
Joe, like Richard, was now nearly six foot five, blond, and handsome.
“Hey, Rich!”
“How you doing, Joe?”
“Same old same old.”
“What’s up?”
“Rich…I have…I have something to tell you.”
“About ma?”
“No…Linda.”
“Linda? What?”
Joe stared at his brother. He, like everyone in Jersey, knew Richard was always armed, always dangerous. “I don’t know how to say this,” Joe began.
“Say what?”
“Rich, I saw Linda and Sammy James go into a room at the Hudson Hotel.”
“What!” Richard demanded, his voice rising, his face flushing strawberry red.
“Don’t go getting mad at me, Rich; I just thought you should know.”
“What room, you know?”
“Yeah, number sixteen, on the ground floor, just near the Coke machine.”
“Thanks, Joe,” Richard said, and he jumped into his car and sped over to the Hudson Hotel.
True, Richard and Linda were mostly estranged at this point, but Richard still thought of her as his wife—and as his property. He pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, which was in a secluded area near the river. It was a place where people went to have sex, for the most part. Richard knew Sammy James. They had played pool as partners. Richard stormed up to number 16 and smashed the door wide open with his enormous right foot.
There they were, both naked, in bed, actually having intercourse. Linda’s eyes nearly popped out of her shocked face. Richard grabbed James, a tall, muscular guy with curly black hair, and pummeled him. Linda, in shock, looked on.
“You treacherous bastard!” Richard told James. “I’m going to break every bone in your body but one, and you go near her again, I’ll find out and break that bone.” And Richard proceeded to methodically smash and break almost every bone in James’s body but the femur of his left leg, repeatedly getting on the bed and jumping on him, kicking him, stomping him, punching him.
Finished with James, Richard turned his wrath on Linda, drew out a knife.
“If you weren’t the mother of my sons,” he said, “I’d kill you, but now I’m just going to teach you a lesson you will never forget.” He grabbed for her left breast. She tried to resist him. He slapped her unconscious, grabbed her left breast, and cut off its nipple. He then did the same thing to her other breast and left her there like that, storming out of the room like a hurricane.
From that day on Richard had little to do with Linda. He’d see his boys now and then; that was it. James left town and never came back to Jersey City.
Philip Marable was a captain in the Genovese crime family. He owned a popular Italian restaurant in Hoboken and lived in nearby Bloomfield. The name of the restaurant was Bella Luna. They served good southern Italian food at reasonable prices. There were yellow oilcloths on each table and candles in empty wine bottles covered with different-colored wax.
Marable was a good dresser, always perfectly coiffed, handsome with thick black hair and dark menacing eyes…a dandy. He reached out to Richard and had him come to the restaurant, greeted him warmly, sat him down, insisted he eat a good meal. Richard kept wondering what he wanted. After they finished eating and had anisette- infused espresso, Marable said, “You know George West, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Richard said.
“We have a problem with this guy. He’s been holding up my runners”—people who collect bets on the numbers racket—“and I don’t want him around no more,” Marable explained.
