permission. He can’t be touched. A Mafia family protects its members and its businesses. Your primary loyalty is to your Mafia family. You are elevated to a status above the outside world of “citizens.” You are like royalty. In ethnic neighborhoods like Jilly‘s, nobody has more respect than a made guy. A made guy may not be liked, may even be hated, but he is always respected. He has the full authority and power of his Mafia family behind him.
One Friday, Jilly was keyed up over a big score he was setting up for the weekend. He had a man inside a trucking company who was going to give him the keys to three trailers loaded with furs and leather jackets. That same inside guy was going to deactivate the Babco alarm systems in the trucks.
Monday morning, Jilly was pissed off with everybody. On Sunday night they had gone into the truck yard. They had opened two of the trailers. When they opened the third, the alarm went off. The whole crew panicked and took off from the scene without grabbing a single item.
It drives the guys crazy to miss a score like that when they were so close, just because somebody fucked up. It also makes them look bad. Jilly had had to get permission to take those loads. On a big score like that, when you’re a low-echelon made guy, a soldier, you have to get permission to make sure you’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes—and also to put the higher-ups on notice that some money will be coming in.
For permission Jilly had gone to his captain, Charlie Moose.
Your captain gets a piece of the action on whatever you do. So you go to him and tell him you’re going to pull a big job. If you don’t tell him ahead of time and he finds out about it, or you tell him after the fact, the captain might start thinking, They got more out of this job than they’re telling me, and that’s why they didn’t ask me up front.
Because that’s what happens all the time. It’s all a big bullshit game. You go to your captain and tell him you’re going to pull off a job worth a hundred grand. Usually the split is half with your captain. So right off the bat you have to give him fifty percent. The captain in turn has to kick in, say, ten percent upstairs, to the boss.
Captains are greedy, just like everybody else. And each captain sets the rules for his crews. He can set any rules he wants. So maybe a captain says, “I want sixty percent, instead of fifty.” Because what he will do is keep fifty and give the other ten percent to the boss. Instead of taking it out of his end, he’s taking it out of yours. Some captains demand that each one of their guys give them a certain amount of money per week, say $200, like a rent payment. That insures they get some money. Plus a percentage of the action.
And that’s because everybody’s playing this same bullshit game, trying to keep as much as they can, pass along as little as they can get away with, regardless of what the rules say. They always fudge. They figure they’re out doing the job, who wants to give up half of what they get to somebody that’s not even there?
So you never told anybody the whole story with money. If you made $100,000 on a score, you might tell your captain you came out with $80,000. That was the standard. It goes that way right up the line. That’s why nobody totally trusts anybody.
Later on, when my position became a connected guy, I had to split whatever I supposedly made on scores with the soldier I was under. He kicked in to his captain. That shows the captain two things: that the soldier is out earning; and that he’s loyal in kicking into the treasury. Same thing with the captains; they keep in good favor by throwing a piece of the action to the boss and the underboss.
Simply put: When you’re operating within the mob, for every score you do, you know that you’re going to split it with somebody at one point or another; you’re going to give some of your earnings up. Everybody plays the game of holding
One Friday, Jilly was keyed up over a big score he was setting up for the weekend. He had a man inside a trucking company who was going to give him the keys to three trailers loaded with furs and leather jackets. That same inside guy was going to deactivate the Babco alarm systems in the trucks.
Monday morning, Jilly was pissed off with everybody. On Sunday night they had gone into the truck yard. They had opened two of the trailers. When they opened the third, the alarm went off. The whole crew panicked and took off from the scene without grabbing a single item.
It drives the guys crazy to miss a score like that when they were so close, just because somebody fucked up. It also makes them look bad. Jilly had had to get permission to take those loads. On a big score like that, when you’re a low-echelon made guy, a soldier, you have to get permission to make sure you’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes—and also to put the higher-ups on notice that some money will be coming in.
For permission Jilly had gone to his captain, Charlie Moose.
Your captain gets a piece of the action on whatever you do. So you go to him and tell him you’re going to pull a big job. If you don’t tell him ahead of time and he finds out about it, or you tell him after the fact, the captain might start thinking, They got more out of this job than they’re telling me, and that’s why they didn’t ask me up front.
Because that’s what happens all the time. It’s all a big bullshit game. You go to your captain and tell him you’re going to pull off a job worth a hundred grand. Usually the split is half with your captain. So right off the bat you have to give him fifty percent. The captain in turn has to kick in, say, ten percent upstairs, to the boss.
Captains are greedy, just like everybody else. And each captain sets the rules for his crews. He can set any rules he wants. So maybe a captain says, “I want sixty percent, instead of fifty.” Because what he will do is keep fifty and give the other ten percent to the boss. Instead of taking it out of his end, he’s taking it out of yours. Some captains demand that each one of their guys give them a certain amount of money per week, say $200, like a rent payment. That insures they get some money. Plus a percentage of the action.
And that’s because everybody’s playing this same bullshit game, trying to keep as much as they can, pass along as little as they can get away with, regardless of what the rules say. They always fudge. They figure they’re out doing the job, who wants to give up half of what they get to somebody that’s not even there?
So you never told anybody the whole story with money. If you made $100,000 on a score, you might tell your captain you came out with $80,000. That was the standard. It goes that way right up the line. That’s why nobody totally trusts anybody.
Later on, when my position became a connected guy, I had to split whatever I supposedly made on scores with the soldier I was under. He kicked in to his captain. That shows the captain two things: that the soldier is out earning; and that he’s loyal in kicking into the treasury. Same thing with the captains; they keep in good favor by throwing a piece of the action to the boss and the underboss.
Simply put: When you’re operating within the mob, for every score you do, you know that you’re going to split it with somebody at one point or another; you’re going to give some of your earnings up. Everybody plays the game of holding
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