Lloyd Corricelli - Ronan Marino 01 - Two Redheads & a Dead Blonde by Lloyd Corricelli Page B

to see who was driving his car but couldn’t make him out behind the tinted glass.
    “Jesus, you look like shit,” Uncle Sal said.
    “I looked worse two days ago.”
    He handed me the pastry and bread, and I put them in the kitchen. Uncle Sal was the type who would never visit empty handed. It was an old-school Italian thing.
    “Can I get you anything?”
    “No, I can’t stay long.”
    We went into my living room, and I motioned to my couch. He sat down, crossed his legs and took his gloves off, placing them neatly across his lap.
    “That a cop leaving here?”
    “Yeah, Lowell PD.”
    “What the fuck did he want?”
    “He’s an old friend. Just checking up on me.”
    Uncle Sal was wary of most cops, though I suspected there had to be a few law enforcement officers in his hip pocket that didn’t cause him to lose any sleep.
    “Place is coming along nicely. You get a pool table yet?”
    “No, I haven’t had a chance.”
    “I got a guy in Somerville who’ll give you great deal. Just let me know.”
    “Great. So what brings you all the way up here?”
    “Your mother told me about your condition. I wanted to stop by and see how my favorite nephew was doing. Maybe see if I could do anything to help.”
    He wasn’t being patronizing. I’d always been his preferred nephew and he never tried to hide it from the family.
    Uncle Sal was my father’s younger brother. Now in his mid-fifties, he was the patriarch of Boston’s reputed Italian crime family. When my father decided to go legit, Uncle Sal stepped up and assumed the reigns of the family business from my grandfather sometime in the late seventies.
    Somehow he managed to survive the investigations from the eighties when the FBI, with the help of the Irish mob, smashed most of the other Italian families in town. My father claimed it was because Uncle Sal had transferred most of his holdings into legitimate businesses that he wasn’t rotting in some federal pen. I wasn’t as confident as my old man, but either way, I was happy Uncle Sal had managed to stay out of Club Fed. Through various corporations, he owned an import/export business, apartment buildings, an equipment rental company, a couple of bars near the Boston Garden and some strip joints in Peabody and Revere.
    The job title he used on his tax returns was “plumbing salesmen,” but it was debatable if he could tell the difference between a plunger and a ball flap. Outside of his known businesses, he was allegedly involved in such illicit endeavors as ticket scalping, numbers rackets and stolen goods. This might be a shocker, but I never had a problem with it.
    With a master’s degree in Criminal Justice, I understood that crime was inevitable. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if Uncle Sal and his organization were gone, something would rise to fill the void–something potentially far more violent and inherently evil than his crew had ever been.
    Yes, Uncle Sal was a mobster, but he lived by a code that most in his trade had forgotten. No one got hurt unless they were involved in the business, unlike the street gangs who randomly shot whoever happened to be in their way. He was the last of a breed, a living stereotype. I couldn’t watch The Godfather and not think of him. Some might accuse me of having a naïve view of organized crime, but I had no misconceptions. My uncle was a dangerous man if you got on his bad side. He was no Kingpin of Crime, but you didn’t want to cross him either.
    There was another side of him that few outside of his community bothered to talk about. Uncle Sal put a lot of money back into his neighborhood by building parks, sending kids to private schools and helping people when they were down on their luck. He was also a huge benefactor of the Catholic Church and on a first name basis with the local Cardinal. It all seemed to balance out in the great ledger of life.
    As a kid, I spent a lot of good times with him. Uncle Sal got great tickets to the Sox, Bruins, Patriots