Whitey's Payback by T. J. English

Tonelli—contacted me and said he’d like to meet. We met for lunch. It was the kind of encounter of which there are dozens taking place on a daily basis in Manhattan—a writer and an editor meeting and getting to know each other. Tonelli asked me what, if anything, I was working on. I mentioned that I was considering doing a book on the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco. It would not be a crime book or a book about the porn business, per se, but rather a sex-positive book that encompassed a year in the life of a remarkable establishment. Tonelli thought it was a splendid idea for a book. We said good-bye to each other and expressed the desire to work together at some point down the road.
    Within days of my lunch with the Esquire editor, I was off to San Francisco to meet the Mitchell brothers. Already, I’d had a phone conversation with Jim Mitchell and told him of my interest in doing a book on the O’Farrell Theatre. He was open to the idea. “Come on out,” he said. “We’ll show you around the place.”
    On my first day at the O’Farrell Theatre, after meeting Jim and Artie, I could see something was wrong. Contrary to my previous conversation with Jim, he had no intention of allowing anyone into the inner sanctum of their business operations in the way I was suggesting. I’d been told the brothers were feuding, and it was obvious from the tension whenever they were in the same room that there was a bad energy loose within the universe of the Mitchell brothers. I returned to New York disappointed that my idea for a book was not going to materialize. Then, less than a week later, I got a call from a mutual friend of the brothers and mine.
    “Did you hear what happened?” he asked.
    “What.”
    “Last night, Jim shot and killed Artie.”
    Later that same day, the editor Tonelli called me and said with some urgency, “We want you to go back out there and do a piece on the shooting.”
    This was not the story I had intended to write about the Mitchell brothers. Tonelli said that Esquire was going to assign someone to write the story; if it weren’t me, it would be someone else. I felt that it was my obligation as a journalist to take the assignment.
    On the surface, Jim and Artie had achieved the American Dream. Their business ventures made them rich and famous beyond their wildest expectations. But the success they found in the American marketplace could not overcome the structural flaws in their relationship. In the end, the pressures of the porn business may have had less to do with their demise than the more primal strictures of blood and family.
    For some, the level of success achieved by the Mitchell brothers represents a world beyond dreaming, something to be viewed in movies and on television, where riches and sensual pleasures abound, and “reality” is a fungible concept squeezed into thirty-minute time slots, with false narratives, fake survival games, and the illusory promise of fame and fortune.
    In the early 1990s, the Asian community in New York City and elsewhere in the United States was in the throes of trauma. The 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square in the People’s Republic of China, which led to the massacre of citizen protestors by the Chinese military, set off a wave of undocumented migration from Asia. New York City was on the receiving end of a massive influx. Many of these desperate, undocumented immigrants resorted to using organized crime syndicates to smuggle them halfway across the world into the United States. Once they arrived, they were indebted to the smuggling overlords and at the mercy of gangsters. Representing the lowest rung on the ladder of assimilation, to this struggling generation of migrants the full measure of the American Dream as experienced by, say, the Mitchell brothers, was about as likely as a trip into outer space.
    Over a five-year period, I covered criminal activities in Chinatown as if it were my regular beat. I wrote a book, Born to Kill (1995), about