All through the heady days of scams and heists, Carmine Imbruglia had never done a day in jail. His first brush with the justice system came one day in the summer of 1953, when he was arrested for having taken part in stealing a newsstand vendor's cash belt.
Carmine and two Brooklyn boys had executed the robbery. Carmine had pretended interest in a copy of Playboy that the newsstand vendor was keeping under the counter. He refused to sell it to Carmine, who, despite looking like a beetle-browed tree ape, was underage.
"Aw, c'mon, mister, please," Carmine wheedled, as Freaking Frasca and Angelo (Slob) Sloboni slipped up behind the angry news vendor.
The vendor said, "Get lost, punk!" and Freaking Frasca popped his gravity blade and sliced free the heavy canvas belt. The Slob caught it.
They cut out like thieves.
Carmine tried to run. He would have made it except that he made the mistake of trying to filch that copy of Playboy on the fly. The vendor caught him by the scruff of his neck and hollered for a cop.
"I can't believe I got pinched on my first heist," Carmine muttered from the cell he discovered himself sharing with a freckle-faced Irish kid named O'Leary.
"What'd you do?" asked O'Leary.
"I didn't you nothin'," Carmine snarled. "They think I did a robbery. What about you?"
"I didn't open a fire hydrant so I couldn't take a shower," said O'Leary.
"They pinch you for that?" Carmine said, figuring O'Leary for shanty Irish.
"They pinched me."
"What do you get for opening a fire hydrant, anyways?"
"Probation."
"I'm looking at three years in Elmira," Carmine said morosely.
"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime," O'Leary recited, turning over in his bunk.
When the court officers came for O'Leary, he was sound asleep.
"Hey, O'Leary," the court officer shouted. "Bag and baggage. Let's go."
"Shh," Carmine hissed. "You'll wake up Carmine."
"You O'Leary?" the court officer asked suspiciously.
"You sayin' I don't look Irish, copper?"
"No, I'm sayin' you don't look clean enough for a punk what got himself pinched for showering in the gutter."
"It's summer," said Carmine. "I sweat easy in the summer. Old dirt must come outta my pores or somethin'."
The court officer shrugged as he opened the cell with a dull brass key. "Come along, then," he said.
Standing with a contrite expression on his broad face, Aloysius X. O'Leary ne Carmine Imbruglia attempted to explain himself before judge Terrance Doyle.
"I was mizzled, your honor. I'm askin' for prohibition."
"What's that?" asked the bored judge.
"Them other two guys, they mizzled me. I didn't wanta do it, but I was mizzled."
"Mizzled?" said the judge.
"That's right, your honor."
"Spell that," requested the judge, now very interested, because he surreptitiously worked the Times crossword puzzle during the long, boring hours of testimony.
"Mizzled. M-i-s-l-e-d," said Carmine Imbruglia, spelling the word exactly as he had seen it in the morning newspaper, wherein a made guy had defended his participation in a bank robbery, putting the blame on his confederates, thereby getting a reduced sentence.
"Who . . . er . . . mizzled you?" asked the disappointed judge.
"The other two what was with me. Freaking Frasca and the Slob."
"Slob?"
"Sloboni. His real moniker is Angelo. He didn't like 'Angelo' so we kinda call him Slob to keep him happy." Carmine cracked a lopsided gin. "What do you expect from a guinea?" He winked.
" I see," said the judge, frowning to keep from laughing. He banged his gavel once and announced that Aloysius X. O'Leary was free to go. He put out an order to pick up those notorious Italian punks Frasca and Sloboni.
The next day, Aloysius X. O'Leary, protesting that his name was not Carmine Imbruglia, had the book thrown at him.
"Six months for the robbery," pronounced the judge in a grave voice. "And another two for impersonating an Irishman."
After that, Carmine Imbruglia became a legend on the corner of Utica and Sterling in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
It wasn't long before a string of car thefts and house invasions brought a summons from Don Pietro Scubisci himself.
Carmine had entered the old man's august presence trembling. The scene was the back of the Neighborhood Improvement Society in Manhattan's Little Italy. It was a dim alcove paneled in black walnut, the walls covered with the sepia-toned pictures of obscure saints.
Don Pietro was eating fried peppers out of a simple brown paper bag so spotted with grease it looked like a faded leopard skin.
"I'm honored to meet you," said Carmine sincerely.
"You been doing crime in my territory," said Don Pietro.
"You heard of me?" Carmine blurted, pleased.
Don Pietro glowered. "I heard you owe me money."
"Me?"
"You steal in Brooklyn you give thirty percent to me."
"But . . . but that's robbery!" Carmine had spluttered.
"You rob from others. I rob from you. It is a dog-eat-dog world."
"All I got is five hundred bucks to my name," Carmine had protested. "If I give it to you, I got nothing left."
"So? You go rob again. Around and around goes the music, but thirty percent always ends up here," said Don Pietro, smacking a greasy hand on the worn black walnut table. He left a palm print that could be fried and served up whole.
Having no choice, Carmine Imbruglia did as he was ordered. The more he brought to Don Pietro, the more Don Pietro asked for. The percentage jumped from thirty to thirty-five and then to forty.
"This is fuggin' worse than inflation," Carmine complained to his wife, Camilla, one day.
"Then get a job."
"How'm I gonna fuggin' become an amico nostro if I bail out now?" had demanded Carmine, who had a dream. And was terrified of physical labor to boot.
One day, as Carmine dumped a pile of bills and loose change on the dark greasy table in the back room, Don Pietro spoke up with his hand deep in the ever-present grease-stained bag of green peppers.
"I'm gonna make you, Carmine," he intoned.
"You're already making me," said Carmine sullenly.
"No, I'm gonna make you one of the guys."
"Will it cost me?" asked Carmine suspiciously.
Don Pietro popped a fried pepper into his mouth and casually indicated the money on the table. "What you just paid is the final installment."
Carmine perked up. "Does that mean I don't gotta pay you a percentage no more?"
"No," returned Don Pietro. "It means that from now on you, Carmine Imbruglia, steal when I say you steal, from who I say you steal from, and you give me all the swag you steal. I, in turn, give you a percentage."
Carmine squinted in the dimness of the alcove. "How much?"
"Twenty. "
"That's fuggin' highway robbery!" shouted Carmine Imbruglia, who was instantly surrounded by a dry moat of pinstripes.
"Or I can have you shot in the face and stuffed into the trunk of a crummy Willys," said Don Pietro casually. "You make the choice."
"Twenty sounds fair," Carmine mumbled.
The next day in a house in Flatbush where the curtains were drawn to create a kind of sad gloom, Carmine Imbruglia was officially inducted into the Mafia.
The induction was done in Sicilian, which Carmine did not understand. For all he knew, they were inducting him into the Portuguese navy.
When they pierced his trigger finger with a needle, he cried at the sight of his own blood. Laughing, they lifted Carmine's bleeding finger to Don Pietro's pierced trigger finger. Their blood mingled.
When it was over, Don Pietro asked, "What is your street name?"
Since Carmine didn't have a street name, he made one up.
"Cadillac. Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia," said Carmine proudly.