Pardon: The Autobiography of a Gangster

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Pardon

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Chapter One

Well here I am again; it seems like a revolving door. I never thought that I was going to be in prison this long. I've got a loooong way to go with a lot of time for thinking and putting things together. This cold dungeon is called Solitary Confinement. They put me in here for doing what is not allowed beyond a shadow of a doubt in this prison or in any other institution, which is selling drugs. They gave me three hundred and sixty-five days. Boy, this is hard. It is so cold down in this dungeon, but it brings me back to a cold, cold morning in the Lower East Side when my father woke my brother, Freddy and me up.

I was about ten years old at that time and I was so happy, because my Dad, my brother and I were going to the market place. I loved going to the market place. You got to see and touch all those beautiful things, like lots of brightly colored oranges, apples, bananas and other exotic fruits, along with carrots, tomatoes, smelly onions and all sorts of different vegetables. There was the butcher cutting and grinding up all kinds of meat and slicing thick juicy steaks and pork chops. Then there were the smells, every booth and store had its own unique and wonderful aromas. Even the fish man had the wonderfully distinct smells of fresh fish, I loved watching him cut the heads and tails off of the fish and make them into fillets. Oh, that was so beautiful. I couldn't wait to go to the market place, and do all those wonderful things that kids do, to live for the moment and just enjoy life, everything for a kid is a game. I mean everything. It was exciting to see the live fish swim around in the buckets and drums. When no one was looking, I would reach down and put my hands in the water touching and feeling the fish swim all around. I would play with the fish until the man yelled at me, "Hey, take your hands out of that barrel!"

Freddy and I used to try to play hands off, we would have elaborate games that we invented that no other kids did, and we really enjoyed ourselves playing our secret games. One day my father dressed us up and said, "We're going to go to the market place and I want both of you to behave." See, my Dad used to take the little ones, Freddy and me, every time he would go to the market place. This would happen like four times in a year because for the rest of the other eight months my Dad was an alcoholic. He would drink, and there was another problem with my Dad, he was an epileptic. He would get epileptic attacks. Whenever he would get an epileptic attack, he would stop drinking. It was like a set time that he would stop drinking. He would drink for eight months and stop for four months. This happened for years and years.

Before we left, my Dad said, "Now mijo (ira puerta) bien." [Translation] "Now son, I want you to start to behave well (in the market place)." See, I was the troublemaker in the market place. Freddy was a troublemaker but not as bad as I was.

As we were walking down, I remember my Dad saying, "Look, at those people." When we looked, there were some drug addicts hanging all around the corner. Not as many drug addicts as we see now, as drugs were just starting to invade New York City. Unfortunately, their invasion also included the Lower East Side. They were in a corner sitting down and would close their eyes and jump up and open their eyes. I asked my Dad, "Why is this guy sleeping in the streets?" My Dad replied, "He's not sleeping, he is motaio which means he is drugged. "La mota lo tiene loco." [Translation] "The drugs have him crazy." I see this man go up and just before he hits the ground he opens his eyes and goes right back at attention. He will do it again and again. This was happening at numerous corners as we walked to and through the market place. My father stopped and looked up to heaven and said, "Dios queda mis hijos" [Translation] He said, "God, take care of my children." Finally we arrived at the market place. Freddy and I immediately started looking under the fruit and vegetable stands and counters for quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Change would often fall under there, and since the adults were too big, it was up to us little people to go under the tables and pick up all of the lost change. Usually, Freddy and I would find some treasures but sometimes we didn't, because some big people would go underneath and take all of the change out before we got there. As we were treasure hunting, my Dad asked, "How about some cherries?" We said, 'Yeah!" "How about some peaches?" We said, "Yeah!" "How about some apples?" and we said, "Yeah!" Then he would name all different fruits and the vegetables and we would say "yes, yes, and yes."

We always came home with our shopping cart full with all sorts of delicious food and cool stuff. Before we got to the house, our father would reward us for being good. Dad would give us a peach or a plum or something else that was delicious. One day we were in the market place and I wanted two peaches, I took one from the bag without my father seeing it and I quickly ate it. Then I choked on the pit from the peach. It choked my little throat and I oh, I thought I was going to die. My father started banging me in my back but I was still choking, so he grabbed me and reached in my mouth and took the pit out of my throat. He looked at me and smiled, and said, "That's for being disobedient." I never forgot that day. "That's for being disobedient," when we are disobedient, bad things happen to us, however, it never soaked into my mind that disobedience brings problems in our lives, Sometimes it even brings death in our life. We went back and I remember that my father looked at me one day and I said, "What happened ... I ... I ... I didn't do nothin' wrong. Whatever it is I didn't do it." Because I used to get blamed for everything, but then, I used to do everything, mostly. My Dad said, "You know, when I see you, I see a leader. I know that you are going to be the leader of this family. I don't know how. I don't know when. But one day they are going to depend on you, and when I pass away I want you to watch over the family." I didn't understand what he was saying at that time, so I ran outside and joined Freddy, Georgie, and my sister, Iris on the fire escape. We were looking at the cars and would name the cars and say, "That car is gonna be mines" and "That car is gonna be mines" and "No, that car is gonna be mines" and so on, and we continued to play the game "your choice of a car". However, I never forgot what my father said to me; it would be many years later when I finally understood what he said.

Chapter Two

My father gathered us around and he wanted to know what we wanted to do when we grew up. He asked Freddy, "What do you wanna do when you grow up?" Freddy said, "I want to be a lawyer." He asked Georgie. Georgie said he wanted to be a cop - a police officer. He asked Iris and she said, "I wanna have a good husband and have kids - lots of kids." He came and asked all thirteen of us, when he got to me, the baby, he asked, "And what do you wanna be?" I stood up, stuck my chest out and said to him, "I wanna be a gangster." He said, "A gangster? No, you wanna be a doctor." "Nah," I said, "I wanna be a gangster." See, it was because I used to watch the movies with George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney; all those guys really impressed me. I wanted to be just like them. I wanted to have a shootout with the police and tell people what to do. I loved the excitement of living on the edge and that is why I used to tell my father "I wanna be a gangster" every time he asked. My father would always try to change my mind and say, "No, you're gonna be a doctor,"

One day when I was eleven years old, my little "gang" and I were sitting on the front stoop. There was about five or six of us and they start saying that they were hungry, but no one had any money for the hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream that we all wanted. While everyone was complaining about not having any money, I kept thinking about how I used to get money when I was "younger." Then I remembered the treasure hunts at the market with Freddie and realized there were treasure chests right in front of me. I said, "Well, I tell you what, there's a whole bunch of parking meters full of money, if we go to the hardware store and take a crowbar, we could open them up". See, we never paid for anything, we just took it. We had a saying, "This man owes us and he had it to pay." He never owed us anything but it didn't matter, we just didn't wanna pay and loved the excitement of getting away with stealing.

While we were walking to the hardware store, we were devising our plan. Nobody wanted to take the crowbar, so it was decided that since I came up with the idea, I should take the crowbar." I said, "Okay, I'll take the crowbar but I want you guys to distract the man. While you distract him, I'll take the crowbar." When we hit the store, the whole gang spread out making a whole lot of noise and pulling things off the shelves pretending to be interested in them. It took a little while to find the crowbars, they were in the back of the store. I looked around, then grabbed a crowbar and headed straight for the front doors. My lookout yelled that the man was following me, so I took off and ran as fast as I could. He yelled at me, "Hey! Stop you little punk!" and he started running after me. All of the gang members started running after the man and they pushed him down from behind and we all ran as fast as we could out of that store. We didn't stop running until we got back to our stoop and celebrated our victory. Now we had the tool to get our justly deserved treasure, we had a crowbar.

We were really nervous breaking into the first couple of meters, but all that change pouring out quickly built our confidence. We knew that we came up with a great idea, but we needed a system and strategy so we wouldn't be caught. We had one guy lookout on one corner and another guy on the other corner, we figured out a way to quickly pry the door off the meters and after I broke the door off, another gang member caught the change in a bag as it poured out. As the bags filled up, another member ran and stashed the bags so we could quickly grab them as we left. Some of the meters wouldn't break that quickly, so we figured out how to unscrew them from the poles. Then if a meter didn't break open, someone else unscrewed it and stashed it with the rest of the change so we could open it later. Man, we had that system down to a science and when we hit a street, we weren't leavin' nothin' behind.

After we hit every meter on a street, everyone ran to the stash spot and started grabbing the bags, boy were they heavy, yeah, heavy with money, lots and lots of money. As soon as we got back to our backyard, we would break open the meters we brought back, and while a couple of guys dumped the broken meters in different dumpsters, the rest of us started counting our treasure. First we would dump all of the bags onto the table, it was a huge pile of quarters, dimes and nickels, and it felt so good diving my hands into all that money. Next we would divide it into separate piles of quarters, dimes and nickels. Then we divided each of them equally between the gang members, everyone went home with a great big bag of money.

Boy, we became rich; we were eleven-year-old rich kids strutting our stuff all around the neighborhood. We were buying clothes, jewelry, food, money was no object, we were the rich kids of the block. Eventually the word got out of how we were getting all our money and the police started asking a lot of questions. One of the guys got ratted out to the police and they arrested him. They threatened to send him to jail if he didn't talk, they scared him so much that he told all.., he told the police officers all of our names and addresses, we all got arrested and taken to the 7th Precinct police station. They put us in the bullpen, which was the first time I ever saw bars. Then they called our parents and our parents had to come and pick us up. They whipped us all the way home. We had to walk six to eight blocks so that was a good whipping. When we got home my brother Freddy asked me, "What happened?" I told him what happened and he said, "Ah, man. We got to get this guy." I said, "Nah, 'cause his mother and father, they got scared and they're movin' outta the neighborhood. So, leave 'em alone."

Chapter Three

When I was twelve years old, my older brother Tito found the Lord. He was not looking for God he did not fear God in fact God was nowhere in his life. His life was all about his gang the Ballerino Dragons, the Puerto Rican brotherhood. They were his family, they protected him and he was on his way to prove his loyal and allegiance to his gang. His gang was at war with the Irish gang the Forsythe Boys, and they were gonna rumble for control of the streets. Tito was pumped and he was ready to get it on, then God stepped in.

Tito was angry, very angry. He had been angry all day. We knew that when he was in his angry moods to just stay away from him because if we tried to even talk to him he would start yelling at us and punching things. He was very scary, especially to Freddy and I. He was our big older brother and we did not want him to be angry at us, no way. We didn't do anything to him, in fact, nobody did anything to him but every time he was going to do something with his gang, he would work himself up into such a rage before he left that we all hid from him and didn't dare come out until he left. On that night, when he came back acting all weird and stuff, he was especially angry and boy were we glad when he finally left.

Tito was walking to his gang's headquarters just fuming about that Irish gang, the Forsythe Boys. They came onto his gang's turf and challenged them for control of the corners. He was thinking about how he was going to teach those BOYS a lesson; you don't send a BOY to do a man's job. He was lost in thought about the upcoming rumble when he heard an old familiar voice calling to him. It came from the other side of the street and it was a fellow member of the brotherhood, Benny. They hadn't seen each other for a long time because Benny got caught by the police and was sent to prison a few years ago. He was doing time in upstate New York and had lost touch with his old brotherhood. When Benny saw Tito walking on the other side, going in the opposite direction of him, he ran over, hugged Tito and said, "Ah, man-I haven't seen you in a long time, where are you going?" Tito said, "Were gonna get it on with The Forsythe Boys." Benny replied, "You don't need to do that." With that, Tito stepped back and took a second look at Benny because Benny never turned down a good fight. He then realized that Benny looked different, very different from how he remembered him.

Benny had a suit and tie on, a really nice suit and he was clean cut, he actually looked pretty sharp. "Wait a minute, what's going on? Why are you so dressed up walking on these streets" "I'm going to church," replied Benny, "I'm going to preach" "You're going to preach?" "Yes, I was invited to preach at the church a few blocks from here, I would love to have your support. Will you come with me and watch me preach?" Tito couldn't believe what he was hearing. He just couldn't believe that Benny, Benny is a preacher. No, impossible, not Benny! "Come on, come walk with me" coaxed Benny, as he gently took a hold of Tito's arm and slowly turned him around. They started walking together, toward the church.

Tito's head was spinning, ten minutes ago, he was on his way to a gang war and now he is being led to a church. Tito was strong, very strong, he could have very easily pushed off and walked away from Benny but for some strange reason, he just couldn't pull away from Benny's magnetism. He felt a weird sense of peace while walking with Benny, something he never felt before and it kept pulling him in. Somehow, he forgot about his allegiance to the brotherhood and was drawn into this small Pentecostal Church with Benny gently leading him.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Pardon by Hector Rodriguez Copyright © 2010 by Hector Rodriguez. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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