Elegy for a mob lawyer

Mood: down
You wouldn't expect to find a retired New Jersey mob lawyer on Grove Avenue, but there he was, looking like Santa Claus and just as jovial. He was a neighborhood fixture, calling out greetings to anyone who came within a block of him. At first, I thought he was a street person, or at least a group home person, but he was as wired up as anyone in this town. As for the mobbed up part, he claimed to have only represented the Mafia in its straight business dealings like property transfers, not criminal cases. Then again, he also said he was an eyewitness to a mob hit. He claimed a lot of things, some of which may or may not have been true. Not only was he a liar, he was a bigot. He said his father was a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials, but he was an anti-Semite. He maintained that blacks smelled different than whites. How much of this he really believed and how much he said to get my goat, I have no idea.

But he was a liar, no doubt about it, and they flowed out of his mouth like water off a duck's back, and just as easily and naturally. He was a schemer who, given a choice between getting something done honestly and dishonestly, would always go for the scam that took twice as much work. He said his family owned an estate in the country, but he got free food from the local church and sold food stamps. He lived in his sister's boarding house, but it was a single room fit for a Bowery bum. He had more girlfriends than you could shake a stick at, but none of them seemed to stick (his 30+ girlfriend in the hospitality industry was pushing him to get married, but he didn't want to do it again after his first trainwreck). He was nailing a 17-year-old blonde from the troubled teen home down the street, and even after she left, she still showed up at his house every week to get hammered.

He was a snitch too. The three characteristics of a snitch are: 1) They ask too many questions; 2) They invite you to commit illegal acts (that's how they became snitches) and 3) Well, you don't want to know number 3, especially if you're a snitch...

And he was drinking himself to death. Never convicted of a crime despite his numerous nefariousnesses, nevertheless, he had sentenced himself. Sitting with someone who is dying is not hard, per se. The act itself is painful to witness, but watching the regrets surface is even more heartbreaking. My mob lawyer chased after the American dream and grabbed it by the throat. In the end, though, it turned into ashes in his mouth. His world kept getting smaller, until it consisted of a a dirty room, a front porch, and a tiny lawn he insisted on mowing even though it gave him heat stroke.

He got all things society taught him he had to have in order to be happy - money, power, women, property, including a Florida condo, and possessions, and yet he wasn't. He was a man of ravenous appetites, and he consumed, consumed, and consumed, and still he wasn't sated.

Like the Great Gatsby, "He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Unlike Gatsby, the mob lawyer didn't believe in the future. Unlike Frank Sinatra, who sang "the best is yet to come", the best was in the past. His green light was a former Miss New Jersey. He destroyed his marriage to her through his infidelity, drinking, and overwork, with his mother-in-law as the coup-de-grace.

He was my consigliere for my last move. Half his advice was spot-on and the other half was dead-wrong, which would have made him the finest baseball player of all time, but not the best source of advice for where to find my next home. For me, the final cut in our friendship was when he tried to set me up with a waitress at a local strip club who had a pathologically-jealous psycho boyfriend. I guess that's mob humor for you.