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friends, and he told me maybe I should stop using my friends to help with collections. He said, “Jon, take my meat guys.”
    The “meat guys” weren’t Mafia. They were actual meatpackers in the union my uncles controlled. The union thugs were loyal to my family. But I was loyal to the Outcasts. This caused me some aggravation in the spring of 1965.
    My uncle Sam had a dry cleaner who got behind on a loan. Dominic and I grabbed him off the street and took him into an apartment I kept off of Lexington and 48th. Obviously, you couldn’t beat people on the streets of Manhattan, so I had an apartment for collections work. We developed a method. We’d strip the guy naked, tie him to a chair, gag him, and beat him. I didn’t say a word. Just beat, beat, beat. We’d beat a person on and off for hours. It was like marinating a piece of meat. Everybody softens over time. When we’d finally pull the electrical cord from his mouth and tell him to get money, he’d be grateful he was being talked to like a human. I’d hand him a phone and tell him to call somebody—his wife, his in-laws, his rabbi, anybody—and get the money he owed. That person would deliver the money to one of my guys at a coffee shop. We’d let the guy go, and everybody’d be happy.
    This time I stepped out during our beating to meet a girl I was seeing. While I was out, Dominic shot up a load of heroin and nodded off. He fell on the floor like a dead man. The guy managed to escape—crawl down the stairs and roll onto the street—still naked, and tied to the chair. Some asshole Good Samaritan called the cops. They came into the apartment and found Dominic on the floor. He was comatose, and they actually drew a chalk outline around his body before they realized he wasn’t dead. They took him to the hospital, and when I walked back in, two cops threw me on the floor. I saw the chalk outline of a body, and I said a very stupid thing. “Where’s Dominic?”
    The cops had Dominic’s name from the ID in his wallet. If I had been wise, I would have said I’d walked into the wrong apartment. But I’d let them know I knew Dominic. My own mouth gave them the evidence they needed to arrest me. Every cop in the room laughed at me.
    I fucked up. Evil is stronger than good, but it don’t beat stupid. I was young. Young people make mistakes. Mistakes can help you learn. As long as you don’t do it a second time, anybody’s entitled to a mistake. Because of my mistake, I was charged as an adult for kidnapping and attempted murder.
* Walter Hutter is a pseudonym to protect Judy’s friend.

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    J . R .: They took me to the Manhattan Detention Center on White Street, the “Tombs.” In 1965 the Tombs was made of stone and iron, like a jail in medieval times. The cells had metal shelves on the walls for inmates to sleep on. Two guys had to sleep on the floor. It was overrun with rodents. You’d wake up with a rat tail dragging across your mouth. We slept with our shoes in our hands to fight the rats.
    The Tombs exposed me to new things. There were hippies in there who were part of a movement headed by Timothy Leary. He got all these kids to take acid, and they’d trip out on the streets and get arrested. The hippies believed in revolution, but some of them were so blown in their minds, they could hardly put two words together. There were also Black Muslims in jail. I had never been aware of the Muslim situation until then. They weren’t friendly to white people, but they didn’t look to pick fights. They would preach, “You whiteysare going to get it because it’s all going to come back around. You’re all going to kill yourselves.”
    What the Muslims and hippies had in common was they all talked about overthrowing “the man” and the Vietnam War. I had never heard about this war before. A few years earlier I was bored because everybody in America was into the Beach Boys and was squeaky clean. Now it was like the whole country was flipping out.
    My