Read Online The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin - Free Book Online

name of the person that was kidnapped?
A: Jimmy Hydell.
    In the back of the courtroom, a young woman clenches her teeth and hisses. “Motherfucker…. My mother wants Jimmy’s bones back…. Put a woman at peace….”
    The young woman sits next to me and whispers like this through a whole morning’s testimony. Her name is ElizabethHydell, age forty-two, full of hatred. Her brother Jimmy was shot to death as directed by Kaplan and Casso and carried out by Caracappa and Eppolito.
    Jimmy Hydell, twenty-six, was a light-haired, hefty thug, an office boy with a gun. He ran around frothing at the mouth and shooting. He was still living with his mother, in Staten Island, when he died. The family originally came from Bensonhurst, on Eighty-third Street, which was dominated by St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church and school. The Hydells merely had to stroll across the street to mass. The family bloodlines were German and Irish. The father worked in the transit system.
    “My father paid forty thousand for that house. We had to walk away from it,” Elizabeth Hydell mutters. “It was up for two hundred and twenty thousand, and they came and took the deed away from him.” I ask her why.
    “Because my father got told.”
    “Who told him?”
    “He got told by the top.”
    About this she will say no more. It makes no sense to wonder.
    “Jimmy was mesmerized by the Mafia,” she tells me. “The clothes, the cars, the way they just walked around with their jewelry and never had to go to work. He went on killing sprees. At the same time, he was a mama’s boy. He called his mother twenty times a day. The night he got engaged, he called her from the hotel room where he was in bed with his fiancée.”
    She remembered how Jimmy later became uncontrollable when the young woman, whose name was Annette Dibiase, broke up with him. He kept pacing up and down the hallway at home. “Then, I don’t know what he did, he took her car and tied her up and drove out by the airport like he was rehearsing a kidnap. I guess he was.”
    Riding around with him was Robert Bering, a former transit cop who thought that if he piled up enough dead bodies, they would let him in the Mafia, even if he didn’t have enough Italian in him to order dinner. Witnesses saw the fiancée being yanked into a car in front of her house. They found her with five bullets in her head, buried near a road in Staten Island. Hydell seemed an insane killer at this point. He had supposedly also murdered two shylocks, one drug seller, and two people who ran school-bus companies.
    Elizabeth said, “I was in work when my girlfriend called and told me that they’d found Annette. I knew right away that Jimmy had done it with Bering. When he came home, we all knew he did it. Nobody said nothing to him, and he didn’t talk to us. It was obvious that something terrible had happened. Then the next thing, he was ducking and scared of this Casso.”
     
    Hydell and Casso had some history even before they were joined by bullets.
A: I was supposed to meet an attorney, Jerry Shargel, at the 19th Hole where Chris Furnari was, and we werestanding outside the bar, and the owner of the Chinese restaurant two doors away came in to talk to Chris, and he told Chris that there’s some drunken kids in his place and they had a Doberman dog and they were causing all kind of havoc and the customers were afraid and they were leaving. And Chris went to Angelo Defendis—they all came outside at that time, and I heard Chris say to Angelo Defendis, Didn’t I tell you to straighten this kid out to stop causing problems in the neighborhood? And Angelo Defendis said, I told him. I warned him. So Chris said, Go in there now and get him out of there. And Angelo went into the Chinese restaurant, and he came out with Jimmy Hydell and another kid and—with a big dog—and Angelo started pointing his finger at Jimmy Hydell, and every time he pointed his finger, the dog started to snap at him.
    And Gaspipe came