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and buy things that were under the authorization limit. For instance, on some cards the store will call up for authorization if the item being bought is over fifty dollars or over one hundred dollars. ‘Under the limit’ buyers always make purchases below the call-in figure. They’ll go into department stores or shopping malls and bang out forty-five-dollar items on a fifty-dollar card all afternoon. You can go out and buy blenders, radios, cigarettes, razor blades-the kind of stuff that’s easy to sell off at half the price-and in two hours make a good payday for yourself. Stacks Edwards, who was a tall, skinny black guy who hung out with the crew, was an ‘under the limit’ master. He’d do a day at a shopping center with a panel truck until he ran out of room. Then he had an army of people who used to go out and sell his stuff in factories, or he’d take it to small mom-and-pop stores in Harlem, or places in New Jersey that would buy his whole truckload.

    “It was Jimmy Burke who put me into cigarettes. I knew about them from having been in North Carolina. A carton of cigarettes was $2. 10 in the South at the time, while the same carton would cost $3. 75 just because of the New York taxes. Jimmy came by the cabstand one day with his car full of cigarettes. He gave me a hundred cartons and said I should try and sell them. I wasn’t sure, but he said I should give it a try. I put the cartons in the trunk of my car and drove over to a nearby construction site. I sold every carton I had in ten minutes. The working guys were saving about a buck a carton. It was worth it to them. But I saw I could make twenty-five cents a carton in ten minutes for my end. That night I went to Jimmy’s house and paid him for the hundred cartons he had given me and asked for three hundred more. I took as many as I could fit in the trunk. The next day I sold them in ten minutes again. I said to myself, ‘Ain’t this nice,’ and I went back and got another three hundred for my trunk and two hundred more for my backseat. This was adding up to a hundred twenty-five bucks for a couple of hours’ work.

    “Jimmy came by the cabstand one day with a skinny kid who was wearing a wiseguy suit and a pencil mustache. It was Tommy DeSimone. He was one of those kids who looked younger than he was just because he was trying to look older. Jimmy had been a friend of Tommy’s family for years, and he wanted me to watch out for Tommy and to teach him the cigarette business-help make him a few bucks. With Tommy helping me, pretty soon we’re making three hundred, four hundred dollars a day. We sold hundreds of cartons at construction sites and garment factories. We sold them at the Sanitation Department garages and at the subway and bus depot. This was around 1965, and the city wasn’t taking it very seriously. We used to sell them on the street, and we’d give a couple of cartons away to the cops just to leave us alone.

    “Pretty soon we’re importing the cigarettes ourselves. We’d fly down to Washington, D. C. , on the shuttle, take a cab to the truck-rental place, use a fake license and ID to get a truck, and then drive to one of the cigarette wholesalers in North Carolina. We’d load up with about eight or ten thousand cartons and drive north. But as more and more guys began doing it, things started to heat up. At first a few guys were pinched, but in those days they’d just give you a summons. The cops were tax agents and they didn’t even carry guns. But then they began confiscating the trucks, and the rental people stopped giving them to us. We used every scheme in the world to get those trucks, from bribery to sending local people in to make the rentals. We burned out half the U-Haul places in Washington, D. C. They went bust. Vinnie Beans had the Capo Trucking Company in the Bronx, and so we started renting his trucks. He didn’t know what we were going to do with them, so that went along fine until he realized he was missing a