While The Kid was still in college, working his summer job in the financial rackets, a mob connection with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, took him to one of the Gangland hangouts to meet their Crime Family Godfather.
The Westchester Country Club was not an unlikely place to be rubbing elbows with mobsters who’d grabbed all the money in the world that hadn’t been stuffed inside mattresses yet. Everywhere one looked, aging Presbyterians in knickers and these argyle sweater kind of thingies were putting and swinging and chipping with alarming inaccuracy. Most wore those same sporty caps his prep school classmates always put on whenever they drove The Kid around in their MG’s.
He loved those MG’s. Please don’t get mad at The Kid anybody.
When they found the Don, the Godfather was sitting in a golf cart waiting for the foursomes ahead to realize they wouldn't be teeing off quite as scheduled. He chatted with The Kid's mob connection, who turned out to be a Crime Family Lieutenant or something, then glanced over at The Kid. The Kid stared into the cold, dead eyes of a great white shark. It was easy to see why this guy made Don.
“Do you want to work for us when you graduate, young man?”
“No.”
The Don turned back to the Gangland Crime Lieutenant. “None of our lads do. Not mine, not Jack’s, nobody’s. They think we’re a bunch of crooks. All of them.”
By then the carts ahead had sort of piled into each other but off the trail, and the Godfather’s driver motored his toward the First Tee. The Kid didn’t have time to respond.
“Thank God for that,” his mob connection must’ve been thinking as The Kid watched the Gangland Crime Lieutenant rolling his eyes while the Don's cart bounced jauntily away.
It took fifty-one years and financial Armageddon to convince The Kid that he really ought to tell people about this conversation. The Kid's not the only one. Somewhere in this great big nation of ours there are others who got taught this stuff and couldn't believe their ears either. Others with The Kid's same underworld connections. Dozens anyway.
The wise guys inside these Wall Street Crime Families are crooks. All of them. The Godfather about said so himself.
