This is an excerpt from STAND-UP GUY, a true crime gangster memoir.
The Music Lounge. I went in for a period of two, three hours at first, working with the bartenders. I started out cleaning up the glasses but I was paying attention, analyzing how to make the drinks. The Brandy Alexanders, the Tom Collins, the Whiskey Sours, the Martinis, the Zombies and all the rest of the stuff that was popular in them days. I learned it all and I loved it. The place held lots of people and was full of single women. I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. It was in the sixties and it was wide open, I had women lined up. At first, when I wasn’t making much money, I hustled the women. They used to put their names and phone numbers on napkins and wrap it around the glass for me. Sometimes I would go home with two or three girls. We’d have orgies, switch women, yeah. Six, eight, ten sometimes we had twelve people. Depended on where we went, what we were doing. The less guys the better. Sometimes I’d have four, five women a day, gorgeous women and they had a lot of money. Rich women from the club. Suits, cars, they’d buy for me. All these women were older than me, in their mid to late twenties. I was strong, I was healthy and I was good at what I did, you know. So they came back for more. I got spoiled at an early age.
My thing was I loved Petrocelli Suits. They were expensive, at that time. I bought them in a store called Pasqual’s in Farmingdale, Long Island. Very expensive suit store that custom built them to your body. Everybody bought their suits at Pasqual’s. After awhile I was going suit crazy. I had suits for every occasion. Twenty or thirty suits. In those days a lot of places you went were Jackets Required. So I wore suits, I wore jewelry, diamond rings, cufflinks, you know, diamond stickpins. Silk ties. Every day. Every day. I was just a bartender but I made good money. This place was a top shelf club and I went from bar boy to assistant bartender to full-time bartender to head bartender in a very short period of time, maybe a year.
Anyway, Tommy had plenty of trouble in there because all the gangsters wanted a piece of that club. So he had to go to this trumpet player that was connected, Mike Mancini. He played the trumpet as a front. Mike Mancini and the Playboys. They were a show band that came in there and played a lot and Mike was connected. He kept the mob away from Tommy’s club. I analyzed all this. After awhile he did what he had to do. Mike was hooked up, not with the Long Island mob, he was hooked up with the mob in Manhattan, you know. Little Italy
Tommy was Italian, Tommy Escrole you know, but he was from Pennsylvania, from more or less a farm community. He grew up there and there was no gangsters or nothing and he didn’t know anybody. Then he got into the nightclub business in New York. Tommy was a smart businessman, he knew how to get the people in there. He gave away things and when you give you receive. I was glad I worked for him. More than once I quit and came back. Of course a successful nightclub, that’s what they want the connected guys. They could wash a lot of money in a place like that. Sure, play with the tapes, you know. Register tapes. Sure. It’s a great place to do that.
I started noticing all these people coming in and that Tommy was getting paranoid. I didn’t know there were bomb threats, you know, when I was working there. It was a very successful club. It was a big club and it held lots of people. They wanted that club and they wanted it bad. The gangsters that wanted that place were threatening to bomb it. Fire bomb it if he didn't give it up. They'd finish him off, him and the place. That’s when he had to go to Mike, when it got real rough. They were coming in there and they used to just stare at him. They used to sit at a table and just stare at him all the time and make him nervous. They thought they had themselves something but then he turned around and knew somebody. See? He knew somebody.
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