Then a new gang began to form. They called themselves the Savage Lords and wore shiny black jackets and dungarees studded with metal. There were only a half dozen of them at first, but through one long, snowy winter they grew in numbers, and by summer there seemed to be fifty of them, maybe more. Most were Latinos, but there were some Irish in the gang, too, and the last of the Italians, and when Sonny Marino saw them moving together along the avenue, like some black-jacketed army, he felt uneasy, even afraid.
But he couldn’t really judge them. He would look at the Savage Lords walking in their own version of the diddy bop, the weight heavy on one foot, the second swinging along loosely behind it, and he remembered the thrill of old summer evenings, the sense of power that came from being part of a large, hard group like the Cavaliers, afraid of nothing, makers of fear themselves. But looking at these young men, Sonny Marino, out of shape and growing older, couldn’t rid himself of his fear. The Cavaliers were long gone, but this was the new guerrilla army of the neighborhood, and he knew that eventually he would have to deal with them. And he was alone.
“Did you hear what happened?” his wife said one morning. “They took over a building over Twel’ Street. One of the abandoned buildings. They’re movin’ into the place. It’s their headquarters, they say.”
Almost every day after that, she would ask the same question of Sonny Marino: Did you hear what happened? The Savage Lords had wrecked Canavan’s Bar, because the owner wouldn’t serve them. They’d broken the doors off the emergency exit in the subway because the man in the token booth asked them to pay. A neighbor told them one night to stop playing disco music at two in the morning, and they set his car on fire. Harry Perez came into the Store, heartsick and desperate, to say that his daughter was forced to live with them in the headquarters, and when he came to take her home, they threw him down the stairs. The cops came around and made them move along in the evenings, but the cops couldn’t watch them all the time.
In midsummer, Sonny Marino first heard about the “Lords Insurance Company.” They were working their way through the neighborhood, explaining to the shopkeepers that for fifty dollars a month they could guarantee the safety of a store. “You know what that is?” Sonny Marino told his wife. “That’s an old-fashioned protection racket.” She looked at him gravely and said, “What are you gonna do about it? Go to the cops?” Sonny shrugged. He wasn’t raised to call the cops.
The young insurance men came to the Store late one Saturday. Three of them: two were large, beefy, muscle-bound; the third was a short wiry kid with glasses. All wore black jackets. The short kid did the talking. “So that’s the deal,” he said. “Fifty a month and you’re safe.”
“Get out of here,” Sonny Marino said, in a low, hard voice.
“Whajoo say?” the short kid said.
“I said get outta here before I break your head.”
The short kid’s face went blank, and then he turned on his heel and walked out, with the two muscle boys behind him. The short kid helped himself to an orange.
That night, it started. Three shots were fired from a car and shattered Sonny’s plate-glass windows. A carpenter replaced the glass with plywood boards, and they came by again and shot out the glass pane in the door. Milk deliveries were smashed; stink bombs hurled into the Store; a fire started in the cellar. Sonny broke his own code and called the cops; they explained about budget cuts, undermanning, asked him to press charges if he saw the kids who did it. After the cops left, Sonny went out to his car and found all four tires slashed. At the end of ten days, he got a phone call at home. A young voice asked: “You ready for a deal?” Sonny Marino screamed something into the phone about the young man’s mother and hung up. That night, his daughter’s boyfriend dropped her off, and then was grabbed on the stoop. They took him to the park, stripped him, tied him to a tree, and painted him with glossy red paint. Next time, they told him, they’d set him on fire.
His daughter cried, his wife talked about closing the Store and moving to Florida. But Sonny Marino said nothing. When they had all gone to bed, he sat alone in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. And then he knew what he had to do. He reached for the phone.
Early on Sunday morning, before the rising of the sun, strange cars started appearing in the neighborhood. They had come from all over, from Long Island and Jersey, from the far reaches of Brooklyn, from the upper Bronx. One was driven all the way from Philadelphia. The drivers and passengers were all middle-aged. They parked on the empty streets around the factories, and when they got out, they were hefting baseball bats, tire irons, slabs of metal. They embraced each other, patted their stomachs, laughed, smoked cigarettes.
