Geffkens

Vario was fifty-nine years old and feeling all of his years. A bear-sized man with glasses and multiple chins, he was living in an apartment above the tavern because his wife had kicked him out of his home in Island Park in Nassau County after discovering his dalliance with a mistress. In the past few months, he’d been hit with a torrent of criminal charges. He was looking at six years in prison, having been convicted on federal tax evasion. In state court, he was facing six separate indictments, all stemming from a bug placed by police detectives in a junkyard trailer on Avenue D where he occasionally did business. Dubbed the “Gold Bug” after Brooklyn district attorney Eugene Gold, whose office made the case, Vario had been caught trying to buy a list of informants from a detective posing as a corrupt cop. More embarrassing, he’d been recorded telling the detective, Douglas Le Vien, how he rigorously avoided wiretaps by refusing to have a telephone in his house. The hardest blow, however, was the death of his youngest son, Lenny, in the summer of 1973. Moments after an arson explosion at a nearby construction company involved in a labor dispute, Lenny, twenty-three, was deposited at the emergency-room entrance of Wyckoff Heights Hospital. He had burns over 90 percent of his body. He lingered for weeks, but true to his dad’s ethic, he refused to say anything before he died. The tragedy was compounded by what the son didn’t say: that he had been dispatched on the arson mission by his father. “Yeah, Paulie sent him there. But the kid didn’t know what he was doing. He went to torch the place and the fumes from the gas ignited on him and he caught fire himself. They had to have a closed casket.” The funeral was held at St. Fortunata’s Church on Linden Boulevard in East New York. “There had to be a thousand people there, half of them wiseguys. Some real old-timers went, out of respect for Paulie. We had to park five blocks away, it was so jammed. I went with Joe Schiavo, and he never liked to go to those things because he knew there’d always be cameras and agents.” Cameras and law enforcement agents were on hand for this one as well. But when the crowd spotted cameramen for two local TV stations, they set upon them, beating them furiously. Detective Kenny McCabe was across the street conducting surveillance for the DA’s office. He waded into the crowd toward the besieged cameramen. But that afternoon, the rage was so strong on the sidewalk outside the church that even the bear-sized McCabe took a pummeling. “He saved those news guys’ lives, but he took some shots, I saw that.” When Al got the summons to Geffken’s Bar, Paul Vario was waiting to surrender on a combined sentence of three years. “Paulie had all these things going on with him, but he called me out to Geffken’s to tell me that, even without the button, he was going to treat me just as if I’d been made. Then he took me around to the members of his crew and told them the same thing.” Leaving the bar, Al told himself he was at least halfway to his goal.