Chapter 1

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6

My introduction into the world of urban piracy came at a tender age. It was a beautiful spring day in the year two thousand. I was four years and four months of age. My father, Francesco “Frank” Il-Cazzo, took me for a ride in his shiny, black Lincoln Town Car. He had purchased the car from a colleague named Giuseppi Ladro. I knew him as Uncle Joe or Joey Wheels. At the time I knew nothing about the purchase, but later research indicated that a car lot several states to the south had been robbed of thirty vehicles. The manager of the lot had closed the business for ten days in order to have some maintenance and extermination done on the main building. Upon returning he noticed the missing cars. After filling out the proper police reports and paperwork, the owner was compensated fully by his insurance company. The manager received forty percent from the resale of each car by the “thieves.” The cars were retagged and one of them was purchased by my father for a low price. The insurance companies, run by the wealthy at the expense of the poor, took a small beating. The rich car manufacturing companies took a hit by not getting a cut on thirty cars and trucks. Everyone else either got paid or saved a fortune on purchasing prices. Such are the efforts of urban pirates.
That sunny spring day my father and I drove to a warehouse at the airport. As we neared the noisy and dark building my father looked over at me. “I want to introduce you to someone. Just call him Uncle Sal. He's not a blood relative, Vinnie, just a friend of mine.” I was absorbed in watching the planes take off and land. I didn't pay much initial attention when my father introduced me to Salvatore Testa.
“How you doing, Vinnie?” Sal asked as he bent down to shake my hand. He had black slicked back hair, a face that was all points and angles, and was dressed in a blue one piece uniform with his name embroidered on the left breast. Sal and my father stepped back into the cargo area to discuss business. I couldn't hear a word they said over the roar of the plane engines. I explored the dusty cargo area and saw some open wooden boxes with silk dress shirts in them wrapped in plastic, crates full of laptops and one crate entirely full of New Balance sneakers. Sal was talking in earnest and waving his arms around. My father was shaking his head and pointing at the boxes. Finally they shook hands.
My father and I were starting to leave when Sal stopped us. He reached into the crate of shoes and pulled out a pair. “Try these on, Vinnie. A gift from your Uncle Sal.” They fit perfectly. I recall being excited to receive them.
It wasn’t long until I saw Uncle Sal again. Early the next Saturday morning he pulled up in an SUV filled with crates of fresh fruit. Not just regular fruit like bananas, apples and oranges, but exotic fruits as well, like kiwis, star fruit, guava and pineapples. My sisters and I stood and watched as Sal unloaded the crates and brought them into the house. My mother, Antoinette, shook her head as she sorted through the crates, “There must be enough here to feed the neighborhood!” She looked bemused.
“Just a little gift from my family to yours.” Sal murmured. The following Sunday he
showed up with cases of expensive red wine and boxes of imported chocolates. My father gave me a sip of wine one night. It was dry and quite strong to my taste. I made a face and asked for another sip.
The next weekend Sal brought a box full of leather motorcycle jackets in various sizes.
Trailing behind him I asked where he got all this cool stuff. “It’s F-O-T, Vinnie.” I gave him confused. “You know, it fell off a truck.” Sal laughed.
I was shocked. How could a driver be so careless? This was a lot of stuff. It was worth a lot of money. After a few more weeks of receiving “gifts” I began to wonder why the drivers didn't pick the stuff back up and put it back inside the truck.
There were enough leather jackets that my father was able to outfit six neighboring
families. We had a giant block party one weekend and my father handed out the jackets as well as timberland boots, designer jeans and mirrored sunglasses. Neighbors brought pot luck for the party. Scotty McGregor, who lived three houses down, brought thirty pounds of boneless ribeye steaks. Charlie Valance, who lived across the street, brought an enormous tossed salad and homemade Italian dressing. Other neighbors provided hors d'oeuvres and desserts. We also had five kinds of bread, grilled sweet potatoes, various assortments of cheese, fruit and so forth that Sal had brought us. My family sent large quantities of leftovers home with neighbors after the party.
That night as my father tucked me in I finally asked, “Papa, where does Uncle Sal get all that stuff he brings us? I asked him and he said it fell off a truck. But none of it looks damaged to me.”
My father laughed a moment and then his eyes lit up. “You’re a smart and observant kid, Vinnie. F-O-T is just an expression. Things have been great economically for a while now. But the stock market has been having some issues and with the recent election of George the second, that prosperity is probably set to change. People have to improvise if they plan to stay afloat. No matter what it takes we can not let the corporate defenders destroy our middle class. So sometimes urban pirates, like Sal, plunder the cargo from the ships hauling freight. Or rather the trucks and airplanes.”
I nodded sleepily, understanding almost nothing of what my father had said. He tucked me in. “I'll explain more tomorrow. I want to take you with me to work.” I smiled at that and fell asleep dreaming of pirates and plunder and things falling off of trucks.
The next morning I awoke to the smell of fresh coffee, waffles and frying bacon. I slowly made my way downstairs with sleep still clouding my mind. My mother was still asleep as usual. My father was awake and cooking. The opera Aida was playing in the kitchen as he poured batter onto the hot waffle iron. After eating waffles and drinking half coffee-half milk until my tummy hurt, I was shooed upstairs to get bathed and dressed. “Jeans, long sleeved shirt, bandana and boots, Vinnie. Oh and don't forget your backpack, you'll be wanting it.” My father winked at me. I was confused by why he wanted my to bring my knapsack, but I figured that he would explain later.
After scrubbing myself to a glowing pink in the tub, I dried off and put on a T shirt,
sweatshirt, loose fitting jeans and my boots. I tied a black and red checked bandana over my long, sandy hair. I grabbed my sack and headed downstairs. My father was already dressed in a long, white, cotton coat with deep pockets worn over cargo jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, long leather boots that folded over on top and a black baseball cap. I knew he worked unloading boxes at the grocery store but I had never joined him. He smiled at me and we walked out to the car.
“Son,” my father patted me on the head as we pulled out of the drive way, “Today I'm
going to let you in on some secrets. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.” I nodded at him, proud to be included in his confidence. “What kind of secrets?” I inquired.
A half hour later we pulled into the parking lot of a giant supermarket. The place was like a series of mammoth, neon lighted, streets of food. As I followed my father through the store toward the back I saw him stop at a bulk food section and fill a bag with cashews, almonds, granola, yoghurt covered raisins and carob chips. He wrote a number on a sticker from a bin of flax-seeds and put it on the bag. As we walked he handed me the bag. “Just a snack for you, Vinnie. We can pay on the way out. Did you notice that the flax seeds are eighty-five cents a pound? The cashews are six bucks a pound. The almonds are four bucks a pound. So what you do is write the number code for the cheap flax seeds and then load up on the quality food. Later you pay for a couple pounds of the cheaper item.”
I looked up at him in awe. “But, isn't that like stealing? And fibbing?” I wasn't sure how to process the information. But I was hungry and ate a handful of the trail mix he had created.
“Son, urban pirates have been plundering supermarkets on a regular basis without raising the slightest suspicion, ever since the supermarkets began. It is almost a crime not to plunder them. The fact that so much of this goes on and the supermarkets still bring in huge profits shows you exactly how much overcharging has occurred in the first place. They’re the criminals, the dishonest cheaters. We pirates are on the right side. Like Robin Hood.” My father stopped at a rack of all beef summer sausages and hard salamis. He picked up two salamis and before I could blink they disappeared up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. Three summer sausages went inside the big front pockets of his coat.
“I thought Robin Hood took stuff to give to the poor.” I felt confused, but I knew my
father was a good man who took care of our neighbors whenever they needed anything. Therefore what he was saying had to be true.
“He certainly did, Vinnie. But we aren't exactly rich anymore. None of our neighbors are rich. Your mother and I barley make enough to pay the bills and insurance and food. We aren’t the only ones having problems. Beside that fact, supermarkets, like other businesses, refer to plundering as "inventory shrinkage." It's as if we pirates are helping businesses reduce weight. So I try to view our efforts as a method designed to trim the economy and I plunder with a positive attitude.” My father winked and removed a couple of cans of Coke for us from a long 12 pack box. He popped them open and handed me one.
We walked through several aisles that were partially full of mid-morning shoppers. I didn't see anyone else trying to help the grocery store reduce itself, but I wasn't sure what to look for. As we passed through an aisle of candy and chips I noticed my father checking the prices on some bags of potato chips. I casually lifted four family sized bags of Reese’s Pieces and slid them into the pockets of my sweatshirt. My father was right, it was easy. We walked toward the back of the store and I opened my bag of trail mix and poured in two bags of the candy. My father noticed what I had done and smiled.
“You catch on fast. You are one clever kid.” He chuckled. “I have to work now, but
you can sit on the loading dock and watch how the job is done.” My father showed me a chair. I sat and sipped Coke in between handfuls of trail mix.
For the next three hours I watched with interest as my father and three other men I knew from our neighborhood worked at their job loading and unloading trucks in the rear of the store. Every half hour or so a car would pull in and someone would talk to my father. After a brief conversation the other three men would unload a few cases of food, soda, beer, wine and various non-food items. They would transfer the cases from one of the trucks into the car that had pulled up. The driver of the car would drive away and the men would continue bringing merchandise from the trucks and loading it into the storage area.. My father looked to be in charge of everything.
After three hours I started to drift off into a nap. An hour later my father woke me up and said he was done working. We went back inside the grocery store and found a cart. I stood on the back as my father filled the cart with steaks, seafood, pork chops, cereal and other items. After using his employee card to get a ten percent discount, I helped him unload items at a self checkout. He moved so fast that it was impossible to tell which items he had scanned and which he had not. He placed his scanned items back in the cart with the rest of the unscanned groceries. Some items got packed directly into my knapsack. After a few minutes I saw him swipe a visa gift card and bag everything up. Instead of leaving through the main entrance we pushed the cart into the gardening section and left through an area that sold plants and seeds.
“Vinnie, “ my father looked over at me once we were in the car, “We never exit the
front entrance to the store. There are sensors that might beep if you have unpaid items. The gardening section doesn't have those sensors on their exits, I'm not certain why, but since they don't it is easier to leave that way. We just paid slightly over one hundred dollars for almost three hundred dollars worth of groceries. That's why you always use self checkout. No one can keep track of what you scanned and didn't scan, if you do get caught, feign confusion and start scanning over again,”
I nodded. There was a small knot in my stomach because what my father was saying sounded wrong to me. But I was starting to notice how much enjoyment he got out of beating the system. I also was sure that my father knew best.
“That credit card I used, I got it from a lady your mother knows, Agnes McGillicuddy.
She works at another store. Agnes adds funds to a dozen or so cards every week. After doing so she slips the cards to your mother and some other friends. The cash register will come up short unless she pays for the cards. But there are ways around that as well.” My father was driving toward home. The stuff uncle Sal brings us is his way of paying me back for getting him some visa cards and helping him save a fortune when he purchased a motorcycle. A bit of quid pro quo, if you will.”
I smiled and nodded. “Those boxes that Leo, Johnny and Clark were loading into cars, were those F-O-T?”
My father laughed. “Bingo! Very good, Vincenzo my lad.”
I thought for a moment. “So things don't really fall off a truck. They are removed by
workers and put somewhere else? And pirates get the stuff and share it around like mama and you do at our parties?”
“Exactly, my boy. You are catching on.” My father beamed at me. “And the store is
covered by insurance. So it isn’t a huge deal to them anyway if they lose some stock.”
“I have two bags of M&Ms for Gina and Tori. And I got a coloring book too.” I pulled the coloring book of wild animals from the front of my pants where I had half stuffed it using my sweatshirt to cover it. “I hope that’s OK.”
“You certainly have a knack for this. I'm proud of you, son. Your sisters will appreciate the candy. But remember, don't take more than you need, don't operate without someone to cover you, and never take cheap items. You should always shop for high end goods. After all, it’s free.” My father turned on the radio and an easy-listening station filled the car as I watched the other cars whizzing by.

Author's Note

A rough draft