change. You hold up your end, the other guys hold up theirs. Five men on the job, four get popped, that fifth man better be holding four shares. That’s why it’s better to have a planner—lots of things could happen to that fifth man over a few years.
If you fall, it’s okay to do something for yourself. You don’t have to plead not guilty and take your chances. You can take a deal. If you can clear up a whole lot of cases for the cops, you might score a pretty decent offer. Doesn’t matter if you did them or not. Nobody cares. Solved is solved.
That doesn’t happen too often to guys who do my kind of work. Those deals, they’re usually for killers. Not hit men, sickos who get off on doing it. Those kind, they want to talk about what they did, unless they’re holding out for a book-and-movie deal.
The cops, most of the time, they’ll respect you being a professional. It takes a long time for them to do that, though. My first time down, the cops told me, if I wouldn’t help myself, I’d be doing everyone else’s time for them. They also said I wouldn’t get any play from the DA unless they cleared it first.
That’s all a lie. NYPD Special. The truth is, they always want a plea. Unless the case makes the papers, that is. Once the media gets hold of a case, then the DA’s Office has to play hardball. Otherwise, unless they’ve got you dead to rights, they don’t want a trial.
Even the Legal Aid guys know this. They’ll sit down with you and tell you what they think the case is worth. Any armed robbery can land you with a quarter to do before your max-out date. Twenty-five years. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a first offender or a working pro, the top can’t be more than that. For one job, I mean. If you’ve been down before, every year you can cut from the top is worth a lot, because then your minimum is half your max. There’s always a going rate for pleas. Even for a guy like me.
Sure, the cops’ll look me over, tell me, “You’ve got enough sheets for a king-sized bed.” Meaning, so many priors they wouldn’t fit on one piece of paper. Actually, what I’ve got is a lot of arrests. Only two convictions, and one of them a misdemeanor. Until I took the last one, I mean.
But that’s just cop-talk. They know it’s not up to them. If some ADA wants to cut a few years off your time, there’s nothing they can say about it.
It’s funny. The kind of work I do, the smoother the job goes, the more slack they can cut me if I get dropped. Armed robbery, that’s one thing. Armed robbery where you have to use the weapons, that’s another.
There’s all these fine little edges. You break into a warehouse, cart away a truckload of loot, that’s something you can deal on. But if you break into a house, not so easy. Those cat-burglar guys, you never know what they were really after, see? But with guys like me, the cops know it’s always money. Only money.
The law makes you aim high. Take down a bank or stick up a liquor store, it’s still an armed robbery. If they’re going to lump it all in that same bag, why take a ten-year risk for cigarette money?
Must be the way those black-glove guys start thinking after a while. Once they’ve got the girl captured, they know what’s next. Even if they let her go, they’re still going down forever—that kind of thing, it’s probably got twenty different crimes tied up in it. Murder, that’s Life, too. So why let her go, maybe have her testify against you?
But on a professional piece of work, the cops usually know where to look. And they’re not the only ones.
It was Ken that changed that, a long time ago. Solly told me Ken was the first heister who wouldn’t pay tax on his work. Used to be, you pulled a job in anyone’s territory, you had to let them slice a little off the top. Probably started back when the families were only taking Sicilians. I even heard you had to ask their permission first.
Solly really admired Ken. He never got tired of telling stories about him. Not what you might think, though. What he liked about Ken the best was the way