The Iceman Cometh…The Wise Guys Go-eth

(Originally published 7/1/14)

My paternal grandfather first came to America with his father as a six-year-old boy in 1898. William McKinley was the president at the time. The pair returned to their hometown, Castelmezzano, Italy, for several years after that, but they could not resist the allure of the states.

Their peripatetic ways were all about finding work and earning some decent money in hardscrabble times. Their native land was not exactly a land of opportunity. When, however, my grandfather reached young adulthood, he resented the old school ways of turning over everything he earned to his father and receiving—in return—a meager allowance. Understandably, he wanted to keep the fruits of his labor and forge a life of his own. His father, though, found such a request beyond the pale and would not budge. This father-son dispute set the wheels in motion.

Having more than he could stomach of what was akin to indentured servitude, my grandfather hopped on a boat back to Italy, which proved to be poor timing on his part. For it was the eve of World War I and he was promptly drafted into the Italian army. My grandfather spent a couple of years in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where enemy combatants were treated poorly. But fortunately, he made it home—alive and in one piece after the war—when so many men did not. He also made it back to the United States. This go-round, though, he was his own man and was not about to turn over any of his earnings to a higher authority.

In the mid-1920s, my grandfather brought his wife and daughter—my grandmother and aunt—to live here. They would all become Americans. My father and a brother were born on American soil several years later during the Great Depression, which was around the time my grandfather founded his own ice business. He was an iceman when most people had iceboxes in their homes and refrigerator technology was in its infancy. The man lugged countless heavy blocks of ice up countless flights of stairs in the tenements that housed the preponderance of his customers. He had some business clients, too, including the Lucky Club, a speakeasy on Broadway in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan.

Upon making an ice delivery at the Lucky Club one afternoon, my grandfather was confronted by a man who made him an offer he could not refuse. He was informed that all his wholesale ice purchases would thereafter be made through this hoodlum's concern. Of course, the cost of the ice would be more than he was paying. My grandfather said no in no uncertain terms to this business arrangement and was told something to the effect, “We have ways of making you change your mind.” Soon after, two men set upon my grandfather as he exited the club after an ice delivery. They made the same proposal as before: Buy the ice from us or suffer the consequences. My grandfather informed the goons to take a hike, and they did not take kindly to the suggestion. In fact, they were about to show him the “ways” they had to make a person change his mind when my grandfather pulled out an ice pick from his pocket and thrust it toward them. He exited the club forthwith, wondering if what he had done was the wisest course. After all, Mafia hoods do not subscribe to the philosophy, “May the best man win,” which, in this instance, was my grandfather. He worked hard for his money—and it was not a whole lot in those days—and did not intend on sharing it with greaseballs.

As fate would have it, my grandfather knew a neighborhood police captain who had some sway with the local wise guys. The cop put in a good word for him and requested he be left alone—and that no retaliation come his way. My grandfather never bought his ice from the syndicate. And this intercession turned out providential for a whole host of people, including me, who might not have been born thirty years later without it. While my grandfather’s ice business melted away in the 1940s, when refrigeration became accessible to the masses, he nonetheless had saved up enough money to buy a house of his own in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. He worked at the Sheffield Milk plant—first in the Bronx and then in Brooklyn—until the day he retired. And he needed no help from the Luca Brasis of the world.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)