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of course. The Bonanno crime group was very much opposed to selling drugs, if it was done officially. If it was done unofficially, the money to be made would have made Donald Trump blush. Of course, there was a downside to all of this. Robert Lino knew all about it.

    For starters, his older brother, Vincent, had died at age twenty-three of a drug overdose. He took too much heroin and that was that. This was like a slap in the back of Robert’s head. Vincent was a lot of things, but he would always be Robert’s brother. Now the drugs were ripping apart the rest of the family. Robert’s sister, Grace Ann, had addiction problems. Grace Ann was scoring from gangsters, informally. She would disappear for days at a time, sliding further and further away from the rest of the family. Only Robert had managed to stay away from it. It was a depressing time for him. He viewed the area and the era as dangerous to his family. He believed both drugs and the neighborhood itself had killed his brother Vincent. He was aware that his father would spend weeks at a time in Italy arranging drug deals. His father could only see all the money he was making and nothing else.

    That was Midwood in the late 1980s. It was the Wild West. At one point there was a young couple from the neighborhood who’d come to the conclusion that robbing Mafia social clubs was a great idea. They would put on disguises and bust in waving revolvers and take as much cash as they could, then bolt out of there faster than red-blooded American shoppers the day after Thanksgiving. When word leaked out that this was going on, they became known in the press as Bonnie and Clyde of Brooklyn. This iconic tag was probably somewhat romantic, but the truth of such matters is messy and difficult to understand. To the reading public, the couple became a pair of antiheroes, criminals who robbed only criminals.

    There was something appealing about this, but there was also a foreboding sense that Bonnie and Clyde—just like their namesakes—were headed for a nasty end. In Midwood, you certainly couldn’t have found anybody who’d bet Bonnie and Clyde of Brooklyn were long for this world. People didn’t really debate their motives. Who knew why they chose such a self-destructive career? It was clearly a deliberate act of suicide, and almost nobody thought the New York City Police Department should even bother with them. The criminals would catch the criminals, administer their own version of justice, and that would be that. The taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the cost of a trial.

    The reaction to Bonnie and Clyde revealed a Midwood symptom: sometimes the mob becomes the criminal justice system it seeks to subvert. It is as much a part of the neighborhood as Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Uncle Louie G’s Italian ices. So when Bonnie and Clyde were shot in the head at a stoplight as they were driving home a station wagon filled with Christmas presents, there was no surprise and not a whole lot of effort to find out who did it. This was the correct ending to a peculiarly Brooklyn tale.

    The way people from the neighborhood figured it, the crazy couple had ripped off the gangsters, so the gangsters were justified in killing the crazy couple. The gangsters had every right to, and in fact, under the rules of Midwood, they were obligated to do this. They had no choice. End of case. With certain residents of Midwood, the notion of what was criminal was relative. If you asked somebody if they thought it was a crime to murder your obnoxious upstairs neighbor, they’d say, “Of course.” If you asked them if they thought it was a crime to murder a man and woman burglary team who had made a point of robbing Mafia social clubs, they’d respond, “What’d they expect?” There was common sense in it, and it was this Midwood logic—the “you get what you deserve” school—that Robert Lino carried around with him.

    The Midwood logic shaped opportunities. In Robert Lino’s world, where