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drugs killed your brother and were killing your sister, you had to get out or get with the program. You joined the army or got a job at the post office or ran a pizza parlor. Or you dealt drugs or became a gangster. With the last two choices, it was important to note the distinction. The drug dealer was a lowlife. The gangster was a man of honor. These options were clear in a neighborhood where you started off a few steps behind the starting line.

    College was not an option. In school Robert sometimes had problems reading all the words. In class, he had a hard time sitting still. He wasn’t the biggest kid, so football wasn’t an option. He made it only as far as sixth grade. He never learned algebra or chemistry or the history of Western civilization. He dropped out of middle school when he was thirteen years old and nobody blinked. He wasn’t expected to stick it out through high school. His father hadn’t. His cousins Eddie and Frank hadn’t. Few of the wiseguys he knew took school seriously at all. If anything, they derided it as a waste of time. What was the point? What did you learn there that you couldn’t learn on the street? They knew where they were headed and school was not in the picture. The idea that you graduated high school, went off to college away from the neighborhood, got a big-money job and earned a real salary—it was all a big joke. Only losers and the kids whose fathers could afford to send them to military school or Poly Prep did that. For Robert Lino, stepping forward into late twentieth-century America with only a sixth-grade education was just something that was meant to be. There wasn’t much you could expect to do about it except find another way.

    So while other kids learned calculus, Robert Lino learned Mafia math—the best way to figure the line on college football; the quick way to calculate points of the vig when helping your cousins track the money they put out on the street. He was the kid who was always around, available to do the work nobody else was willing to do. He was the caddy, the ball boy, the sorcerer’s apprentice. And these guys, these made men, they were his heroes. They were part of something special, something outside of the usual banal life of the dollars-per-hour working sad-sack drone. He believed that the myth of The Godfather was real. He believed that gangsters only hurt rats and dead-beats, only stole from people who could afford it, and did it all to feed their wives and children. He swore allegiance to the ritual of omerta , saw “the life” as a calling. Other teenagers memorized batting averages or spent all their unscheduled hours skateboarding. By the time Robert was a teenager, he knew the entire induction ceremony by heart—the business with the burning saint, the pin in the trigger finger, everything. “If you prick my finger, will I not bleed?”

    From the first day his father had him collect bets from his lowlife bookmaking customers, Robert Lino knew where he was headed.

CHAPTER FOUR

    June 1989

     
    Post-crash, the Vertical Club on the Upper East Side remained popular among Wall Streeters. Those who paid the exorbitant monthly fees toned up abs and pecs and worked on keeping themselves fit and trim and in good enough shape to make more and more and more. They worked out whenever they could fit it in. The club was open from five in the morning until midnight, and there’d be people there when the doors opened and people there when they closed. It was a desirable place to be because more often than not there was the potential to make a connection that could lead to a deal or a commission or some transaction that ended with more money in your bank account. Between sets with the free weights and the four miles on the treadmill, if you weren’t talking business, there was something wrong with you. After all, what else was there but getting and having? Or in the case of Cary Cimino, keeping.

    In less than two years the market had recovered