Read Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion for Free Online

ended up on the wrong end of a gangster’s knife, and he knew it would not be the last.
    Before the kid made good on his promise to send Harris on a one-way trip out of this world, he had a question for him.
    “Are you a Jew?” the kid said.
    This was a question Harris had heard too many times before. He thought of the winter mornings he descendedinto the subway station tunnel on his walk to school to avoid the cold in his native Inwood, then a predominantly Irish neighborhood, and the Irish Catholic kids who would wait on the other side to beat him because their parents told them the Jews killed Jesus. He remembered how petrified he was to walk those streets with the velvet bag that contained his tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl he received on his bar mitzvah which he took with him to the temple up the block on the High Holy Days. How he would hold it close to his body so the neighborhood bullies would not see the Star of David embroidered on it.
    Jewish kids growing up in the Inwood of Harris’s youth knew they were in for a beating if they dared enter any of the neighborhood’s seventy-three Irish pubs. Good Shepherd Church near the bustling intersection of 207th Street and Broadway hosted no less than fourteen masses packed with Irish Catholics every Sunday, and a xenophobic paranoia thickened the air with rumors about the “negroes” moving in and the jobs and homes they would steal from Irish families who had lived there for generations. The black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish children of Inwood grew up with a nagging feeling they were some foreign presence discourteously taking up residence on somebody else’s turf. To be different from the rest on those streets, and especially to have had the audacity to be born a Jew, was to live your life as a marked man. And now, a couple of hours down the road from all that, here was a south Jersey hood with his knife pressed to Harris’s gut and a question all too familiar to a kid from those angry streets back home. Maybe, for the first time in his life, he found himself yearning for those days when the worst thing he had to worry about was what to say to his mother when he made it back home just before dawn. Maybe that freedom he went chasing when he left her house for good also was something to fear.
    Persuading the kid he had not been hustled had been worth a shot, but there was not much Harris could do about his Jewishness. His first instinct was to tell the kid that no, he was not a Jew. But then he figured that if being Jewish was the thing he was about to die for, he would rather die proudly than die a coward.
    “Yes, I am,” Harris told the kid. “What about it?”
    For a moment, everyone was silent.
    “No shit?” the kid said. “Me, too! Gimme five!”
    The hood put away the blade and stuck out his hand. Harris could not believe it. He hesitated a moment and slapped him five. Then he noticed the kid’s expression change.
    “What’s wrong?”
    The kid mewled pathetically about not having any money for breakfast.
    If enough dough to buy breakfast was all it would take to spare Harris his life, then breakfast was precisely what these boys would get. Harris learned enough on the streets of New York City to know a can’t-miss deal when he saw one. He promptly curled off thirty bucks from his roll of the night’s winnings—easily enough in those days to buy breakfast every day for the next week. And, just as quickly, he and Schlegel followed Nagai out of the place, making sure to offer a few kind goodbyes for good measure.
    Nagai’s Cadillac may have been the reason Schlegel and the boys headed south on Route 1 that night, but there was another reason they liked having the old man along when they went fishing: They knew they could count on him to deliver an ass-kicking as much as they could count on him for a ride. Nagai may have been older and smaller, but he was a guy you did not mess with. Nagai and his cohorts were at least as tough as any of the gangsters