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want.”
    What he meant was sell them opportunities to gamble, sell them prostitutes, sell them protection, or—the coming business in the 1960s—sell them narcotics.
    Fine. Except that the Five Families had gambling and prostitution tied up in New York, and other families of Cosa Nostra had it tied up in other cities. I think Frank Costello could have arranged to let me buy into a piece of the gambling action in Manhattan, but the Families were fighting turf wars, which meant a chance of losing everything, including your life, in one hellish night.
    So far as prostitution was concerned, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Exploiting girls was not my idea of a way of turning a profit. I had scruples. You could never be sure if a girl came to the life because she wanted to, or because necessity pushed her, or—worse—because some guy forced her. I didn’t want to have to worry about that. Besides, more and more, girls were entering the life because of addiction. It was the worst of all possible combinations.
    Narcotics? No way. The problem there was that dope had been sold to the dregs of the community for years, and as long as that was where it was sold nobody much cared, but in the sixties, the trade was expanding into the good neighborhoods and the suburbs, which meant that the law was going to turn fanatical. Ohio, for example, had already made it law that a guy would go up for life for selling just one hit. Imagine that! Life in the slammer for selling just one hit of heroin! And I’m not saying that was wrong. Bad chemicals make people into animals. Worse, it makes them into walking corpses.
    Buddy suggested a chop shop—that is, a garage where stolen cars were modified, numbers filed off, repainted, and so on. Sure. Okay. A small profit. A small-time operation.
    I wanted a legit business.
    Okay. Sell people something they want. Better than that, make them want something they didn’t know they wanted, and then sell them that. A thousand billion-dollar businesses had been built on selling people what they didn’t know they would ever want—what, in fact, they didn’t want when they bought it, and had no need for.
    My idea came to me when I wanted to buy Giselle a present, as much for me as for her, something very sexy to wear on her gorgeous body. Remember the fifties? Where would you have bought a really brief bikini or a G-string or a pair of crotchless panties? Department stores did not carry much in the way of intimate apparel. Neither did women’s shops. White rayon panties and white cotton bras from Woolworth’s or Penney’s were standard underwear. I remember a nylon panty-and-bra set based on a leopard-skin print. It was considered daring, even though the waistband covered the navel.
    You might try a sex shop, almost all of which were so sleazy a man or woman would be embarrassed to be seen coming out of one. You could order something by mail from Frederick’s of Hollywood, but that was about it.
    It’s unbelievable, when you think about it. In those years young women still wore girdles! Also panty-girdles. And rigid bras of nylon and rubber that forced their breasts into unnatural pointy shapes that were ogled on television. Nothing was too hideous for women to force their suffering flesh into in those years. Giselle wore no bras most of the time, and seeing her breasts moving naturally under a blouse or sweater caused some men to ogle and some women to cluck.
    The fifties ended, the sixties began, and it didn’t get much better. We were on the verge of the so-called Sexual Revolution, but—okay, I’ve made my point.
    It occurred to me that here was a business: selling sexy scanties in respectable shops in silk-stocking neighborhoods. Men would buy to please their wives and girlfriends. Women would buy to please their husbands and boyfriends. We could go into that business on the basis of a cautious investment, and who could guess what would follow?—utter failure, modest success, or a big