Chapter 4: Sean

When I graduated from Harvard with a law degree and the desire to take on the world, I had no idea that I’d end up working for my father, the notorious Irish gangster, Patsy O’Connor.

I refer to him as “notorious Irish gangster” because that’s what the press and the cops have called him for if I could remember. Even growing up, the neighborhood kids treated me differently just because I was the son of Patsy O’Connor.

Even the neighborhood bullies gave me a wide path, only working up the nerve to talk to me to offer their services for protection, enforcement, or vengeance.

If you ever need anybody’s ass kick, Sean, you just let us know.

Uh, sure. Will do. I mean, what do you when you’re ten years old and the bullies want to work for you.

I’m sure most kids would have thought it was cool. To me, it was just an embarrassment. I didn’t tell anyone that I was Patsy O’Connor’s only son because I didn’t want anyone to know. I would have preferred to fight my own battles in anonymity than to be known as “Patsy O’Connor’s boy”, the little Irish gangster of Wilford Brimley Middle School.

I’d never experienced the notorious side of Patsy O’Connor. He was never anything but warm and kind to me. I was the apple of his eye and I thought he hung the moon. Period. Of course, I had no way of knowing back then that after throwing the ball in the backyard with me he’d have to rush off to service his mistress or break some poor schmuck’s arm for not paying back money he’d been lent or paying for protection he’d been offered.

I didn’t know exactly what my dad did for a living until I was in my teens, when my best pal Joey Boots worked up the nerve to ask what my dad did for a living.

“He’s in import/export,” I said without having a clue what that even meant. We were probably ten or eleven, sitting on the stoop eating ice cream to battle the summer heat.

“My dad says your dad is a gangster,” Joey said. “I mean, don’t tell your dad that my dad said that.” He paused with tears suddenly filling his eyes.” I wouldn’t want my dad to disappear or anything.”

I remember frowning at him like he was a dog with two heads. The ice cream dripped down my knuckles because I wasn’t eating it fast enough. I scowled at him.

“What are you talking about?”

Joey looked left and right, then over his shoulder at his front door. “My dad said there was a story in the paper about your dad being arrested for something, but he didn’t say what.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said angrily. I had no idea if he was lying or not. I wasn’t allowed to read the papers or watch the news. I had never wondered why until that moment. I must have given him a hard look because I remember the blood draining from his face as the vanilla ice cream ran down his chin.

“Hey, you’re right,” he said. “I was just messing with you. Come on, I’ll buy us another ice cream.”

When I asked my mom what dad did for a living she said to go ask him. When I asked him, he just shrugged and said, “Whatever the fuck it takes to put food on the table.”

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. How could I not know that my dad was the head of a notorious Irish gang?

One word: denial.

Of course, I knew it, but I refused to believe it. To me, he was just Patsy O’Connor, the best dad in the world. I knew there was something more to his personality, something a little dark and mysterious, but I refused to speculate on what that might be.

It wasn’t until years later, after the dawn of the internet when I was probably sixteen or seventeen years old that I worked up the nerve to type “Patrick Patsy O’Connor” into a Yahoo search bar.

According to Yahoo, my father was a notorious (damn that word) Irish gangster who had spent most of his teenage years in detention centers because he couldn’t stay out of trouble and a good bit of his adult life in prison for the same reason. His crimes ranged from extortion, burglary, assault and battery, racketeering, and loan sharking. There was no mention of drugs and prostitution, so I guess he had to draw the line somewhere.

I left for college at eighteen and came home after getting my law degree at twenty-four. My plan was to go to work for a big firm and make as much money as possible and to distance myself from my notorious father.

When people asked if I was Patsy O’Connor’s son I would just say no and quickly change the subject.

Then my dad showed up at my apartment late one night a few weeks after I’d moved back to the city. I remember opening the door to find him standing there, his coat slick with rain and a look of impending doom on his face. For a moment, I thought he was there to tell me that my mother had died. No, he was there with news that was, in his mind at least, probably worse.

“The feds are up my ass again,” he said, sitting at the bar that separated my tiny kitchen from my tiny living room while I pulled a bottle of Irish whiskey and two tumblers from the cupboard. He brushed the rain from his buzzed white hair and wiped his hands on his shirt. “Motherfuckers, just won’t leave me alone.”

I stood across from him and poured two fingers of whiskey into his glass. He downed it before I could pour mine. He held out his glass and I filled it to the rim.

“Tell me exactly what’s going on,” I said, shooting back the whiskey and sighing as it burned its way down my throat. I studied his eyes, wondering if this was the pivotal point in our relationship when he actually told me the truth.

“You know about my business,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. The older he got, the lower he spoke. His voice had become a growl since I’d been away at college.

“Is that a question?” I asked. “Or a statement.”

“You know what I do,” he said, taking a sip of the whiskey and wiping his lips with a knuckle. “You’re not stupid. I know.”

“No, I’m not stupid, dad,” I said. “You’re in the import/export business. The problem is the things you import and export are not exactly legal.”

He shrugged with his entire face. He had aged substantially since I’d been away at school. His pale, pudgy features went up and down.

“We don’t do dope and we don’t do guns,” he said as if I should be proud that he had at least set a bar for his illegal activities. “Mostly counterfeit goods, these days. Knock off designer handbags and shoes coming out of China. Some watches out of Korea. Goddamn fake Rolexes. Look just like the real thing.”

“So, you’re knocking off watches, purses, and shoes,” I said. I held up my glass to toast him. “Glad you’re not into human trafficking or anything really immoral.”

He glared at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “Don’t you fucking talk down to me, boy,” he growled. “My business put food on the table and a roof over your head since the day you were born. And paid for that expensive law school you just had to go to. NYU wasn’t good enough for you. No, you had to go to fucking Harvard.”

“I appreciate everything you’ve ever done for me, dad,” I said. “And I will pay you back, every cent.”

He waved a thick hand at me. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, boy, I don’t want your fucking money.”

“Then what do you want, dad?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“I need you to come to work for me,” he said, pleading with his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a helpless look on my dad’s face. “I need you to help keep your old man out of jail.”

Over the last ten years I had managed to keep him out of jail and move him toward legitimate business interests. He was resistant at first because the business made so much fucking money. Incredible amounts of cash. The kind of money that was hard to resist, even by the most moral among us, including me.

I became his corporate and private legal counsel. I had insight into every aspect of his business, legal or not. I finally knew after all those years exactly what my dad did for a living. I learned every secret, business and otherwise.

We stayed up all night, finishing that bottle of whiskey and putting a good dent in another. He told me about every aspect of his business. And without me asking told me about every aspect of his personal life. He railed off a long list of women he’d slept with (other than my mother), how each relationship started and ended, how much it had cost him to get the scorned ones off his back, and most interestingly, how he had been having an affair with his secretary, Boozie, since before I was born.

Boozie Hamilton’s real name was Betty Anne Hamilton. Dad gave her the nickname Boozie because, he said, that was how she made him feel. Boozie. I asked him what the fuck that meant.

“You know, boozie, like drunk,” he said, giving me a look that clearly said it was a dumb question. “When I’m around her, she just makes me feel good, like I gotta slothful of booze.”

“Ah, I see,” I said. At that moment in time, ten years ago, dad was fifty-eight and Boozie was older, probably already close to sixty. She was probably 5’2 or so, a little dumpy and thick around the middle, with makeup that she applied with a trowel and a beehive haircut that she had sculpted twice a month at a salon downtown. I could imagine what she must have looked like naked, but I was pretty sure when dad looked at her he saw the thin redhead he had started banging a decade before my birth.

I’d seen pictures of Boozie back in the day. She was a showgirl at a club downtown. My dad was immediately taken with her and her with him. The only problem was, Boozie was not the type of girl a good Catholic Irish boy took home to mother. So, he set her up in an apartment and fucked her on the side and made her his private secretary so he could keep her close. I would imagine in her day Boozie could have had her pick of men. Patsy O’Connor was not the kind of man to share a mistress, so he wanted Boozie close enough to watch. And to fuck any time the urge hit.

And now Boozie was sick and leaving and dad’s heart was breaking. Forget that the feds still sniffed around the business-like hounds on a blood trail. The old man wasn’t worried about that. All he could focus on was Boozie leaving and the giant whole it was going to leave in his life.

I wasn’t overly concerned about Boozie retiring. To the contrary, I couldn’t stand her and looked forward to the day when I came into the office without doing so under her glaring gaze. I think Boozie saw my mother when she looked at me, and she blamed my mom for being the sole reason she had never been made Mrs. Patsy O’Connor.

Boozie was set to leave on Friday. Today was Monday. My dad was walking around like a lovesick pup about to lose his litter mate. Boozie was her usual self; sitting at the desk filing her nails or touching up her makeup. She was wearing a bad wig to cover up her balding head, courtesy of the chemo that dad was paying for. She was a lousy receptionist and not a very nice person, but according to dad, in her day, she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch with her lips. Just the thought makes my skin crawl.

I was hungover, as usual. I had fallen into the habit of spending every night at The White Rabbit until two or three in the morning and it was catching up to me. Like my dad’s resistance to abandoning those business dealings that put millions in his pockets, I was having a hard time resisting the lure of booze, pot, pills, and pussy that The Rabbit offered.

This was not where I thought I would be ten years out of law school, but I was sleeping in a bed of my own making. Or at least, fucking there.

I filled my coffee cup and carried it to my desk. I tried to ignore the heavy odor of mold and mildew that perpetually hung in the air inside the ancient warehouse. Sometimes it irked me, knowing that I could be working in a big law firm downtown with a plush office in a high-rise building. Instead, O’Connor Import & Export was housed in an old warehouse in the waterfront district that my dad had owned forever.

The warehouse was always stacked to the ceiling with pallets of goods that had been shipped in from China and Korea, or pallets waiting got be loaded onto a ship bound for the Orient.

I had gone out of my way to legitimize the business and the fact that there was barely room to walk down the aisles was proof that you could build a multimillion dollar operation without crossing the line.

Still, the old man hung refused to entirely shut down his old operation. I knew he still had his hand in things that I didn’t know about, but he denied it to my face. I guess it was hard for him to let go of the past, even if it meant risking twenty years in the state pen.

I had insulated myself pretty well from that side of his operation, so even if the feds busted down the door, I had little chance of getting convicted of anything more than protecting my old man, which I could probably argue my way out of.

The offices were on the second-floor that ran the length of the front of the warehouse. My dad had a large office with Boozie occupying a desk just outside his door in a small lobby area. My office was half the size of dad’s, most of it taken up with locked file cabinets containing the legitimized documents of the business’ thirty-year history. The other documents, the ones the feds would have loved to have gotten their hands on, were locked away in a vault in another building in another part of town. The feds would never find those documents and the day my dad died, the documents and the building they were in would mysteriously burn to the ground, with no record of ownership that could be traced back to the O’Connor family.

Along with the offices, there was a small kitchen, a single bathroom and shower, and a storage closet that held nothing more than office supplies.

There was a conference room where The Three Stooges hung out. The Three Stooges were two stick-thin Irishmen named Danny and Doug O’Malley, and a fat Italian who always smelled like garlic named Freddy Manicotti.

The Stooges had been friends of dad’s since grade school. Back in the day they were his muscle, his collectors, his enforcers. All that shit stopped when I came onboard. No more broken legs, no more extorting protection money, no more loan sharking.

I had wanted to fire The Stooges but dad wouldn’t hear of it. They were all old and fat, he said. Who was gonna hire them to do an honest day’s work? So, they sat in the conference room all day, drinking coffee and eating bear claws, collecting paychecks for doing nothing more than being dad’s old pals.

There is no more loyal a soul on earth than my dad, at least until you cross him or piss him off.

I knew the feds could raid the warehouse at any time, so I made damn sure there was nothing on the premises that could get us in trouble. Every pallet and every storage container held legal goods. The illegal goods were stored somewhere else and I didn’t have a clue where that was. That was dad’s bucket of shit to deal with, not mine.

“You find a replacement for Boozie yet?” dad asked, leaning in my doorway with a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. Back in the day, there was no one tougher than Patsy O’Connor. Now, he was a fat old man who huffed when he came up the stairs.

He was almost sixty-eight now. He had put on a lot of weight and was showing the tell tail signs of a long-term drinker. He had thick bags under his eyes and tiny purple veins lining his cheeks and bulbous nose. The middle drawer of his desk looked like a pharmacy. He lined up the pills every morning and choked them down with a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey.

I found it amusing and a little sad that he was so concerned that Boozie’s transition from secretary and mistress to woman of leisure in Tampa cause her as little trouble as possible.

“I’m calling an agency now,” I said as I set my coffee cup on the desk and switched on my computer. “I’ll get someone in as quickly as possible.”

“Make sure they’re legit,” dad said, wagging a thick finger at me. “Check references, do a background investigation.”

“Dad, she will answer the phone and type,” I said, holding out my hands. “She will not be privy to your secrets the way Boozie was.”

“Does that mean I can’t bone her?” he asked, grinning at me. Dad always had a gap between his front teeth that he stuck his tongue in when he grinned.

“Mom probably wouldn’t like that,” I said, fingers tapping computer keys to pull up my contact list. I had an associate who owned a staffing agency. I’d call him to send over a few women to interview. I looked up at him and smiled. “Besides, your days of boning the help are over. That’s my job now.”

He chuckled at me. “Yeah, like you have to time to fuck the help here.”

I picked up my coffee cup and gave him a frown. “What does that mean?”

He let his round shoulders go up and down. “I hear rumors.”

“Such as?”

“Word is you’re turning The White Rabbit into your own little playground,” he said. He brought the cup to his lips and blew a cooling breath across the steaming surface and judged me with his eyes. “Fucking girls in the restrooms. Blowjobs under the VIP table. Big bar tab every night.”

I gave him a smile. “So? Is that wrong? We do own a piece of it, you know.”

His bushy eyebrows furrowed over his dark eyes. “Irish Dan owns a bigger piece of it,” he said, referring to Dan Reardon, one of his old pals who truly fit the notorious Irish gangster mold. “He would appreciate it if you found another place to hang out if all you’re there for is to fuck the paying customers.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m butt-fucking Irish Dan’s daughter in the men’s room,” I said, picking up the phone.

“Jesus, boy, I hope you’re joking,” he said, shaking his head and making the sign of the cross on his chest. “You don’t fuck with Irish Dan. If he thought you were screwing his daughter he would personally chop off your dick and shove it down your throat.”

“I’ll remember that the next time she asks me to come to the restroom with her,” I said, offering him a smile. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find you a new secretary.”