***
I may have learned one of the biggest lessons necessary for survival in the racket that lovely afternoon with Billy under that Japanese cherry blossom.
But, I wouldn’t learn the greatest lesson of all until three days after the lesson on guns with Billy the Club.
It was on that day that I learned the hard way a lesson once taught to me by Rafael Visconti, and it stuck with me forever to this day:
“You can’t save the people or things you loved every time. And sometimes on the cause of trying to do that, you may as well lose yourself.”
***
We have burst upon our guy on Lenox Avenue that late evening— myself, Billy the Club, and Carlos Stony, my preference to Carlos Draco that everyone called him. Our man; Mark Siegel, a Jewish bookmaker making illegal profits off the backs of hone
