Tales from the Patch

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Honorable Mentions

Tales from the Patch

M. F. Gardiner

Copyright © 2024 M. F. Gardiner

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89061-823-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89061-824-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To Danny, the child I was not sure I wanted. I now find life an empty void without you. You are forever missed.

Introduction

Tales from the Patch is a group of short tales about growing up on the streets in the shadows of the Chicago Outfit. I will try to describe a place and time that no longer exists. I want to share some tales of my day-to-day life and introduce you to some ghosts of the past. I see myself as a grown-up child in a childish world. Self-preservation is the common thread in the Patch.

Our characters are real lovers, liars, and clowns. Some of the tales are comic; others, tragic.

According to some of the other tales I've read about life in the Patch, there were victims and survivors. What I do know is that every character in the Patch is one of a kind.

Amazing how a people can have different perceptions of a place.

If perception is reality, then this is mine:

Chicago, Illinois—Grand and Western

In the past, or holy fuck ago, I lived on the south side of Chicago Avenue, which is now called West Town. The north side of the avenue is now Ukrainian Village. Old-timers called this whole area the Patch. It started at Taylor Street and spread out from there, taking over the city of Chicago from the 1920s through to today. Grand Avenue is the main artery of the heart of the Chicago Outfit. Grand Avenue starts at Lake Michigan and follows straight out to the northwestern suburbs.

This was the territory of the notorious outfit. Crime and corruption spread everywhere like kudzu. There were many crews that made up the Outfit. For example, there's the Grand Avenue crew, the Cicero crew, Taylor Street, Chinatown, etc. My crew, your crew, their crew—head for the crew—you get it.

I've seen it all and heard it all.

Speaking of that, the only men who go to jail more than the guys from the Chicago Outfit are Illinois governors! Now let that lighten the mood! I grew up here. I don't identify as victim or survivor. I see myself as a VOLUNTEER.

Chapter 1

Nobody Special

I was born on November 28, 1961, on the northwest side of Chicago. The beginning years were great. I had parents I trusted and would never lie to me. Every Sunday, I attended church. While attending Holy Rosary School, I attended every mass on the first Friday of the month. Once a year, this jolly guy with a white beard and red suit brought me presents. I got to play and really have no worries. Life was great for the first six years, except for occasionally getting in trouble for drawing on walls. When I reached the age of seven, this would change. Between the second-floor dining room windows, there was what they call a three-foot gangway. You could see across into Grandma Frangello's dining room.

My mom, in the kitchen baking cookies, told my brother Gary to go next door. Now my mother gave me the bum's rush to get out of the kitchen. Go watch the Christmas cartoons on TV. While I was sitting at the dining room table, I looked across into my gram's house. My brother Gary was wrapping Christmas presents at Gram's table. Then I happened to notice those gifts were presents I asked Santa for. What gives? Hey, Mom, come here! I yelled. She came into the dining room as I pointed across the way. Are those my gifts from Santa that Gary is wrapping?

Son of a bitch, I can't believe it. He was supposed to wrap them in the kitchen.

I knew it—the older kids in the playground said Santa was a marketing con. They tell you about Santa to control your behavior. Now that made sense for some reason. I would come to find out this was a common practice. Come to church. Behave or burn in hell. Scare tactics work best. Ninety-nine percent of all children don't care when you tell them the nonexistence of Santa. All you have to do is reassure them they'll still get presents and all is okay to them. Not me—my parents lied. I couldn't trust them now. Who else was lying? I would have to become a critical thinker.

This was the very first thought that crossed my mind.

Let me tell you about Charlie and Mary, my parents.

My father was a bookmaker. You can find that information by googling "United States of America v Dote and Charles Frangello." At the time, my dad liked to book the horses. He, along with a few of Rocco Dote's crew, were being surveilled by the FBI /IRS as well as the Chicago Police Department. They were small-time and easy to catch. You know, reel in the small fish and try to catch a big one.

In my dad's younger days, he was a World War II veteran in the US Army. He never went overseas. Instead, he was stationed at a psych hospital in Kentucky. He was a first-class private and served as a medic. My dad was five feet, ten inches tall. He weighed about 275 to 300 pounds and wore a size-13 triple-E shoe. He helped to restrain patients that came back shell-shocked, what they used to call people suffering from PTSD. This experience eventually started my dad's journey of falling into the bottom of a liquor bottle.

I knew my life was a bit different as a young child. I recall the Chicago Police Department busting through the back door one day to arrest my dad. I have a vision of my father running into the bathroom to dispose of betting slips in the toilet. He had those special pads of paper that would dissolve in water. The evidence the police thought they would collect was circling the toilet bowl.

The older Frangello boys were sharper than any cops or feds. They left with zip, zero, nothing. One day, I took a pad to school to use for scratch paper. When I came home from school that day, he was totally paranoid.

Did anyone notice the paper? he asked.

No, I said, no one noticed. Why?

Because this is Daddy's special paper. You can never take it out of the house again. Promise me.

Okay, Dad.

Strange, but okay. I could only guess what it was about.

One of my first realizations as a child was knowing my mom might be a little off. One evening, a mouse got in the apartment. My mother forced my father, two brothers, and me to all sleep in the front bedroom with an old door across the doorway to keep the mouse out. I remember my brother Chuck looked at my brother Gary and said, You know Mom's insane. My brothers were laughing, so I started laughing too. Good to know others thought that, so I wasn't alone yet.

My father was not afraid of rats, being old-school Italian. He literally kicked and stepped on the heads of street rats. He was afraid of two things, though. First was thunderstorms. During a storm, he would turn off all electricity. He would tell the story about when he was growing up next door. The electric in the building was not grounded. One day, while one of the Frangello brothers was running a bath during a thunderstorm, lightning came through the faucet and left a crack in the tub. Fortunately, no one was in the tub at the time. This was what caused my dad to fear storms. The second thing he feared was someone parking in his spot. A public, taxpayer-funded street in front of the house was his spot.

God help anyone who parks in Charlie's spot.

My mom was terrified of mice, like the ladies in cartoons up on the chair. He would often give in to my mom's odd behavior.

I, on the other hand, questioned everything she did or said. My mom was actually developing a hoarding problem that would become worse with time. This also meant with extra clutter, the rodent problem would increase. In later years, our half of the building would become infested.

The majority of the people from my family and my neighborhood were friendly and outgoing. I was constantly yelled at by my mother for talking to strangers. Maybe I'm naive, but to me, a stranger is someone you haven't said hello to yet.

One day we were at Dr. Colletti's office, then located on Chicago Avenue. I started talking to an older man. I didn't know it yet, but I would have a thing for older men. After he went in to see the doctor, my mother started scolding me, saying, What did I tell you about talking to strangers?

So like all kids, I started to raise my voice. That's all you ever say without any reason. Let's make this easy on both of us. How old do you have to be to talk to strangers?

A few people in the waiting room snickered. I heard one of them say, This one's gonna be trouble. They had no idea what was going to be unleashed.

First thing you have to know, every Italian (including me) in my neighborhood yells. Not because they're mad, but because they're Italian. Yelling seems to be the standard tone. I know you're wondering, Then how do you know when they're mad? Easy, they have voices; the bass in their voice becomes so loud and deep. It will rattle your bones as you shake in your shoes. That's how you know.

I met many different types of alcoholics, but my dad was my favorite. He was a funny, happy-go-lucky kind of drunk. When he wasn't drinking, he was not mean, just grumpy. Some of my friends also had alcoholic parents. Their parents were mean and abusive. But I was Daddy's little dolly, and he spoiled me as best as he could. The best example of this is when he would take me shopping and tell me to get whatever I wanted. I wanted a pair of roller skates. Funny, at the time, I didn't know how to roller skate, but I just had to have them. My mom was, of course, upset because I talked him into buying me something I didn't know how to use. He would be the first of many men in my life I would be able to manipulate.

My two brothers, on the other hand, knew better. They mostly saw me as a little she-devil.

As time passed, my father continued to drink in excess. His choice of spirit was a horrible liquor called Malört. Jeppson's Malört was a Chicago original, a drinking man's drink. And then Dad would add a glass of beer to turn it into a boilermaker. Horrible, just horrible. Dad had owned a bar for a while and, in short order, drank himself out of business. After that, my dad spent his time drinking at Bert's Tavern on the corner of Race and Levitt Street. This is where his younger brother John tended bar. Bert's Tavern was an original spot for the first C-Note$ crew to hang out in the 1950s. They hung on the corner of Race and Leavitt Street. My oldest cousin, Gene, once told me he and the other Italian guys he hung with started the C-Note$. My younger cousins and I always thought he was kidding. That was until we found two old black-and-white pictures of him and his crew, one taken in front of Bert's Tavern, the other in a basement or garage with a C-Note$ sign on the wall. It was their hangout.

On the corner of Grand Avenue and Leavitt Street, there was a car repair garage. The garage was called the Jap's place. Yes, you heard me right—if you needed your car fixed right the first time, you took it to the Jap. So there was Joe the Jap, then a few doors down was the Turkish bathhouse. The building still stands today. Locals will remember this bathhouse. The second bathhouse is located on North Avenue. It was a Russian bathhouse. Many of the old-timers frequented the bathhouses. Some homes and apartments did not have bathtubs. At the time, indoor plumbing was still rare. A lot of these homes also had gas lighting, the pipes running through the walls of the buildings. In the 1920s, this was still a poverty-stricken area full of mostly Italian immigrants.

My family lived on Race Street, across the street from Mitchell Elementary School. The school had a nice-sized playground. On the other side of the school was Ohio Street, the home of Joe Lombardo. Yes, that Joe Lombardo! No one considered him the gangster/killer that the media portrayed him as being. He had a beautiful wife and two children. Joe was the same age as my mother, both born in 1929. Joe was younger than my father and Uncle John. They claimed Joe was a good kid. His vice was gambling—he ran floating crap games since he was a kid at Wells High School. According to my family, Joe was an okay guy. Both our families belonged to Holy Rosary Church.

My mom was a petite 110 pounds with red hair and green eyes. She did not grow up in our neighborhood. She grew up on Southport Avenue, not too far from Wrigley Field. Her mom, Mary Beilski, was a Polish girl and telephone operator. Her father, Edward Egan, was a printer for a local newspaper. Her mother was three years older than her father, which was rare in those days. My mom was the oldest of three children and had two brothers. The owner of the paper her dad worked for had been threatened by some local gangsters. For, you know, running stories they did not want printed about their criminal activities. From what I was told, they couldn't get to the owners of these papers because they had protection. Sadly, the printers who ran the stories had no protection.

Some guys followed my grandfather home from the newspaper and beat him to death in an alley right behind his apartment. They were sending a message to the owners. Many papers did shut down from fear or just stopped printing about organized crime in the city of Chicago. My mom was only four years old when her dad was murdered, and her mother was left a widow. That was the first story I heard about my grandfather.

The second story I heard was that he had a gambling problem and owed some gangsters some money. When he could not pay, they beat him to death in the alley behind his apartment. Being beaten to death is a horrible way to die, but only if it's truly deserved.

I believe the second story. Why? I remember my mom telling me her mother was upset when she decided to marry my dad. She did not like him because he was Italian. She said Italians were the men who beat her father to death. This would be the one and only time she disobeyed her mom. She loved Charlie, and they would be married in June 1947. She looked at her mother like a hero for keeping her and her brothers alive during the time of the Great Depression. Truth be told, though, my mom's mom treated her like crap. My grandmother was also an alcoholic—the worst kind of alcoholic, a functioning one. Of course, she treated her sons like gold. She had suffered a stroke that left the right side of her face paralyzed. She continued to drink and smoke. Carlo Sarlo was nice enough to rent her an apartment down the block from us. My mom took care of her until she passed away at the age of seventy-six.

My mom was a nice Catholic girl who got married a virgin at the age of eighteen. My dad was twenty-eight and out of the service. They met one weekend when she and a friend stopped at the Green Mill Jazz Lounge on Broadway. My uncle Ted played clarinet in a jazz band. He was playing there that night, and my dad was there to support his brother, along with brothers Joe and John.

The best part of my mom's life—besides being a wife, mom, and grandma—was her love of Frank Sinatra. She was a real Frank Sinatra bobby-soxer. She always talked about the times she saw him in person.

This Polish Irish girl tried to assimilate into an all-Italian family.

About My Family

The Frangello family lived in a set of English row houses purchased by Eugene and Theresa Frangello. They owned a few residences on the 2200 block of West Race Street. I lived on the second floor of the building right in-between. I had uncles, aunts, and cousins on both sides. It was a rectangular apartment containing three bedrooms and a bathroom. I remember a bridge that went from the back porch to the garage and from our house to Grandma Frangello's house. We all crossed that bridge a million times. The building once had eight apartments, four in front and four in back. As the Frangello family grew, the eight apartments were rehabbed into four large flats.

At that time, the place was filled with uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends. This was an