Was Rudy Giuliani Connected to the Mob?

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950’s, the friends in my New York neighborhood were mostly 2nd-generation Italian Americans whose grandparents still had connections back to the ‘other side.’

The fathers of my friends worked for the most part in construction or maybe they worked at the big Proctor & Gamble factory or took the subway into ‘da city’ where they were employed by some Wall Street outfit in some kind of maintenance job.

There was one guy who didn’t seem to have any regular kind of work, but he always drove a new car and often sat in the car wearing a suit and tie.

Every day while this guy was sitting there, his name was Josey, by the way, a few of the neighborhood men would come up to his car, lean over and whisper something into his ear and he would nod up and down a few times and the guy leaning into his open window would then be on his way.

Josie was the connected guy in my neighborhood, and every neighborhood in Brooklyn and Queens which had lots of Italian families also had at least one connected guy.

Mario Cuomo’s father was a connected guy, which is why Mario could be the Governor of New York State but that’s as far as he could go. The block in Queens where my grandfather had his little grocery store had a connected guy named Tiny, so named because he…