You hurriedly roll sheets of plastic onto the clubhouse floor as if a mobster were about to be whacked and you fold up the chairs and stuff them into the lockers.
In the end, it was Tom Robbins, 58, rather than his friend and former colleague Jerry Capeci, 63, because Mr. Capeci has made a career writing about mobsters.
Ruby, as he was called, was popular with the cops and politicians and even with the mobsters he wrote about, because, his son told me, he was a gentleman.
WHEN Manhattan mobsters talk about somebody "taking a swim in the Hudson", it is seldom a voluntary pursuit.
He has testified that he was once dangled out a seventh-story window by mobsters upset about an unpaid debt.
Federal prosecutors say that the two retired mobsters talked about 10 times over two years and that Mr. Gravano invited his old friend to join the Arizona Mafia, a desert chapter of La Cosa Nostra that Mr. Gravano set up in Phoenix after leaving federal protection in 1998.
It ended with wiretapping becaming legal if a judge saw sufficient probable cause -- and you can listen to recorded conversations by the mobsters you've read about -- and the passage of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) law.
As he did in his blood-rusher "Shooting Dr. Jack, Greenn writes about mobster families with a knowledge that is unnerving in its intimacy.
"Ivory Tower," a documentary about the high cost of college from Andrew Rossi, is in competition, and "Whitey," about mobster "Whitey" Bulger, will premiere there.
"Bugsy," the biographical film about mobster Bugsy Siegel, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, opened nationwide over the weekend, after one week of a limited run.
