The Band of 41 Thieves Story

1952

A true story

Written 07/14/2015* 2,358 Words

By Howard Yasgar

By the end of 1962, I was 23 years old and I was working in Stamford Connecticut with my new partner and mentor Abe Zion.

When Abe and I met, he offered me a proposition that I couldn’t refuse.

He had asked me to join up with him and I agreed, and that’s how Abe then became my mentor.

I had never met anyone quite like Abe before, he was a business entrepreneur, and he wanted me to manage many of the various deals and businesses he had started.

This story is about one of those deals, it was one that didn’t work out so well for me, but I never regretted the learning experience.

One day, we were sitting in our office in Stamford Connecticut, Abe was sitting in a chair with his feet up on an old scratched up wooden desk.

Abe was reading the New York Herald Tribune, because the Tribune listed all the current auctions going on in the area. Abe was looking for something interesting, something that he thought could be profitable for us.

Then, suddenly Abe was smiling, I knew that he had found something good.

He said there was to be a big auction in New York, it was a large “AAA” towing and auto repair facility that had gone bankrupt.

Abe said he knew of the company, he said it was in Manhattan, within sight of the United Nations building.

We decided to meet at the auction site the next morning to look things over.

I was living in New Haven Connecticut, so I drove straight to the auction site in New York.

When I got there, the first thing I noticed was how big the building was, it was one of those parking garage buildings where you entered on the ground floor and then you drove in circles up to each floor.

I parked on the seventh floor, and walked up to the eighth floor, it was the floor that was formerly the AAA company’s main office.

The entire office floor was made up of glass walled offices, perhaps fifty of them, and they were all filled with desks and filing cabinets.

Every desk had an elaborate telephone system, and some of the phones must have had over 50 buttons on them.

Then I walked up to the tenth floor, it was where the former parts department was, and it was where the auctioneer had set up his information table.

I didn’t see Abe around, so I walked up to the top eleventh floor, where the bodywork and paint shop was located.

I noticed that looking out the big windows on the eleventh floor, I could clearly see the United Nations building.

I estimated there were over a hundred people walking around, all of them were doing the same as I was, looking things over.

Finally saw Abe had arrived, so I walked over to see him.

As we were walking around, I noticed that Abe had recognized someone.

Abe gently leaned over and whispered to me, “The Mafia is here”.

I didn't have a clue as to what Abe was talking about, so what if the Mafia was there.

When we were in a quiet area where Abe could talk, he explained that in New York and New Jersey, the Mafia controlled all the auctions.

He said they were referred to by everyone as “The band of 40 thieves”.

Abe said, “When the Mafia showed up at an auction, it meant, you couldn't buy anything unless you cleared it with them first, then they would do all the bidding for you.

I asked Abe if he would point them out to me, I wanted to see what a real Mafioso character looked like.

Abe approached an older fellow that was having a discussion with several men, all of whom looked like thy came out of the godfather movie.

As we approached them, an older fellow, whose back was towards us, turned around.

When he saw Abe, he put out his hand and smiled.

He said, “Abe my good friend, how are you”?

I thought the fellow looked pleasant enough, he looked just like someone’s grandfather.

He was about 60 years old, potbellied, and wore his work pants with suspenders.

“What brings you here Abe”?

Abe said, “We thought we could find something to make a few dollars on”.

“Let me know if you see something you like”, the older fellow said”, “I will”,” Abe replied.

Then Abe said, “Tony, I want to meet my new young partner, he’s a nice kid from New Haven”, and that was how Abe introduced me to the Mafia.

The Mafia boss glanced at me and said to Abe, “Does your kid know the score?”

“Yes.” Abe said, “He knows”, and Abe said, “If you ever need some good help doing something

Just ask him, he’s always available to assist you if you need him for something. That was when I realized Abe was talking about me.

The Mafia fellow, then turned back to talking to the men he was talking to.

The next day, at eight in the morning, was the start of the auction.

The auctioneer walked from each lot to lot, auctioning off each one as he went.

By about three in the afternoon the crowd had thinned out, and I found myself standing next to Tony, the Mafia boss.

He turned to me and said quietly, “Hey kid from New Haven, do you have twenty bucks on you”?

When he said that, I got a little nervous, back in 1962 twenty dollars was like several hundred dollars today.

“Yes, I replied, I have twenty bucks”.

Tony said, “Take the twenty and roll it up and then press it in the auctioneer's left hand, then tell him Tony said that you get the auction clean-up”.

I did exactly as Tony said, I put twenty dollars into the auctioneer’s left hand, and I told him, Tony said, I got the clean-up.

The auctioneer looked at me, he nodded in the affirmative, and put the twenty dollars in his pocket, acting as if nothing had happened.

After the auction, I asked Abe, “what he thought, regarding Tony telling me that I had the “clean up”, I told him that it had cost me twenty bucks.

Abe said, “I think, Tony has taken a liking to you, and the cleanup could be very profitable for us.

It means that after the auction is over, and everyone has left, you can come back in, and take anything that was left over, and no one will say anything to you.

It was exciting to think that for only twenty dollars everything left over from this giant auction was mine.

Abe laughed, he said “You see, now that Tony likes you, and you have now become thief number

41 in the band of 40 thieves.

That afternoon, as everyone was loading up from the auction, Tony came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

He said his boys were loading their truck, and he asked me to follow behind them to New Jersey.

He said it was just to make sure nothing fell off the trucks on the way there.

I did it and once we all were in New Jersey, I was treated to a big Italian supper just as if I was now one of the gang members.

All evening everybody kept calling me “The Kid from New Haven”.

The next morning, I drove our GMC truck from our yard in Stamford Connecticut.

I was hoping we were going to make a lot of money doing the cleanup.

When I got to the building in New York, there was a security guard at the entrance and I leaned out the window of the truck, and in my best New York accent, I said, I’m the cleanup guy, Tony sent me.

He just waved me in. Obviously, he knew who Tony was.

I was so excited at the prospect of what I might find left over from the auction on all the different floors, I really didn’t know where to start.

So, I started out on the administration floor where all the offices had been.

All the filing cabinets had been sold and whoever had bought them had dumped all the invoices from the filing cabinet drawers onto the floor, in some places the invoices and papers were over a foot deep.

I thought I was in heaven because now all the scrap paper was mine, and it was free.

I appeared to be the only one in the building, and I noticed that the air conditioning had been shut off and because of it, I had already started sweating profusely.

But I didn’t care, all I had to do was load the truck up with all the scrap paper and run it down to the scrap paper dealer and collect my money.

I started to pick up piles of papers off the floor and stack them on the bed of the truck.

It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be, because the invoices were all loaded with carbon paper, and they were slipping out of my hands.

I had to slow down and organize the invoices into neat stacks, then I could carry each stack to the back of the truck.

After several hours, I was thoroughly soaked with sweat and my arms were all black from the carbon paper and I hadn’t even made a small dent in the tremendous mess of invoices still on the floor.

That’s when I started to have second thoughts about everything I was doing.

As I stood there sweating and thinking of a better solution, I heard someone whistling at me, it was the security guard.

“How's it going pal?” “Not bad I replied”.

He looked at the paper I had on the truck and said, “What are you going to do with all the scrap paper, you going to the dump”?

I'm going to fill the truck up and sell it to the scrap paper company I replied.

The security guard said, “Are you sure they will buy scrap paper with carbon paper mixed in?”

Well, that’s when it dawned on me, all the papers on the floor were invoices in triplicate with carbon paper behind each sheet.

When the security guard left, I climbed up onto the truck and started to throw all the paper that I had collected back onto the floor.

It took me over an hour as I pushed papers, I threw papers, and I kicked papers, I think it took me longer to push the paper off truck than it took for me to load them on.

I was disappointed, but now I was determined to find something else of value in the building, I was sure that if I looked everywhere, there had to be something of value there.

That’s when I noticed all the telephones that were buried under the papers on the floor.

I took out my cutting pliers and started cutting all the telephones free.

I had cut about fifty phones free, and that’s when I got a big water blister on my hand from using the cutting pliers.

It was then that I stopped and looked over all the telephones I had already collected.

I could see that the telephones were all plastic and most were cracked or broken. I concluded that what I was doing was making another big mistake.

I decided I should leave the pile of telephones and look for something that was a little easier to do, so I then drove to the repair shop.

I walked around the entire floor and checked every inch, but I never saw one item of value.

I then drove the truck up to the paint and body shop.

I was starting to get a bad feeling about this whole clean up deal that Tony the Mafioso guy had so kindly fixed me up with.

Just like the other floors, the body shop floor had been completely cleaned out.

However, I found there was one small room that was about 10 feet wide by 20 feet deep with a door that was still locked shut.

By using a piece of a bent automobile bumper, I got the door of the room open and I went inside.

I was so happy that I had finally found something of value.

The little room was full of cans of automotive paint.

There was shelf after shelf of car paint. It was in all size cans and there was every car color you could imagine.

The next day, I was back in Connecticut, and Abe came down to the Stamford yard to see what I had brought back from the auction cleanup.

Abe looked at the paint and I could tell by the expression on his face that he didn't know what to say.

He pulled out a quart of paint and brought it over to me to read the label, it said 1952 Pontiac Forest Green.

The can had obviously already been opened and some of the paint had been used.

Abe asked me, “Who can you sell this to”?

By then I already knew the answer, there was no one you could sell used cans of old car paint.

Then Abe said, if we get caught with all this contaminated paint on our property, we could get in big trouble, and get fined, I knew he was right.

So, the next day I drove around all morning stopping at every trash dumpster in the neighborhood and little by little, I threw the entire truckload of paint away.

After that auction cleanup experience, I had time to give the situation a lot of thought.

But one thing I could never determine was if Tony, by getting me the cleanup was doing me a favor or teaching me a lesson.

If it was a lesson, I think I learned the lesson pretty good.

Anyway, Abe was right about one thing, for a very short time, I had been number #41 in the “Band of 40 thieves.