This is how my family made its money. In May, , my grandfather Leo Konigsberg started a wholesale food business in Bayonne, New Jersey: one delivery route, one driver, and two trucks. He added an afternoon route and drove it himself, dropping in on his high-volume customers—grocery stores and restaurants—to see if anyone was running low and needed something on the spot. That was what Leo liked most about being a butter-and-egg man, getting out and seeing clients. At first, Leo ran his business out of his home, storing nonperishables—pickles, mayonnaise, and shortening—in his garage, and perishables in two walk-in coolers he rented in Jersey City.
In time, he was able to pay his father rent on a space he used as a warehouse and office. As he frequently reminded his children, the only free thing he ever accepted from his relatives was a driveway for his trucks. Leo was fanatical about his reputation. He was consumed by the anxiety of having to demonstrate his uprightness. One night in , Leo returned from his route and was met in his office by three men; two of them had stockings over their faces and one shoved a crowbar into his ribs.
They made him open his safe, which had more than two thousand dollars inside, then tied him up. Leo had never once stayed home from work, but he spent the next day in bed, sick to his stomach. In the picture, he appears to weigh upward of two-fifty. He has wavy, dark-blond hair and a face like a veal cutlet. He looks at peace.
Unlike a typical Mafia contract killer, who answers to a hierarchy of bosses, Harold was freelance and would work for whatever family had hired him.
The Justice Department considered him the king of all loan sharks; conducting business out of a half-dozen offices in midtown Manhattan and in Jersey, he claimed to have a million dollars on the street at any given time. He taught himself to read as an adult, he said, and he served as his own lawyer in two major trials.
