“You are going up the steps of your parish church to attend Sunday Mass when you are stopped by Gerald, the Communist. Gerald has a gun and he demands that you renounce your Faith in God or he will kill you. What do you do?”

This was an actual question at the end of one of the chapters of the Baltimore Catechism, which we all had to study in Catholic school. Well, that might not be the exact wording, but that’s pretty much it and definitely how I remember it.

Now to me this was not something I really saw happening, there not being many Communists roaming the steps of St. Stephen’s Church in Kearny, New Jersey. But since I often arrived with my family late for Mass, the steps would be deserted and maybe Gerald would be out there waiting for a straggler like me. And if that ever happened, if ever Gerald the Communist was out there with a gun and he grabbed me as I was climbing the grey granite steps of St. Stephen’s Church, I was pretty sure what I would say to him.

“Hey, Gerald, no problem, man. There is no God. Whatever you say. Now let me go and don’t kill me, okay?”

Nowadays a question like that, posed to third graders, might be taken to be a kind of child abuse, but even at the time, at the end of the 1950s when the Communist tide was running high, it was pretty clear to me how I would handle a question like that. Sitting there in my narrow wooden desk in the third grade I silently decided I was not about to become some sort of martyr just to say I believed in God. Besides, Gerald couldn’t prove it one way or the other, so if it makes him happy and keeps me alive, sure, I’ll tell him I don’t believe in God.

Of course, this was not the answer the nuns teaching us the Baltimore Catechism wanted to hear. Oh, no, they’d expect us to let Gerald kill us rather than say we didn’t believe in God. So for the nuns it was the same deal as with Gerald the Communist.

“Of course, Sister, I will tell Gerald the Communist he can kill me if he wants, but I will never renounce my belief in God. I will declare my Faith right to the end! And I will go straight to Heaven!”

I don’t remember if I ever actually got called on to stand up in class and answer this particular question. But inside my 8-year-old heart I knew for sure I was not going to let Gerald kill me. This was one white lie I’d just have to tell.

Now weaseling out of difficult situations, even if not as dramatic as this one, was something I became quite adept at. Call it weaselly, call it cowardly, or call it the shrewd negotiator in me. Mainly I hated getting beat up, I really did.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” was something my parents inculcated in me. And so somehow I managed to get through a New Jersey childhood with no broken bones, and just one broken tooth.

“Hey, what are we fighting about? Let’s talk about this.”

Confronted with a bully about to bash my face in, this bought some critical time and confused my adversary. It was useful to either defuse the situation or to get into some more advantageous defensive posture. Or to run away.

Buy time. Always buy time. The story of my life, even as a kid.

It didn’t always work but it worked well enough and I didn’t have to endure getting beat up in too many fights. And when it didn’t work I’d turn a fight into a wrestling match by launching myself into my distracted opponent and this often leveled the playing field somewhat because, if nothing else, I could grab his arms. And later on I usually had the bulk advantage, too.

The other fall-back position I had was to threaten that my big sister would come and beat them up. It was highly unlikely she would ever do this, and in fact on more than one occasion she told me to forget about it and to stop telling kids this. But it was worth taking the chance and buying a little more time, as unlikely as the reality was. They didn’t know that.

The one person I came to learn I could not count on was my cousin Tommy. When push came to shove, Tommy – my one cousin about my own age, just five months younger than me – would take off running, and I was the one left to fend off the bullies and employ all my time-buying techniques. Sometimes I’d even be defending Tommy and then Tommy would take off running and I was left holding the bag. This of course did not ingratiate Tommy much to me and in fact it pretty much got me pissed-off at him. Then he’d come to our house and clean out the candy bowls. Great help Tommy was, as my sister was all too quick to point out, never mind that she was not going to defend me, either.

Beatings on the asphalt playground at recess time at school – usually in the form of a punch to the stomach and threats of more to follow – became an every day event. And complaining to the nuns was fruitless.

“Go back out there and fight your own battles,” was their usual intonation, standing safely in their black penguin suits within the doorway that led from the playground back into the school. Why they were called Sisters of Charity was never quite clear to me since I never sensed much charity on their part.

And so it came to pass that, day in and day out, from September to June, I got too many threats, too many punches to the stomach, too much hassling from the class bullies. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more and the answer became clear. And that is how I came to form my own gang, the Mafia, in the sixth grade.

There were several of us who bore the brunt of the bullies’ threats, and it had become tiresome to all of us, and it was clear the nuns were not going to help us. So when I announced formation of the Mafia I had a ready following and, thus, became an instant grade-school gang leader.

The sides quickly aligned and the turf war shook out between the Mafia, wearing the white hats, and Al Capone’s Gang, the black-hatted bullies. Not that we really wore hats, but that was how we perceived ourselves across the moral divide, such as it was on the playground battlefield.

With the formation of the Mafia there was a new sense of empowerment in the classroom, and out on the asphalt. Knowing that I had a small force of oppressed miscreants who would stand together against the bullies gave me a feeling of security, something that I did not have much of before.

Keeping the boys of the Mafia in line wasn’t always easy, though. There was a certain amount of power brokering going on even within the group with the more peripheral members threatening to go to the other side, which was doing what it could to exploit the situation by making various offers to my members. But mostly we held together.

The sense of security soon led to a sense of power. And that was where Susan Elliott entered the picture.

Susan sat in front of me in class. She was a pretty cool girl with curly brown hair, a slightly problematic complexion, and a throaty voice that somehow translated to sexiness in the mind of an 11-year-old who barely knew the word sex. And she was growing tits, too, the biggest in our class. All in all, something about Susan attracted me, me who was still clinging to the idea that I hated girls.

I wanted Susan to notice me more than in the off-handed sort of way she did notice me. And I wanted something from Susan. I think it was a kiss. A kiss, notice, loyalty – for her to join the Mafia and become my sixth-grade gang moll, I suppose.

Susan noticed me all right, but she would have none of my attempts to get her to do whatever it was that I wanted. She certainly was not about to join the Mafia. So I felt the need to bring to bear my new-found power, such as it was. Passing notes and whispering over her shoulder and in breaks between classes, I issued my sixth-grade gangster threats to Susan.

“You better do what I say, Susan, or the Mafia is going to get you.”

“Yeah, and what are you going to do to me? Beat me up?”

Susan’s mocking was almost as bad as the bullies’ threats, and as it turned out I would never have really hurt Susan. She sensed the idle threat and called my bluff, and I never did persuade Susan Elliott to do whatever it was I wanted her to do. My first unrequited love, I suppose, though who knew at the time.

Meanwhile, the stakes were mounting in the divide between the Mafia and Al Capone’s Gang, and I had other things to worry about than Susan Elliott kissing me or becoming my moll. The inevitable culmination of our growing conflict was going to be an all-out gang war. We agreed this would be held in a few weeks, when school let out for the summer, at the Manor Park down the hill from my house. This was our turf and we knew the terrain well from the many years of internecine dog-shit warfare the kids in the neighborhood carried on. We even had a fort dug out in the clump of bushes at the southeast corner of the park.

Now the one thing the Mafia was determined to do was to take the technological advantage in this war. Al Capone’s Gang had the advantage of being the bullies. They had the brute strength, the fighting advantage, but they also were saddled with limited intellectual capacity. We on the other hand had the brains. We might have been a bunch of fighting wienies, but we in the Mafia were the scientists. And we would defeat Al Capone’s gang through our science.

I myself was a scientist, and I had Louie Pallozzi, an always neatly dressed fat kid who was another mad scientist, and a couple of others. So we broke out the encyclopedias and the chemistry set manuals and started researching things like nail bombs, insidious devices used as early as the Civil War, glass jars filled with homemade gun powder and nails. We’d light and throw them or place them like land mines, buried in the tired clay soil of the Manor Park, and send nails and glass shards flying into our startled adversaries in Al Capone’s Gang.

And rockets. We began planning rockets we’d launch against the stupid bullies of Al Capone’s Gang. Nail bombs. Rockets. Chemicals. Explosives. Trip wires. Al Capone’s Gang would be no match for our science, our superior technology. The blood lust was growing, we could almost taste our adversaries’ blood, our ultimate victory over the bullies, as we plotted our strategy and weapons during Saturday afternoon war-planning get-togethers. And after school, out on Kearny Avenue, the main street through town, the two gangs would shout back and forth how we each were going to cream the other. War could break out at any moment, it seemed.

And then all hell broke loose. Somehow both sides had been doing too much blabbing about our projected gang war and word of it got to the goody-goody students in the class. And the goody-goody students went to our teacher, who freaked when she heard what was afoot, and she ran to the Principal and broke the whole thing wide open. The jig was up.

“Who are all the gangsters in this class!” our teacher bellowed out one tense afternoon. “The Mafia! Al Capone’s Gang! It’s like you all just got off the boat!”

Even in the sixth grade that had the sound of being an ethnic slur to me, an Italian-American kid all too sensitive to the hostility we faced mostly from the Irish kids in town.

“Stand up, all of you involved in this! And which ones of you are the leaders?”

Well, it was not an honor I necessarily was anxious to accept, but I stood up and copped to it, admitted to being leader of the Mafia. It couldn’t be denied, anyway.

“You’re all going to see the Principal! And then your parents will be informed! What is wrong with you people?”

Part of what was wrong with some of us people was that we could get no assistance or protection or even understanding from the good nuns, and we were tired of the beatings all the time. But that point seemed lost at that particular moment standing there in the class like weeds that had sprung up faster than the surrounding grass, the grass sitting there staring at us.

The teacher stormed out of the classroom to the Principal’s office. We stood there, glaring at the goody-goody kids.

“Thanks a lot, you guys. Really nice.”

Self-righteous little creeps. And some I considered friends. Friends turned traitors, squealers. And there was Susan Elliott, too, who had sided with the goody-goody students. This was a rift that would not be easily healed.

One by one we were marched off to the Principal’s office. I didn’t care too much about that. Necessary formality. But to tell my parents? No, that was what really had me scared. That I had to try to stave off, though it seemed inevitable.

Finally, it was time for the two leaders, Richard Jankowski, a clear sadist and sociopath, the worst of the bullies and chief of Al Capone’s Gang, and myself, the young scientist.

We stood before the Principal, Sister Eucharia Something-or-Other, Richard and I. Richard got to tell his side of the story first, which he sneered out as some sort of self-serving blah-blah accusation against me.

And then it was my turn. I am sure I was shaking, standing there in front of the Principal, who towered over us in her black nun’s garb, her hands set sternly on her hips, her standard-issue rosary draped down the outside of her thigh. And all I did was tell the truth, the truth about the years of bullying, being threatened, beaten up on an almost daily basis, and finally forming a gang out of self-defense, a way to protect ourselves from the bullies, like Richard.

There was a moment of silence as the tall nun looked from one of us to the other. And then she said the most amazing thing.

“I believe him. I believe he is telling the truth.”

And she was looking at me as she said it. Wow, did honesty just pay off? And then the words I most wanted to hear.

“All right. I’m not going to tell your parents. But this is going to end. You will disband your gangs and stop all this. I never want to hear another word of this. Do you both understand?”

I was ready to collapse from relief.

“Yes, Sister. I understand. Thank you, Sister.”

I was first to express my relief and thanks, and then Richard uttered his agreement, begrudgingly, it seemed. Not that I think he much cared whether his parents were told or not, if he even had parents. Maybe he was being raised by wolves in the caves under the railroad bridge, for all I knew.

We both wound up out in the corridor, walking up the empty terrazzo corridor on the way back to our scandalized teacher, our divided class. Heading up a short flight of steps, I turned to Richard, my hand outstretched in a gesture of peace.

“Wow, I’m glad that’s over. We’re really lucky. I hope we can get along now.”

Foolish me.

“I’m going to get you, Yacenda!” Richard snarled. “You’re really going to get it now!”

Years later I heard that Richard was in prison. Convicted of torturing animals and who knows what other offenses. A sociopath through and through. But on that day in the sixth grade I managed, as Tony Soprano would put it many years later, to dodge a very large bullet.

And so ended the short but brilliant history of the Mafia in St. Stephen’s School in Kearny, New Jersey.