Wednesday, November 20, 2013

What to do when you find out your neighbour is a mafia boss

Nothing.

And let me tell you why.

These guys are the very best of neighbours.

I didn't even have an inkling that Buddy next door was any sort of Mafia bigwig until I saw him on TV. In fact, when you watch the show, it even had my house in one of the shots!

Now, had I given it more thought, I might have come up with suspicions about Buddy. Middle aged Italian gentleman who dressed nice, didn't appear to have a regular job, went away somewhere warm every November to March, and always drove a Cadillac or a Mercedes - it changed every year.

When you put it like that you'd have to say only a willful idiot didn't see it.

But it wasn't like that at all.

He was the best of neighbours. Liked to mind his business like I mind my own.

The odd time we'd stand and chat for five minutes. Mostly it was just a neighbourly wave as he went about his business and I went about mine.

But then, there was that time I was scalping tickets outside Copps Coliseum... it was the Canada Cup back in ... oh man, 72?  82?...

Anyway, this wasn't anything I did on a regular basis, but a friend had a few extras and so there we were about a block down the street, and there was lots of folks around doing the same thing. Lots of people just happened to have a few extra tickets, and this Canada-Russia shit kinda went viral... people were happy to pay $500 for a ticket with a face value of less than fifty bucks!

And suddenly here is this well-dressed Italian gentleman sidling up the street, and the scalpers scatter. Well, some of them.

The rest of them seem to be friends of his. Then he sees me, and.... holy jumpin'... it's my neighbour!

So we stopped and chatted for a minute. He knew exactly what I was doing. I knew exactly what he was doing. If I hadn't been his innocent next door neighbour, there might have been an issue.

But there wasn't.

Which is why, when you find yourself living next to a middle age Italian guy with no visible means of support but a really nice car, you know you've got nothing to worry about.

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