My cousin was murdered while sitting on his couch in his living room, shot twice and left to bleed out and die. Most all of my cousins were really smart go-getters and made a lot out of themselves, but Tim really just wasn't that bright.
He was big, racist, and he looked and acted gruff like a mean biker, but I knew him from a little kid and he was really soft -- a pussy as a little kid, actually.
He went to restaurant school to be a chef, and somehow ended up in Nevada where, because of his size and looks I guess, he told me that one day that 4-5 big guys in shiny suits with bulges under their armpits came into his kitchen and told him to come with them.
He was taken to an office, given a large, fat envelope, and told to deliver it to another office where another 4-5 big guys in shiny suits with bulges under their armpits took it from him.
He was then told he had a new job, delivering these packages. He got a raise, and said he only worked 2-3 days a week. Later, he said, he was given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a car and told to drive around Nevada and buy up restaurants. Before credit cards totally took over, I guess, restaurants, with their steady cash flow, were a great way for the mob to launder their money.
Anyway, he came back home for his Dad's, my Uncle Ed's, funeral. Uncle Ed was a WWII infantry combat vet, and an ATF agent, which I had always thought back then meant that he worked in a office, which might have been the case, I don't know.
Anyway, we took a walk after the funeral reception, and he told me his story. He said he wanted to quit, but didn't know what to do. I told these guys, the mob, were not his true friends, and that if he could get out, he should.
A year or so later, he did move back, and opened a born-to-fail electronics store. One of the first things he did was "arrange" a break-in of his own store, so he could collect insurance on his inventory while fencing the stuff himself.
In one of those weird, weird, coincidences, I later found out that the jamoke he had carry out his "break-in" was the SAME guy who, a couple of years later, stopped at the gas station where I was getting my six volt, sunroof, VW bug inspected and asked me where the SPCA was. At that time I didn't know. He then proceeded to bring an absolutely gorgeous, champion pedigreed, 150 lb, 10 month old Great Dane out of his Camaro and said in his mullet voice, "I bought him for my girl friend, but she don't want him,
you want him?"
I couldn't say no, and as I looked at Bogie (he was already named Bogart) across the tarmac heat shimmering in the August sun, I had to say to myself, "Till death do us part" because that's the way I have always felt about the responsibility of taking on a pet.
I did get his girl friend's address and later went and got his papers from her. Bogie went in and lay down in the exact same spot in the kitchen where she said he always had, but he did NOT even interact with her at all. Bogie had class, reserve, and presence!
Bogart and me. He's the big chested blonde:
Bogie letting this douche's inferior Dane try to sniff him while he regally ignores the cur:
Bogie the Rogue Yogi Doggie, the Hound of Renown. Never on leash, always under absolute voice control, even when I lived in West Philly.
But I digress.
My cousin Tim. He was into coke. I kept trying to tell him how stupid that was. He wouldn't listen. He had some mob guy "friend" fly in regularly to Philly from Nevada and supply him. He dealt. I told him that was even stupider. He didn't listen. I also told him keeping mob contacts was not a healthy idea. Again, he just didn't listen.
We drifted apart. I remember some time not that long before his death his saying he owed some punks money, but that they could go fuck themselves. He was always arrogant like that, this big scary guy that
I knew I could take with one hand behind my back, my little pussy cousin Tim. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
When I heard he'd been murdered, I went right over and his sister, my cousin, was stunned and just FUTILELY trying to scrub the blood out of the couch in the living room he'd been sitting on when he been shot to death, with a vacant, zombie look on her face, the stunned mask of uncomprehending grief. Sudden death is a weird thing to try and get your head around.
Getting all that blood out of the red soaked couch, it was never going to happen. But I couldn't stop her. She needed to be doing
something. I'll never forget that.
Anyway, all these years later, and there's still links to the trial of his idiot punk murderer:
http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-26/news/26242025_1_preliminary-hearings-drugs-haverford
http://articles.philly.com/1987-09-24/news/26208280_1_police-cars-preliminary-hearing-slaying
I didn't go to his funeral, I don't know why. But I did write a long poem about Tim and gave it to his Mom, my Aunt Helen. Actually I just put it in her mailbox and drove away. I didn't keep a copy. I sorta' wish I had.