I was reminded of another story the other night by an old friend from back home. I was a kid at the time but I heard this story years later. This goes back to the late 70s. Buffalo capo Benny Carcone (Russ’s father) had given the ok for a robbery to the old “barge canal gang”. This was a group of mostly Polish and Irish thieves who’s MO was to commit a robbery or home invasion on one side if the Barge canal/Mohawk river (which runs east and west through most of Upstate NY) and use boats cross the river and canal in order to avoid detection and roadblocks, they could literally cut out an hour of exposer this way. One of the Terzini Brothers (we couldn’t remember which one) had tipped them off about the large amount of cash and jewelry in the house, which combined was 6 figures in 1970s dollars. The Terzini’s owned a restaurant somewhere in the sticks half way between Utica and Rome, which was located across a corn field from the canal on old NY Route 49. The plan was to have a car in the parking lot of the restaurant for the thieves to use after crossing the canal, so Benny arranged to have the car parked there. Unaware of the plan, the Terzini’s sister was doing payrool in the office afther closing and when she left she sees the strange car in the parking lot. Pissed off that people would leave their cars overnight and go to the motel next door for the night, she calls the tow company to have the car towed, and goes home. So the thieves lug their take through the woods and the corn field, to find no car waiting for them. They are stranded. They go to the motel next door, and find no vacancy. They use the pay phone to call one of the Terzini bothers to say “Where the fuck is the car”?. Terzini calls his sister and asks if there was a car parked in the lot when she left and she says, “Yeah, I had it towed” Terzini went nuts, and told his sister don’t ask any questions, and to just get her ass back over there because three guys needed a ride to Yorkville. So she jumps in the family station wagon, drives to the motel and picks the guys up, and drives them, along with the cash and jewelry the 20 or so miles between the place and Yorkville. The Terzini sister was no babe in the woods, in fact her husband was a Buffalo associate. (Possibly a made guy at the end) So half way there she says something like “The meter is running guys”…and demands to pick out some jewly and grab some cash. They wanted to protest but you didn’t exactly say no to the Terzini’s sister and Andaloro’s wife. So she picks out some trinkets and somewhere around $1500 in cash. Benny Carcone hears about this the next day and is half pissed and half laughing like hell. It was too funny and too nuts to even get mad about, but in the end Andaloro stepped in and kicked back half the cash to Carcone, but the woman who almost sunk the plan and could have gotten everyone pinched, ended up shaking down the thieves for a cut of the swag, for a ride home.