My brother was a bagman for one of the country’s most notorious mobsters, and he did it with grace. Tom Homan, the notorious mobster Donald Trump’s Big Bad Border Czar, disgraced the calling.

(Fred Flintstone? Or, Trump Border Czar Tom Homan inhaling his latest bag of cash?)

My brother was a bagman for John Gotti and the Gambino Crime family for years.

He cut a very elegant figure for performing such a grubby job of shaking people down for money in exchange for “protection.”

Six-feet tall, with striking black hair when he was younger and glorious grey salt & pepper hair as he aged, he was the very model of a modern American mobster. He had a perfect petite nose, beautiful dark eyes, and a quick, warm, welcoming smile.

My brother modeled himself after the debonair Pat Eboli, my mother’s cousin by marriage, and the quiet, strong, model for Marlon Brando’s “Godfather “ character. My mother’s first cousin, Jean, was married to Pat Eboli—brother to the successor to Vito Genovese, Tommy Eboli. My mother’s other first cousin, was Alfred Lettieri, Jean’s brother, who went on to play “Solozzo the Turk,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s first “Godfather” movie. It was Al Lettieri, drug-doing friend of Al Pacino,’s who introduced Coppola, and Pacino and Brando to our cousin Pat Eboli, and the rest, as they say, was movie history.

Pat Eboli, was the apple of Lucky Luciano’s eye, and his Cary Grant-like good looks, made him more movie star than mobster. He was an ethereal force in our family, hovering over family-history like a God, paying in full for my Aunt Josephine’s—my mother’s older sister’s—50th Wedding Anniversary back in 1962.

The Anniversary Party was held at my parents home in North Babylon, Long Island, and was the first time since 1957’s Appalachin Mob Boss meeting in upstate New York, that leaders of the Genovese Crime Family and the Gambino Crime Family were together in the same location. The Gambino Crime family was represented by Carmine “Charlie Wagons” Fatico, another relative by marriage on my mother’s side, whom we affectionately referred to as “Uncle Charlie.” Ironically, ten years later, in 1972, Carlo Gambino, “Uncle Charlie’s” boss, would have Tommy Eboli murdered for failing to pay him a $4 million debt. It was that mob assassination, between the two prominent New York Crime families, that led our cosmopolitan cousin Pat Eboli to flee the US, and never be heard from again. Still, we worshipped him.

It was easy to see why my brother, the bagman, idolized Pat Eboli. Pat was reserved; he was elegant; he didn’t boast or brag, or talk in a steady stream of four-letter words. He listened; he looked at you; he was generous to all of the people he loved; he smiled at you, and he never expected anything in return. He was, in short, just like my brother, and my brother saw that you could be a very tough guy, without being a tough guy.

That may have been my brother’s role model, but with Pat Eboli’s disappearance went my brother’s chance to apprentice with him. Instead, it was “Uncle Charlie” who offered my brother a desperately needed entry-level position in the Gambino Crime Family, which my brother was forever grateful to secure.

My brother was a lover, not a killer, and Fatico, a shrewd judge of men, who was John Gotti’s real-life godfather into the Gambino Crime Family, saw that my brother was not a thug, but a gentleman. He appreciated my brother’s dapper looks, and kind demeanor, and knew he would make a perfect, professional, non-threatening bag man, who would leave no tracks or bruised feelings.

I remember walking into my brother’s office unannounced one day in the early 1980’s, before I started working for Mario Cuomo, and saw him counting piles of money sorted out on a huge wooden desk. I surprised him, and ever so gently, he asked me to give him a few minutes of privacy until he was done. He had just gotten back from his “morning rounds” of collections, and wanted to make sure the right amounts went to the right people.

But that was my brother’s style: to minimize what he was doing, to be discreet, to not make too big a deal out of anything. He would never have openly accepted $50,000 in a brown CAVA food bag, from people he didn’t know, the dumb way Trump’s Bagman, Border Czar Tom Homan did. So tacky; so cheap; so typical of Trump and his miscreant minions.

I communicated to my brother recently about this as we approached the 11th anniversary of his death by pancreatic cancer:

ME: Do you believe this guy? He’s in law enforcement for 40 years, and he falls for the most common sting operation in the FBI. It’s as if ABSCAM never happened, and those Congressmen never took briefcases full of cash, and “Mr. Law Enforcement—Honan—was not even aware of the scam?

My Brother (MB from here on out, which also abbreviates “My Bagman”:

MB: Predictable.

ME: How so?

MB: Look at where he grew up. West Carthage, wayyyyyy the fuck upstate New York. When the biggest City near you is Watertown, you know things are bad. He worked as a patrolman for the local Police Department, making what? $7500 a year? What kind of food could they possibly have in such a bumfuck place? I’m sure they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.

(To my brother, a gourmet chef, not having good food was a fate worse then prison. And Christmas eve, was, for someone with his culinary skills and growing up Italian, the equivalent of making it to Carnegie Hall. You were duty bound to give it all you had: seven fishes and then some. The biggest insult you could give to another family was to say that they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.)

ME: Yeah, but he got out. He quickly made a career for himself in Immigration. He moved up.

MB: (looking at me sideways) Are you serious? You ever been to a border town in Texas? Or Arizona? In the summer, when it’s 105 degrees everyday? You call that moving up? Only some kind of sick bastard would do that, and subject his family to it.

ME: Well, he is sort-of-a-sick bastard. He’s the Corporal Schultz, Nazi-look alike who bragged that it was his idea to separate children from their caregivers. Imagine being proud of ripping babies from their mothers breasts? And he claimed to be a devout Catholic, and boasted of disagreeing with Pope Francis on immigration.

MB: A phony piece of shit. Did you ever take a good look at his mannerisms? He talks tough, and he immediately looks down to make sure his fly is zipped. So insecure in who and where he is. He says a few more stupid things and then pulls his underwear to get it out of his butt crack. The mark of a real jadrool. “A cop’s cop,” he called himself. A dirty, smelly cop if you ask me.

ME: How much money do you think he’s worth today, from his lifetime in public service?

MB: Oh, I don’t have to guess; I know.

ME: How do you know?

MB: I’m dead, remember. I can see everything, even the Epstein files.

ME: So, you already know he’s worth some $10 million?

MB: Know? I watched him grift and grovel for it. He was barely out the door at Immigration when he was paid $150 K to lobby for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that ended up getting a $225 million contract with the State of Texas of to build a section of Trump’s border wall? You think the payoffs stopped there? They never saw that kind of money in West Carnage…

ME: Carthage. West Carthage.

MB: Carnage, Carthage. It’s all the same fucking thing. He wears a badge for a while, struts around like his shit doesn’t stink and rips working stiffs off for millions the moment he gets the opportunity, always hiding behind his sainted “career in law enforcement.” Two years before he joined the SECOND grifting gang to seize power with Trump, he was taking thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the GEO group—the largest prison operator in the US. Our crowd served a lot of time in a lot of their hellholes, and we knew about those pilfering fuckers.

ME: Did you also know they run for-profit prison systems AND build immigration detention centers?

MB: Sons-of-bitches. Well, they sure found the right bagman. The fuckin’ FBI didn’t have to try to catch him by stuffing hundred dollar bills into a cheap brown lunch bag and posing as greedy businessmen. Schultz the Nazi was already bought and sold a thousand times over by these corporate criminals. He found them all by himself.

(My brother had served 90 days in prison for income tax evasion, the typical charge that usually tripped up bagmen because they never claimed their illegal profits on their taxes. The feds pressured him to provide them evidence on John Gotti and the Gambino Crime Family and he refused)

MB: You know what stinks. Not that I went to jail. It was my choice to serve my time; I knew what I did was wrong, and I took my punishment like a man. I never whined like that garbage pail in the White House.

ME: Why do you call Trump that? I know you guys used to do business with him, lots of construction business in New York, providing him cement and drywall. I know that the Teamster Boss John Cody, your buddy, used to drive him crazy, and had Trump peeing in his pants so much, that he forced the flatulent fraud to give his mistress a fancy apartment in Trump Tower. But I heard it from you, from John Gotti, Jr., from every one of your Gambino colleagues who dealt with him: you all called Trump “The Garbage Pail.”

MB: (smiled a sly smile). Because that’s all that’s inside that piece of shit, Garbage; that’s all he holds, garbage; that’s all that comes out of his mouth— garbage.

ME: You were starting to say what you thought really stunk to high heaven about Homan?

MB: He’s a vulgarian. We mob guys got the reputation, but it was just an act we put on to scare people. Homan is a true vulgarian; he wears crappy-looking clothing; he carries himself like shit on a stick; he smirks, as he rips families apart. He hides behind his hollow, pompous poses of being a lawman or a holly roller or a television bullshitter, but he is the smug, self-satisfied face of true evil. He always looks like he just swallowed the evidence of his own guilt and the guilt of all of his accomplices. For me, I was just one of the boys, and when we got caught for doing stupid or mean or illegal things, we paid the price for what we did. Homan, the true vulgarian, and Trump, his criminal Capo, know they never will and that they’ll make more money off what they’re doing, and get away with it. That’s what stinks.

ME: (I paused to absorb the power of what my dead brother just told me) Now, who and what’s in the Epstein files?

MB: (My brother looked at me and winked) I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.

(And, with that, my brother disappeared into the night.)