Joey Cucuzza Loses His Election

The Story for June 2023

This was written for an anthology series that supports a great cause: Democracy Docket, which fights voter suppression. That series is Low Down Dirty Vote, and I wrote the fourth Joey Cucuzza story for the third book in the series, The Color of My Vote, for editor Mysti Berry. Full subscribers can read the first four stories in the Story Archive.

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Joey Cucuzza Loses His Election

by Thomas Pluck

Joey Cucuzza didn’t want to shoot the guy, but he didn’t get a vote on it.

They were parked in a remote section of Newark’s Weequahic park, between the jogging paths and the cemetery. Nowhere to run. The shot from his Baby Beretta would crackle off the autumn-painted trees, and some dog walker would find the body once it got ripe.

If someone had seen him beckon the young man out of the massage parlor and into his electric blue Alfa Romeo sedan, they wouldn’t talk. Not in that neighborhood. Not if they liked their families on this side of the grave.

As the partner of a mob captain, Joey walked a fine line. It gave him great privilege and power, but also caged him in ways a citizen could never conceive. Such as having to ice a dumb masseur who’d given a happy ending to the capo of the juiciest slice of northern New Jersey, so he couldn’t flap his gums that the boss—a high school football hero gone to seed, a real swinging dick, a man’s man—was not only bisexual, but a power bottom.

The young guy barely said a word. Joey wasn’t sure he spoke English. But you could rat in any language.

Joey had said no to the handy offered by his own masseuse. He’d chosen the chestiest of the women to keep his appetite from distracting him, because he never got a rubdown without a few tokes off the pinch-hitter pipe that he kept in the car. But Aldo Quattrocchi, the best-earning capo of the Mastino crime family, and his partner of eight years, was not one to restrict his appetites.

So the massage therapist was fertilizer. He just didn’t know it yet.