The Goat Pen

Broke boxers have forever been forced to find ways to make money. Joe Louis wrestled, Jake LaMotta did stand-up, and Mike Tyson copped. At $99 a ticket, it's a living.

He seems happy. He is down 140 pounds from his self-described "fat cokehead" high of 370. And he's in a forgiving mood, of everybody but himself.

"I'm all dressed up tonight," he said, open-palmed, "but I'm still an animal underneath."

There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can't describe unless you've heard it, which if you're lucky you haven't.

Everyone suspected who the killers were--they lived in the neighborhood, sometimes just down the street--but no one could ever prove anything. Sometimes their methods were simple: a bullet to the back of the head or a bomb strapped under the hood of a car. Or sometimes, like when they got Mr. Magda, they allowed for the more dramatic, tranquilizing their victim with a stun gun and wrapping his head in tape until he could no longer breathe.

Yet the most frightening method, the one that captured the city's imagination, was the most immaculate: the disappearance of people in broad daylight. They were the city's ghosts. Police found their cars empty on the side of the street, the engines still warm, or their dinner tables still piled with food. The only sign of the killers was an artistic flourish: the dozen long-stemmed white roses victims often received just before they vanished.

So, when Lenny Strollo ordered the hit that summer night in 1996, there was no reason to believe it would go down any differently. Only months earlier, Strollo had ordered his main mob rival mowed down as he drove to work. But this time his choice of target was more brazen: the newly elected county prosecutor, Paul Gains.

Bklyn wrote:Oddly enough, at least one of these people looks a bit better after a little meth...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/05 ... r#s=934614

eCat wrote:P90X ain't got shit on meth