Recruitment of the Minna Men

Recruitment of the Minna Men is the formative episode in which Frank Minna draws Lionel Essrog, Tony Vermonte, Gilbert Coney, and Danny Fantl out of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys and into the work that becomes L&L Movers. What begins as an opaque errand—four boys locked in the back of a van and set to hauling crates—gradually becomes a job, a team, and the origin story of Minna’s power to make outsiders feel chosen.

Selection and the first outing

The four boys were selected in part because they were four of the five white boys at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. The fifth, Steven Grossman, was not taken; Lionel later observed that if Steven had been thinner, Mr. Kassel might have left Lionel in the library instead. Mr. Kassel, a teacher who knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood, invited Minna to borrow the boys for an afternoon. Minna wanted white boys to fit The Clients’ presumed prejudice, as well as his own. Lionel could only speculate that Minna may already have imagined reclaiming or cultivating them; Minna did not explain himself that day.

Minna’s first act was not to introduce a business or ask the boys their names. On a hot August weekday after classes, he opened the rear of his dented, graffitied van, told them to climb inside, then shut and padlocked the doors. The boys were astonished by the interruption of their institutional routine and excited to be carried somewhere beyond St. Vincent’s. Tony Vermonte, older and convinced that an Italian rescue was coming for him, read Minna as a possible fulfillment of that expectation. Lionel, by contrast, arrived already physically restless, making a repeated chirping sound as he tried to manage his tics. Tony told him to stop, but his rebuke lacked its usual force amid the afternoon’s strangeness.

The warehouse job

After a mile or two, the van stopped in a gated warehouse yard beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in the industrial district Lionel later recognized as Red Hook. Minna led them to a detached twelve-wheel trailer loaded with hundreds of identical sealed cardboard crates. He assigned the boys to move the goods into a warehouse, giving them a simple route from truck to building and little explanation of what the cargo was or why it needed moving. The task immediately drew Lionel’s attention to the crates as things to count; he secretly took their number as part of the work.

Tony and Danny Fantl jumped into the trailer to work in its shade, while Gilbert Coney and Lionel made the first trips across the sun-struck yard. The older boys eventually joined them in dragging crates. Minna did not carry any. He stayed in the warehouse office, visible through an interior window among desks, file cabinets, notes, orange traffic cones, and pornographic calendars, smoking and talking on the telephone. His separation from the labor made the arrangement’s hierarchy plain: the boys moved the boxes, while Minna managed the job from inside.

At the end of that first job, Minna tossed a beer can into the van and told the boys to finish their beers. The work had ended without an explanation of the larger enterprise. Yet he gathered them again the following week, brought them to the same yard, and assigned nearly the same task. This time the load contained between 242 and 260 boxes. They worked in wary silence; Lionel sensed Tony’s hostility toward him and Gilbert, as if Tony feared that their presence might jeopardize the Italian rescue he imagined for himself. The shared exertion nevertheless began to make them function as a team.

From errand to L&L Movers

Over beers after the repeated job, Minna asked whether the boys liked the work and whether they knew what kind of work it was. Tony answered that it was moving boxes. Minna turned that answer into the job’s official language: it was moving work, and that was what they did for him. He handed each boy twenty dollars and a business card reading L&L MOVERS, with the slogan NO JOB TOO SMALL. SOME JOBS TOO LARGE., the names Gerard and Frank Minna, and a phone number. The cash was Lionel’s first twenty dollars. The card supplied a name for the work that the boys had already performed without understanding its purpose.

That small payment and the four cards established the boys as L&L Movers’ junior staff, at least for as long as Minna wanted them. Twenty dollars and a beer became their usual pay. Minna called them sporadically, sometimes with a day’s notice and sometimes with none. Once they began high school, the possibility of an unexpected call became reason to return to St. Vincent’s after class and wait in the schoolyard or recreation room, listening for the distinctive grumble of his van.

The jobs varied, making the company’s label cover both ordinary moving and more questionable labor. The boys carried merchandise through storefront basement grates along Court Street, in transactions that seemed as though wholesalers ought to have handled themselves. They also moved furniture from brownstone walk-ups for couples who worried that the boys were too young or inexperienced. Minna quieted those concerns by reminding customers that distractions cost money. For a difficult sofa move, the boys rigged a makeshift pulley through a third-story window: Tony and Minna worked on the roof, Gilbert and Danny received the sofa inside, and Lionel handled the guide ropes on the ground.

Other assignments revealed the reach of Minna’s favors and obligations. After a fire damaged a factory beneath the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, the boys moved most of its inhabitants for free, apparently as a settlement or concession to one of Minna’s important, unseen associates. Minna became urgent when college-age artists objected to the rough handling of damaged canvases, because the delay threatened his time and credibility with the friend-client. The boys also rose before dawn to set up temporary stages for bands at the Atlantic Antic, then returned at dusk to dismantle them. On another job they emptied an electronics showroom, disconnecting stereos and amplifiers and even removing the phone. Their work taught them the practical demands of moving, but also placed them inside transactions whose terms and purposes were not always disclosed.

The team’s hierarchy and legacy

The four boys did not enter the arrangement as equals. Tony was fifteen, two years older than Lionel and Gilbert and one year older than Danny; his experience outside the Home, confidence, and stories of private-school life made him the group’s self-appointed authority. He alternated between befriending and beating up Lionel and Steven Grossman, while treating his imagined Italian rescue as a destiny. Minna noticed Tony first and, in Lionel’s later understanding, saw the future Minna Men in the boys: recruits who could be cultivated into men under his command. Tony’s yearning may have helped shape Minna’s ambitions, though Lionel presents that connection as a possibility, not a certainty.

The recruitment also established a pattern in which masculine standing was performed through toughness, control, and the ability to belong to Minna’s world. Tony’s confidence and aggression distinguished him among the boys; Gilbert was Tony’s stocky, sullen right hand, while Danny’s relative obliviousness left him outside some of the tensions. Minna, only twenty-five that summer, seemed fully adult to them. The boys watched how he occupied the center of a group and how he behaved with women, studying his teasing and physical familiarity as part of the social knowledge they hoped to acquire. That apprenticeship was not simply a matter of lifting boxes: it taught them who gave orders, who waited to be chosen, and how Minna’s attention could confer status.

In retrospect, the first jobs also foreshadow Tony’s later ambitions. Lionel eventually understood that Tony wanted Frank Minna’s share of the Fujisaki scam and imagined taking Minna’s place with both The Clients and the Fujisaki Corporation. Tony had been fitting himself for Minna’s criminal role since he learned that such a role existed, perhaps when the boys first unloaded equipment and encountered Minna’s associates, or earlier. Recruitment did not make that future inevitable, but it put Tony inside the world whose power he would later seek. For Lionel, the same episode marked a different beginning: a boy who had felt unwanted was included in a group, given work and wages, and brought into the orbit of the person who would shape his life.