The below short story originally appeared in American Crime Magazine.
Joey Pinto
By Paul Davis
I stopped in at a cigar store and lounge in South Philadelphia this past week.
I bought a Cohiba cigar and took a seat among my fellow cigar aficionados. I lit my cigar and took a sip of the coffee I brought with me. There were some young cigar smokers in the shop, but most of the customers were, like me, older men.
A man about my age sat in the chair next to me. He lit his cigar and we exchanged greetings. He said he recognized me from the photo that was published alongside my crime column in the local paper.
Harry Smith, a retired Philadelphia police officer, mentioned names of people he knew and wondered if I knew them as well. South Philly, although heavily populated, often seemed to be like a small town, or, as we often noted, a small world.
One of the names Smith mentioned stood out to me in particular: Joe Pinto.
“Yes,” I said. I know Joey Pinto. We grew up together.”
“He had a heart attack and died, you know.”
I didn’t know.
In the mid and late 1960s Pinto, who was two years older than me, lived down the block from me on Iseminger Street, a clean street of neat row homes just east of 13th Street, between Shunk Street and Oregon Avenue in the mid and late 1960s.
Pinto was about six feet tall with dark curly hair and olive skin. Although he was no athlete and did not play sports with us, he lifted weights in his house, which made him quite muscular.
Pinto had a hard childhood. His mother took off with another man when Pinto was 12 and left him alone with his cold and mean-spirted father. His father, a Philadelphia police officer, mostly ignored his son, and Pinto practically raised himself.
Joey Pinto was part of our crowd, and despite being liked, he was often mocked for his lack of brains, naiveté and his outlandish, unbelievable bragging. I’m sorry to say that I, more than anyone, mocked him and enjoyed the laughter I received for my put-downs.
Pinto usually took the insults in good humor, which was one of the reasons why he was so well-liked.
I was two or three years younger than the crew, as the teens were my older brother’s friends. I was the baby of the gang, but that did not stop me from being sarcastic. I would have probably been beaten up on occasion had it not been for the tough reputation of my older brother Eddie, but I’m proud to say that I never once threatened to sic my brother on anyone.
Still, the guys knew that I was the kid brother of the leader of the crew. But in truth, Eddie would have cracked me himself if I knew that I was running my mouth with the older guys.
During the summer months we hung on the corner of 13th and Oregon Avenue outside of JP’s luncheonette, which was across the street from the park. Although we were underage, we stood on the corner and drank beer and smoked pot. Often joining us were groups of young girls who liked to party with us.
In the cold winter months, when the miserable woman who ran the luncheonette tired of us and threw us out, we often ended up in Pinto’s house to escape the cold. Pinto’s father was seldom home, as he was in the bar around the corner when he was not working.
When Pinto would leave us in the living room to use the upstairs bathroom, one of the guys inevitably would bring up the time a few years earlier when Pinto’s mother, a most attractive woman in her 40s, came down the stairs when we were all sitting around the living room. She was clad in a see-through negligee. Her braless breasts swayed under the sheer negligee with each step and her visible brief white panties gave us all pause.
She smiled at us and said hello in a sexy voice, confirming that she enjoyed arousing the young boys. She left the Pinto house for good a year or so later, but like her son, we never forgot her.
One evening when six of us were smoking some good weed, we all got the “munchies.” An hour earlier Pinto’s father had come in carrying several bags of groceries. After he left for the bar, we all went into the kitchen, including Joey Pinto, and we tore into the food from the refrigerator and the cabinets. It was quite a feast.
When some hours later Pinto’s father came home, he found his son and us passed out on the couch and in the living room chairs.
“Jesus Christ,” we heard him holler as he looking into the refrigerator. “What the fuck happened to all of the food I just bought?”
We saw that as our cue and we got up and walked out of the house quickly and quietly, leaving Joey Pinto to deal with his father.
I recall another evening when we were all a bit drunk and high. I laid into Pinto, our host, calling him as dumb as an ox. Usually, he did not respond to my sarcastic comments, but on this night, he took offense and told me to get out of his house.
“Sure,” I replied. “Step outside with me if you’re brave enough.”
Although I was training as a boxer at the South Philly Boys Club, Pinto was older, taller and more muscular than me.
I opened the door and stepped down on two of the three steps leading to the pavement in front of his house. I then turned around quickly and looked up at Pinto, who was coming out the door and taking off his shirt.
When his shirt was down around his elbows, effectively blocking his arms, I stepped up and hit him with a good overhand right. He stumbled backwards as the other guys came out and stepped between us.
Pinto got up and apologized to me and I apologized to him, and we went back into the house.
A couple of years later Pinto,
despite his bravado about becoming a tough cop like his father, had no desire to become a tough soldier. He joined the Marine Reserves knowing that they would
probably not be called up to go to Vietnam.
I, on the other hand, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1970 when I was 17, hoping to go to South Vietnam on a 100-foot coastal Swift boat. But after Boot Camp, I received orders to report to the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. The carrier set sail for Southeast Asia, and the Kitty Hawk performed combat sorties on “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea off the coast of North Vietnam.
I returned to South Philly in 1972 and discovered that our gang had moved exactly one city block, from the luncheonette on 13th and Oregan Avene to the Moonlighter Bar on 13th and Shunk. Although I was only 19 and a half, I was served by the bartender and owner as I was an accepted member of the crew that spent a lot of money in the bar.
Drugs were a growing thing, and sadly, many of the young guys in the neighborhood were taking heroin but were not yet full-blown drug addicts, so they drank in the bar in between their heroin fixes.
Pinto, who did not take drugs, not even pot, was also not much of a drinker and he would sip on one beer for hours.
One night at the Moonlighter in 1973, one of the guys asked me about my time in the Navy. I began to give him the short version when I was interrupted by Pinto.
“Sailors are pussies,” Pinto said with a laugh. “We Marines are the real warriors in Vietnam.”
“Hell, Joey, what is this “we” shit? Did you see much combat in North Carolina? You joined the Marine Reserves to avoid Vietnam, so don’t play the warrior hero around me.”
Pinto walked way without a word.
I was working as a Defense Department civilian at the Defense Personnel Support Center, known locally as the “Quartermaster,” in 1980 when I met a beautiful woman at work. We dated and then married in 1982.
After I married, I stopped hanging at the bars with the old crew, but in 1983 Bobby Franco stopped me on the street and told me about a reunion of the old gang at a bar around the corner from my house. I was interested. Franco said his wife and some of the other wives were also coming, so I should bring my wife.
He also suggested that I tell my older brother Eddie about the reunion, as several of the “old head,” the older guys from our corner, like “Little Ant-ny,” whom my brother had been good friends with, would be there. I called my brother, but he was not interested.
I was, and I brought my young wife with me. The first guy to greet me and my wife in the bar was Joey Pinto. I introduced him to Dolores, my beautiful wife. He smiled and called her “Mrs. Paulie.” Then everyone started calling her Mrs. Paulie.
My wife got a kick out of the guys calling me “Paulie.” In South Philly, most of us were known by the diminutive of our first name. I never introduced myself as Paulie, but that was how I was known in the old crowd.
It was a fun evening. About 20 of the old gang came to the bar. As I sat at a table drinking with my wife, Pinto came over and sat with us. I asked him where his wife was. He said he was separated. I offered my condolences.
“My wife is a cop,” Pinto said. I heard he failed the police test several times until he finally passed the written test but then failed the psychological test. I found it interesting that he married a police officer.
“My wife beat me with her club, but I told her that I wasn’t gonna take it anymore, so she left me.”
I did not know how to respond. Neither did my wife.
I was thinking that I could not imagine that happening to me, but if it did, I don’t believe I would tell anyone, least of all a woman I just met.
Thankfully, an old friend and his wife came over to say hello, and Pinto got up and went to the bar.
My next encounter with Joey Pinto occurred about ten years later in the early 1990s. While continuing to work for the Defense Department during the day, I was working part-time for the local paper covering crime at night and on weekends. The editor assigned me to cover a town watch group that had just started.
I met the leader of the neighborhood town watch. His name was Earl Butt, and I soon discovered why he was called “Butthead.”
Butt was about 5’10 with wavey reddish-brown hair and he wore thick glasses. He was a pretentious idiot. He was an insurance agent with dreams of becoming a politician.
He said he was going to run
for Congress because he was dedicated to South Philly.
I tried hard not to laugh at the way he described his role in keeping the neighborhood safe. He claimed the police were ineffective, but his town watch kept criminals away.
I wrote in my notebook, “clown watch.”
Most of the members of the town watch I met that night were good, earnest people, but one member was even more of a pretentious idiot than Butthead.
That would be Joey Pinto.
As I was speaking to Butthead, a bright light blinded me as Pinto jumped the curb on a bicycle. He turned off the spotlight and greeted me.
“Paulie, are you joining the town watch?”
I told him I was covering the watch for the newspaper. Pinto told Butthead that he grew up with me and we were good friends.
I smiled and looked at the huge, mounted lamp on his bicycle. Butthead lost interest in the conversation as we were not talking about him, so he walked away. (I later learned that he was so dedicated to South Philly that soon after our encounter he moved to New Jersey.)
Although Pinto failed in his quest to become a police officer, it appeared he threw himself wholeheartedly into the town watch. He said he used his lamp to illuminate the dark streets that he patrolled at night.
Pinto shook my hand and rode off, switching on a lamp one might associate more with a prison guard tower rather than a bicycle.
I was left on the sidewalk with a town watch member who seemed normal. Bill Bruno was a short, balding man in his 40s. He said he was part of the town watch because he wanted to do his part in keeping the neighborhood where his wife and children lived as safe as possible.
“Do you know Joey Pinto?” he asked.
“Yeah, we grew up together.”
“Um…”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, reading his mind. “Joey is a bit of a goofball.”
“He’s nuts. Did you see that
light on his bike? Last week he saw a group of young guys smoking marijuana on
a corner, and he rode up to them with that spotlight glaring in their eyes.”
“That sounds like Joey.”
“They pulled him off his bike and beat the crap out of him.”
I decided to focus my
newspaper piece on Bruno and I quoted him extensively, although not about
Pinto’s run-in with some angry corner boys. To be fair, I also mentioned Butts
and Pinto briefly in the piece.
My last encounter with Joey
Pinto occurred about a month later as I waited on a corner for the traffic
light to turn green.
A truck passed me and then pulled over. Pinto jumped out of the truck and walked over to me. He pumped my hand with a firm shake and thanked me for mentioning him in my newspaper piece.
“I’m working at a wholesale warehouse,” he said. “I drive the delivery truck four days a week and I work in the warehouse four days a week.”
“That’s eight days a week.”
“Ah…”
“That’s OK. I understand.”
I took a draw from my Cohiba
and said it was a shame he died.
“He was a goof, but a likeable guy,” I said.
“I worked with Pinto in the 1st
District for a while,” Harry Smith said. “And he was called much worse things than
goof.”
“You mean Joey finally became a cop? Good for him. That was his life-long dream."
“Yeah, he retired after a
traffic injury. He was lucky that he wasn’t prosecuted for driving recklessly.
I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was an idiot.”
“But likeable.”
“Yeah,” Smith admitted. “One could not help but like the fool.”
© 2026 By Paul DavisNote: You can read my other crime fiction stories via the
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