During the summers and winters while a student at Syracuse I worked for my hometown engineering department. It wasn’t the most difficult of jobs. Basically I drove a truck around town and watched all the construction projects going on, and I did do a good amount of surveying work, as well as some plan review in the office. In fact, I asked for a theodolite for Christmas, but never got one.

My last summer after graduating from Syracuse, and before I headed out to Berkeley for grad school, which I had never visited before (I went there on a whim; I had been to California once before, the previous spring), I had received the results of my EIT exam (formerly called the FE). The exam was a few months earlier on April 20. I remember because of the midnight celebration that surprisingly did not affect my early morning test-taking abilities. (They couldn’t have scheduled it for a more inconvenient day.)

I passed the exam, and I planned to tell my boss, the Town Engineer. He was a good guy, maybe early fifties, on his second marriage, with ties to the local mob. That is the hidden secret about Buffalo and her suburbs: the presence of the mob — however quiet — in daily life. The grocery store, the car dealership, and especially the construction companies, were mostly mob-run, or affiliated with the mob through family.

My colleague while working at the Town had his life threatened by construction workers when he made a stink about some of the work that they were doing. We were reviewing their building pad elevations with our trusty theodolite and the crew didn’t like the fact that we were on the site, let alone what we were doing. My colleague — his name was Marty Root, a son of a former powerful local politician, maybe twenty years older than I; a lost son of sorts, known for his past drunkenness; think of a young George W. Bush — filed a complaint about the incident, and I signed-off on it too. I didn’t think much of the incident when it happened, but I was a fan of the Sopranos, and I wasn’t the one being threatened.

My boss pulled me aside a day later and told me Marty was in the wrong, that we shouldn’t be reviewing the construction crew’s work, and to watch out for myself. The construction crew was part of the Cimato family, the head of which (Anthony) had emigrated to America from Italy decades earlier and made his fortune installing sewer in the northern suburbs of Buffalo. Tony started with nothing but took all the work he could (always submitting the low bid), and slowly but surely he made a lot of money, eventually owning his own business, and later he started a development company (with land that was given to him as payment for sewer work). One of his first neighborhoods was called Kingsview Estates, where I lived for the first twelve years of my life. My parents moved in a few months before I was born. My next door neighbor — the owners of the biggest house and lot in the neighborhood — was Tony Cimato, the developer himself. (Our house was tiny in comparison.)

I remember swimming in his pool with his college-age daughter Maria. There are photos that attest to this — Maria holding me in her arms in the pool — which is probably what started my youthful fondness for Italian women. My older sister (five years my senior) played with Tony’s youngest son, Francesco, around that time as well. Francesco grew up and took a role in the construction company his father built, the same company that was threatening my colleague at my summer job.

As my siblings and I grew older (and less adorable), the relationship between our neighbors and us sort of soured. At one point, we were told that we were no longer allowed to swim in their pool (it was one of the only pools in the neighborhood; my family usually went to the community pool to swim). My brother (sixteen months my elder) and I would play baseball and football in our backyard, and every now and then, an errant throw would wind up with the ball in their yard and behind their fence. We would climb the fence, a metal white picket fence, maybe five feet high with sharp points at the top, and get the ball, but they had a big scary black dog that frightened us (not a lab, possibly a Rottweiler that was chained to a big doghouse in their backyard), and we broke the top part of their fence once or twice. The mother was an old Italian woman and she did not like us young children climbing in her yard, and she would come out through the patio door yelling at us. (She looked like Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, but more Italian and mean, like the chef from the Muppets.)

I bumped into Francesco once before on another construction site in town. The crew was installing concrete curb along a road that was eventually named Michael Douglas Drive. It was not named for the actor but for one of Tony Cimato’s grandchildren (or great grandchildren), as were many other streets being built in the residential neighborhoods in my town. Francesco didn’t recognize me, and I wouldn’t have recognized him if it weren’t for hearing someone call his name. He was the foreman for the curb installation job. Francesco was not on the other site when Marty was threatened with his life, an incident that Marty took much more seriously than I.

After Marty’s complaint was rejected, he told me that he would tell me all of the town’s secrets he knew, an unflattering account from all of his travails, secrets he knew because of his politically powerful family, including how the mob controlled construction in town and how they kept it that way. Marty and I never had the conversation as I was to depart to California, and never return, in a month or so.

I was sitting in my cube when I told my boss that I had passed the EIT as he walked from the reception area to his office, which was adorned with Republican memorabilia, including a photograph of him with then-President Ronald Reagan. My boss stopped and smiled, and said, “Well, that is like taking a shit.” And then he continued with more career advice. “And the PE — that’s like taking an even bigger shit.” He was right.

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