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Niccolo turned to go… then paused at the door and looked back.
“I initially resisted hiring you. I thought Dario was just trying to help out a friend… but now I can see I was wrong. I think you’re going to be very, very good for the family.”
“Thank you. I’m going do my very best.”
Niccolo nodded, then walked away down the hall.
117
Training the next morning was a shitshow.
Niccolo sent me a group of 40 men, half young, half old – and they were abysmally out of shape. Even the young guys with good physiques had no stamina. They might have been gym rats able to deadlift 400 pounds, but they couldn’t run a quarter mile without collapsing afterwards.
The worst were the older guys – the 40- and 50-somethings who’d worked for the family for decades.
The young guys at least wanted to get better. They had an eagerness to learn and a competitive spirit.
The old guys had nothing but bad attitudes.
Why the fuck we gotta do this?
Nobody runs in the Cosa Nostra. If you’re running, you look guilty.
I ignored them and continued to put them through their paces.
After an hour, five of the old-timers walked off and went back to the house.
“This is bullshit,” one of them sneered. “I’m paid to guard Fausto, not train for the fuckin’ Olympics.”
I let them go without comment.
After another 30 minutes of calisthenics, I took the remaining men to grab some unloaded assault rifles and pistols in the garage, after which we sprinted to the building by the winery. They needed the exercise.
During the run, I lost another three old-timers who walked out.
The building was an old concrete structure filled with wine-making casks and a thousand odds and ends that nobody had ever thrown away. Lots of shadows… lots of clutter… lots of places to hide.
Perfect.
I started them with the basics: making sure their guns were unloaded. Keeping their fingers off the triggers unless they were about to shoot – otherwise, it was too easy to get startled and kill a teammate by accident.
Then we covered how to handle assault rifles vs. pistols. How to enter a room with guns drawn. How to cover your teammates to make sure nobody could get the drop on them. Where to look and how to make sure there were no threats in a room. How to go up a stairwell with at least one person watching the group’s back.
We drilled for two hours. I followed groups around and yelled at them whenever they made a mistake.
Then I turned it into a game of hide and seek. Half the men were ‘seekers,’ and the other half hid throughout the building. The goal was for the seekers to clear the structure using the principles I’d taught them and find all the ‘hiders.’
If a hider could sneak up and tag a seeker before he’d realized it, then the seeker was dead. At the end, we tallied up the living vs. the dead, and the winners got bragging rights.
They seemed to like that, if for no other reason than they didn’t have to run.
So I made them run back to the house.
By the time we got back at noon, they were exhausted – but the younger guys were excited and talkative. The older ones were sullen and pissed off.
I went and found Niccolo.
“How did it go?” he asked.
