The Friend Who Leaned

Q. On the brick wall of a parking garage at 345 West 36th Street in the garment district is a touching plaque dedicated to someone named Leander E. Jones that says he used to lean against the building. There must be a story behind this.

There is, explained Anthony Russo of East Meadow, N.Y. His brother-in-law, Jack Anthony Gambino, who owned the garage before he died in a 2000 plane crash, put up the plaque to honor an old friend, Leander Jones, known as Gene. "Gene was a big, massive man," Mr. Russo said. Both the teenage Jack and his friend Gene, who was at least 15 years older, had worked for Jack's father and uncle in a trucking business, and the two took a liking to each other.

"Gene became a kind of mentor for Jack," Mr. Russo said. "Once Jack sprouted his wings and decided to go into business in the garment district himself, he took Gene on as his right-hand man." Gene was the garage's dispatcher, telling about 15 men where to deliver garments that were off-loaded into carts and destined for various stores.

One of the men at the garage, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, recalled that Gene likes to lean against the front of the building, and the idea that he was holding up the building was a kind of joke between Gene and Jack. After Gene died in 1999 -- of a heart attack, Mr. Russo said -- his friend put up the plaque.

It reads in part: "This plaque is dedicated to Leander E. Jones. Affectionately known as Gene. For it is on this site that Gene kept this side of my building up, occasionally leaning on the other side to balance it."

"Gene, you always taught me well, and I'll always appreciate it and remember it."

See what I mean? -- A cute story about a guy who leaned against a building and a friend who commemorated it.

Except that:

• The Gambino crime family notoriously controlled trucking in the garment industry in the New York area, using extortion and other standard Mafia techniques to maintain their position.



• In 2003, a person named "Anthony Russo" pled guilty to conspiring to commit extortion and was sentenced to 33 months of imprisonment followed by 3 years of supervised release. He "conspired to extort more than $10,000 from the owners and operators of a clothing manufacturer in New York City in order to gain labor peace."



• The NTSB apparently could not determine the cause of Jack Anthony Gambino's air plane crash. "Things at first seemed normal. The tower at Roanoke Regional Airport received two radio transmissions from the pilot before the single-engine plane suddenly disappeared from radar. Then, without any apparent sign of distress, the plane dropped from the sky. ... 'The plane came apart in the air,' said 1st Sgt. Joe Peters of the Virginia State Police.

Alright, nothing definitive in any of that -- I could be impugning the reputations of perfectly legitimate and law-abiding citizens -- but, the whole story -- the kid and his "mentor" who worked for his father and uncle in garment district trucking until the kid "spread his wings" and started his own garment district trucking business; the "mentor" who was a "massive man" and worked as a truck dispatcher and the bosses' "right-hand man", but had enough spare time to be well-known for leaning against a building; the whole thing -- just feels like wiseguy stuff to me, and I wonder why it didn't feel that way to Michael Pollak, the writer for the Times? And, for that matter, why didn't it strike any of his editors that way?

Or was someone leaned on here?

Maybe it's nothing -- either there's no story there, or else it's just a minor case of lackluster reporting. But in any case, if these guys are hoods, the story loses most of its charm for me.