Tag Archives: diamonds

SOME CHOWDAH, BOBBY by Peter Nolan Smith

April 23, 2025 – 4:42 am

Last holiday season Richie Boy had hired me to help with sales and schlepping merchandise between dealers and jewelers. Hlove and I worked together to make sales, but business on 47th Street was murder. There was no foot traffic and my old customers hated the street and all the hawkers shilling to buy gold. “Back […]

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St. Valentine’s Day Massacre / BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

February 14, 2025 – 4:18 am

Every Valentine’s Day diamond dealers and jewelers on 47th Street anticipated a winter spending spree by lovers for their loved ones, but each year of the 21st Century the sales numbers dropped drastically, as the economic downturn cut into everyone’s surplus, but the rich. Valentine afternoon in February 2011 shoppers crammed the chocolatiers along 5th […]

By Peter | Posted in Bet On Crazy, Diamonds, Love, NEW YORK, semi-fiction | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

11:59PM – bet on crazy 2016

December 21, 2024 – 8:04 am

The Friday before Christmas was the Winter Solstice. I stopped by the diamond exchange on 47th Street. There were no customers in sight. Only the rich have money and the vast majority of the .00001 had fled south for Palm Beach or St. Bart’s. Richie Boy was working with a wealthy friend, asking $260,000 for […]

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MAKE NICE / Bet On Crazy by Peter Nolan Smith

November 14, 2024 – 5:07 am

Published on: Nov 4, 2011 The Diamond District on West 47th Street was a closed community. Family histories have been intertwined by marriages and business deals. The smiling faces on the surface hid the turbid conflict behind the scenes. My boss, Manny, and his son, Richie Boy, followed the Corleone tradition of never laundering family […]

By Peter | Posted in 2010s, Bet On Crazy, Diamonds, NEW YORK, semi-fiction | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

THIEF OF TIME by Peter Nolan Smith

November 13, 2024 – 8:36 pm

Published on: Mar 23, 2011 My first watch was a Timex bought by my father for my fourteenth birthday. I wore that timepiece throughout high school and college. It disappeared in the mid-70s. Lost, but not stolen. I went without a watch for the reminder of the decade. Punks in the East Village had no […]

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