It's late. Pooch, the howling Doberman next door, is distraught. 73-year-old Granny Ann decides to take him a treat of left-over roast beef. She falls precariously through a rotted fence and discovers that all is not well with her reclusive and mysterious neighbor. A few clues later; she immediately adopts Pooch as her own and is smiling big with a hidden manuscript and other surprise discoveries. She absconds with a windfall which leads her to an unexpected confrontation with a very angry and extremely depraved and dangerous Mafia hit-man. Lovable Pooch the Doberman becomes his judge and jury. Pooch ends up a local hero. 'He didn't need no stinkin' badge ' Questions proliferate and linger: Glaring truths, though unproven, arrive accidentally as a secretive fact from a very unlikely source; (in the form of a young offspring of the guilty party). The ensuing tale leads to a passel of interesting people and a pair of partners-for-life. It reaffirms and confirms Granny Ann's original allegations as to why everyone's water and garbage rates are so high. After the Mafia shakedowns of the 1990s, the FBI assumed the mob had been completely diffused. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe the Mafia had simply gone underground and into the very lucrative and semi-respectable garbage business. The flamboyant days of John Gotti were surely over. 1992 was a very tough time for the Mafia The crime bosses who had replaced those of that previous era had carried on. They had simply chosen to remain anonymous and totally invisible, (the older Sicilian way). They had eased out of the headline-grabbing notorious rackets of the past. Instead, they had very quietly eased unnoticed into the nation's garbage service industries. Garbage collection became more profitable than the earlier protection rackets and/or the drug or gambling rackets combined. In truth, it was making them more money than ever and it was almost respectable. The competition had all been frightened away, eliminated or devoured, creating a monopoly. As a result, the monopolization of garbage collection became 100 times more profitable than even the crime bosses had dreamed. The Mafia was still quietly and very much in control of 'That Thing of Theirs'. The old Mafia had become the new invisible Garbage Mafia. This new Mafia was apparently totally invisible, invincible and more untouchable than ever before. J. Edgar Hoover, the old bulldog, had failed to bring them down. Bobby Kennedy couldn't bring them down; nor had Rudy Giuliani or anyone else . . . (for long). They had quietly become invisible in plain sight once again, and they had apparently survived it all. Local Police remain baffled as Granny and Pooch unravel the case a few steps ahead of them. A new and soon to be life-partner, helps conclude the story by making suggestions to a few powerful connections in exactly the right places. The story becomes national news and the Mafia disappears once again. Will it lead to reduced water and garbage rates for the entire nation? That would be nice, wouldn't it So, if your water and garbage rates seem unreasonably high, you may want to question the possibility that maybe the Mafia hasn't actually disappeared. It's just possible that they have gone quietly and discreetly into the new and different (almost respectable) monopolized racket of gouging us all for our garbage collection service. Can we be certain that this is a fictional story? You decide