Russ’s personal life, meanwhile, became ever more complicated. If I am searching for a personality in researching this book, and feel continually thwarted at trying to locate it, in this period it is particularly frustrating. It feels as though Russ tried to hide by dividing himself up among different women—as though he’d hit on the brilliant idea that creating enough chaos would keep him distracted from looking at what was at its center. I had the feeling he was hiding from himself.
His affair with Vicky was fiery; maybe it was exciting to carry it on behind their spouses’ backs, but it had to have been utterly exhausting. Meanwhile, Isabel never went away. She was still cleaning for Joe and Millie, from which position she was able to oversee her little boy’s childhood. And now she had gotten Russ to let her do the cleaning at the Haven. For more than a decade she had persisted in believing that Russ would leave Mary for him. Certainly he knew that was her hope; maybe he led her along. I suspect he was too weak to stand up to her force of personality, too weak to sever ties with her, and rationalized that keeping her in his employ was a workable compromise, just as he had thought that giving their child to Joe and Millie was a solution.
But naturally Isabel found out about Vicky. Vicky thus replaced Mary as the object of her ire. One night Vicky and Alex were at the Haven. They had brought Alexis with them. It was getting late; Alex left because he had to work in the morning. Vicky and her daughter stayed until closing time—in other words, just when Isabel showed up to start cleaning. (“My mother thought nothing of keeping me out till two in the morning,” Alexis said.) As Russ locked up, he told Vicky he would take her and Alexis downtown to Coney Island Hot Dogs for a late-night snack. “So we waited and we followed him in our car,” Alexis told me. “And all of a sudden here comes Isabel following everybody. We were driving up Roxbury Avenue and she sideswipes my mother’s car. Your grandfather got out of his car and started screaming at her. He didn’t see it but she had a hatchet. She hit him right in the top of the head with it. All I could see was blood coming down. I was sure he was dead. Isabel took off and my mother and I took him to the ER. My mother called your grandmother and told her what happened. And she said, ‘Let the bastard die.’ ”
Russ lived. Mary’s suffering continued. While I was interviewing various women in my family, I asked for their thoughts about my grandmother’s situation. She was married to a man who was a pathological cheat not only at dice and cards but in life, in his marriage. His behavior bred psychological chaos, drove her to the depths of depression and maybe to the brink of madness. Why didn’t she leave him?
Everyone had the same answer. “Women didn’t leave their husbands,” Minnie told me. “A lot of times they had good reason to, but they didn’t do it.” As long as Russ kept returning home at night, Mary was trapped.
Finally, in 1964, he moved out. The last straw was when Vicky showed up at the family home to confront him and Mary—and she was clearly pregnant. My guess is that Russ had made an effort to deny that he was the baby’s father, and that set her off. My aunt says a loud shouting match ensued, with Vicky doing most of the shouting. That was too much for Mary; and at last it was too much even for Russ.
Mary was relieved once Russ was gone. Years of black, corrosive tension drained away from the household. “I don’t know why he didn’t do that years earlier,” my mother said. “They were torturing each other.” I think the answer must have been Russ’s weakness. As much as he needed the affairs, he also needed the relative stability of a home life.
My sharpest and warmest memories of my grandmother are from precisely this time—after Russ left home, beginning in the summer when I was five years old. My mother had her hands full with my younger siblings; I liked being with my grandmother, so for a time I spent mornings and afternoons at her house. She doted on me, fried me steaks for lunch, set up a tray in front of the TV for me to watch daytime reruns of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, smiled at me with her watery eyes. I didn’t mind her steadily pouring herself little glassfuls of beer throughout the day from the quart bottles she had delivered by the case. I knew they were meant to help her. At times she could be almost light. She had a dog named Bee-Bee. I loved it when she fried four eggs: two for me and two for the dog. She spent the whole day with Bee-Bee, talking to her. I listened resolutely as she told me that Bee-Bee standing beside the front door and growling in a rolling “ow—OWWW” sound meant that the dog was attempting to speak English: “I wanna go OUT.” I knew she believed that.
She was also perfectly capable of enveloping me in her painful reveries. I don’t remember her railing against her husband, but I knew that ache was there. She would at times go off on jags against “the Serbians.” I didn’t know who the Serbians were, but they were clearly awful people. I had no idea that she’d had an abusive stepfather, let alone that he had been a Serb.
I suppose I understood that my grandfather had recently moved out. I have dim memories of just before—him sitting at the kitchen table, a napkin tucked into his shirt top, her waiting on him—and I guess I understood that an event like the husband leaving the home only happened following great turmoil. Strange to say, but I found the house, on those languorous afternoons when it was just my grandmother and me, to be simultaneously a place of comfort and mystery. I loved exploring it, and it occurs to me that I was trying then to do what I am doing right now. I knew that things had happened in this house. There was a story, and I was trying to report it. I felt that my exploration needed to be carried out with some stealth. I had to assume an air of nonchalance. I studied the objects as if they held clues.
On the mantel sat a bust of two lovers twisted into a kiss. I recognize it now, looking at it in my mind’s eye, as Art Deco in style. The man and woman were so molded to each other, the lips so fused, they suggested a union of utter completeness. In the basement was some leftover paraphernalia from Russ’s days as an operator of illegal casinos: dice in a cage that had a handle you could turn; a bright-green board playfully divided up into circles and squares. Toys that weren’t toys.
On the banquette in the dining room there was what appeared to be a set of books, but if you opened the top you saw they weren’t books at all but a kind of box. Inside was a kit for making drinks: tumblers, shaker, strainer, shot glasses. This object seemed particularly significant. Why would you need to hide this activity behind a literary facade? Who was it being hidden from? I seem to have known both to associate my grandfather with alcohol and that he hid things from people. I opened this little chest only when I was alone, and only once or twice.
In spite of the heaviness of the atmosphere, I felt content being with my grandmother in her home. I loved my own house, but it was a chaotic place of babies and toddlers. Here it was quiet, and I had my grandmother to myself. She and I valued each other. Of course, I didn’t appreciate the timing. It didn’t occur to me that my grandmother had replaced one Russell Shorto with another.
WHEN VICKY’S BABY was born, in 1964, her husband, Alex, accepted him as his own son. They named him Sandor, after Alex’s father. The boy had a fraught life. Alexis remembered a time when Sandor was two years old and Isabel showed up at their house and picked him up off the front porch. She started to take him, Alexis screamed, Vicky came out. Isabel put the baby down and ran. “She resented Sandor,” Alexis said. “She was going to kidnap him.”
I don’t know how to characterize what supposedly happened next, so I’ll just quote what Alexis told me: “A man went to Isabel’s apartment soon after that and threw acid on her face. Apparently it was a message—to tell her that enough was enough.” Alexis wasn’t sure the man succeeded—nobody mentioned to me that Isabel’s face was disfigured after that. I asked her how she knew this, and she said she remembered Russ telling her mother about it. I asked if he said it with surprise or concern. “No, I think he was sort of chuckling,” she said. In other words, she said, Russ was telling Vicky that she wouldn’t have to worry about her son’s safety anymore, because Isabel had been sc
ared off.
This story shocked me more than all the stories surrounding Pippy’s murder. I didn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t.
Alex died in 1972, of lung cancer. After that, Russ moved into Vicky’s house. He and Sandor were then much like father and son, after a fashion. Russ would get the boy out of school early so he could take him to the racetrack. “Sandor loved the track,” Alexis said. “He loved gambling. He idolized Russ.” Russ took Vicky, Alexis, and Sandor to the Shangri-La, or some other fancy supper club, three times a week. “Sandor and I grew up with that kind of lifestyle. Russ and his friends lived for the present. We loved being with him.” Sandor accompanied Russ on trips around town, to meet bookies and gamblers. Sometimes the boy would whisper to Alexis, in a thrilled voice, “This is the mafia!”
But here’s a strange thing. Vicky would not admit that Sandor was Russ’s son. She made Sandor call him Uncle Russ. Sandor knew better; he longed to have the relationship clarified. As a defiant teenager, he would yell at his mother, “I’m a Shorto—I know it!”
And here’s a stranger thing. The way people in my family understood the breakup of my grandparents’ marriage was that when Sandor was born, Russ left Mary for Vicky, and later, when Alex died, he and Vicky lived together as a couple, even though he remained married to Mary. But Alexis told me it was more complicated than that. When Russ moved into Vicky’s house, he slept not in Vicky’s bedroom but in Sandor’s. He and Sandor shared a set of twin beds. Alexis never once saw her mother and Russ being affectionate with each other.
Alexis and I put our heads together. What we concluded was that Russ and Vicky had a child together during their affair, which forced Russ out of his married home. He lived after that in the apartment above the Jockey Club. But by the time Vicky’s husband died—when Sandor was eight years old—Russ and Vicky’s relationship had become something else. They were no longer lovers but rather two people disillusioned with each other—Vicky had originally thought of him as a mobster with lots of money, and it was looking increasingly like he was more of a broke old drunk—who were now connected by a child and nothing else. Russ couldn’t go back to Mary, and Vicky wanted a father figure for Sandor, even if she refused to have the relationship acknowledged. So Russ moved into her house, as something between a tenant and an uncle.
But even that was fraught. About the only thing they did that reminded Alexis of some couples was fight. “They fought all the time,” she said. “I remember one time my mother threw a sweeper at him.” Where my family believed that Russ was off enjoying himself in another relationship, he seems instead to have exchanged one domestic hell of his own creation for another.
I met Sandor twice when I was in my late teens. He struck me as painfully earnest and desperately longing for something. Because of the tension between Vicky and my grandmother, there was very little contact between him and my family. Sandor wanted nothing more than to have that very contact. Some in my family actively shunned him, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist. My father, however, as if he felt an obligation to make amends for his father’s moral failings, went out of his way to embrace Sandor. He would meet with him, the way he did with the AA people he counseled, and commiserate, talk, even pray with him.
Sandor died of a brain tumor in 2007, at the age of forty-two. Tony visited him in the hospital, and referred to those visits many times. “He just wanted to be loved,” he would say, getting almost angry, as if one of us were arguing the point with him. “I told him he was my brother and that I loved him. He just wanted to belong.”
AS FOR RUSS’S other out-of-wedlock son, the one raised by Joe and Millie, I don’t recall ever meeting Joey before I started on this project. Once, right after my first Panera Bread session with Frank and the guys and just as I began doing research, he came to my parents’ house at my dad’s request, along with some other relatives, to share stories about the very old days of Antonino and Annamaria. When I had tried to bring up more recent matters, Joey balked. He didn’t want to go there. I understood. His situation was different from Sandor’s because he had grown up as part of our extended family—as Russ’s nephew. But learning later in life that he wasn’t who he thought he was could not have been easy. A few years later, however, when I was near the end of my research, and realized that I couldn’t write about Russ without some involvement on Joey’s part—Joey was, in a way, as central to the story of Russ and Joe as the mob was—I asked my aunt to contact him again.
This time he agreed to sit down and talk about himself. I didn’t know how he felt as he approached our meeting, but I was nervous. Would he throw up a wall of outrage when I brought up his parentage? Did he openly acknowledge it? How awkward was this going to be? I brought my aunt along, telling her it would make Joey more comfortable, but I was also thinking of myself.
His emotions weren’t apparent. At seventy, he was gruff, grizzled, manly. He had an interesting way of dealing with sensitive material. I would ask a question, and his first answer would be dismissive. Then he’d circle back around and give a blunt, forthright reply. When I steeled myself and asked how he had found out that he was actually Russ’s son, he was vague, meandered off onto another topic, so I thought that was in essence his answer. Then about five minutes later he said, “I found the adoption papers.” I respected this approach. It seemed to me he was saying, Look, I’ll help you, but this is hard stuff. Give me a minute.
After a bit he became more direct in his answers, or as direct as he could be.
RUSSELL: Did you ever confront your parents about the fact that they weren’t your parents?
JOEY: I said something to my mother. I never said anything to my dad about it.
RUSSELL: What did Millie say when you told her you knew she wasn’t your mother?
JOEY: She started crying.
RUSSELL: Did you ever tell Russ you knew he was your dad?
JOEY: I think I probably did, but I don’t recall.
This seemed both extraordinary and totally believable.
RUSSELL: Did he treat you as special in any way?
JOEY: Not that I can remember.
Joey talked about his life growing up: how his mother was “the sweetest of them all,” who had only one rule: you had to be at the dinner table at the stroke of six. As for his father: “Him and I didn’t really get along.” Little Joe, he said, was never happy with him, was always berating him. “You never heard him raise his voice to anyone,” he said, reflecting what others had told me. “Except he raised his voice at me all the time. My sister got good grades, she could do no wrong. Her wedding was huge.”
I had heard from many people about this wedding. It was held at the Shangri-La and was just about the most lavish affair the town had ever seen. There were eight hundred guests, tents, flowers, lines of limos. Some people told me they believe the wedding actually contributed to Little Joe’s downfall—that the spectacle of it caught the attention of state investigators who were just then looking to crack down. My dad told me that when he saw The Godfather several years later its famous mob wedding scene brought him back to the wedding of Little Joe’s daughter, and suddenly his whole background came into focus.
I asked Joey why he thought his dad was so hard on him. My aunt sharpened the question: “Do you think that he resented that you were my dad’s son?”
“I think he resented that I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do,” Joey replied. “He wanted me to be an attorney. I wasn’t going to do that. I hated school. When I went to college I thought it was all about how much you could drink.”
I asked Joey about Isabel’s involvement in his childhood. He said she was always around the house in his early years, caring for him and his sister. Then, suddenly, Little Joe got fed up with the situation. Isabel had become progressively more involved—more of a mother, which was increasingly awkward for Millie. “He told her to get out of town,” Joey said. So after Russ had forced Isabel to give up her child, and Russ and Joe together had demoted her from moth
er to servant, Little Joe chased her away. Isabel spent the next several years in California.
Then she came back and somehow picked up where she had left off, working for Joe and Millie and doting on Joey and his sister. “She was always buying us presents,” Joey said. When he turned sixteen, she bought him a ring with a diamond chip in it. That was the closest she came, during his childhood, to acknowledging their relationship.
Then, several years later, Joey was a young man sitting at the bar at El Rancho Steak House getting drunk with some friends. Isabel happened to come in. “She came up and gave me hell for wasting my time,” he said. “I gave her hell back. She said, ‘How can you talk to me that way?’ And then she said … ‘I’m your mother.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ ”
Isabel died in 1999. Joey said he was pretty close to her at the end.
Joey told me that when Sandor was in the hospital dying he went to visit him. Joey felt an urge to connect. They were linked by this odd bond—they were Russ’s unacknowledged sons. But Sandor wasn’t having any of it. He said Sandor was bitter and angry at his fate, and lashing out. Joey left feeling angry.
In all of these stories and events—involving Joey, Isabel, Sandor, Alexis, Mary, Vicky, Alex—Russ was present in his usual way. He was the offscreen actor, the boundaryless protagonist whose morals were relaxed enough, whose hold on himself was tenuous enough, that he let other lives play out across the decades, simply backed away, and left people to puzzle out their places and their identities.
SOMETIME BETWEEN 1965 and 1970 Russ stepped out of the organization for good. This time, according to Mike, he went to Joe rather than wait for Joe to come to him. “Russ says to Joe, ‘I just can’t quit the booze. I’m no good to you anymore.’ ”
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