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“SO, DR. B., WHAT I WANT IS TO UNDERSTAND THE MIND-SET OF someone for whom killing has become an option,” I began. I was sitting in the Court Street office of a forensic psychologist, asking him to posthumously shrink my father. Dr. B., who runs his own neuropsychology center in addition to his graduate teaching position at John Jay College, had granted me a full hour, and I intended to use every minute.
He listened as I described my father—convicted murderer and fugitive, but charismatic, loving man—and my mother, the woman who willingly lived with a murderer and kept his secrets until the last moments of her life. He nodded, listening intently. As I spoke I noticed that he kept a pager clipped to the top of his shirt, which I later called him on. “I like having the option of calling people back,” he explained.
I had come here on the recommendation of a mob reporter I knew named Jerry Capeci, who penned an online column called Gang Land News. “If you want to understand the criminal mind, this guy’s the best,” Jerry told me.
“It sounds to me like a large part of your father’s personality would have to be antisocial,” Dr. B. said when I finished. “Even if you don’t picture him as sadistic or mean, part of his personality is psychopathic, permitting him to do things people wouldn’t normally do.”
Did he just say that my father was a psychopath? “Like, he compartmentalized what he did?” I ventured. “Compartmentalized” was the word my mother had trotted out to counter the perception that my father could be a monster. How else could he have coexisted as a loving father and a killer?
“For him to take this on as a job,” Dr. B. said, “part of him had to rationalize it. And all these guys—like Sammy the Bull, for example—they use the rationale ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ or even ‘Well, everyone’s crooked on some level.’” I remembered that scene from The Godfather when Kay says to Michael, “Senators and presidents don’t have men killed!” To which Michael responds, “Oh, who’s being naïve, Kay?”
“Yeah, my mother always said that killing was part of my father’s job,” I said. “It was like she absorbed his rationale and adopted it as her own, like, ‘It was unavoidable, so how can you question it?’”
“Part of what makes these guys so dangerous is that psychopathic aspect, that they can take life so easily,” he said. “Usually these guys are beaten as a kid, their fathers are rough on them, that’s not uncommon. Something early on compromised the sanity of his household. Maybe his father was addicted to something? Knocked him around?”
I tried to remember the little my father had shared about his early life: a domineering mother and a good-natured but slightly absent-minded father who gambled and drank too much until his wife put her foot down and seized control of the family finances. All I could recall was a story my father once told me about stealing his father’s car while he was in the barbershop and later persuading him that he’d walked to his haircut appointment. His father smiled, nodded, and gobbled it up. I remembered Grandpa’s hapless wheeze, his thicket of white hair. There may have been a few instances when he chased my father around the house with his belt, but it was my grandmother Helen who had the real control.
“As far as hitting him,” I said, “I don’t think my father was beaten or anything, other than a few spankings here and there. But I did talk to someone, his first wife’s brother, who said that my grandfather’s gambling addiction became so bad that he was running numbers to support his habit until his wife put a stop to it.”
“Sure, sure,” Dr. B. said. “The wins made him high, and the losing could make him angry, and it could have had everyone in the house walking on eggshells. If he was terrorized as a kid, he developed a psychopathic invulnerability. Which means he adopted a sense of bravado and became, like, a ‘tough guy,’ a stance which was reinforced by his social and cultural environment.”
Like, maybe, a community in which men of power and perpetrators of crime were revered. “My mother told me a story about how my father was this nice, shy kid who always got teased for reading books during recess,” I recounted, “until one day he’d had enough and brought a baseball bat to school and threatened to knock his bullies’ teeth out.” That image had always made me sad: my father, sitting under a tree, all innocent eyes and fine sandy hair, with his nose in a book, just like my mother at that age. Except instead of going to college—or even finishing high school—he veered violently off course. “Wasted talent,” as my mother would say, quoting that line from A Bronx Tale.
“Any element of unpredictability can upset the household,” Dr. B. explained, “and your father found a way of exerting power by using violence. He grew a thick skin and developed a desire to punish other people. You don’t really just become a guy who does hits. It doesn’t happen overnight, it’s not magical. Your father then developed his own compulsive behaviors, like alcohol and drug addiction, as a way of identifying with his oppressor, in this case his father. People tend to identify with the behavior of their oppressors.”
Was my grandfather really a monster? How bad was his gambling addiction? I reached into the far corners of my memory and pulled out a hazy anecdote, something about Grandpa Frank gambling all their money away, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. My father laughed as he told it. He didn’t seem angry about it; his chuckle didn’t reveal any underlying pain about having an addict as a father and having to cower in the face of unforgiving mood swings. But then, maybe he was simply minimizing the impact of his father’s weaknesses, the way my mother had with my father. Or maybe my grandmother was the true oppressor. I had no way of finding out—my father’s siblings were dead.
“Maybe, if your father had been raised in a WASP family,” Dr. B. continued, “he might have become a ruthless man of business. If he’d been weaker than he was, he might have just been a drug addict, mired in depression. But because of his temperament, he became this. Then he uses the ‘It’s just business’ excuse as a way to funnel these negative experiences, and as a way to funnel the rage, the anger.”
“It’s interesting, what you say about rage,” I said. “His first murder—well, the one he did time for—was supposed to be this simple hit on a guy who was informing on him to the cops. But he lured the guy into a secluded park with the promise of heroin, shot him five times, and stomped on his body. My mother always contended that his killings were ‘just business,’ but this sounds like a very angry act, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Dr. B. agreed. “This crime tells you a lot about his level of rage. And once you let the genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to put it back in. Once he succumbed to that rage, those impulses, it’s very hard to rein them in again. I’m sure he calmed down afterward, though—maybe got high or drank, that probably helped—because he wasn’t psychotic; he could control it.”
Like when he’d fly into a rage after I’d somehow provoked him only to calm down and forgive me hours later, granting me permission to run free, ungrounded. “You know, that way of insulting the body,” Dr. B. added, “like when your father stomped on his victim after he died—that’s something serial killers do. They insult the body after death. Look, if it really was ‘just a job,’ as your mother would probably say in his defense, he would have shot the guy once in the back of the head. But he didn’t. He shot the guy five times and stomped on him. I see a lot of anger there.”
“And then he bought the afternoon edition of the Daily News, which featured the murder on the cover, and showed it to his mistress and said, ‘Look, I did this.’ Like he was proud or something.”
“You see, that’s the hallmark of the psychopath,” Dr. B. said. There was that word again. “They have no conscience, no empathy. There’s paranoia mixed in there, too, because their own lives are so unstable, and it becomes difficult for them to regulate their emotions after that.”
“When he first started out he used to rob houses on his own block,” I revealed.
“Well, sure,” he said, “a lot of criminals start out robbing their neighbor’s houses b
ecause they know when they’re not home. Stuff like that is dyed-in-the-wool antisocial behavior. He had contempt for the weakness of his victims, so he exploited it. Did he ever abuse you or your mother?”
“No, he never laid a hand on my mother,” I said. “Me, he got out the belt once or twice—well, maybe more than once or twice—but you know, that’s typical old-school parenting. I did see his rage, though—he’d get so angry so fast but calm down later, just like you described. But my mother,” I continued, even though I saw Dr. B. opening his mouth to interject, “she always stood up to him. She was never scared of him, and this was a man she knew was capable of murder. She stood up to her own father in the same way. He was this dreadful alcoholic who would push her away when she wanted a hug and chip at her self-esteem by telling her she was stupid, but after a while she told him to shut up.” Another tidbit I’d gleaned from Arline. “She was the only one of her sisters to do that. She was the only one who wasn’t scared of him.” I was so proud of her for that.
“Often these Italian guys put ‘family’ on a pedestal, even though they’re capable of such violent acts,” Dr. B. said. “Your father probably idolized his own mother, which was his way of overcompensating for treating others so badly.”
“He definitely idolized his mama,” I said, groaning slightly. “All Italians do. So then,” I said, shifting gears, “he spends twelve years in prison, and that certainly didn’t help him change his ways, I bet.”
“I’m sure in prison he was surrounded by mob guys who shared his values,” Dr. B. said. “But by twenty-six, your personality is solidified. You’re already pretty much who you’re gonna be.”
“And what does it say about my mother, that she stayed married to a killer?” I asked.
“She met him in prison, right?” he asked. I nodded. “So she already knew the deal with him. She got off on it, the excitement.” There was an element of adventure in it, for all of us. “Something in her background predisposed her to a man like this.”
“Her father,” I said.
“And she found in your father the penis she didn’t have,” he said. I laughed out loud. “No, really,” he iterated. “This was her way of giving the world the ass-kicking she wanted to, but was too weak to do herself. She lived vicariously through him and his tendency toward violence. And in return she justified his antisocial behavior.”
“Did she ever,” I said. “When I came to her with my father’s prison record, which I’d found on the Internet, her chief concern was not that her daughter had discovered the truth, but that my father had no privacy, that anyone with a modem could find out about him.” I remembered that day in the car and, for the first time, felt how inappropriate her reaction had been. Time away from her had exposed how out of tune it was with civilized society.
“Oh, sure, some of the sex offenders I see are angry about the national sex offender registry,” he replied. “And I feel for them, but, you know, I see the other side of it, too.”
“So what would you say about a woman who keeps all of her homicidal husband’s secrets and takes her infant child and goes on the lam at the age of forty-three?” I asked.
“The fact that he told her so much, that’s rare,” Dr. B. said.
“He never told his first wife as much as he told my mother,” I said. “That was how he pulled her in—he made her feel needed.”
“More than that,” he said, “it’s pathological.” My blood curdled. “Look, she wasn’t eighteen when she went on the run, she knew better. Most women, when they find out something like that, they leave, especially with an infant.” But I loved him, she would say. But it was different—it was your father.
“Wait, I just want to back up a second,” I said, my mind finally catching up to my pen, which was furiously taking all of this down. “Are you telling me that my father was a psychopath?”
“Yes,” he said. “He had many of the characteristics of a psychopath: He displayed antisocial behavior, he acted without conscience or remorse”—he had nightmares about it, you know—“he was given to bouts of rage, poor impulse control—I bet he lied rather easily.” And that’s how he got me. He steamed me up.
“My mother told me this story about how she had to talk him down from killing someone,” I said. “And this was when they were only dating. She had to actually dissuade him from doing it—they were on their way to the guy’s house with a gun. And she didn’t leave then, and that was before they had a kid together. But, you see, he was so charming, so charismatic—everyone in my mother’s family immediately accepted him, and his charm practically erased everything bad he had done. Everyone always made excuses for him.” His wives, his parents, his children—even me. My father transcended his mistakes with a grace and elegance unmatched in the most moral of citizens, I’d said at his memorial service. What a load of garbage.
“Antisocials are also very charming and seductive,” he said. “Serial killers can wander into a bar and pick out their prey just by reading physical cues. They can identify which women will accept rides from them because they’re good at reading people. And you hear people who knew these guys say, ‘But he was so charming, so nice.’”
“Like Ted Bundy,” I offered.
“Yeah. They have girlfriends, they’re good-looking,” he said. “But they can tell who will be receptive to them and who won’t.”
“So if my mother was absorbed in this pathological relationship,” I said, trying it on for size, “and my father was a psychopath, what does that say about the child from this union?”
“You mean, how much did they mess you up?” he asked. I shrugged. “Well, if you’d been a son, maybe he would have been more aggressive toward you and showed you a more violent way of dealing with things. If he’d been coked up, then maybe you would have seen that side of him, but he compartmentalized, and made sure you never saw him that way. He hid a lot from you, which was good.”
“I was the only one of his kids who didn’t know what he had done, what he was capable of,” I said. “He was still innocent in my eyes, and I think he liked that. Listen, Dr. B., on a scale of one to ten, just how damaged were they?”
“Your father, definitely a nine or ten,” he said without hesitation. “Your mother, maybe a little less, like an eight.”
“Really?” I asked. Hearing it from someone else was like a stranger describing a dream I’d had, one that I could barely remember upon waking. I could feel the details were true, but hearing them from the lips of an outsider was like having my mind read. It was also vindicating, in a way; a suspicion confirmed. Because, let’s face it, I always knew.
“Your mother wasn’t a killer,” he conceded, “but she was an enabler.”
“Some might even call her an accessory,” I said.
“Yes, she was,” he said. “Like I said, she enjoyed the excitement, probably.”
“Her first husband, whom she was married to for twelve years before my father, was a homosexual,” I said. “Then she met my father and, needless to say, he was very different.”
“I would say your mother probably chose a husband who couldn’t deeply engage her,” he said. “Maybe she feared men. A lot of women do, because, you know, we can be scary. But after twelve years of rejection, she became pathologically involved with your father.” I shuddered again at the suggestion that my parents’ relationship had been sick. Even though I always felt that it might be, I’d never heard it characterized that way.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Would she change her mind about him if she had seen the court transcripts and the newspaper clippings with her own eyes?”
“Probably not,” Dr. B. said. “She made her decision not to question it a long time ago. She made a decision not to challenge it right at the beginning.”
My mother was warped. She had been my best friend, I trusted her implicitly, but she was warped; her moral compass was fucked. And I grew up with her—she raised me! But I didn’t think like her—I was here, I was questioning it, which she n
ever did. And I didn’t like what I had found, and I was not afraid to tell everyone close to me about it, or about how, though I loved them, I rejected this part of them. I was different.
“Would you be surprised if I told you I’ve had relationships with damaged men—addicts, rageaholics, closet homosexuals?” I asked him, supplying the basic facts of my ill-advised affairs.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “There’s an uncanny ability for people with this vulnerability to attract damaged people.”
“Like a homing device,” I said. I learned long ago that there was something about me that attracted darkness, a quality exuded on such a subliminal level that I couldn’t perceive it. Even for men who hid their darkness in shadowy corners, one conversation with me seemed to draw it out.
“Exactly, like a homing device,” he said. “People subconsciously mimic their parents. It’s instinctual, it’s a vibe. It’s a very primitive thing.”
“Does it make sense that despite all this, there was a lot of love in my house?” I asked. “Is it possible that being on the lam fused us together, in a way?”
“When you have to lie to the outside world, when you have to conspire to keep a secret, the atmosphere inside the household can become like a cult,” he said. “It’s like a witness protection mentality.”
“But I was never brainwashed like my mother was—like she allowed herself to be,” I pointed out, cringing as I said it. “I like to believe my life is different than theirs. My mother was never without a man in her life, and here I’m single, and I’ve lived on my own for eight years. I don’t act out or lose my temper with people, like my father did.”
“You are not your mother or your father,” he said. It was reassuring, but it also depressed me. Their way of life was truly over for me, and there was some sadness in that. “But you’re also not immune to the choices that affected their lifestyle,” he continued. “Your skepticism is indicative of your own temperament and intellect. Look, the life you live now—you have your master’s degree, you work at The New York Times, you appear to have your life in order.” I wanted to tell him how lousy I was with my finances, but I let it go. That one was easy—I’d learned by example, and I needed to grow up and craft a fucking budget. End of story.
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