Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “My husband’s life?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And she said the only person who knew about it was your son Carmine.”

  “I have no idea,” she said, searching her memory. “I never heard that.”

  “Vinny didn’t even know about it,” I said.

  “Then I wouldn’t have heard about it,” she said. “And I have no idea how Carmine would have—”

  “She told me the name of the guy he killed,” I revealed.

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “It was Vinny’s partner at the time, a guy named Tommy Palermo.”

  Her face was expressionless. “Tommy? I knew Tommy Palermo. But he was your dad’s partner, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tommy Palermo took money from a lot of people—” she started.

  “My father killed him, Celie,” I said again, and this time it seemed to penetrate. She’d been wiping the table down with a sponge but stopped and sat back down at the table.

  “I identified the body,” she said quietly, instinctively lowering her voice as she invoked the dead.

  “The body was found?”

  “After he was missing for about three months,” she said.

  “Where was he found?”

  “In a car trunk, out by the airport,” she said.

  “In the trunk of a car? Was it JFK?” I asked, rapid-fire.

  “Mmm-hm,” she said, nodding solemnly.

  “Lemme guess, we were living in Florida at the time,” I said.

  “I’m not sure where yous were,” she said. “They needed somebody to identify his body, and I couldn’t get ahold of his wife, and the cops were there, at Tommy’s mother’s house, she was an old lady. And his son was there, and he was only, like, sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, little Tommy, and they insisted on taking him to the morgue, so I said, ‘Listen, let him stay, I’ll go.’ And they said, ‘No, we need a family member,’ so I said, ‘Fine, let me go with him.’ I didn’t want to send the kid by himself. So that’s how I got to be there to see the body.”

  “Where was he shot?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Did you see his face?” I asked. “Was there any blood on his face?”

  “You know, I took a peek, but what he looked like was a dried-up prune, he was all black and dusty,” she said. “If they didn’t tell me it was Tommy, I never would have known. I just identified the clothes. The officer said, ‘Don’t even look at him.’”

  My father’s handiwork. Great. I’ll take the check and a lifetime of therapy, please. “Who would Tommy have stolen from?” I asked. “Any made guys?”

  “I don’t remember who they were involved with at the time. I really don’t. I’d be lying to you if I said I did.”

  “Of course, no, I believe you,” I said.

  “I can’t say for sure, but I know he was supposed to go to—god, Tommy,” she said, suppressing a giggle. “He’d just come home from prison. But when he was away he really lost his mind. He felt like everybody owed him something. He did a lot of time—he did time for other people, too. He and some guys ripped off, um, a savings and loan place? And they got away with it, but Tommy got picked up for it. And Tommy brokered a deal where he’d do less time if he gave it all back, and they wouldn’t investigate anybody else. He had to do a certain length of time—eight years, I think—and a lot of other people walked away. But when Tommy came home, he felt like they all owed him. So he just went around and got money from everybody, and said he was gonna go over to Cuba, he had friends, he was gonna go over here and do this, he was gonna go do that—and meanwhile, he called up and said, ‘Ha ha, I lost it all.’”

  “Apparently one of the guys he stole from was a made guy,” I said, “who thought Vinny had something to do with it, and Dad got wind that they were going to kill the both of them, and he drove up to New York and talked to the made guy and said, ‘Vinny Cassese had nothing to do with this.’”

  “He didn’t,” Celie interrupted, “because Tommy stole money from Vinny, too.”

  “Really?” I asked, and vaguely remembered my mother telling me something similar. “The made guy told my father that if he was so sure Vinny was innocent, then he could kill Tommy Palermo. So he did.”

  “I could see that, because Tommy would get into a car with your father in a minute,” she said.

  God, how many times in my father’s life had he gone from friend to executioner in the space of a few minutes? “Are you surprised that Dad did that for Vinny?” I asked.

  “No,” she said immediately. “Because you know why? Tommy was wrong, what he did. But I don’t know if Vinny ever knew.”

  “But Carmine found out,” I said. “Maybe my father told him later, maybe after Vinny died.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Although I don’t see your father saying anything.”

  “So Vinny was more affiliated with this Tommy Palermo guy at the time?” I asked, wondering why my father wasn’t also implicated in this Vinny-Tommy-made-guy mess.

  “At the time, yeah,” Celie said. “Because when your father left prison, he left Vinny and Tommy there together.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “Dad knew Tommy from prison?” This gang was growing by the minute. I could probably identify half the guys in that prison football team photo now.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Then Vinny left, but Tommy was still there.”

  “I wonder which family ordered the hit,” I said.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “It’s an unsolved murder,” I said. Was I supposed to call someone now? The Queens Cold Case Squad?

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Solved now,” I said. “The perpetrator’s dead, that’s it. No one goes to jail.”

  “Nope.”

  “You know, when my father told my mother that he’d killed other people, she didn’t tell anyone,” I said. “Her sisters didn’t know. That’s why she told me that night, I think—I think it was weighing on her, that she knew about this. Because she didn’t grow up with this element, she didn’t grow up in this life, it must have registered deep down somewhere that it was wrong, but she did whatever she could to protect her family. There was no way she would let him go back to jail. I think it weighed on her after a while.”

  “Yeah,” Celie said. “It does. When you know something like that, it does.”

  “Did Vinny ever kill anyone, that you know of?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “But I suspect. And that does weigh on my mind, too.”

  “Did you ever wonder who killed Tommy Palermo?”

  “I always thought it was somebody that was connected,” she said. “Because I knew he took money from them. I think they were people from Brooklyn.”

  “You rip off the wrong people …” I said.

  “I don’t think it was just the person he ripped off, either, I think it was the way he did it. You don’t do it like that. I don’t even think he was out of prison a year.”

  And my father killed him. This poor hapless jackass. “You know, when I found out Dad killed someone, I was shocked. But it’s funny, I used to ask my mom if he ever raped anyone. To me, that was a worse crime. I didn’t even consider the fact that he could have killed someone.”

  “Your father would never have raped anyone,” she said quietly.

  “I know. So when I found out he killed someone, it sounds crazy, but a part of me was relieved that it wasn’t rape.”

  “If your father had to kill a rapist, how would you feel?” Celie asked me pointedly.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’d kill a rapist.”

  “Well, don’t you see?” Celie said. “Your father felt that these people that he killed were just as bad as rapists. He didn’t kill for joy, he didn’t kill for money. Never. He killed to protect the people that … and I don’t want to say ‘family,’ but in a way, it was their family on the outside. See, in their minds they were protecting a good guy from being taken away from his family because
of something he did, and maybe this other person did also. But the other person didn’t have enough balls to do what he was supposed to. I mean, how do you do that? How do you dare do that? So to them, it was like rape. And they never, never hurt anybody for money.”

  She told me this, but instead of feeling anger, I felt love—for Celie, for my father, for my parents. Where was my sense of moral outrage? He killed, but it was to protect his “family.” Never for money, never for joy. Was there honor in murder? Whatever the answer, I had forgotten that these were my roots. I’d spent a year alternately hating and pitying and cursing and crying over my father, but when Celie spoke of his elegance and grace, I couldn’t gather up the strength for even an imaginary rebuke. I just missed him, and my mother, no matter what they did or covered up. And no matter where I journeyed in my life, a part of me would always belong to this world, to our past, and I was relieved. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my life denying it.

  “Mom said he was haunted by what he did,” I told Celie. “He had nightmares. She said he had to work himself up to do it—which, I now understand, meant he probably had to get high. He didn’t like it.”

  “Um, yeah, who likes to do something like that? Unless you’re a psychopath. And he wasn’t.”

  “Actually, I went to a forensic psychologist because I thought it would be useful to get an expert opinion,” I said, “and he said that anyone who believes that murder is an option has psychopathic qualities.”

  “I guess you have to be a little psychopathic to be able to do something like that and then go on living,” Celie conceded.

  “And pretend to fit in among the rest of the world, among us,” I said.

  “But you have to remember that it was justified in their minds. They were protecting their people, their ‘family.’ Was it right? Of course not. But that was their life.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I glanced out the window, where glimmers of pale twilight still clung to the sky. “You don’t know how depressed I got to find out that your mom had passed,” Celie finally said, rubbing her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s part of life, you know.”

  “We were very close,” I said. “She was my best friend. I’m sorry she won’t be able to see my kids.”

  “She’ll see them,” Celie said. “I truly believe that.” I nodded politely. “Where are her ashes?” she asked me.

  I recited the various locations of the various piles of ashes that had once been my parents. “It’s very complicated with the thirds, but they’re together now, on my mother’s baker’s rack, surrounded by framed photos of the three of us.” I suddenly thought of something Jeff said when he’d come over for dinner the previous week: He’d paused at the blue-and-white ceramic pot of my parents’ ashes on the baker’s rack, gestured with one of his spindly arms, and said, “When are you gonna get rid of those?”

  I’d looked at him, appalled. “Never. What do you mean, when am I going to get rid of those?”

  “You’re not going to spread them somewhere?” he asked.

  “No!” I said. “I’ve spread enough of them. Those are the last of my parents. I can’t part with them.”

  “Oh,” he said, shrugging. “Okay.”

  “Am I supposed to get rid of them?” I’d asked.

  Celie must have read my mind, because she leaned forward and looked into my eyes. “You know you have to move on,” she said. I nodded. “It’s hard,” she continued. “It’s still early. And you lost the two of them like that, and you were just the three of you, such a tight-knit group. It’s gonna take time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It will.”

  ——

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I ran in to work with enough adrenaline to power an army. I searched the Times database and found a brief item from August 15, 1980, about Thomas Palermo, gun dealer. “According to law enforcement sources,” it read, “Mr. Palermo is the son of Thomas Palermo, Sr., a convicted jewel thief who was the victim of a ‘gangland style’ murder. The slain man’s body was found in 1977 in the trunk of a car at Kennedy International Airport.”

  I sat back in my chair. Now it was real. I jumped up and ran over to Willie Rashbaum and asked him to call up a spreadsheet he kept of unsolved Mafia hits from the seventies and eighties. Thomas J. Palermo popped up immediately; his body was found March 23, 1977, and while there was no perpetrator listed, it was credited to the Genovese family. “Yep. That’s him,” I said. Willie also dug up an article from the Daily News archive, MURDER VICTIM LINKED TO $4M ROBBERY IN QUEENS, which shed some light on the rather significant haul Celie had mentioned: “Palermo was one of several robbers who escaped with the jewels from the Provident Loan Society in Queens on February 17, 1969.”

  Police said that Palermo, whose hands and feet were bound with wire, had been shot several times in the head. … Identification was made through papers found in the clothing of the victim. The discovery was made by an Avis Rent-A-Car employee, who checked out the car after it had been abandoned in the parking lot Jan. 17. It is believed Palermo was killed on or about that date.

  January 17 was mere weeks after my parents moved to Florida, and just before I was conceived. I tried to imagine my father binding someone’s appendages with wire, but decided against it.

  “This may make a difference, it may not,” Willie said when he approached my desk a little while later and handed me a memorandum from the Queens district attorney’s office. It trumpeted a tip from an informant who claimed that Palermo was killed by someone named John W. Quinn in retaliation for another murder. “But I know my father did it,” I called to Willie as he started back toward his desk. Did someone else get killed for murdering Tommy Palermo, when my father was the real perpetrator? Or did my father have nothing to do with it—did my mother make it all up? “Is it possible that this informant was trying to shorten his sentence by offering a bogus tip?” I asked. Willie shrugged.

  I ran back to my desk and filled out a FOIA request for the homicide file of Thomas Palermo, but even as I skimmed over the familiar fields—address, phone number, subject, purpose—exhaustion washed over me. If I opened this door, it could open several others, and several others after that. How far did I really want to take this? Didn’t I already know plenty? For the first time I felt I’d learned enough about my father’s criminal life. Unless he was responsible for the Lufthansa heist or some other sensational caper, what more did I really need to know?

  Before he left that night, Willie handed me another Daily News clip from 1980. It was a column by the late newspaper great Jack Anderson entitled ANOTHER OUTBREAK OF .22-CALIBER FEVER IN MAFIALAND? It went on to describe a “series of nearly 30 mob-style executions across the country.” He singled out four in particular, all slain on contract for the Genovese family and all performed with the same gun, according to “a secret ATF analysis of the killings in the New York and New Jersey area.” Thomas Palermo was one of them.

  “Maybe it wasn’t your father’s gun?” Jeff offered when I called him in a panic. “Other people could have used that gun.”

  “Like if he sold it?” I said. “Or maybe whichever family he performed the rubout for, maybe they gave him the gun and he gave it back right after.”

  “Maybe if they are kept by trusted people they can be passed on?” Jeff theorized. I didn’t have a better answer. I didn’t know how any of this stuff worked.

  “But killing informants was his M.O.,” I argued. “It’s why he went to jail in ’sixty-three.” I shuddered—could Jack Anderson have been describing my father? “Either way, it gives a face to the murders my mother only told me about.”

  “Jen, you can’t dwell on the past; it was what it was,” he said. “And you can’t ever fully understand what he was.”

  I spent the rest of my shift sulking, though an email from my mob reporter friend Jerry Capeci lightened me somewhat. “To paraphrase one federal judge who has sentenced a lot of wise
guys,” he wrote, “there’s good and bad in every man, and once in a while, his offspring is proof positive.” I smiled at my computer.

  The next morning Jerry wrote again: “I would assume that Palermo was really killed by your old man, not John Quinn. Quinn was killed because he was a car thief who they thought might go bad.”

  So it was official. Now I could stop.

  I never did figure out who ordered the hit on Tommy Palermo, and I never wrote Carmine Cassese in jail to ask him what he knew about it. Sometimes I fantasize that my father’s deadly deeds were only in my head, and my mother’s confession was merely a dream from which I’ll wake. In a way, it was—it didn’t seem I was going to crack any cold cases. But one look at his record, still available on the Department of Corrections website, disabuses me of that notion. He had committed murders, even if I didn’t know every single detail about them. Maybe some things are best left in the dark.

  CHAPTER 23

  December 31, 2007

  • • •

  IF I WAS GOING TO BE STUCK AT WORK ON NEW YEAR’S EVE I decided I was going to make full use of my location. A few days before the ball drop I began scouting possible routes to the forbidden fifty-second-floor rooftop of the six-month-old Times building, construction of which was not yet completed. A security guard had been nice enough to take me up there two days before, and after a jerky trip on the freight elevator I found spread before me a knee-knocking 360-degree panorama of New Jersey, Queens, the Statue of Liberty, and the George Washington Bridge. “You won’t be able to see the ball from here, you know,” the guard informed me. “Maybe from the old building, but the Reuters building is just too high.” The Reuters building was relatively new and rose behind the spot where the ball traditionally dropped—starting exactly one hundred years ago, in fact. But from Fifty-two I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at, so I had no choice but to nod and thank him for the tour.