“You and your gay boyfriend eat them!” I snarled, as I ran out to get a cab. It was a monsoon. There were no cabs. Eating humble pie and nothing else, I walked back in and asked Vince to call me a cab. A total gentleman, he got drenched hailing me a cab, came back in, found an umbrella and kept me dry until I was safe inside. Two days later, he called me up to ask me out. “I don’t date gays,” I snarled. I only married them.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a laugh. Then he told me the story about how the night I left, Nick got his comeuppance. He hadn’t even seemed to care what happened to me. He had run into two Broadway producers at the bar whom he thought he could hustle for a part. Instead they tried to hustle him into bed. Nick, Vince said, had given him permission to call me up.
“If you’re not gay, are you married?” was my follow-up question.
“Separated,” he admitted.
Again, I almost hung up. But he hung in, convincing me his marriage was a lost cause. He had married a nice Italian girl, but when he moved with her and their young son to Greenwich Village, she had become a beatnik Frankenstein, spending all her time at peace marches and protest rallies. I felt his pain and agreed to a date. But I had such low expectations that I didn’t feel as if it would be worth the trouble to dress up. Instead, I invited him to my apartment for a TV dinner with Gary and Mommy. Maybe I just wanted to scare him away and get it over with.
Vince showed up with a box of cookies from a great old Italian bakery. Somehow he was instantly right at home with my crazy family. Gary shook his hand, then ignored him completely in favor of the television. Mommy gave him the fish eye for about ten minutes, then warmed up. They spent the rest of the evening talking about old times on the Lower East Side, where she and Aunt Esther had sowed their wild oats with Daddy and Uncle Benny. Vince had grown up in the same neighborhood, right near the Henry Street Settlement House, with all its concerts and cultural events. I hadn’t seen Mommy so animated since her happy days at the Beresford.
Vince told us how his father spoke his native Sicilian dialect, from where he had immigrated, and English and Yiddish as well. Vince’s dad had been a clothes presser in the garment industry, like Grandpa Lansky. We had more in common than I would have guessed. Like my parents, Vince’s father was a poor immigrant, his mother a rich one. In Sicily, her family, the Tranchinas, had hired the Lombardos as their bodyguards, or private police force, for generations, to protect them from kidnapping and other medieval savagery.
In America, while Vince’s dad wasn’t particularly ambitious, happy pressing coats and doing magic tricks in his spare time, his Uncle Anthony had been a crime chieftain in Chicago, very close to Al Capone, and his New York Uncle Rocco had risen to become a rich and powerful bigwig in the Unione Siciliana, the forerunner of the current Mafia. Uncle Rocco Lombardo’s front was a plumbing supply business, which eventually enabled him to live as a gentleman farmer in Connecticut, somewhat like the Citrons in New Jersey.
“I love him!” Mommy exulted when he left. Then her face turned glum. “But Italians never get divorced.” That was it. I wouldn’t go out with Vince again. He called and called, but I held the line. I couldn’t face putting myself out and then getting hurt. Six months later, while taking a walk with Gary, I ran into Vince on Broadway. He held my arm and stared straight into my eyes with his beautiful blue ones. “Sandi. I’m divorced. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the papers.” And that was the start of something great.
My romance with Vince broke the mold of glamorous café society New York that I had previously known. Our first date was at Manganaro’s, a grocery store near the Lincoln Tunnel with rickety tables in back. And amazing grandma-style, long-cooked Italian food. It was a perfect place for Vince to share his childhood memories with me.
Things didn’t seem to have changed that much on the Lower East Side from Daddy’s generation to Vince’s. Vince’s Catholic elementary school sounded like Blackboard Jungle. Like Daddy he had constantly been bullied, in his case by the tough Irish majority, endlessly taunted as wop, guinea bastard, greaseball.
One day when an Irish tough whacked him one time too many in the back of his head with a ruler, Vince turned around and stabbed a lead pencil in the kid’s eye. The nuns called an ambulance. Vince was taken to the office of the Mother Superior, sure to be on his way to reform school. Irish cops arrived to take him to the station, where they locked him in holding cell and gave him the “dirty wop” tirade. Then Uncle Rocco and some big guys from the Unione Siciliana showed up, winked at him, and got him out. Back at school, no one messed with him. He had a reputation as a homicidal maniac. That’s what made you a big man on campus on those mean streets.
Vince admitted that as a boy he felt about the Jews the same way his Irish tormentors felt about the Italians. His father set him straight. “Why do you hate the Jews?” he asked Vince. “Because they killed Jesus,” was Vince’s stock answer. His father slapped him hard across the face. “Who the hell do you think Jesus is?” his father asked him angrily. “An Italian God,” Vince had said. His father slapped him again. “No, you idiot. He was Jewish. And if it wasn’t for my Jewish friends, we’d be in the street.” Afterward Vince preached the gospel of tolerance to his onetime Irish enemies, who now feared him on the playgrounds. They still thought he was out of his mind, but they didn’t dare cross him.
Like Daddy’s sister Rose, Vincent’s father died of walking pneumonia, in 1943. That was the big immigrant disease. Vince was eight. Aided by his rich gangster Uncle Rocco, Vince’s mother moved the family to the relative countryside of Brooklyn, to an area called Gravesend Neck Road. She got a job in the ILGWU, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. You see, you didn’t have to be Jewish to be in the rag trade. You did pretty much have to be Italian, though, to belong to the Avenue X Gang, the toughest gang in South Brooklyn. With his reputation for insane bravery, Vince was welcomed as a member.
A lot of Vince’s gang became members of Carlo Gambino’s crime family. He guessed that 75 percent of his pals had already died bloody deaths. Most of the ones who survived were in jail. The two successes he could cite were a cop and an undertaker. Vince got the opportunity himself when, after the war, his mother remarried another Sicilian immigrant named Pete Mazzarino, who also worked in the garment district. During World War I, Pete’s job in the Italian army had been to execute soldiers who didn’t obey orders. He bragged that he had shot over 150 of them. No wonder he chose to immigrate.
Pete put Vince in a special Boy Scout troop that was a feeder for the Gambinos. He introduced Vince to the feared Carlo at his Catholic Church, and when Vince was fifteen, he gave him the offer of a lifetime: to join Gambino. But he had to know that the Mafia comes before everything else, “before your country and your God,” as Vince recalled Pete’s pitch. “If I tell you to kill your mother, your brother, what would you do?”
“I wouldn’t kill them. No way,” Vince told his stepfather.
“Then it’s not for you,” Pete concluded. However, to avoid squandering Vince’s fighting skills, Pete decided to turn him, if not into a hit man, then into a prizefighter. He signed him up with the Police Athletic League. In Lincoln High School, where he was also a champion cross-country runner, Vince fought as a semi-pro. He had seventeen wins and one loss. The resemblance to Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano was more than coincidental. Through his stepfather, via Carlo Gambino, right to the owner Frank Costello, Vince got a job as a bouncer at the Copacabana. He might have been at my sweet sixteen party, though he was surely too busy making money on the side. He supplemented, or rather multiplied, his salary by being a one-man bank, or loan shark, to waiters and busboys. He was also in the numbers business.
Vince claimed never to have heard of my father. I thought I had caught him in the one big lie. Maybe he wanted to play dumb so I wouldn’t think he was a fortune hunter. How could he work at the Copa when one of Daddy’s closest friends was Frank Costello? “What does he do?” Vince asked me
.
“Don’t you read the papers, Vince?”
“No.”
“Do you watch the news on television?”
“No. Just Ed Sullivan and Sid Caesar.”
“How about the radio?”
“Cousin Bruce. Murray the K.”
“Jesus, Vince. Did you ever hear of Frank Costello?”
“My boss.”
“And his boss, Charlie Luciano?”
“Hey. What is this? $64,000 Question?”
“Vince, where have you been? Under a rock? Those are my father’s partners.”
“How can that be? You’re father’s supposed to be Jewish. What does he do? Keep their books for them?”
At that point I gave up and realized Vince genuinely did not know. And did not care. Vince was oblivious to money. He was also, for all his tolerance, oblivious to Jews. He was of the old Moustache Pete school that didn’t believe that non-Italians could be in the Mafia. To him Jews weren’t mob material. I had to admit to myself that Daddy’s world of crime, whatever it was, seemed so different from Vince’s. The difference was between a banker and a gangster. Daddy’s world was distant, clean, business-y, straight out of Wall Street. Vince’s was straight out of Hollywood, earthy, bloody, dangerous, in your face. That made it romantic.
Eventually Vince got married, had a son, and decided to settle down, trading in the Copa loan sharking for becoming a private eye for a Mafia lawyer, with whom he branched out into the home improvement business. Always enterprising, he ran an after-hours club on 56th and Second. Although he wasn’t in the Mafia, or LCN, or whatever you wanted to call it, he was perilously close. After dating exclusively for two years, Vince took me and Gary to dinner at his parents’ home in Coney Island, within earshot of the Wild Mouse roller coaster. His stepfather, Pete, was Old World, quiet, and scary as hell. Gilda was warm as Mount Vesuvius. They’d made enough food to feed the Italian Army, even after Pete had gotten through with the deserters. During the meal, Vince turned to Gilda and asked her, “Mama. Do you like Sandi?”
“Yes. Very much. Nice girl.” She waved at Gary. “Nice boy, too.”
“Good, Mama,” Vince said. “’Cause this is the girl I’m gonna marry.”
News to me! He had never mentioned marriage before. “Vince, is this the way Sicilians propose to a girl?”
“Well?” He smiled at me, waiting, waiting.
“Yes.”
Gilda broke out a bottle of Asti Spumante.
Daddy had no idea about Vince until he got a letter from him in Miami (Vince had begged me for the address) asking for my hand. He called me. “Who is Vince Lombardo?” he asked.
“The man I love. The man I want to marry.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Two years.” He didn’t ask anything about him, and I didn’t volunteer. Never explain. Besides, I’m sure Daddy had already checked him out.
“Give me his number.”
Daddy came to New York to meet Vince, alone. They made a deal. Daddy would let us marry if Vince promised to get out, if he were in, and stay out, under any circumstances, of the Mafia for the rest of his life with me. Vince made the deal. And no one broke a deal with Meyer Lansky. Vince would make his way, and maybe his fortune, in home improvements. We were married on September 12, 1964, in Revere Beach, Massachusetts, back in my birth state. Hy and Elizabeth Abrams hosted the ceremony at their seaside mansion. Hy was one of Daddy’s oldest friends, a partner way back at the North Shore dog tracks, a partner now in the Flamingo and the Sands in Las Vegas. I asked Elizabeth to be my witness instead of Teddy. Tough. It was my wedding, and I could pick whom I wanted to.
It was almost exactly ten years after my marriage to Marvin. What a difference a decade makes. A justice of the peace performed the ceremony. Gary was the ring bearer. The best man was Vince’s friend Tony Salerno, who was the nephew of Fat Tony Salerno, the big boss who “owned” Harlem. You could keep the boy out of the Mafia, but you couldn’t keep the Mafia away from the boy. They were everywhere, although not at Joseph’s, the very snooty restaurant, the haunt of Cabots and Lodges, where we had the big dinner. We were staying at the Copley Plaza. Before we drove out to Revere for the wedding, Vince and Tony managed to lock themselves in their room, and hotel maintenance couldn’t open the door. Gary figured out how to spring them. He had a future with Vince in the construction business.
Uncle Jack and his wife were there. I had turned the other cheek. So they snubbed me from Linda’s wedding; I was too happy to let that bother me now. Because Teddy was there, Mommy, who loved Vince, stayed home. But she was happy, too. Also there was Daddy’s chief Boston doctor, Seymour Gray, the great Harvard Medical School professor whose patients included the Saudi royal family. Dr. Gray had kept Daddy alive and well to see this amazing day. I kept looking at Daddy’s face. Was he happy? I hoped so.
Daddy was impossible to read. I didn’t see the unalloyed pride I remembered from the day Paul graduated from West Point. How could I compare the two days? Daddy was older now, sadder. His life was winding down. There was a lot more to look forward to back then. There was more hope. The hope was gone now. I looked at Vince and his friend Tony. I had married a gangster. That wasn’t Daddy’s dream for me, but it was too late in the game for dreaming. The best we could do was survive. I hoped we all would. If only little D.J. could have been there. But he was stuck at the Crippled Children’s Hospital. Despite Dr. Gray’s overseeing his care, he was not getting better.
I did my best to put D.J.’s tragic condition out of my mind. That lasted until the next day. Then I started worrying again, and the guilt flooded in. Vince and I had no honeymoon. He wanted to go to work. He also refused, proud manly man that he was, to take a cent from Daddy, or let me take any, either. For the first time in my life, I was no longer the poor little rich girl. I was the poor housewife in Queens, where we moved from West End Avenue to live within our straitened budget. I had no conception of how hard that would be. Mommy had to move back to her place on the West Side. Queens might as well have been Queensland. It was too far for her to come, too far for me to go. She had lost the purpose I had given her when she took care of Gary. Meanwhile, I lost my mind.
I had made an almost full disclosure to Vince. But not total. What I had withheld from him was my continuing addiction to diet pills, which I thought I would kick but never really tried. That was an expensive bad habit, a lot easier for a rich playgirl than someone trying to learn to be lower middle class. All I felt was pressure, mounting pressure. How did Daddy handle the real stress of being under the federal microscope? Queens seemed so wrong, so preposterous, to me that I never unpacked. I could barely figure out how to buy subway fare. We put Gary in a public school near our apartment. I just assumed Vince would give in and accept Daddy’s bottomless handouts. Meanwhile, how was I going to pay for my pills? That was the big question for me, the only thing that mattered.
By the time my weight went down to nearly ninety pounds, Vince had had enough. I was as crazy as I was skinny. None of my clothes fit. I looked like a mad bag lady. Vince moved out in June 1965, when Gary was off at the summer camp that Daddy had insisted on paying for. In September, I spent my first anniversary having dinner with Marvin at Spindletop, trying to hit him up for money. Before I remarried all he would give me was the $40 a week child support, down from the $100 he was supposed to pay but rarely did. I was so desperate I called Buddy begging for cash. He mailed me a five-dollar bill.
I did get a friend in Miami to send me care packages of pills from Florida, but I used them up and needed more. I stopped smoking to save money, stopped eating, though on pills that wasn’t a hardship, as I had no appetite. I stopped buying clothes. I was so small I could wear Gary’s. Unable to afford the bus, I’d ride Gary’s bike, in his clothes, down to this pharmacy in Rego Park that gave me my drugs on credit. It was my equivalent of the last chance saloon.
I took money from everyone I could beg from, then stashed it inside the coats that I
couldn’t sell to used clothing stores. I tried to get money from Mommy, tried to get her to hock some of her jewels for me. But she ended up in the mental hospital at Creedmoor, with a breakdown that was precipitated when I took Gary away from her. She was stuck there for months, while I was falling apart myself. Daddy was always away now, in Europe and in Israel, investing his money from Las Vegas offshore, planning his retirement.
Havana proved to have been Meyer Lansky’s last blaze of glory, his last chance at a monument to himself. Now he was fighting for his health and for his freedom. John Kennedy was dead, the only man left who could restrain his brother Bobby, who, along with J. Edgar Hoover, had kicked up their rampage of hatred against my father to a new high, even when Daddy was at a new low. Daddy’s heart was too weak for me to risk breaking it by letting him see what a desperate addict I had become. Shielding him was the only shred of conscience I had left.
With nowhere else to turn, I turned to the Mafia. I called Vince’s uncle, Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, a brutal but fair underboss in the powerful mob family of Joe Colombo. He liked playing King Solomon, doing the just thing. For some crazy reason, he liked me and thought that, if I ever got straightened up, I would make a great wife for Vince. Accordingly, he decreed that Vince should come back to me and give me another chance. Vince had learned one thing in life, which was to obey his elders. So he came back to me, but as part of a mission.
The first order of business was to shut down the Rego Park pharmacy that was my chief enabler. Vince went in wearing a wire and found out that they were selling illegal prescription drugs not only to me but to lots of children. He took his information to the police, and the pharmacy was shuttered. In front of him, I ceremoniously threw my entire stash of drugs down the incinerator. I never took another diet pill. Then in 1966 Vince moved Gary, his own son, Davide, six months younger than Gary, and me down to Miami to get away from the toxins and temptations of New York, and to start a new life.
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