by Jon Roberts
At thirteen I was already hairy. I started to shave. I looked older. I felt older. I played basketball with older kids in the city court. I thought I was going to be a professional basketball player. I was not tall, but I was fast. I liked playing kids who were bigger than me and beating them.
There was a high school boy I played whose name I’ll never forget: Ivor Swenson.* He was a Swede or a German, over six feet tall, a star on the high school football and basketball teams. No matter how cold it was, he’d always take his shirt off when we played because he liked to show off his muscles. He always beat me.
Then I got better and finally beat him. That day I could see in his eyes it bothered him that a small kid beat him, so I rubbed it in by laughing in his face. He lost control and punched me. One pop, and I had a bloody nose. I looked at the blood streaming into my hands and became angry.
Ivor believed he was so big, he could get away with hitting me. He was technically correct. I wasn’t afraid to fight him. I would fight anyone. But there was no way I could take him. He was 180 pounds. I was maybe 100 pounds.
I would make my point to him a different way. After he hit me I acted apologetic. I said, “Ivor, maybe your game was off. Let’s play again.”
He agreed. The asshole wouldn’t shake my hand, but that was okay. I had a plan.
There was a group of older Italian kids from around Teaneck that I was starting to hang out with. They were bad kids, and I went to them and asked if they could get me a gun to give somebody a little scare. They thought it was comical helping an eighth grader get a gun, so they gave me one. A few days later I met Ivor at the court. I carried the gun wrapped in a towel.
“You ready to play?” I asked.
It was a cold day. But it didn’t matter. Ivor was going to take his shirt off to show off how big he was, and as soon as his shirt was over his head, I shot at his leg. It wasn’t as easy as my dad made it look when he killed the guy on the bridge. I was only two or three feet away, and I shot a few bullets without hitting Ivor. He danced around with his shirt stuck over his head, yelling while I fired away. It was like a scene in the cowboy movies where they make the guy dance by shooting at his feet. Finally, the big kraut fell over. He’s crawling around, his shirt still stuck over his head. I saw a red spot in his warm-up pants where I shot his calf. I put my foot on his back and told him I’d shoot again if he didn’t stop moving. I watched the blood spot grow. It reminded me of a science-class film strip they showed in school of a flower opening up. It was beautiful. Ivor was shaking and crying under my foot. I will admit to you I got excited watching him suffer. I wanted to say something to him. Finally, it came to me like a line from a movie: “Let’s see how much basketball you play now, you prick.”
I kick him in the head, walk away, and throw the gun in a sewer.
That night, I went home, turned on the TV, and that was it. Nobody came after me. I never got charged with a crime. Nothing happened.* I felt nothing. It did surprise me that I shot Ivor. I wasn’t sure I would actually shoot him. I had proved something to myself. I didn’t have a father anymore. But I was a man. I had my dad inside me.
* Now called the Park Central Hotel on 870 Seventh Avenue.
* The Apalachin Meeting raid on November 14, 1957, was a seismic event in the annals of American crime, prompting congressional hearings and a restructuring of the FBI, which for years under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover had denied the existence of a nationally organized Mafia.
* “U.S. Taking Steps to Deport Aliens at Gang Meeting,” New York Times, November 24, 1957.
* The fictitious ranching family on which Bonanza centered.
* Ivor Swenson is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s victim.
* There is no record of this shooting. One of Jon’s friend’s from that era, Peter Gallione, whom I interviewed, recalled that Jon was involved in several shootings, but he did not remember this incident. Gallione added that Jon and the friends who gave him the gun had assaulted and terrorized so many kids, they were often afraid to report them to the police.
** Jon’s own records from this era are incomplete. He has not produced a birth certificate, and his sister Judy’s birth certificate, while it shows her birthplace as the Bronx, bears a Jewish surname. Jon states that his father acquired false birth certificates for both children. I interviewed many sources who knew Jon in his youth as “John Riccobono.” In published accounts of Jon’s criminal activities in the late 1960s, he is called “John Riccobono.” But one source I interviewed claimed that Jon’s father was a Jewish gangster affiliated with the Riccobonos named “Epstein”—a name that Jon also used as a criminal alias in the 1980s. Law-enforcement officials I interviewed who were involved in the 2005 arrest of Mafia capo Gerard Chilli—who Jon claims is his maternal uncle—believe that Chilli is indeed an uncle of Jon’s and that he is Italian.
† On October 25, 1957.
† Joseph Riccobono had been in the center of a few media storms ever since Thomas Dewey indicted him in connection with Murder Inc. in the 1930s, but his arrest at Apalachin gave him a degree of infamy that culminated in his being named as a top boss in Joe Valachi’s testimony to the U.S. Senate in 1963. His name would surface again in 1978 congressional hearings exploring the assassination of John F. Kennedy, though no evidence was presented that connected him to the death of the president.
‡ “Apalachin 5 in U.S. Plea,” United Press International, August 28, 1958.
§ Texts of Opinions Reversing Conspiracy Convictions at Apalachin Meeting,” New York Times, November 29, 1960.
4
J.R.: My mother took a job at Revlon. She went to different stores in New York and showed makeup products. She told me, “I promise you, you’re going to have a good life.”
Her way of trying to improve our lives was dating rich men. For a while she was involved with one of the top guys at Revlon. Then along came this other man. His name was Arnold Goldfinger, like in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. He had a lot of money. He drove a new Cadillac and lived in a big house in West Englewood, which was the rich area near Teaneck. My mother had hit the jackpot.
JUDY: Our mother married Arnold Goldfinger in 1961. He owned a radio tube factory and was very wealthy. My mother believed having a better life would help Jon. Unfortunately, the marriage did not have a good effect on Jon. He felt betrayed by our mother.
J.R.: I never liked my mother being with that guy. She changed. All of a sudden she had a halo around her head. When my dad was putting furs on her back, getting her the nice car, she never stopped him. Now he was that terrible man, and Arnold Goldfinger was our savior. She told me, “Arnold is going to be your father. He owns a factory, and someday it will be yours.”
The first time I met Goldfinger, he told me I shouldn’t turn out like my father. God, I hated him. He got rich because he made a special radio tube that had to go in radar machines used by the military. My mother took me to his factory, and he showed me all the people working for him. My mother kept saying, “You see how smart he is? You should be just like him.”
I looked at Arnold Goldfinger and said, “Who fucking cares about your money?”
Everybody kissed his ass. I wanted him to know I was never going to like him.
The feeling was mutual. When my mother told him how much I liked the Harlem Globetrotters, he offered to buy me tickets. But there was a catch. I had to write one thousand times on paper: “Please, Mr. Goldfinger, let me see the Harlem Globetrotters.”
I wrote it, because I loved the Harlem Globetrotters. But it made me hate his guts even more.
JUDY: Excuse me for saying this, but when it came to Jon, our stepfather was a prick. He had money up the kazoo. He lived in a mansion. When we moved in, I was given my own bedroom. You know where he made Jon sleep? In a storeroom downstairs, where they had kept dogs.
J.R.: When they put me in the dog room, that’s when I knew my mother had literally thrown me to the dogs. I decided, “Fuck my mother, fuck everybody.”
; I didn’t talk to my mother. I didn’t look at her anymore. A few weeks after we moved into the house, she and Arnold went to Europe on a honeymoon. Judy had graduated from high school and was dating a guy, so she was gone most of the time. I was in the house alone with my two older stepsisters. Barbara, the eldest, was nineteen, and she was put in charge of me. She worked in a bank and already had the attitude of a classic ballbusting Jewish broad. Her main rule was that I stay downstairs in my dog room.
The one bright spot of moving to West Englewood was a girl who lived down the street named Nancy. I was at the age where the stuff was pumping in me. Nancy was a couple years older than me. She was a blond bad girl who was into rock and roll. Her thing was teaching me to play doctor. She let me feel her titties, her ass. She showed me how she liked to be kissed. We were doing this one day, and suddenly it felt like the walls were moving. My pants got wet. I didn’t know what had happened, but it felt good. All she’d done was use her hand, but it gave me an inkling how good a girl could make you feel. I never looked at girls the same way after that. One hand, and they could take you into a different world.
I still was hanging out with my older friends who’d gotten me the gun. These guys were seventeen and eighteen. They’d come over at night and drink beer in my little dog room. One night one of them said, “Hey, let’s take your stepdad’s car into Manhattan.”
My stepfather drove a 1961 silver-blue Cadillac. It was a beautiful car. While he and my mom were in Europe, my stepsister Barbara had the keys. I waited until she went to sleep and took them from her purse. I met my friends outside, and I got into the driver’s seat.
“You don’t know how to drive,” my friends said.
“Guess I’ll learn real quick.”
I’d driven around with my father and Mr. Tut for years. Driving was no big deal. Next thing I know, I’m on the highway driving across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. My friends are laughing. “You better let us drive home, because we’re going to get you fucking drunk tonight.”
Even though I was thirteen years old, my friends knew a shithole on the East Side called the Blue & Gold Tavern* where the bartender didn’t care. I walked in and sat at the bar, and he said, “You want a beer, kid?”
I had no tolerance. I drank two or three beers, and I was history. Hours later I came to in the back of my stepfather’s Cadillac. One of my friends was driving. Route 4 was the road to my stepfather’s house. I was so drunk, when I looked out the window at the sign, I thought it read “Route 44.” I was seeing double.
I start yelling that it’s my car, I got to drive it. My friend pulls over. “Drive your fucking car.”
I nearly made it to my stepfather’s house, but when I reached his street, I drove on the sidewalk and hit a telephone pole. The pole broke over across the hood. We crawled out of the car laughing.
The next morning I woke up in my dog room. My stepsister Barbara was shaking me. “You wrecked my dad’s car!”
“Come on, I’m thirteen years old. I don’t even know how to start a car. Someone must have stolen it.”
I tried going back to sleep. Then I heard my stepsister in the next room, calling our parents in Europe. I ran in, grabbed the phone from her hand, and smashed it. She tried fighting me, and I knocked her over. That put some fear in her eyes.
I told that bitch how it was going to be. “Don’t make aggravation for our parents on their honeymoon. You let the car get stolen. You’re the asshole. You fix the car.”
For weeks and weeks my stepsister had thought she had the upper hand, that I was a dog living in the storeroom. Those days were done. She paid to repair the car and fix the telephone pole.
By the time my mother and stepfather returned from Europe, the car looked brand new. My mother was home a few days when she came into my room and said, “I’m going in the hospital tomorrow. I’m going to have an operation.”
I said nothing. I still was not talking to her.
JUDY: Our mother had become pregnant by Arnold Goldfinger, and she decided not to keep the baby. In those days doctors would say they were doing a “hysterectomy,” but it was a euphemism. She went to Fifth and Flower Hospital in Manhattan and had an abortion.
J.R.: A day after my mom went into the hospital, my stepfather told me, “Your mother’s sick. There were complications. She has peritonitis, blood poisoning, and lobar pneumonia.”
My stepfather wanted to drive me into the hospital to see her. There was no way I would visit her with that piece of shit. In my group of Italian friends from Teaneck was a guy named Jack Buccino, who offered to drive me.
Jack had a red Ford Fairlane convertible that I’ll never forget. It was a nice day when we crossed over the bridge into the city. I had a very strange thought, a magical thought. My sister had told me the real reason our mother had gone to the hospital. Driving across the bridge, I thought maybe my mother had the abortion because she didn’t want to be with our stepfather anymore. She was going to leave him. I thought by visiting her now, I was going to change everything. We’d start talking again. Everything would be different. I’d stop going down the path I was on. I’d be a normal kid.
When the nurse took me into my mother’s room, I didn’t recognize her. There were tubes sticking out of her. Her face was caved in. She was out of it. I didn’t even try to talk. I went to a bar with Jack and got blasted out of my mind on beer.
A day later my stepfather came up to me. “Good news,” he said. “Your mother made a great improvement. She’s getting better.”
What I didn’t know—and what my stepfather didn’t know—is that sometimes when somebody is really sick, they give it one last fight, to try to live. My mother did that. Everybody thought she was getting better. Next day she was dead.
My mother’s death shook me for a long time. The last memory I have of my mother is a woman in the hospital with tubes in her who I could not talk to. That’s the picture of her that stays in my eyes today.
JUDY: Jon did not shed a tear when our mother died. His reaction was not natural. Instead of going through grief, he filled with more hatred.
For all the bad things I can say about our stepfather, he loved our mother. After she died, he took her ashes to Florence, Italy, and buried her there. That had been her favorite city on their honeymoon, and he showed his devotion by taking her there one last time.
He treated Jon and me terribly. He gave away her jewelry to my stepsisters. He threw out photographs. He made me buy the piano my mother got for me when I was little. The only item of clothing I kept of my mother’s was her plaid coat. It was red and black and had big buttons down the front. That coat was my mother: bright, bold, full of life. I don’t think Jon knew that woman. She adored Jon, but he didn’t see that. She died before he could figure her out.
J.R.: My sister was the one fucked up by our mother’s death. She went insane over the piano. It was her only bond with our mother. She dragged that fucking piano from place to place for decades. She was never the same after our mother died.
As I got older, I stopped holding a grudge against my mother. I saw she made decisions for reasons I didn’t understand as a kid. I don’t hate her anymore. I thank her. She gave me my life. I regret now that I never said, “Hey, Mom, I love you.”
But that new way of seeing her came years later. When my mother died, it reinforced the way I was. Her death made me stronger. I didn’t give a fuck anymore about anything. My philosophy was, fuck the world.
* The Blue & Gold Tavern is still on East Seventh Street.
5
J.R.: Both my father’s brothers took an interest in me. My uncle Sam, from Brooklyn, was the only person on my father’s side who had any heart. He was younger than my father and looked more American to me. He’d come out to Jersey to visit me, take me for a ride in his car. I’d tell him about the trouble I was making at school and he’d laugh and tell me to knock it off. I used to wish he was my father, but then he’d go away and I wouldn’t see him for six months.
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My uncle Joe, my dad’s older brother, was bald and had a beak nose that made him look like a bird that could eat you. After my mother died, he had a car pick me up and take me to a restaurant in Little Italy. He had bodyguards sitting at the tables around him. He didn’t laugh or smile like Sam. But as different as my uncles were from each other, both told me the same thing: I should stay with my stepfather because it was good to grow up in a rich man’s house.
My stepfather drank and drank after he lost my mother. He was a wreck. As broken up as he was, and as much as we hated each other, he let me stay in his home. He tried to make rules. He’d say, “It’s a school night. Be home early.”
My older friends would come over, and we’d set back all the clocks and go out. I’d come home drunk, fucked up on weed, at two in the morning, and my stepfather would stumble out to yell at me. I’d point to the clocks set to the wrong time and say, “Fuck you. I’m home early.”
My stepdad kicked me out of his house. My grandparents couldn’t handle me. My sister had gotten married and moved out of state. So I was sent to a boys’ home in Hackensack.
Being in the boys’ home just made me closer to the older kids I’d been running with. The reason Ivor never ratted me out after I shot him on the basketball court was because he was afraid of these guys.* They were the worst kids in Teaneck.
They called themselves the Outcasts, but they were never a true gang. They were just a group of kids that ran together. They became my brothers. They didn’t make me who I was, but they put a lot of craziness into me. God Almighty, what a crew they were. These guys were maniacs.
There was Frank Messina.† His father was a typical Mafia thug who weighed four hundred pounds. He owned a driving school. He had one of those cars with two steering wheels, but Mr. Messina was so fat they had to indent the dashboard and push it back so he could fit. His son Frank was a small guy who was so nuts he used to wear a cape, like he was a vampire. As we got a little older, Frank started to carry a sawed-off shotgun under his cape, so it came in handy.