by Linda Scarpa
“This is the hand that has been dealt to me. I’ll play the hand. If I can outbluff the opponent, which is death, fine. If I can’t, I lose the hand,” he said once. “I will show my enemies and my allies the bravado I have displayed all this time. I will show them that hey, this is still me. There isn’t anything on this earth that I will hide from or back up from and I certainly won’t do it with this, either.”
So that’s what he did. He decided he was going to help Carmine.
CHAPTER 9
WIND BENEATH MY WINGS
As I’ve said, I always had a hard time meeting people. Everyone was afraid of my father, so I couldn’t make real friends.
The only way I was able to meet guys was if they were from different neighborhoods and they didn’t know who I was. And that was what happened when I met the person I married. He was a banker from Long Island, so he didn’t really know a lot about my father.
The first time I met my now–ex-husband, my car had stalled on the side of the road on Eighty-Sixth Street in Brooklyn and he pulled over to help me. For a few weeks he kept calling me, asking me out. But I didn’t really respond to going out with him.
My father kept asking me questions.
“Who is this guy calling? He calls every day.”
“Just somebody that I met.”
“Well, why don’t you go out with him? He sounds like a nice guy.”
So I did, and he came to the house to pick me up. That’s when he first met my father. My father liked him because he wasn’t from the streets. My father wanted me to settle down because he was sick, and he knew that he wasn’t going to be around much longer to take care of me. He felt that this guy would be able to take care of me and do the right thing.
In the beginning my ex-husband came across as a regular guy. But down the road I found out that he wasn’t such a regular guy. He wasn’t a made guy, but he was into the streets more than I knew. My father knew that about six months into our relationship, but it was already too late. I had my mind set on him, and he had his mind set on me—and that was it.
We went out for about a year and then we got married in 1990, when I was twenty-one. I had told him pretty much immediately who my father was, and he didn’t seem bothered by it. He didn’t seem to be scared at all. Then I got pregnant and we were staying away from anything that had to do with street life. After we got married, we were really separated from all that.
The problem was that nobody was happy that we were getting married. His mother wasn’t happy, and my father wasn’t happy, either.
A week before my wedding my father told me not to marry the guy.
“Don’t you think it’s a little too late for that?”
“Don’t worry about anything. I’ll take care of you and the baby. I just don’t want you to marry him. He’s going to make you miserable.”
“Dad, everything is going to be fine. Don’t worry.”
The wedding was like a big blur to me. I was really sick for my wedding. I had very bad morning sickness. My father was sick, too. The morning of the wedding I was afraid that I was going to pass out, and he was afraid that he was going to pass out.
My father was telling me to calm down. He was trying to keep me calm because I was so nervous that I thought I was going to faint. I had fainted once before during the pregnancy.
We got married at The Shrine Church of St. Bernadette on Thirteenth Avenue. Right before he walked me down the aisle, he said, “Calm down. Don’t worry. I got you. Everything is going to be okay.”
“You’re telling me to calm down, and you think you’re going to faint,” I told him, trying to make a joke out of it. The ceremony was beautiful, and my father and I both made it through.
The wedding reception was held at La Mer on Ocean Parkway—the same place where I had my Sweet Sixteen. The hall looked so beautiful. There were gorgeous flowers on the tables. My new husband and I were glowing. When they introduced my new husband, the DJ played the theme song from Rocky. He came into the hall with his hands up because he was the champ.
While we were planning the wedding, my fiancé wanted to invite Gambino family boss John Gotti because his family was friends with the Gottis. My father didn’t like John Gotti, so he said he couldn’t come. But my fiancé said out of respect we had to leave an open seat at the reception for John Gotti, so there was an open seat. All that Gotti gave us was $500 in an envelope, which my father thought was pretty cheap for the boss of a crime family. We did okay, though. We walked out of there with $50,000.
Until the father-daughter dance everything seemed to be going so perfectly. There was a little bit of tension at the reception because of my husband. I wasn’t really all that happy, but I wanted to be. I was nervous and tense because he made me feel nervous all the time. For one thing he didn’t like the fact that I kissed my father when we were dancing. He got really angry.
At that point he had a feeling that my father was sick with AIDS. He told me he had seen the medication my father was taking and it was medication for people with AIDS. But I didn’t know it at that time. I thought he was crazy. I believed what my parents had told my brother and me—that my father had cancer. I didn’t have any reason to doubt them.
“How do you kiss your father like that? That’s disgusting.”
“What are you talking about? He’s my father. He kissed me while I was dancing with him.”
It wasn’t anything abnormal. It was a father-and-daughter kiss. That’s why my father hated him so much at the end—my father knew that he was causing me all this stress.
I had a lot of regrets about my wedding. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t done right. I felt that my brother was left out of a lot of it. He was in the bridal party, but that was about it. It was all about my ex’s family. My father let that happen because he was trying to keep the peace, even though a week earlier he had told me not to marry him.
The song I picked for our father-daughter dance was “Wind Beneath My Wings” because of the words. My father was my hero. He was everything to me, so that was just the perfect song. But the funny part was that I couldn’t figure out a song for my soon-to-be husband and me. I made the DJ pick it. He chose “All of My Life” by Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt.
It wasn’t long before my relationship with my husband took a very big twist. Soon after we got married, things started getting strange.
We moved to Staten Island, and we were fighting like crazy over there. We were fighting all the time. My father was calling me every day to go to the house because he missed me. My husband was upset by that. He didn’t want me to go. I’d bring him food that my father had cooked, but he didn’t want the food from my father. He wanted me to cook. It was like he was trying to control me.
He was distancing me from my family. He was trying to keep me from them—that’s why we fought. He wanted to move me to Long Island, but I wasn’t ready to move there. I wanted to stay close to my father, because I didn’t know how long he was going to be around.
When I was at my parents’, I’d call my husband and tell him to meet me there for dinner after work. But he didn’t want any part of it. He said he just wanted to go home. There was just not a good feeling. There was a lot of tension—it wasn’t like a happily married couple having a baby.
That’s not to say we didn’t want my son. We did, very much. He was pretty much planned. We both knew what we were doing, but we were too young. We both knew that I was going to get pregnant. We were trying to get pregnant, although I’m not sure we knew why.
I guess we both wanted to get out of our situations at home. We really were not happy with our home lives. I wanted to get married—and in the beginning my father was kind of pushing me to get married. He was afraid that he wasn’t going to be around long and he wanted me to find someone who would take care of me.
At the time I knew that he wasn’t healthy, but I didn’t know what he had. And I also knew that I didn’t want to move far away from him, since I didn’t know how long he
was going to be around.
When I got pregnant with my son, I immediately told my parents. My mother was so excited and my father was, too. But he got all emotional, saying his baby was having a baby. When my son was born, my father came to the hospital to see the baby and me. He didn’t even make it to the inside of the room.
When he saw me lying in the bed, he broke down and cried. He was so overwhelmed and filled with emotion. I felt how much he loved me at that moment, and I loved him for that. I understood that although he was so overjoyed he had a grandson from me, it hurt him to see me lying in the bed. After all, I was still his baby and now I had a baby. He couldn’t stand to see me all grown-up. It bothered him to see me like that, just like it bothered me to see him going through something.
My son had to stay in the hospital for a small medical issue for five days after he was born and I was a wreck. Everybody was so upset. He was so loved, especially by my father and my mother. His father and I were there with him all the time. We didn’t want to leave the hospital.
On my first Valentine’s Day with my husband, I decorated the whole house for him. He wasn’t happy about it at all and he was very mean to me. He didn’t care that I did that. He wasn’t a grateful person. I used to get very upset about everything he did, but I was trying to keep it together so he wouldn’t get killed. I knew if I told my father everything my husband was doing to me, he definitely would have killed him.
I did tell my father about the shirts. My husband wanted me to wash and iron his white shirts myself. My father couldn’t believe it.
“It costs a dollar to get a shirt done,” he said.
“Yeah, but he wants me to do them.”
“Fuck that, bring them to the dry cleaner’s.”
“No, he’s going to get mad if I do that. He doesn’t like the chemicals.”
“Just do me a favor. Bring me your own hangers and I’ll take them to the dry cleaner’s and tell them no chemicals. He’ll never know the difference.”
So that’s what I used to do.
But it was obvious to my father that there were other problems. I was really unhappy and we weren’t getting along. There were times when we would fight and my husband would somehow take both cars and leave me trapped in the house. I’d have to call my parents to come and get me.
It wasn’t long before my husband and my father became almost like rivals—they didn’t like each other at all. My father didn’t want me with him anymore, and my husband didn’t want me around my father. So I was put in the middle.
It was even more horrible because my father was sick. He would call me in the morning to go over to the house so he could make me breakfast. My husband didn’t want me to go.
“You can’t go. You have things to do around here. I don’t want you there.”
Of course, I would go, anyway, because he was my father, and my husband wasn’t going to stop me from going. But it caused a lot of problems in our marriage. It pretty much broke up the marriage. My father hated him.
My father was not really as possessive as you might think he would’ve been. He knew that I was married and had a child. And he knew that I had to kind of figure things out—he was trying to let me do that on my own. He knew that I wasn’t stupid and that I knew what was right and what was wrong for me. He saw that I wasn’t happy and he saw that I was trying to do something about it on my own. I wanted my father to stay out of it.
But he couldn’t do that.
One day he said, “Linda, I want to kill your husband, but I need your permission. I don’t want you to live with the guilt.”
“You can’t do that.” I was horrified. My husband was the father of my son. But, ultimately, my father was right. My husband tormented me.
I felt that the reason my father made an exception not to threaten—or kill—my husband was because we had a child together. That was probably the only reason. He felt a very strong connection to and love for my son. Knowing that my husband was his grandson’s father, he was probably very torn. Still, he didn’t like the way my husband was treating me anymore. I also didn’t like the way I was being treated anymore, so we got divorced.
The turmoil between my father and my husband basically caused the breakup of our marriage. That and the fact that we were both very young, and we both came from homes where we were pretty spoiled. We just didn’t know how to make a marriage work at that time.
Unfortunately, we were too young to know how to stick it out and work it out. I loved my husband in the beginning, but then it became such a controlling relationship. He had to control everything that I did. When I went to the store, he wanted to know why I took so long. He was just too controlling, and I was too young to be controlled. Nobody should ever be controlled, anyway.
The marriage didn’t even last a year. Looking back, if I knew everything then that I know now, I probably would have tried to make it work because the pain that it caused my son growing up was pretty bad.
Ten years after I was divorced, I met someone else—someone I had known when we were kids. But we had moved away from him when I was sixteen.
We met up again when I was in my thirties and we hit it off immediately. I felt such a sense of security with him. Here was somebody who knew my whole life story. He knew my family. Someone I didn’t have to explain myself to—someone who was going to be good to me.
We ended up living together and I had three children with him. And during the time that we were together, he became extremely abusive. I became a victim of domestic violence. After all of the years of having everything, and being protected, and thinking that no one could ever hurt me, I was the victim of domestic violence. I was walking around on eggshells every day, waking up afraid.
This guy wasn’t a street guy at all. He had been a straight-A student in high school. Very smart, good-looking, educated, went to law school. He was the person I went to when I needed help with homework as a kid. He wasn’t from the streets, but there was something just not right with him. He would constantly bring up my father and call me names. He called me a rat and said I came from a rat family.
He was so abusive and I was so afraid of him that I wouldn’t even prosecute him until one of the assaults was so bad that I had no choice. The district attorney told me they weren’t going to need me on the witness stand because they were going to have my body on a slab and that would have been enough for them to put him away. I was afraid I was going to die, so I decided to testify.
Finally after thirty-five arrests for assaulting me, he went to prison. It was kind of ironic that my life would take such a twist. My father had protected me when I was growing up, but then he was gone and I was the victim of abuse. If my father had been alive for that, only God knows what he would’ve done.
CHAPTER 10
THE SHOOTING ON THE BLOCK
It was November 18, 1991—a cold late-fall day. There was a very eerie feeling in the air. It was scary—a day I’ll never forget.
It had been five months since the war erupted and things seemed kind of peaceful. Little did I know, all hell was about to break loose.
When the war was going on, there was a lot of tension in the air. There were a lot of people at my house all the time—my father’s crew never left his side. They’d come to the house armed—each one had his own weapons—to pick him up. Then they’d go wherever they had to go. They’d drive around the neighborhood, go to the club. They were always on guard.
My father usually left the house at the same time every day—between eleven o’clock and noon. That was his routine. On this particular day I happened to leave at the same time as my father, which I never did. I had a shower to go to that night and I was going to buy a gift. I was walking down the steps carrying the baby, who was eight months old, and his diaper bag. And walking all around me were all these guys with loaded pistols. I couldn’t see the guns, but I knew they all had them.
I know that’s crazy, but at the time it all seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t thinking, Holy shit, I’m
surrounded by guys with guns. Back then this really was kind of normal for me.
When I got to my black Mercedes, which was parked in front of the house, my father helped me put the baby into his car seat and kissed us good-bye. As soon as my son was settled, I got into my car. My father got into his car, which was parked in the driveway.
His car pulled out of the driveway and took a right heading toward Twelfth Avenue. I checked my rearview mirror and saw a van speeding up the block. When I backed out, I cut the van off. It almost slammed into me because it was so close and the driver was trying to pass me. I didn’t have any idea who it was. I was thinking it was just a van driving up the block, but the guy was really flying. I yelled a few choice words and started driving again.
As I got to the corner of the block, where Eighty-Second Street met Twelfth Avenue, I saw a big white truck pull in horizontally between the stop signs on both sides of the street. My father’s car got to the stop sign and my car was right behind him. The van was behind me. For some reason I glanced over to look at the baby, who was next to me in his rear-facing car seat.
At that moment I noticed this statue of Jesus in the front yard of the house on my left—his arms outstretched toward me and my son—surrounded by perfectly manicured shrubs. It was in front of this magnificent tree. Dried-up brown leaves still clinging to its nearly bare branches, remnants of summer. The statue had been there forever, but I never really paid much attention.
My father’s car came to an abrupt stop, forcing me to stop my car. Since we weren’t going anywhere, I figured it was a good time to put my radio back into the dash. Everybody was stealing car radios at that time, so Mercedes made radios that you could remove from the dashboard. I leaned down and reached underneath my seat, where I used to stash my radio. All of a sudden I heard popping noises that sounded just like fireworks.
I looked up and there were these guys dressed from head to toe in black. It was like a scene from a Mafia movie, but it was all too real. Their faces were covered with black ski masks and they were carrying these long black guns with silencers. They literally were dressed to kill.