by Linda Scarpa
The next morning, at about six-thirty, the cops came back with their warrant. I was getting ready to go to the hospital. They had their warrant, so I had to let them in. But it didn’t matter, because my mother had cleaned up all the blood, and I knew that there was nothing in the house that they wanted. They were looking for the gun my father used to shoot Mikey DeRosa.
I didn’t care that the cops were in the house. I just cared about seeing Joe Randazzo. I wanted to know what happened at the hospital and if he was going to be okay.
When I walked into his room, I knew it wasn’t looking good for him. I remember seeing him in that bed. I can still see his face now—his head was all wrapped up. I just knew that there was no way he was going survive. If he did live, he was going to be a vegetable.
His family wanted to know who was with Joe in the car. I told them I helped Joe until the ambulance came. Once they found out who I was, and exactly what had happened that night, they turned on me. They kicked me out of Joe’s room. They told me not to come back. They didn’t want me there.
Although I was devastated, I understood. They blamed my family. I wanted to be by Joe’s side, but it wasn’t really my place. I respected the family’s wishes. How could I not? He died the next day.
I didn’t see my father that day. I went to the hospital with my mother a couple days later. He wasn’t supposed to have visitors, but his lawyer snuck us in and arranged for us to see him in the atrium. I was sitting there and he was telling us everything was going to be okay. I was traumatized. I just remember seeing him and feeling afraid because he didn’t have an eye.
My brother went into a really bad state of depression. Joey decided to stay at my parents for a while. I was living there as well. He just basically locked himself in his room and stayed there. He didn’t know how to deal with what had happened. He didn’t want people to see him cry.
Joey felt really guilty. He had so much guilt that Joe died and he lived. He was in shock. He was angry at my father because he thought they were going to see Mikey DeRosa to straighten things out. It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. At the same time, he was still his father.
My brother just stayed in that room. He wasn’t leaving my mother—he needed my mother. The problem was, my mother wasn’t dealing with things much better than Joey. She just completely zoned out and was like a robot. She just went with whatever was happening and did whatever she felt she was supposed to do.
As for Mikey DeRosa—he lived and went back into the streets. The shooting actually gave him rank out in the streets, because he was the guy who shot Greg Scarpa. He was the one who got Greg Scarpa—him and his crew.
I ran into Mikey recently and he told me his side of the story about what had happened that night. He told me it all started because a guy who was working for my brother, selling drugs, borrowed money from Mikey, but he wasn’t paying him back. One day Mikey saw this guy in front of his house, so Mikey pulled the money out of the guy’s pocket. The guy told him it was Joey’s money, but Mikey didn’t care.
He said a few hours later, Joey and Joe Randazzo went to his house with baseball bats. He said they tried to hit him, so he ran inside, grabbed a gun, ran back out and started shooting at them. Joe and Joey jumped in their car and drove off, with Mikey chasing them up the block.
When they left, Mikey went back into his house and called James “Jimmy Frogs” Galione, his street boss in the Lucchese family. Jimmy told him to stay in his house. Jimmy said he was getting made and didn’t want any trouble.
But when my father pulled up with Joey and Joe, Mikey’s brother ran out of the house to talk to him. In the meantime Mikey gave guns to the rest of the guys who were with him. He then went over to the car and shook my father’s hand.
My father asked what was going on with him and Joey. Mikey said it didn’t have anything to do with Joey. It had to do with a guy who owed him money. Then my father told Joey to get out of the car. He shook Mikey’s hand again, like everything was over. My father told Mikey to call his guys off, which he did.
As the guys were walking away, Mikey said he felt like he was hit with a baseball bat. The bullet went into his neck and he fell to the ground. Messy Marvin emptied his whole clip into the car, where my father and Joe Randazzo were sitting. Joe got hit in the back of the head.
Mikey got up and started to run. My father shot at him again; this time the bullet hit him in the back and another bullet got him in the side. He said when my father was shot, the bullet went through his nose and came out the side of his face, taking his eye with it.
He said my brother was lucky because he had been out of the car and left when the shooting started. Mikey somehow made it back into his house. He was very happy because he thought my father was dead. As he was making a phone call, he looked up. He said, “What the fuck! The guy just drove away with a hole in his eye.”
Because of the shoot-out and the fact that he had shot my father, Mikey’s stature in the Lucchese family was escalated and he was making more money. Mikey and Messy Marvin were then on record with the Lucchese family, and everybody knew they were protected.
They say there’s three sides to every story. In this case there’s my brother’s side, Mikey’s side and the truth. And I believe my brother’s side to be the truth.
CHAPTER 14
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
While my father was in the hospital, the prosecutors revoked his house arrest. When he left Mount Sinai Hospital, the marshals took him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan.
My mother went to visit him and was horrified at what she saw.
“I noticed his skin was turning purple and black. So I got in touch with his AIDS doctor, Dr. Jeffrey Gumprecht, on Park Avenue and I told him what was happening. He got in touch with the doctor at MCC and they brought him to another hospital. He was bleeding internally. That’s why he was so purple,” my mother said.
When my mother got to the hospital, the marshals were standing at the door to his room. They had him handcuffed to the bed.
“I asked them if they could please take off the handcuffs. ‘Where’s he going?’ I wanted to know. So they took off the handcuffs and they let me stay with him. Some days I’d bring him food and they didn’t mind. So I’d stay with him all day in the hospital,” my mother recalled.
After he was released from the hospital, they brought him back to MCC, and then he went to court. Because my father had violated the terms of his house arrest, the judge revoked his bail in January and he went back to MCC.
Shortly after that, he was indicted for racketeering and three murders, in addition to the gun charges and murder conspiracy he had originally been charged with. He was arraigned on February 18, 1993. He pleaded not guilty and tried to get out on bail again.
Dr. Gumprecht, who had been treating my father since 1990, explained to Judge Jack Weinstein about my father’s condition. He told him that my father only had a month or two to live. The doctor said that my father had gotten worse since he had been sent to MCC and had lost twenty-five pounds. He called it “AIDS wasting” and said my father was losing more weight.
The doctor told the judge that my father was also losing weight because he had lost his stomach in 1986 because of a bleeding ulcer. And that meant he had to have a special diet and needed to be fed frequently—something the doctor said MCC couldn’t provide.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the doctor told the judge about the gunshot that destroyed my father’s left eye and part of his face, and now there was only soft tissue left between his skin and brain. My father also had an infection on his face that was probably going to spread to his brain and he needed to have intravenous antibiotics almost immediately. He explained to the judge that my father was also suffering from AIDS-related dementia and didn’t have a firm grasp on reality.
The doctor said my father had trouble walking and standing and had fallen a few times at MCC, putting other inmates, who had volunteered to help him, at risk be
cause he would bleed. The doctor said my father needed basic nursing care, which wasn’t available at MCC. Not only that, he said if my father contracted tuberculosis or the flu—both were prevalent at MCC—he would probably die. Dr. Gumprecht said my father needed to be in a hospital with AIDS specialists who would be able to treat him.
The government didn’t offer any medical testimony but relied on evidence before the judge that MCC could give my father adequate medical care.
The judge agreed that the medical facilities at MCC were not that great. But Judge Weinstein said that Beekman Hospital, located in Manhattan, had an agreement with MCC and treated inmates who needed to be hospitalized.
The judge acknowledged that although the federal prison system had full hospital facilities and could take care of my father, they were far away from New York. That meant we wouldn’t be able to visit him, and his doctor wouldn’t be able to treat him. Judge Weinstein said if my father was sent to a federal prison that was far from New York, he’d continue to suffer a rapid decline in prison without “humane care in the last days of his life.”
But even though he was so sick, the judge said, my father would most likely commit more crimes if he was allowed to go free. So, on February 19, 1993, the judge decided to send my father to Beekman Hospital under certain conditions, including that he would be guarded 24/7 by U.S. Marshals and my mother would pay for the marshals, as well as for his medical care.
A few days later the hospital told the judge that the infection on my father’s face had cleared up and he didn’t have to be in the hospital any longer, so the marshals brought him back to MCC. Then my father asked to be admitted to Cabrini Hospice. He said a bed was being held for him.
The government didn’t want him to go to the hospice, saying MCC could deal with his medical needs. Judge Weinstein said that was probably true when it came to his physical illnesses, but MCC wouldn’t be able to handle his psychological and emotional problems or do anything to help our family’s suffering.
The judge said the Cabrini program, on the other hand, was designed to ease the distress of the patient and the family—things the court should take into consideration.
“It must be emphasized that the defendant is still presumed to be innocent. He is deprived of his liberty, only to prevent his flight and danger to the community,” Judge Weinstein said. “Both of these problems can be solved by having guards constantly posted at the expense of defendant’s family.”
My mother had something to do with the judge’s decision to send my father to hospice: “I told the judge—with the doctor—that he only had a few months to live. Then the judge called me up and said, ‘You know, you’re responsible if anything happens.’ I said, ‘He’ll be fine.’ So in March, he was put under guard in the Cabrini Hospice. And I had to pay for it—two U.S. Marshals to guard him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at fifteen dollars an hour each.
“I used to go down and get liquor and food for him and the marshals—they were all eating. And I’d get cookies and other food for the other patients. There were young guys there with AIDS and they were in bad shape. Greg was always worried about everybody. He’d tell me, ‘Go see if that kid wants anything’ or ‘Go see if this one wants anything.’ There was food and liquor, and he enjoyed it. He was there six weeks. But I looked like the patient, not him, because I was there twenty-four/seven. He looked great.”
Then after six weeks, my father told my mother that maybe he should go to Rikers Island.
“So after I spent fifty thousand dollars, he decided he’d go to Rikers, because Dr. Gumprecht said he knew the AIDS doctor at Rikers and he would be put in that unit. So that’s where he ended up going. Greg made friends with the doctor over there, and the doctor took care of him. And Greg stayed there until he was sentenced in December 1993,” my mother explained.
The last time I saw my father, he was in Rikers. It was a horrible place. They made it so hard to visit. It was a nightmare. I hated seeing him there, and I was horrified when I left and had to leave him there.
It was different when he was in the hospice. Even though he was guarded by the marshals, it was still a relaxed atmosphere. I knew it wasn’t difficult to leave and then go back the next day because it was more of a homelike setting.
So I didn’t visit him that much when he was in Rikers. That was really hard because I never went a day without telling him I loved him. I didn’t want to see him deteriorating behind the prison walls. I just couldn’t face it.
Maybe if the disease had progressed more slowly, I would have been able to deal with it better. But knowing he was suffering so badly in prison, I just couldn’t go there, see him and leave. It was also a defense mechanism. I had to protect myself, which sounds selfish, but it really wasn’t selfish because I had a kid to take care of.
In May 1993, my father pleaded guilty to three murders—Vincent Fusaro, Nicholas “Nicky Black” Grancio, and Lorenzo “Larry” Lampasi—and several counts of conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced on December 15, 1993. He thought he was going home because he was so sick, but that didn’t happen.
Initially he was sentenced to life in prison, which was later reduced to ten years by Judge Weinstein, who cited “humanitarian reasons” for his decision to lessen the original sentence. Shortly after being sentenced, he was transferred from Rikers to a federal prison hospital near Pittsburgh.
My mother used to visit him there: “I used to meet him in the place near Pittsburgh. That’s where they sent him because they said he couldn’t stay at Rikers. He went to court, and the judge said he was going to keep him close. Yeah, right, thanks—that was pretty far. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but I took a plane to Pittsburgh and then took a little six-seater plane to the town the prison was in.”
When my mother got to the prison hospital in Pennsylvania, she went crazy because of the way they had been treating my father.
“His hair was down to his shoulders, his nails were not cut, he wasn’t shaved—I went nuts. I flipped out on the people in charge. He told me he was sleeping on this hard bed. I said, ‘Get me a scissors—are you afraid to cut his hair? I’ll do it.’ They said they’d have someone come down and do it,” my mother stated.
“I said, ‘This should’ve been done—look what he looks like.’ I was hysterical. And then they sent somebody down. I said, ‘You’re discriminating against him because he has AIDS, and I’m reporting you. You’re not letting him in the general population, where he’s supposed to be. You can’t discriminate against him because he has AIDS. And you just can’t keep him locked in the room.’ The marshals were with us all the time, but I didn’t give a shit. I mean, God, they didn’t do anything for him there,” she continued.
So my mother contacted the right people, who convinced the authorities to move him to the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Rochester, Minnesota: “I got in touch with Greg’s doctor and the AIDS activists. They talked to the prison people and then they moved him to Rochester, Minnesota. They moved him because they couldn’t do anything for him in the other place.”
When they moved him to Minnesota, my mother had to take a plane to Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and from there she took another plane to Rochester. The medical center for prisoners was right near the Mayo Clinic, which was one of the local hospitals that worked closely with FMC Rochester.
“I used to leave on a Friday morning, about five, to make the early flight to get there for the eight a.m. visit, every week. I’d stay until Monday and leave after that day’s visit. Then I’d go back again on Friday,” my mother shared. “I used to put him in the wheelchair, and I’d tell the staff to give me a jacket because I was going to take him outside for a cigarette and a walk. Of course, the marshals followed us when we went outside. I’d take him for a walk and buy him food from the vending machines. He was like eighty pounds. He loved it when we went outside. He used to put his head up in the sun and say, ‘Oh, I feel like I’m in Florida.’ Sometimes he was in his right mind, someti
mes he wasn’t.”
Then, all of a sudden, my mother said the prisoners somehow found out that he had AIDS: “He cut himself in the visiting room and people complained. So then they told me I couldn’t take him to the visitors’ room anymore. They said he had to stay in his room, but they still let me take him outside for a walk. But he was pretty bad, anyway. He wasn’t eating, so I used to force-feed him. I’d tell the staff to get me fresh fruit. They’d give me some fresh fruit, like oranges. So I’d squeeze the oranges and give him that—at least he could drink that.”
I never went to see my father in Rochester. I was trying to get all the paperwork done so I could visit, but it didn’t get done in time. My brother went once, but he couldn’t go again. He didn’t want to see him like that. But my mother said my father would ask about Joey.
“Greg kept asking for my son. One day he was lying in bed, and he says, ‘I thought Joey was coming up.’ I’d tell him Joey was sick with a strep throat. Then the next week, he’d ask, ‘Where’s Joey?’ And I’d say he was still sick. But Joey couldn’t see him like that. Joey went once, and he flipped out. He just couldn’t stop crying. Joey couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t deal with it, either,” my mother recounted. “But if I didn’t go . . . I had to go. But it was a horrible sight. It was better that the kids didn’t see him that way. It was a terrible sight. He had sores all over his body, in his mouth, everywhere. He was about fifty pounds because he couldn’t eat.
“One day, Greg was in bed—and he only had the one eye—I saw a tear coming down the eye. I asked why he was crying. He said, ‘I can’t believe what happened. I can’t believe what I did to you and the kids.’ I said, ‘Oh, Greg. Don’t worry. You’re coming home.’ But he knew he wasn’t. He said, ‘You know, I wanted to retire.’ He did want to retire until the war started. He really wanted to get out of it. He wanted to go to Florida and stay there. He didn’t want to be involved in it anymore. It was just too much. He never mentioned God, though. He just said that he was sorry for what he did—for what he did to us. For making us suffer. For whatever suffering we did.