by Linda Scarpa
“They killed your brother.”
There was no sympathy in her voice. It was like the world stood still. I started freaking out. Then Charlie got on the phone.
“The bad guys got him. The bad guys got him.”
He wasn’t making any sense. When I got off the phone, instead of leaning on my boyfriend for support, I started hitting him, kicking him, punching him, punching the walls. The vein in my arm popped out like a bubble, since my fists were going through walls.
“You wished this on him. You wished this on him.”
I had to tell my mother. I called for an ambulance to go to my mother’s house in Long Island—three hours away. Then I called her. I didn’t want her to be told by strangers. When I heard the EMTs knock on her door, I said, “Ma, Joey’s with Daddy.”
She didn’t understand at first.
“What do you mean? Daddy’s dead.”
Then she started screaming and she collapsed.
The next morning I had to drive to Brooklyn because the family was meeting at my aunt’s house. I don’t remember why, and I don’t even remember how my mother got there because she was in Long Island. It was all such a fog.
On the way I had to drive by Ronnie’s and Russell’s house and I saw all these cars parked on the block. I hadn’t talked to Jay at this point, but I just knew it was Vinny who had killed my brother.
I had experienced hits before, so I knew what happened after a hit. If my father killed someone, his crew came back to the house and all the cars were parked up and down the block.
When I drove by the Carluccis’ house, I was scared, but I was also really enraged when I saw all their cars. I just wanted to take a bat and smash every one of them. I didn’t do it, but that’s how I felt.
When I walked into my aunt’s house, I didn’t talk to anybody, not even my mother. I can’t remember much about. It’s buried in my mind somewhere. I know I had to go pick out my brother’s coffin with his wife. My uncle came with us and told me it was too expensive and we didn’t have the money for it at the time. But I wasn’t thinking about that. To be honest, I had no idea who paid for everything.
Joey’s wife and my uncle went to identify my brother’s body. I asked them how he looked. I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to see him. His wife told me he looked peaceful—like he was sleeping. That fact, plus the fact that Jay told me my brother didn’t see it coming, made me feel a little better. It didn’t comfort me, but at least I knew he didn’t suffer.
When I found out that he was killed on Brown Street in Sheepshead Bay, I drove to the exact spot and pulled over to where he was parked. I brought a dozen red roses, which I was going to leave there. I sat in my car for about an hour. I looked around just to see what the last thing was that my brother saw, because Jay said it wasn’t Vinny.
While I was parked there, someone came out of one of the houses to ask me who I was and what I was doing. I said that my brother had been killed there, and I just wanted to sit for a while. The person apologized to me for intruding. After that, I tied the roses to a tree and left.
My brother had to be autopsied, so I knew that if there was a wake or funeral, there wasn’t going to be an open coffin. I didn’t want to see him that way and I know my mother didn’t want to, either. None of us wanted to see that. So I pretty much decided that there wasn’t going to be anything. Joey wasn’t going to be embalmed, because I didn’t want anybody else touching him. I remember giving orders about what was going to happen. He was just going to be buried and there would be a priest and a ceremony at the cemetery.
The day that my brother was getting buried, I just couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face watching my brother go into the dirt with my father underneath him. I couldn’t deal with it. It was something that I felt that I would never recover from. I was afraid that I was going to have a nervous breakdown and I wouldn’t be able to take care of my son.
My mother collapsed at the cemetery when they were putting him in the ground, and they had to call an ambulance. She was in a psych ward for a month.
So I went to the cemetery when everybody was gone and he was completely covered. I stayed there for the whole day by myself. I was in shock. I couldn’t even believe my brother was gone.
I knew then that if I had seen my brother being put into the ground, my life was over. I was never going to recover from that, never. And I had a son. I had to be there for my son. My mind was so messed up.
I couldn’t deal with the pain of my brother’s death. It was an unbearable, unimaginable, inconsolable pain. I couldn’t control the pain. It was the most horrible loss that I had ever experienced. I’d be driving and I’d be thinking about my brother and I’d start crying and screaming at the top of my lungs.
“No! Why, God? Why?”
That was in 1995. Today it’s not better, not even a little bit.
I don’t regret not going to Joey’s funeral, because I know that my kids wouldn’t have me now. If I had witnessed that, I would not be here today, period.
I wanted to remember my brother the way he was the last time I saw him, which was at my son’s birthday party. That day he was having a hard time with his daughter. I yelled at him. I don’t remember why. I just got annoyed at him. I felt guilty about that after he was killed.
For a long time nobody ever told my niece that her father had passed away. Everyone kept telling her that he was away, but she was distraught over it. She really loved him. She kept asking for her father. She didn’t stop. She kept crying and screaming, “Where’s my daddy? Where’s my daddy?”
She wasn’t getting over it. She remembered the last thing he said to her was that he was going to bring her a big doll from Toys “R” Us.
One day I picked her up to spend some time with her. I couldn’t take seeing her pain anymore. It wasn’t my place to tell her that her father was gone; it was her mother’s place. But her mother couldn’t deal with it, either. I knew my brother wouldn’t want this for her, so I sat her down and talked to her.
“Honey, I want to talk to you about your dad.”
“Okay, where’s Daddy? What do you want to tell me?”
I had a giant piece of construction paper and I started drawing a picture of a rainbow, the sky and butterflies. It was a pretty picture.
When I was finished, she asked, “What is that?”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s really pretty.”
“That’s heaven.”
“Heaven? What’s heaven?”
“That’s where Daddy is.”
“Can I go there?”
“No, honey, not now. You can’t go there. But Daddy is there and it’s a really nice place. So you don’t have to worry about Daddy anymore, because that’s where he is.”
Of course, she was confused.
“But I want to see him.”
“You’ll be able to see him, but it’s just not going to be now. It’s probably going to be a long time from now. But you don’t have to worry about him, because he’s in a really nice place.”
“But I miss him.”
“I know you miss him. But keep this picture with you all the time, and every time you miss Daddy, look at the picture and know that that’s where he is.”
Her mother flipped out on me, but I didn’t care. His daughter needed to have some type of closure. And as much as her mother didn’t want to admit it, my niece felt better knowing where he was. Not knowing was driving her nuts.
CHAPTER 16
REVENGE
I once dated Joe Rizzuto, the brother of the guy who murdered my brother.
After I broke up with my husband, I decided if I ever dated again, I’d go out with someone who was the complete opposite of him. My ex was a really flashy guy. Always wearing a suit and tie. He was a John Gotti idolizer. I even used to call him that. I wanted to meet a guy who was wearing jeans, sneakers and a white T-shirt.
One night my cousin Charlotte begged me to go out with her because it was her birthday. We
went to a club in Brooklyn. We were standing at the bar when my cousin, who knew the type of man I was looking for, said, “Look who just walked in.”
“Oh, my God. That guy is gorgeous,” I said.
The next thing I knew, he was standing next to me ordering a drink. Of course, I had to flirt. Then we started talking. His name was Joe Rizzuto. My cousin was not too happy—it was her birthday, after all.
“I’m going home because you’re ignoring me.”
I definitely wasn’t leaving, so Joe said he would take me home.
“Charlotte, I’ll see you later. I’m going home with him.”
“You’re not going home with him. You don’t even know him.”
“No, I mean he’s driving me home.”
“All right, fine.”
When it was time for us to leave, Joe and I walked into the parking lot. I was hoping he would just have a regular car, because I just wanted to be with a regular guy—not someone like my ex-husband who was a show-off. But when he hit the remote control on his keys to unlock the car, I noticed the interior lights of a flashy red Cadillac Allante go on. Even though I thought I wanted a regular guy, Joe was looking pretty good.
When I saw Joe walk in that club that night, it was love at first sight. I was head over heels. When I got home, I ran up the steps into my parents’ room to talk to my father.
“Dad, get up.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Dad, I have to tell you something. You don’t even know. I just met somebody. Oh, my God. I’m in love.”
“What? Go to bed.”
“No, Dad. I’m telling you—I’m in love. I swear to God, you have to see him.”
“Okay, tell me about it in a little while.”
It was so crazy! I had never done that before.
Joe was younger than me. But when we first met, I didn’t know exactly how much younger, because he lied to me about his age. I was just about to turn twenty-three and he told me he was twenty. I didn’t find out how old he really was until after my brother was killed and the newspapers printed his age. He was five years younger, so that meant he was only eighteen when we started going out.
What’s interesting is that he never acted like he was that young. He was very mature. He was driving a nice car and he told me he was working—I found out later that he wasn’t. Even if I knew this at the time, it probably wouldn’t have mattered.
One day his sister asked me, “How do you feel about going out with such a younger guy?”
I said he wasn’t that much younger, but she never told me how old he was.
I used to ask him, “Really, how old are you?”
He’d just laugh and say, “I told you.”
He always told me the same age—it was like he was holding on to his lie.
From the night we met, we were inseparable. We were together every single day for a year. He loved me as much as I loved him. That’s why it was so hard to get over the fact that he had something to do with my brother’s murder.
Joe even had his own apartment. So when my son was with his father for the weekend, I stayed with Joe. We were so connected—we were both crazy for each other.
He became close to my son as well, and he made a bedroom for my son in his apartment. He bought a car bed and made it like a real kid’s room. We were always together. We did everything together.
We had a very affectionate relationship. I was so in love with him. Sometimes when he was sleeping, I would stare at him and touch his face. He was so beautiful and I loved him so much. And he’d do the same. I’d wake up and he would be staring at me. He’d say, “You’re so beautiful when you sleep.”
That was what hurt me so much. I couldn’t believe that I could actually love somebody who could do that to me—a man who could be involved in my brother’s murder. That was a very confusing feeling.
My father didn’t like Joe much. Maybe it was because Joe’s father, Vinny Oil, was tied to the Gambino crime family. There was always some type of awkwardness when they were together—not that we were at my house all that often. It was kind of uncomfortable. It wasn’t that my father didn’t like Joe; it was more that he wasn’t sure about him.
It didn’t feel wrong, but it didn’t feel right, either. There was just something I couldn’t pinpoint. I never really knew the reason, but I didn’t care. It wouldn’t have mattered what anybody said to me about him.
On one of our first dates Joe brought me to his house to watch the movie Revenge. It was about one guy getting revenge on his friend for stealing his wife. That movie gave me nightmares.
Joe and I spent a lot of time at his parents’ house. We had dinner there on Sundays. His mother would cook a whole dinner, and we all would be sitting at the table: me, all his brothers and sisters. Then Vinny would start with Joe. They’d go back and forth. Next thing you knew, meatballs were flying. Sauce, spaghetti, meatballs on the ceiling, on the walls, on the table. The table would be flipped upside down. It was because Vinny was so jealous of Joe.
Vinny was a lowlife—not working, sleeping all day. Joe was a lowlife, too. But I didn’t see him like that. To me, Joe was a classier kind of guy—always dressed to the nines, clean-cut, with the nicest cars and nicest clothes. Vinny was a street thug, a real dirtbag.
I used to ask myself what I was doing with that family. Joe and I were supposed to get married, but we broke up. Toward the end he wanted to go out without me—to do things with his friends. He started thinking he was a gangster. That’s when everything changed and we started to have arguments. Then I caught him with a girl in his car. They weren’t doing anything, but he was in the car with a girl. I just ended it after that because I didn’t trust him anymore. I didn’t want to deal with him.
He came crying to me one day. I told him I wasn’t going back with him. To this day I wonder if my brother would still be alive if Joe and I had been married. Would that have saved him and changed everything?
When Vinny killed my brother, it was all about him getting revenge for whatever he thought my brother had done to him. He got revenge on my brother. The revenge I wanted was to see him go to jail.
After my brother was murdered, I called Joe and told him I needed to talk to him.
“You want to talk to me?”
“Yeah, I need to talk to you. We were together for years, and I need to talk to you about some stuff.”
“I’ m not meeting you.” He was afraid to meet me. He thought I was setting him up.
“Meet me in a public place.”
“I’ll meet you on Eighty-Sixth Street.”
“All right, fine. I don’t have a problem with that.”
When I saw him, I started crying. I was hysterical. Just seeing him, I wanted to kill him. I started punching his chest and he started crying.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’m so sorry,” he repeated.
“How could you let this happen? You knew this was going to happen to my brother, and you should’ve stopped it. You could’ve stopped this.”
“There was nothing I could do.”
That was a load of crap. It came out later that he did know—he planned it.
“There was nothing you could do? Listen, I want to know where your brother is.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
I was sitting with him in his car. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that he didn’t know. Joey was my only brother. How could he possibly have known and let it happen? He was supposed to have loved me as much as I loved him.
I had to find Vinny. I was literally putting my life at risk. But I was so messed up. I was a girl who was in the middle of shoot-outs. I lost my father. I lost my brother. My mother was in a psych ward. I was completely on my own. And I was out of my mind.
For a long time I made Joe think I wanted to talk to him and be friends. I was using that as my weapon to get information. I would hang out with him to snoop in his apartment and snoop in his car. I actually
gave the detectives two addresses, which I found in his apartment, that were leads to where Vinny was. They followed the leads, but Vinny was already gone.
One day Joe caught me snooping in his bathroom.
“What are you doing, snoopy?”
I laughed, but I was scared.
Well, what are you looking for?”
“I’m not looking for anything. I really should get going.”
“Listen, you’re not going to find my brother.”
“Whatever, I’m not even looking anymore.”
That was the last time I saw him. I thought maybe he was going to try to hurt me because he caught me. Joe Rizzuto was a dangerous guy. But at that point I still didn’t know that he had conspired to kill my brother. I thought that it was just Vinny and his cousins. I didn’t know that Joe was involved.
My mother even went on America’s Most Wanted to find out where Vinny was. Finally, in June 1998, Joe and Vinny Rizzuto and their cousins Russell and Ronnie Carlucci, described as members of the Gambino and Lucchese crime families, were indicted in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn for Joey’s murder, as well as racketeering and drug trafficking. Vinny turned himself in at that time.
Joe took a plea in September 1999 and was sentenced to seventy-eight months in prison—a plea that meant he wouldn’t have to admit to planning Joey’s murder. He was sentenced only for drug dealing and racketeering. Russell and Ronnie pleaded guilty to racketeering, murder conspiracy for my brother’s murder and other charges. Russell was sentenced to 168 months and Ronnie was sentenced to 120 months.
Vinny pleaded guilty to Joey’s murder in exchange for a term of eighteen years in prison—but the feds reneged on the deal and the judge gave him twenty-four years. Vinny was sentenced in early 2000. I had so many different feelings, knowing we were going to Vinny’s sentencing. I was angry, but I was also afraid to face him. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew that my mother and my brother’s wife were going to have to stand in front of Vinny and speak. I knew that my brother’s daughter—my niece—who was nine years old, was going to have to try to speak in front of the man who killed her daddy.