The Gemini was never a wiseguy hangout like the Ravenite was. Many of the customers were local firemen and cops. I quickly learned to recognize them, even out of uniform. My father was always telling me, “Keep your eyes and ears open, Al. You can tell a lot about a person just by looking.” I could already spot a policeman by the way he walked, the way he looked around a room. And I could tell by his shoes. It was surprising how much I could tell about somebody by his shoes—how much money he made, what he did for a living. Wiseguys wore expensive Italian shoes, maybe top-of-the-line Nikes if they were young guys. My dad had shown me the finely stitched leather on the Italian shoes he wore. Cops all wore the same cheap, black, ugly lace-ups with thick soles. Some of the cops were just there for a drink after work, but many were there to see my father. Some had gambling problems and needed to borrow a few hundred; others were on his payroll. I would watch my father go into the back room with them and count hundreds into their hands. Other times they would simply hand an envelope to Jackie at the bar, and I would see Jackie slip a couple of hundreds under the cocktail napkin when he served their drinks. They were usually older cops, burned-out middle-aged men who gladly accepted the thousand dollars a week my father paid them to supply him with information and deflect unwanted attention. To me they were just more of my father's associates. The line was never clear.
When Dad bought the Gemini, he also rented the apartment attached to it for an elderly second cousin named Joe. Cousin Joe had just gotten out of prison for bank robbery. My mother rolled her eyes whenever my father talked about Joe, and she didn't like him coming to the house. My dad felt sorry for Cousin Joe and knew he wouldn't survive on his own, so he kept Joe around as a sort of resident caretaker and watchdog. Tall and gangly with a grayish, sad sack face, Cousin Joe was the most inept human being I ever knew. According to my father, he was also the world's stupidest bank robber. A few years before, he had decided to rob a bank in broad daylight, so to disguise himself, he got the bright idea of dressing up as a woman. He put on a woman's dress, shoes, wig, and makeup, and went off to rob the bank. He must have been the ugliest woman who ever darkened a teller's window. He stole a getaway car, held up the bank in the middle of the afternoon, and then flipped the stolen car in his hurry to get away. Running from the scene of the accident, he peeled off his dress and wig as he fled. Since there was a long line of witnesses watching his remarkable progress down the street, the police didn't have much trouble finding him. They cuffed him and took him back to the bank for the manager to identify. The manager had no difficulty pointing him out to the officer. Cousin Joe, who hadn't even thought to wipe off the makeup, immediately responded, “How the fuck do you know it was me? I was dressed like a woman!” Joe had been sent to jail for a long, long time.
By the time I knew him, Joe was out of jail and living next to the Gemini. His apartment was as bare as a hotel room. I never saw any personal effects there. I did notice, after a while, that it got repainted a lot. I wondered why. Most of Dad's friends called him Dracula. I assumed it was because of his tall body and gray complexion. Joe looked like a walking corpse in his baggy sweaters and pants. Dad said it was because Joe looked like Bela Lugosi hunched over his big pot of steaming pasta. Joe was a tired old crook who was happy just to have a bed, three meals a day, and a steady supply of liquor next door. He was a great cook, and whenever Dad and I visited the Gemini, Cousin Joe would cook something for us. There always seemed to be a pot of meat sauce simmering on the stove. Joe also delivered bread to our house. Every morning he would come by our house with a delivery of bread from a baker who owed my father money. He was such a bad driver that it was a miracle he managed to get there with the bread. Sometimes Joe told my father that there was some juice in the box with the bread. One morning I was thirsty, so I went looking in the box for the juice Cousin Joe had mentioned. To my disappointment, all I found was an envelope of cash. When I asked my father where the juice was, he laughed. It dawned on me that “juice” meant interest on loanshark debts.
My father's operation was growing; and as it did, he started building his own crew. Henry Borelli came into the crew as my father's accountant, keeping track of the money that changed hands continually. Henry was well educated, a suit-and-tie kind of guy. He seemed better qualified for Wall Street than for the Gemini. Chris Rosenberg was there a lot, and Freddy and his brother Richie dropped by often. Uncle Nino's nephew Dominick came by every couple of weeks to pick up Nino's share of the money my father made. Dominick was Nino's eyes and ears at the Gemini. My father felt sorry for Dominick. He told me that Dominick had never been quite right since he came back from combat in Vietnam. Dominick wanted to be a wiseguy, but he used heroin and had psychological problems, so Nino didn't trust him to do anything dangerous or complicated. Nino kept Dominick employed much the same way my father employed Cousin Joe.
Shortly after he got the Gemini, my dad took on a guy from another crime family as a favor. The guy's name was Anthony Senter. He was the nephew of another family's capo, the word for a Mafia higher-up. It was the equivalent of an upper management position. Anthony was an accomplished car thief who brought in a lot of money, but I didn't like him. There was something slick and phony about him. I didn't trust him. Anthony was a stereotype of a young wiseguy. He was very handsome, very Italian looking, with dark brown eyes and black wavy hair brushed straight back off his forehead. He wore clothes well and was obsessed with his appearance. Everything on his body was expensive, from the Italian leather slip-ons, to the tailor-made slacks, to the Rolex and large diamond on his pinky finger. He always had a gold chain around his neck, the cross tangled in his chest hair. Anthony drove or wore every dime he made. What he didn't spend on cars or clothing he spent on women. He could get nearly any woman he wanted, from waitresses to supermodels. The only thing that didn't fit the image was his breathing. Anthony had a collapsed lung, and he chain smoked. He was always pressing his hand against his chest and complaining that he couldn't breathe. My father sent him to every lung specialist in town, and they all told Anthony the same thing: Stop smoking. Of course, he never did.
Anthony's best friend was Joey Testa. Joey was like a duplicate of Anthony, except his hair was a little straighter and he was an inch taller. Joey's complaint was his bad back. When Anthony wasn't complaining about his breathing, Joey was complaining about his back. People started calling them the Gemini Twins because they were always together at the Gemini and because they looked so much alike. Even their cars were alike. Both owned black Mercedes 450 SLCs. Anthony always drove. There was a subtle difference in power between them. Anthony took the lead in most things. I always suspected that Joey was jealous of Chris. Everyone knew that Chris was my father's favorite on the crew. Joey never said anything, but he looked at Chris sometimes the way my cousin Benny looked at me when I got a cool new toy. I had a feeling Joey would be happier without Chris around.
Cousin Joe's apartment became the main gathering place for the crew. I sat at Joe's kitchen table on Friday nights, eating pasta and watching my father count out everybody's cut from the car theft operation. There was a definite pecking order in the crew. It was subtle, but it was there. Whenever we gathered at Cousin Joe's apartment, the positions were always the same. My father sat in the middle, with Chris on his right. I was the only other person who ever sat on my father's right. Anthony sat next to Chris, and then Joey. Joe never sat with us; he cooked or watched TV, ready to come if my father called him for something. Freddy never sat, either; he stood or paced, keeping an eye on my father like a watchdog.
One evening I sat in Cousin Joe's apartment with my father and Chris while Joe cooked dinner. We were playing cards at the kitchen table. A .38 revolver lay on the table next to me where my father had set it. The aroma of garlic drifted through the air. After a few minutes Chris went into the living room to watch TV, and my father went to the bathroom. Joe went into the living room to watch TV with Chris. Suddenly someone kicked open the door from the street with an ech
oing crash. A man I didn't recognize rushed into my line of vision with a gun aimed at me. Without pausing to think, I scooped up the revolver and fired at the intruder. There was a click, and I realized the gun wasn't loaded. I stiffened, but within seconds the intruder put down his gun and laughed as my father and the others came into the kitchen.
Everyone crowded around me, congratulating me on a job well done. “You passed the test, Al! You're gonna go all the way!” my father said, beaming with pride.
The whole thing was a setup. My father had gotten some guy he knew to stage the home invasion with an empty gun. None of us had ever been in danger. He just wanted to see if I could handle myself in an emergency. I'd passed the test.
Trying to control my shaking voice, I said, “Well, what did you want me to do? I'm sitting here all alone and the guy was going to kill us all!” Everyone in the room seemed to think it was all very funny, that I had done a wonderful thing by firing at the man. I tried to play along with them. I didn't want anyone to know how I actually felt.
My entire body had gone numb. I had been target shooting since I was six, but I had never shot at any living thing except the chipmunk I killed on my first hunting trip. I'd been handling guns all my life, and I had a shelf filled with GI Joes and other battle figures. But this wasn't play; this was real, horribly real. It didn't matter that it had all been a setup. All I could think was, “I could have killed somebody. Really killed somebody. I am capable of taking someone's life.” That realization didn't make me feel powerful. It made me feel sick.
That night my mind spun as I lay sleepless at home. I replayed the scene in Cousin Joe's apartment over and over in my mind. I had actually fired a gun at somebody. I had done it believing I was defending myself and my family. But still . . . I was terrified by what I had done, desperately in need of some kind of explanation. But whom could I tell? Certainly not my mother. And my father seemed to think I had done a good thing. I struggled once again to shove the painful thoughts into the back of my mind. What other choice did I have?
Most of the time, life was still good that year. My parents seemed happy together, and my father was attentive and affectionate with my mother. Though she loved to cook for other people, my mother rarely ate her own cooking. She preferred a hamburger and fries from her favorite diner down on the highway. Nearly every night while we still lived in that house, my father went by the diner on the way home and picked up a burger and fries for my mom. Even when he came home late, he always carried a white paper bag from the diner in his hands. She rarely ate it all, but I could tell that it pleased her, not so much because of the food, but because it showed my father had been thinking of her.
The Fourth of July celebration we held that summer was the biggest we'd ever had. It was 1976, the year of the nation's bicentennial, and the streets downtown were all draped in red, white, and blue bunting. There was a reenactment of the colonizing of America in the New York harbor, complete with replicas of sailing ships parading around the Statue of Liberty. The market even sold special bottles of Coca-Cola for the occasion. My father went all out that year to host the neighborhood celebration. Panel trucks pulled up in front of the house all day, loaded with fireworks that the delivery men carried into the garage and workshop until there wasn't room for another box. There were freezers full of burgers and hot dogs, and my mother spent days making cold salads and desserts with Barbara and her friends from the neighborhood. The neighbors from blocks around came to the party; Freddy came with his wife and kids, and Chris was there with his wife. The Gemini Twins came and brought Cousin Joe with them. I could tell by my mother's stiff hello that she didn't like them. I saw Anthony whisper something in my father's ear. He nodded and then went on with the celebration. Everyone drank Coke and beer and ate until they couldn't hold another bite, and the kids swam in the pool and ran around on the grass screaming and giggling. When the sun began to set, Chris and Freddy cordoned off the street at either end with sawhorses.
It took nearly an hour just to move the boxes of fireworks from the garage to the front lawn and get set up: There were rockets, flares, sparklers, everything you could imagine. Jim was too drunk to stand up straight by then, so Dad asked Barbara to go home and get his uniform. I watched as Dad and the crew helped him into his NYPD uniform and propped him up against a car in front of the house. When the neighborhood police cruised by half an hour later and asked what was going on, my dad said, “We already got a cop here,” and Jim pulled himself together enough to smile and wave. The officers recognized him and waved back, reminded us to be careful, and told us to have a good time. The only thing to do then was to wait until it got really dark.
Half the neighborhood had set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk and street around our house by then. It looked like a group of fans at a football stadium, waiting for the halftime show. Freddy and Chris cordoned off the area around the fireworks for safety while my father checked all the children's feet to make sure we were wearing shoes. A few of the kids were barefooted or wearing sandals, and Dad sent them home to put on sneakers for protection against stray sparks. There was a table set up with sparklers for the kids, with a trash barrel that my father filled with water for safety. He always worried that one of the little ones would get burned. When everything was finally ready, he started lighting the fuses, and the sky lit up above our house. It was glorious: red, white, blue, silver, gold, all filling the night air, rockets exploding with deafening noise, filling us with joy. Afterward he lit the sparklers for the little ones. I helped him watch the kids, and the minute a sparkler burned near a child's fingers, we would take it and drop it in the water barrel. By that time it was well past the small children's bedtimes, and their parents carried them home over the ashes, most of them draped sound asleep over their parents' shoulders.
Barbara helped Jim stagger home, but a few neighbors stayed behind to help us clean up. While the women wrapped the leftover food, the men took brooms and swept up the litter and ashes from the explosives. I helped my father with the sweeping. The crew had already left. About midnight a truck came and picked up the garbage. When the garbage trucks left and everything was clean once again, my father told my mother he had to go out for a while. I didn't want him to go, but he said he had to and told me to go upstairs to bed. It was nearly sunup when I finally heard him come in.
Whenever he could, my father would get me out of the city for the weekend. I think he needed the change of scene as much as I did. Dad had been an Eagle Scout in his teens; and though I never joined the Boy Scouts myself, these trips gave me a wonderful education in all of the outdoor skills that Scouts learn. The only difference was that instead of going on overnights with a Scout leader and a band of boys, I went with my father—and sometimes with the crew.
Some of the outings were strictly family trips. The “men” of the family—Dad, me, and Uncle Joe—would pack up the Cadillac with camping gear and head north. Sometimes we went to visit relatives in Connecticut. Other times we took my cousin Benny with us and headed out to the woods to camp. We would pack up tents and sleeping bags and rough it, living off the fish we caught and a few basic food supplies. I hated it when Benny came. Dad said we should bring him because he didn't have a father. Benny's father had been a policeman, but he'd died of a heart attack when Benny was very young. Dad and Joe and I loved roughing it, but Benny was another story. Even though he was ten years older than I was, he whined like a baby. Why do I have to pee in the woods? Why can't we stay at a hotel with a real bathroom? I don't want hot dogs; I want lasagna. By the end of the trip, we could hardly wait to take him home. Grandma was living with Aunt Marie and Benny by then, and I thought he and Grandma deserved each other.
One time my father's zeal for camping nearly got him killed. In a burst of temporary insanity, Dad took me and Joe to the sporting goods store and spent a small fortune buying state-of-the-art camping equipment, complete with cellophane survival blankets and astronaut-style freeze-dried food. Our first night out was cold, and
we quickly discovered that the odd, shiny blankets offered little in the way of warmth. Worse, the food we had brought was anything but filling, and my father got up in the middle of the night and ate all of the freeze-dried packets we had with us. What he didn't realize was that the food was designed to expand in the moist environment of the stomach, eventually filling you up with a small portion.
The next morning he got up, and no sooner had he started moving around than the food expanded. The result was incredible. My father's stomach blew up like a cartoon figure before our astonished eyes, and within minutes he was doubled up in agony, his insides almost exploding. Realizing what had happened, we got him into the back seat, and Uncle Joe took off driving at nearly a hundred miles per hour to the nearest hospital.
As we roared down the highway, Uncle Joe looked in the rearview mirror and muttered, “Oh, shit.”
“What's wrong?” I asked him.
“We picked up a cop.”
My mind immediately went to my father's gun and the box he kept hidden in the trunk, and Uncle Joe and I exchanged a glance. Joe said, “Let me handle this.” My father just groaned in response.
Uncle Joe pulled off the highway and stopped. The cop came to the window and asked for Joe's driver license. “Did you know you were going over a hundred miles per hour?” he asked Joe. The officer glanced at the car as he did so. A new Cadillac wasn't exactly common in that part of the woods.
“I'm sorry, officer,” Uncle Joe replied, gesturing toward the back seat, “but my brother's really sick. I have to get him to the hospital as soon as I can.”
The officer looked in the back, then opened the door near my father's head. “What seems to be the problem?” My father was in too much pain to talk, drenched in sweat, his stomach grossly distended. It only took a glance for the officer to see what bad shape he was in. “Follow me,” he said to Uncle Joe, and jumped back on his motorcycle. With lights and siren going, he led us at maximum speed down the rural highway to the nearest hospital. My father had his stomach pumped and spent the night in the hospital for observation. The policeman never knew he had just saved the life of a Mafia capo.
For the Sins of My Father Page 8