For the Sins of My Father

by Demeo, Albert

  I was small for my age and got teased quite a bit by the bigger boys at school, but my parents didn't want me starting fights at school. One kid in particular was always harassing me, and for a long time I just brushed it off. But one day the abuse became physical, and he pushed me into a trophy case in the gym. I knew how to box, and even though I was half his size, I beat the living hell out of him, throwing him into the glass case. The boys' PE coach saw the whole thing. He knew that the other kid had started the fight. Neither of us was seriously injured, but we were both taken to the principal's office to be disciplined. The principal called our parents, and there was a conference in his office to decide our punishment. My father came to pick me up.

  Driving home afterward, my father asked me to tell him exactly what had happened. I explained that the other boy just wouldn't quit hitting and shoving me. Dad listened carefully, then patted me on the knee and said, “You did the right thing, Al. A man has the right to defend himself. If this is the worst thing you ever do, you've got nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Relieved to find that my father wasn't angry with me, I asked in the camaraderie of the moment, “What's the worst thing you ever did, Dad?”

  He looked away from me and concentrated on the road. I realized uncomfortably that he couldn't meet my eye. His voice was husky as he replied, “Someday you'll know, son.”

  In one horrible instant it came to me, as clearly as if I'd heard him speak the words. I knew what he was referring to. My father was a murderer. My dad, the person I loved most in the world, had killed people. Photos I had seen in the newspaper and movies, of bodies lying on streets in pools of blood, flashed through my mind. Had my father killed any of those people? A wave of pain and nausea washed through my body. In that endless moment I sat by my father, trapped with him in silence.

  five

  INFERNO

  Between the acting of a dreadful thing

  And the first motion, all the interim is

  Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

  —SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

  For the first twelve years of my life, my father worked to keep our family in a glass bubble. As long as we stayed inside that bubble, we would be safe. From the inside, the bubble was a very convincing microcosm of the real world. My parents had a traditional marriage in most respects, and my sisters grew up like the daughters of policemen and stockbrokers, worrying about grades and party dresses. Inside the bubble, my father was a regular dad. Bad guys are not bad guys twenty-four hours a day. Like other fathers, our father liked movies and music, good food, and Sunday nights in front of the TV. For twenty-three of every twenty-four hours, he was just like any other father. But in the early summer of 1979, something happened that shattered the bubble, and my father was never able to piece the fragments of glass together again.

  As I prepared to enter the seventh grade, our family was planning for another change. With his income expanding exponentially, my father began building his dream house on the southern shore of Massapequa. The neighborhood we were about to enter was among the wealthiest on Long Island, with wide, curving tree-lined streets and mansions that housed an assortment of lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers—and mobsters. Carlo Gambino's house is there. Building such a house was the pinnacle of the American Dream for a Brooklyn boy like my father. Moving there was the beginning of a nightmare for our family. From the day we moved into the mansion by the water, our lives began to swerve out of control.

  The new neighborhood was only a few miles from the old one, but it was light years away psychologically. The old neighborhood was largely middle class, tight-knit, and unpretentious. Kids rode their bikes on the sidewalks and played ball in the street, and neighbors visited over back fences. We knew everyone there, and everyone knew us. My mother had shared recipes with the other moms and baby-sat for half their children; she could tell you their birthdays from memory. Whatever doubts the neighbors had about my father's profession, they kept to themselves. To them, my parents were just Gina and Roy.

  In the new neighborhood, however, we became the DeMeo family in a neighborhood where wealthy Italians were assumed to have Mafia connections. We might as well have had “Mob family” on a bronze plaque hung next to the front door. What had gone unspoken in the old neighborhood was whispered in the new one, though not yet to our faces. I think my mother would have been just as happy to stay where we were, but she was philosophical about the change. As the theme song for The Jeffersons claimed that year, the DeMeos were moving on up.

  For the first time we had a maid as well, an Irish woman recommended by a friend of my father's. My mother could not take care of the new house alone. The maid came several times a week to help my mother with the cleaning. She was a strange woman with dark interests, whose favorite hobby during her time off was attending strangers' funerals. She read the obituaries daily and took notes on times and locations of memorial services. She was odd but kind-hearted.

  The house my father built for us was beautiful, thousands of square feet, with marble floors and arching ceilings. In addition to the million dollars spent on its construction, my father hired an interior decorator to furnish it from basement to ceiling with the most expensive, state-of-the-art technology and custom-made furniture. He ended up with even more than he ordered, though: After we waited for months to have the furniture made, the furnituremaker went bankrupt. The bank locked up the warehouse and prepared to sell the contents at auction, including our furniture. When the decorator told my father what had happened, my dad hit the roof. All that time and money, and now there would be no furnishings. Dad insisted on knowing where the warehouse was, and that night after the decorator left, Dad called Freddy. Freddy made a couple of calls of his own, and about four the next morning, Freddy arrived with a large white truck and backed it into our garage. Inside we found not only our furniture but much of the other furniture in the warehouse. By the time they unloaded it all, it was nearly sunup. When the decorator saw it the next day, he didn't say a word. I don't think he wanted to know how it got there.

  In our old house the only security system had been Major, our German shepherd, and though Major made the move with us, he was no longer the only thing protecting our house. My father had the house wired with a sophisticated burglar alarm and mounted surveillance cameras in the trees out front. Security cameras were fairly common in the new neighborhood, where many people kept valuables and cash in their homes. Dad had a shooting range and a full gym built in the basement, complete with weights and training machines, so he could work out every day. He was trying to keep his weight down; and though he never succeeded, he did manage to build more muscle than fat onto his stocky frame. He was incredibly strong, able to lift over three hundred pounds like it was nothing. The gym was for both of us since I was trying to fill out my skinny biceps as well.

  The house backed directly onto the water, where the canal led out into the Atlantic Ocean a mile away. My father had a large wooden dock built adjacent to the property, with a slip where we could keep a boat. I could dive off the dock directly into the canal from my own backyard. There was a large patio area for entertaining, as well as a pool and a slide. Installing the pool turned into an unexpected adventure, at least for the builder.

  Early in the construction, my mother noticed that the men digging the hole for the pool were digging it backward. She spoke to the foreman herself, but he refused to make the correction. My mother is no pushover, so she drew up her full four feet nine inches and repeated more forcibly, “I want the hole dug correctly.”

  The man retorted, “Bafangul!” assuming my mother wouldn't know he had just used an obscenity. He was wrong. Mom called my father at the Gemini and told him what had happened. He was not pleased.

  When my father got home, we walked out to the building area together. My father looked unusually calm, always a bad sign. Unfortunately, when my father told the foreman he would have to redig the pool, the foreman replied, “Fuck you! I not doing no hole again.”
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br />   I saw the veins pop out in my father's neck. Before the foreman knew what was happening, my dad had picked him up by his hair and belt and thrown him into the deep end of the pit. Then Dad climbed onto the bulldozer and started filling in the hole himself. As he did so, he shouted down to the guy, “Are you going to redig this fucking hole, or do you want to be buried in the deep end, where I'll think of you every time I swim over your bones?”

  As the other workers dug the foreman out, he screamed at my father, “I gonna send you to jail!” My father chased him all the way back to the truck, wielding a shovel overhead. The workers piled into the back of the truck and roared away.

  The next day the owner of the pool company showed up to apologize to my father, saying his cousin the foreman was from “the other side” (Italy) and didn't understand how things were done. Clearly, the owner had made a few phone calls and was more than a little anxious not to offend my father further. The pool was redug correctly, and when it was completed, the owner refused to give my father a bill. My father paid him the agreed-upon amount anyway, but the owner never cashed the check.

  Just as we had in the old house, my dad and I spent time together making modifications to the new one. My father hired a contractor to put in a wide stone driveway, but when the man graded the area, he did it incorrectly. Dad told him from the beginning that the way he was doing it, there would be a dip in the middle of the driveway, but the man paid no attention. Sure enough, when he started laying the foundation, there was a dip. My father fired the guy and told me we would have to do it ourselves if we wanted it done right. Dad had his crew get him a load of cobblestones for the driveway, expecting them to go to a quarry and buy it. Instead, they contacted one of my father's guys in Manhattan, who was doing some roadwork for the city at the time. This guy had his crew dig up a cobblestone street in the middle of the night and bring the whole truckload to Massapequa. My father couldn't believe it; they had literally stolen an entire block of a Manhattan street and transported it to our front yard. The city never even noticed. The cobblestone apparently got lost in red tape.

  Always overly careful about everything he built, Dad then asked a friend of his, who worked on bridges in the city, what the strongest form of concrete was. He didn't want the driveway crumbling after a few years of use. The friend gave us a bag of reinforced magnesium and told us to mix it with the concrete. My father had me pour the magnesium into the concrete mixture, and the result was a bond for the cobblestones that could probably survive a nuclear blast. It took us several Saturdays to finish the driveway, but it was beautiful when it was done. I drove by the old house recently, and twenty years later that driveway looks like the day we laid it, not a dip or a nick anywhere.

  We tried to continue some of the old traditions in the new neighborhood. Our first summer there we held a Fourth of July party for our new neighbors. Just as in the old neighborhood, we invited everyone for blocks around, and many of them accepted. This was no neighborhood barbecue, however, with burgers sizzling on the grill. This celebration was a lavish affair befitting our new status. Instead of redwood picnic tables by a home-built pool, we held a catered event overlooking the water. Tables were laid out on the large deck one level above our pool, draped with white linen cloths and groaning with every kind of food imaginable. Steaks were cooked to order on the barbecue, and instead of beer and soda, there was Perrier and buckets of Dom Perignon champagne. Kids lined up to go down the slide into the pool, and their parents took turns cruising in our new yacht, docked behind our house. My father hired a small band with a singer to croon Sinatra tunes for the evening. Space was set aside for a dance floor under the open sky, and as the afternoon turned to dusk, couples swayed in the cool evening air. Once again there was a truckload of fireworks, but this time they exploded in the skies above the water. They looked like magic.

  A few things did remain the same. Barbara and Jim came with two or three families from the old neighborhood. I think they felt a little out of place at first in the sophisticated new environment, but we were so glad to see them that they relaxed after a while and began to enjoy themselves. Some of my father's crew came as well, Freddy and Chris with their families, and Joey and Anthony. The mobsters in the group mingled freely with the stockbrokers, attorneys, and judge who were our guests. I wondered if the judge realized who he was talking to, who was hosting the party. My mother seemed glad to see Chris and Freddy, but she spoke to Anthony and Joey as little as possible. I could tell she didn't like them. Later that night I heard her tell my father that she didn't like having them around. She didn't trust them.

  Once we settled into the new neighborhood, my father adopted a more sophisticated personal image. He also decided he needed a full-time driver. Freddy was the natural choice for the job: a combination race-car driver, mechanic, and bodyguard. The only problem was that Freddy was a little rough around the edges, so my father gave Freddy a makeover. Freddy's teeth had been bad since he was a kid, so my father paid a fortune in dental work, got him a good haircut and manicure, and had him fitted for a whole new wardrobe. Somewhere along the line Freddy even got most of the grease out of his pores. Outwardly, Freddy was a new man, but inwardly, he was still just Freddy, as doggedly loyal as ever.

  Some vestiges of the old life remained. Uncle Joe still pulled up in his old Cadillac limo, as bluff and unpretentious as ever, and the Sunday dinners continued. Grandma DeMeo continued to show up for holidays and special occasions, to sit in her chair and wait for attention. If anyone understood the nature of power, my grandmother did. Grandma wielded guilt and disappointment like twin revolvers. She was still living with Aunt Marie, making her life a living hell. Aunt Marie had to listen to my grandmother's daily insistence that Grandma was going to wake up dead the next morning. She also had to endure being called a whore if my grandmother suspected my aunt was dating. As it was, Grandma DeMeo's visits were like the monthly inventory at a department store; the main reason she seemed to come was to go through the house and take mental notes on our new possessions. She had spent most of her adulthood envying Mrs. Profaci; now she fingered my mother's new mink coat in stiff-faced silence. In spite of the fact that my father had supported her generously since he was sixteen, Grandma bitterly envied her daughter-in-law's new acquisitions. My mother was living in the style to which my grandmother had always thought she was entitled. Ironically, though my mother enjoyed the things my father bought, they were never that important to her. She continued as before, focusing most of her time and money on her children.

  When I entered the sixth grade, my father had begun educating me about the family finances. My father maneuvered his money expertly from enterprise to enterprise, being careful to make regular payments to the IRS. There was never a time when my father did not own and operate many businesses legally, for he was a shrewd investor who wanted to protect his capital. A sizable amount of his income was invested in stocks, bonds, and other traditional depositories, and he made certain I understood the importance of guarding my assets.

  He also explained the ins and outs of the monetary system within the Mob, a system that simultaneously benefits and enslaves its members. Once a member begins paying a certain amount of money to the boss each week, he is expected not only to maintain but also to increase that amount. My father had long been kicking up twenty, thirty, even fifty thousand dollars a week, and there was continual pressure from above to increase the amount. If the tribute payments leveled off or lessened, the assumption would either be that he had outlived his usefulness or that he was pocketing part of the profits. Either was dangerous. He knew that Paul Castellano kept him in the family purely because my father was a big earner for the Gambinos. Castellano didn't like my father any more than my father liked him.

  My father's loan-sharking business continued to bring in sizable profits, and by the time I was twelve, my father's auto theft ring had grown into the largest, most lucrative automobile theft operation in the Northeast. The enterprise had started out legitim
ately. My father's car dealerships on Long Island were providing luxury cars for the Arab market. The Arab requirements were very specific; none of the cars could have leather seats, for the Muslim religion forbade them from using leather. The demand was tremendous, and when the dealers couldn't get enough of the cars legally, they began stealing them. One stolen car brought fifteen thousand dollars in the Arab market, so the profit margin was huge.

  When my father learned what was going on and saw the potential, he studied the problem. He was scientific about his operations. He hired a tool and die maker to create the special ratchet tool he had shown me. The tool made it possible to steal a car within seconds. The risk of getting caught in that amount of time was very small. Then my father did a little nosing around and found a man at General Motors who was willing to join the operation. He provided my father with the actual stamps and blanks used to print ID tags at the factory. With an inside man at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the scheme became virtually foolproof. The cars were taken off the street, retagged with factory equipment, issued new DMV registration, and made ready to ship within twenty-four hours. Transportation was simple, as the retagged cars looked all legal and thus could be shipped openly on cargo vessels. It was an astonishingly effective system that soon brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. And since my father was meticulous about security, insisting that everyone wear gloves at all times, from thief to tagger, the cars could not be traced if intercepted.