By 1930, the Great Depression had already begun to blanket Brooklyn with despair. To tour the streets along the Gowanus during the 1930s would be an assault to modern sensibilities. People were living in shacks, sagging wooden-frame houses, moldy cold-water flats. Men lived in a shantytown at the current site of the Red Hook Housing Projects.
The Hook’s main drag was Columbia Street—crowded, boisterous, packed with street vendors and saloons where they’d fill your bucket with tap beer. If you were lucky enough to have coins in your pocket, you could buy ice, coal, fresh fruit, and vegetables, or drop a penny in the tin cup of an organ grinder’s monkey.
There were still more horses than cars, and kids with shovels ran into the street to gather up fertilizer for their home vegetable garden. As in Sicily, the actual red soil of the Hook did not yield good vegetables without a boost.
And so it was when a white-collar worker in a blue-collar neighborhood named Carmine John Persico Sr., who lived only a block from the Gowanus Canal, socked his very pregnant wife right in the eye.
* * *
Carmine Persico Sr. and the strong-willed Assunta—American name Susan, maiden name Plantamura—were kids when they got married and lived at the bottom of the hill on Eighth Street. The couple, by neighborhood standards, were doing okay. They lived in a brick structure—over a garage, okay, but it wasn’t going to blow away in a nor’easter. Neighbors got used to hearing shouts mixed with the thumping and crashing of violence in the Persicos’ place. He was twenty, she eighteen and ready to pop.
On the night Carmine gave Susan the shiner she waited till he was asleep and went outside, flagged down a beat cop, and had him arrested.
In the Fifth Avenue Court, on the same docket as a clash over cab fare and a case involving a lost dog, Carmine heard the charges read against him and was asked for his plea by Magistrate Sabbatino.
“Guilty, your honor,” Carmine replied.
“Before I sentence you,” Sabbatino said. “Tell me why? Why did you hit your wife that is so clearly with child?”
Carmine believed an explanation neither necessary nor anyone’s goddamn business. It was part of the code. A man disciplines his wife. Still, he chose to answer: “I believe in curfews for wives, Your Honor,” Carmine said. “Ten-thirty. On the dot. She got home late so I hit her.”
We don’t know what punishment Carmine received, although it’s likely he was sent home after promising not to do it again. (Susan was probably given a lecture as well about the benefits of being home on time.) Soon thereafter Susan gave birth to her first child, a son Alphonse—called Allie Boy—and then, three years later, Carmine Jr., followed by Theodore (1937), and sister Delores.
* * *
Nature isolated Red Hook from its surrounding neighborhoods by bordering it with Gowanus Creek and its surrounding marshland. After World War II, that isolation became manmade as the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and then the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel made it difficult entering and exiting Red Hook. Considering the isolation, it’s no wonder that Red Hook developed a culture all its own, populated as it was by tough men walking to and from work on the piers with their longshoreman’s hooks over their shoulders.
Along Red Hook’s waterfront there were no beaches, no fishing—just piers. The water was for work, not play. In the mid-nineteenth century the Erie Basin was built in Red Hook, a system of protected piers and the State Barge Canal Terminal making it one of the busiest U.S. shipping centers, with oceangoing cargo vessels and canal barges lined up for loading and unloading, serving the entire northeast, South America, and Asia. For many years, the neighborhood was a storage and transshipment center for grain. The hustle and bustle lasted until after World War II when New York City ceased to be an industrial leader, taking Red Hook down with it. Once the neighborhood started to slip, poverty and despair again flourished. An epidemic of disinvestment and abandonment overwhelmed all efforts at revitalization.
* * *
Carmine John Persico, Jr. was born in a modern facility, but into a very old-fashioned world. In a time when most babies were born at home, Carmine entered the world in the Long Island College Hospital in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, not far from Gowanus, on a hot summer night, August 8, 1933. The hospital had existed at the location, on Henry Street just south of Atlantic Avenue, since 1858, but was in 1933 still state-of-the-art.
Today, the Italians of Brooklyn, though we still enjoy our traditions, are modern twenty-first century people. But back in the days of Carmine Sr. and Susan and their babies, Italian women were expected to stick with their own. It was not uncommon for women who spoke only Italian to arrive in Brooklyn as little girls and die seventy years later still only knowing a word or two of English. They simply didn’t deal with the English-speaking world.
Most men who took up the life in mid-twentieth century Brooklyn did so because of their limited options. But that wasn’t true of young Carmine, known as Junior right from the start. He could’ve done anything. He was smart. His dad had a white-collar job, legal stenographer, a regular job with a Wall Street corporation and steady freelance work from a coven of law firms—so the Persicos were much better off than most. Not long after Carmine Jr.’s birth, the Persicos were able to afford to move out of Gowanus and into the more affluent Park Slope section of Brooklyn, about eight avenue blocks uphill and to the east, where the air was comparatively fresh.
Almost all of Carmine’s plentiful opportunities in life involved staying in school, but Carmine was nocturnal, not interested in the benefits of a classroom education, and he didn’t care about the legitimate world, which was clearly rigged against Italians.
An education on the night streets would suffice.
And on those shadowy streets, Junior thrived. There was something obstinate about him. He wasn’t big, and yet he was the immovable object. Even as a child, no one convinced him to change his mind if he had it set. And nothing frightened him. He was the danger.
The term didn’t yet exist, but the Persicos were middle class. Still, Junior hung with poor malcontents often older than he. He was so smart. He had a chance to be a powerful man in the legit world. Instead, he chose to enter the life, just as did the sons of longshoremen. Older brother Alphonse demonstrated the same organized-crime proclivities, but somehow that was different. Less was expected of Alphonse. Carmine was the special one.
* * *
My mom, Dee DiMatteo, the former Dolly “Chubby” Fiore (although she’d stopped being chubby when still a baby), remembers Carmine from those teenage days. She grew up on Baltic Street, between Henry and Hicks, but moved to First Place when she was thirteen. She had a girlfriend that dated Joey Gallo and lived in the same building as Punchy Illiano. And they were tight with Carmine.
Her first memory of Carmine Persico was hanging out on Third Avenue and Carroll Street. They were all maybe fourteen years old. He didn’t seem tough as much as confident. He wasn’t big, but he was cute and smart, she recalled, a big mop of hair and big eyes, and he made it clear with the expression on his face that he could outthink you when he was asleep.
She says some of the guys that would be at Carmine’s side when he became boss were already there. Cousin Andrew “Mush” Russo was on that street corner. So was a young kid, still little, named Gennaro “Gerry Lang” Langella. Lang’s parents were from the Campania region of Italy. He looked up to Junior as a big brother, and he grew up to be his lifelong friend.
Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati was there from the start. He was a Garfield Boy. Other Garfields included nineteen-year-old Frank Brandofino of Fifth Avenue, Vince Caruso, and Anthony and Dominic LaBua.
Mush Russo acted like a bully sometimes but he didn’t think of himself that way. He had a protective side when he was around those clearly less fortunate than he. He couldn’t stand it when guys picked on the handicapped kid, called him Gimp (polio was still a thing), and was quick to feed such bullies a knuckle sandwich.
Mush was diff
erent in another way. He was an artist, always drawing, painting, creative in little ways that seemed weird, but very smart, to the other kids. Carmine recognized Mush’s artistic bent as part of a keen mind. He loved and trusted no one like his cousin Mushie.
(Frank Brandofino was executed in June 1970, when a man stepped out of a car and shot him five times in the head and body as he was leaving his home in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. Frank’s brother Anthony, a reputed “intimate of Joe Colombo” was shot six times in 1959 but survived.)
My mom had a crush on Gerry Lang, who grew up before her eyes. “He was such a sweetheart,” she exclaims, seventy years later.
Hugh McIntosh, she recalls, wasn’t around yet. The guy they called “Apples” or “Hughie Mac” later on became part of Carmine’s crew.
So Chubby Fiore and her girlfriend Chickie hung out on the corner for a while with Mush, Lang, and Carmine. They went riding around together in cars the way teenagers do. Sometimes the car belonged to someone they knew, sometimes it was borrowed from a stranger.
At that time Chubby’s other girlfriend Nancy went out with Junior, but that was long before he was married. (Nancy later dated Louie “Cadillac” Mariani, one of the Gallo crew’s best, and an ill-fated gunman.)
My mom remembered it like yesterday. Carmine was behind the wheel, Nancy next to him, and he said he needed to stop and get gas. Chickie was quite the booster and while Carmine was getting gas Chickie left the car and came back walking funny.
“Chickie, why you walkin’ that way?” Chubby asked in her normal tone of voice, which is loud.
“Shush,” Chickie said.
Turned out, Chickie had stolen a car battery and was holding it between her legs. Carmine and Mush laughed until there were tears in their eyes. (Chubby could be a booster, too. She robbed a place without anyone noticing during John Glenn’s three orbits because she knew everyone was watching TV.)
She remembered Junior as being wiry, fun—and, yeah, nice sometimes. He didn’t have a dirty mouth. He wasn’t nasty. She didn’t know he’d be a crime boss, of course, but she knew he was going to be somebody. He would pull guys aside and whisper to them, and they would snap to, more subtle but like a soldier coming to attention. He gave off strong vibes of dominance. He was never abrupt. Him and Mush, too. Always calm and cool. Of course, she didn’t know what they were like when they were doing business.
Carmine and Mush, my mom recalled, did have a mean streak, even when they were just having fun. Mom remembered she was going to a formal affair with her father and was wearing a new dress. The boys pulled up in a car.
“Hey Chubby, come here,” Carmine said. She stood on the running board and Junior hit the gas, just a little, but enough to send my high-heeled mom tumbling. She wasn’t hurt but ruined her dress.
“I’m never gonna forgive you. You’re paying for this dress,” she said, but they laughed.
So, if I get a chance, I should relay a message to Junior. You owe Dee DiMatteo, your old pal Chubby Fiore, for a dress.
* * *
Of course, mom was a good-looking girl. In other company, Carmine wasn’t playful, but rather ruthless and moody. As a youth he could be soft-spoken, and speak grammatically correct English if he put his mind to it—grading on a curve to account for Brooklynese. He could be charming or as cold as ice. Everybody who encountered him understood, immediately and silently, it was much better to be on his side than against him. He didn’t hide it. His dream was to one day be a top gangster, a man of great power, wielding his mighty sword while sipping espresso in a store-front social club.
CHAPTER TWO
Street Tough
Carmine was first arrested for murder at sixteen, brawling in a gang fight straight out of West Side Story, a rumble that left one youth still and cold on the dark side of Prospect Park and another screaming in agony with a stab wound to the guts.
CARMINE JOINED A GANG when he was still in grammar school, Garfield Boys midgets division, and quickly became its precocious leader. His gang grew up into being one of the toughest in the City of Churches, in fact the prototype of 1950s Brooklyn street gangs, the Carmine Persico edition of the Garfield Boys, so named because they hung out on Garfield Place’s street corners in Park Slope, just around the corner from Carmine’s house.
The age range of the senior gangs was from about fifteen to twenty-one. If a guy was in his twenties and still hanging with the gang of his youth, he was probably dim, destined to bag groceries and guard the front door. In order to discipline the “children,” police sent a man from the Juvenile Aid Bureau to sit down with school principals. Police were alerted when a mom complained that her kid was every day losing his lunch money to a bunch of little thugs. Police prognosticated that the bad boys would graduate to shaking down store-owners and committing burglaries.
Carmine didn’t go back to school in the fall of 1949, despite the fact that he was quicker than the others, with a gift for gab. He took those qualities, plus his strength of commitment, to the street corner. Because of his middle-class status, he ate three squares a day, and had a more aggressive and worldly view of his surroundings. Most of the kids in the Garfields, if they had dads around at all, were the sons of the unemployed, or the sons of longshoremen, sometimes disabled by the job. Dads filled their bellies with booze every night to ease the ache. In home after home, the neighbors could tell time by the state of dad’s nightly rant. It was comedy if it was someone else’s dad, tragedy if it was your own. As Carmine and his Garfield Boys grew, they became widely feared. If you see’ em coming, cross to the other side of the street.
Like their competitors such as the Tigers, Devils, Wanderers, Gowanus Boys, Savages, DeGraw Boys, Socialistic Gents, Farragut Street Boys, Presidents, Nits, Tiny Tims, Jolly Stompers, Black Angels, Breakers, Brewery Rats, Shamrocks, Beavers, etc. Each had their own territory—turf—carved out on the map.
Not every gang was at war with every other gang. Some had things in common, cousins or something like that. They became affiliated, so things stayed friendly. Trouble came when there was a beef. Sometimes guys fought in reform school and sought to finish the score on the streets.
The thing post-WWII adults didn’t get at first was that these gang members weren’t just acting tough, they were actually afflicted with a cultural malaise—jaded to the bone, cold-blooded, suffering from an existential despair and anger beyond their years. In other words, they were seriously fucked up.
Some said maybe it was World War II’s fault. The war had such a profound effect on America that young people saw the world in terms of war, building small armies, with the front lines and battles taking place right there in the streets where they lived. Others said nonsense. Gangs went back to the days of the fucking caveman.
Gangs like the Garfields got into fights, and ran small-time money-making schemes. As they reached mid-teens they no longer lowered themselves to scamming kids’ lunch money, but extortion remained the idea.
Not all of the gangs were criminal. Some just liked to fight. Some formed singing groups—the birth of doo-wop. But every neighborhood had them. That was the way it was in the late 1940s, every corner from the Hook to Downtown Brooklyn and over to Prospect Park had a gang of kids on the corner combing their Vitalis hair as they plotted schemes to press their advantage.
There was a (very brief) time in 1950 when zoot suits were the rage. A truck of them was found empty, and the Garfields all had one. On nights when they were pretty sure they weren’t fighting, they wore them, heavily padded and draped coats, tapered pants with tiny cuffs, “pistol pocket pants” they were called, extra-large front pockets for the .22 if they had one. For a stretch there, they were almost comically sharp, shades, coiffed, and violent. They smoked Luckies and drank Rheingold.
Some combed their hair in an elaborate way, with elaborate curls spilling onto their foreheads and a duck’s ass in the back. Carmine was different. He had a lot of hair, big mop on top, but it was dry and unruly. He could comb it al
l day and night and it would still do whatever it wanted. During the brief zoot suit fad, Carmine seemed lost in his, he was so small.
It’s not the part people want to remember, but there was already a lot of heroin. In 1950 you could only get horse in two places in New York—Harlem and Red Hook. A lot of guys got ruined. A lot of guys like Carmine hated drugs as much as polio because they’d seen street brothers turn gray and die under the influence of the babonya.
They didn’t know certain mob bosses were behind the drug trade, two-faced guys preaching an anti-drug policy one minute and importing ships loaded up with heroin the next. Kids were the victims, loaded up and criminal when they should’ve been playing football in Carroll Park.
There were two types of leaders on the street. There was Carmine’s type, the brainy little bastards, who led because they could think things through, and the other type, the kid who was the toughest fighter. Some gangs had two leaders, the brainy one for strategy and the tough one for tactics.
During the fistfight era, rumbles were scheduled like baseball games, in series. There were even home-and-home doubleheaders where two gangs would fight at one’s home base on Tuesday night and then at the other’s on Wednesday. Guys were bruised and battered, but serious injuries were rare and combatants could fight every night.
The fights escalated over the years, going from fistfights, to sticks and bats, knives and guns. And the weapons were in the hands of younger and younger gangsters.
Carmine the Snake Page 2