For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life

by Albert Demeo

  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.

  Our most memorable camping trips with Uncle Joe were to upstate New York, where a friend of his lived in isolation on a piece of rural property. Russell was a Vietnam veteran who was unable to adjust to life when he returned from combat. Joe said Russ had battle fatigue, a mental problem that men sometimes suffered from after going to war. Russ used his discharge money to buy a piece of land in an isolated area, and when I first knew him, he was living in a tent while he slowly constructed a house for himself in the woods. We would go camping in the area, and over a period of time, we became good friends with Russell. My father always related to the outcasts of the world, so soon we started going up on the weekends to help Russ build his house. Dad's skills as a carpenter were invaluable, and the house was soon coming along nicely.

  Late one afternoon, after a long day working on the man's house, Uncle Joe took Russ to the nearest town to buy food and other supplies. Dad and I stayed behind and built a campfire. As the shadows lengthened toward dusk, Dad and I were talking quietly when out of the silence, a shot pierced the air just over our heads. We dove away from the fire into the shadows as voices rang out. “Hey, ya'll, you hear that? That was just a warning. You take your crazy friend and get the hell out of there, or next time we won't shoot over your heads.” Then we heard drunken laughter and a few more shots. It was like a scene out of Deliverance. We later learned that the men owned property nearby and wanted to get the “crazy guy” out of there so they could have the whole area to themselves.

  They had shot at the wrong campers. My father had brought along a small arsenal of weapons for target practice, and as the voices came down to us, he tossed me a Mac Ten and nodded at the ridge. “See where they are?” he asked me as he pulled out extra rounds of ammunition for both of us. I looked up the ridge, in the direction the voices were coming from, and nodded.

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “Good. Okay, son, start firing in that direction when I do, and aim high. We don't want to hit anybody. We just want to scare the shit out of them.”

  On his signal, we both began firing, emptying round after round of ammunition into the growing darkness above the ridge. Finally we emptied the last clip, and quiet fell. After a moment a voice floated back down, a shaky one. The bravado was gone; this voice was stone sober.

  “Anybody dead down there?”

  Dad replied, “No, but you'll be if you keep fucking around.”

  That was the last we ever heard from them.

  You haven't lived until you've gone camping with the Mob. Every now and again my father decided to bring the whole crew from the Gemini along with us. He'd rent a big Winnebago, and everyone would pile in, guns and all. On family trips we didn't shoot any living creature; except for the fish, no animal needed to fear when the DeMeos went to the woods. Apparently, however, no one explained this principle to the crew the first time they came with us. My father was horrified when Anthony and Joey came back from cruising the area, bragging that they'd whacked a cow in a Winnebago drive-by. Dad said, “What the hell did you do that for?”

  We all got in the Winnebago, and Dad made the guys show him where the cow was. The farmer had called the police by then with a description of the shooters. The state police showed up to investigate, and things started getting complicated. I climbed on the fence and looked at the cows while Dad apologized to the farmer.

  “Look,” Dad said, “I'm really sorry about what happened. Those guys are idiots. They've never been hunting before. I'm not even sure they knew it was a cow. I don't want any trouble. Let me reimburse you for your loss. What was the cow worth?” my father asked as he peeled hundred-dollar bills off his cash roll into the farmer's hand. Somewhere around two thousand the farmer started to feel forgiving. He told the officers he'd decided not to press charges. There was nothing the police could do at that point but go away.

  Back at the campsite, my father chewed out his crew. “What were you thinking? You want to go to jail over a fucking cow?”

  My father was philosophical when he saw that the crew had brought virtually their entire arsenal of weapons to shoot at targets in the woods. He just didn't want them shooting animals. All went well for the rest of the expedition, with the guys happily eating hot dogs and firing off rounds to their hearts' delight. Late Sunday afternoon we headed for home. On the way everyone got hungry, so we pulled into a roadside diner for something to eat before continuing into the city.

  We had finished eating and were waiting for the check when my father became aware that two state police officers had entered the diner. They were standing warily in the entrance, hands resting on their holsters, clearly surveying the area in search of a suspect. Glancing out the window, we could see more law-enforcement vehicles pulling up, surrounding the diner. When one of the crew noticed what was going on, his first impulse was to reach for his gun, but my father frowned and shook his head. Suddenly very quiet, my father said, “Everybody just hold still. Act as though nothing unusual is happening. When they get here, I'll tell them I'm calling my lawyer.” I felt my heart stop, and as the officers drew near our table, the tension was palpable. No one said a word. I stared down at my plate, afraid to look up, trying to act normal as I picked at the remains of my food.

  The two men drew adjacent to our table, paused a moment, then said, “There.” My father placed his hands in clear sight on the tabletop and was just beginning to say something when the officers moved swiftly past our table and surrounded two men in the corner booth.

  We all turned to look where they'd gone. Sitting at the booth were two confused, frightened, dark-skinned men who stared at the police officers and struggled to communicate in broken English. I heard them say, “No, no! We hunting. Kill deer. Is okay. Is okay.” Then they lapsed into Spanish, shaken and clearly desperate to make their point. When the two officers escorted them outside, my father paid the bill, and we all trailed out after them, overcome with curiosity. The two dark-skinned men were walking toward a beat-up old pickup truck that had become the center of attention for a ring of incredulous officers. With worry written all over their faces, the two suspects pointed frantically at something in the bed of the pickup, repeating, “See! Deer! Deer! We shoot deer!” As I trailed toward the vehicle behind the rest of the crew, I could see four hooves sticking upright over the sides of the truck. There was something odd about the deer.

  I walked up a few feet behind the officers and finally saw what was going on. In the back of the pickup was a mule, shot and gutted like a deer, roped down on the bed of the truck with its legs rigidly in the air. I couldn't believe my eyes. The crew was doubled up laughing, and even my father was having trouble keeping a straight face. He motioned us to get back in the motor home, and we all piled in before the officers even noticed us. A few moments later we pulled out of the parking lot as the officers cuffed the hapless poachers, who continued to insist with pathetic sincerity that they had shot a deer. As we passed the exit, the crew waved out the window at the officers standing by as backup. The officers waved back and smiled as half the New York Mob drove merrily back onto the highway, our load of illegal weapons stowed safely with the camping gear.

  My father and I did some home projects together that summer, too, extending the back patio and bricking in the barbecue area. Dad taught me how to lay bricks and frame concrete. One hot afternoon, as we sat together in the basement workshop at home, he also taught me how to build a homemade silencer.

  “If
you ever need to quiet a gun down,” he told me, “you'll need a silencer. You can get silencers for pretty much any gun, but if you have to, you can make your own. It's easy. I'll show you.”

  He picked up a plastic Coke bottle from the garbage can and began to work. He used the knife he always carried to slice the top off the bottle, where the neck widens about two inches down. Then he took some chicken wire, coiled it tightly, and slid it inside the bottle. He repeated the process until he had a thick coil of wire, with an empty core just big enough to admit the barrel of a .38. When he finished, he picked up the bottle top he'd cut off earlier and reattached it, winding duct tape around the bottle until it was secure. Finally he took the contraption, slid it carefully over the barrel of his gun, and handed it to me.

  “Go ahead, Al. Try it.”

  I pointed the gun down toward some rubbish where the bullet would bury itself safely and pulled the trigger. It made a popping sound that I could hear clearly but would be difficult to hear from any distance. I nodded at Dad and handed back the gun. He pulled the coke bottle off the barrel and tossed it back in the garbage.

  Another evening I found my father in the basement examining something that looked like a ratchet screwdriver. “What's that, Dad?” I asked him.

  “I just got it. Ordered it from a guy. Here, I'll show you how it works. You know the wings that stick out on either side of the car ignition, kind of like ears?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you want to start a car without a key, the first thing you have to do is pop those off. You can use pliers for that. But the hard part is getting past the wheel and ignition lock. That's what this is for.” He held up the ratchet-looking thing and demonstrated. “You can slide this thing in the ignition and give it a quick twist, and it will break the locks real easy. Then all you have to do is put a screwdriver in and it'll start right up. See?”

  “What if you get caught?” I asked.

  “Oh, that's no problem if you use your head. Only an idiot would drive around with a screwdriver sticking out of the ignition. Once you get it going, you stick the ears back on and replace the screwdriver with a fake key. That way if the cops stop you for a traffic ticket or something, they won't suspect a thing.”

  I knew by then that the crew made their living by stealing and that my father helped them do it. The lessons I'd absorbed at Sunday school taught that stealing was wrong, yet my father made it seem ordinary, harmless. The black-and-white lines of childhood were already gray for me. To me, my dad was primarily a businessman who sometimes went about matters in an unusual way. As long as I was with him, life seemed normal. It was only in his absence that the anxiety crept in.

  The year I turned eleven was a landmark year for the men in our family. I was confirmed in the faith and became a man in the eyes of the Lord. The occasion was celebrated with a special dinner, attended by our relatives, and a beautiful Bible—a gift from my mother. It was called the Good News Bible, a new modern translation. The cover was gold, with black letters and a flyleaf inscribed, “To my dear son Albert, God bless you—Love, Mom.” An avid reader, I read it from cover to cover, flaked out on my bed in the afternoons after school. It didn't always make sense to me, but I liked the idea that God cared about what happened to people. It gave me hope that there was a purpose somewhere in the confusion of my life.

  Not long after my mother gave me my Bible, my father gave me a commemorative book as well: Machiavelli's The Prince, advising me to read it from cover to cover. He said it would help me understand his life. My father had been passing along books to me for years, and I dutifully studied every page of the Italian statesman's cynical treatise on political survival. It was an interesting counterpoint to the Bible I had just read. Unlike the scriptures, the precepts Machiavelli taught seemed both realistic and familiar. Where the Bible encouraged readers to expand their horizons to find greater meaning in life, The Prince reduced human existence to a bleak Darwinian struggle. The Mafioso scriptures spoke not of hope but of resignation, not of transformation but of survival. I nicknamed it the “Mafia Bible.” It seemed to fit.

  The same year I became a man in the eyes of God, my father finally achieved the dream he had been chasing since adolescence. In spite of misgivings, Paul Castellano inducted my father into the Gambino family as a made man. My father did not share this information with me, but I knew something was different. For one thing, his schedule changed, and he was gone more of the time. The weekend outings my sisters and I had once taken with him became rare events. Sometimes he even missed Sunday dinner, and on weeknights he came home later than ever. He didn't take me to see Nino Gaggi very often anymore; and when he did bring me along, I noticed a new intensity in the conversations between him and Uncle Nino. There was a lot more money, too. My father began talking of building a big new home in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Long Island and furnishing it from the ground up. We were even going to get a small yacht. From my sisters' point of view, Daddy's business was doing really well, and he was happy about it. I knew he had somehow moved up in the organization, but the only thing I knew about getting made was what I'd seen in the movies. It was not a secret men shared, even with their sons.

  That fall my father told me that he was taking me to the White House. To any other fifth-grader, this would have meant that we were going to Pennsylvania Avenue to see where the president lived. Yet I already knew that there were two White Houses in America. One was the White House we talked about at school, where President Carter lived. Anybody could visit that place. The White House my father was taking me to was the place where Paul Castellano lived. Paul Castellano was il capo di tutti cappi, the boss of bosses, godfather and chosen heir to Carlo Gambino. Big Paul was at least as powerful in the underworld as the president was in the world of international politics. The Castellano White House was a private place, and only the inner circle could go there. My father was now a part of that circle.

  My father prepared carefully for the trip. I watched as he put a case of the finest wine in the trunk of the car, then counted out tens of thousands of dollars in cash and put it in an envelope for Big Paul. Dressed in my very best clothes, I sat quietly next to my dad as we wound through the streets of Massapequa to Staten Island toward the great white mansion on a hill. As we drove, my father talked about Paul Castellano and his role in the Gambino family.

  “I don't have much use for Big Paul myself. He doesn't like to get his hands dirty, so he has other people do the dirty work for him. Remember when Uncle Nino introduced you to Mr. Dellacroce at the Ravenite? Now that's a powerful guy. That old man can do more with a wink or a nod than Big Paul ever did. But Mr. Gambino named Big Paul to replace him when he died, and I got to respect Mr. Gambino's wishes.” Tradition said that tribute was due to the head of the family every week. Usually my father sent it up to the White House through Nino, but now that Dad was a capo, he took it himself every now and then. My father was bringing tribute that week, and he wanted me to witness the ritual.

  The house hidden behind the armed steel gates that opened before us was a dead ringer for the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, columns and all. This was no coincidence, as Castellano wanted a home that reflected his new power. My father had contempt for this need for display. Carlo Gambino had lived much more simply, in a rambling yellow house on the shore of the Sound. He would never have drawn attention to himself in this way, but Castellano, my father explained, wanted to be named among New York's rich and famous. Big Paul wanted people to think of him as an executive, a white-collar corporate leader. If you really had power, my father told me, you didn't need to show off.

  I approached the towering front door of the mansion by my father's side. A strikingly beautiful young maid answered the bell. My father went inside, but I hung back, knowing that protocol required I keep my place. My father murmured, “My son, Albert,” and the woman smiled and waved me in. My father disappeared into another room on the way down the hall. The maid took me to the kitchen and served
me espresso. It was the worst espresso I had ever tasted, and it took all my courtesy not to register this on my face. But she was a nice woman, and we chatted while I waited for my father to come back. The maid's English was terrible, so we talked about the weather and smiled at each other in between silences.

  About half an hour later my father returned and said it was time to go. As we walked back down the hall toward the front entrance, I could see Paul Castellano sitting behind a desk in the room my father had gone into. When Mr. Castellano saw me, he waved us both in; but once again, I hesitated. He called out, “Come in, come in, Roy; let me meet your son.”

  Entering the study, I approached the elegant white-haired man seated behind an elaborately carved desk and reached out to shake his hand. His hands were huge. The room itself was beautifully decorated, with oil paintings and dark, glowing wooden furniture. I leaned over to kiss Big Paul on the cheek as a gesture of respect, as my father had instructed me. Castellano seemed pleased by my manners and smiled approvingly at my father. He remained seated throughout the encounter. When you are the boss, people come to you. You never go to them. When it was over, I walked quietly back down the carpeted hall by my father's side.

  My father was unusually preoccupied on the way home. When we came to the Brooklyn Bridge, I finally broke the silence by asking him why he was so quiet. “Politics, Al, politics.” Then he turned to me and asked, “What did you do for that half hour with the maid?”

  I said I talked to her and drank the worst espresso I'd ever had. My father laughed at this.

  “You can make lousy espresso when you're banging the boss.” When I looked startled, my father said that Mr. Castellano did not keep her in his employ because he liked her coffee. The woman was Big Paul's mistress. Most of the important men in the Mafia had mistresses, he informed me. I thought about my mother. Did she know that?