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

by Albert Demeo

  I began to reassess every aspect of my life. My wife was gone, and I saw now that our marriage had been a sham from the beginning, for the man she had married had never really existed. I also took a long, hard look at my friends. Tommy and Nick remained loyal friends; they had laughed and partied and suffered with me for many years, and I knew they would always be there for me, only a phone call away. Other friends were more troubling. I realized that I had held on to associations with people who had stayed with me for years because I was the mobster's son, and that was my primary fascination for them. Those friendships had never been either healthy or authentic, and one by one I began to let them go.

  One of the key moments of insight for me was a trip to an Italian ice store near my old neighborhood. It was run by a former member of the organized crime task force who had dedicated a decade of his professional career to prosecuting the New York Mafia and then retired to sell Italian ices on Long Island. An old friend insisted I should visit the store, and finally I did. I had expected to find myself face to face with one of the men who had formerly hounded me, who would regard me with contempt if he realized who I was. It was my determination to get well that empowered me to walk through the door of his establishment that day. Once inside, however, what I found was a virtual shrine to the Mafia. Posters from the Godfather and GoodFellas movies covered the walls, and the shelves were packed with souvenir memorabilia glorifying the Mob. I purchased a raspberry ice and ate it quietly as I listened to this former police officer regale admirers with tales of “the Life.” Listening to him, it was impossible to tell which side of the law he had been on. As I stood there taking it all in, my friend said, “Tell him who you are, Al. He doesn't recognize you. He'll be so excited to hear you're Roy's son.” I looked at my friend in disbelief. All those years he had known me, and he didn't understand the first thing about my life.

  An even more telling incident occurred a short while later. I no longer drove a car, but I made it a habit to get out of my apartment regularly. My fear of leaving home was gradually abating, but I knew it would come back if I gave in to the urge to hide again. One Saturday morning I walked down to a local doughnut shop to buy a glazed doughnut and a cup of coffee for breakfast. The shop was one I had stopped at occasionally as a kid, and I was forcing myself by then to frequent my old haunts and get reacquainted with the person I once had been. Long Island was then in the process of replacing old gas station tanks with new, more environmentally safe storage units, and the gas station next door to the doughnut shop had been recently torn up. A small article in the local paper had mentioned that human remains were found in one of the old tanks. I hadn't paid much attention to the article, as it didn't seem important at the time.

  Standing in line at the crowded counter, waiting to place my order, I gradually became aware of a customer ahead of me talking with the Middle Eastern shop owner while he waited. The voice sounded familiar, and when I looked over, I recognized a guy I had gone to high school with. We had never been friends, but we lived in the same neighborhood and knew one another by name. He was speaking loudly and with great enthusiasm, and everyone in line could hear what he was saying. “You know that body they found in the gas station across the street? I know who probably killed the guy. I bet it was Al DeMeo. We went to school together. His father was a big-time mobster. I'll bet the dead guy is one of Al's.”

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. For a moment I wanted to turn and walk right back out the door, but I had never run away from anybody, and I wasn't going to start then. So I made my way behind the line, toward the counter where the two men were chatting, and stepped up in front of my old high school classmate. I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, and I hadn't shaved, so when he first noticed me, he didn't realize who I was. I pulled the cap off and removed my sunglasses, looking him full in the face. As recognition dawned, I saw him go white as a sheet, and for a moment, I thought he might actually faint. All his bravado drained away as he stood there in stunned silence.

  I looked at him for a moment and then said, my voice heavy with sarcasm, “Actually, the guy they found isn't one of mine. I've been far too busy taking care of other Mob business all these years to have time to murder anybody. You know how it is. Sometimes you just can't get everything done.” And I walked out the door and down the street, back toward my apartment. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with exhaustion.

  “All I wanted,” I muttered to myself, “was a God-damn doughnut.”

  I knew I could never make final peace with some scenes of my past until I revisited them. Taking my courage in both hands, I decided to go back. The resulting journey was not only enlightening but sometimes bitterly ludicrous.

  I took the train into the city one afternoon and got off near Forty-Second Street, where I had once made cash collections for my father in seedy sex malls and sordid theaters. In place of the red light district where my father and I had once hidden from the law, however, I found a thriving theater district showcasing the best of Broadway on clean streets near upscale restaurants. To my infinite amusement, the small venue that had once sold sex toys to Cousin Joe was now a Disney Store, selling Mickey Mouse souvenirs within yards of the theater mounting Disney's Lion King.

  Another afternoon I took a trip to Brooklyn, where my parents and Debra and I had all been born. My grandparents' house was on a quiet, tree-lined street, well maintained and inhabited by working families. The brick duplex where my father had grown up looked the same as it did in family photos. The Profaci house, however, once a grand mansion, had crumbled into a neglected apartment building, with curtains blowing out unscreened windows and piles of junk on the porch. The open front doorway showed a dim interior and a line of mailboxes on the wall. The splendor that had once filled my grandmother with envy was a thing of the past. She had died that year, selfish and cantankerous to the very end. She had her hair done, put on her favorite dress, and announced that she was going to die. True to her word, she woke up dead. My aunt Marie had moved to Florida after my grandmother's passing. She had been a faithful daughter. I hoped that she, too, was finding a new, happier life.

  It wasn't far from my parents' neighborhood to the old Gemini Lounge, but it took me a while to find it. I passed it several times before I was certain I had found the right place. To my surprise, it had been transformed into a storefront church. Underneath an advertisement showing the hours of service, a prominent banner claimed, “All who enter these doors will be eagerly welcomed.” I remembered the lurid descriptions in Murder Machine of the victims who had met their deaths on the other side of those same doors, and I felt an inexplicable desire to laugh. A neighborhood boy, sitting a few yards away on his bicycle, told me that he went to youth meetings in the basement of the old Gemini. He cheerfully informed me that you could still see the bullet holes in the concrete walls. Cousin Joe's apartment, however, had been torn out and renovated. It now formed part of the sanctuary. A redemption of sorts, I mused. Somehow it seemed fitting. My uncle Joe had recently told me that Joey and Anthony—who had put the fatal bullets in my father's head and who had once tried to kill me—had reinvented themselves in prison as a rock band. Sometimes life really is stranger than fiction.

  I also took a taxi to Little Italy with friends to see where my dad and I had walked the streets when I was a young child. Two guys on a corner of Mulberry Street were unloading a truck. I wondered if the goods they carried had “fallen off.” The neighborhood had not changed much, though it was a little more upscale than I remembered it. It still boasted the best espresso in the city. The Ravenite, where I had visited my uncle Nino, was now a high-end clothing store run by a Japanese designer. The wooden icon of the pope I remembered from childhood was gone forever. I even felt comfortable enough to eat a leisurely lunch with friends in my father's favorite restaurant. The chef still made lobster cream sauce. The food was as good as I remembered, and though I recognized the maître'd, he didn't recognize me. Only one vestige of an old habit remained: I sat at my
father's table in the very back by the exit, my back against the wall.

  That same afternoon we drove to Greenwich Village, where my father's pizza parlor once adjoined the occult shop, and Uncle Frank's restaurant across the street had served me anything I craved. No vestige of the pizza parlor remained, but the restaurant was still there; and standing in front of it, I felt a chill. Called The Vineyard under my father's ownership, it had been reincarnated as an upscale Gothic café called The Jekyll and Hyde. On the right of the outdoor dining area was a tall sculpture with skulls gazing down at the diners, death masks to remind them of their own mortality. What disturbed me the most, however, was the quote from Robert Louis Stevenson emblazoned on the front of the building and inscribed on all the napkins and menus:

  In each of us, two natures are at war—the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose—what we want most to be, we are.

  My father had made his choice. So had I.

  That night I had a dream I'd had many times before. I was on my boat, floating in the bay near Massapequa. It was a beautiful day, the sun dappling the water with slivers of gold as the waves lapped gently against the hull. Toward the stern my father was sitting in a deck chair, a cold drink in his hand. Always before in the dream, he had been sad and silent, but this time he turned and smiled at me. Then he faced the ocean once more. When I looked again, the chair was empty.

  epilogue

  THE DARKENED GLASS

  For now we see through a glass, darkly;

  but then face to face: now I know in part;

  but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  —1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

  One day not long ago, I was rummaging around in the back of a closet and came across an old box. Pulling it out, I sat down on the floor and opened the cardboard flaps to see what was inside.

  A faint odor of must rose, and I found myself looking down into a box of my father's clothing. For a moment time spun backward, and I realized I must have packed this box nearly twenty years ago, in the wake of my father's murder, and never given the things away. I stared at the contents for a few moments, then reached tentatively inside and removed a pair of my father's shoes. The leather, stiff with age, felt rigid in my hands.

  The shoes were shiny and black, still as pristine as the day my father had cleaned them, identical to hundreds of other beautifully crafted Italian dress shoes I had watched him slip into each day. Always fastidious, my father had kept his shoes as carefully polished as any military officer. He had routinely bought his shoes in lots, often twenty pairs at a time, for he walked so much that he would literally wear them out within weeks. Like other mobsters of his generation, he had early developed the habit of walking the streets while he talked business, constantly alert to the danger of an electronic bug. Hefting it in my palm, I set one shoe on the carpet and turned the other over in my hand.

  The sole lay in sharp contrast to the glowing leather upper. It was worn and slightly uneven, stained with the detritus of New York streets. As I looked at it, I wondered what secrets it held. Had it grown thin treading countless miles down Mulberry Street or Flatbush Avenue, during clandestine walks near the Gemini or Ravenite, overhearing what the government was not supposed to? Had it rested on the marble floors of Paul Castellano's palace, its top reflecting the glow of the chandeliers? Had it run from a hit? Was that dark stain a melancholy remnant of someone's life blood? I turned it back over, and there was the shine once again, a brave face for the world to see. I ran my fingers over the shiny surface and reflected that, like my father, his shoes were proud and seemingly unscathed by events on the surface but underneath, stained and worn. I set the shoe on the carpet next to its mate and reached into the box once again.

  I pulled out my father's favorite leather jacket. It, too, was black and carefully maintained. Opening the front, I looked at the inner pockets. They were empty now, stretched and worn from their former occupants. I slid my hand into one pocket. My father had kept his .38 revolver there. The fabric was slightly thinner where the handle had once bulged. I removed my hand and touched the other pocket. That was where he had kept the roll of hundreds that he peeled out whenever I wanted candy as a kid.

  Rising to my feet, I slipped my arms into the sleeves of the jacket. Then, pulling off my own sneakers, I carefully stepped into my father's shoes and walked awkwardly to the bedroom mirror.

  The reflection staring back at me was pale and drawn, melancholy hazel eyes above an unshaven face. The boy who had once shadowed his father's every movement was gone, replaced by a stranger. The broad face and softened chin were those of a man just approaching middle age, but the eyes were those of an old man, haunted and weary. I straightened the jacket on my shoulders, but no amount of adjustment would make it fit properly. I had grown and filled out in the years since my father's death, but the jacket still hung loosely on me. I thought of my father's broad chest, all the hours spent lifting weights to wear off the pounds he could never lose. I placed my hand on the leather covering my chest, and my eyes filled with tears.

  My eyes followed the path of my reflection downward, and I stared at my feet. Like the jacket, my father's shoes swam on me. They gaped around my insteps. I looked like a little boy playing dress-up. I lifted my chin and gazed at my reflection once more, half expecting to see my father. But instead, as I looked at the mirrored image, perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw myself, a sad young man wearing his father's clothes. They didn't fit me. They never had. And by the end, my father hadn't wanted them to.

  As I gazed at my motley appearance, I thought of the agony of thirty lost years. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and somehow that living image of myself showed me something that no words had been able to convey. My father had made me who I was, but it was up to me to decide who I was to be. The choice was in my hands. I had my own shoes to wear, my own journeys to take. I had chosen a different journey from my father's. I would love and miss the man until the day I died, but I would not repeat his mistakes. We are each responsible for our own sins, he for his, and I for mine. We are not intended to bear each other's. No one can survive that burden.

  I stepped out of the shoes and put them back in the box. I removed the jacket, folded and smoothed it, and placed it carefully on top of the shoes. I closed the cardboard flaps and put the box in the back of the closet once again, where it will lie undisturbed for another twenty years. Then I picked up my own shoes and shut the door behind me.

  FOR THE SINS OF MY FATHER. Copyright © 2002 by Albert DeMeo. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeMeo, Albert, 1966–

  For the sins of my father : a Mafia killer, his son, and the legacy of a Mob life / Albert DeMeo, with Mary Jane Ross.

  p. cm.

  1. Mafia—New York (State)—New York. 2. Criminals—New York (State)—New York—Biography.

  3. Murder—New York (State)—New York. 4. Murderers—New York (N.Y.)—Biography.

  5. Organized crime—New York (State)—New York. 6. DeMeo, Roy. 7. DeMeo, Albert, 1966–

  I. Ross, Mary Jane. II. Title.

  HV6452.N72 M343 2002

  364.1'06'0974
71—dc21 2002066659

  eISBN: 978-0-7679-1129-0

  v3.0