The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  That narrative scaffolding had enabled me to rig the draft, but so what? Did it serve anybody anymore? I slept on the possibility that it amounted to nothing but a cheap trick, this meritage blending of the third and the first, and stupidly show-offy, which was worse. By morning light I determined: either he and him or I and me had to go. I made my move. Over the next four weeks, I rewrote the entire book in the first person, and that’s the way it would be published. I haven’t heard a peep from him since and may I be forgiven for his sins.

  Fresh Head

  I couldn’t estimate how much my dad squandered gambling, but I can hear my mother screaming at him over the decades about the thousands upon thousands of bucks he “pissed away.” He never did buy a house, which didn’t really trouble him, so I gather he never thought to sock away money for a down payment. He preferred to “invest” his funds elsewhere. He did ultimately lose the interest in betting the ponies when the Alzheimer’s seized him, but that was not until he was well into his eighties. He was a good handicapper, however, which might sound funny given his track record. I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but my guess is you would have to be a superhuman handicapper to stay in the black, much less make a living off playing the ponies.

  He did declare bankruptcy once, in the late 1960s. This development sounded grim to my adolescent ears, and later I published a poem related to the subject that caught his eye, the one poem of mine he ever mentioned. He ran across it in my first book of poems, which was published with some small fanfare by a university press when I was twenty-five, a poem entitled “My Father Declares Bankruptcy,” which ends this way:

  I notice my name

  Is missing from the list of creditors.

  How much do I owe? What court can settle

  Our accounts?

  All right, it ain’t “Ode to a Nightingale,” and he made brutally clear he didn’t like it, but unlike with Keats and his moronic critics, no great poet was devastated as a result. Others might share his low opinion, though maybe not the editors of the respected literary magazine that initially printed it. When I presented my parents a copy of the book I presumed neither of them would open it. My father’s take on the whole poetry enterprise was blunt: “Won’t pay the light bills,” he declared. True enough, but who tipped him off? Beyond that, I felt terrible that I had hurt his feelings, not that that was my intention. I couldn’t defend myself.

  He often said to me, and he might have said as much that impromtu poetry review day, “You got some kinda fresh head.” It might have been a common expression, but I cannot recall anybody else ever saying that. What did fresh head connote? It seemed to indicate something like naïve, or stupid, or overambitious, or overreaching, or foolish, or pathetic. All those meanings would have fit the context, given his dismissal of me.

  He did not pursue a lifelong career as a small-time criminal. In fact, once he got to California, I have no solid information that he was ever again up to his old tricks—except for gambling. Instead, he worked in one dairy or another, in the freezer or driving milk trucks, mostly. He brought home lots of milk, butter, and ice cream, which we were made to understand was a perk of the job, and I have no suspicion he was stealing, but maybe I do indeed have a fresh head.

  Whatever his vocational aspirations may have been as a young man, besides gambler, I have no idea. But his life did indeed take a remarkable turn in the 1980s.

  •

  That was when he got involved in labor union politics, and won nine consecutive elections, first as a business agent and then as secretary-treasurer (effectively the chief operating officer) of a Teamster milk drivers’ local in the East Bay. He took pride in the job and worked very hard, and gave every evidence of relishing the schmoozing and deal-making and breaking bread—as he liked to term it—that came with the job. His executive style filtered down into his home. When he left a note on the breakfast table, to get his wife’s attention he wrote at the top, in big neatly shaped letters, “MEMO.” And when his grandson got his first big job, he was suitably proud; once the boy became partner in the firm, the labor organizer saddled him with a new identity: Mario became “Management.” This happened when my son, fresh out of college, chose to live with his grandparents for about a year in an arrangement they all relished.

  Obviously, my father was well-liked—nine straight election victories don’t happen by pure chance. Whatever he did to be effective in a charged political and business context, he must have possessed mad skills at compartmentalization. He negotiated complex union contracts, he fought off adversaries, he sat across from the fat cats who owned the companies and seemed to hold his own. He must have thought consecutively around people who weren’t in his family. He must have taken notes, and when he gave speeches to the rank and file he must have made sense and been persuasive. His Brother Teamster leaders always spoke of him in laudatory terms. Nine consecutive elections is no small feat.

  Recently I came across a flyer printed for one of his early reelection campaigns for business agent that went out to the rank and file, to invoke wonderful union lingo. If memory serves, and I’m certain in this case it does, I composed some of it, or at least revised it, relying upon his notes and a rough draft he handed over. If I couldn’t be 100 percent certain, I would guess I did contribute because he couldn’t type, and his prose wasn’t consistent in terms of standard syntax or grammar. Unlike with my poetry, my prose composition efforts must have met with his approval. And I must have felt pretty good about it, too, because I kept a few flyers, which I came across some thirty or so years later at the bottom of a file drawer when I moved offices.

  •

  Dear Sisters and Brothers:

  Some people learn on the job.

  Some people learn from the job.

  As your Business Agent these last three years, I did both.

  There’s nothing fancy about being a Business Agent. It just means working hard for you all day long. That’s something you can’t learn in schools or conferences. Every day—every single day since you voted for me—I have had the chance to serve my brothers and sisters in the Union.

  [He details a few of his specific accomplishments.]

  But this sounds like I’m blowing my own horn. And I know as well as anyone that there’s always a lot more to do, always a long way to go. How many nights I spent at some plant working out a tense situation. How many times I cooled off an angry or an unreasonable employer. How many late night and early morning phone calls from my brothers and sisters who felt misused or wronged. As I say, there’s a lot more to do.

  I’ve been a member since 1962. I know the jobs and the plants from the inside. I’ve been a boxman and a cleanup man, I’ve worked in ice cream production, milk production, and as an ice cream truck driver. I understand first hand the hard work you’re doing. You can bet one thing: I won’t forget any of that when I sit down at the bargaining table.

  Let’s talk. I want to let you know what I stand for.

  I want to keep working for you. Everyday, as your Business Agent, I’m on your time.

  •

  One could highlight the self-conscious disparagement of formal schooling, or underscore his righteous pursuit of justice on behalf of the put-upon working stiff. Equally, though, one could note the overriding sincerity of his tone, as well as his appeal to the fundamental fair-mindedness of his adopted brothers and sisters. He mixed in self-advertisement with modest self-abnegation. Nice touch, no? And he wanted them to appreciate in no uncertain terms that he understood firsthand the hard work they were paid to do, for which they should be paid more after he negotiated the next contract. He pleaded for their trust, which he hoped he had earned. And they gave it to him: they reelected him, again and again.

  (Side note: having a sealed criminal file, as he did indeed have, would have been a boon to his employment or election prospects, because being a convicted felon would have conceivably j
eopardized his union ambitions—the feds were all over the Teamsters, after all.)

  He was also pragmatic and anything but sanguine as to the benefits of organized labor. For instance, when I was a restaurant general manager I detected the grouchy stirrings of a unionization effort led by a few malcontents. My dad gave me counsel off the record. (Now that I think about it, everything he ever said to me seemed to be off whatever the record could possibly be.) I may have asked for some advice; I cannot recall. And neither can I summon up the substance of his advice on how to avoid the complications of a union shop. I do recall that we made the facts abundantly clear to employees: our wage and benefit package exceeded union standards—without employees paying those pesky, needless dues. I’d like to think that we treated everybody respectfully, compassionately, professionally; that was our intention. The net: the vote to unionize fell well short. Then we fired all the rabble-rousers. Kidding—no reprisals, honest. We weren’t tempted, and we also weren’t stupid. The Labor Commission would have handed us our heads on a platter.

  When he retired from his union, following his long run, Teamster leaders gathered for a big send-off in Oakland. He himself was left speechless, literally, at the celebration. By which I mean Popey stood up to the podium and could not utter a single world, not one. But the crowd cheered for him nonetheless. He was embraced by his colleagues, and sincerely. And he was loved by many, including his longtime and long-suffering administrative assistant. Janine was genuinely bereaved when I informed her of his passing. She sent a beautiful and impressive wreath for his memorial and sat in her pew teary-eyed throughout the services.

  Organized Crime?

  In 1993, in his capacity as a union official, my dad fell under the dreaded scrutiny of the FBI Strike Force. They were vigorously probing union corruption and the connection to organized crime. Nobody was under the illusion for a second that when Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, he went underground to join an ashram in Nepal; more like under the ground of the football stadium then under construction in the Meadowlands.

  The Freedom of Information and Privacy Act permitted me to initiate a general inquiry as to my father’s criminal life—not that I knew anything about the FBI Strike Force interest in him. I conjectured it was worth a shot to see what I could see about his past, and that’s where I first found out about it. Eleven months after my first formal request for information, I received eighty printed pages in his file.

  The records indicated that the FBI had indeed staked him out. They were looking into the possibilities of his swinging sweetheart deals and taking in something like $500 a month under the table, trivial stakes considering the high risk. Notes refer to him as a former numbers runner in Brooklyn, and indicate that he went to the track every day, and that his son, my younger brother, was… At which point the notes were inscrutably redacted, but no doubt they indicated my brother was a drug addict and a felon, but why this information mattered here was left unexplained. The pages were heavily redacted elsewhere, too, and they would also not send me ten more pages existing in his file on the grounds that these contained information as to confidential procedures and identification.

  When all was said and done, months later, my dad would be in the clear. As explained in a March 3, 1993, internal memo to the director, re: JOSEPH DI PRISCO, the FBI investigation “has revealed no specific evidence of criminal activity based upon these allegations [of a ‘sweetheart’ deal between union officials and employer representatives]. Investigation has shown evidence of possible misrepresentation to union members involving coverage of benefits. Information regarding this possible misrepresentation has been forwarded to the U.S. Department of Labor.

  “On March 2, 1993, Assistant United States Attorney GEOFFREY A. ANDERSON declined prosecution in this matter. For this reason, the San Francisco Division is placing this matter in a ‘Closed’ status.”

  •

  I myself have been the subject of a federal racketeering investigation. Actually I was identified as the prime suspect, formally advised by an FBI agent not to leave town, my phone tapped, my meetings covertly filmed, the whole deal. In case you’re wondering, being branded the prime suspect in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act investigation is not something you would put on your bucket list. My own lawyer advised the Bureau they were on a RICO fishing expedition. Lawyers voice such a cliché to the feds, and in my case it was true. Probably. We never really understood what they were looking for, and our requests for clarification were met with the default position: “All in due time,” which meant, “wait till discovery.” We had a few guesses—having to do with my connections with people who they probably believed were mobsters, and my involvement in business ventures, restaurants specifically, in which men of Italian descent went after each other, in the courts and elsewhere. My entrepreneurial associates and friends weren’t mobsters, not really. Considering their various enterprises and all the vowels in their names, it was vaguely plausible to speculate as much, I suppose. But that I was the button in a racketeering operation? Wow, that was most surely insanely implausible. All they had to do was look into my financial assets or slice open my lumpy mattress to determine conclusively I was no big fish—but the skinniest sardine in the sea. Come to think of it, they did look into my finances, and evidently shared the numbers with people they interviewed—or so I was told by my brother, whom they interviewed.

  I have been attempting for years to gain access to my own FOIA files, so far without success. But I will soldier on till I do. Seems overwhelmingly likely the FBI was intending to leverage me, to use me against my associates and to pressure me to flip on them—about what? I would like to know what their theory was. Hey, they surely knew my father’s confidential informant past, so I guess it was worth a shot.

  My case was eventually dropped as well, for reasons they never explained, and not before the scrutiny shredded my life for about a year. All that time, I was an anxious mess. One thing you never want is the feds investigating you—or, as the old man would delicately phrase it, up your ass. DOJ resources are effectively infinite, and nobody is innocent of everything, including me—and with all due you know, probably including you, whoever you are.

  Also as it happened, the special agent in charge, the one who told me to stick around and not take any trips, interviewed my father about my activities. Talk about a switch I couldn’t have anticipated. In advance of that interview, I had briefed him a little bit, not that there was much I cared to reveal, but he himself didn’t care to know too much, pure Brooklyn, pure plausibly deniable Pope. Afterward in our postmortem of the interview, he said it went all right, and he didn’t have anything to tell the guy. I wished I could have been a fly on the wall to hear his non-responsive, passive-aggressive answers to the fed’s queries.

  How my father fared, emotionally and psychologically, during his own Strike Force investigation I will never know—which I guess applies to many other stages of his life. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t take its toll. Either that, or he had the mud to withstand the onslaught. Of course, I never knew about that investigation into him until shortly before he passed and his dementia took hold. In his lifetime, he never once said a word to me about the episode. In my dad’s eyes, and as far as his son was concerned, it never happened. Who wantsta know?

  Sympathy for the Guy Sitting On My Phone Tap

  PLEASURES OF BEING THE PRIME SUSPECT

  Not that I have much sympathy for him, but what was it like for the poor mope listening to my takeout Chinese orders, baby-talking girlfriend, screaming matches with you-know-who, my parents complaining about something and everything, and the meets with customers who needed product before the party?

  I’m not admitting anything. What’s to admit?

  Lawsuits flying. Fists flying in the restaurant.

  Getting fired as the general manager. Going to the hospital for stitches after a kitchen brawl.

  Italians
as restaurant business partners not getting along, on a hair trigger, ready to blow it all up. What could possibly go wrong?

  Say that somebody was dealing, that he was using, that he was going through the seven-year-long breakup he confused with being in love.

  Say that he was hanging by his fingernails in grad school, supposedly working on a Ph.D.

  Say that the prime backer of his blackjack career was fat city, with too much free money not to take a flyer on new restaurants. Say that one night the man’s brother-in-law broke into the Nob Hill apartment, pissed off about everything including not being respected or taken seriously and he’d show everybody what being taken seriously meant, and he tied up the backer’s teenage daughter on a chair and lay in wait for him, and when he came home, he jumped him armed with a billy and they beat each other bloody, crashing all the way down the stairs and through the door and into the street, and the neighbors called the cops, and the brother-in-law did eighteen years for attempted murder and kidnapping.

  But now say serious money was financially involved in that beautiful, new waterfront restaurant, where his partner told him to fuck off and stay out. Say that the judge was going to rule whether or not the business would go into receivership, pissing off everybody. Well, wouldn’t it be good to show that the business partner, who had invested everything he had into the operation, didn’t know how to run it? Who cared if it cost money in the short term, it was the long term that mattered. So it would be good to have it demonstrated to the judge that the restaurant’s assets were being mismanaged. How to do that? Show decreasing receipts. How to decrease receipts? Bring the business to a halt, that’s how. Flood the house with deadbeat patrons, recruited from the newspaper ads run for the purposes of doing a sociological study. Meet the unwitting participants week after week at a hotel near the waterfront, pay them cash to sit at their tables and order little or nothing. Then please fill out the study as to workplace attitudes of employees under stress. Also have somebody’s father and brother hand out phony discount coupons to the restaurant, cause a little chaos on the floor. The local television nightly news reports on the scam, they mention the freebie offer comes courtesy of some fabricated entity known as The Friends of San Francisco. So what if the ace celebrity investigative reporter calls from the newspaper, wanting to ask a few questions? Somebody says, I have admired your work, which was true, though not in the moment. And then the FBI gets in touch with some information. Tells somebody he’s a racketeer. He hires lawyers, sure, and wait…