The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (13 page)

CHAPTER 12

AIDS—GREG SCARPA'S MOST POWERFUL WEAPON

As for us—after the shooting, that was the end of anything normal in our family. That was the end of it all. My life, as I knew it, was gone. Even though my father always talked to us about his life, he still tried to keep the family as normal as it could be. What I thought was normal was gone.

Before the shooting I had a mother and a father and a brother. And we were a family. When I woke up in the morning, I could pick up the phone and know that they would be there. But everything was gone—there was nothing left.

Greg Junior was already in jail, but the same guys put out a hit on him in jail for the same day that they tried to kill my father. It was supposed to be my father and Gregory. Gregory got stabbed in the neck, but he lived.

After the hit my father sent Joey away to a farm in upstate New Jersey. My father didn't want him involved in the war. He knew if his enemies saw Joey in the streets, they were going to kill him.

At that point I didn't have the same feeling that I had when I was younger, that my father was invincible and no one could ever touch him. Now I knew that my father wasn't invincible, and neither were we. We were open game in that life. Nobody was protected, and nobody was safe.

Even though the guys were in the same crime family, they didn't care. They were killing each other. They didn't care about killing a guy in front of his wife or children anymore. There was no loyalty in the family. They didn't care that I was there. They didn't care that my son was in the car. They knew and they didn't care.

As far as my father was concerned, they crossed the line in that world when they attempted to kill him in front of his grandson and me. So everybody was fair game to him; he didn't care if there was an innocent person standing next to the person that he wanted.

For him, it was revenge. But also on top of his revenge, he was sick with AIDS. He wasn't thinking clearly because he was on such heavy medications, which distorted his perception. Even though he was so distraught over the shooting, he might have handled it differently, if he hadn't been so sick.

The way he handled it, he was just out of control. He wanted to get anybody he could who was on the other side. He just didn't care. He didn't care if he didn't come home at night, and that was the scariest part for my brother and me—not knowing if he was going to come home. We knew he was going out. We knew what he was going to do. We didn't know if he was going to return home.

My father wasn't going quietly, until he got everybody who was involved. And he had to deal with the nightmares that I was having. I was screaming and crying all the time. I was too afraid to walk around. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid to leave the house.

Once those people tried to kill him in front of us, he became an absolute irate maniac. There was no stopping my father. You couldn't talk to him the same anymore. Not me, not my mother—no one could tell him what to do at that point. You couldn't control him. He was a different person. He became a killing machine and he didn't care about anything.

He did care about us, but he wasn't the father I knew anymore. He was on a mission to get revenge and that was the bottom line. He wanted them—Vic Orena's crew and Wild Bill's crew. He called up Larry Mazza, because Larry hadn't been with him the day of the shooting, and Jimmy Delmasto. They were the first ones who came to the house and then the rest of the crew came over.

That afternoon I called my ex-husband. I told him I needed his help. I said his son and I needed a place to stay. Basically, he said we were on our own.

“What do you mean I'm on my own?” I screamed into the telephone. “This just happened to me and your son, and you're telling me you don't have a place for us to stay?”

He said we couldn't stay with him.

Now all of my father's crew were in the living room. They were all armed. There were guns that I never even knew existed. I had no idea a civilian could even have access to those kinds of weapons.

I was scared. I tried talking to my father, but he wasn't listening.

“Dad, I can't stay here.”

“You're not going anywhere.”

“Dad, I'm not staying here. I'm scared. You got all these guys here.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don't know, but I can't stay here, Dad. I'm scared.”

So he told me to call my aunt, the one who lived on Eightieth Street, and ask if I could stay with her for a while. She agreed; so the next day I took my son and we left. We were back a few days later.

That night in our house my father gave his crew their orders.

“This is what you're doing—you're all going out and you're going to be in different cars. Whenever you see somebody, you kill them. I don't care if they're with their mother or their father, their sister, their daughter. I don't care. If you see one of these people, you fucking kill them,” he said.

“What do you mean if we see them with somebody?” one of the guys asked.

“They wanted to kill me in front of my daughter and my grandchild. I don't care who they're fucking with. And if I find out that you seen somebody who was with someone—their mother—and you didn't get them, you're going to have to fucking answer to me. You're going to answer to me, so make sure you do what I'm telling you to do.”

My father felt that the guy in the trench coat with the walkie-talkie saw me and knew who I was. He could have called off the hit because I was there, but he didn't. The plan was in place and ready, and they decided to do it whether I was there or not. And now my father didn't care about their families, either.

So they went out that night and from then on it was day after day, night after night. They were on a mission to kill people. During the war, my father spoke about the people he killed openly in front of my family as if he expected us to know who this person was, or who that guy was and we had to deal with it.

He once said, “When you choose this life, you choose to live or die—some people live, some people die, but this is the life we chose.” The war was complete mayhem—the killing was all over the news. People were getting sloppy and so hungry for revenge. The guys from both factions were waiting just to kill.

Although my father was sick with AIDS and his once-muscular body had shriveled from 225 pounds to just 150, he and his crew cruised along Avenue U in Brooklyn, looking for members of the Orena faction in social clubs and bars. He was particularly looking for Wild Bill, since he had orchestrated the hit on him.

Over the next few weeks the bullets flew and the bodies piled up.

On November 24, Persico soldier Hank Smurra was murdered. On November 29, Fat Larry was ambushed in a drive-by shooting. Fat Larry wasn't hit, but the driver of the car he was riding in hit several pedestrians, including a four-year-old girl, as it made its getaway.

Every day during the war was a day of hunting—searching and hunting—for my father. Day in and day out, and during the night, until he was satisfied—and he wasn't going to be satisfied until he killed every one of them.

On Tuesday morning, December 3, 1991, my father was out hunting with Larry and Jimmy when he saw Orena loyalist Joey Tolino standing in front of a social club in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Tolino was standing with this old guy, Gaetano “Tommy Scar” Amato. He was seventy-eight and was a member of the Genovese family, not the Colombo family.

As Jimmy was driving the van in front of the club, my father started shooting. The bullets were flying. He only wounded Joey, who was the target, but he accidentally killed Tommy.

I remember when my father came home that day. He was pissed off and aggravated. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he shot the wrong guy.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there was a guy that I wanted to get. He was with the Orenas. And I fired, and I shot the wrong guy.”

He sat down and turned on the TV. He was pretty distraught that he had killed the wrong person. I sat down next to him and we talked about it. He said Tommy was a nice guy. I was sorry that it happened and I felt bad for my father that he felt so bad. My father said Tommy was a family man, and he didn't mean to hurt him and it was done accidentally. I tried to comfort him.

“But, Dad, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

How twisted is that? My thought process was distorted. Why would I say such a thing? My father just looked at me, confused. He didn't know how I could say something like that, and neither did I. It just came out. I had never seen my father show remorse before and I just wanted to help him.

When I saw Tommy's obituary in the paper, I was really upset. He was described as a father and a grandfather who was loved and who would be missed.

As I was reading it, I thought I could be reading about my father. He was going out killing people, and someone could just as easily kill him. Just thinking about it was driving me crazy. I didn't want anything to happen to my father. I didn't want him to be involved in this war.

I actually approached him about it.

“Dad, you're not invincible. What if something happens to you? What if they get you?”

He got really pissed at me.

“No one is getting me. What do you think, your father is stupid?”

He wasn't in his right frame of mind because of the AIDS dementia. He wasn't acting like a sympathetic father anymore—he was becoming an offensive killer.

“What do you think, I'm stupid? I'm not a stupid guy. Nobody is fucking getting me. They tried once—shame on them. They ain't gonna get another shot at me.”

He was getting agitated with me. And that was hard for me to come to grips with, because I was getting angry toward him for making us go through this. It was very traumatic for my brother and me at that time. The months were dragging on, and it was just the same thing day after day—him going out and trying to kill people.

Two days later, on December 5, Persico soldier Rosario Nastasi was shot dead while he was playing cards in a social club in Bay Ridge and his girlfriend was wounded.

The next day my father killed Vincent Fusaro, an Orena loyalist, while he was hanging Christmas lights outside his family's home. The story was that Fusaro was standing on a ladder, with his back facing the street. So my father rolled down his car window and stuck his rifle out, getting off three shots that found their target.

On December 8, James Malpeso, a member of the Orena faction, was shot in the chest. Several days later, in retaliation for that hit, the Orena crew murdered eighteen-year-old Matteo Speranza, who was working behind the counter at the Wanna Bagel store on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge. That was another mistake. They were gunning for another employee.

After that happened, my father came home and talked about this young kid who got killed in a bagel store. He said he was an innocent kid just working in a store that was owned by a Persico—the Persico family had a piece of this bagel store. My father said that because the Orena faction wasn't getting anybody, they were becoming frustrated. So they went to this bagel store and decided, “You know what? We're just gonna kill the kid who works in the store.”

My father was pissed. He was ranting and raving that the Orena crew was out of control and needed to be put in their place. He was really going nuts about this poor kid, who was completely and totally innocent, getting killed.

During this part of the war my father was getting information about the Orena faction from Lin DeVecchio, despite what Lin would like to have people believe.

On January 7, 1992, my father murdered Nicholas “Nicky Black” Grancio, one of the capos in the Orena faction. That was the worst one for me to hear about.

My mother was there when Larry and Jimmy came to the house to tell my father that they had just seen Nicky Black on Avenue U: “Larry came to the house with Jimmy and told Greg he had just seen Nicky on Avenue U, but there was police surveillance around. Then Greg got on the phone and got in touch with Lin, and then the surveillance wasn't there anymore. So when Greg, Larry and Jimmy went back to Avenue U, there was nobody around, and that's why they had the opportunity to kill Nicky Black.

“And he got Nicky Black, shot him in the face, while Nicky was sitting in his SUV with his nephew. When he came back with Larry, Greg got on the phone with Lin and told him, ‘This was the big one.'”

Nicky Black was my father's prize kill. He was like his twelve-point buck. Because to him, as far as status in the family, Nicky Black was the biggest one.

So when he walked through the door, my father came in like a hunter who had bagged a deer. He was psyched.

“You had to see it. You had to fucking see it. You had to see. I shot his nose right off his face. There was blood all over the windows. I literally shot his nose off his fucking face, that rat bastard.”

My father was freaking out that he had killed Nicky, and the blood, and the nose, and this and that, and ranting and raving about it.

“Fuck them, I'm gonna show them who's the boss! I'm gonna fucking win this thing for Allie.”

But then he changed. It was like he didn't really care about anybody. It was about taking care of himself.

“Fuck Allie, too. You know what? This ain't even about Allie anymore. This is about me. This is about what they did to me. This is about what they did to my family. Fuck everybody.”

I sat there looking at him—this crazed man—and I was literally scared of my own father.

My father was involved in another shooting. The guy's name was Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace. Waverly was part of the Orena faction, so my father hated him. But he hated him even before the war and he wanted him dead, anyway. War or no war, it didn't matter. Killing Waverly would have been a trophy for him.