The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (20 page)

I had a lot of expensive jewelry at my house, but I didn't think it was safe there. I asked Tommy's sister to keep it for me for a little while because she had an alarm system. There was a lot of jewelry and I trusted her with it. Why wouldn't I? I was married to her brother.

When things started going bad between Tommy and me, I called his sister and asked her for my jewelry. She told me she had already given it back to me. We got into a huge fight because she was lying to me. She had never given anything back to me.

But there was nothing I could do. I went to the cops, but they told me I didn't have any proof. Then I told Tommy the whole story. I was shocked at how he reacted.

“She would never do that.”

“Tommy, don't tell me she wouldn't do that—she did it. Please, just tell her to give me my stuff,” I told him, although I wasn't quite sure what she had done with it.

That caused such a problem for him and me. After all, she was the person who was taking care of him while he was in jail. She was the one who sent him money. She was the one who sent him clothes. She was the one who sent him food. I didn't have any money to send him anything. He couldn't fight with her or he'd have nothing.

Tommy was put in a bad position. I was his wife, and she was his sister who raised him and was still taking care of him. He didn't know what to do. He was in jail, so there really wasn't much he could do. I was yelling and screaming at him that his sister stole from me. He just kept saying she wouldn't do that to me.

Finally I decided I couldn't be part of that family any longer. I could never forgive my sister-in-law for what she did. Tommy and I just faded. We broke up. It was just over and I filed for divorce.

I really loved Tommy. He always reminded me so much of my father and brother. It was his personality, his strength. He was a protector. He knew how to love me. He was the only man who truly loved me. And that's what makes it so sad.

All these years I went from one bad relationship to another, even though I had someone who really loved me, and I really loved him. I should have waited for him. It would have been hard, but I could have done it. By the time he got out, I was basically still on my own. But there was no going back—he had met someone else, gotten married and had a kid.

Shortly after Tommy got out of prison in 2008, he flipped. He was arrested for a murder he had committed with his uncle, Thomas Gioeli, seventeen years earlier. He didn't want to go back to prison. He became an informant for the federal government and basically “brought down the Mob.”

I didn't even know that he had turned at first. I did know that he never wanted to go back to prison. Before he went to jail on the drug charges, he told me he had something big hanging over his head. However, he never told me what that was. At that time I told him he should flip and go into witness protection. I wanted to go with him and then we could have had a life away from everything.

Before he went to jail, he told me he would never rat. I told him whatever it was that he did was going to come back to haunt him. I said the feds were going to wait until he did his fourteen years on the drug charges. Then, when he was ready to walk out that door, they were going to nail him. But he didn't want to hear it. Well, guess what? That's exactly what they did. Tommy really didn't have any choice but to flip. After doing fourteen years, I'd flip, too.

When I found out that Tommy got out of jail, I wanted to see him. I didn't know he had a girlfriend. I didn't know he was an informant for the feds. I didn't know much of anything about him, but I wanted to see him. I thought that he would contact me, but he didn't. (It was probably because he was under surveillance—he hadn't testified for the feds yet—and also because he had a girlfriend.)

Because I didn't know any of that, I used to drive by his sister's house, hoping I would see him. I hated his sister, so I couldn't just go to the front door and ring the bell. Still, I wanted to see him.

One day when I drove by, he was outside getting an ice cream from the ice-cream truck. I pulled up and called out, “Tommy.” His hair wasn't brown anymore; it was completely gray. When he saw me, he turned white. I knew he was nervous. It was pretty awkward. I asked him how he was and I told him I had been dying to see him. He wasn't himself, though.

Then a woman started screaming out of the window, asking him who I was.

“Is that your girlfriend?” I asked.

He just smirked.

“Okay, I just wanted to see you.”

“It was nice to see you,” he said.

“You too.”

Later I reached out to him on Facebook. I said I was happy to see that he was happy because he deserved it. He never responded.

CHAPTER 18

NOBODY WON THIS THING

Lin DeVecchio was one of the few FBI agents ever charged with murder. His crime: leaking information to my father about the whereabouts of mobsters from a rival Colombo faction—mobsters my father was trying to kill. The case was dismissed when Lin's attorney discredited a key witness—my mother—during the trial. But she was telling the truth about how Lin helped my father. I know because I was there.

On March 30, 2006, Lin was indicted for taking bribes from my father in exchange for giving him information that helped him murder Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico, Lorenzo “Larry” Lampasi and Nicholas “Nicky Black” Grancio—as well as Mary Bari. Lin pleaded not guilty.

On November 1, 2007—in the middle of the trial—the lead prosecutor, Mike Vecchione, dropped the charges because he said his star witness against Lin—my mother—didn't tell the truth in court.

During the trial reporters Tom Robbins and Jerry Capeci came forward with tapes of interviews that they had done with my mother years earlier. They were planning to write a book with her, and they indicated that she told them different accounts of certain events than she was giving at Lin's trial.

I maintain she was telling the truth at Lin's trial, and everybody knew she was telling the truth. The prosecutors all knew about those tapes because my mother told them. My mother can explain everything that happened

 

 

 

 

When the DA's office sent people to my house to convince my mother to testify against Lin, they told her they had other witnesses who were going to confirm her story. They said they had a rock-solid case against Lin. I wasn't buying it.

“You're not going to beat the FBI,” I told them.

“How can you say that we're not going to win?”

“Well, first of all, the FBI isn't going to let Lin go down and then have to let twenty-five or thirty or maybe more Mafia guys get retrials and let them all get out of jail.”

I believed that's just what happened.

During her testimony my mother told the court about the money my father paid Lin for the information that he used to murder people. She even explained that before Lin came over to the house, she'd pull the blinds and lock the doors. All through her testimony my mother told the court what she was saying was fact.

I was supposed to testify as well. I had been scheduled for the day after the charges against Lin were ultimately dropped. I was going to tell the truth about what I saw—when Lin was at the house, I saw my father give him envelopes with money in them. And my father did cover the doors when he came over. Lin even went on vacation with us to our house in Florida. What FBI agent does that?

Lin also called the house a lot and I'd answer the phone. Whenever he had to talk about something that he didn't want my father to talk about on the house phone, he would make my father call him from another phone, either a pay phone or the phone downstairs in my aunt's apartment.

When my brother and I were younger, my parents would take us when they had to leave the house if my father had to call Lin from the pay phone. We'd sit in the backseat and wait for him to get off the phone. Lin had a phone called the “hello” phone, which my father used to call when he wanted to reach Lin.

The DA knew about the tapes because Tom Robbins, one of the reporters, wrote about them during the trial. He was summoned to appear before the judge on October 31, about a week after his story was published. At that meeting the prosecutor said he was going to drop the case if the tapes confirmed what was in Robbins's story.

So, on November 1, the DA's office knew they were going to flip the case on my mother, but they didn't tell us. Then before she was to get back on the stand that day, someone talked to her and confused her. The result was that she said the opposite of what she had been saying all along.

Of course, when she said that at trial, all hell broke loose. The judge told her she could face perjury charges. After that happened, I called the cop who had initially approached my mother about testifying against Lin. I was flipping out about what they were doing to my mother.‘

“Don't worry. Your mother is going to be found not guilty of perjury. Don't worry.”

It was like he knew already.

“How do you know?”

“Don't worry. It will work out.”

He was right. A special prosecutor decided there wasn't enough evidence to charge my mother with perjury either for what she said before the grand jury or at trial.

CHAPTER 19

A DAY IN THE LIFE

I love my father, and I always will, but I have anger and resentment toward “the life.” It's a life of horror—filled with nothing but misery, death and nightmares. This life destroys everything around you.

When you marry someone in the Mob or are conceived by someone in the Mob, there is really no way out of it. You lose people you love. There is so much pain you can't get over it. I live with the pain every day, as do the families of my father's victims. But I don't expect tears, nor do I want sympathy.

When I was a child, the man I knew was very loving, affectionate, caring and protective. As I got older, I knew what he was. I knew that he was in the Mafia, and I knew what he did. But I still loved him. I didn't agree with the things that he did, but he was always there for me when I needed him.

He was like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute, in the house, he would be this big teddy bear who would sit there and watch
Wheel of Fortune
with us—we'd all guess the letters—and
Family Feud
. I mean he would play video games with us, laugh and joke around. He'd bake and cook. He was so sensitive when it came to us.

Once he left the house, he was a different person. In some circumstances he was still a very caring person. When he was sick, I used to go to Manhattan with him when he had to get transfusions. He'd give out money to homeless people there. He would pull over if he saw somebody in the streets cold or hungry, and he would give them $100. So he did have this other, caring side to him.

But when he left the house to be the person that he was in the streets, he was completely different. He could walk out of the house and go shoot someone. I could hardly believe some of the stories I heard. I told myself he couldn't have done those things. But he did.

Although he was a killer before the war, he was a true-blue father. He was a loving, caring, protective—maybe to an extreme—father. In his book, the son of an infamous Mafia crime boss said his father chose the life before he chose his family. That's not the case with us. In the beginning my father chose us before he chose the life, until he knew he was going to die of AIDS.

But then he had to show the world that he was still strong, even though the disease was going to ravage his body. He wanted people to know that even though he had a disease that was going to kill him, he was still who he was. He was still powerful and he was still going to fight the fight. I don't think he really wanted to wage the war. I think he wanted to prove to people that he still was strong. But once they tried to kill him in front of us, then he lost it.

My father wasn't the monster people make him out to be; he was a gangster. But his fatherly instincts always took over. AIDS, revenge and anger were fueling my father, and he was in a position where he didn't care about his life anymore. He knew his life was going to end, and he wanted to be sure he got those people back for what they did to his family. He was thinking about us, but in way that wasn't rational because he had lost control because of AIDS.

It still boggles my mind, though. I can't figure out to this day how he was able to be two different people—if not more. I haven't been able to make sense of any of it. I'm still tormented by it, because there's the person I love and want to remember. Then I hear all these things, and sometimes I get angry. But then I go to the cemetery, and I'm not angry anymore. It's just constant turmoil that I have to deal with.

And I think about the other families that he destroyed, and that hurts. I know what that feels like because of what happened with my brother. When I think about the other people that he did that to, it's very painful and disturbing.

My brother and I—and I'm sure other kids in the life feel this way, too—we had this curse that never goes away. You have to deal with the pain for the rest of your life, especially if you lost a sibling or parent. It doesn't ever go away—it stays with you forever. Holidays and birthdays are not the same, but my brother's murder was the worst pain that I have ever felt.

Not too long ago a mutual friend introduced me to Wild Bill Cutolo's son. Wild Bill's son was dealing with the same kind of pain because we're both children of people who were in the Mob.

We've been talking on the phone, trying to make sense of a life where no one thought twice about killing a friend or a former friend. We want to continue our new friendship in the hopes that it will help us get past the sins of our fathers that haunt us to this day.

Recently I also spoke to Vic Orena's son. The first time we talked, it was very strange. It was something that was hard to imagine—two kids brought into the same type of family, whose fathers were rivals and out to get each other. Now we're friends, and that's also kind of strange.

He let his dad know that we were speaking, and he said his father was very happy that we were talking. Before the war started, my father and Vic were acquaintances. They weren't really friends. I don't even know if they really liked each other, but they had to get along.

But once the war started, that was it. They became enemies. My father wanted him badly, and he was doing everything in his power to try to find him. And Vic was after my father. It was kill or be killed, whoever found the other one first.

But neither of them found the other; they were both pretty smart, calculating men who knew how to protect themselves. That's why they both stayed alive.

The reality of living this life is . . . I'm not sure how to explain it. If I met someone now, and he was fascinated by someone in the Mafia, or she was bragging about dating somebody in the Mafia, I would tell this person that the life has nothing but horror, misery, nightmares and death. Not that anyone would listen. I'm sure this individual wouldn't listen. Everything horrible in life that you could ever imagine
is
really in that life. Nothing good ever comes out of being in that life.

All the money that you have at that time, it doesn't matter. There is no amount of money that could bring back someone that you love. And once you're in that life, and you lose someone, that's the only way you're going to know what I'm talking about.

One of my biggest fears in my life, even when I was younger, was that I was going to go crazy. I could never watch movies like
Girl, Interrupted
or any movies where there was somebody who was crazy and got locked up.

That's probably why I was so scared to go to the weekend visits with Tommy, because I didn't like being locked up. And I was afraid I would go crazy because of everything I had gone through in my life.

I was always trying to be strong and keep it together. I wanted to be there for everybody else, and I was really never there for myself. When the war happened, and my father got sick and died and my brother was murdered, I thought there was no way that I could experience those things without going crazy.

I finally got over that fear. I figured, I was already crazy, but I've been out in the real world and haven't been locked up. Recently I went to a new therapist, but I was afraid to tell him everything because I didn't want him to think that I was sick and needed to be locked up.

I've kept it together for my kids. My kids have always been the reason why I stayed strong, when I really wanted to fall apart.

There have been days when I couldn't get out of bed. I literally spent a month in bed one summer when my son was with his father. I got up just to have something to eat and drink, and then I went back to bed. I was sleeping twenty hours a day for that whole month. When I knew that my son was coming back home, I had to pull myself together.

Every March 20—the anniversary of my brother's murder—I watch my mother suffer through the day. It's a sad life. It's been over twenty years since he was killed but it never gets any better. My kids make me happy, of course, but there's always that void.

I've missed out on so much, not having my brother there for so many life events. Not being able to call him on the phone. Not being able to hear his laugh. Not being able to hear him joke about the stupidest things, and make up the craziest nicknames for everybody. Joey had a free spirit. He tried not to let things bother him, but he got mixed up in the wrong life.

After he died, I felt so alone. I ended up in a violent relationship, where I was abused, and I didn't have anyone to turn to. I was afraid, and nobody was there for me.

One thing about being in this life is that when the shit hits the fan, everybody runs. And the people who run, they don't come back. The people you care for are dead, and you don't even know where you are half the time.

My nephew Gregory Scarpa III, Greg Junior's son, grew up in the life, too. It wasn't easy for him, either. He was eight or nine when his father went to prison in 1988. I've asked my nephew to share his story.