The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (3 page)

 

 

I grew up thinking Charlie was my real father. At that time—I was born in 1969 and Joey came along a couple years later—having a baby without being married just wasn't done. My mother's marriage to Charlie ultimately ended—they eventually divorced—and Greg moved in with us, but I still called Charlie my father.

Until I was about four or five years old, we lived with Charlie in Brooklyn. We lived on Fifty-Fifth Street, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Avenues. I didn't remember exactly when Greg came into the house because I was so young. I just remember that it was Charlie; then, all of a sudden, it was Greg because Greg was always part of our lives.

I called him “Greggy” at the time—I didn't call him “Dad.” I called Charlie my dad, and so did my brother. But we were really confused. We didn't understand why Greg was in the house acting like a daddy, but then we also had Charlie, who was Daddy.

My father had another family—his wife, Connie, and four kids: Deborah, the oldest, Greg Junior, the second oldest, Bart and Frankie, the youngest. When my father separated from Connie, she and the kids lived in New Jersey.

I called Greg Junior, “Gregory.” He was about twenty years older than me. In the beginning I didn't know he was my brother because I didn't know Greg Senior was my father. But Gregory was very good to me. He acted fatherly toward me. He used to call me “dollface,” and he always gave me hugs and kisses. He was very affectionate like a family member would be—and that just confused me even more.

We asked a lot of questions, but my parents—Greg and my mother—didn't really make it easy for us.

“Well, Charlie is your dad. You have to see him every other Sunday, or every Sunday—whenever else you want, you could see him. But you see him on Sundays,” my mother said.

Even so, Greg acted like a real father in the house. He put us to bed, helped us with homework—all the things fathers did. Except for Sundays when Charlie picked us up. But the fact was even when we were young, we were being taught that Greg was in charge.

“Something happens, you tell me, and I'll take care of it,” he told us.

When my little brother, Joey, was about four, he got into a fight with another young boy. The kid bullied my brother, and my brother came home crying.

“What happened, Joey?” my father asked.

My brother told him that this kid had bothered him. My father went into his bedroom and came out holding a baseball bat.

“Okay, take this bat and hit him over the head with the bat, and then when he's crying, tell him to go get his father.”

He was telling this to a little four-year-old. So my brother went out to do what my father told him to do. But Joey made up with the other little boy and didn't end up hitting him.

Most of the time growing up on Fifty-Fifth Street was pretty normal. My father used to watch TV with us and play video games. He was a regular dad. Taking care of us when we got hurt or when we were sick.

One day I was playing outside and I fell and hurt my knee. I was screaming like somebody was killing me. My father came running out of the house because I was yelling at the top of my lungs. He jumped over the patio, thinking I must have been really injured. And there I was, with a little scratch on my knee.

He picked me up and said, “Oh. What happened, my baby? You got a little boo-boo.” But meanwhile he was having a heart attack because he thought something really bad had happened to me.

Another time I was extremely sick. I had such a high fever and my father and my mother couldn't bring it down. They took me into the bathroom to put me in a cool bath. I was crying and screaming and my fever just kept getting higher and higher. My father couldn't deal with the stress. He got so crazy that he actually punched himself in the head, knocked himself out and fell into the tub. He literally knocked himself out.

One summer after dinner I was playing on the front steps with my toys. I was ready for bed, wearing my Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas. I was about six. My father came outside to tell me it was time to come in. We started talking and sometime during the conversation I called him “Dad.” I caught myself.

“Oh, I mean Greggy.”

“It's okay, honey. You can call me ‘Daddy.'”

“Okay, Greggy.”

But I still wasn't sure. Most of the time, I called him Greggy. But every once in a while I'd call him Daddy, and he loved it. He'd always tell me it was okay to call him Daddy. I think the day I first called him Daddy was the happiest day of his life.

Then I started getting used to calling him Daddy, even though I didn't really think he was my dad. He felt like my dad, but at the time Charlie was really still my dad. I never let Charlie know that I called Greg, Dad. So whenever I visited Charlie, I always had to say Greg. I knew that I couldn't refer to Greg as Daddy in front of Charlie. I was just a little kid. It was very confusing and I was very torn.

Sometimes when my parents went out, our neighbors, Maria and Louis, used to take care of us. I hated it—I didn't like just anybody else taking care of us. I wanted my mother and my father home. At that point I had started to think of Greg as another father.

One day when they were babysitting us, I was watching a movie. In the movie the girl's father died. When my parents came home, I was crying my eyes out.

“What's the matter?” my father asked, sitting down on the couch with me.

“Are you going to die?”

“Why are you asking that?”

“Because I saw a movie, and the girl's daddy died. Are you going to die?”

“I'm not going anywhere.” He always used to tell me that and I really believed him, up until I was in my twenties. I didn't want anything to happen to my father.

Once when I young, he came home with bruises on his arms. I asked what had happened, and he told me that the bad policeman did that to him. I asked why and he said because policemen weren't nice.

Not long after that, I was driving in the car with my mother, and a police cruiser pulled up next to my side of the car when we were stopped at a red light. The policemen looked over at me and started waving. I opened my window and yelled at them.

“You're bad. You hurt my daddy. I don't like you.”

My mother was horrified.

“Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. She doesn't know what she's saying. She didn't mean that.”

The cops didn't know what to think because here was this sweet-looking little girl yelling at them, telling them that she didn't like them because they hurt her daddy.

During this time my father was running his crew from the Wimpy Boys Social Club on Thirteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, an old Italian neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn. The club moved to a second location on Thirteenth Avenue later, but I really didn't go there much.

Back in the day there were Mob-run “social clubs” from different crime families on almost every avenue in Brooklyn. My father's name for his club was, of course, ironic because “wimpy” was the exact opposite of what they all were.

There were about thirty guys in his crew, either full-blooded Italian or of partial Italian descent. Some were made men, while others were young associates—mobsters in training hoping to become members of the Colombo crime family.

There were Mob guys everywhere. They would just hang outside—sometimes on lounge chairs—drinking and smoking cigarettes. Everything was so open back then and everybody was just so free-spirited. No one was thinking about the cops. That's just the way it was. That's how I remember Brooklyn.

My father usually left the house at 11
A.M.
to go to the club and he'd be back by 5
P.M.
for dinner. We all had to be in the house by that time and have dinner together. Dinner was at five, every day. He left whatever he was doing at the club to be home with us.

No matter what they had going on—card games, whatever—he'd tell his crew: “Time for me to go.” If he wanted to have a talk with the members of his crew after dinner, they would have to come to the house. It was very rare that he went back out after dinner, unless he was going out with my mother.

But during the day the social club was where they met to talk business, take care of business and play cards. They ran numbers from the club, gambled and lent money; I'm sure they planned a lot of hits there. The club was the place where they had to show face every day. Like a regular job, they had to be there.

And they all had to be dressed appropriately. They couldn't go there looking like slobs, because my father wanted everybody to be clean-cut. His crew had to look like they were ready to do business, not like they were ready to hang out in the streets. My father was very strict about it.

A friend of mine, Sal, who used to hang out there, told me that he went to the club one day without shaving. My brother Greg told him he had to go home.

“Why do I have to go home?” Sal asked.

“When you come back with a clean shave, you can come in the club,” Greg said. “But until then you have to go.”

When we were kids, my mother used to drive Joey and me to the club if she had to see my father. We were really young, but I remember that it had wood paneling and carpeting and my father's office was in the back.

Whenever my brother and I used to walk in there—I was about eight or nine, and Joey was about six or seven—the guys would all give us money. Well, actually, they'd give me money; they used to make Joey work for it.

My brother took gymnastics and he was good at it. He used to walk on his hands. He could walk across a room—and even walk down steps—on his hands. The guys would say to Joey, “I'm going to bet you that you can't walk from this side of the club to the other side of the club.”

“I can do it! I can do it,” Joey would say.

“All right, twenty dollars if you can do it.”

“Well, if I walk back and forth, then I want double.”

By the time Joey walked out of the club when it was time to go home, he'd have $50 or more. Joey loved going there because it was such fun for him—most of the time.

My father's friend “Scappy”—Colombo capo Anthony Scarpati and my father's “boss”—was the one who always bet my brother couldn't walk on his hands across the club. Scappy was always teasing my brother. He'd give him a wedgie or just do things to annoy him. It was okay if it was in good fun, but my father didn't like anybody teasing Joey or me.

One day Scappy put ice cubes down the front of my brother's pants. Joey got really upset and started crying. My father yelled at Scappy and told him never to do that to Joey again, which was crazy because Scappy was the boss. But Scappy never did it again. The truth is that Scappy treated us unbelievably well, but he just liked to tease my brother. And my father didn't like that at all.

We loved going to the club because there was a candy store right across the street—we used to say it was our candy store because we could get anything we wanted and we never had to pay for it. Then there was the luncheonette next door. When we visited my father, he'd take us there for breakfast or just to get a couple milk shakes.

They also had those chocolate egg creams, although there weren't any eggs in them. They were made with milk or half-and-half and soda water and either vanilla or chocolate syrup. Egg creams were big in Brooklyn because it was rumored that the guy who invented them came from the neighborhood. We loved going to the club because we could go to the luncheonette and sit with my father for a while.

That old club had a warm feeling to it, but the new club was kind of cold. We really didn't like it. What I remember most about the new club was the steps going downstairs. You didn't ever want to go down those steps. Well, if you were a guy, you didn't want to take the walk down those steps because you were going to get a beating or worse. We were never allowed down the steps.

You could see my father's office as soon as you walked in, so he had two-way glass installed. He could see out, but nobody could see in. I always thought it was pretty cool. As I got older, I realized why that was necessary.