The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (9 page)

CHAPTER 7

DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL

I was always daddy's little girl.

At my Sweet Sixteen I had him light the sixteenth candle on my birthday cake. The sixteenth candle is supposed to be for your boyfriend. I had a boyfriend, but I wasn't going to have him light my sixteenth candle. My sixteenth candle was for my father.

I had the DJ say, “For the true love of Linda's life, Daddy.” Then the DJ played the song “Daddy's Little Girl.” My father was just beaming when the DJ called him up. He was so happy and there was so much love in his eyes. I still cry when I watch that video.

It was a really great party, too—held at La Mer in Brooklyn—except for the fact that not many of my friends showed up. They were scared away by my father's reputation. I had given invitations to a lot of the kids in school—guys and girls—and they all said they were coming. But although all the boys came, only a few girls attended. My friends Justine and Melissa were there.

But there was a whole table that was empty that was supposed to be for the other girls. I felt terrible that they didn't come, like any kid would feel if people didn't show up to her party. My parents asked me where they all were. All I could say was that they probably weren't coming. I was embarrassed. My father told me not to worry about it and just to have fun. He said the people who came were my real friends, but I still felt bad.

None of those girls ever told me why they didn't come. I just stopped talking to them after that because it was apparent that they weren't really my friends. Although I was a loner in a lot of ways, I was still always trying to fit in.

But there were a lot of made men and family there to help me celebrate. My Sweet Sixteen was beautiful. I had a Madonna look-alike there, a Michael Jackson look-alike and break-dancers. They did shows. I had these big, really cute dolls with balloons on them propped on the tables. Guests could take those dolls home. It was a very extravagant party.

Growing up, I was spoiled somewhat. My father didn't always give us everything we wanted, but we did have a lot. We definitely had more things than other kids had. We had the nicest cars and the nicest clothes.

I got my first fur coat when I was six. It was a rabbit coat, but I felt funny wearing it because none of my friends had anything like that. I told my mother that I didn't really like it. Of course, she said it was beautiful.

“But it's a rabbit. Did they really kill a rabbit?” I asked.

I was a kid and I was really confused about the rabbit thing; nobody else had anything like it. I was six, wearing a fur coat and diamond stud earrings.

I loved my father so much. I used to love looking at him, just his presence in the room, and listening to his voice. He had a deep voice. Singer Barry White was big in those days and my dad's voice sounded just like his. Sometimes when Barry White's songs would come on the radio, my father would start singing and tell us that was him on the radio.

He sounded so much like Barry White that when he used to imitate him in front of us, my brother and I would look at each other and then ask, “Is that really you?” We didn't know for sure, especially when he sang “You're the First, the Last, My Everything.” He would do his voice exactly.

One day I was watching him as he sat at the kitchen table, talking to my mother, my aunt and a couple of his friends. I thought,
God, what would I do without my father?

I always wanted to be around him, to be with him. If I was sitting next to him, I'd be almost on top of him. Our feet would even be together. He'd beg me to give him some room, but he loved having me with him.

“Look at our feet. We got the same feet. You got the same feet as me,” he'd tell me.

That's how close we were. That's the kind of relationship that we had. My mother used to ask why I never sat next to her. It's not that I didn't love my mother, but I was completely a daddy's girl. Joey, though, was totally a mama's boy.

My father had this very, very soft side, especially when it came to me. I was his baby girl. He was so affectionate and loving. I was his little girl, and that was it. As I got older, I sometimes took advantage of that.

When we moved to Eighty-Second Street, I was still in high school, and I really didn't have any girlfriends. My friends growing up my whole life were always guys, even until this day. I hung out with a lot of kids—girls and boys—but the girls weren't really my friends.

Not long after we moved, I met these twin girls, Nicole and Teresa. They were friends with everybody, but they hated me.

Nicole and Teresa were snotty little rich girls like me, but their father wasn't a made guy. He was a regular working guy. They didn't have the crowd around them that I had, but they hung out with the same type of people that I did. Teresa was going out with Carmine Sessa's son. They liked the same scenery as I did at the time. They wanted to hang out with all the street guys.

Carmine's wife, Annie, was at the house one day and she talked to me about them.

“You should make friends with Nicole and Teresa.”

I wasn't having any part of it.

“I'm not making friends with them. They're so snotty.”

“Well, I'm going to talk to them and see if they want to talk to you.”

They didn't. They said the same things about me that I said about them. They told Annie they didn't want to be friends with me because I was such a snob.

The funny thing was, I wasn't a snob. I honestly never knew why nobody wanted to talk to me. I didn't really understand it. Even though my father told me when I was younger that it was because of who he was, I didn't think much about what he was saying.

Maybe I had this persona of being a show-off, when I really didn't realize that I was. I never thought I was a show-off. It was instilled in me by the age of six that having nice things was okay. But I never was the type to stick it in people's faces, like some of the girls I knew.

They had everything—I even felt like they had more than me—and they
really
showed it off. I was never like that. But everybody loved them, so I never understood why people liked them, but they didn't like me.

Recently I ran into a guy who's a friend of mine—a single dad—at my kids' school, who kind of put things into perspective for me. He told me that when he's talking to other women in the schoolyard and I go near him, they walk away. I was shocked.

“Are you serious?” I didn't realize that. “Why?”

“I don't know. It doesn't really matter.”

“I really want an answer. Are you joking around with me?”

“No, I'm serious. Take notice the next time there's a group of mothers I'm talking to. Whenever you come over to me, you'll notice they walk away.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Well, Linda, when you walk into the schoolyard, you have a presence about you, an attitude.”

“I have an attitude?”

“I don't even think you realize it.”

“I don't realize it, because I
don't
have an attitude.”

“Linda, I know you, but people who don't know you, they would think that you do.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. It's just the way you look.”

The more I thought about it, I realized it was because I was always on the defensive, thinking that somebody had something to say to me about my father, or the life, or whatever. That's basically why I became so disliked. I was always on the defensive, and I've always been on the defensive.

But growing up not understanding why people didn't want to talk made me very insecure. It made me not want to be sociable with anyone. People thought I didn't want to be bothered. It wasn't that I was snobby. Instead, I was just going into a shell. I didn't know how to socialize because people weren't talking to me. If I was just being me, and no one wanted to talk to me, then I figured I must be doing something wrong. I thought they just didn't like me, but I didn't know why.

Despite the fact that Nicole, Teresa and I didn't want anything to do with each other, Annie wasn't giving up. For some reason, she wanted me to make friends with them. So she planned this date for us to meet. She set it up so I would have to go to their house.

The minute I got there, I was miserable. We were in their room and they were playing with makeup. One of their friends was there and they were putting makeup on her. I felt like I was in hell.

Then they decided to put makeup on me. I tried to get out of it, but it didn't work. They started doing my makeup. They told me I had really nice eyes and the makeup looked pretty. I started thinking maybe they weren't so bad, after all. That's when we started to become friends. We used to joke about how we were forced to become friends.

We actually became best friends. We started out hating each other and ended up loving each other. In my entire life they were probably the only friends that I ever really considered my best friends.

One day their mother let me drive her car because I had a license and they only had learner's permits. I wound up smashing the car on one side. Their mother was really pissed, and she wanted to know who was going to pay to get it fixed.

One of my father's friends owned a body shop. So I brought the car there and told him he had to fix it. He wanted to know who was going to pay for it. I told him nobody, but he'd better fix that car. The guy fixed the car—and I didn't get in any trouble when my father found out.

Like me, most of the kids I knew had nice cars—Cadillacs, Lincolns, Grand Prix and Monte Carlos. I drove a Mercedes. Everybody had done-up cars. They had spokes on the wheels and radios in their cars with big speakers, along with the fuzzy dice and air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirrors. In the summer everybody was always getting their cars washed and waxed.

A big thing about Brooklyn when I was growing up was Eighty-Sixth Street—the main east-west street in Bensonhurst. It was mobbed with guys and girls hanging out in the street, sitting next to their cars on lounge chairs or on the trunks or the hoods of their cars, listening to their radios. It was like the beach on the street. The street was so long that it took us two hours to get from one end to the other because we stopped here and there to talk to various guys. It was insane.

If you had a convertible, which I had at one point, you drove around with the top down even in the middle of the winter. It didn't matter. People even got dressed up to go to Eighty-Sixth Street and hang out. In the summer the girls wore heels and they all had these poufy hairdos and long nails. The guys wore wife-beater T-shirts and gold chains with the horns and crosses on them around their necks. The boys grew their hair kind of long, and most of them styled it in a DA, which stood for “duck's ass.”

That was Brooklyn in the '80s—showing off your car, driving in your car, hanging out in your car. That was a big deal.

I was seventeen when I started going to clubs—younger than I should have been. There were clubs for kids around seventeen or a little older everywhere in Brooklyn when I was growing up, and these were all owned by Mob guys.

Nicole, Teresa and I went out every night. We had a routine for every day of the week. Wednesdays was Pastels; Strings was Thursdays. On Friday night we went to the Bay Club. Every night it was a different hot spot. We'd get dressed up and go out and have a good time. I still did okay in school, so everything was fine with my parents.

There were a lot of after-hours clubs, but I never went to those because there was always trouble, and my father never wanted me in them. My after-hours hangout was the Vegas Diner. My friends and I would go out to Pastels or wherever; and then at 4 or 4:30
A.M.
when they shut the doors, we'd be at the diner. It was always jam-packed. That was a big hot spot, too.

My father allowed me to go to the regular clubs, but I had to go to the clubs where his friends were, so they could keep an eye on me. They didn't like that, though, because if anything happened to me, they'd have to answer to my father. I didn't like it, either. So I'd leave with my friends, and not let his friends know I left—and that would drive everybody a little bit crazy.

I'd tell the valet that a particular car—whichever one I happened to like—that belonged to one of my father's friends was mine, even though it wasn't. I'd take the car and we'd go out all night and have a good time with my friends. Then I'd go home and park it in the driveway. The next morning my father would see the car.

“Linda, whose car is in the driveway?”

I'd tell him whose car it was.

“How did it get there?”

“Well, I borrowed it.”

Then later he'd get a phone call.

“Your daughter took my car.”

He'd just say, “Linda, you shouldn't do that. You can't just take someone's car.”

I really didn't get in trouble. He just told me not to do it again, but I still did it every time.

Even though I did some crazy shit when I was a teenager, I still didn't get in trouble with my father.

It was kind of strange, though, that my parents didn't mind me going out so much. Nobody said anything about it, so I just did it. Whenever we went to a club, there would be a line around the block. There was no line for us, though. I would go right up to the door, tell them who I was and they'd let us right in.

Even though I didn't like my father's friends watching out for me, I always felt protected. I received a certain respect that other people didn't get, so no one really got out of line with me. If anybody ever tried anything, one of my father's friends would say, “Oh, watch out! That's Greg's daughter.” And the person would back off. But there were some people who wouldn't back off and they'd get a beating. I never liked that. I always tried to stay away from that part of it because I didn't want anybody to get hurt.