American Desperado (3 page)

When I was about five or six, my dad started taking me around with him instead of driving me to school. My dad had a driver, Mr. Tut, who was always with him. Mr. Tut was a black guy who’d boxed in the ring but never made it big because whenever he started to lose, he’d revert to street fighting. He was a giant, with huge fists, and I liked him because unlike my father, he’d smile and seemed like a happy guy.

To my father, black people were “moolies.”
^*
That’s not to say my dad was prejudiced. He didn’t like anybody. He didn’t even like himself, probably. To have a black driver served a purpose. It was a lot easier walking into a black bar with a black guy than with a white guy because then the blacks didn’t get attitude. It helped that Mr. Tut was a tough man.

I don’t want to dishonor my father, and I don’t judge him, but I don’t have fond memories of him. He wasn’t a happy-go-lucky guy. He was not nice.

My dad always had a big Mercury or Cadillac. He would ride up front with Mr. Tut and put me in the back. Some mornings they’d drive me to school. Other mornings my dad would take me with him to work. Since my dad didn’t talk, I never knew where I was going until I looked out the window.

There was a day in about 1955 when we left early in the morning. We headed toward the bars in New Jersey. I was dozing in the back and felt the car stop. I looked up and saw my dad and Mr. Tut staring ahead.

We were in a half-residential, half-farm area of Jersey. The road led to a one-lane bridge. A car was stopped on the bridge facing ours, blocking the way. Mr. Tut started to open his door, and my dad said, “I’ll take care of this.”

My dad got out and walked up to the car on the bridge. He always carried a gun. I saw him take it out from his waistband and say something to the man in the car. Then he pushed his gun into the window and shot the man.
Boom, boom, boom
.

Mr. Tut said nothing. We watched as my dad opened the door to the guy’s car, pushed the man he’d shot sideways, and got in. He backed the car off the bridge. We drove across it, and my father climbed back in our car.

My father turned to me and asked, “What just happened? Did you see anything?”

I said, “No. I didn’t see anything.”

I was lucky, I guess, because I made the right response. My father studied my face, the way you’d look at a map. I was studying him, too, like he was the map of my future. I was scared, but I felt close to him like I hadn’t ever before. He’d done something that I’d have to keep a secret from everyone. I felt like he was treating me like a man.

I believe the shooting changed me. It made my reactions different from a normal person’s. I learned not to get emotional. I learned to observe without reacting or crying. My father trained me in that incident to be like a soldier: not to let what I saw get to me, to move on. I was a little kid. I didn’t reason this out. It seeped into me as instinct.

After the shooting I watched the news on TV. I expected to hear a story like “Man gets shot in the head,” but there was nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. In the movies it was a big deal if someone got shot. The police investigated. There were trials, arrests, headlines. I’d seen a real shooting, and nothing happened.

I became interested in holding a gun, to see what it felt like. We had a big, yellow-wood cabinet in the living room. I noticed my father put things behind the top ledge of the cabinet when he thought nobody was looking. I climbed up there and found a gun. It was a .38 revolver. I remember holding it, being amazed. When he shot that man in the head, it wasn’t a little
pop
like in the movies. It was an explosion. I felt the tiny gun and thought,
This is unbelievable, the force of this
.

By doing a murder in front of me, my dad taught me another lesson. He showed me you can get away with things. It’s not like they teach in school. My father did what he did, and he didn’t go to jail. It wasn’t like God punished my father, made him lose a leg or get cancer. What my father did made no difference to the universe. It showed me that if you’re careful not to get caught, you can do anything. It was a very good lesson, maybe the best lesson I ever got. It made all the violence that was to come my way a lot easier.

A
ROUND THE
time of the shooting, my family moved to Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. It was a walk-up apartment in an old building. When you came in, you saw we had a lot of nice things. The furniture was new. We had two TVs. We had air-conditioning. It was obvious we were different. All of a sudden mink coats would show up in our house, guys with guns were dropping off expensive food, liquor. I’d go out on the street with my father, and people would move aside.

My parents fought constantly. I never saw my dad hit my mother. But she was afraid of him. I couldn’t understand what put them together. What had attracted her to him? She never told me.

My mother and father’s beliefs were at the opposite ends of the world. She had compassion for people. He had zero. All they had in
common was that they made two children, me and my sister, Judy. She was a good girl. She didn’t get into trouble. She liked school. She watched
American Bandstand
. As different as she was from me, Judy was always loyal. No matter what I did, she never looked down on me.

J
UDY
:
Our mother was artistic. She could draw. She always had flowers in the house. Her parents, Honey and Poppy, were full of life. Poppy was born speaking Polish, but he learned to write poetry in English that he’d recite to Jon and me. Honey was a seamstress for Claire McCardell,
^*
and she’d bring me beautiful dresses she made. Our mother drew so much from her own parents. When our father wasn’t around, she had a wonderful sense of humor. She loved laughter and music. She taught me to play the piano.

Our mother worked at giving Jon and me a normal childhood. She and Honey used to take me to Philadelphia, where they filmed
American Bandstand
, so I could dance on the show.

Our mother adored Jon. He was obsessed with cowboys and Indians. He watched all the westerns on TV. She got him cowboy outfits, toy guns, and figurines. When Jon was sick in bed, she would sit with him for hours and play cowboys and Indians with his little stupid figurines.

Jon was generous with me. If he got a cookie, he’d share it with me, which is unusual for a boy and his older sister. He was physically rambunctious. He was a daredevil, always jumping off things, running all the time. He jumped off a ledge and split his head open. He came back from the hospital with giant clamps on his head and ran around like crazy. I worried the clamps would get stuck on something and his head would fall open.

Jon loved sports and memorized all the statistics. He had a very good mind for numbers. He was a little wild, but he had a sweet heart. He was a normal boy.

Our home was not normal at all. We had a dual life. Our mother was light. Our father was darkness. When Jon was in grade school, he changed. He started to act out and scream and bully our mother. She shrank from him. She would not stop him from acting out. I asked her why, and she said, “I can’t say anything to your brother. Your father won’t let me.”

I don’t believe my father loved anyone, but he took an interest in Jon. I believe our father was pulling him into his darkness. Jon was so small, and such anger started to come out of him. It would grow and grow.

J
.
R
.:
My mother wouldn’t tell me to do homework, to pick up my room, nothing. She stopped talking to me. I didn’t understand. After I got older, I realized my mother was terribly afraid of my father. I was afraid of him, too. How could I not be? I saw him shoot a man because he blocked his way on a bridge. What normal person would not put the car in reverse and back up? Is it easier to shoot somebody in the head or back up? To my father, it was easier to shoot the guy. I did not ever want to piss this man off. Even when he would say or do something that made no sense, I never would say a word back, nothing.

But our bond was tighter after the shooting. He and Mr. Tut took me on their rounds more and more. I’d barely go to school. In the summer my dad took me to the Jersey Shore. I’d look around at other kids who were there, and they’d be with their mothers, playing little games. I’d be with my dad and his friends—guys with guns, monster bodyguards—all hanging out in the middle of the day playing cards. Nobody had a nine-to-five job.

Many days my father would take me to the racetrack. It was the one thing he did that made him look almost happy. He loved the horses and was an excellent handicapper. I got my love of horses from him. Years later, when I bought my first horse, I thought of my father. It’s the one good thing he turned me on to that I thank him for.

My father really liked black music. Obviously, he ran the black bars, and that music is what we heard when we went in them. My father also liked black women. When he’d take me into the bars to collect the cigar boxes with the numbers money, he would tell Mr. Tut, “Watch Jon.”

Mr. Tut would sit me at the bar, get me a Coke, and my dad would disappear with a woman. He liked black music and black, black women. Italians don’t like to admit this, but in ancient times there was a black migration into Sicily. That’s why you see a lot of Italians with very dark complexions. There’s African blood mixed in all of us.

Another part of my father’s job was looking for people who owed him “vig”—interest on the money he lent. My dad put a lot of money out on the street to blacks and whites. When a guy didn’t pay on time, my father would have to chase him down and give him a beating.

It was easy to find people in those days. It was a simpler world. People didn’t have the means to pack their bags and take off. If you owed my father money, he and Mr. Tut would drive around until they found you. They’d ask around in the bars. There was always somebody in the bar who would rat out a deadbeat. “The motherfucker that owes you the money is over here.”

We’d drive to wherever he was, and my dad would beat the guy. He’d take whatever was in his pockets. If he had a car, he’d take that from him, too.

My dad had big arms and hands, but he didn’t believe in using his hands on people. He always hit people with objects. My dad kept a baseball bat in the car. Sometimes he carried brass knuckles. If he had nothing else, he’d beat the guy with the end of his gun. He didn’t believe in punching it out with the other guy. My dad was there to give a beating.

Even as a kid, I understood my father’s thought train:
The quicker you do a beating, the less problems you’re going to have
. If you stand there and punch somebody back and forth, you don’t know how long it’s going to last. My father’s belief was to hit the
guy with something hard and end it as quickly as possible. Make your point physically and move on.

My father was careful not to hit people in the face who owed him money. You hit somebody in the face with a baseball bat, you might kill him, and then you won’t collect your money. My dad focused on breaking people’s arms, or cracking their shins. I can tell you, when you break someone’s bones, they will scream bloody murder. But I never saw my father get excited when he beat people. For him violence was a business tool.

My dad did some things that were a mystery to me. If the guy who owed him money was with a friend, my dad would beat the snot out of the friend, too. My dad would tell him, “This is what you get for being friends with a piece of shit who owes me money.”

It made no sense to me. Why beat the one guy if the other one owes you money? But that was my dad’s way to make his points to people. If he thought his way was right, then it was right. All my dad’s friends and my uncles, they all thought the same way. To them, their way was the right way. There was no question about it.

I’m a person who’s used to violence, inflicting it and taking it. I’ve been shot, had bones broken, and I have been tortured a few times. One time in Mexico dirty cops put jumper cables on my balls and electrocuted me. That was not a good day. But violence and pain don’t scare me. They make me angry. They hurt. They force me to concentrate my reasoning and solve the problem of why someone is hurting me.

But you take a normal person, and you break his bones, or you make him watch while you break his friend’s bones, or burn his skin with a lighter, he will become very frightened. He will follow the directions you give him. I learned this from the way my father used pain and fear. My father instilled in me that if you’re doing something wrong, do it in a forceful way, and you’ll come out way ahead. Way ahead.

My dad never explained his philosophy in words. I used to wish he would talk to me more, but he didn’t. I had to watch him. I absorbed what I saw without reasoning or understanding. But what I
saw entered my mind and changed how I looked at the world. On the playground I would see kids draw a little circle in the dust, and two guys would stand and fight each other. In my dad’s world, there were no little circles.

As a nine-year-old, I couldn’t put what he was teaching me into words. But as I got older, my father’s philosophy became clear: evil is stronger than good. To kill, to hurt, to instill fear gives you power over situations and people. If you have a problem, choose the most evil way to solve it, and do the evil as forcefully as you can. That’s how you come out on top. The evil path is the strong path, because evil is stronger than good.

That is what, unfortunately, my father taught me. Having a son of my own, I see that what you put into the eyes and ears of a child feeds his mind. His mind will grow different ways depending on what you feed it. My mind was fed the power of evil.

I’m not saying I agreed with everything I saw my father do. We’d go to the bar in the middle of the day, and my father would lend money to some poor fucker that didn’t have a job. The guy borrowing the money was borrowing it to drink. My dad didn’t give a fuck. When the guy couldn’t pay him back, my dad would tell him, “You better go steal the money you owe me.” And the guy would. That was my dad’s business, taking money from poor people who had to steal from other poor people to pay him. What kind of business is that?