The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (21 page)

CHAPTER 20

ONE MORE SECOND WITH MY BROTHER

After my brother died, I used to drive by his house in Staten Island all the time when it was empty and just stare at the house. Then finally I had the courage to go in. I used to open the door and call out his name—that's what I used to do when he lived here. I'd call out “Joe,” just to let him know I was there. I did that for a long time because it made me feel like he was there. Finally I decided that I wanted to live in that house. I bought it and lived there from about 1996 to 2005.

It's so hard for me to remember some things about my brother. But I want to tell you what I do remember. Even though we were only two years apart, we were worlds apart. We had different friends and we were completely different. We really didn't hang out. When we lived on Avenue J, we used to play outside together and play video games with my father. We did a lot of things together, but we still fought like crazy. We'd always get in trouble for that, because my mother and father hated it when we were fighting.

We were a real family on Avenue J, having dinner together every night. We loved that house. But once we moved to Eighty-Second Street, everything changed. It destroyed our lives in a lot of ways. There were no more rules. Joey wanted to go out; I was going to clubs. There was no more family. Maybe that's why I have such a hard time remembering.

One of the things I do remember is when Joey met his wife, Maria. She was dating one of his acquaintances. My brother was head over heels for her. He fell totally in love with her. He loved everything about her. She was all he talked about. He had to have her.

At the time there was a song out called “Maria” by TKA. Joey played that song for her over and over. Actually, I still can't listen to that song or I'll fall apart. If you listen to the words, they pretty much described his life when he met her. The Maria in the song was dating another guy, and there was this other guy who was crazy about her. He was trying to get her away from him. When Joey met his Maria, she was with another guy, and Joey was trying to get her away from him. The words just tell the story about how Joey felt about Maria and what he was going through.

Maria finally broke up with that other guy. When she did, she and Joey started dating. They dated for a year or so; then they decided to get married. They had their wedding at the La Mer reception venue. My brother was hysterical at his wedding. Somebody had given him gum before he got there, so he was chewing gum during the ceremony.

The priest was talking about love and he kept saying the word “love” again and again. Finally my brother said, “Okay, I get it.
Love.
” He was just so funny.

The wedding and the reception were beautiful, but Maria's father wasn't quite sure how everything was going to turn out. He wore a bulletproof vest to his daughter's wedding because he thought he was going to get shot.

My father was sitting at one of the tables talking with him when he realized the guy was wearing the vest.

“Are you wearing a vest? Is that a bulletproof vest?”

My father nearly wet himself; he was laughing so hard. He could not believe this guy wore a bulletproof vest to his daughter's wedding. This was a joke for the longest time.

I was never sure how Maria's family felt about my father, since they never let the real truth out. If they didn't like him, they weren't going to show it. But when my father was sick, Maria's mother used to make him a lot of food every day. He'd tell her, “I don't have a stomach. Where do you want me to fit all this?” She would tell him to “eata the food.” I guess they did like one another, because why else would she do that?

When they first got married, Joey and Maria lived in an apartment, but I don't remember where it was. It wasn't long before they started looking at houses and they bought a fully furnished town house in Staten Island. All they took with them was their clothes. It was a beautiful house—it was the model home. Then they had a baby and there they were, two kids living in this house with a baby.

Joey wasn't working—he was dealing drugs in the streets. He wanted to open up a business, but he didn't know what to do or how to go about it. He just knew he didn't want to continue to do what he was doing.

He tried to talk to my father about how to start a business and what to do, but he just couldn't get it done. When you get caught up in making fast money, it's really hard to get out of it—it's really hard to get away from it.

My brother really was a good person—he wasn't a bad guy. He didn't want to hurt people. He didn't act like a tough guy. Sure, he had problems in the street and he did act that way, but that was over territory and stepping on each other's toes in the neighborhood.

He never used all his training in karate on anybody, either. He wasn't that type of person. He had been taught by the karate teacher never to use his training in the street unless it was self-defense. He lived by that.

I've always felt that our lives were kind of rushed. We both got married so young. But I believe it was supposed to be that way because his life ended so fast. At least he got to do things that most kids his age wouldn't have been able to do. It wasn't the norm to get married at nineteen and have a baby.

We actually had our kids around the same time. My son was born in March 1990, and his daughter was born in November of that year. They used to play together.

But after Joey and Maria had the baby, things started to change. Her mother started becoming overly protective. She didn't want Maria and the baby to come to our house or spend time with us on holidays. I wasn't sure why she felt that way. Maybe she was being protective, because she thought that some bad things were going on.

My brother was upset about it. He wanted his daughter to be part of our family, just like I wanted my son to be around my parents. We were both dealing with the same problems—in-laws who wanted us to be with them and not with our own family.

We knew that my father wasn't well and we were trying to do everything we could for him. It seemed like it was harder for us to leave our parents. Maybe it was because we were so young, but my brother and I wanted to be home with our family, and we wanted our kids there. I guess it was hard for our in-laws, too.

After we both separated from our spouses, there was a time when Joey and I were living back home and the kids were with us. We let the kids run wild in my parents' house. They pretty much wrecked it. My father was always saying, “Somebody watch these kids over here—they're wrecking my TV!” Or he'd say, “Can someone stop the baby? She's eating a cigarette.” It was pretty funny. Then after my father died, our relationship with Joey's daughter was pretty much over.

Most of our lives there was always something that kept Joey and me from spending time together. Once we were living back home, we were able to see each other, one-on-one, and we had some good times.

One night we went to a club together in Long Island. It was strange to see my brother in a club; I never had when we were teenagers. He was a lot of fun. He had a couple drinks and he was laughing most of the night. I was really surprised.

As I look back to when I lost my brother, I realize I've missed out on so much with him. It bothers me a lot. I never got to have that relationship that a brother and sister have when they get older.

In my heart I've always believed that we would have been the best of friends and we would have been there for each other. I knew we were going to become really close. I'm not just saying that because he's gone. I'm saying it because of how I felt before he died.

It makes me sad that we didn't have a chance to become close. All of a sudden he was gone. That was something that I was never able to come to grips with and it bothers me to this day. I carry a lot of guilt over it and I think that's part of the reason why I block out so much of my time with my brother.

I live with this guilt because I feel that I could've done or said so much more to him in the time that I had. I often hear people say, “My grandmother lived until she was ninety. She had a long and happy life, and we had so much time to spend together.”

Well, I didn't have that time. My brother was taken when he was twenty-three. But then there are people who say, “Well, I had five years with my child, and at least I had those five years.” I had more time than those parents, but I still didn't have the time that I should have had with him because of our ages and what we were going through. We were just being teenagers. I'm sorry that I didn't get to enjoy his life while he was alive.

I don't keep any pictures of my brother or my father around the house. I try not to think about it. But my mother is constantly thinking about my brother. She's constantly doing things that remind her of him. We have two very different ways of dealing with it. My mother will never, ever have closure. She lives and breathes my brother every single day.

On the twentieth anniversary of my brother's death, I was looking at the Facebook page my mother created about him. I came across this open letter that she wrote to him twelve years after he was murdered:

If I had one more second with my brother, I would tell him how beautiful his daughter is. I would tell him that she has his eyes and it's like looking into his eyes. I would tell him that he would be so proud of her because she's come a long way in all these years. She's almost twenty-five now. She's standing up for herself and she wants to be part of her father's family.

If I had one more second with my brother, I would tell him that I was sorry for taking for granted all the days that he was here. I would tell him that I was sorry for all the times I could have hugged him or kissed him, but I didn't.

Sometimes he would grab me and pick me up, and I'd tell him to stop because he was so strong that he would squeeze the air out of me. Now I wish I hadn't told him to stop. I wish I had let him squeeze the air out of me or pick me up and swing me around. So what if I got dizzy?

All those things annoyed me when we were kids. I wish I could take back all those things I said about being annoyed. I wish I could tell him that I want him to tease me, make fun of me and annoy me.

I've felt so guilty about that, always. Even now, I feel guilty that I never got to spend that time with him. When you're a kid, you're going out, you're having a good time, and you're hanging out with your friends. You're not thinking that your brother is going to die when he's twenty-three years old. You're not thinking that, so you just take things for granted. You don't realize that this could happen. He could have just walked out the door and been hit by a car. But who thinks of that when you're a kid? You just don't think of it.

If I had one more second with my brother, I would tell him that I was sorry—so, so sorry I couldn't be there for him. Sorry that I couldn't help him. Sorry that he died that way. Sorry that I never got to show him how much I needed him. Sorry that I never told him how much I loved him. I did need him and I did love him. But I didn't show him enough.

I'm sorry.

NOTES AND SOURCES

 

March 20, 1962, Memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, Debriefing Gregory Scarpa Senior.

 

Fredric Dannen, “The G-Man and the Hit Man,”
New Yorker,
December 16, 1996.

 

Anthony Villano, with Gerald Astor,
Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI
(New York: Quadrangle, 1977), pp. 98–100.

 

David Stout, “Byron De La Beckwith Dies; Killer of Medgar Evers Was 80,”
The New York Times,
January 3, 2001.

 

Judge W.O. “Chet” Dillard,
The Final Curtain: Burning Mississippi by the FBI
(Denver: Outskirts Press, 2007), pp. 71–75.

 

Shaila Dewan, “Former Klansman Guilty in 1964 Deaths,”
The New York Times,
June 22, 2005.

 

“The FBI's Lin DeVecchio and ‘The Grim Reaper,'” CBS,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-fbis-lin-devecchio-and-the-grim-reaper/
(May 22, 2011).

 

Captain Rodney Stich,
Crimes of the FBI-DOJ, Mafia and al Qaeda,
2nd ed. (Alamo: Silverpeak Enterprises, 2010), p. 282.

 

 

David M. Herszenhorn, “New Indictment for Reputed Colombo Crime Family Captain,”
New York Times,
July 7, 1995.

 

Todd Venezia, “FBI Tied on Agent to Hit Mafia Beauty,”
New York Post,
February 17, 2006.

 

 

“Black Americans and HIV/AIDS,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundations, last modified April 25, 2014.
http://kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/black-americans-and-hiv-aids
.

 

Mary B.W. Tabor, “Settlement in Lawsuit on H.I.V.-Tainted Blood,”
The New York Times,
August 30, 1992.

 

Todd S. Purdum, “Reputed Mob Figure Fatally Shot in Brooklyn Club,”
The New York Times,
June 16, 1987.

 

Joseph Fried, “Howard Beach Defendant Given Maximum Term of 10 to 30 Years,”
The New York Times,
January 23, 1988.

 

Arnold H. Lubasch, “Persico, His Son and 6 Others Get Long Terms as Colombo Gangsters,”
The New York Times,
November 18, 1986.

 

Arnold H. Lubasch, “Prosecutors Tell of Colombo Family Murder Plot,”
The New York Times,
September 1, 1991.

 

“Bad Blood,” CBS,
Street Stories,
November 12, 1992.

 

 

Jerry Capeci, “Capo's Son Gets 6 Yrs. In Plea Deal,”
New York Daily News,
September 10,1999.

 

Jerry Capeci, “Get It in Writing,”
Gang Land News,
September 23, 1999.

 

Jerry Capeci,
Jerry Capeci's Gang Land
(New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 262–264.

 

 

Kevin Gray, “The Mobster Who Brought Down the Mob,”
Men's Journal,
October 2011.

 

 

William K. Rashbaum, “Retired F.B.I. Agent Is Accused of Role in Killings,”
The New York Times,
March 31, 2006.

 

Scott Shifrel, Joe Gould, Melissa Grace, “Judge in Lindley DeVecchio Case Rips FBI,”
New York Daily News,
November 2, 2007.

 

Michael Brick, “At Trial of Ex-F.B.I. Supervisor, How to Love a Mobster,”
The New York Times,
October 30, 2007.

 

Tom Robbins, “Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress,”
The Village Voice,
October 23, 2007.

 

Michael Brick, “Ex-F.B.I. Agent's Trial Fizzles, as Does Witness,”
The New York Times,
November 1, 2007.