Q. You knew that when you gave that answer, you were telling an untruth, didn’t you?
A. No, I wasn’t lying about it. You didn’t give me a chance.
Except for a few newspaper articles and my refracted childhood recollections, most knowable information about his criminal life is gleaned from police disciplinary proceedings that took place in Manhattan, 1961–62, and as recorded in New York State Appellate Division, Records and Briefs:
1949
Convicted of bookmaking in Brooklyn, given a suspended sentence, pays a fine of twenty-five or fifty dollars (evidence varies). Testified twelve years later that he took the arrest for a bookmaker named Jim Discano as a favor, which was known as a “stand-in” arrest.
He is twenty years old, residing in Brooklyn, though he sometimes gives his address as my grandparents’ farm in East Islip. I am born in 1950; my brother John, fifteen months later, in 1951; my parents marry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Greenpoint on February 21, 1953. That means that for at least a few years my mom is a single, unmarried, and divorced young woman living with her four sons (John and me, along with my two older half-brothers, Bobby and Eddie, share one bedroom) in her working-class, Catholic, Polish, and Italian ’hood of Greenpoint. Her living arrangement might have conceivably tested a woman possessed of less intestinal fortitude. She was evidently immune to any social stigma. This observation would not shock anybody who was her neighbor, waiter, physician, priest, spouse, or offspring.
My father moves into my mother’s apartment around the time of their wedding; before then, he would visit his two boys, he told me in his advanced years, take them in a carriage to the park a couple of blocks away. This is her second and last marriage; his one and only. If anybody snapped wedding portraits, I never saw them framed on the mantle (no mantles either). And if they ever once in their long married lives celebrated their wedding anniversary, I missed the festivities. As for the date of his wedding, he testified that he was married, not in 1953, but in 1948. Husbands can be confused on the anniversary subject, or so I have been curtly informed on occasion, but that seems a significant alteration of the timeline. It’s probably a reach to make too much of this. After all, he was attention-challenged and, at the moment he offered that misinformation, battling with a pit bull attorney.
1950
Convicted of petty larceny in the Bronx (theft of granite monuments). Pleads guilty, receives a suspended sentence.
1955-57
Jobless. Operates as a paid confidential informant for Officer Vincent “Jimmy” Santa, whom he knew from the neighborhood, who is stationed in Brooklyn. His information, he believed and contended, led to many arrests.
Meets Officer John Tartarian and Officer John Scire through Santa. Under oath, Tartarian later denies knowing him.
February 1957
Fingers bookmaker Sal Valenti, mentioned before; Officers John Tartarian and Baldasaro “Benny” Ficalora shake down Valenti for six hundred dollars. Receives one hundred dollars from Tartarian later that night.
December 23, 1960
Unemployed again; laid off as stonecutter.
Testifies that he owed loan sharks $1,500 and was in debt for a total of about $3,000; most of the money used by him to gamble. States that gambling was not his business, it was his “vice.”
January 29, 1961
Playing cards with Joe Cacavella, “Babe” Dareda, and Junior Loterzio. Picks up a name and number for a possible score. Tells Santa; Santa and Officer Peter Celentano “hit” the location in Maspeth, but nothing there.
(Hallmark Opportunity: this is his wife’s birthday.)
February 20, 1961
Celentano calls, informs my father his phone is tapped.
Meets with Celentano and Officer John Gallagher; they want a name of a bookmaker they can shake down. Owes Celentano $150-$200. Gives them a name: Corky, but that revelation does not bear fruit. Celentano wants more names. Gives him the names and license plate numbers of two other bookmakers: Dominick Spinelli and Joe Cacavella.
March 1961
Informed by Santa his phone is tapped.
Late March 1961
Meets with Celentano, Santa, Gallagher, and Officer David Frisher; waits with them in a truck and then points out a bookmaker. The cops score “Cock-eyed Jerry” for $1,000.
Receives one hundred dollars, his cut, from Santa the next week.
Provides Santa with another name, a bookmaker on parole, “Babe” Dereda. Cops go to Dereda’s house, score $2,000. Receives $250 from Celentano, who also forgives a debt of $125. Celentano tells him they should “start from scratch,” an apparent reference to the forgiven loan.
Targets Junior Loterzio as another potential score during that meeting with Celentano. Celentano tells him they should let things cool down for now after the two recent scores totaling $3,000.
April 12, 1961
Santa dismissed from the police force after he refuses to answer questions pertaining to Di Prisco and presumably about the shakedowns of “Cock-eyed” Jerry and Dereda.
April 15, 1961
Receives a call from Celentano, telling him not to say anything over the phone, prompting this writer to wonder all over again—what the hell was he was thinking, talking on the phone? Meets with Celentano, Gallagher, and Frisher on Greenpoint Avenue.
Later told by Celentano not to say anything about the Dereda score in front of Frisher because that cop wasn’t in on it.
Also told by Celentano that he had been questioned by superiors about Di Prisco. Advised by Celentano to “lay low” and “get lost.”
In testimony given six months later, he says that he never saw Celentano again after this meeting.
April 18, 1961
Celentano questioned by high-ranking officers of the Police Commissioner’s Confidential Investigations Unit (PCCIU); suspended for consorting with Di Prisco and another known gambler, Gerald “Cheesebox” Callahan, and for refusing to answer questions about them.
April 19, 1961
The New York Times reports that Celentano and two other cops had been suspended for consorting with known criminals and gamblers, apparently a reference to Di Prisco and Callahan and others.
April 20, 1961
The New York Times runs a follow-up story: “19 Police in Queens Shifted in Shake-up of Gambling Squad.” Mentions suspension of Celentano and others.
Late May/Early June 1961
Law enforcement attempts to arrest my father at his parents’ farm in East Islip, Long Island. He dashes into the woods and is not apprehended.
Summer 1961
Employed briefly in Massachusetts; drives to California.
My mother, younger brother, and I fly to San Francisco, where we meet my father sitting in his car at a gas station that was then located inside the airport. We live in a Santa Rosa motel for a while not to be confused with Hitchcock’s famous Psycho setting, eek eek eek eek eek, and eventually arrive in Berkeley, where we take up residence. Berkeley? I know, right? Berkeley.
He finds work first as a stonecutter and later in a dairy.
June 22, 1961
NYPD announces a big bust. Among the arrested are Officers Santa and Scire, along with Sebastian “Buster” Aloi and Dominick Spinelli, the bookmaker fingered by Di Prisco on February 20, 1961.
Aloi is reported to have extensive underworld ties, described as a capo with the Colombo crime family; reputedly a big-time mob loan shark.
Santa, Scire, and Aloi charged with extorting Spinelli by threatening to have him arrested in connection with a burglary ring that was responsible for more than $250,000 in hi-fi equipment thefts, if he did not pay them $2,000.
July 19, 1961
Di Prisco indictment filed in Queens for check forgery, grand larceny, and conspiracy. He is in California at the time. Bail is set at $2,500.
September 26, 1961
Remains unclear as to whether or not he reached out to the NYPD or whether they found him. Unlawful flight, in legal parlance, carries with it a presumption of guilt. In any case, he waives extradition, is arrested in Berkeley by Lieutenant Walter Stone of the PCCIU, and returns to New York City. Testifies that he was in jail for five to seven days upon arriving.
I begin at Saint Joseph the Workman School in Berkeley.
September 28, 1961
Arrested for forgery and grand larceny.
October 1, 1961
Interrogated by the Police Commissioner’s Confidential Investigations Unit, the forerunner of the Internal Affairs Bureau.
October 4, 1961
Arrested on a warrant from Brooklyn for forgery.
October 6, 1961
Questioned by PCCIU in connection with the February 1957 shakedown of the bookmaker Valenti. Officers Tartarian and Ahrens also questioned by PCCIU.
October 18, 1961
Formally identifies Tartarian and Ficalora as the cops who did the Valenti shakedown.
October 20, 1961
Provides testimony against Celentano; is the only witness in the departmental trial.
October 27, 1961
Provides testimony against Tartarian and Ficalora pertaining to Valenti shakedown.
Discloses that there are charges awaiting him; says that he is “living in a hotel,” where he was, according to the furiously exercised counsel for the accused, “treated like a pet.”
He tells me, a year before he dies, that that was when he was being “squeezed” because he had “a lot of information.”
Testifies that after he returned to New York City, the DA told him he “would be given consideration for [his] full cooperation.”
February 8, 1962
Provides additional testimony with regard to Tartarian and Ficalora on the Valenti shakedown.
February 14, 1962
Court date in Queens on his indictments. Some kind of Valentine’s Day.
April 17, 1962
Celentano found guilty of consorting with gamblers and is dismissed from the NYPD. The New York Times reports that he had been linked with a paid informer, an apparent reference to Di Prisco.
April 24, 1962
New York Herald Tribune: “Cop Fired for a Shakedown,” referring to Celentano, who was convicted on the basis of Di Prisco’s testimony on the shakedowns. Mentions that Celentano consorted with Di Prisco, who is identified by name as “a known criminal, gambler, and a person engaged in unlawful activities.” Celentano is twenty-seven years old.
November 1962
Santa and Scire go on trial for attempted extortion of Spinelli; both plead guilty to a reduced charge of coercion. After Santa finishes his sentence and is back on the street, he becomes a full-fledged mobster.
January 16, 1963
Gallagher and Frisher found not guilty after departmental trial.
Police commissioner states that Di Prisco’s testimony during their trial is unworthy of belief.
May 16, 1963
Tartarian and Ficalora formally dismissed in connection with the Valenti shakedown.
1963
My father has a job. He wears white coveralls with Joe stitched in red scripted thread on his chest, and drives a truck for a dairy in Oakland, California. I am twelve and he is thirty-eight years old.