I do not know how much schooling my father had, but it couldn’t have been a lot. Given that he was cannot-sit-still, jumpy-as-a-cat, I can imagine that for a youngster like him sitting in a desk would be unalloyed torture. So then, what is an uneducated, first-generation Italian American like him, fresh out of the service in WWII, supposed to do to make a living in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s? In his case, he works as a runner for a bookmaker and also a numbers operator; in 1947, he’s twenty-two, and he takes the pinch for the book when he is arrested. The judge sees through the young man’s guilty plea and dismisses the charges—or so my father told me.
My dad and I used to talk in his assisted living apartment in California, a few miles from my home. At this time, he and I were spending the most time together since my earliest childhood. He required round-the-clock care, and his residence was a sophisticated, kindly operation. By then, he had lost interest in television, including sports, absolutely stymied by the challenge of the remote control. He would soon to be on his way to the euphemistically named memory wing for the seriously demented, from which he bailed almost immediately because he detested the joint, as well as the company of sad droolers and drifters and specialists of the non sequitur. One day, he was in a semi-garrulous mood with me, so I took the opportunity to ask him if he had ever been arrested. At the time, I didn’t know.
“No,” he said.
Count to three. One, two…
“Once.”
Yeah, that’s my old man.
Records indicate that he was convicted on that 1947 occasion, given a suspended sentence. I do think it is possible he may have been confused, believing suspended meant dismissed. Beyond that, as I would come to discover from a rap sheet and other trial proceedings, he was actually arrested at least five times in his life.
•
Along with “don’t get involved,” “keep it to yourself” was another catchphrase of his, his response to anybody ever giving up inside, that is, emotional information, or venturing a report from the hinterland of feelings. Like the time my brother John, briefly in recovery, told him across a Thanksgiving table that he loved him. My father instantaneously countered: “Yeah, well, keep it to yourself.” Such displays of vulnerability must have struck him as being unmanly if not “embarrassing,” a prime term in his rhetorical arsenal. His most potent threat to me when I misbehaved as a child: “I’m gonna embarrass you.” Consistent with his lifelong commitment to keep things to himself, he said he never told his wife about that first conviction—information that came out in a much later case when he gave sworn testimony. That arrest took place before she divorced her first husband, yet I doubt she was in the dark. She didn’t miss much of anything until she started missing everything on account of her own Alzheimer’s.
In general, he was not susceptible to the appeal of TMI. That was the prime reason my son and I were never really worried about a stranger scamming him when he was losing it. If some lowlife scum crooks on the phone tried to get him to give up his social security number and credit card, which they did indeed try to do, in the end he’d be more likely to get theirs. The last real argument Mario and I had took place when I appropriated my father’s credit cards. My son was indignant, complained that I was undercutting his grandfather’s self-respect, and contended there was no real downside to his keeping or using the credit cards. What’s the worst that could happen, if, say, he blew some money on something or other? To me it wasn’t about the cash burn, and I lost my temper, but after calming down, I did arrange for my father’s personal caremanager to go over with the grandson all the risks, which she contended were considerable, given his impaired mental capacity and his tendency to outfox his handlers and his proclivity to ramble away from the security of his residence when the handler’s attention wavered. That conversation, along with some books I gave him about Alzheimer’s insidious pathways, helped Mario change his tune and come around, though my father never did. He was furious. Furious until, finally, he lost that edge, too. But I should underscore that all of us were struggling to understand how to deal with him and his dementia. He had entered that twilight, upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland, surreal realm, and we were all on the fast track to incomprehension and frustration.
As for his liquid assets, when he was in assisted living, he seemed to be rolling in cash. His care manager told me she had never had a client who threw around money like him, somebody who seemingly had thousands of dollars handy. He had a penchant for trying to tip out the staff. Employees’ accepting gratuities was strictly forbidden, but I don’t think house rules stopped him or dissuaded them. I can’t help but imagine that, for an old Teamster boss like him, he might have enjoyed the unionized fantasy of organizing the help. Once I took advantage of his having a dental appointment and searched his apartment. I went through everything and uncovered no stash of cash. He still had his chops. And he had more surprises up his sleeve—and in his pockets. Without prompting or a word of explanation, he one day transformed into an ATM before my very eyes. He reached into his right pants pocket, pulled out a roll of hundreds, and handed it to me. Good, I thought, maybe my message had gotten through to him, and maybe he was trusting me, and maybe he was giving over to an acceptance of his state. I told him I would put away the money for safekeeping. Then in a minute he reached into his left pants pocket and pulled out another roll of hundreds. And then a little while later, he reached into his back pants pocket and—yet another roll. I must have asked if that was it, and he must have indicated it was. I didn’t exactly believe him, because why start now, but I was yet again impressed.
•
During the war, he enlisted at sixteen in the Coast Guard and shipped out on a troop transport in the Atlantic, where he served as a fireman in the engine room. That sounded scary. But he also said he ran the dice games on the ship. When I asked him about how he managed that, he said he stole what he could. (Maybe not so coincidentally, my brother ran blackjack games in prison, where he took the unsuspecting players for everything he could—more about this, and John, soon.) Eventually my dad was honorably discharged, and late into his life he marched in war vet parades and wore pins on his lapels and proudly flew the American flag from his porch on patriotic holidays.
When he landed in Naples, he said, he and some fellow sailors fell in with some locals who offered up their sister for their pleasure, and for the brothers’ profit. It seems the guys threw their money on the table, but then got cold feet. “It wasn’t right,” my dad said. He also said he stole some food from the ship and gave it to the impoverished Italians, who obviously needed help. He liked the ladies his whole life, and they reciprocated, but if he ever cheated on his wife (who probably cheated on him, if reports and my recollections are real), he never tipped his hand. He had a courtly, somewhat prudish, side. Once we all went up to Reno where we submitted ourselves to an inane casino show. The comic was performing a very blue act, and my father looked abundantly offended, if not nauseated. It took all his self-control not to run out of the place.
Then there was a time we hired a professional companion to spend a few hours with him in his assisted living; this is fairly standard practice. We thought it would be beneficial for him to not be alone for long stretches, to talk with another person who was proficient at dealing with the elderly and demented. In short order, he dismissed her. He explained to the incredulous supervisor that the woman wanted to have sex with him, and he was upset. He reminded her he was a married man. That was when my mother had been dead for two years.
As a young man home from the war in 1945, he took jobs at various times in a dairy and most prominently as a stonecutter, following in the steps of my naturalized-citizen grandfather who brought the trade with him from Fontanarosa, a picturesque but economically depressed mining village a couple of hours outside Naples.
A few years ago, Patti and I made an excursion to the town. I wanted to see what family records were accessible. The functionary on duty at first didn’t appear pleased to be of service, insofar as the sacrosanct lunch hour beckoned. But our Italian was in good shape, and before long, she relented cheerfully. She came up with my grandparents’ wedding papers and birth certificates. At some point, the postal delivery woman stopped in, nosy about the visitors, and made conversation; Americans in town, maybe this could be diverting. I asked her, in Italian, if there were any Di Priscos nearby. She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands and indicated the place was crawling with them. I didn’t look anybody up.
As for stonecutting, it’s hard to imagine more strenuous, backbreaking, potentially injurious labor. I recollect one day being in a car picking up my nonno and dad from the stonecutter’s, and I can picture the coating of gray dust all over them and the blue rags they wiped their faces with. My father is eventually fired by this employer, and is arrested for pilfering stone from the shop. His rap sheet itemizes the arrest but gives no details as to the case’s disposition, but in testimony given during the dirty-cop trials he owns up to the larceny.
Mostly, he bet the horses, thoroughbreds or trotters, whatever was in season. And therefore he was always looking for money, because he was not cleaning up at the track. He was a good handicapper, I would come to realize, but even good handicappers are not good enough to keep in the black. As one cop, later dismissed from the force, said in his testimony about him, “This man is in dire need of money at all times. He’d ask anybody, he’d give up his mother for money.”
“Fast” Eddie Felson in The Color of Money says: “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” That’s from Richard Price’s screenplay, and, as with most things, he hits it out of the park. Nobody ever bothered to say that money lost is aromatic as cigar ashes, or that the memory of the occasional win ever counterbalances memories of the bad beats.
•
Here is as good a place as any to disclose that there was a time when I did business with bookmakers of my own, when I put money down on games and races in the premobile-phone era, including when I was an English graduate student instructor at Berkeley, where there was a convenient pay phone (remember pay phones?) outside my Wheeler Hall classroom and from which I could make, if so inclined, a bet or two during class breaks. Was I a gambler, did I have my old man’s vice? I was traveling in social circles, excuse the term, of guys who carried crisp stacks of cash in their Italian leather purses and bet very serious money, guys who knew stuff, smart guys, wise guys. I learned from them. This was a different sort of liberal education for a schoolboy like me. I never bet the favorite in my life, rule one of many good rules. Did I go broke? Not right away. Did I buy a house in Beverly Hills? Also no. Did I borrow from loan sharks? I wasn’t that irrational. I had other vices I preferred.
I also played blackjack professionally for high stakes around the world for several years, in my late twenties and early thirties, bankrolled by big-money backers who recruited me when I worked as a waiter in one of their restaurants. I never considered that gambling, even while I was playing hands where thousands of dollars rode on the turn of the next card. To my mind and more importantly to the mind of my backers, I was adept in doing on-the-fly statistical probability analysis—that is, I counted cards in blackjack in numerous casinos in Vegas, Reno, the Caribbean, South Africa, Monte Carlo. I experienced it all. Offers to comp me Dom Perignon and call-girls. Big scores and equally big busts. Fast Eddie was right. Money won is indeed twice as sweet as money earned. I wish I had won more of it before I came to be barred, thanks to an international private detective agency, by what was then every casino in the world. But that is another story, told in Subway.
I would not allege I dabbled in the fine arts of wagering in order to gain a window into my dad’s life, but it was something I acquired nonetheless. I knew what he thought about blackjack. He doggedly clung to crackpot strategies pertaining to hot decks and when to hit and when to stand and when to double down. All I recall is that everything he said was pretty much dead wrong. I tried to teach him, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hear me.
I cannot say I enjoyed feeling superior to him. After all, he was no different from 99.99 percent of blackjack players in the world, who hold all sorts of dubious theories about the game. But was there a part of me that was internally gloating? He was a gambler, I was a player—in effect, an investor, an asset manager. I knew more than he did about playing cards. I don’t think I can absolutely deny feeling some primitive sense of competition. And was he proud of my career turn? My hunch is yes. Maybe my career confirmed some conception he held of being a young man, of the allure of the casino and the music of riffling chips on the green felt tables. His closest associate at the time was the younger brother of my principal backer, Johnny Francesco, so I assume he had plenty of inside information on the operation. One thing for sure was that my life as a counter playing blackjack around the world was something he could intuitively understand much better than my life as a teacher or poet or grad student. For a while, I could say the same about myself. As for his depths of understanding or empathy or curiosity, they were either nonexistent or inexpressible for the man called Popey. And he might have been fascinated by how I was playing with Other People’s Money, and not money I borrowed or stole, but money entrusted to me. And when I played with OPM (technically, a small share of it was mine) and I won, I got to claim some of it as my own (well, my percentage of it anyway).
In the end, playing cards for money and gambling in general maybe wasn’t in my DNA. Except for the times when I took my father to the track in his waning years and kept him company and bet alongside him, I haven’t made a wager in thirty years, but I still pick the games for pure intellectual sport, the way other guys read the Racing Form every day, for pleasure. Take it from me: don’t bet the favorite, automatically going in on what appears to be the more talented team. The better teams can and do indeed lose, and teams are more evenly matched than records and statistics superficially show. Sometimes the favorite convinces itself that it’s the disrespected dog, and that’s different, so they play hungry, but it’s a subtle distinction hard to explain in the abstract. Underdogs almost always have more reason to play and to win, or at least to cover the spread, and that’s why getting the points is valuable. Not that that is reason in itself to bet. Because don’t forget rule number two: only losers robotically jump on a good team getting points, banking on covering. That’s fool’s gold. If you don’t really believe the dog can win the game outright, it’s usually prudent keeping your powder dry.
•
It’s one thing to understand a capo of the crime families, the John Gottis, the Sam Giancanas of the underworld, or the monsters who became murderers and are bizarrely, cinematically lionized. It’s another to understand the little guys who are doing all they can to scrape by. Hard to romanticize the kind of life my father led. And he was nowhere near a big fish. If he was offered Witness Protection and a new identity, I never heard about it.
All the same, my father rubbed shoulders with some very infamous figures in New York crime annals, such as the very big-time Columbo Family underboss Sonny Franzese, who lived in our neighborhood. And he seemed to cross paths with a made guy named Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, who is credited with recruiting Franzese into the mob and who was arrested twelve times during the course of his criminal career on charges ranging from gambling to murder. My father told me he worked as a bartender in a local joint. I speculate that the bar was operated if not effectively owned by Aloi, and that my dad did business with dirty cops who worked for or with Aloi. He could hardly be in the dark about the goings on of bookmakers, fixers, number runners, robbers, stick-up artists, shakedown specialists, loan sharks, burglary rings, and truck and air cargo hijacking crews operating in the neighborhood.
Along the way he also became acquainted with Mickey “Cheesebox” Callahan. Callahan enjoyed a reputation as being bookmakers’ as well as corrupt cops’ best friend. He was the notorious and preeminent “wireman” and the inventor of a device, the size of a pack of cigarettes, that could transfer phone calls so that bookmakers were able to take bets away from where the phone was situated. He would be the subject of a 1971 New York Times piece by the eminent journalist David Burnham (who broke the Serpico and Karen Silkwood stories), about Callahan the “inventor” going straight later in life. Before that career transformation, though, he was also expert at sabotaging official radio transmission of race results, so as to enable gamblers (like Al Capone, for whom he once worked) to past-post bets and clean up with bookmakers. (Al Capone!) He crossed the wrong guy, however, a mob associate of Aloi, who one night attempted to rub him out, only to shoot Callahan’s son instead.
Sidney Cooper, with whom my father cooperated, was a captain in the Police Commissioner’s Confidential Investigations Unit. One night in April 1961, when he arrested Callahan, he crowed that he had heard a lot about the famous Cheesebox but never thought he’d get to bust him.
“The pleasure is all yours,” said Callahan.
Cooper told Callahan that he wasn’t his real target, it was crooked cops. He tried to recruit him to work with the PCCIU.
“Captain, if you knew anything about me, you know I’d never be partners with cops. That’s like taking a bath with alligators.”
That was apparently not a sentiment shared by my father, or maybe that is a sentiment he could not afford to share. At one point he testified against a cop who was a neighborhood friend of his, Vincent “Jimmy” Santa, another associate of Callahan, who was known as the bagman of the Brooklyn Morals Squad. After Santa was drummed out of the police force, he reportedly became a full-fledged mobster, later convicted of truck hijacking, and did hard time. I always knew my old man was not exactly risk-averse, but I didn’t know the depths of his recklessness and desperation.
As for his career paths, he did leave behind stonecutting. Silicosis is a very common affliction of a stonecutter. Silica is associated with lung cancer, and breathing it in over the long haul can lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, especially back when my father was cutting stone and fewer state-mandated labor precautions were in place. The dust buildup in the lungs can accumulate and set like concrete. That’s the sometimes deadly cost of making tombstones for strangers. My father’s whole life, he seemed to be rolling the dice, always trying to suck in enough oxygen to breathe.