Probably you’ve heard this one: there’s one thing an Italian with dementia will never, ever forget—and that’s a grudge. The folk wisdom might be confirmed by the science, and by my own personal experience: I am incapable of forgetting a real or perceived slight. Like father, like son?
Brain researchers say that long-term memory is the last to be vitiated by Alzheimer’s; it’s the short-term that is friable. And my dad did hang onto his grievances and grudges like they were family heirlooms. Which they were, in a way, because he persistently claimed to have been betrayed by his own family, his two brothers and one sister, who, in his view, ripped off his legitimate inheritance.
I overheard this accusation from early on, but was never presented the bill of particulars, so I never quite understood what his brief was against them. He was wronged, plain and simple. I knew it was disloyal of me, but I remained skeptical. And when his brothers or sister called on the phone, as they rarely did, my mother said he was walking the dog or something, even if he was sitting in front of the TV and even if we didn’t then have a dog. If I had to hazard a hunch, I’d say his family might have been burned by him in the past. Maybe he borrowed money from them he never paid back, which he didn’t pay back because he was entitled—he thought it was his birthright. Of course, the chance remains they refused to give him money he was entitled to because they were, in my mom’s phrasing, “Italian fucking barbarians.” Coin flip, I would say. It requires being a moron to bet on the outcome of a coin flip.
Over the years, and over the course of his accelerating dementia, my father was unsurprisingly consistent in his remarks about his past. So when I asked him periodically about the reasons for the flight from Brooklyn to California, he maintained that he was in trouble in New York City because he “had a lot of information” about cops, and that he was being “protected” in exchange for his testimony. He was being “squeezed,” his term, by the FBI and the police. I asked him what he did to acquire that valuable information. He was evasive. No new development. He swam like a shark in a sea of evasiveness.
It becomes clearer in these NYPD hearings, and in the contemporary newspaper accounts, what he was up to. As a young man, he was habitually broke and an incorrigible gambler, and he relentlessly, intrepidly hunted for the cash to put down on the horses and then, when he lost, the cash to pay back the loan sharks and the others from whom he had borrowed it. Yet once, in a vulnerable-seeming moment, he acknowledged to me that he asked a made guy in the neighborhood for a loan, but was turned down. Why? The made guy said he wouldn’t lend him the money because he liked him. The tale was spun as a point of pride.
At one stage, it seems, he was in the hole three thousand bucks, in debt for at least half of that to loan sharks, whom he and everybody else called “shylocks.” Adjusting for inflation, that’s about twenty-five thousand in today’s dollars. Serious money, especially when you factor in loan sharks’ draconian lending rates, which could escalate to 50 or 100 percent—a week.
He was also borrowing from at least three cops, and to pay them back he would engage in conspiracies to shake down bookmakers and parole violators. He would finger somebody, set them up, and then the cops would score them; that is, they would fake-arrest the mark, but would offer to make the arrest go away if they paid them off. Stakes were not trivial. In one instance, they shook down a couple of bookies for three thousand, quite a haul in the day. They paid my father $250 for his efforts.
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Here’s where the story gets a little more convoluted, if not deviously clever.
When I asked him what he did for the bookmaker he worked for, he would be less than clear. He wasn’t one of those guys in green visors taking bets on the phone, spouting off the odds in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he explained. Though he sometimes did that on Saturdays, as he defended himself in court. That’s when wiseass counsel reminded him that it was also illegal on a Saturday. And he also wasn’t delivering bags of cash on square-up days to the rare-as-white-elephant winners, or threatening to break the legs of those who didn’t or couldn’t square up. “Tough guys collect,” he said, implying he didn’t qualify.
What he admitted to me was this: he was subverting the competition. That is, he took care of rival bookmakers who were, in his words, “stepping on our turf.” This sounds like Brooklyn bookmakers’ generally accepted best business practice.
A man named Joe Loguerico testified that he played a crucial supporting role in the Sal Valenti shakedown. He had known my father “at least twenty years” from the “old neighborhood, Greenpoint section.”
Q. Did there come a time when you had a conversation with Joe Di Prisco regarding Sal the bookmaker?
A. Yes.
Q. What was the conversation?
A. He wanted to know who I was betting with and I told him and he said he’d like to have him arrested. I went along with it and I told him I’d come walking out the building with him the following night.
Q. Was it mentioned by Di Prisco that you were to be paid for this?
A. He said he’d take care of me.
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So my dad would like to have a rival book arrested?
The conclusion we might draw from Loguerico’s own words as well as my father’s statement that he had a job dealing with guys who stepped on his turf is this: he seems to have been using the cops to eliminate or at least curtail the competition. The cops collected the shakedown money from the guys who didn’t want, or couldn’t tolerate, the bust, perhaps because they were on parole. Then, they seem to have shared some of the profits with him. Therefore, as the cops were using him as a confidential informant ostensibly in the service of the public good, they were in truth doing business for themselves. That also means that, as they were exploiting him, he was playing them to do the dirty job on the competition. It’s easy to imagine—in fact, it’s hard not to imagine—he was also making some money on the side from the bookmaker who employed him. Nothing of his working both ends of the deal ever came out in his testimony during cross-examination.