In October 1961 the Police Commission called a single witness to testify against a decorated police sergeant, one Baldasaro "Benny" Ficalora. He, along with his partner, stood accused of shaking down a bookmaker named Sal Valenti, in 1957, for $600, which amounts to about $5,000 in today’s dollars. Until my father appeared in New York City in September 1961, the police had no clue as to the Valenti shakedown. That meant he had been sitting on this information for use on a rainy day (such as being indicted, as he was). Either that or he had made up the story to get some play from the oncoming DA.
The transcript makes for fascinating reading, if by fascinating one means excruciating, forehead-smacking frustration. Under questioning, my father seems often confused, or feigns being confused—states of mind not readily distinguishable relative to him. Sometimes he’s reticent, more than occasionally defensive. His thinking seems tortured, but thinking doesn’t seem the word. His memory, overtaxed. His word choices, pokes in the eye with a sharp stick. He seems incapable of comprehending, much less responding to, direct questions. Or he understood them perfectly and didn’t wish to answer. Then again, in my experience, he was always that way. Downtown Joe Di Prisco.
For example, under suppressive cross-examination fire pertaining to these dirty cops, he testifies that “they grabbed him,” “him” referring to the bookmaker, Valenti. Counsel for the defense wanted to know, reasonably enough, who was “they.”
“Tartarian [Ficalora’s partner] got out of the car.”
“It was not ‘they,’ just one man?”
“I got out, fingered the bookmaker to Tartarian.”
“I’m asking you who is the ‘they’?”
Counsel for the Department: “He said…”
Counsel for the Accused: “He didn’t say.”
For the Department: “He said it was Tartarian.”
For the Accused: “‘They’ is not Tartarian.”
For the Department: “To you it’s not, to him it is.”
For the Accused: “So is that what you mean, ‘they’ is one man?
“Tartarian got out of the car.”
“You didn’t mean ‘they’?”
“Ficalora was at the wheel.”
“You did not mean ‘they’?”
“Well, only one man got out of the car. I can’t say he didn’t.”
It goes on in this Runyonesque via Greenpoint fashion here and elsewhere for pages and pages—much like the unrecorded transcript of almost every conversation I ever had with him. His words are cumulatively reminiscent of nothing so much as a stoner version of Abbott and Costello’s baseball vaudeville routine “Who’s On First?” My father liked those comics.
Costello: Well then who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy playing…
Abbott: Who is on first!
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: That’s it.
Costello: That’s who?
Abbott: Yes.
And no, English was not my dad’s second language, though he makes it sound like he came through Ellis Island the week prior. More than anything, he seems to be heeding the stock wisdom of the streets: nobody was ever hanged for something he didn’t say, something he couldn’t deny, something nobody could understand. So he didn’t express anything you could pin on him. This principle was absolute, and it applied not only to courtroom testimony, it also applied to the weather, to what he had for lunch, to how he was feeling today, to where he was going, to what he thought of the game, to what he wanted for Christmas. Plausible deniability was in his blood.
Of course, nobody should underestimate how stressful testifying under oath can be when counsel has painted a bull’s-eye on somebody and is argumentatively skillful, able to distort a prepped witness’s words. Equipped with his grade school education, my father distorted his own words enough for a courtroom of lawyers. What’s more, for somebody like him, who I have no doubt in another era would have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, it had to be supremely challenging to think cogently and speak coherently at the same time—assuming cogency and coherence were his priorities, which it was not always clear they were. Compounding everything was that those felony charges were hanging over his head in the two boroughs over from Manhattan, where he sat in the witness chair. The prospect of execution truly concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson said, but in my father’s circumstances, that seems a long shot. My general verdict on the old man’s performance was not too bad, considering. He mostly held his own with the suits. Not bad was that Brooklyn man’s highest accolade.
•
The formal charges against Ficalora (and in other proceedings, his partner, Tartarian) alleged that he conspired with my father to frame the bookmaker Valenti in 1957. My dad used his old friend, Joe "Smokey" Loguerico, to help identify Valenti coming out of work, and then my father signaled in the police, who ushered Valenti into the backseat of Ficalora’s car. That’s when my father testified that he took an envelope from Valenti and said that there were numerous betting slips. At this point, it was contended, “having seized evidence of said crime [bookmaking], [Ficalora] did solicit, demand, and ask the said Valenti for a sum of money, in return for which the said Valenti would be released and freed from arrest.” Valenti offered $200, but the cops said that wasn’t enough. As my father predicted for Tartarian, Valenti would pay because he couldn’t afford the pinch, or so Loguerico advised my father, and as a result he was summarily squeezed. My father took off at this point, and they drove the bookmaker to his home, where he came up with an additional $400, and that’s where the matter lay dormant—until my father’s extradition, when he testified.
In exchange for his information as confidential informant, my father received one hundred bucks from the cops, about eight hundred in today’s dollars. He gave either twenty-five or fifty dollars to Loguerico, or so he said at various times, though Loguerico swore he never got a dime.
It would be easy to be suspicious of my father’s testimony. After all, until he came back to New York, nobody knew the first thing about this shakedown. Seemed a little bit too convenient for somebody in tight straits like his. While counsel for the defense strained to establish that my dad made up the accusations out of whole cloth to save his own skin, giving something of value to the police so as to increase the chances that his own problems would go away, the two cops made some crucial errors that cast grave doubt upon their defense. For one thing, Tartarian denied using my father as a confidential informant as a regular practice, but that seemed not to be true upon examination. In fact, he had used him for years. “Tartarian was plainly inconsistent and evasive about his relationship with Di Prisco,” ruled the Police Commission.
For another thing, Ficalora asserted that the car my father identified as being the one driven during the night of the shakedown could not have been his car, which, if so, should discredit Di Prisco’s testimony and exonerate him. The 1949 Chevy, he said, had been junked before the night of the alleged crime. But police furnished records and other evidence indicating that that car had been operable on the night in question and that, in fact, Ficalora had unfettered access to the vehicle.
Once the hearings concluded, the deputy police commissioner formally weighed in on my father’s status and commented on his testimony:
“It is conceded that there are several inconsistencies in Di Prisco’s testimony and that he was not truthful at a previous departmental trial where he said that he did not know other policemen, wherein in fact he did. It is also conceded that his character and background are unsavory and that his relationship with the District Attorney, while under indictment at the time of his trial, provided a ready motive for his testifying against these respondents.”
As they claim in country songs, you gotta dance with the one that brung you. Despite my father’s “unsavory character,” “Additional support for the credibility of Di Prisco’s testimony can reasonably be found in the testimony of the men charged, which on crucial questions is so inconsistent and evasive as to permit the inference that had they testified in a straightforward manner, their guilt would have been apparent.”
In the end, Benny Ficalora was dismissed from the police force, but though my father testified on this matter to the grand jury, he and Tartarian were not indicted.
•
On many fronts the city was cracking down on police corruption, and the press was gearing up for big sweeps and crackdowns. As The New York Times reported, on April 24, 1962, Peter Celentano, a plainclothes Vice cop, was found guilty of consorting with gamblers, clearly a reference to my dad, and dismissed from the force. “He also had been linked with a paid informer”—also my dad. I am pretty sure my father never perused the Times. No copy ever showed up in our apartment. Back when there were eight metropolitan papers, he was a News and Mirror guy—at least those were the papers he usually sent me out to buy at the candy store on a Sunday morning. I wonder if he would have felt relieved not to be named. The New York Herald Tribune did name names, in “Cop Fired for a ‘Shakedown’” on April 24, 1962:
“Peter R. Celentano, 27, working with an ex-patrolman dropped from the force last year, used a police informant ‘to put the shake’ on bookies and policy operators [number runners] who could not stand being arrested, according to the testimony of the informant, Joseph Di Prisco.
“Di Prisco testified…that he along with Celentano and Vincent Santa entered a conspiracy in which Di Prisco would give them the names of gamblers going full blast…
“Di Prisco testified that in March, 1961, he fingered a bookie operating in a truck. This was in violation of the bookie’s parole. The bookie thereupon was shaken down for $1,000, with Di Prisco pocketing $100 and the rest going to the two officers, according to his testimony.
“About the same time last year, Di Prisco, through the two officers, ‘put the arm’ on a paroled policy operator, who shelled out $2,000, of which Di Prisco got $250, he said.
“However, Di Prisco testified, there were times when in acting as finger man for the two officers, they did their duty and made arrests, shunning shakedowns.”
That’s interesting, and a curious turn. Wonder if it was true. But if they didn’t extract a payoff, the cops did my father a service by popping his rivals.