I walked outside, past the barbed wire fence, and didn’t look back.
I intended to con them all, but in the end, it was me who was the unsuspecting mark.
The goal of RDAP was to help inmates become better adjusted people, help them explore the reasons why they drank or drugged themselves into oblivion, why they needed to escape themselves or the world. Often, that exploration led to an unraveling of the reasons why they committed the crime they were in prison for, too.
By the spring of 2012, I’d sat in on two years’ worth of classes on psychology, addiction, brain chemistry, behavioral patterns, chemical imbalances, cognitive therapy, and more—taking the same ones over and over again. Essentially, I did the program four times. At some point, the stuff started to sink in.
I had taken a few required psych courses in college but didn’t pay much attention during them. I thought it was crap. It didn’t help me as a kid when I went to therapy, and when I got older, well, mob guys don’t sit around and talk about their feelings.
Unless they were at the opera, Italian men didn’t cry. My dominant emotion was anger. Any pain, sadness, frustration, or vulnerability I ever felt during my life I chose to ignore, erase, or turn into rage. It was a survival mechanism, one of the psychiatrists told us in class. Except for my few hungover moments of self-introspection at Bear Mountain in the early eighties, I’d never been interested in analyzing my behavior.
But now I’d lost everything, including a daughter. And I wanted to know why.
It was one of the first questions I asked Dr. Bowe at Fort Dix soon after Lauren was killed. Why had I done this to myself and everyone else? Why did I need the Bentleys, the cash, and the mansions I’d never even live in? Why did I hurt so many people, including myself and the ones I loved, and not feel a thing in the process? Why did I spend decades drunk and coked up?
Sitting in class one day, my first major realization was when the doctor talked about addictions being genetic. I thought of my mother pouring her first of many drinks at the bewitching hour and popping Xanax at night to sleep. I thought of my father going into rages when he drank his vodka. I was so used to it growing up, I didn’t realize until that moment in class that both my parents were classic addicts, and I’d inherited the gene from both sides. By ten I was swigging church wine from the chalice and drinking cocktails of gin, vodka, and scotch with Eddy and Danny in the woods.
But that was only part of it. There were also the emotional reasons why someone wants to drink too much or take drugs or overeat—because doing so blocks out specific feelings you can’t or don’t want to deal with.
“Unless you understand that,” said one speaker in class, “you won’t be able to stop. And you’ll find yourself back here.”
As good as I had it at Milan, I had no intention of ever coming back if and when I ever got out. So I started paying close attention to what the doctors were saying about one’s environment growing up and family dynamics.
Figuring out my mother was easy. She had a husband who abused her verbally and physically every day of their marriage—that was something for her to want to escape from with booze, and something I’d want to erase from my mind as well.
But there was also the hazy memory of her going away for six months to a mysterious place with gray walls and white coats, when I was little. She begged and cried to come home. I tried hard to remember what I felt during those Sunday visits I had with her there, and it took a while to dig it up: fear, horror, and abandonment. No wonder I let her wipe my ass for me.
When I dug further, as the therapists gently suggested I do, I found wells of anger at her—anger that she didn’t protect me from my father and that she didn’t protect herself.
“She didn’t know how,” said one of the Milan therapists. “She was frightened herself and did the best she could. Can you live with that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Were you the perfect father?”
“God, no.”
“Did you cause your children pain?”
“Yes.”
My father wasn’t a mystery to me at all; I knew why he drank and hit us: because I was bad, I was nothing, and he hated me. That was a truth I’d been certain of ever since I was three years old.
Then I remembered something. My mother and I weren’t the only ones abused by my father. When I was a kid and my grandmother Josephine, his mother, used to come to our home in North Haledon for Sunday night dinners, he’d insult and yell at her so bad she sobbed right there at the table. He was always so angry at her, but I could never figure out why. And then it dawned on me.
I called up a cousin of mine and asked her to visit my father’s sister, Aunt Millie, who was now elderly and living in Virginia. I needed her to answer something. A few weeks later she called me.
“I asked her what you wanted,” my cousin said on the phone, “and you were right. Aunt Millie said, ‘My brother Joe used to get beaten badly all the time by our father—and by our mother, too. I was the favorite one. I was spoiled and could do no wrong. But he was the “bad” one. If Joe didn’t come home at a certain time, they’d lock the door and make him sit outside all night. This is when he was a still a kid. They wouldn’t give him dinner and made him sleep outside all night.’ ”
I slowly hung up the pay phone. Son of a bitch, so that’s your story. He hit you so you hit me, is that it? Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, now?
I did, a little. I felt sorry for both of us . . . for what we lost as father and son and more. I realized that along with my many other failings as a husband and father, I’d stayed away from my own children for fear that my temper was like my father’s, and I’d beat them the way he did me. Staying away from them, I reasoned, kept them safe. I suppose it was my way, unknowingly, of breaking the cycle of violence in the family.
Knowing my father got hit didn’t take away the sting of my hundreds of beatings, but at least it made me understand some of the why of it. All those hours sitting on the rock behind our house as a kid, crying and wondering what I’d done wrong. And all along, I’d done nothing.
I wasn’t born bad.
In my own class workbook, I wrote:
My father was hit by his father, and then beaten up even worse in the Marines. He drank to self-medicate, then took out his rage on my mother, so she drank. He beat me and beat me down, so I drank and took drugs. My desperate need for expensive cars, watches, homes, clothes, and women was another way to escape or numb the pain and lift myself up to a “grandiose” level. And it was a way to get him to love me. And it was a way to get my revenge on him without hitting him back. I fell into a self-sabotaging pattern where I built up my world, then fucked it up because I didn’t feel worthy. Everything I touched turned to platinum, and then to shit.
And all this led me here.
I understood what had happened and that was good. I wasn’t about to get all emotional over it, though. What’s done is done. I had no need to think or talk about it anymore.
The rest of my unit, though, wanted to talk about their shit.
My unit was mostly made up of guys aged twenty-five to thirty-five. Because I was older and in charge of the kitchen and the meetings, they began to look up to me and trust me. They gave me my new nickname, “Old Gangster,” or “OG” for short. They wanted to talk to me about their shit instead of the therapists. Most of them came from bad, fatherless families living in the Detroit ghettos and they looked up to me. This was a first for me.
I’d been presenting myself as a completely different version of Tom Giacomaro in front of them—reliable, helpful, of service, caring—they didn’t know the other Tom, the real one, the asshole Tom. He wasn’t the kind of guy you told your problems to.
They didn’t know that. So as I rushed around on my twelve-hour-plus work schedule, they began coming up to me to talk.
It started with Golden Boy, who was having problems with his girlfriend. Then other guys in our unit began approaching me after the morning meetings to talk. Soon my kitchen crew started spilling their guts as they pulled hamburgers from their pants, and guys in the chow hall started plopping down next to me at my special table, my throne, where I was not to be disturbed.
“Hey, Mr. Tom,” they said, or, “Hey, OG, can I sit with you a minute?”
“Yeah, sit down.”
“You won’t believe what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Betty-Sue didn’t take my call last night. She said she was sending me a letter. I didn’t get no letter. I think she’s cheating on me. I’m depressed. What should I do?”
Every inmate lost his girlfriend or baby-mama while in prison; there wasn’t one who didn’t. These bad, rough guys from the ghetto broke down crying telling me about it. I was embarrassed for them that they cried, never mind that they did it in front of me. I wasn’t a fucking therapist; I didn’t know what to tell these kids. I barely knew how to be a good friend.
They were desperate for letters from the people they loved, and I didn’t care about that anymore—I’d given up on that six years earlier. No visitors at holidays and no mail from family hurt me in the beginning, but by the time I got to Milan, I was so disconnected from them I didn’t feel it no more. I’d hardened up.
“Oh, shut the fuck up, you crybaby!” I’d tell them. “Get rid of the broad. You’ll get a new one when you get out! You were cheating on her with three other broads anyway!”
After they stopped their whimpering, I’d attempt some practical advice.
“You gotta stop going to mail call,” I’d say. “It’s bad for you.”
Somehow, my unique brand of tough love made them feel better and helped them.
Word got around outside our unit that I was “a good listener,” and soon I had at least three inmates a day approaching me. I began booking “sessions” and keeping a notebook for appointments. I even had a waiting list.
Because of my phenomenal memory, I remembered every detail about everyone’s life. (“You got that photogenic memory,” Frankie used to say.) I knew whose dad walked out, whose moms were addicts, who was married and the names of their kids. I knew who killed a guy, who was suicidal, who was innocent, who didn’t finish high school.
The doctors encouraged me to keep going because a lot of the guys didn’t want to reveal themselves to a cop, and the psychiatrists were federal officers. Soon, I was doing my “therapy” sessions for three to four hours a day, and it even cut into my sacred suntan time. Dr. T unlocked a conference room for me after hours so I could hold sessions after midnight.
Why did I keep listening? Some of these guys were my crew, and I had to make sure they weren’t too fucked up to work. Plus, I wanted to keep scoring brownie points with the staff, which went toward my plan to get out of there early.
But . . . it was something else, too.
When the twentieth tough guy broke down sobbing in front of me, I started listening for real. I actually wanted to help them. It also felt good being useful, using my mind in a way I never had before, in a way I never knew I could. I could hear Lauren’s voice: Just like the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, Daddy. They followed the yellow brick road to get a heart and a brain and realized they had it all along.
I was also curious about the raw feelings they expressed so freely. It was foreign to me, like I was Spock in Star Trek observing these primitively unrestrained humans.
With Dr. T’s guidance, I started giving better advice.
“Listen, you’ve got to move on with your life,” I’d say. “You’ve got to start planning for when you get out.”
A lot of them had never held a real job before, so I counseled them about where to start: “Go to a supermarket; they’re less stringent on requirements. Take a job at night stocking shelves when the store’s closed so you don’t have to deal with customers, and it keeps you out of trouble. We have job placements in this unit to help you.”
Dr. T was amazed at how much I helped them.
“They look up to you like a father, Tom,” he said. Which amazed me. My own kids didn’t look up to me like a father.
These kids were the same age as my eldest two with Debbie: Tom Jr. was now thirty-one and Nick was twenty-nine. I’d never talked with them about girlfriend problems or jobs, like a real father would. Maybe that’s why I was doing it now with these fatherless kids. I was a childless father and maybe it was a way to make it up to my own children.
I’d started out telling my fellow inmates to ignore mail call as I’d done for years myself, and forget about friends and family who deserted them. But the truth was, the RDAP program promoted and encouraged family connectedness. They even gave out free greeting cards so you could write to your family and develop or mend your relationships with them.
In the fall of 2012 I took one of the free cards the unit offered and wrote a letter.
My daughter Stephanie was three years old when I went away, and probably had little memory of our fairy-tale home in Saddle River, or of me. Even at such a young age, Dorian used to call her “Tom with hair” because she was most like me in looks and personality.
Stephanie was thirteen now and living outside Detroit with Dorian’s mother, a thirty-minute drive from the prison. Her world was vastly different from how I’d left it. A few months after I went to prison, the government took the $25 million I’d hidden for Dorian, and they’d been struggling ever since. I wasn’t sure what Dorian told Stephanie about me or if she’d ever given her and her brother and sisters the cards and letters I’d written from various prison cells all over the country. I was a stranger to her.
Still, in the spirit of family connectedness I wrote, asking if her grandmother would bring her for a visit.
One day that November, Stephanie and her grandmother were waiting in the visitor’s room. As soon as I saw her from across the room I choked up. She had my features but she reminded me of Lauren—the same soft hair, something in the eyes. Or maybe, seeing her simply reminded me that I was a father.
We weren’t allowed to hug so we sat down across from each other at a table. For a minute, I couldn’t speak. I felt sick inside—it was the sickness of regret. I was about to say something when her grandmother cut in.
“You really made a disaster of everything,” Dorian’s mother began. “You ruined my daughter’s life, you ruined the kids’ lives, you . . .”
The list went on and on as Stephanie sat silent, slumping lower and lower in her chair. When Dorian’s mother was done, I asked Stephanie questions about school, her siblings, but she barely answered. After fifteen minutes, they left.
It was a start, I thought.
A few days later I called Stephanie to see if we could try again—this time without her grandmother?
“Lose my number,” she said. “I never want to see you again.” Click.
That Christmas I worked double shifts in the kitchen. Most everyone else had family or friends visiting so I gave them the time off. It was the best time to work in the kitchen anyway, because I could steal the steak and make a big profit.
At Thanksgiving, we had turkey; on Memorial Day, we barbecued thousands of hamburgers, hot dogs, and sausages outside; on Christmas and New Year’s, we got Applebee’s steaks. They were delivered frozen the day before, so right after 3 AM count on Christmas Day, I raced to the chow hall in anticipation. I checked in, did breakfast, and organized my captains to do the cleanup. Mr. Klemme was ready for his morning nap about then.
“Mr. Klemme, I need to get salad from the freezer to prep it for lunch. Can you unlock the freezer for me?”
“Giacomaro, you know we don’t freeze the lettuce.”
“Right. I’m craving an ice cream, then.”
“At 7 AM?”
I shrugged.
“Okay, okay. I’ll unlock the freezer for you.”
After he unlocked it, he went to his office for a little sleep. That gave me time to get out cases of steaks hidden at the back of the walk-in freezer and load up my crew, who smuggled them out of the chow hall in their pants. At my price of three dollars per steak I made at least $1,000 that day, which cheered me after the Stephanie fiasco. Merry Christmas to me, I thought, as I microwaved my steak alone that night, slathering it with stolen butter.
The New Year’s present I gave myself was even better; it was my freedom.
After learning about psychology and medical stuff in class, I was hungry to learn more and started borrowing books from Dr. T’s medical library. Every month he lent me a new one. I read about anatomy, the nervous system, and the circulatory system. Then I read all his psych books—Freud, Fromm, Jung, Kinsey, Pavlov, and Skinner.
“Giacomaro, you already know way too much about how people’s minds work and how to sway them,” Dr. T said, as he handed me a book on abnormal psychology. “With what you’re learning now you could be a very dangerous character on the outside.”
It was similar to what Harry said after I got out of the FBI Academy. Dr. T was only half serious, but he needn’t worry. My goal in learning this time wasn’t about that. I was always a smart kid but for so many reasons, never applied myself in school. Now, I really did want to learn.
After I read all the medical books, I devoured the law books. Every prison in the country has a complete law library so an inmate can read up and file appeals—it’s our civil right. One at a time, I took out each law encyclopedia from A to Z and read all night in the conference room. I speed read—I could look at a page and see it in its entirety. I read about criminal law, civil law, and more. Had I not told Princeton to go fuck itself forty years earlier, I might have done this reading on campus at their goddamn law school.
In January 2013 something in one of the updated law books caught my eye. I was reading a section about the Federal Bureau of Prisons and I came across something called the Second Chance Act, which allowed inmates to serve their entire final year of a sentence in a halfway house. President Bush signed the order in 2008, the year I arrived at Allenwood, but it wasn’t exactly advertised at the prison—I’d never heard about it, but it was something I was qualified for.
I immediately wrote a letter. The US Attorney’s Office hadn’t heard from me in a long time—too long, I smiled. One more request and they’d be rid of me for good, I wrote. I urged them to grant me early release under the Second Chance Act. I wrote that letter, and then I wrote another, and a dozen more after that. They already knew what a persistent son of a bitch I could be.
A few months after I sent that first letter, I was playing cards with the guys as my tomato sauce bubbled in the microwave when a counselor came over with the news: I was being given the Second Chance.
Packy Noonan carefully placed an x on the calendar he had pinned to the wall of his cell in the federal prison located near Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Packy was overflowing with love for his fellow man. He had been a guest of the United States Government for twelve years, four months, and two days. But because he had served over 86 percent of his sentence and been a model prisoner, the parole board had reluctantly granted Packy his freedom . . .
Mary Higgins Clark
—The Christmas Thief, November 2004
On August 28, 2013, I put on my new sweatpants and Champion sneakers and packed three laundry bags with my stuff—commissary clothes, spaghetti, olive oil, cheese—to take on the nineteen-hour Greyhound bus ride to New York and the halfway house that would be my new home for the next year.
Like I did with Fat Tony, Golden Boy walked me to the admissions and orientation area with a handful of my young crew. They waited on the bench with me until my name was called.
“How are you guys gonna eat without me?” I asked, and they laughed. But I wasn’t kidding—these poor kids were gonna starve unless one of them got industrious and snagged my kitchen spot.
“Who ya gonna tell all your sob stories to, huh?” I worried about them a bit.
“Giacomaro, let’s go!” a corrections officer called out.
We all got up and one by one, the kids gave me a hug.
“Thanks for being there for me, Mr. Tom,” said one.
“You always made time to talk to me and I really appreciate it,” said another.
“Yo, Old Gangsta . . . thanks, man.”
What those guys didn’t know was that it was me who should have been thanking them. Over three years I became their counselor, big brother, mentor, and father figure. But in helping them, this Old Gangster ended up helping myself.
“You bunch of crybabies!” I said, laughing at their sniffling. “Toughen up!”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I left them with the same sendoff Fat Tony, Hoffa, and The Chin had given me. By now it was tradition: “Always remember,” I told them, as I walked toward the metal exit door, “do the right thing.”
I walked outside, past the barbed wire fence, and didn’t look back. A white van was waiting to take me to the nearest bus station.
What did you expect, a big dramatic exit or something? A getaway car? A shoot-out? This ain’t no bullshit Hollywood movie, and at sixty years old I’d had enough melodramatic endings to last ten lifetimes.
On the bus many hours later, I looked out the window at the road ahead as we passed little towns between Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philly.
I didn’t want to close my eyes; I didn’t want to miss a thing. I felt something I hadn’t in a very, very long time, and I couldn’t place it at first, but it was strong.
It was freedom, yes, but not only the physical kind. I felt happy, sad, excited, exhausted, relieved, regretful, grateful, hopeful, and scared—all those feelings welled up inside me. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass as another transport truck barreled by in the night.
After nearly sixty years of damming them, a river of emotions began pouring out of me and I couldn’t stop it.
For once, I didn’t even try.
And ya know what? It felt fucking fantastic.