RUSS AND JOE were successful men now. Through the war, both, together with their wives, had continued to live in the immigrant way, with extended family in narrow houses in the old part of town, near the mills and mines, one cramped bedroom to each nuclear family, each day a multigenerational hullabaloo of groans and sighs and smells and squabbles. After the war, both men bought houses in newer neighborhoods, Joe near the river in Dale and Russ on Rambo Street in Roxbury, the kind of neighborhoods with neat, modest streets filled with middle-class families, with Packards parked out front and Schwinns leaning against fences.
By now Russ and Mary had three children, what would be their complete family. Millie and Joe struggled in that department; they apparently tried to have a child, but something was wrong with one or the other of them. Finally, they adopted a baby girl.
There were wild amounts of money flying around now. One of Tony’s early memories: “I walked into the bedroom one day, and my dad had more cash than you ever saw stacked all across the bed, must have been fifty grand. I realize now he was making the banks for different bookies.” But you didn’t act like you were swimming in cash. Joe and Russ wore nice suits, but sober, and never tailored. They drove Buicks; there was a no-Cadillacs rule in effect.
Joe also bought a big house in Pompano Beach, Florida, at this time, next to LaRocca’s vacation house, and both Joe’s and Russ’s family began making regular winter trips there.
Maybe the money got to Russ. He stayed quiet and reserved, because that’s what you did. But forces inside him were stewing.
The two families shared a housekeeper. Isabel was her name. She came from Altoona—forty-five miles away. It was Russ who found her—or, rather, she found him. He was in Altoona one night for a big card game, which was at the house of a guy Russ knew named Don Schmittel, who worked for LaRocca there. Don introduced them. Russ, I’d like you to meet my sister. Isabel, this is Russ. Isabel mentioned that she needed a job. She was tall, lanky, with lazy eyes. Russ said he could find something for her. She started doing the cleaning at his and Mary’s house in late 1948.
Russ’s drinking—his serious, medicinal drinking—began around this time too. Maybe it came on with the first rushes of cash, the cascades of ones and fives and tens and twenties, the gnarled bankrolls from the pockets of the bookies dumped onto the desktop. Maybe when he got his first handgun. Maybe when they had to start threatening people who tried to welch on bets. Maybe, when things got a little bit rough, he needed to fortify himself.
At home, the fights had begun. Mary could deal with drunkenness. Drunk husbands were everywhere. Johnstown’s police records of the time seemed to use “staggering” as a synonym for drunkenness. “Staggering on sidewalk.” “Slumped over.” Can I give you a hand, buddy? All the old guys talk about how the whiskey flowed. “In those days whiskey was more powerful,” one of them assured me. “So when people were drunk they were really drunk. They would piss their pants, they would bounce off the wall and fall dead asleep on the pavement.” And it was always whiskey, always hard liquor. You sat down to shoot the breeze and somebody poured you a shot. Buy you a shot? Shot-and-a-beer? Mary didn’t mind the drinking. In fact, she was known to abet it, hand him a bottle to help him pass out—better that than him running around on her.
Mary found out about one woman, a waitress named Tess, who worked next door to City Cigar, at the Mission Inn, who was bold enough to phone the house and ask for him. She went ballistic: screaming, firing dishes and glasses at Russ. Then she heard about another, name of Tootsie, and that was enough. Mary and Russ had just had their second child. Mary carried the baby to Russell’s sister Perina, who was living in Franklin. Perina had become the matriarch of Russ’s family—they called her “the General.” Perina was the only person, besides Little Joe, with any authority over Russ. Mary thrust the baby at her: “Here, you can raise him.” Eventually Perina got her to calm down by telling her she would talk to Russ.
But Mary didn’t see what was right under her nose. When did the snuggling with Isabel start? It could have been one day while Mary was out for lunch with a group of lady friends, or over at her sister Vera’s house: Vera had an abusive husband and needed her older sister just then. Maybe Isabel was changing the sheets on the marital bed and he came up from behind; he couldn’t resist, she didn’t say no.
But my dad’s cousin Minnie—who was Russ’s niece, knew him well, worked for him at City Cigar, considered him a good man, loved him—thinks it started before Isabel entered his employ. She told me Isabel made a play for Russ the night they met at her brother’s house. “Russ was a good-looking Italian guy, and everyone knew he had money, he was on the rise.” That, of course, is a darker scenario. It would mean that he knowingly planted a psychological landmine in his family home. If that were the case, I would have to back up, rethink his entire relationship with Mary, restart my whole study of this man and what formed him. Which I can’t do: he hid things too well. One time Tony said to me, speaking of his father, “He never stepped out of character.”
Lots of guys back then had mistresses. But what kind of person would bring his mistress into his household? And not just that. Tony tells me Isabel was a constant presence. She lived with the family for a time. They took her on vacations with them. These weren’t little weekend getaways either. The modesty rule applied in town, but once you were out of town you could let loose with your wealth. An extended network of friends and family members packed off together for a month every summer in Atlantic City, staying at Haddon Hall, the classiest place in town, in a suite of rooms overlooking the ocean, with room service and their own reserved corner of the dining room. The place was so posh, the bathroom sinks had three faucets: hot, cold, and ice-cold. (“The kids drank so much ice water they would go to the bathroom constantly!” my dad’s older cousin Marcia said.) Everyone dressed for dinner. In the evenings they regularly went to the 500 Club, the legendary place—it was onstage at “The Five” that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis took off as a comedy duo—whose mobster owner, Skinny D’Amato, was a friend of Joe’s.
At Haddon Hall the family had all the servants they could want. So why bring their housekeeper with them? As a babysitter, one might proffer. But they also brought Marcia expressly to watch the little ones. (She told me with amazement that Russ handed her a $100 bill every day to amuse the kids on the boardwalk, and gave another hundred to Tony, who was older and was allowed to go off on his own. In the early ’50s, needless to say, a C-note bought a lot of taffy.)
So what was Isabel’s role? What did Mary think?
Late in that first year, Isabel had to leave for a while; she went back to Altoona. Sometime later Joe and Millie made a little announcement. They were adopting another child, a son. Wonderful—let’s have a toast. And now that they had two children, Millie would need some help around the house. Everybody decided that Isabel, when she came back, would work for them too.
And that’s what they did, Joe and Russ. For years and years it went on like that. As the gambling empire waxed, as numbers were played and payoffs were made, as they took over more and more legit local businesses, as Russ began to slide downhill, going from slightly unstable to dangerously unreliable. As Russ and Mary fought about other women. As Tony and his siblings grew up.
“Isabel’s mother wanted to take the baby and raise him,” Minnie told me. “But Isabel didn’t want that. She thought she was going to get Russell to marry her.” But he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he and Joe decided the way things would be.
And yet, Joe didn’t play an active role in this decision. Because as time went by a regular routine evolved at Joe’s house. Isabel would clean the house, then get out: she and Millie made sure she left before Joe got home, because he wasn’t comfortable with her being around. He seems to have agreed to the arrangement at the outset because Russ wanted it, but over time the psychodynamics became too messy for him.
Naturally Russ, Joe, and Millie knew about the con from the outset—and Isabel was in on it, of course, though against her will. Of the adults involved, only Mary was out of the loop. She would, as the years passed, feel self-conscious, aware of others—Millie’s relatives, friends of Joe—giving her pitying looks, whispering, but not knowing the cause. The kids didn’t know. And Joe and Millie’s little boy—another Joe, whom they called Joey to avoid confusion—had no idea that Millie wasn’t his mother, that the guy he called dad, who was the big boss in town, wasn’t his dad, but that the one he called Uncle Russell was.
As Russ saw it, it was an arrangement that worked out for everyone. This way, see, Isabel could keep near her son. Making his bed, picking up after him. Why, it was almost like she was his mother.
The con became part of everyone’s life. It worked its way into Russ and Mary’s household. My aunt Sis was aware of it on some level. She was eight years younger than Tony, but remembers being a little girl watching her father lying on the couch moaning in a drunken stupor and observing the odd behavior of the housekeeper stroking his head and soothing him with words whispered into his ear.
Did Tony see any of this in the early days? He was the eldest, seven years older than the next sibling, which meant he was probably the only one old enough to truly be aware, to be formed by the nexus of his dad’s business dealings, affairs, and drinking. What did he see?
He saw a lot. It’s 1949; he’s eleven. Cars are pulling up in front of the house, men in their baggy suits stepping out, the loud report of leather heels on the porch floor, deep laughter filling the living room. Important men. Sam Di Francesco was recognizable from the papers: the newly minted district attorney, whose rags-to-riches life the Tribune had just declared “outdoes heroes of Horatio Alger.” A local hero! They pulled him in. He was a paesan, after all. He put some skin in the game, too, became a participant in their latest venture. Russ and Joe had taken over the lease on the Heidelberg, the old German-American Club, which had been shut down during the war. They were going to call the new place Shangri-La. It would be a big supper club in the woods, out toward Ligonier, on the way to Pittsburgh. It was gonna be posh as hell. They needed Sam to do some work for it. “The problem was the place was just over the town line, where you couldn’t have a liquor license,” my dad said. “With Sam’s help, they actually got the line moved, so they would pay city taxes, and that way they could sell liquor.” I had heard this story before, but this time, as Tony retold it, I was aware of something in his voice—pride, I think.
LaRocca, the Pittsburgh boss, came to the house, too, around this time. He was going to be a partner in Shangri-La. Even at his age Tony knew who he was. Everybody knew who he was. He had a serious edge about him. You treated him with respect.
There were other things the boy took note of. Maybe it wasn’t especially odd that Tony’s mother had new things all the time, but she got them in a way that none of his friends’ mothers did. The big card games were going on now in the back room at the bowling alley, and when Russ had roped in a whale—Joe Marks, say, of Marks Apparel, across Main Street from City Cigar—he would sometimes agree to take his winnings in goods. He’d come home and give Chinky an order: Go down to Marks and do some shopping. Take as much as you can carry. The manager would watch as she browsed, assist her as she tried on dresses and coats, package everything up nicely. Instead of paying, she would sign a piece of paper, deducting the amount from the gambling debt.
Or, out of the blue, a brand-new RCA television set arrives from Glosser Brothers Department Store, unasked-for but, as far as Tony was concerned, wildly welcome. And just like that the household is transformed by the ten-inch screen, which broadcasts snow all day long but then flickers into extraordinary life from 7 to 10:30 p.m.: Ed Sullivan. The Morey Amsterdam Show. Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Texaco Star Theatre.
Sometimes a case of cleaning supplies would arrive on the front porch: “20 Mule Team Borax.” Or chewing gum. Or candy bars.
To a kid, this was all like a pirate’s booty. Because it was. It was also normal, for his family. Tony knew perfectly well what was behind it. He knew all about the G.I. Bank and the tip seals. Mostly he picked things up from overhearing conversations. But once his dad gave him something like a formal introduction to the business. Russ had a good pal named George Bondy, who owned the Mission Inn next door to City Cigar and was involved in the organization. One time Russ and George took Tony to Atlantic City with them. Even the drive down was memorable. George had a Cadillac; he told Tony to stick his arm out his window while he did the same on his side. “Now flap your arm! We’re taking off!” Most of their working vacation was spent at the racetrack. The energy in a roaring crowd of gamblers was thrilling. Russ gave Tony some money, talked to him about horses, and Tony listened as if his future depended on it. Pedigree and handicapping; how to bet, how to work with odds; the difference between an exacta and a quinella. “I won fifty bucks!” my dad told me. “I was on top of the world!” Russ sat back and watched as his boy clutched his tickets and cheered.
They went to an illegal casino while they were there and Russ gave his son a direct insight into what he did. “I was mesmerized by the slot machines,” Tony said. “He gave me a real stern look. ‘Listen. They want you to be dazzled by all the lights so that they can take your money. Its designed to beat you. You can’t win. You get it?’ And I did get it. I never became a gambler.”
These moments, I was beginning to realize, gave Tony an expectation, a feeling that he was being groomed for something.
But Isabel. Did Tony see anything there? A quick caress or a swap of glances, the kind of thing that, though barely glimpsed, might send a juvenile psyche into free fall? If so, he buried it. There was no trace of it in the memory of the old man who was my fellow researcher. But as a child he certainly experienced the fall-out from his father’s affairs. He was aware at least in a subliminal way of a dagger being slowly plunged into the heart of his family unit; the energy from it zinged through him like electricity. Yet just when he was sensing his father’s perfidy, and was ready to sympathize with his mother, she quashed it by letting him know that he and his siblings were to blame for her predicament. She only stuck around, she told him, “because of you kids.” And well into her own self-medicating with alcohol, she would put an even finer point on it: “You’re the reason I suffer.”
As Russ’s carrying-on continued, Mary’s feelings of being trapped became overwhelming. “What really stands out is the time my mother cut up all the furniture,” Tony said. “It was new, expensive stuff. She took a knife and slashed the couch and all the chairs, stabbed the cushions, the stuffing was flying.” Tony took charge that time, got his little brother and sister out of the house. He wasn’t old enough to drive but he got them in the car anyway and took off.
“Where did you go?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember I didn’t want the kids to see that.”
As things spiraled downward, and feeling he had nowhere else to turn, Tony sought out the parish priest, a certain Father Francis. He didn’t express his predicament directly to Father Francis. He didn’t say, “I’m afraid at home.” He tried to translate his dilemma into the kind of lingo he figured a man of God would go for. “What,” he asked, “is the most important thing in the Bible?”
You might expect Father Francis to come back with “forgiveness,” or “love,” or “mercy,” or “Jesus died for our sins.” Or maybe to turn things around, ask the boy some questions about his situation, try to figure out what kind of answer would help him.
But no. He replied: “ ‘I am that I am.’ ” That, he informed the boy, was the most important thing in the Bible. One of the broadest, most obscure lines in the Old Testament. A dereliction of priestly duty, if you ask me; a failed opportunity to help a desperate young member of his congregation. Moses, in Exodus, is tending a flock when he comes upon the burning bush. God speaks to him from within the bush, instructs him to tell the Israelites that he has been ordered to lead them out of bondage. It’s when Moses asks what name he should attach to the deity issuing the command that he gets the mind-tripping response. “I am everything” might have been one attempt at translating its meaning. Or the priest might have helped by pointing out that in the same passage the Lord also says, “I am the God of your father.” Or at least he could have talked about the various interpretations of the Hebrew verb “to be.” But the priest didn’t clarify. He left the boy alone with a verse whose meaning has been debated by centuries of theologians.
And yet, somehow, the elliptical scripture inflicted on the eleven-year-old worked. It turns out the kid had a spiritual bent; he was a lover of koans and parables, things that upset the neat, rational template we try to impose on reality. He chewed on the linguistic twistiness of what the priest had said.
And he kept chewing. Zip forward a generation, and there I am, as a kid, about the same age as my dad was, having a theological conversation with him, sparked by what I don’t recall. And my father defined God for me with the same formulation. I don’t know how Father Francis intoned it to him, but Tony was an exuberant dad when I was young, who would get fully into character when he was telling a story, and he declaimed the verse in a theatrical baritone, as if he were doing voiceover for a Cecil B. DeMille movie, as if he had become Elohim, the God of the Israelites:
“I am … that I am!”
When—no-nonsense child that I apparently was—I asked prosaically what it meant, he just repeated the phrase, this time with such resonance I heard the echo of his voice upstairs in the hall that led to our bedrooms.