5

SING SING

He knew Sing Sing from the movies, the ones he’d watched as a child with his grandfather through clouds of cigar smoke at the Subway Theater. Sing Sing was the Big House, where his hero, James Cagney, framed for murder, landed in Each Dawn I Die. It was where John Garfield, the hood with the good heart, was sent up the river in Castle on the Hudson.

It looks just like the movies, he thought as he passed through the towering redbrick walls on a plateau above the Hudson River. There were the endless tiers of gray cell blocks packed with prisoners in gray uniforms. There was the din of 1,800 inmates and 500 guards trying to keep them in line. There were the glimpses of the Hudson, a reminder that home and family lay just thirty miles down the river.

But the movies had left much out, he discovered, both bad and good. The bad was that much of the prison was a damp dungeon, beset with rodents, roaches, constant filth, and predators. The good almost made up for it: Sing Sing was one big graduate school for gangsters.

*   *   *

“They throw you in quarantine for fourteen days when you get there to make sure you’re not bringing any diseases inside. I don’t know why. They didn’t have to worry about bringing anything in—they had plenty of their own.”

His first breakfast, Al spotted black flecks in his oatmeal. Rat feces, he learned. Some prisoners simply flicked them aside and continued eating. Al threw his away. Handed an orange in his first week, he figured things were looking up. But that was it, a single orange, once a month to keep inmates from getting scurvy. In his bunk, he slept crushed up against a freezing steel wall, feeling the chill from winds on the river. He’d wake up and his legs would be numb from the cold. He could see his breath, even inside.

He was given a uniform with a number. His was 128968.

For the prison’s receiving blotter, he was asked the basics of his crime and background. A clerk typed in his responses.

Reason for crime? “Needed money at the time.”

On friendly terms with accomplices? “Doesn’t know accomplices.”

Occupation? “Odd jobs.”

Employer? “No verifiable employment.”

Social Security number? “?”

Family left behind? “Father, 53. Mother, 49. Two sisters. Wife, 29. Two children.”

Grade reached? “Two years high school.”

Well, close enough. No one cared how much high school he had.

Moved into a cell on an upper tier in B-block, a vast warren of caged men, Al kept to himself, alert to any challenges headed his way. He bought Pall Mall cigarettes at the commissary. When an inmate asked him for one, he said sure and in a friendly gesture, shook a half dozen out of the pack. “Soon as I did, these other guys come over demanding the whole pack. I said, ‘Come by tomorrow, I’ll give you a carton.’ I was ready for them too, I was going to bust them up. But they didn’t show.”

It was the first prison lesson learned: kindness spelled weakness, which was to be avoided at all costs.

A few days out of quarantine, Al spotted a friendly face. Sal Scarpa was from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and had worked with Al’s cousin Gino Crisci. Al also knew Scarpa’s brother Greg, a swaggering member of Joe Profaci’s crime family.

Sal Scarpa was just one year into a fifteen-year stretch for armed robbery, assault, and kidnapping. With a partner and a revolver, he had hijacked a tractor-trailer carrying $12,000 worth of cheese and tomato paste. The heist was a side job. At the time, Scarpa was a $110-a-week organizer for an upholsterers workers local that practiced unionism the same way as Al’s own labor tutor, Sammy Chillemi.

The two cons greeted each other as long lost friends. “Sal told me to come by the ‘Italian table’ and he’d introduce me around.”

The Italian table turned out to be a spot in the cavernous recreation hall where inmates with mob connections ate and talked. It was an exclusive club, criminals of Italian descent only. Next to it was the Irish table, where hoods from Manhattan’s West Side and the Bronx gathered.

The recreation room included a long row of gas burners where inmates could set their pots and cook a quick meal. The Italians made a tomato sauce with pepperoni sticks from the commissary or goods brought by family members. “They had it down to a science. They’d get the tomatoes going, drop in the pepperoni and some salt and pepper everyone kept in their pockets or anything they’d scored from the mess hall. Then set it on the table, where everyone scoops it out of the pot with some bread crusts. It doesn’t sound like much, but in there it was heaven.”

It was a multiethnic food fest. “The Puerto Ricans made rice and beans. The Irish had some kind of stew. You were only allowed twenty-five minutes to use the burners so everyone was rushing to get their sauces going.”

In addition to Scarpa, the regulars at the Italian table included Frank Aliventi, another gangster from Brooklyn. Known as “Frank the Sheik,” Aliventi was doing thirty years for a shooting death during a stickup. The difference in the Sheik’s case was that he was innocent. “Everyone knew he’d taken the rap for a friend of his who pulled the trigger. That’s the way it was. You got caught, you did the time. You couldn’t finger someone else.”

Another regular was Vincent Caserta, a soldier in Vito Genovese’s family known as “Jimmy Red,” who was doing a three to five year term for loan-sharking. Then there was Salvatore “Babe” Vario, another Brooklynite doing time for robbery. He was one five brothers. His older brother, Paul, was a power in the Luchese crime family. More important to Al, they were protégés of his cousin, Joe Schiavo, who had sponsored them as soldiers in the family.

Not that those ranks counted behind bars. Mafia prison etiquette required that the dividing lines between mob families and crews be suspended, Al learned. It didn’t matter what group you belonged to, or what grade you’d achieved. “Everyone was the same, on an equal level. What mattered was that you watched each other’s back, and took care of any guys who turned rat.”

The power assembled around the Italian table was acknowledged throughout the prison. “Even the hacks paid us respect. When we were together, they couldn’t touch us. Alone, they’d make a run at you sometimes. But at our table? We were like bosses.”

Other inmates also paid homage. Convicts were not permitted to approach the group unless invited. Seated at the table one afternoon, Al watched as a compact black inmate in his thirties with a large scar on his neck walked toward them. The inmate stopped several feet away as if at an invisible fence. “Come on over, Reggie,” said a regular, waving. The inmate stepped forward. Reginald Seaborn, Al was told, was a well-practiced killer. He had served as an assassin for Bumpy Johnson, the Harlem drug czar allied with the Genovese family’s branch in Italian East Harlem. Seaborn was doing a five to seven-year hitch for one of his few mistakes. His pistol had failed him as he was trying to gun down a rival in a Harlem bar. “I think he must’ve killed forty or fifty guys out there. But he was a very honorable guy. Everyone liked him.”

Despite the gangland bravado, there was a steady reminder of the consequences they faced. The Italian table sat in the shadow of Sing Sing’s most famous landmark, its electric chair.

“Our table was right across the alley from the death house, where they kept Old Sparky. You’d look right out on where they walked convicts inside, the Last Mile. There were a lot of stories about guys who took that walk.”

Executions had long been a booming business at Sing Sing. By 1962, the year Al arrived, 613 people had been put to death there, receiving the fatal 2,000-volt jolt through moistened electrodes attached to leg and head. Court appeals and growing sentiment against the death penalty had slowed things considerably. There were no executions at all during his first year in prison. But Al was there when the electrodes were strapped on for the last time on August 15, 1963, for the execution of Eddie Lee Mays, who had killed a woman during the robbery of a Manhattan bar.

By that time, Al was friendly with a few inmates who had once sat on death row before their sentences were commuted. “I remember how spooked everyone was that night, how quiet the place got.”

*   *   *

One of the most popular men in the rec hall was a garrulous older Jewish inmate who had been behind bars for decades. Nathan Goldstein was an honorary member of the Irish table. That was thanks to his past close association with Owney Madden, the former beer baron and gangland potentate pushed aside by the Mafia.

“They called him Sonny Gold. He had already done twenty-five years for a hit he did for Madden. He did his first few years in the old cell block by the river, the one where Warner Brothers shot the movie with Spencer Tracy, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. They had a plaque up there about it.”

Sonny Gold was filled with tales of prison life that hadn’t made it into the Warner Brothers version. “He told how the old cells, you could barely fit in there with a bunk and be able to turn around. They had no running water. They’d slide a rusty pie plate of drinking water under the door. You and your cellmate would crap in a night bucket. You had to live with that stinking bucket all night and most of the day. Then they’d march you down by the river to empty it. Cons had to walk single file in chains, with a hand on the shoulder of the guy in front of you. Then you’d fling your bucketload in the river. Sometimes the wind would blow it right back at you.”

Sonny Gold had persevered, thanks in large part to a strong-willed wife who stood by him through his sentence. The wife worked hard, earning enough money to allow her husband to buy himself considerations not allowed other prisoners.

“Sonny had all the top hacks on his payroll.” The most influential was the principal keeper, the prison’s top disciplinarian. While wardens came and went, Al learned, the PK remained. “PK Kelley had been there for years, and he was the one who really ran the place. When Sonny wanted something done, that’s who he went to.”

Gold took a liking to Al and offered to help get him a job as a clerk in the administration office of the hospital prison. Traditionally, well-educated Jewish inmates had a lock on the post. But thanks to his tough schooling by the brothers at St. Patrick’s Academy, Al was a good candidate. “There were a lot of guys in there couldn’t read or write, so they picked me for the file job. It was a nice soft spot.”

To make sure his friend obtained the slot, Sonny Gold met with the principal keeper. “He’s with PK Kelley and he tells him he has three hundred reasons why I should get the job and never get transferred out of there. As he’s talking, he’s counting out $20 bills and dropping them in the wastebasket by Kelley’s desk.”

*   *   *

It was the perfect prison job. He did nothing. “I sat in a little room, every once in a while you had to file a chart or sign out a piece of equipment. That was it.”

Sitting in the office, Al became friendly with Herbert Russell, an older black inmate who worked in a small hospital kitchen next door preparing meals for diabetic prisoners.

“The day I met him he was fixing fresh coffee, which you never got in stir, but he could get it for his patients. He sees me and asks if I’d like a cup. I says, ‘I’d kill for one,’ which was almost true. He laughs and pours me one.”

Russell had spent his own quarter century behind Sing Sing’s walls thanks to his association with another gangland legend. In 1933, Dutch Schultz was expanding his criminal empire to include Harlem’s lucrative numbers rackets. A key obstacle in his path was a prominent member of the Elks club and a congregant at the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church named Martin Harris, who was known as Harlem’s “policy king.” Harris publicly vowed to resist the white intruders.

Posing as police, Russell and three others forced their way into Harris’s West 130th Street apartment. He was shot dead in front of his wife. The allegation, widely trumpeted in Harlem’s much-outraged black press, was that Russell had done the deed at Schultz’s behest. Russell suggested otherwise to Al. “Herbie always said the real story never came out.”

Russell’s first conviction for first-degree murder was dismissed on appeal. A second ended in mistrial. The third time his luck ran out and he was sentenced to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair. On the eve of his execution, however, Governor Herbert Lehman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, saying there were still doubts about Russell’s role in the slaying.

The two convicts enjoyed the relative freedom their prison assignments brought them. “Herbie was in his little kitchen right across from me. We’d just sit and talk about the rackets, about our families, our neighborhoods. I learned a lot talking to him. He was a great guy.”

*   *   *

Not all prisoners were eager to gab. Coming and going in the hospital was an elderly Mafioso named Antonio Russo. Then in his late seventies, Russo kept to himself, speaking to no one. A native of Sicily, Russo had been in prison more than fifty years. As a young man he had been a combatant in the battle between the Camorra and the Mafia for supremacy in the years before World War I. Convicted of three separate murders, one in New Jersey and two in New York, Russo had served twelve years in Trenton State Prison followed by forty-one years in Sing Sing when Al encountered him.

Al would see him each morning when Russo, assigned to work as a hospital gardener, approached his desk to sign out a pair of pruning shears. Each evening he returned them. “He never said a word, but his eyes had this ‘I’m already dead and I got nothing left to lose’ look. It made you not want to bother him. When guys would try to engage him a little, he always said the same thing back: ‘If I no talk to you, you no talk to me, capice?’ Then he’d turn away.”

When Russo’s sentence finally ended in 1964, the state moved to deport him back to his native Sicily. The exit of one of their longest-serving prisoners was a noteworthy event for Sing Sing’s administrators, if not for Tony Russo.

“On his last morning, we’re standing on the breakfast line, and this screw named Garland comes up to him. ‘Russo,’ he says, ‘I’m here thirty-six years and you were already here when I got here. Come in the kitchen and I’ll cook you whatever you like on your last day.’ Tony Russo just points to the table in the dining room. ‘For forty years,’ he tells the guard, ‘I sit at that table and eat what they give me. This morning, I stand on this line, I take what they give me and sit at that table.’”

Stung, the guard turned red and walked away. After watching the exchange, Al decided to say something. “I expected to get the same ‘If I no talk-a to you, you no talk-a to me,’ he always said. But I wanted to wish him well. So I tell him in Sicilian, ‘Tony, tonight you will breathe aria fresca—fresh air—in the land where you were born. Buona fortuna, good luck to you.’ He looks at me and answers back: ‘Yes, I leave today, and I will breathe the aria fresca. But what good will it do me now? Tutte le rose sono lasciato la faccia.’ All the roses have left my cheeks.”

Later that morning, a line of prison officials stood at a side exit near the hospital to say good-bye to the old man. “They were all there, the old-time hacks, the doctors in the hospital, PK Kelley, even Warden Denno. Tony Russo just walks right by all of them. He never even looks in their direction. The warden has his hand out to shake, and Tony goes right past. That was some kind of tough guy.”

*   *   *

Many old-time gangsters had washed up behind Sing Sing’s high walls and were now fading away. Mike Basile had been a bodyguard for Vincent Coll, the freelance enforcer who worked all sides of New York’s bootleg wars. Basile was with Coll when he earned his tabloid tag as “Mad Dog” by strafing an East Harlem street corner with machine-gun bullets, felling a five-year-old boy. A few months later, Coll met his own end, gunned down while sitting in a drugstore phone booth on West Twenty-Third Street. Basile retreated with the remaining gang members to an upstate hideaway in Colonie, New York, near Albany. There, he was wounded in a shoot-out with detectives. Sentenced in 1933 to seventeen to thirty-five years for attempted first-degree murder of a policeman, Basile served the full term.

By the time Al met him, Basile was due to be released. But like aging tough guy Antonio Russo, it wasn’t going to do him much good. “Mike was dying of cancer. They’d never done anything for him in the hospital. He was an attempted cop killer so they wouldn’t really treat him. They just let him get sicker.”

Knowing he was soon to die, Basile told the younger gangster that when he went, Al should help himself to a tin box he kept under his bunk in his cell. “He said, ‘There’s a box there. When they take me outta here, do whatever you want with it. It’s yours.’”

Basile finally did make it out of Sing Sing, only to die in an ambulance on his way to an outside hospital. After he left, Al retrieved the old tin box. “It was filled with newspaper clippings about his life. All the old stories about him and Mad Dog Coll. Them and a couple of prayer cards. That was it.”

*   *   *

As the months ticked by, Al did his best not to worry about his own fate and that of his family back in Brooklyn. Dolores visited every week. Sometimes her father drove her up to Ossining. He’d wait outside in the car for her. As a former felon, he wasn’t allowed in the visiting room.

More often, Dolores came by public transportation. She rode two buses and a subway to get to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, then took the New York Central line, which dropped her a long walk away from the visitors’ entrance to the prison. The first few times she came, she brought Ava Marie, who had just turned four, and Joseph, who was six.

“Joseph didn’t know what the word ‘prison’ meant,” Dolores said of her visits. “I told them this is where their father worked. They didn’t know for a long time.” But Joseph soon started to figure things out. “He started to ask me questions. I thought this wasn’t for a little boy. He didn’t need this.”

Al agreed. “I wanted to have the kids come visit, but after a while I felt like this was something they shouldn’t see.”

For Joseph, the trips in the car with his grandfather to Ossining were an adventure. “There wasn’t much happening in our lives. We had no money to go anywhere. A long ride in a car was a big deal.” He was fascinated by the looming high walls, the gates that buzzed as they approached, and the strange uniformed men everywhere. “I remember sitting in this big room at these long tables, my father on one side, us on the other.” Surveying his surroundings, he looked up and was surprised to see men standing in the corners above them holding guns. “They were standing up above us, like where the priest stood in the pulpit in church, except they all had these big guns.”

He took all of it in. Leaving the prison after a visit, Joseph walked beside his mother as they passed a sunken, fenced-in area where inmates were playing baseball. As they walked, a ball came rolling through the fence. He ran to grab it. “It was like a hard rubber softball. I took it home with me. I had it for years.”

The ball was his one happy souvenir from his father’s prison days. Back in Brooklyn he began to piece things together. “I’d see a movie on TV about prison, and I’d say, ‘Hey, that’s where Daddy is.’” Other reminders came from kids in the neighborhood. “They’d shout, ‘Your father’s in jail. We saw the cops come to your house.’” He didn’t know what they were talking about, but it was enough to start a fight anyway. Like his dad, he was fast with his hands and fast to use them. “I’d be fighting with these kids, even if I didn’t really know why.”

There were occasional letters from his father, decorated with drawings of cars and dinosaurs for the children. “They were few and far between, but my mother would read them to us, show us the pictures. He was pretty good at drawing things.”

On her visits, Dolores assured Al that things were fine at home. Both her parents and his were helping. As proof, she brought sacks of groceries—loaves of Italian bread, cheese, salami, tomatoes.

But things weren’t fine. Without telling him, she applied for welfare. “I had to. No one else had any money. My parents tried to help, but they didn’t have much either.” Welfare brought another official intrusion into the house. “They’d come and look everywhere in the apartment. They’d walk right into the bedroom, look all around. What did they think? I was hiding something?”

Approved for public benefits, she was told her telephone was an unallowable luxury. “Don’t ask me why, but they said I had to get rid of it. So we had no telephone for years.”

In the neighborhood, the visits from the welfare inspectors to the D’Arco household were no secret. It became another taunt Joseph heard in the street, and another cause to use his hands. “‘Your mother’s on welfare,’ they’d yell at me. Pow, right away I’m in another fight, no idea why.”

Al heard about none of this. “Dolores never complained once. She didn’t say nothing about going on welfare to me. She just did it.”

He had an outside chance to get home much earlier and help lift his family out of the hole he’d dug. With good time—months lopped off his sentence in exchange for staying out of trouble—Al was eligible for parole as early as September 1963.

But he had a hard time being good.

*   *   *

“The first time I got tossed in the hole was after I hit a guy in the head with a bucket. I did thirty days for that. But it couldn’t be avoided. I had to fight him.”

The battle erupted when a guard ordered Al to make the rounds of the cell blocks distributing slices of a single-layer sheet cake. The cake had been baked in the kitchen as a treat for prisoners who were too old to leave their cells. “These guys were invalids. They wouldn’t take them in the hospital, so they just stayed in their cells. But you’d try and take care of them. They were our senior citizens.”

He walked around handing out the little cakes, making conversation with the elderly inmates. In prison, sweets of any kind were as good as cash, and like everything else in Sing Sing, the slices were counted. Al was responsible for any shortage. For keeping things orderly, his reward was supposed to be that he got his own slice when he finished.

“I get to this old Italian guy, Frank, on the bottom floor. He had twenty-nine years in and was not in good shape. He says, ‘Al, give me another piece.’ I says, ‘Frank, I can’t, they’re counted. If I give you another piece, I’m going to have to beat somebody else out of a piece.’ He’s looking at me and I say, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna give you the one that’s supposed to be for me.’ So I gave him another slice.”

As Al turned toward the next cell, three tall black inmates blocked his path. “They were big, like basketball players. They seen what I did. But they mistook kindness for weakness. It’s all predators in there. One of the big guys says, ‘Hey, motherfucker, give me some of that cake. I want two slices for me too.’ I said, ‘You want some cake? All right, I’ll give you some cake.’ And I swung the bucket up and smashed it in his face.”

The bucket was steel and the tall man collapsed with a groan, blood spurting from a gash in his head. His two friends grabbed for Al. He tried to fend them off. “I was swinging at the other two guys when the screws jumped us and I got pinched.”

In solitary confinement, the only furniture was a concrete slab covered by a thin horsehair mattress. “Down there, if you give them trouble—any little thing they don’t like, just talking back will do it—first thing they do is take the mattress away. Now you’re sleeping on concrete. Then if they think you’re a real prick, they spray the concrete with a hose to wet it down. You learn fast why they do that. Concrete burns the skin. You get a bad rash. It stings like a bastard.”

*   *   *

It was the first of four trips Al was to make to the hole during his time at Sing Sing. Other infractions earned him a secondary-level punishment known as keep-lock. “They just lock you in your cell. They hang a sign on the outside, ‘Keep Locked.’ You don’t come out for nothing till they’re done with you.” Keep-lock sentences often lasted two weeks, sometimes longer.

With little else to do locked in his cell, Al fashioned a physical regimen. “I had a little metal desk about three feet tall and a wooden chair. I’d take that, lift it up, put it on the bunk. Then I had that much more room and I’d do my exercises, put my feet on the bars and do push-ups, sit-ups. All day long.”

When he’d had enough of his workouts, he’d lie on his bunk and listen to the guard pacing up and down the tier. “The hack on our block was Mr. Johnson, not such a bad guy. He sat in a little office down at the end of the corridor with his desk. Every half hour, he’d come out and walk this way and that way. The hacks had this routine, they’d take their billy clubs and brush them up against the bars as they walked. Made this ratatat-tat sound. It wasn’t to make a racket, but to see if the bar makes a different sound, like a ping. Then they’d know the bar’s been cut.”

There hadn’t been a successful breakout from Sing Sing since 1941 when three convicts killed a guard as they made their getaway. But escape remained a topic of discussion, most of it fanciful. “There were plots, but no one ever made the move. They watched you too close. They’d do a head count every few hours. Wherever you were, everyone froze in place until the count was done. If the number wasn’t right, the hacks would be running all around. The warden would come down. But always it would turn out someone screwed up.”

Inmates had their own communications systems. To stay in touch while locked in their cells, prisoners tapped runners in each block who relayed messages along the tiers and to friends gathered in the yard and the rec hall.

“The runner on B-block was a little guy everyone called Jerry the Jew. If you needed to tell someone anything, you passed the word down the tier to send up Jerry the Jew. The screws used him too, to pick up coffee from the kitchen, whatever they wanted. He pretty much had the run of the place. He knew everything that was going on. You wanted to check out a rumor, you asked Jerry the Jew if he’d heard anything. If he didn’t know, he’d find out. He was better than a telephone.”

Reading was another kind of escape. “I liked to read. I read Moby-Dick in there. And Jack London, and John Steinbeck, his book about the guys in the cannery. I even read dry stuff. Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul. I got into it.” The problem was the light. After dark, he was allowed only a 25-watt bulb for the little lamp permitted in his cell. “My eyes couldn’t take it. You couldn’t get bigger lights. The bulb kills your eyes.”

But trapped in a seven-foot-by-five-foot cage day and night took its own toll. Lying on his bunk, Al stared at the shadows of the bars on the ceiling just as he’d done as a little boy in his Nonna’s bedroom on the top floor on Kent Avenue, imagining what it felt like to be in prison.

So now he knew.

*   *   *

If there was a saving grace it was his constant exposure to the gangsters’ version of the social register. In the four years and three months that Al D’Arco was to spend in Sing Sing, a steady flow of mob-connected inmates passed through its gates. It made for musical chairs at the Italian table. It also offered a network of useful contacts in the outside world of crime.

Al became friendly with an ambitious young criminal named Ralph Masucci, doing time for an embezzlement scam. Masucci was thirty-five and from Greenwich Village. Unlike most of the cons in Sing Sing, he had turned to crime less out of desperation than by choice. His family was fairly well off, he told Al. His father was a successful fruit and vegetable vendor whose customers included many of the city’s biggest nightclubs, including the Copacabana and the Stork Club. His parents wanted Ralph to become a doctor. But like Al, he had been dazzled by the gangsters he had encountered growing up. “He lived just a few blocks from Don Vito Genovese himself and he knew all the guys in the downtown crew of the family.”

Masucci had gone to school with Vincent Gigante, the boxer whose off-kilter bullet had grazed Frank Costello’s head. “He was a couple of years older than the Chin and he had a little dice game going in school. Ralph told how the Chin had come around, all tough talk, trying to shake him down. Ralph knocked him on his ass.”

Masucci sported a boxer’s build himself, and Al thought he looked like he could have done it. But his approach to crime had so far been more mental than muscle. Before his most recent conviction, Masucci had done a short federal stretch for counterfeiting.

The inmates hit it off. “Ralph had ways to make money I’d never heard of. We’d walk around the yard and the cell block, gabbing.”

Another, nervous new prison arrival was the young man Al had seen pushing a hand truck on Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn at the grocery bust-out. He barely remembered Vic Amuso’s name, but he knew the face when he spotted him on B-block.

“No one else at the Italian table knew Vic, so he wasn’t invited over. He was up on the fourth floor with all the black and Spanish cons. You could see he was having a hard time.”

Amuso needed all the help he could get. He was the eleventh of twelve kids from a poor family in south Brooklyn. He’d won his first prison term at the age of twenty-one when he served two years in Green Haven prison. A few months after his release, he was picked up on an assault and robbery charge. He’d beaten that case, but then he’d tried to pull off the single-handed theft of a $3,200 payroll at an ironworks factory in Brooklyn. During the holdup, the factory clerk was shot and wounded. Amuso had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a term of two and a half to ten years.

Al told his pals he knew the kid upstairs was okay and that he should be allowed to join them. He brought Amuso over and introduced him around. Amuso was deeply grateful. “Thank you, Al,” he told him later. “I’ll never forget this.”

Other newly arrived wiseguys needed no introduction, but still appreciated whatever assistance they could get. Al became the self-designated welcome wagon. “Fungi Gambino shows up—he was with the Profaci family. I knew him from Albert the Blast Gallo. His real name was Filippo, and he was doing a bid of two and a half to five, same as me, for burglary. They stuck him in a cell where the bed was all caved in. He showed me—you couldn’t sleep on it.”

Eager to make his friend comfortable in a new place, Al went looking for a better mattress. He found one in an empty cell downstairs. “They’d just shipped out a guy that week so I knew no one was using it. I grabbed the bed outta there and I dragged it around the corner. Fungi is up on the second tier, and I am handing the bed up to him when here comes this hack I knew, his name was Gioia. He says, ‘What the hell are you doing there, D’Arco? Put that bed down. Get to your cell.’ Right away, I squared off on him. I said, ‘You cocksucker,’ and raised my fist. He jumped. He says, ‘Hey, it’s me. I’m a good guy, don’t be swinging at me.’ I said, ‘Okay, you’re right.’ But next thing I know they have me in keep-lock for fifteen days.”

*   *   *

He risked much harsher punishment a few months later over another old acquaintance, one who had been nothing but trouble ever since Al first met him. Patrick Sparks had grown up near Al in north Brooklyn. Al hadn’t seen him since the two men had brawled over an unpaid loan beneath the Myrtle Avenue elevated train, grappling for a gun as terrified Saturday shoppers watched. When he heard Sparks’s voice echoing down from the tiers where new prisoners were held in B-block he recognized it instantly.

“He lived over near Skillman Avenue. His father was black and his mother was Italian. He was real light-skinned and he used the name Anthony Valenti.” Sparks ran with Joe Gallo’s gang in Red Hook. When Sparks asked for a loan of $600, Al agreed. The debtor made the first payment, and then went missing.

“I left messages for him all over but he wasn’t answering. Then on a Saturday I spot him at Skillman and Myrtle.” Sparks was hard to miss. He dressed in the style affected by Joe Gallo’s crew, in a black coat, narrow pants, and the wide-brimmed gingerella hat worn by would-be hoods all over Brooklyn. “First thing, I smacked the silly hat off his head and knocked him down. He pulls out a gun and we’re grabbing for it. I get it away from him and I pull the trigger to shoot, but nothing happens.” Sparks ran. It was the last Al saw of him until B-block.

Al called out to him. “They called him Maverick, because of the dumb hat. I says, ‘Hey, Maverick, what happened?’ He sees me and he’s panicking already. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was wrong,’ he says. He’s leaning over the rail looking down at me and I can see how scared he is. I told him forget about it, that I’d see him when he got into general population. I sent him up a care package of shaving cream, soap, some coffee, and a mirror, the way you did for guys you knew when they first arrived. But I don’t hear anything back from him.”

A few weeks later, he learned why. Sparks had arrived facing a tough fifteen- to thirty-year sentence for having stabbed a liquor store clerk in a $500 robbery. He had promptly sought to make his time easier by offering to be a direct pipeline to the warden’s office on the activities of problem prisoners.

“They gave him a special cell in the Number Five building, the best cell block out by the wall. He was allowed to come and go on the grounds without a pass. Even the guards were scared of him because he was squealing on them too and the warden loved him.”

Around the Italian table, the informant became an urgent topic of discussion. The issue was raised most forcibly by Freddie Sardo, a tall and gaunt man who was a soldier in the Genovese family originally from Hartford, Connecticut. Sardo’s ferocious temper had earned him the nickname of Sudden Death. At the table, and in walks around the prison yard, Sardo loudly announced his hatred of snitches. “It’s an insult to all of us. Everyone thinks this kid is Italian,” he said.

Al listened to the rants, and waited to hear a plan. “Everyone wanted to see this stool pigeon dead, but all they were doing was talking about it. I said I’d take care of it.”

His initial plan was to make his way into Sparks’s cell in Number Five building just as the cell doors were opening in the morning and then, amid the clamor of prisoners filing out for breakfast, plunge a shank fashioned from a jagged piece of metal from the machine shop into his neck before he could cry out. As a backup, he carried a guitar wire in his pocket. “I was going to garrote him if I could. This was stuff they trained us to do in the Army. I knew I could do it.”

But his dreams of enemy combat were again frustrated. Three times, Al snuck into Sparks’s cell block. Three times the informant was not to be found.

Plan number two called for surprising Sparks at the weekly movies shown in the prison hall. This time Al’s weapon of choice was a heavy metal bar from the prison repair shop, wrapped in cloth and electrical tape at the bottom so as not to leave fingerprints. He hid it inside his trousers. “I figured when the lights went down and everyone was temporarily blinded, I could smack him in the back of the head hard enough maybe to at least put him out of action for a while.”

His co-conspirators were Jimmy Red Caserta and Fungi Gambino, who would surround Sparks so no one could see. “Jimmy was really anxious and wanted to get to the movies early. I said we should wait because he’d see us and get spooked.” This proved true. Just before the lights went off, Sparks spotted the three cons headed his way.

“He starts yelling, ‘He’s gonna kill me! He’s gonna kill me!’ and he’s running and jumping over people’s chairs, climbing over their heads. Jimmy Red yells, ‘Get him, get him!’ Now the whole place is one huge riot, everyone’s screaming.”

Al chased after Sparks but the lights came back on. He dropped the rod. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. The three hustled out of the hall. They made it back to B-block without being stopped. Al stretched out on his bunk, trying to look like he’d been there for hours.

A few minutes later, Jerry the Jew came running down the corridor. “Did you hear what happened over in the hall? Someone tried to kill that rat Sparks,” he said.

Al looked up. “Jerry, just remember, I was here all night, right?”

The runner’s jaw slipped. “Yes you were, Al.” He turned to go, then added: “Hey, Al, I’m proud of you!”

For two days, nothing happened. The would-be assassins thought they had gotten away clean. Then the “Keep Locked” signs came out and all three were locked into their cells. They remained there for five days before being brought to a disciplinary hearing. They faced the likelihood of criminal charges with heavy increased sentences if found guilty.

“We’re brought into this office. I’m looking around for other guards because usually there are witnesses against you, but there’s just us and these two captains in there.”

The inmates had nicknames for the top prison officials. “Captain Fitzgerald was heading the hearing. We called him ‘Cherry Nose’ because he had this big honker with red veins that got redder when he got agitated.” Sitting alongside Fitzgerald at a long desk was an especially brutal officer named Captain Taylor. He was dubbed “Captain Munsey.” It was an inside joke with the convicts. Munsey was the name of the vicious prison captain played by Hume Cronyn in the 1947 Burt Lancaster film Brute Force. The movie, in which an informant is crushed by a huge stamping machine, was a prison favorite.

Captain Fitzgerald confronted the prisoners with the metal rod and shank they had dropped in the movie hall. “Are these yours?” Al was asked.

“No,” he said. Fitzgerald’s nose began to redden. Taylor stepped out from behind the desk, pounding his baton into an open palm. Photos of Sparks and his friends were presented.

“Do you know these men?”

Al took the pictures and looked at them. “No,” he said, passing them to Caserta and Gambino.

“No,” they said.

Fitzgerald started shouting. “Don’t fool with us. We know you mob guys did it. And we know why!”

The inmates said nothing. A frustrated Fitzgerald pulled out another photo. “And I suppose you don’t know this guy either?” he said. Al peered at a picture of himself.

“No, but he looks familiar,” he cracked.

As he spoke, Captain Taylor punched Al in the side of the head, then jammed his billy club into his stomach. Al doubled over.

Fitzgerald exploded out of his chair. “Stop it, stop it. We’re not going to have that.” Taylor stiffened, his hands still in fists, his baton poised.

Fitzgerald glared at the inmates. “Look you guinea bastards, I’ll not frame you. But we know you did it, and if I see you back here anytime soon, I’ll turn this guy loose on you.”

Al later learned how they’d beaten the rap. The guards at the movie had been so delighted to see Sparks’s panicked rush across the hall that they’d all said they didn’t see the attackers. Sparks was placed in special protective custody. It was almost as effective, if not as satisfying, as having completed their attack, since he was now out of the informant business. Sparks was later moved upstate to Clinton prison near Plattsburgh, where his good citizenship helped win him early parole. “I heard after he got out, he stayed up there, which was a smart move on his part.”

A few weeks after the hearing, officials moved to break up the trio. Gambino was shipped out to Attica prison, near Buffalo, a tough commute for his family. Caserta was dispatched to Green Haven, a few miles north in Dutchess County.

For Al’s part, he had already blown his first parole date. Now a second flew by. Then a third. He steadily lost credit for good time that might have hastened his return to his family.

On the other hand, he savored the applause he received at the Italian table for having taken the initiative to silence the hated informant.

*   *   *

In Sing Sing, newspapers were handed from cell to cell. “When it was your turn, Jerry the Jew would bring you the News or the Mirror, whatever we could get.” By the time it arrived, the paper was dog-eared and torn. Some articles had been ripped out.

In the fall of 1963, the Italian table inmates pored over the papers. The big news wasn’t the death of the president, which came a few weeks later and was of markedly less interest. It was the front-page photos and stories of an unthinkable event: Genovese soldier Joseph Valachi, aka Joe Cago, his hand raised in the air, giving sworn testimony about the Mafia to a United States Senate committee.

“This is gonna be very, very bad,” said Frank the Sheik Aliventi, a reaction shared around the table.

No one was more stunned than Freddie Sardo, the mobster who complained loudest about hating snitches. Sardo, Al learned, had been Joe Cago’s longtime partner in crime. Before Valachi’s photo showed up in the papers, Sardo was under the impression his pal was serving his own stretch in federal prison in Atlanta. But the stories explained how Valachi, fearing he had been marked for death by his boss, Vito Genovese, had split the skull of another convict he believed had been dispatched as his assassin. Except he’d killed the wrong man. And shortly after that mistake, he had fled into the arms of the FBI for protection.

“Freddie Sardo wasn’t saying anything, but you could tell he was worried. He was in on a parole violation after serving a long bid for murder in Dannemora prison. He was wondering if anyone was looking at him cross-eyed for what his partner had done. I think he was trying to figure out if he was safer inside prison or out.”

*   *   *

Informants at least were a threat that Al and the Italian table understood, much as they loathed them. Far murkier was another prison peril that haunted the gangster convicts almost as much. That was the policy aimed at thwarting prisoner sexual activity by alerting families back home that inmates were associating with known homosexuals.

Sex was common in Sing Sing. But to the outlaws gathered around the Italian table, it was an infamia, shameful and unforgivable conduct. The homosexual ban was one law they supported wholeheartedly.

“If the prison saw you even talking with anyone suspected of being a fag, they’d write a letter home to your family saying you were associating with someone suspected of homosexual conduct.”

Al made it a point to shun anyone suspected of socializing with homosexuals in the prison. “I maintained myself like a monk in there. I didn’t let anyone come near me.”

His concern led him to abruptly shut off all contact with a prisoner he’d grown to like and admire.

Morris “Moishe” Malinsky was forty-three years old and serving his fourth term in prison when Al met him at Sing Sing. Another tough kid from Brooklyn, he was the son of Russian immigrants. As a teenager, he did three years at Elmira Reformatory for assault and robbery. Released in 1941, he was arrested with two of his Elmira roommates for the murder of a policeman who had been escorting the manager of the Loews Coney Island theater on Surf Avenue to a bank to deposit $770 in box-office receipts. The bandits gunned down the patrolman and snatched the cash.

Captured and charged with first-degree murder, Malinsky was convicted in 1943 and sentenced to die in the electric chair by Judge Samuel Leibowitz, Brooklyn’s most famous jurist. He spent three years on death row at Sing Sing before the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision, citing evidence that cops had beaten Malinsky into confessing. He’d been taken to the sixth floor of the Hotel Bossert on Montague Street in downtown Brooklyn, where detectives stripped him naked, beat him, and threatened to throw him out the window if he didn’t tell them what they wanted.

At his retrial, it was revealed that prosecutors had supplied witnesses in the case with hookers and cash. Acquitted, Malinsky sobbed his thanks to the jury.

Granted a second chance at life, Malinsky simply became a more sophisticated criminal. He became manager of the New York Pickle and Condiment Dealers Association, the lead group in what was then a $10 million city industry. In 1956, he was convicted on federal coercion and extortion charges for using a corrupt union to instill “fear and terror” in pickle dealers to get them to join his association. He got three years.

Back on the streets, he was arrested in 1961 while tunneling into a drug-supply warehouse in Long Island City. He was serving that sentence when Al met him.

“Moishe used to come down to my cell to talk. He talked about the death house and how he’d handled that. He could tell a great story, and he knew a lot of wiseguys. He knew the labor rackets and he’d spent time out in Las Vegas.”

The storytelling came to an abrupt end one day when Jerry the Jew stopped by Al’s cell. “He says, ‘Al, can I talk to you? I want to tell you something. Moishe just wrote a letter to this female impersonator who was in here. He’s doing some kind of show at this club on Fourth Street in the city and Moishe’s writing to him.’”

“Get the fuck outta here,” said Al.

“No, I swear it’s true,” said Jerry.

Al listened. He imagined Dolores getting one of those letters about his socializing habits.

Al told Ralph Masucci what he’d heard. Together they went up to Malinsky’s cell. When they got there, Malinsky was fixing himself a lunch of tomatoes and lettuce he had taken from the mess hall.

“Hello, guys,” he greeted them. “Help yourself.”

Al stood at the door. “You come by my cell again and I’ll kill you,” he yelled.

“What’d I do?” cried Moishe.

“You want to come near my cell? Are you out of your mind? Stay away!”

His reputation preserved, Al went back downstairs.

*   *   *

He was marking his fourth full year in prison when inmates went on a sit-down strike to protest parole rules. On January 3, 1966, immediately after breakfast, 1,550 of the 1,821 prisoners in Sing Sing refused to report to their work assignments in the shops and galleys. There was a brief riot in the yard where some inmates started breaking up the ballfield stands. Corrections officers marched them back to their cells. Prisoners locked themselves in and refused to come out.

In B-block, Al was a prime agitator. “We all stuck together. A couple of guys didn’t want to do it. In fact, one of them was a Genovese guy from the West Side who was friends with the Chin. We told them either they lock themselves in or we’d do it for them. They went along.”

The prisoners were demanding mandatory time off for good behavior of up to a third of their term. That rule was already on the books, but parole officials frequently overruled it, citing prisoners’ lack of jobs or housing on the outside.

Word of the protest rippled up and down the prison grapevine, sparking sit-ins at correction facilities around the state. It was an echo of a similar statewide sit-in over parole inequities that lasted for two days in November 1961, shortly before Al’s arrival. Sing Sing warden Wilfred Denno had helped end that protest by telling prisoners he agreed with their complaint, and that he’d push for state legislation to remedy the inequities in the system. No one was punished for the protest, but the legislation never passed.

As far as Al was concerned, his parole hearings were just a formality. Even if he’d behaved himself, he was sure he’d have been denied early release. “They would’ve never let me out. You go to those hearings and the parole commissioners, the top guy was Oswald, would make a big deal about your plans for after prison. He’d go, ‘Oh, what are you going to do when you get out? Oh, you don’t have a job?’ Well of course I don’t have a job. I’m stuck in Sing Sing. It was all a fake.”

In January, the warden helped end the new sit-in by promising there would be no retaliation against the strikers, and that he’d try again to win the reforms. After two days, the inmates went back to work.

In April, three months after the protest, Al was released on parole. He would serve the last nine months of his sentence at home. “They couldn’t hold me any longer. It was mandatory release. I did my time.”

Dolores and her father picked him up. It was a sunny spring day in April. “I remember looking at the river and everything outside and thinking, Wow, you could almost forget what the rest of the world looks like in there.”

When Joseph came home from school that afternoon his mother was standing in the living room. She hadn’t told him his father was coming home that day from prison. But then she hadn’t really told him he’d ever gone. “My mother goes, ‘Oh, I have a surprise for you!’ And then the door swings shut and my dad is hiding behind it.” The ten-year-old stared at the father he hadn’t seen in four years. “It was like boom—there he is. I ran to him and was hugging him and crying.” Holding his father, he thought how strange it was that they were in the same spot where his father had tied his shoes years before and said good-bye.