by Linda Scarpa
“Why are you asking that?”
“Because I saw a movie, and the girl’s daddy died. Are you going to die?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He always used to tell me that and I really believed him, up until I was in my twenties. I didn’t want anything to happen to my father.
Once when I young, he came home with bruises on his arms. I asked what had happened, and he told me that the bad policeman did that to him. I asked why and he said because policemen weren’t nice.
Not long after that, I was driving in the car with my mother, and a police cruiser pulled up next to my side of the car when we were stopped at a red light. The policemen looked over at me and started waving. I opened my window and yelled at them.
“You’re bad. You hurt my daddy. I don’t like you.”
My mother was horrified.
“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She didn’t mean that.”
The cops didn’t know what to think because here was this sweet-looking little girl yelling at them, telling them that she didn’t like them because they hurt her daddy.
During this time my father was running his crew from the Wimpy Boys Social Club on Thirteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, an old Italian neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn. The club moved to a second location on Thirteenth Avenue later, but I really didn’t go there much.
Back in the day there were Mob-run “social clubs” from different crime families on almost every avenue in Brooklyn. My father’s name for his club was, of course, ironic because “wimpy” was the exact opposite of what they all were.
There were about thirty guys in his crew, either full-blooded Italian or of partial Italian descent. Some were made men, while others were young associates—mobsters in training hoping to become members of the Colombo crime family.
There were Mob guys everywhere. They would just hang outside—sometimes on lounge chairs—drinking and smoking cigarettes. Everything was so open back then and everybody was just so free-spirited. No one was thinking about the cops. That’s just the way it was. That’s how I remember Brooklyn.
My father usually left the house at 11 A.M. to go to the club and he’d be back by 5 P.M. for dinner. We all had to be in the house by that time and have dinner together. Dinner was at five, every day. He left whatever he was doing at the club to be home with us.
No matter what they had going on—card games, whatever—he’d tell his crew: “Time for me to go.” If he wanted to have a talk with the members of his crew after dinner, they would have to come to the house. It was very rare that he went back out after dinner, unless he was going out with my mother.
But during the day the social club was where they met to talk business, take care of business and play cards. They ran numbers from the club, gambled and lent money; I’m sure they planned a lot of hits there. The club was the place where they had to show face every day. Like a regular job, they had to be there.
And they all had to be dressed appropriately. They couldn’t go there looking like slobs, because my father wanted everybody to be clean-cut. His crew had to look like they were ready to do business, not like they were ready to hang out in the streets. My father was very strict about it.
A friend of mine, Sal, who used to hang out there, told me that he went to the club one day without shaving. My brother Greg told him he had to go home.
“Why do I have to go home?” Sal asked.
“When you come back with a clean shave, you can come in the club,” Greg said. “But until then you have to go.”
When we were kids, my mother used to drive Joey and me to the club if she had to see my father. We were really young, but I remember that it had wood paneling and carpeting and my father’s office was in the back.
Whenever my brother and I used to walk in there—I was about eight or nine, and Joey was about six or seven—the guys would all give us money. Well, actually, they’d give me money; they used to make Joey work for it.
My brother took gymnastics and he was good at it. He used to walk on his hands. He could walk across a room—and even walk down steps—on his hands. The guys would say to Joey, “I’m going to bet you that you can’t walk from this side of the club to the other side of the club.”
“I can do it! I can do it,” Joey would say.
“All right, twenty dollars if you can do it.”
“Well, if I walk back and forth, then I want double.”
By the time Joey walked out of the club when it was time to go home, he’d have $50 or more. Joey loved going there because it was such fun for him—most of the time.
My father’s friend “Scappy”—Colombo capo Anthony Scarpati and my father’s “boss”—was the one who always bet my brother couldn’t walk on his hands across the club. Scappy was always teasing my brother. He’d give him a wedgie or just do things to annoy him. It was okay if it was in good fun, but my father didn’t like anybody teasing Joey or me.
One day Scappy put ice cubes down the front of my brother’s pants. Joey got really upset and started crying. My father yelled at Scappy and told him never to do that to Joey again, which was crazy because Scappy was the boss. But Scappy never did it again. The truth is that Scappy treated us unbelievably well, but he just liked to tease my brother. And my father didn’t like that at all.
We loved going to the club because there was a candy store right across the street—we used to say it was our candy store because we could get anything we wanted and we never had to pay for it. Then there was the luncheonette next door. When we visited my father, he’d take us there for breakfast or just to get a couple milk shakes.
They also had those chocolate egg creams, although there weren’t any eggs in them. They were made with milk or half-and-half and soda water and either vanilla or chocolate syrup. Egg creams were big in Brooklyn because it was rumored that the guy who invented them came from the neighborhood. We loved going to the club because we could go to the luncheonette and sit with my father for a while.
That old club had a warm feeling to it, but the new club was kind of cold. We really didn’t like it. What I remember most about the new club was the steps going downstairs. You didn’t ever want to go down those steps. Well, if you were a guy, you didn’t want to take the walk down those steps because you were going to get a beating or worse. We were never allowed down the steps.
You could see my father’s office as soon as you walked in, so he had two-way glass installed. He could see out, but nobody could see in. I always thought it was pretty cool. As I got older, I realized why that was necessary.
Joey didn’t like it at that club because now that he was older, he really didn’t like some of the guys. Joey told my father that he didn’t want any part of them. And that’s the way he felt throughout his life.
CHAPTER 3
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR FATHER IS?
We lived in the house on Fifty-Fifth Street until I was around seven; then we moved to Avenue J in Brooklyn. We moved because my parents found a better house, plus we were on a dead-end block on Fifty-Fifth. My father didn’t like living on a dead-end block—he felt he didn’t have a way out. If anything went down, he would have been trapped.
Our first experience on Avenue J was when the kids around the block started throwing mud balls at me and my brother. My father had to go and talk to their fathers. That was our first day there. We were miserable; we hated living there at first. But things eventually got better.
Although I hated the neighborhood, I loved our house on Avenue J, especially my room. I had pictures of all the hot movie and TV stars tacked up on my walls: John Stamos and Scott Baio—Chachi from Happy Days—I loved him. He was all over my room. I always had beautiful furniture in my room. It was Formica back then, but it was all white Formica.
The rest of the house was mainly brown and white—my mother’s favorite colors. We had bamboo wallpaper and brown furniture. Really fancy furniture, big wall units, the best TVs and sound systems. We had the most up-to-dat
e gadgets in the kitchen—things other people didn’t have, except my father’s friends. Whatever was new, we had it in the house. We even had a tanning room in the basement.
Our house was always the place where everyone wanted to be. My father was a very big family man, and he was very into holidays and birthdays. His friends, their wives or girlfriends, my aunts, uncles and cousins all came to the house on Avenue J for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We had a huge table. My father and mother did most of the cooking. My brother and I couldn’t wait for the holidays. It was the best time for us. The Christmas gifts, the people and the parties—it was just so much fun. There was such a feeling of warmth.
We had a very welcoming house. My father would make breakfast for his friends if they came to the house in the morning. There was always coffee brewing; pancakes, sausages and eggs cooking on the stove. My father was just like a regular father and a regular guy who loved his family and friends.
Our house was always filled with people. My parents liked to party. They were always having parties at the house. They also enjoyed getting all dressed up to go out drinking. They were completely different from the parents of my friends at school. I never thought of my father as a typical guy who worked a 9-to-5 job and then came home to his family.
My father’s crew was always in and out of the house—even when we lived on Fifty-Fifth Street. At first, I just thought they were his friends. They were so nice to me. They’d pick me up and swing me around. They’d hug and kiss me. And they’d always buy me gifts. To me, they were the greatest people in the world. My mother hung out with their wives or girlfriends—or their wives and their girlfriends—and I didn’t really understand that, either.
My father and his friends weren’t like everyone else. Most members of my father’s crew were pretty good-looking. Those guys were charming. Flashy dressers, with nice cars and nice jewelry. They smelled nice, wearing cologne like Grey Flannel. They always wore sunglasses—even at night. All the guys, including my father, shopped at the George Richland men’s clothing store in Bensonhurst. They all wore leisure suits, seamless dress pants and patent leather shoes. Some of them even had their initials embroidered on their shirts. I never saw any of this going on in other people’s houses.
Joey and I loved his friends, too. They were so different from other people. And they treated us like we were really special. Everybody treated us very warmly—we had a lot of love from a lot of people. We had the best time of our lives on Avenue J because of the family and the friends—my father’s friends, not our friends—and all the get-togethers.
For a long time, though, we were confused about what my father was and what he did. He was a professional gambler. He owned a restaurant. He came up with different stories all the time.
Finally, one day, I just asked.
“Dad, when people ask me what you do, like at career day at school, what do I say?”
“Just tell them that I’m a professional gambler.”
“A professional gambler, what the heck is that?”
“Linda, that’s a real job. People do gamble professionally.”
So whenever anybody asked what my father did for a living, I’d tell them that he was a professional gambler. They’d just sort of look at me. At that point, I didn’t really know any better. My brother and I just went with it. What choice did we have? Maybe we weren’t sure what he did for work at first, but one thing we did know for sure was that the love that my father showed us was unconditional—at least before all the violence started.
My father pretty much kept us sheltered until we were teenagers. We had really strict rules. Not only did we have to have dinner at a certain time, but we had to be in bed by a certain time—9:30 P.M. when we were younger, unless we were watching a special show as a family, and then eleven o’clock or midnight when we were in high school.
But even though we were in bed, it didn’t mean we’d go to sleep. Sometimes when we were younger, I’d sneak into Joey’s room or he’d sneak into mine. A lot of times we heard noises coming from my parents’ room—music and laughing. That’s just the way they were—very into each other. So we’d sneak up to their door and try to hear what was going on.
“Lin, what are they doing?” Joey would ask because we really didn’t know.
As we got older, and I started to figure things out, I’d tell my dad, “Me and Joey heard you and Mom making a lot of noise last night and we couldn’t sleep.”
Then my father would say, “Really. What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. We just heard you making a lot of noise, Dad. And your hair looks kind of messy this morning.”
They didn’t really hide things like that. They weren’t the type of parents who were discreet. My mother and father were very open. Joey and I didn’t really like it, but what could we do?
In a lot of ways we were the typical family, spending time together, going on vacation. When we were younger, we went on a lot of vacations to Florida with my mother. My father came with us sometimes, but often we went with people in my father’s crew, such as Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico—I really loved Joe Brewster—and Robert “Bobby Zam” Zambardi. I was about seven or eight years old. I always thought it was weird that they came with us.
When I got older, my mother told me why they were with us—they were going there to kill people. Sometimes we’d all go down there first to check things out, like where they were going to do the actual murder.
One time we drove down because they were going to kill this guy named Joe Peraino, but they didn’t get the job done. Joe Brewster had the gun in his shorts, but he must have forgotten about it because he went swimming and he lost it in the ocean. So we just flew back to New York. I got my first airline pin from the pilot on that trip.
When Larry Mazza came into the picture, I was around ten and Joey was about eight. Larry was my mother’s lover. We didn’t know that until we were much older. He was eighteen and she was thirty-two when they first got together. My father knew about it and he was okay with it. In fact, Larry became part of the family. That was strange for me and my brother at the time because we weren’t really sure who this guy was. After a while, though, having him around became second nature to us.
Larry was this really handsome man—tan, good-looking, well-spoken, was polished. He had this way about him. Because he was young, he didn’t seem like the other guys who were hanging around with my father.
He was so cute and I had a kiddie crush on him. Whenever he came to the house, I always wanted to sit next to him. My mother told me I was too young to be looking at boys.
Larry was around the house more than anybody else, even Greg Junior. He had a very positive influence on us. Larry just cared about our best interests. He never wanted to see anything bad happen to me or to my brother when we were young. He was like a big brother, and Joey needed that because he was very shy.
Joey loved Larry. He made Larry his sponsor for his Confirmation and he took Larry’s name as his Confirmation name. Because we went to Catholic school, Confirmation was a big deal back then; it was also a big deal that Joey picked Larry to be his sponsor over everyone else.
To help Joey overcome his shyness, Larry said he wanted to get him involved in karate and self-defense to build his confidence. Larry was a black belt and he felt that karate would be the best thing for Joey. Larry played a big part in helping my brother come out of his shell and learn to be more sociable.
My brother did really well in karate. His teacher absolutely adored him. He said Joey was one of his best students and he had so much potential. Joey loved karate. He lived for it. He walked around the house in his karate pants and belt. He used to watch the Karate Kid over and over and over again. He’d imitate the Karate Kid’s stance just to annoy you. He’d stand in front of you with his hands out and one leg up and he’d be making all the karate sounds. It was pretty funny.
He participated in competitions, which was a big thing for him because he was so shy and not able to ex
press himself. So for him to go out there and compete, it was a big deal. Martial arts is all about respect and discipline and hard work, and Joey was taught to walk away from trouble and only to fight to defend himself.
So when his teacher found out that Larry was involved with my father, he told Larry that he wasn’t allowed at the school anymore. So Larry took Joey to his lessons, but he couldn’t go inside with him. But even so, Larry and karate really helped Joey when he was younger.
Joey stopped taking lessons when we moved to Eighty-Second Street when he was about fourteen. As soon as he got to high school at Bishop Ford, he started having trouble. He was failing. He was miserable in that school.
He was really having a problem with the principal, Mr. Fernandez. For some reason the principal didn’t like Joey. He didn’t treat Joey right. He had some gripe with Joey, but I think the gripe was really with my father. Everyone in that school treated us differently than they treated everyone else. I think the teachers knew who my father was—at that point, so did we.
My parents took Joey out of Bishop Ford and put him in a public high school, where he did better. It was either that or the principal at Bishop Ford was going to be found dead in his office.
I didn’t do so well in school. I had a problem with learning. I kept telling the teachers that I had a learning disability. But Catholic-school teachers, back then especially, they didn’t really care about that. Maybe because they didn’t know too much about it. They didn’t address my disability, so I struggled in school with comprehension and learning in general.
Larry was very into school and he helped us with our homework. He tried hard to help me with my assignments, but I couldn’t understand anything. I never got diagnosed, so I never knew the exact problem.
By the time I was a teenager, a lot of the kids around Avenue J were drinking and experimenting with drugs. The kids in that neighborhood didn’t really like me and there were a lot of bullies there. But I still had the girlfriends—especially three really close friends—I made at the Holy Ghost School. I went there from the first to the eighth grade. We used to have so much fun. There were lots of sleepovers and parties. The Halloween parties were great.
