Andy’s father had also gone into the business, but with mixed success. Andy still remembers the electric company turning off the lights because his father was unable to pay the bill. The constant flux in his father’s fortunes created tension in his parents’ marriage, and Andy usually found himself taking his mother’s side during heated arguments. Years later Andy vowed never to reprise his father’s financial mistakes.
As a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, he was instilled with the work ethic, spending his Saturday mornings shining shoes in a local barbershop. By the time he reached high school, his father had moved the family into a new house in Old Westbury, an affluent suburb on Long Island. Andy attended the local high school, Wheatley High. A classmate, Allyn Kandel, recalled that he was a gregarious teenager with lots of friends. “He was extremely bright, possessing a certain intelligence and maturity that went beyond his years,” she said.
By Andy’s senior year in high school his father was so deeply in debt that he lost the house to the mortgage company, forcing the family to move into a rented house in nearby Roslyn. When Andy graduated in 1963, he immediately went to work for his father’s company, called M.C. & Son, arriving on the job at 6:00 most mornings. At night he worked with his father on the books and on drawing up bids for other jobs. They were lean years for the family business, recalled childhood friend Richard Haas, now an airplane pilot, who worked alongside Andy in the company. “Typically we would work six or seven days a week if the work was available.… To say Andy learned the construction business from the bottom up is an understatement.”
Two years after Andy graduated from high school, he started work on a sewer project for a developer in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. The developer had knocked down an old mansion to build four big homes on the property at Somerset Street and Grand Central Parkway. They blended nicely into the old, established neighborhood of expensive Tudor and brick homes.
On the job that spring of 1965, Andy, then nineteen, met Nancy Roth Herbert, a pretty twenty-six-year-old housewife. She had moved into one of the big new houses the year before with her husband and three small children. Andy introduced himself one morning when he asked if she would mind moving a car parked in front of her house because it was blocking his backhoe.
Nancy still remembers how handsome Andy looked that day as he stood in her doorway in his dusty work clothes. He was just slightly taller than she, but he had a powerfully built body and jet-black curly hair, long dark eyelashes, and a disarming smile. She followed him outside with the car keys, and they chatted a little. “There was instant chemistry,” she later said.
At 5’9” tall, Nancy was a striking beauty with green eyes and long chestnut-brown hair that fell to her waist. She had a great sense of style, and she must have struck Andy at the time as being very rich and sophisticated. Jamaica Estates was one of the wealthiest sections of the city, home to doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives.
Nancy grew up as an only child in nearby Hollis Hills, a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Her father ran a company that manufactured notions for chain stores. A graduate of Skidmore College, she received a degree in nursing, but she worked only briefly as a nurse. Soon after her graduation she married Howard Herbert, the handsome son of a successful clothing manufacturer, whom she had dated steadily while in college. Both sets of parents approved the match. A graduate of Exeter and Dartmouth, her husband had been the president of his college fraternity. Marrying him seemed quite a sensible thing to do at the time. “He was every girl’s dream,” Nancy said.
Within five years they had three children: two girls and a boy. She thought she should be happy, living in her brand-new home with her husband and her babies, but she was miserable. Her husband worked long hours for his parents’ company and frequently traveled, selling coats and suits all over the country. He sometimes stayed away from home for months at a time.
Bored and lonely, at age twenty-six Nancy was tired of shopping, vacuuming, and attending PTA meetings and lunches with “the girls” in the neighborhood. One of “the girls” at the time was Marlene Manes, whose husband, Donald, was spending long hours away from home, too, building his political career, which eventually led him to Queens Borough Hall, where as borough president and head of the Queens Democratic party he became one of the most powerful political figures in New York.
As spring turned into summer in 1965, Nancy found herself talking almost every day with Andy Capasso, the young ditchdigger working outside her house. By the middle of the summer it was obvious to both of them that there was a strong physical attraction, she said. They would “eyeball” each other as they stood together on the sidewalk. Finally, one morning, he asked her, “So when are you going to invite me in for a cup of coffee?”
At first a little nervous about having a strange man in her house, Nancy asked a neighbor to join them. Seated around her kitchen table, sipping coffee, they joked and laughed for almost an hour. “He was very likable,” said Nancy. “He was funny, charming, and very bright. There was lots of chemistry.”
They began having an affair almost immediately, secretly meeting at his tiny apartment in the Forest Hills Inn. From the beginning, she said, Andy begged her to leave her husband for him. Finally, about a year and a half later, Nancy asked her husband for a legal separation. Howard Herbert moved out of the house.
Nancy’s closest friends were stunned when she broke the news. “He was a kid, and all of us had graduate degrees,” said Judith Yeager, Nancy’s next-door neighbor and good friend, referring to the circle of friends she shared with Nancy. “He was very different from what we were used to. He was definitely blue-collar. That was just not our world. It just wasn’t done. You are dealing with a social group of doctors, lawyers, and accountants, and here is Andy, the ditchdigger. He just didn’t fit in.”
Nancy’s mother couldn’t believe that her daughter was leaving her Ivy League husband for a laborer, either. What did Andy Capasso have to offer? “Her mother used to call me and beg me to talk her out of it,” Yeager said.
Nancy didn’t care what her parents or anyone else thought. She moved ahead with a divorce. While Andy may not have been as sophisticated or as well educated as Howard Herbert, Nancy could not deny her passionate feelings for him.
And Andy apparently felt the same about her. “He was madly in love,” Yeager said. “I thought he was in awe of her. He was entering, what looked to me, like a new world to him, into the world of the Jewish American princess.… He was a charming, bashful young man overwhelmed by Nancy and her world.”
Nancy saw in Andy a determination and ambition that persuaded her that he would make something of himself. She encouraged him to leave his father’s company and start his own business. At the end of 1967, at age twenty-two, Andy left his father’s business and went to work for another construction company as a bulldozer operator. His plan was to put some money aside and eventually start his own construction company. Within months he had turned his apartment at the Forest Hills Inn into an office. He leased construction equipment and managed to convince a few builders to hire him as a subcontractor.
Andy called his new company Nanco Contracting Corporation, which, according to Nancy, was named for her. “He painted NANCY on the nose of his equipment,” Yeager said. “She wasn’t even embarrassed.” During their bitter divorce years later, however, Andy insisted that he had named the company after himself. He claimed the N in Nanco stood for Naples, the place of his family’s origins, the an was for Andy, and the co represented the first and last letters of his surname.
In the early years of the business Andy worked between fourteen and eighteen hours a day. Nancy insists that she helped him get started by keeping the books, signing checks, doing the payroll, and dropping off bids at municipal offices. By early 1970 Andy’s company was finally able to obtain bonds and bid on big city contracts. In March of that year Andy was awarded his first job with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, a $26,835 contract to build s
torm and sanitary sewers on Union Turnpike in Queens. He quickly built a reputation in the city for doing good work and getting it done on time.
By late 1970, five years after Nancy and Andy first met, she was finally free to marry him. Her bitter divorce from Howard Herbert was about to become final, so she was deeply distressed when she learned Andy had been seeing another woman, a pretty stewardess who lived in Louisville, Kentucky.
Finally Nancy gave Andy an ultimatum: dump the stewardess or she would never see him again. Andy agreed to break off his relationship with the stewardess and marry Nancy. In December 1970 they bought a small colonial house together for $51,000 in Greenvale, just outside of New York City in Nassau County on Long Island. They planned to marry the following spring, as soon as her divorce was final.
On March 28, 1971, they were married in a civil ceremony at Yeager’s home. Nancy was thirty-two. Andy was twenty-five. Only family members and a few close friends were there. Donald Manes had provided the judge but was unable to attend the wedding. In a photograph taken outside Yeager’s home that afternoon, Andy is beaming as he stands next to his new wife, with his hand on her shoulder. Nancy is smiling, too, looking like a happy bride in a cocktail-length brown and white dress, holding a small bouquet of flowers in her right hand.
During their marriage Andy could not have been a better stepfather to Nancy’s three young children—Helené, who was eleven when Andy and Nancy married, nine-year-old Steven, and six-year-old Debbie. Both Nancy and her three children agree that he was a loving and caring father, treating the children as if they were his own.
“He was very good with the children,” Nancy said. “And he supported the fact that we were all Jewish.” Andy, baptized a Catholic, sent one of his stepdaughters to Israel so that she could learn more about her Jewish heritage. At Steven’s bar mitzvah Andy took over the role of Steven’s real father during the ceremony. Instead of saying the prayers in English, Andy, a former altar boy, studied Hebrew so that he could stand by his stepson’s side and recite the prayers in Hebrew.
A year after Andy and Nancy were married, Nancy gave birth to their first child, a boy. A daughter was born two years later. The house in Greenvale no longer seemed big enough for their family, so they decided to move. In the early 1970s Andy’s business was doing well enough for them to be able to afford a Georgian colonial mansion with a circular driveway in Old Westbury, the Long Island suburb where Andy had spent his teenage years. Surrounded by almost three acres of land, the seven-bedroom house had a swimming pool and a tennis court. Andy and Nancy had come a long way since the day she found him digging a sewer line outside her home.
Just a year after they moved to Old Westbury, though, New York City was confronted with a fiscal crisis that resulted in deep cuts in the city’s budget and a sharp reduction in the number of city contracts awarded for street improvements and sewer connections. Determined not to end up like his father and lose his beautiful new home, Andy scrambled for work, taking jobs in Connecticut and New Jersey to keep his new business going. Once he got through those difficult years, the company grew rapidly in the late 1970s as New York City began to recover and resume its construction projects. He added more and more people to his payroll, including his struggling father, to save him from financial ruin.
By 1976 Andy owned his own office building for his company headquarters in the Long Island City section of Queens. He had twenty-five employees and more than $4 million in contracts. Within six years, by 1982, he had $32 million in contracts and employed more than 400 people. By 1986 Andy held ninety-seven city contracts worth $200 million for a variety of projects ranging from street paving to sewers and water pollution control.
To succeed in the construction business in New York, Andy cultivated relationships with politicians, city engineers, and powerful union officials. He even entertained people with ties to organized crime, which dominated the cement industry and other aspects of the construction business. During the mid-1970s, in Palm Beach, the Capassos played host to former Teamster boss John Cody, who controlled almost every truck that moved in the New York metropolitan area. Cody, regarded by law enforcement officials at one time as an associate of the Gambino organized crime family in New York, was later convicted on federal charges for evading taxes on kickbacks.
Several nights a week Andy would return home late, telling Nancy he had meetings with “Matty and the guys.” “Matty” was Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello, the Capassos’ friend and neighbor. He was a captain in New York’s Genovese organized crime family who was later convicted of racketeering. “There isn’t a person who is using cement or in construction that doesn’t have to deal with the Mafia, day in and day out,” Nancy once said. “Sure, we knew them. Sure, we would have dinner with them. But what does that mean? You have to do business with these people. That doesn’t mean you are one of them.”
As Andy’s sewer contracting business expanded during the late 1970s, Andy and Nancy began to lead a lavish lifestyle. They bought an oceanfront condominium on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach. In 1978 they bought two condominiums on Sunrise Avenue in Palm Beach. They traveled to Europe on the Concorde, spent Christmas in Palm Beach, and took February school vacations in Aspen or the Caribbean. “We had a lot of fun,” Nancy said. “It certainly wasn’t dull. We were energetic people.… The company was really growing. We did a lot of traveling. Things seemed very good.”
Andy seemed to like the idea that his wife’s statuesque beauty attracted the attention of other men. He liked to “decorate” her, Nancy recalled, with the finest clothes and jewels. During a trip to Italy they attended a party where most of the other women were dressed in couturier clothes and expensive jewelry. After they left the party that night, Andy told Nancy he wanted his wife too to have nice things, and when they returned to New York he bought her an expensive Hermes handbag. He was also extremely generous with jewelry during their marriage, giving her thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, including a diamond necklace and huge ruby and diamond earrings from David Webb. “Everything was wonderful. There was enough for everything,” Nancy said.
Although Andy was now earning millions of dollars, the Capassos were not members of New York’s wealthy social set. There were no invitations to attend glittering charity balls in Manhattan or fancy Park Avenue dinner parties. They were living in what Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner called a “social Sahara.”
Other than Andy’s “business associates,” they socialized most often with their family and Nancy’s old friends and former neighbors in Queens, including Marlene and Donald Manes, who was now Queens borough president and Democratic party leader. “We weren’t in any kind of social circles,” Nancy said. “It was just our plain old friends. I think that’s what he didn’t like. I wasn’t into social climbing. It wasn’t my thing. I didn’t think about it.”
But, she said, Andy would talk about it all the time. “I think he was a real poor boy from Brooklyn from way back, even though he did live in Old Westbury at one time. He just wanted all of these things. First he wanted things. Then he wanted status.”
At the end of 1979 Andy suggested they move into Manhattan. Nancy believes that a palatial Manhattan apartment symbolized wealth and privilege to him. It was as if a move to Manhattan would bestow on Andy the social respectability that he so badly wanted and an entree into the fast-paced, jet-set social world that had eluded him.
Nancy agreed to leave Old Westbury, thinking she might see more of her husband if he did not have to commute. Like Nancy’s first husband, Andy spent much of his time away from home—on business, he would tell her—and Nancy was growing increasingly frustrated spending her evenings alone. They started to argue about his long hours at work and his late-night meetings with “the guys.” “Things were bad before Bess,” Steven Herbert Capasso, Nancy’s son from her first marriage, later told columnist Cindy Adams. “There was always fire and tumult in our house.”
But Nancy remembered passionate reconciliations followi
ng their explosive arguments. Although there were difficult times, overall she thought her marriage was good. “It had its ups and downs. But it was okay. I thought it was fine, and I think he did, too. I just wanted to see him more.”
After looking at dozens of apartments on Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side, Nancy and Andy found what they were looking for at 990 Fifth Avenue in a prestigious prewar building with only six apartments, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a thirteen-room duplex apartment with eleven-foot ceilings and panoramic views of Central Park. There were five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and wood-burning fireplaces in the living room, dining room, and master bedroom. On April 14, 1980, they bought it for $764,897 in cash. The monthly maintenance fee was $5,914.07.
Hoping to create a showplace, the Capassos paid architect Robert A. M. Stern another $1.5 million to design extensive renovations that would take almost a year to complete. With its combination of modern and classical architectural elements, the apartment was later featured on the cover of Architectural Digest magazine. No expense was spared. Each room was equipped with its own built-in stereo system. Stern imported marble from Italy for the bathrooms and for the spectacular marble staircase with curvilinear brass handrailings leading up to the second floor. In the living room, using floor-to-ceiling windows framed by heavy pilasters, he gave the room what the magazine described as the “light and space of an Italian piazza.”
Overseeing the renovations and furnishing of the apartment kept Nancy Capasso busy during the fall of 1980 and much of 1981. She would spend almost $1 million on antiques and paintings. Working closely with Stern, she chose large, comfortable chesterfield sofas covered in Rose Cummings chintz for the living room. For the dining room she spent $200,000 on an early Victorian mahogany table on scroll-carved lion’s-paw feet and a set of six George II carved mahogany chairs. To the master bedroom she added an antique camelback mahogany loveseat covered in striped satin and a Chippendale walnut writing desk. She also purchased several paintings, including an untitled Cy Twombly for $192,500 and a Jean Dubuffet for $75,000.
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