For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life

by Albert Demeo

  For a long time our trips to see Uncle Frank were fun, but then something happened. An occult shop called The Dark Crystal opened across the street from the Vineyard, next door to my father's pizza parlor. The proprietors wore black robes, and the display windows were filled with strange-looking items that Uncle Frank said were used for witchcraft and devil worship. Weird-looking people in Gothic makeup and bizarre clothing began coming there all hours of the day and night. I heard people in the neighborhood say satanic rituals were performed there after dark. The whole place was creepy for a six-year-old, like something out of a horror movie, and it gave me the shivers. My father knew the store made me nervous, and he got a kick out of teasing me about it. The owners had erected a giant Ouija Board in the alley in back of the store, next to the pizza parlor's dumpster, and my father made me take out the trash so I'd have to go near the Ouija Board. The minute I stepped out the back, my father locked the door so I couldn't get back inside for a while. I didn't think it was very funny, but my father thought it was hilarious.

  After a while, though, even my father didn't think the place was funny anymore. The neighborhood was largely Catholic, and many people were afraid to even pass the store. Business began falling off dramatically at both the Vineyard and the pizza parlor. Something had to be done.

  One Saturday afternoon a couple of months after the store opened, I sat munching garlic bread in my uncle Frank's kitchen while my father's pie man complained about losing customers because of The Dark Crystal. Crazy Mark was sitting in the kitchen a few feet away, listening to the whole conversation. After a few minutes Mark left while Dad and the pie man continued to talk. About half an hour later, my father and I were ready to leave for the day. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the Vineyard, leaning on Dad's Cadillac, sipping cold drinks and bullshitting with Uncle Frank. Suddenly we heard piercing screams from the occult store. My father put down his drink and started toward the screams. A moment later the store owner came running out onto the sidewalk, black robes flapping, his face a mask of terror under the bizarre makeup. Seconds later Crazy Mark ran out after him. Mark was wielding a machete at the devil worshiper's head like a crazed Grim Reaper, screaming, “Out, Satan! I cast you out in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit! Begone and bother my friend Roy no more!”

  I heard my father mutter “What the hell?” as they raced by. The man in black sprinted like he truly was possessed, gradually gaining distance from Mark as they disappeared down the street. No one in the neighborhood ever saw him again. The next day, the mystic merchandise was moved out and the store boarded up.

  Mark was elated to have done this “favor” for my father. “I did it for you, Roy,” he happily informed us when we saw him the following week. He was beaming with joy, clearly waiting for my father's approval. Dad listened quietly and gave Mark a few bills before sending him away. Then he looked at me and shook his head, muttering, “Crazy bastard.” Dozens of people from the neighborhood also came up to us that day to thank my father. They all took it for granted that my dad had “taken care of the problem.” As I watched them, I began to realize that my father wielded a power that I could not explain, and somehow, the realization disturbed me. I was proud of the respect everyone showed my dad. Yet as young as I was, I knew it wasn't normal to commit the sort of extreme act Crazy Mark had done just to please my father. What was it about my father that made everyone so eager to gain his favor?

  The Christmas before I turned seven was one of the most memorable of my childhood. That year my father imported several cars from Italy to exhibit at the auto show in Madison Square Garden a few days before Christmas. I was thrilled when Dad told me he'd take me with him, and when he told me that Adam West and Burt Ward (Batman and Robin) from the television series were going to be there with the real Batmobile, I was too excited to sleep the night before.

  It was a beautiful drive into Manhattan. The Macy's Thanksgiving parade had been held only a few days before, and I was wide-eyed as we passed the Christmas windows at Macy's and crossed the street to Madison Square Garden. Inside the huge lighted building, it was like a giant toy store with adult-size toys. Cars of every color and description gleamed from the exhibits as people milled through the aisles and jockeyed for a good vantage point to look at them. Dad led me through the maze toward his own exhibit.

  A friend of his was waiting for us when we got there. Dad introduced the man to me as Chris Rosenberg. I'd heard Chris's name around the house, but I hadn't actually met him before. I could tell that my father was fond of Chris by the way Dad slapped him on the back as he introduced us. Chris bent down to shake my hand warmly, man to man, saying “How you doing, Albert?” He couldn't have been more than twenty at the time, athletically built, with dark blond hair and green eyes. He wore designer blue jeans, a polo shirt, and expensive-looking athletic shoes. He had on a leather jacket exactly like my father's and was as meticulously groomed as my dad. His left arm was in a sling.

  “What happened to your arm, Mr. Rosenberg?” I asked him.

  “Nothing much. I hurt it doing some work the other day. Call me Chris, Albert.”

  The three of us toured the exhibit together. The Garden was filled with gleaming new cars that glowed and twinkled like the holiday display at Macy's. There was a whole section dedicated to vehicles from television and the movies. Dad and Chris took me to meet Batman and Robin, and I stood in line to get their autographs. Batman was very nice, taking a moment to chat with me as he signed his photograph, but I didn't get to sit in the Batmobile. Afterward we went to another exhibit, where I met Roddy MacDowell and a nice woman with a familiar voice. My father explained that they were the actors who played Cornelius and Zera in Planet of the Apes, one of my favorite movies. I already knew the apes weren't real, so I wasn't disappointed to meet the actors without their ape makeup, just very excited. Finally we went to see the exhibit for a movie I hadn't seen yet, called The Godfather. I could see the movie when I was a little older, my father told me. The car from the movie was there, a 1948 Lincoln Continental filled with bullet holes. My father picked me up so I could see better and walked around the car, carefully explaining how the movie stunt had been done. The movie people had gotten an old Lincoln, he told me, and then taken it to the state police and asked them to shoot it full of holes, just as in a genuine police assault. The cameraman filmed the police while they were shooting the car. Once the police had riddled the car with real machine gun bullets, the movie people had taken it to the studio. Back at the studio, the special effects people had carefully filled each real bullet hole with blasting caps, then repainted and polished the car to make it look like new. For the shooting scene in the movie, the blasting caps were set off in the same pattern the police had used in the real shooting. That way the scene looked completely real, but nobody got hurt. I was fascinated. What a clever idea. Dad and Chris obviously thought so, too. When we finished inspecting the car, we went over to the booth where they had props from the movie. There were many things there, but the only thing I remember is the horse's head. It was a real head, stuffed and mounted for the onlookers to see. I shivered in delicious horror. This would be a great story to make my sisters sick when I got home. Afterward we went to the part of the exhibit that was showing Dad's car. Dad showed me how the roof on the Lamborghini could be lifted back so the driver could get in and out of the low-slung sports car. It was incredibly cool. By the time we got back in the Cadillac to head home, I was worn out with the excitement of the day.

  With Christmas only a few weeks away, Dad and I started decorating the outside of the house the following Saturday. We draped every tree, fence post, window, and empty piece of wall with Christmas lights, the old-fashioned kind with multicolored one-inch bulbs. We wrapped the posts on both sides of the front porch with red and white lights, to look like candy canes. When we ran out of places to put lights, we started setting up the Christmas cut-outs. We put big plastic Santas, elves, and reindeer all over the roof and yard and
tacked plastic candy canes to every post on the picket fence that bordered our property. Mom had Dad wire speakers for the front porch and kept the stereo playing Christmas carols into the yard all day long. She and my sisters decorated the inside of the house with wreaths and garlands, and together they baked literally hundreds of cookies for the neighbors to come by and sample. Mom's ginger cookies were my favorite. They made the whole house smell like Christmas.

  Debra was in charge of the presents we kids got for Mom and Dad. All three of us had saved our allowances for weeks. One clear afternoon Debra led our little procession of bicycles on the half-mile trip to the shopping center. We went to May's first, to the chinaware department. Mom loved figurines, especially the pale blue-and-white Lladros from Spain, so we got her one and had it gift wrapped. They were expensive, so we pooled our money. Dad was next. My sisters got him a nice sweater, but I preferred buying him tools. It really didn't matter what we got, for Dad was sure to like it, but we wanted something special for him anyway.

  Debra was also in charge of the gifts for us, though my parents didn't know it. I hadn't believed in Santa Claus since I was five; Debra had initiated me young into the mysteries of “Santa gifts.” She knew that our parents kept our gifts locked in the big closet in their bedroom, and having discovered the hiding place, she rose to the challenge. A few days before Christmas, while Dad was at work and Mom was running an errand, we made our raid. Creeping into Mom and Dad's room, Debra shushed Lisa and me while she expertly ran a bobby pin into the lock on the closet door and popped it open. My sister could pick that lock like a pro. One by one, she quietly removed the presents while I set them on the floor nearby. Then, using a straight-edged razor from her craft box, she slit open the wrapping paper so carefully that I couldn't see the line and removed the gifts for us to look at. We giggled and whispered with excitement as we peeked at them; afterward Debra replaced each one in its wrappings and sealed it carefully with tape overlaid on the original adhesive. The final trick was putting them back in the same order we had removed them so that Mom and Dad wouldn't be able to tell they had been tampered with. Then Debra locked the closet, and we all crept out to practice our innocent expressions before Mom got home. If my mother suspected, she never let on. And all three of us gave Oscar-worthy performances on Christmas morning, exclaiming with happy surprise as though we'd never seen the presents before.

  The most exciting part of the official preparation was the trip to the tree lot to buy the Christmas tree. One evening a few days before Christmas, my mother bundled us all up in our warmest clothes and sent us out with our father to pick the perfect tree. There was something magical about the outing. We settled back in the big, warm car and stared through the windows at the Christmas lights twinkling in the frost along Sunrise Highway. I put my mouth up to the cold glass and watched the mist form like faint snowflakes on the car window. Once we got there, the three of us kids scattered, tramping through the sawdust in every direction to point excitedly to the best tree. My cheeks burned with the cold, and the smell of pine filled my nostrils. It was exhilarating. When we finally finished arguing and agreed on a tree we all liked, my father picked up the seven-foot beauty and tied it in the Cadillac's big trunk. Then it was home again, where Mom was waiting in the living room with hot cocoa and decorations.

  As always, we put the tree in front of the big bay window in the living room. Dad strung the tree lights, and then everyone decorated the tree with the ornaments my mother had collected. Each of us children hung the special homemade ornaments we had made for my mom over the years. We nibbled at the homemade popcorn strands while we draped them over the branches, and Mom half-heartedly scolded us for eating the decorations. Every year she made big balls of popcorn and marshmallows for us to wrap in plastic wrap and tie on the branches with ribbon. We weren't allowed to unwrap them until Christmas morning. Mom hung the antique glass ornaments herself. They were very fragile. When all the ornaments were on the tree, Dad lifted Lisa high to place the gold-and-white angel on the very top of the tree. And then came the grand moment. My mother turned out the living room lights, and Dad plugged in the tree lights. Everyone gasped, oohing and ahhing at the beauty before us. That year's tree was the best ever.

  The only thing that marred the festivities was a small incident two days before Christmas. During the night someone stole all the plastic candy canes Dad and I had tacked to the fence posts around the house. My father was really irritated that someone had taken our decorations, and he asked around the neighborhood to see if anybody had seen the thieves. On Christmas Eve morning when my mom opened the door to get the newspaper, a strange thing had happened. Someone had brought back every one of the stolen candy canes, nearly a hundred in all, and carefully stacked them on our porch with a note saying, “Really sorry.” I was so surprised that someone would do that. I thought it must be the Christmas spirit.

  That evening my mother served the traditional Italian dinner for Holy Night: lobster and shrimp with fish sauce, homemade pasta, piles of side dishes, and more cookies than I could count. Dad made his special Christmas dessert that year, too—strufale, deep-fried dough balls rolled in sugar and drizzled with warm honey. They were incredibly sticky but delicious. Grandma was there, and Aunt Marie and her children, Uncle Louis (my father's older brother) with his kids, and of course, my uncle Joe, all of us dressed to the teeth in new Christmas clothes. After dessert, the kids all changed into their pajamas, and we gathered in the living room with our parents. My father always set up toy train tracks around the Christmas tree, and my youngest cousins and I stretched out on our stomachs under the tree and took turns making the train go around. The adults and older children, too full and relaxed even to talk much, settled down on the gold velvet couches and watched Christmas specials on television. March of the Wooden Soldiers was first, and then the Yule log came on. My dad had made a cardboard cut-out of a fireplace to fit around the television set, and when the Yule log came on, he put the cut-out around the TV to make it look like a real fireplace. In the silence and beauty of the flickering lights, I could almost believe the fire was real.

  A little before ten o'clock, we kids were sent to bed. My boy cousins stayed in my room, the girls with my sisters. I fell asleep almost immediately, but a little after midnight, I woke to hear my mother's voice shouting from the hallway: “Santa came! Get up, everybody! Santa came!” We all went racing for the living room as fast as our feet would carry us. Sure enough, Santa had come. The living room was filled with presents. It didn't lessen my enthusiasm at all that I knew where they really came from.

  Nearly all of our presents were special ordered, and mine were amazing. That year I got a safari kit, complete with an outfit, a light gun, and a two-foot plastic lion that would charge until I hit it with a beam of light. The minute the light touched it, the lion fell down and stopped moving. But the best gift of all was a white Jaguar convertible, just my size. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, an exact replica of the real car. The motor was electrical and ran on distilled water. My dad charged it up for me, and I drove it all around the living room. I was so excited, I could hardly breathe. My cousins had a lot of gifts, too, but none as wonderful as my car. When my dad insisted they have a chance to drive it, one of them deliberately smashed it into a railing and then glared at me in triumph. I started crying, but my father reassured me that he would fix it in the morning. I was still crying when Dad carried me to bed. My aunts and uncles, meanwhile, packed up to go home.

  The next morning I woke up to the smell of ham and sausage frying. All the sorrows of the night before were forgotten as I threw on my robe and raced down the hall to the kitchen. Dad was there, preparing a huge meal. One of the neighbors had given my parents a big basket of specialty meats, and Dad had sliced them into big slabs and was frying it all up for us to eat so my mom could relax for a while. After stuffing ourselves on pork, eggs, pancakes, and anything else we wanted (Dad took orders), we changed into our play clothes and went b
ack to the living room to explore our new toys. By late morning we could already smell ham and turkey baking in my mother's double oven. Christmas Eve dinner was Italian; Christmas day dinner was American. We had the best of both worlds.

  All day long we played while company dropped by to visit. Barbara and Jim came with their kids, chatting in the living room while we kids compared presents and made deals to share the good ones. Freddy came by in the afternoon with his kids. They got miniature motorbikes from Santa, the only gifts so far that could compare with my Jag. Freddy told me not to worry, that he'd teach me to ride the bikes the next time I came over. I generously offered to let his kids drive my car.

  An hour or two before dinner, Uncle Mikey and his wife walked through the living room door. Uncle Mikey was dragging the biggest Christmas stocking I'd ever seen in my life. It must have been nearly eight feet long and was filled with teddy bears and Christmas toys. The only other stocking I'd seen that was anything like it was hanging in the main display area of a department store. In fact, this stocking looked almost exactly like the one I'd seen in the store. Uncle Mikey said it was for me and my sisters. We all ran to give him a hug and then began unloading the booty as he watched us with a beaming smile. Later I whispered to my dad privately, “Where did Uncle Mikey get that stocking, Daddy?”

  Dad replied, “He told me he won it in a game of craps.” Dad looked into my eyes and smiled.

  I looked at him a minute and finally said, “Oh.” A minute later I had forgotten all about it.

  Just before dinner started, I heard a car pull up in front of the house. Peering out the bay window in front, I called out, “Here's Chris!” He was driving his beige Mercedes 450 SL convertible. The polished hood almost glowed in the streetlights. It was the first Mercedes I had seen outside a car lot.