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

by Albert Demeo

  My father was a criminal genius in the most literal sense. He was always refining his schemes. When he learned that the Arabs would also pay top dollar for American cigarettes, he hid cases of cigarettes in the trunks of the cars. Pornography was even more popular with the fundamentalist Muslims, so soon the cigarette cartons were packed with porn magazines as well. Once, when a new car dealer in Brooklyn who owed my father a large sum of money couldn't pay up, my father confiscated the keys to twenty luxury automobiles and told the dealer not to report the cars missing for a week. When the dealer finally did make the report, my father collected the insurance money as well. The dealer was out of debt, and my father had doubled his profit margin on the transaction.

  The abortion clinic scheme my father created during those years was especially clever in exploiting human frailties—lust for money and religious hypocrisy. When abortion clinics first began to proliferate legally in the Northeast, many of the doctors involved became the targets of threats and harassment. Picketers sealed off the perimeters of many clinics, sometimes with threats of violence. My father knew people in the medical community, and it wasn't long before they put him in touch with clinics that would pay my father for protection. The protection was effective, but my father realized that he would soon put himself out of business if he scared off the protestors permanently. So he decided to try an alternate approach.

  He met with a group of the most outspoken zealots and offered to make a deal. He would provide them with transportation, lunch, and a hundred dollars a day if they would picket and threaten clinics in New York and New Jersey. My father would pick the clinics. They had to agree to go when he asked them to and to stay away when they were told. The idea was to target a few clinics, scare the personnel, offer them protection, and then move the protestors elsewhere once the clinic started making payments to my father. That way my father would make money coming and going, so to speak. As it turned out, my father had no trouble finding takers among the religious. On the contrary, they were only too happy to take money from the Mob and go through the motions of staging protests on cue. I have no idea how they rationalized their decision. Maybe they convinced themselves that they were still making a statement.

  One of his most intelligent schemes was largely legal. From a man who owed him money, my father had acquired a lab that made pornographic films. The price of silver was very high at the time, and one day it dawned on my father that the film they processed was covered with silver nitrate. They were literally washing money down the drain every time they processed the film. So he talked to a dentist friend and found out that the dentist was aware of the problem, because he used X-ray film in his practice. The dentist had purchased a special filter that caught the silver nitrate when he processed the X rays. My father purchased the same filters and installed them in his photo lab in New Jersey. They caught the silver crossover, which my father collected and sold for fifty dollars an ounce. Ultimately, the silver brought in tens of thousands of dollars. Soon he was treasure hunting for dentists who threw out the waste from X-ray processing and was “recycling” that, too.

  He did get a bit carried away by the whole thing, however. Dad heard about an old dental building that had been torn down a few miles from our house, and he found out that the dentists had the medical waste buried on the property. Excited by the prospect of a treasure hunt, he went downtown and found a map of the property, complete with the location of a dry well. Late one night he took me down to the abandoned property with a couple of shovels and told me to start digging. The property was on the main highway in Massapequa, and though no one was interested in an abandoned dry well, my father didn't want to have to explain what he was up to. We started digging after midnight, and three hours later we were still digging. It was exhausting work, and all I wanted to do was go home, but my dad kept saying, “Keep digging, Al! I know there's silver down there!”

  What my father didn't know was that in the same building, there was a proctologist who routinely gave barium enemas to his patients. At 4:00 A.M., after hours of digging, all we got for our effort was four feet of shit—literally. There we were, in the dark hours before sunrise, standing up to our knees in excrement. So much for the glamour of life in the Mafia. We never did find any silver down there.

  As his income increased, the pressure to up the ante, to earn more, was continual. If you don't measure up financially in the Mob, they don't fire you. The only way you can leave is on a slab, and that is exactly what happens when you no longer pull your weight. My father had begun doing hits for money as well, though I knew nothing about that sideline at the time. I suspected by then that my father had killed people, but I felt certain that my dad used a gun only when absolutely necessary, to protect himself or somebody else. After all, that was the lesson he had schooled me in. Never use a gun unless you absolutely have to; but if you must, use it efficiently, for you may not get a second chance. Two in the head, make sure they're dead. I knew what that meant now.

  Outwardly, I remained the same schoolboy I had always appeared to be, studying for exams and swimming in the canal on sunny days. But the fear that had haunted me in the old house grew even stronger in the new one. I knew that our glamorous life came with a price, and that with every step up, the risk of disaster was increasing. The price of our lifestyle would eventually be my father's life. It was a debt he would inevitably have to pay one day. I continued to kiss him good-bye every morning, and I still lay awake until I heard his car in the driveway at night. Increasingly, I asked to go with him, as though my presence could magically protect him.

  I wondered sometimes what my sisters thought, for they seemed utterly oblivious to death's dark presence in our home. One Sunday, when my father made a rare visit to church with us, Lisa asked him why he didn't come forward with the rest of us to receive communion. My father's face darkened as he said matter of factly, “Because I'm not a hypocrite. I know who I am, and I know where I'm going in the end.” Lisa seemed puzzled. I envied her confusion. I knew exactly what my father meant.

  My father had finally achieved the power and affluence he had always dreamed of, but it brought him little pleasure. The cheerful, relaxed father of my early years was growing tense, brooding, silent. In Paradise Lost, Milton's Satan says that hell is wherever he is, for he cannot escape his own mind. I think it was so for my father. I watched my father, surrounded by every trapping of prosperity and achievement, slip further and further into the darkness. Increasingly, he would come home in the wee hours of the morning and hole up in his den, sometimes staying there for days. My mother would bring him food, which he largely left untouched. The only sound would be the television, which he sometimes let run twenty-four hours a day to fill the emptiness. He would stare at it in silence, almost in a trance. The pain he exuded in those moments was palpable. When I came home from school on those bleak afternoons, I would slip quietly into the den to be with him. I knew instinctively that he didn't want to talk. He did not want me to know about the violence that was becoming the center of his criminal life.

  Our family was rapidly being drawn into a vortex of violence that was spinning out of control. With more and more money at stake, and an increasingly complex criminal enterprise, my father's operation began to draw the scrutiny of the authorities. Cars were disappearing off Manhattan streets in record numbers, and the hunt for the power behind the thefts was on. My father himself remained largely invisible to the police, who were looking higher up in the New York Mob families to find out who was involved and how it was being done. Yet with each month that passed, the investigation spread its tentacles wider, and my father knew it was only a matter of time before it caught up with him. Then when my father came home one dawn visibly upset, I knew something had gone wrong. He said nothing to me, but at the Gemini a few days later, I overheard him talking to the crew in Cousin Joe's apartment. Uncle Nino had been arrested. My father was working on a plan that would get him off, but meanwhile the attorneys had to be paid, and Nino's family ha
d to be cared for. I heard my father say something about going through backyards, and I realized he had been cutting through yards and climbing fences to get cash to Nino's wife without being seen. When I asked my father about it later, he shrugged and said, “That's just what you do, Son. One of your guys goes down, you take care of things for him till he gets out.”

  We had been in the new house for two years when disaster struck. The truly fatal misstep occurred not long after my thirteenth birthday. My father's crew was becoming increasingly ambitious. With my father's rise in the Gambino family, a great deal of money was changing hands, and the crew was part of the operation that was making the money. They wanted a bigger share, and they wanted to prove that they could run an operation on their own. They were becoming reckless in their ambition. In the winter of 1979, Chris decided to run a game without telling my father. He had access to information about a large amount of money two Colombian drug couriers were bringing from Florida to New York, and Chris was supposed to broker the deal. Instead he saw easy money, so he killed the couriers and stole the money. Worse yet, he used my father's name in dealing with the Colombians. They knew him as “Chris DeMeo.”

  It didn't take much effort for the Colombians to trace the name back to New York, and from there to my father. Neither did it take long for word to reach Paul Castellano that the DeMeo crew had murdered one of the Colombian Mafia's own, endangering the entire Gambino crime family in the process. At about the same time as Castellano, my father found out what had happened from Nino Gaggi, who was out on bail.

  For the first time, I saw my father out of control. He came home late one night white with rage and locked himself in his study. When I asked him what was wrong, he said only that Chris had done something colossally stupid, endangering Dad's entire operation in the process. What he didn't tell me that night was that Chris's blunder had put my father in imminent danger of being hit from within. Worst by far, however, was what it meant for our family. Unlike the Italian Mafia, the Colombians do not respect family boundaries. Decades before, the Commission—the “legislature” of the five New York crime families—had declared the wives and children of their members off limits. That rule had been carefully adhered to. Any member of the organization was subject to the most severe sanctions, but you were not allowed to harm an innocent relative. The Colombians had no such rule. On the contrary, they routinely murdered both immediate families and more distant relatives as a way of making their point. Terrorism was a standard part of their mode of operation.

  Never in our lives had my father intentionally done something that would put anyone other than himself and his crew at risk. Suddenly our family was in imminent danger of being slaughtered. The changes in our home life were immediate and all-encompassing. The beautiful new house that my father had been so proud of became a fortress overnight. Dad moved Cousin Joe into the basement to keep an eye on us, making up a story for my sisters' benefit about Joe needing someplace to stay for a while. He cut down any foliage that interfered with the view from the surveillance cameras around our house and mounted spotlights everywhere outside, keeping it bright as noon twenty-four hours a day. When he couldn't see the stop where Lisa and I waited for the school bus in front of our neighbor's house, he offered the neighbor several thousand dollars if he'd cut down the tree that blocked the camera's view. When the neighbor said no, he even offered to have a crew come out and move the tree. When the neighbor still refused, a garbage truck “accidentally” crashed into the tree, knocking it down. He wanted us watched on closed circuit television every time we went outside the house. Dad told my mother as little as possible and said nothing to my sisters, but for the first time, he broke one of the cardinal rules of his life. He brought me into the danger.

  Sitting down across from me, he explained what had happened. “People are going to come and try to kill me. They may try to hurt your sisters, too. From now on, I don't want any of you in the car with me. Freddy will take you wherever you need to go in a different car. I don't want you walking around on the public streets. I've done everything I can, but I can't be with you all the time. I need you to carry your gun whenever you leave the house, and you can't let your sisters go anywhere alone. I don't want your sisters to be scared, and you've all got to go to school. You've got to watch out for Lisa during lunch and breaks. Try not to let her notice, just keep an eye out.” He paused, cleared his throat, and continued. “If anybody tries to hurt her, shoot to kill. You won't get a second chance.”

  I swallowed hard and nodded.

  My father rubbed his face with his hands and then looked at me again. “I'm sorry, Al, I'm so sorry. I never wanted you to have to do this. But there's no one else I can trust. I'm counting on you.” His face sagged with despair.

  An unexpected calm came over me, an odd sensation, almost as if I had left my body. Feeling like someone else as I spoke the words, I reassured my father. “Don't worry, Dad. You can count on me. I won't let you down.”

  He stood up and hugged me, not the way a father hugs a child, but the way one man hugs another. I was a man now. At thirteen years old, I had become an adult.

  And so it began. Each morning afterward, I slipped a gun into my pocket as routinely as I brushed my teeth and loaded my backpack before leaving for school. While other boys played PacMan or flirted with girls during breaks, I scanned the perimeter of the quad where my little sister stood chatting with her friends, oblivious to my watchfulness. At home I remained on alert, nervously roaming the house with Major when my father was gone. My father called several times a day to make certain everything was secure, and Freddy cruised the house regularly. For a while everything remained routine—a mailman or a newspaper delivery our only interruptions—but then one day a young Hispanic man came to our front door.

  I was at school when he rang our doorbell. He told my mother he was a salesman. She told him she wasn't interested. He thanked her and said good-bye, but she noticed him driving by the house when I got home from school later that day. When my father returned home with Freddy in the late afternoon, the young man was still parked across the street from our house. As he did every time he returned now, Dad asked my mother if she had seen anything suspicious that day. She told him that a dark, Hispanic-looking man had been hanging around our house. In fact, she told my father, he was still there. She pointed through a window to an older model car across the street.

  My father whirled to look through the window, shouted down to the basement for Cousin Joe to follow, then drew his gun and rushed across the street, shouting at the man in the parked car. Freddy was already running to get Dad's car. Seeing my father rush at him, the young man immediately started his car and floored it out of there, the sound of screeching tires violating the quiet of our neighborhood. Dad and Joe ran back to the Cadillac and jumped in as Freddy rocketed down the street. The last thing I saw as I watched from the front porch was my father and Cousin Joe leaning out the windows of the car, guns drawn, as they careened around the corner and out of sight.

  My mother went straight into the kitchen and started dinner as soon as they left, trying to resume our regular routine as if it were any other day. The only sign that she knew anything was wrong was the banging of pans as she slammed them into place. A short while later my sisters came home and went upstairs to their rooms, unaware that anything had happened. I went to get my gun from its compartment by my bed, checked the load, and shoved it in my pants. Then I came back down and sat in a chair in the foyer facing the door, waiting, listening for the slightest sound. I felt strangely calm, detached, every cell of my body poised to do whatever might be required of me.

  It seemed like forever before my father returned. An hour later I heard the engine roar as he pulled to a stop in our driveway. I was already on my feet as he rushed through the front door. Glancing around the foyer, he asked, “Where's your mother?”

  “Kitchen.”

  “Your sisters?”

  “Upstairs.”

  Reaching into his
pants, he pulled out a revolver. I could smell the gunpowder, and as he passed it to me, I could feel the heat from the metal. I had never seen such intensity on his face, but he was utterly focused. “Wipe it down and wrap it in a garbage bag. Be ready to get rid of it when I tell you.” He disappeared upstairs.

  Hiding the gun under my shirt, I went into the kitchen and ripped several paper towels off the roll, then pulled a garbage bag from the drawer. My mother said, “Did your father come in?” I nodded and disappeared up the stairs after my father.

  In my room I wiped the gun carefully, then put it in the garbage bag. I slipped on my leather jacket and shoved the garbage bag in the inside pocket, then left my room in time to see my father emerge from his study with a small bag. He was calling my sisters' names as he went back downstairs. Hearing the urgency in his voice, they hurried down after him, where my mother waited at the foot of the stairs. His instructions were terse.

  “Pack a bag, now. Take whatever you need, but hurry. You have five minutes.”

  My mother's face was a mask of anger and fear, but my sisters looked bewildered. My father's voice hardened as he ordered, “Do it! Now! Be in the car in five minutes.” All four of us scattered upstairs; my father was behind us in seconds, tossing each one of us a large garbage bag. “Put your stuff in there.”

  Within five minutes we were all outside, where my father tossed the heavy garbage bags into the trunk and slid behind the driver's seat. The car was still running. My sisters were pale with terror, utterly confused by what was happening.

  As he started to pull away, I realized what we'd forgotten. “Dad! The dogs!”