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

by Albert Demeo

  Tommy had heard most of this story, and one week he came up with a way to collect the cash. We'd already been there twice that week, and each time we were told that Joe had just left, and could we come back another time? I wasn't about to beat him up to make the collection, but I did want to get the payment. We knew that Joe was sneaking out the back door every time we arrived, so Tommy got the bright idea of trapping him. I was doubtful, but Tommy kept saying, “Come on, Al, it'll be fun!” Tommy was older and considerably bigger than I was, and he wanted to flex his muscles. So we showed up at the barber shop unexpectedly one afternoon, and Tommy stationed himself at the back door while I went in the front. Tommy pushed a trash barrel directly behind the back door while he waited.

  Sure enough, the minute I walked in the front door, I heard someone running and took off after him. Joe dashed straight out the back and into the trash can, tripping and falling into the alley. By the time I got there, Tommy had Joe by the collar, obviously having the time of his life. I looked at Joe and said, “Come on, Joe, nobody wants to hurt you, but you owe my father some money, and we all know you're gambling again. So for God's sake, just get it over with and pay up.” Joe counted out the cash while I watched, and that was that. Tommy laughed all the way home. It was the most fun he'd ever had. I only hoped my father didn't find out. He didn't like my taking unnecessary risks.

  Nothing was fun for me anymore. The price I had paid for losing my fear was that my capacity for joy went with it. I could and did experience pleasure at times, but happiness was beyond my reach. I went through the motions. I was always the glad hand and big spender in my small group of friends. Even by the standards of wealthy Massapequa, I had money to burn. My father, consumed with guilt for what he was exposing me to, tried to make it up to me by showering me with everything money could buy. And in his world, money could buy just about anything.

  One weekend shortly after my fourteenth birthday, my father brought me along while he made a trip to the country, where a friend of his raised Thoroughbreds. I had been there many times; my father kept several horses of his own there, for himself and for Debra, who was an expert rider. On that particular afternoon, he casually suggested I go to the barn while he talked with his friend and see a fine new Thoroughbred he'd brought in. I walked to the barn and made my way down the row of stalls to the area my father had mentioned. When I got there, I was baffled to find that the stall was empty, but a beautiful young Italian girl was standing there. I thought she must be a stable hand or a rider, so I asked her if she knew where the new Thoroughbred was. She laughed and said, “Right here.”

  I still didn't get it. Looking around, I said, “Where?”

  As I stared in amazement, she pulled her shirt over her head, unfastened her bra, and drew me forward to fondle her breasts, murmuring, “Happy birthday, Al.” I felt my body go white hot. Seconds later she began removing my clothing and drew me down into the straw. At fourteen years old, I lost my virginity in a literal roll in the hay.

  Afterward I returned to my father and his friend in a daze. Dad laughed and slapped me on the back, asking, “How did you like your birthday present, Son?” I tried to play it off like it was no big deal, but I could feel my face growing hot. Both men laughed. From then on, my father told me, I could have any woman I wanted from the string of call girls my father's operation financed. I already knew he had prostitutes working for him; I had seen them hanging around his operations when I went to New Jersey with him. I had passed another of my father's rites of passage. Now, I was a man.

  Tommy and Nick, when they heard about it, thought I was the luckiest kid on the face of the earth and wanted to know when they could get in on the action. I had begun picking up collections from an escort service when my father was out of town. Dad had ordered a limo to pick me up at the house and take me to the city to make the collections. It was a very expensive agency that catered to the wealthy and famous of Manhattan, and the first time I went in there, I thought the women who came and went were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. One afternoon, when the owner took me in the back to give me the payment, I looked him right in the eye and said, “Thanks. I'm taking three girls with me for the evening, too.”

  The man looked at me, startled. “What did you say?”

  “I said I'll take three girls. On the house.”

  I could tell he was angry, but he didn't dare refuse me. For all he knew, my father had ordered the girls as part of the payment. Fifteen minutes later I was in the limo with three women who looked like supermodels, feeling like I had just scored the biggest coup any high school boy had ever made. I told the driver to take me to Little Italy; then I got Tommy on the phone and told him to get Nick and meet me at a restaurant on Mulberry Street. I had a surprise for them. When the guys got to the restaurant an hour later, their eyes nearly fell out of their heads. I played it cool, acting like they were just three women I had met at the restaurant. Afterward we got in the limo, and I ordered the chauffeur to keep driving around the city until I told him to stop. Then I put up the window and made a pass at one of the girls. Naturally, she didn't say no.

  Nick was beginning to figure it out, but Tommy had actually bought my whole ridiculous story. He was in the process of talking earnestly to one of the call girls, telling her about his classes and plans for college. Finally he said, “Hey, if I called you sometime, would you maybe go to dinner or to the movies with me? I really like you.”

  The girl laughed at him and said, “Honey, you can't afford me.”

  Tommy looked confused and embarrassed, but Nick and I roared with laughter. Finally I said, “Tommy, you idiot, she's a hooker! She belongs to one of my father's associates.”

  “You can do whatever you want with me tonight, cutie,” she said with a wink. “It's on the house.” Tommy's face turned beet red beneath the freckles. Luckily for him, the girl knew what to do even if he didn't. Afterward he and Nick bragged to all the guys at school about the women they'd had. I don't think anyone believed them, but it didn't matter to them. They felt like the coolest guys in school.

  With access to a limo whenever my father was out of town, I continued to pick up a few call girls every time I picked up cash at the escort service. After a few rounds of this, the owner was furious, for the girls were worth considerable money to him. When he finally mentioned it to my father, my dad hit the roof. He hadn't yelled at me like that since I was a little kid. That was the last of the call girls, but it wasn't the last of the women.

  I wasn't even fifteen yet, but I felt like a man, and I was already playing the part. I began trying to fill my emotional void with pleasure. Whenever the fear set in again, I would pick up my friends, a couple of beautiful girls, and a bottle of champagne and drown my consciousness. Afterward I was left exhausted and empty, but while it lasted, I felt a rush of counterfeit power. In those moments I was strong, invulnerable. There were no more free call girls, but I soon found that plenty of women would go with me for free during these nights on the town. It was my first taste of the sexual allure the Mafia holds for many women. I played into that notion, and I learned to use it to my advantage in the secret life I was leading. In Massapequa I remained a shy, awkward adolescent. I had my first girlfriend at school, a sweet, traditional girl. I could perform like a man with a prostitute, but my hands still sweated at the thought of putting my arm around my girl.

  By the time I entered my second year of high school, my father was disappearing regularly, and I took on more and more of the cash collections for his businesses. It bothered my father, and he repeatedly apologized for putting me in that position, but it continued to happen. One of my father's most lucrative businesses at that time, next to the car theft operation, was a string of sex shops and prostitution rings on Forty-Second Street in Manhattan. Forty-Second Street was the red light district of New York City in those days, and its sidewalks were lined with hookers leaning against storefronts that advertised sex malls and pornographic films. Many of those stores were m
y father's. It was another world that most teenagers never enter.

  To authorize the money pickups, my father introduced me to the pimp that ran the prostitution ring. He knew the system well and ran the day-to-day operations. My father's only role was financial. The pimp had a girlfriend, a strikingly beautiful woman who lived with him but also worked as a call girl. I was shocked the first time I heard him set up the woman he claimed to love with a customer. I asked my father about it, and he said that to the pimp, the girlfriend was an expensive commodity that he couldn't afford to waste. She fetched top dollar, and it would be foolish to give up the revenue she could bring in. It was a practical matter. Besides, she did it willingly. All the women in the ring did. They made far more money than they could ever make doing traditional jobs; they had expensive clothing and jewelry, and some had nice apartments where they could raise their children in comfort. It was a good deal for everyone, my father reassured me.

  I listened to what he was saying, and on one level, it made sense. Yet a distant voice in the back of my head echoed other words my father had taught me: Always treat a woman with respect, for she is somebody's daughter, mother, or sister. I thought of my own sisters. I knew there was something wrong with what I was hearing, but I couldn't figure out what it was. There was a fundamental contradiction in what I was experiencing.

  My two sets of morality came close to colliding one afternoon as I was making a routine collection for my dad. The Roxy Theatre, once the pride of Broadway, had been converted into a sex mall that my father now owned. Once famous, it towered over Forty-Second Street like some grand old lady of years gone by. I had never been inside, but in my imagination, the glory of former years still lingered. I was excited at the prospect of entering the old building. It would be like walking into the past.

  Nothing I'd seen so far prepared me for what I met inside. I had made many collections on Forty-Second Street by then. An associate of my father called Tony Cigars would pick me up at the house in a black Cadillac limo and drive me into the city after I finished my homework. The collections themselves were simple; most of them involved walking into some shabby office and picking up an envelope or a small package and slipping it into my jacket. Afterward I would take the money home and put it in the carved cabinet in my father's office or take it to Cousin Joe to place in the safe. The collections were usually depressing more than disturbing. But what I saw inside the once dignified walls of the Roxy was far beyond anything I could have imagined.

  The arched ceiling still bore the elaborate gilded carvings of the early part of the century, when vaudeville ruled. Even the neglected paint and the loose plaster couldn't obscure the remnants of the Roxy's former beauty. As I followed the manager through the lobby, however, I noticed a row of what appeared to be small stalls or cages lining the walls. Someone had erected a cheap wall with flashy paint on the entrances and peep holes on the sides with sliding panels. A Hasidic Jew was emerging from one of them, dusting off his black coat as he did so. Hasidic Jews, the manager explained, were some of their best customers. Their religion forbade certain sex acts with women of their own faith, including their wives, so they frequented the shops on Forty-Second Street instead. Besides, he snickered, it was easy to hide any number of things under those long, loose coats.

  As we passed the stall the man was emerging from, I couldn't resist glancing aside. In a small, filthy space, hardly big enough to lie down in, a naked woman sat staring blankly in the corner. She seemed indifferent to the body fluids pooled on the floor around her. The stench that emerged from the space nearly made me retch. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “an animal wouldn't mate in that place.” I stared at the man walking by me, but he was indifferent to my reaction. With no apparent sense of shame, he calmly walked toward the exit. As we neared the end of the row of cubicles, I saw a Hispanic man working in one of the spaces. He had a bucket and a mop, and he was swamping body fluids out of the cubicle the way you would muck out a stall. Once again, a wave of nausea swept over me. Turning to the manager, I said, “Jesus! Nobody should have to do that job.”

  The manager just shrugged and said, “He's paid well.”

  As we passed the last stall and headed toward the main theater, we passed the former concession stand. An old-fashioned popcorn machine still sat there, a relic of the days when kids bought intermission treats between films.

  We rounded the corner into the main auditorium, and the manager led me down the aisle toward the wings, where the small office was situated. As I walked toward the front of the auditorium, I looked around in the vast space. The place was surprisingly crowded for the middle of the afternoon. Large, dusty velvet curtains framed a stage with old-fashioned footlights lining the apron. Music was playing on a bad loudspeaker, and as I looked up at the stage, I was stunned to see a very pregnant woman parading around, completely naked. She was walking up and down with several other women, all of them nude, displaying herself for customers. The manager told me that the women were competing for the highest spenders. The pregnant one always got the best offers, he told me. The crowd loved the pregnant ones, the bigger the better.

  As I watched in sickened fascination, the women made their deals and the lights dimmed as they began to dance. I visibly flinched when, as though on cue, men all over the auditorium unzipped their flies and began masturbating. The sound was so loud, it actually echoed. A chorus of groaning began. I looked away, longing to cover my ears, and hurried toward the office in the wings. The smell was becoming overpowering. As I began walking faster, I noticed the soles of my shoes sticking to the floor. Looking down, expecting to see the residue of chewing gum or candy, I realized that the floor was coated with a mixture of semen and urine. My gorge rose. Taking the package that was offered to me and shoving it inside my coat, I nearly ran from the premises.

  That evening, when I got home, I peeled off every stitch of my clothing and threw it all in the garbage. Doubled over the toilet, I vomited until my stomach ached. Then I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it and climbed in the shower. I lathered myself over and over, scrubbing until my skin was raw, drenching my scalp with shampoo. But nothing seemed to get rid of the smell, of the film of filth that still clung to my body. Finally I got out of the shower and rummaged through the medicine cabinet for the box of Q-Tips. Soaking them in alcohol, I began scrubbing the inside of my nostrils, anything to remove the stench that seemed to linger there. My hands were shaking, and I could barely keep a grip on the cotton swabs. Finally I gave up and crawled into bed, where I lay sleepless in the darkness, trying to will the obscene images out of my memory. I didn't dare close my eyes.

  Later, in the small hours of the morning, I heard movement downstairs. Trying to quiet my breathing, I slipped from under the sheets and picked up the .38 I always kept loaded and ready in the compartment by my bed. Moving down the darkened hall as silently as a shadow, I crept toward the stairway. “Shit!” I murmured as I realized that Major was in the run out back. Why hadn't he barked? In the silence that was nearly absolute, I discerned a movement. Leaping forward in one instinctive motion, I lifted my gun to fire. At the same moment, another figure leapt toward me, into the faint reflection of the security lights outside the window, gun pointed directly at me. Finger on the trigger, I felt my body go rigid. The face looking back at me was my father's. We both froze, our faces masks of fear as we realized what had nearly happened. Neither of us said a word. Turning silently, my father went back down the stairs, and I followed him, gun still drawn. We cautiously checked every door and window as we had practiced so many times before. Outside the kitchen window, a branch was scraping against the glass. Satisfied at last that the house was safe, we climbed the stairs together, still in silence, and went to our rooms. I lay down on top of the bedspread and waited once again for sleep to come and release me. That night, like so many others, it never came.

  seven

  REDEMPTION

  I am in blood

  Stepp'd in so far that, should I
wade no more,

  Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

  —SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

  My father died for his own sins, not for the sins of others. Those sins were many and serious, and by the end, he knew it. My father knew that his own damnation was certain, and he told me so in the most direct terms, but the last wish of his heart was that my sisters and I would not suffer the same fate. So he did the only thing he knew how to do that might make things right. He gave his own life in hopes of saving ours. The pain that I felt on his passing was like a sword run into my heart, and there were times I thought I would surely bleed to death. In Christ's hours on the Cross, scripture tells us that mankind's sin shut God temporarily from his son's view. At the end, my father's sins shut him away from me. I had never felt so utterly forsaken.

  The events of the year before had set a complicated chain of events in motion, all leading to the same conclusion: the disintegration of my father's criminal career. For the first time, my father was arrested. In his twenty-five years in the Mob, that had never happened before. He was in the process of opening a Plato's Retreat—a sex mall like the one on Forty-Second Street—across state lines in New Jersey. The rumor going around was that the mall was actually a cover for a prostitution ring, and my father got called into FBI headquarters in Jersey and booked on charges of soliciting prostitution. At that time the feds had strong suspicions about my father's business, but they did not yet have evidence to indict him. The arrest in Jersey was an opportunity to get him on the books and possibly hold him on something that would stick until they were ready to prosecute him for more serious offenses. They still weren't certain where he fit into the Castellano investigation, but they knew he was a player of some kind. They never charged him, and he spent only one night in jail. But the arrest destroyed any illusions he was still nurturing about anonymity. He was fingerprinted, voice printed, and photographed. He now had a record that was public knowledge. The Gemini Twins were booked with him, along with Cousin Joe. It seemed a minor incident in the scheme of things, but it unnerved my father. It brought him one step closer to being terminated by Paul Castellano as a bad risk. And the implied exposure and scrutiny threatened his auto theft ring, whose income was the only thing keeping Castellano from killing him. We had embarked on desperate times.