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

by Albert Demeo

  To this day, my mother believes it was somebody else in that casket, that my father tricked everyone and got away. She knew that dead or alive, he was never coming back. But a part of her clings to the notion that somewhere, he is alive and well, that someone else's loved one was slaughtered and stuffed in a trunk. Some truths are too painful to accept. If it comforts her to believe a lie, so be it. She survived twenty-five years of lies by believing one truth: My father loved us. Whatever outsiders believed, we knew that my father loved us all.

  If anything symbolizes the bitter futility of life in the Mafia, it is a mobster's funeral. Movies still show the funeral processions of the old guard among the godfathers, trains of cars filled with flowers, elaborate masses with crowds of mourners. Carlo Gambino went out that way, but he was the last one who did. With surveillance everywhere and rampant distrust within the organization, mob funerals in recent decades are barren affairs. No one comes except the immediate family and a ragtag collection of civilian friends. The swarms of people who had surrounded my father in his heyday, who had rushed to bring me presents and show him respect, had vanished. In their place were vans filled with cameras and microphones across from an empty church. Even the curiosity seekers stayed away. My father was being realistic when he told me to put him in a garbage bag and pretend he had never lived. As far as his associates were concerned, his existence was already forgotten. Only one of his associates came, a minor player who had known my father since they were kids. He showed up at the funeral home after dark wearing a hat and sunglasses, jumpy as a rabbit but determined to pay his respects. None of the Gemini crew came to the funeral.

  The next two days survive in my memory as fragments, sharp-edged pieces of a mosaic I cannot reconstruct. I remember my uncle Joe, his face a mask of sorrow beneath his Grizzly Adams beard. Scrupulously honest himself, he had nevertheless loved my father devotedly, and in losing him, he lost not so much a big brother as a father. He stood silent and stricken in the shadow of my father's coffin. Jim and Barbara were there with their children, along with five other families from the old neighborhood. From the new neighborhood, only our next-door neighbors and Dad's stockbroker friend showed up. No one else so much as called. Tommy and Nick were there with their families, looking uncomfortable in their dark suits. Tommy had really loved my father, and his freckled face was riddled with sadness. Nick, always the protector, watched me with a brow furrowed with worry. I was touched to see Mrs. Profaci enter the viewing room, her face still beautiful in age. I understood enough by then to know that it couldn't have been pleasant for her. The stigma from her former brother-in-law still clung to her as my father's did to us. No one stayed long. There was nothing to say in the face of the circumstances.

  My grandmother held court, first at the funeral home and later at mass, her erect form draped in black widow's weeds. This was her moment. She had lost a second son, and she considered it fitting and proper that she be the center of attention in the family drama. She received condolences with a sorrowful countenance, but I wondered what she was really feeling. Aunt Marie was silent and sad, but my cousin Benny watched the proceedings like we were exotic animals at the zoo. Uncle Louis had called that morning, on my grandmother's behalf, to make certain my father's death wouldn't lessen her support check and to find out how much money Grandma had been bequeathed in my father's will. Even in death, my father remained my grandmother's meal ticket more than her son. He was also interested in knowing whether my father had left him anything, and if so, did I know how much? I suggested he call my father's lawyer.

  And most of all, I remember my mother and my sisters, deathly white and silent beside the coffin. Tears slid quietly down my sisters' faces, but like me, my mother didn't cry.

  I was the man of the house now. It was my responsibility to take my father's place, to care for my mother and sisters in his absence. I moved about the funeral parlor in my best suit, greeting visitors, thanking them for coming. I comforted my sisters, checked on my mother, checked and rechecked final details with the funeral director. I stood tall by my father's coffin, my face impassive, my form erect. My voice never trembled as I spoke with the mourners, and I resolutely detached myself from the discolored figure lying inside the mahogany container, covered with flowers. I was seventeen years and two days old, and I had already lived a lifetime.

  I've been told the mass was lovely. I don't remember. I do remember standing in the chapel at St. John's Cemetery in Queens the next day, again greeting the straggle of mourners who found their way there. Another priest said a few words, and it was over. My mother laid a rose on my father's coffin, and when it was my turn, I placed my own rose on the casket and leaned to kiss it one last time. Later that day the family grave would be opened and my father buried with his ancestors under a simple stone marked “DeMeo.” Carlo Gambino and Joseph Profaci were buried only a few hundred yards away. As the limousine bearing my mother and sisters and I wound slowly toward the gates, I gazed out the window at the crypts that lined the drive of the old cemetery. They were hauntingly beautiful, dozens, perhaps hundreds of white marble angels, their wings arched protectively over the loved ones below. I wanted to believe that somehow, somewhere, my father rested in peace.

  Wherever we went in the days that followed, I knew we were watched, for the eyes of the government were everywhere. Our very private grief was being recorded, down to the most minute detail, by an army of public servants. Plain white vans sat across the street twenty-four hours a day, and a government car followed me every time I left the house. Among the four of us, the government seemed primarily interested in me. My mother was indifferent to the surveillance, rarely appearing to notice the presence of those prying eyes. I did what I could to keep my sisters from noticing the unwanted attention, bringing movies home to keep them away from the television, allowing no newspapers in the house. “Reputed mobster Roy DeMeo found murdered. . . .” No, they didn't need to hear that. They never needed to hear that. Nor did they need to see the photograph in the paper of my father's frozen body in the trunk of our car, a crystal chandelier resting on top of him like a bizarre monument. We had lost our father. That was all they ever needed to know. Meanwhile Nick and Tommy worried, constantly asking me if I was all right. Of course, I was all right. I didn't feel a thing. I couldn't understand why they seemed so worried about me. My father was counting on me. I would be fine.

  On Monday I returned to school and tried to appear as if everything were normal. I showered and dressed and strode onto campus as if nothing had happened. But something had happened, and every student in my high school knew it. The weekend news reports had torn the veil of secrecy that had covered my home life for years. For the first time at school, people actually backed away from me as I approached, turning their backs, averting their eyes. I could hear the whispers as I passed. “That's the mobster's son . . . yeah, his name's Al . . . murdered his father . . . blew his head off . . . heard the body was already decomposed . . . heard Al is in the Mafia, too . . . think he's ever killed anybody?” I ignored them and went from class to class, grateful for the two classes I had with Nick that day. He sat silently beside me, his glare daring anyone to say something while he was around. I sat quietly, intent on my books, listening politely as my teachers droned on about history and English and geometry. The fact that I couldn't understand a word they were saying was irrelevant. I was there, and I was strong. Yet my teachers avoided my gaze, as unable as my peers to speak openly to the mobster's son about his father.

  Only my Italian teacher had the courage to speak to me with compassion about my father. As my last period of that interminable day ended and my classmates crowded out the door, he asked me to stay behind a minute and speak to him. Shutting the door behind the stragglers, he sat down at a desk and motioned for me to sit down across from him. His words were straightforward and unaffected. “Al, I heard about your father's death. I'm so very sorry. I just wanted to tell you that if you need anything, someone to talk to, anything at all
, you come to me. I know how rough this must be, and I'm here for you.” For the first time since the funeral, tears welled up in the face of his simple kindness. I mumbled a few words in thanks and shook his hand. He stood up, put his hand briefly on my shoulder, and returned to the front of the room to collect the papers on his desk. I wonder if he ever knew what his thoughtfulness meant to me.

  One other person also treated me with caring, though in his case it remained unspoken. Determined to prove to myself and the rest of the world that I was still strong, I went to the athletic field after school and told the coach I wanted to join the football team. He looked at me a moment, then told me to change and meet him back on the field. We never talked about it, but somehow I knew he understood. I wasn't much of a player, but he allowed me to work out with the team every day and to sit on the bench at games.

  The following Sunday I made the first of countless journeys to my father's grave. Across the street from the cemetery, I asked the cabbie to drop me off by a flower vendor's shop and went inside to make my purchase. Overhead hung dozens of wreaths dedicated in loving memory to mothers, husbands, beloved friends. Carnation crosses proclaimed the hope of resurrection. I chose my father's favorite, a dozen long-stemmed roses, deep red like Italian burgundy. I asked the woman to put them in a vase for me, and I added a small ribbon that read “In loving memory of my father.” But when it came time to pay, I discovered to my confused embarrassment that I had given all my cash to the cab driver. In the emotion of the moment, I had gone out without enough cash. I felt my face grow hot, and tears of disappointment stung my eyes as I shamefacedly admitted that I couldn't pay for the flowers, that I had given all my money to the cabbie. To my surprise, the woman behind the counter simply picked up the vase and put the flowers in my hands.

  Stammering in confusion, I said, “You don't understand. I made a mistake. I can't pay for these.”

  Her kind face smiled back at me. “I understand. You take these flowers, you go visit with your father. You don't worry about anything. You bring me the money when you can.”

  Unable to speak, I nodded my thanks and carried the flowers out to the sidewalk. As I kneeled by my father's grave a few minutes later, her face remained with me, softening ever so slightly the raw pain that was now a permanent part of my existence. The next Sunday I brought her the money, and the Sunday after that I returned for another dozen roses. Eighteen years and hundreds of journeys to the cemetery later, I still buy my flowers from the same woman, at the same shop.

  Financially, life went on as it always had. The house and all our principal possessions were in my mother's name. There were life insurance policies for my mother and grandmother, savings accounts, college funds, all legal and carefully thought out. My father had planned well. We were set for the remainder of our lives. The hundreds of thousands of dollars owed by my father's loan-shark customers would go unclaimed, the loans forgiven in my father's death. I could have tried to collect them if I'd wanted. I knew where he kept his records, and many of his customers knew me—but those debts would die with my father. I had no heart for any of his criminal enterprises. And I knew my father wouldn't want me to.

  There was one final bit of business that remained for me to do. My father's car remained in the impound lot, where it had been towed the afternoon they found his body. It was a maroon 1983 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, worth a fair amount of money, and it had to be claimed and sold at auction. I did not want my mother to see it, so I arranged with my uncle Joe to go pick it up at the impound yard. We were treated with contempt by the police officers there, but I was used to that. To them I wasn't a teenager or even a human being; I was just the mobster's son, and I was treated accordingly. After days of filling out paperwork and making endless phone calls, I went to the impound lot with Uncle Joe to get the car.

  Standing there in the lot with Uncle Joe, I stared at my father's Cadillac in disbelief. I had never seen anything like it, even on television. The forensic team had dusted every inch of it, inside and out, and the maroon of the exterior was completely submerged under a thick coating of powder. We walked gingerly around it, and when I opened the door to peer inside, I could see that the seat cushions and dashboard had the same heavy coating. I remembered all the Sunday afternoons of my childhood spent cleaning my father's car. He had always been so particular about his cars, keeping them shiny and spotless inside and out. Uncle Joe looked over at me and shook his head incredulously. Then, using his sleeve to wipe a small clear space in the windshield, he slid behind the wheel. I climbed in next to him. In spite of the cold, we rolled down the power windows so Joe could see to drive. The engine turned over as smoothly as ever, and Joe pulled carefully out of the lot and onto the expressway. Neither of us spoke a single word all the way home.

  When we reached Uncle Joe's house, he pulled the car onto the front lawn and turned off the ignition. Both of us climbed out and just stood there quietly a little longer, staring at the car. After a few minutes Uncle Joe said he was going in the house to clean up for dinner and told me to do the same. Joe disappeared into the house, but I couldn't bring myself to leave. That Cadillac was the last link I still had to my father. I had made countless trips with him in that car. He had spent his final days on earth imprisoned in it. I needed to say good-bye. I needed to spend a few last minutes in the same space he had so recently inhabited. I needed to understand how it had felt for him, even in death.

  I slid inside, behind the wheel, and leaned my head back with my eyes closed. Beneath the musty smell of the chemical dust, the scent of my father's aftershave still lingered. The leather upholstery cradled my head. I tried to imagine my father's last journey in that car, tried to reach back through the last two weeks to his final moments in that same seat, but search as I might, I could not find him. I could not sense him. Finally I gave up and decided to join my uncle in the house. But as I turned to open the car door, a sudden impulse made me reach inside the glove compartment and pop open the trunk. There was a soft click as I felt it open. Sliding across the seat, I stepped onto the grass and went around to the back of the car.

  I had already been to the morgue, already identified my father's twisted remains, already seen the worst there was to see. I did not think it would do me any more harm to look in the trunk, to see the space that had become his tomb. It was a morbid impulse; it was also my last chance to feel close to my father. Whatever the source of the need, I knew I had to look into that trunk.

  I took my time circling the car, edging slowly toward the rear. The first thing that hit me was the smell of congealed blood; the second was the sight of white paper, contrasting starkly with the frozen sea of dark red in which it was suspended. For a moment my mind went blank. What was it? I moved closer to look.

  The trunk itself was a shallow pool of blood, frozen into immobility in the winter light. I reached a tentative finger out to touch one of the papers that lay scattered beneath me. It stuck to the trunk mat. Finding a spot on the mat that appeared to be clean, I held the mat down with one hand and gingerly pulled one of the papers loose with the other. It was a white wrapper, the kind that surgical gloves come in. The trunk was littered with them, like a polluted pond. I lifted my other hand and realized that it was sticky. I looked down at it. It was coated with blood. My father's blood.

  Suddenly, after so many days of numbness, I felt a shock pulse through my body, and I began to shake. Looking down at the soiled pile in front of me, I suddenly could see it all. A cold, lonely street in Brooklyn, a group of police officers popping the trunk open. My father's body, contorted inside, on top of him the chandelier he was taking to Goodwill for my mother. The morgue workers gathering around the back of the car to hoist my father's body from the trunk like garbage. After all, they did this kind of thing every day, and besides, he was just another mobster, the victim of just another gangland hit. The swarm of forensic officers snapping their rubber gloves into place, dropping the wrappers where my father's body had lain, peeling the gloves off when
they finished and tossing them in the trunk of our family car like it was a garbage bin.

  And then I went further back, and I was seven years old again, finding the knife and disguises in the trunk of our Cadillac, wondering what my father did with those things in the middle of the night. I clenched my fist to keep from crying out in pain. The heat from my body dissolved the sticky mass in my left hand, and as I looked down in sickened disbelief, I saw my father's blood running down my wrist. For the first time in my life, I felt my body consumed with rage, blind, overpowering rage. My father's words came back to me: “No, Al, you will not take revenge. You will forget I ever lived.” But I knew that I could not, would not, let it end this way.

  Into the silence of that terrible moment, I heard my uncle shouting from the front porch. “Al!” he called sharply. “Al, stop it! Let it go! Enough!” I could hear the mixture of anger and fear in his voice. I closed the trunk and walked into his house.

  As I stood in his small, warm bathroom, I could feel the winter cold seeping from my body. My limbs began to thaw, and I could feel the blood pumping through my chest. Yet as my body warmed, my heart grew colder, and though I scrubbed my father's blood from my skin, I knew that the stain would never leave me. The rage still pulsing through my veins settled into a steady course, and I made my resolve. Vengeance would be mine, I promised my father. I would find his killers, and I would kill them myself.

  nine

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY

  This is most brave,

  That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,

  Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

  Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.

  —SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

  I had been in training for my father's death since I was twelve years old. I thought I was prepared for it, and from a practical point of view, I was. What I was not prepared for was the abyss of pain that opened beneath me with his passing. My father's final advice to me had been to forget him and to have a good life. The problem was that I didn't have the faintest idea how to do that. So instead I did what most people do in the aftermath of sudden loss: I carried on in the way I was accustomed to. And that meant taking care of business for my father. Not his Mob business. My father had started down that path at the same age I was, seventeen, and I knew where the journey ended. It was a journey I did not want to take. It was the other business of his life that I shouldered.