by Albert Demeo
I had come to do what was required of me, and I entered the room expecting to find a man doing the same. Mack was doing his job, my father would have told me; he had nothing personal against me. One glimpse of his face dispelled that illusion. The man looking across at me radiated animosity, the same animosity I had already encountered with investigators. He rose to his feet and walked around the desk to look down at me. At six feet, five inches, Mack's skinny frame towered over me, his face raw and reddened, topped by fair, thinning hair. When he opened his mouth to speak to me, I saw that his teeth were crooked and discolored and wondered briefly why he'd never had them fixed. His clothes, too, were cheap and ill-fitting. Don't they pay this guy decently? I thought. Suddenly I was painfully aware of my own manicured nails and Italian suit. I cleared my throat nervously and waited for someone to say something.
Sitting back down behind his desk, Mack turned to Jay and opened with, “We believe Al knows a great deal about his father's business, a great deal more than he's telling us.” Without pausing for a reply, he turned to me and said, “We believe that he was, in fact, actively involved in all aspects of his father's business dealings.” I thought it was odd that he kept referring to me in third person as if I weren't there.
Before my attorney had a chance to reply, Mack preempted him with, “We are, however, willing to discuss certain incentives if your client decides to cooperate.” And with that he proceeded to explain the witness-protection program. If I would share everything I knew about my father, the government would give me a new identity and relocate me where my father's associates couldn't find me. Funny, I thought, my father was going to try the same thing with his disappearing act.
I listened politely as Mack outlined the government's offer in more detail. Accepting it was out of the question, but I didn't want to antagonize him further by refusing up front. The only thing I knew about the witness-protection program was my father's description: “The place where rats go after they sell out their friends.” As for the government ensuring my safety, I considered that a joke. I knew that if the Mob really wanted to find me, they would. I would be a fish out of water in the Midwest, where he was talking about sending me. Besides, everyone has a price, and I had seen government employees on the Mob payroll all my life. Nobody could guarantee my safety. My father had realized the same thing about his own escape plans. Sometimes the only way out was to stay and face the consequences. Meanwhile, I would be abandoning the one role that still gave any meaning to my life: the protector of my mother and sisters. My father had died to keep them safe. Leaving them was out of the question.
Perhaps most important of all, in turning informant I would be abandoning the most deeply ingrained lesson of my life: Never rat on anyone. Even if it means you get blamed for something you didn't do, even if it means losing your own life, you don't tell. I believed in the traditional code of silence to the core of my being. I had tried to take revenge on my father's murderers myself, but I could never turn them over to the authorities. Even if I'd decided to finger them, I don't think I could have forced the words out of my mouth. I would have choked trying.
When Mack finally paused for a response, I didn't wait for my attorney to reply. “No thank you, Mr. Mack. I'm afraid I couldn't accept that offer, sir.”
His eyes narrowed momentarily, and I saw a vein begin to bulge on the side of his thin neck. His raw skin turned a shade redder as he turned to Jay.
“I would advise your client to accept our offer if I were you,” he went on as if I weren't there. “Without it he will become subject to prosecution himself.”
“Are you charging my client with something at this time?” Jay asked rather belligerently.
“Not at this time,” Mack replied after a moment's pause. Then, shifting tactics, “I do have to point out, however, that if Albert doesn't testify, I will feel compelled to subpoena his sisters.” Sorting through some papers on his desk, he continued, “I believe Debra is his older sister's name, is it not? And Lisa, yes, Lisa will be eighteen next year, I believe.” He knew perfectly well when she would be eighteen. Mack struck me as the kind of man who knew the content of every sheet of paper among the stacks on his desk. Anger welling within me, I struggled to maintain my composure. My fear was gone; I felt more focused than I had since my father's funeral. I knew what I was facing now. This was a war. I knew how to behave in a war. Be calm, Al, and think, I heard my father's voice say to me. Stay aware of everything around you. That's how you survive. No smart-mouthed civil servant was going to come after my family. I would play out this game to the end.
As my lawyer and the prosecutor talked on, I silently sized up my opponent. I think my politeness irritated him most of all. In his eyes I was an arrogant little punk, stone cold and defiant, and my careful courtesy seemed to him another form of disrespect. Every time he looked at me, the vein on the side of his neck bulged visibly.
After what felt like hours, Mack dismissed us with a final admonition to Jay for his client to think carefully about the consequences of refusing the government's generosity. As we walked back down the courthouse steps, I breathed deeply of the cold winter air and said, “What's next, Jay?”
“They'll probably subpoena you before a grand jury. Don't worry, Al. I'll make sure they grant you immunity.” Immunity from what? I wondered.
I did not tell my mother or sisters what had happened in Walter Mack's office. When Debra asked, I just said he wanted to ask me a couple of questions about Dad's murder. I did not want her worrying.
The weather warmed toward spring, and each day I expected another process server to appear on my doorstep, but no one did. I had actually begun to hope the ordeal was over, that the prosecutor knew his threats were empty. I was graduating from high school in a couple of months, and there were parties nearly every weekend. I went with my girlfriend and tried to enjoy myself, but it was difficult to relax. Tommy was already in college, but Nick would be graduating in my class. Senior prom was the big social event of that semester, and my girlfriend had spent weeks planning her dress and hair. I knew how important the special night was to her. I ordered a limo and prepared to go with Nick and Tommy and their dates. Even though he had graduated, Tommy was taking a girl in my class. That evening we all met at my house, and the last thing we did before getting in the limo was to line up on the sidewalk so my mother could take pictures of us all in our formal attire. We were all too busy smiling for the camera to notice a stranger approaching on the sidewalk.
“Albert DeMeo?” he inquired.
Immediately wary, I replied, “Yeah. Why?”
He pulled an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and threw it at me. It glanced off my chest and landed on the sidewalk.
“You've just been served,” he grinned and then walked off down the street.
I felt myself flush deeply as my girlfriend looked at me and said, “Al . . . ?”
Tommy and Nick had already taken their dates by the arm and guided them into the limo, away from me and the humiliation of the moment.
Leaning over to pick up the envelope from the sidewalk, I tried to sound reassuring as I told my girlfriend, “Everything's fine. I just need to go in the house for a minute and make a phone call. Then we're out of here.” Her face was sad, uncertain. I kissed her on the cheek. “It's fine. Don't worry about a thing. I'll make a call, we'll go have a good time.”
I went quickly upstairs to my father's study and called Jay at home. He told me to meet him at his office in the morning. Then I went back down to the limo and climbed inside. As the driver pulled away, I asked, “Who wants a drink?” and everyone laughed with relief. We spent the next six hours dancing the night away at a country club with the class of 1984. Tommy says we had a good time. I don't remember a thing about it.
A date had been set for my first appearance before the grand jury investigating Nino Gaggi and the Gemini crew. Jay explained the process to me carefully. We would go to the courthouse, where I would be taken into a room filled wit
h a jury composed of citizens from all walks of life. There would be no judge, and Mack would be there as prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. I would be interrogated, probably extensively, about my father's business dealings. Jay told me to take the Fifth Amendment on everything they asked me, except for verifying my identity. He had not yet been able to secure me immunity, but he was confident the government would offer it when it became clear I would not testify without it.
The psychological war with the government I had been drafted into escalated steadily. Surveillance vehicles reemerged in growing numbers from the night of the prom. As my grand jury date approached, a series of odd incidents began occurring. They began with my car radio, stolen from the parking lot while my girlfriend and I were in a movie theater. Since we had been tailed to the theater, I went over to ask the surveillance team if they'd seen anyone tampering with my car. They told me they didn't know what I was talking about. They hadn't seen anyone near my car. I didn't think too much about the incident until the T-top was stolen off my car a couple of nights later, while I was eating in a restaurant with Tommy and Nick. Then a few days later, I went into the backyard one morning to discover that my speedboat cover had been taken while the boat was moored to the floating dock out back. And finally, on the morning I was scheduled to testify, I went out to the driveway to find all four tires of my car flat. All of these incidents had taken place while government cars surveyed me continually. In spite of their ongoing presence, the agents all claimed to have seen nothing. One suggested some of my “Mob buddies” had done it. That was a ridiculous suggestion. I knew the Mob wasn't responsible for any of it. If they wanted to influence my testimony, they would threaten me directly, more likely kill me. Besides, I knew Jay had told them I was not going to testify against them. That was why I'd hired him in the first place.
Everything about the grand jury system is designed to intimidate. To begin with, attorneys are not allowed in the jury chamber, so each participant, witness or accused, enters the jury chamber alone. I had not been warned about this the first time I testified; Jay gave me this information at the door of the jury chamber as I entered that morning. Horrified, I responded, “You're not coming with me?” No, he replied, I could leave the chamber whenever I wanted talk to him, but he would not be allowed in the room with me. I was unnerved by this unexpected turn of events. Even the door the court clerk directed me to enter was intimidating. Large and heavy, with the seal of New York State on the outside, it radiated authority. I felt suddenly very small as I pushed it open and walked through the portal.
Inside the chamber, on both sides of me, jurors sat on tiered benches that looked like bleachers. As I walked toward a table straight ahead, I was painfully aware of a hundred pairs of eyes staring down at me, the mobster's son. The faces above me represented a cross-section of New York City: male and female, old and young, poor and middle class, black and brown and white—I had the eerie sensation that the entire city was there. What did they see when they looked at me? I wondered. I had dressed carefully for the occasion in a conservative suit and tie, shoes shined, and hair combed. Yet no amount of scrubbing and brushing could make me look like the frightened teenager I really was. I knew that the jury saw the same thing the government saw when they looked at me: the junior wiseguy, a miniature version of my father. The mask of bravado I put on to get me through the moment only made things worse, yet it was the only mask I had.
I was shown to a chair at the end of a long, heavy wooden table. Mack sat at the other end, seemingly miles away. After a lengthy pause, during which I could feel my hands shaking, he began to question me. His questions were slow, deliberate, repetitive. After verifying my name and address, I began taking the Fifth: “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that it might incriminate me.” When a witness takes the Fifth four or five times in a row, the prosecutor usually stops the proceedings for a ruling from the judge. Mack did not stop. He kept on asking me questions.
“What did your father do for a living?”
“I respectfully decline . . .”
“Are you familiar with a bar called the Gemini Lounge?”
“I respectfully decline . . .”
“Are you acquainted with a man named Anthony Gaggi?”
“I respectfully decline . . .”
After a while he whispered something to his clerk, who walked the length of that endless table and laid two photographs in front of me. One was a picture of my father, smiling into the camera, another a snapshot of my father and me when I was small. Where had they gotten these pictures? Mack continued questioning me, making no reference to the photos lying before me. The clerk glanced at Mack, who nodded slightly and continued speaking as the clerk began laying other photos in a semicircle around the smiling snapshots of me and my dad. These were crime scene photos taken at the time of my father's murder. There were about a dozen of them, taken at various angles while he lay contorted in his own blood in the trunk of our car. There were close-ups of his face and hands, where the bullets had penetrated. I had never seen these photographs before. Clenching my hands to control their shaking, I heard Mack ask, “Who killed your father, Albert?”
The faces of the Gemini Twins flashed in front of my eyes, peering through the darkness at me behind ski masks. This is war, Al, war, I reminded myself. I pulled my eyes away from the photos and met Mack's gaze.
“I respectfully decline . . .”
The clerk returned to the far end of the table and sat down as Mack changed direction to a more innocuous series of questions.
“Who did your mother hire to decorate her house?”
What was he talking about? The decorator? The minutes dragged by. At another nod from the prosecutor, the clerk made another journey to the end of the table where I sat. He began arranging new photos around the crime scene pictures of my father's body: Anthony, Joey, Nino, Freddy in his race car, another family snapshot of my father. As the clerk laid each one down, Mack asked me, “Do you recognize the person in this photograph?” Finally the clerk laid down a snapshot of the crew leaving the Gemini. “Who killed your father, Albert?”
All day long it went on. There was a short lunch break, and then it started all over again. More questions, the same questions rephrased and repeated, more photographs. Some were of people I had never seen before; others looked vaguely familiar. One in particular caught my attention. My first thought was “That's Freddy.” Yet it didn't look like Freddy. The features were different. Plastic surgery? Jay had told me that Freddy had already been relocated by the witness-protection program. My gut told me it was Freddy DiNome, but I couldn't be sure. Other photos were deeply disturbing. I was shown a series of murder scenes, strangers with mutilated bodies and faces disfigured in death. Piece by piece, a mosaic of horror was constructed in front of me. When the crime scene photos were laid on the table, Mack came down to where I was sitting to point at them, leaning so close to my face I could feel his breath. I could smell his hatred as he asked me to identify the victims in the photos. He clearly believed I knew who they were, but with every question, I became more confused. Who were these people? What did they have to do with my father? After what felt like several lifetimes, I was finally dismissed for the day. My entire body was numb. I had taken the Fifth Amendment more times than I can remember.
The next morning Mack called Jay and offered me immunity. A few days later, when the paperwork was completed, I returned to the grand jury room for my second appearance. The questions, the photographs were a repetition of my earlier testimony. I answered politely, vaguely, offering as little information as possible. I identified crew members as “friends of my father's” but said I didn't know what they did for a living. I soon realized that Mack was hoping to trap me into a different reply by continual rephrasing of the same questions, to confuse me or frustrate me into saying something I hadn't planned on. Each time I felt uncertain, I asked to see Jay and made the long walk to the door as the eyes of the jurors followed
me. Outside in the hall, I would confer with my lawyer, then open the door and return inside the chamber. Each time I opened it, the door got a little heavier. By the time they finally dismissed me, I felt like an old man. It was over, Jay told me. But I knew by then that it might never be over.
I graduated with the rest of my class, and my mother and sisters were there to smile and wish me well. I made myself smile back at them, and I ached as I watched classmates embrace their fathers and listened to idealistic speeches I could not relate to. Our neighbor the stockbroker arranged a summer job for me in the financial district. It was a kind and courageous gesture on his part, for the stigma of my father's murder had made us pariahs with most of the neighborhood. I worked hard all summer, and in September I began classes at St. John's University in Queens as a business major. It was a beautiful little campus, filled with historic buildings and arching trees, still overseen by the order of priests who had founded it. Yet even there I didn't feel safe. One morning a few weeks into my first semester, I saw the professor look toward the door and say, “May I help you?” in a puzzled voice. I turned with the rest of my class to see two men standing in the doorway. My throat closed. Federal agents.
“We're looking for Albert DeMeo,” one of them said, scanning the classroom.
I was on my feet before he finished the sentence. Heading for the hall as quickly as I could, I mumbled something to the professor about going on without me. He resumed the lecture as I stepped into the hallway. One of the agents said, “Mr. Mack wants to see you, Albert. He just has a few more questions.”
“Call my lawyer” was my only reply. I quietly retrieved my books from the classroom, called Jay, and met him downtown. I didn't want to prolong this ordeal for another minute.
