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

by Albert Demeo

  Two weeks after that it happened again. And again after that. My classmates peered at me curiously, and I could hear them whispering as I walked by. Near the end of my first semester, the dean asked to see me in his office. I entered stoically, expecting the worst, but the face that examined mine over his priestly collar was concerned. “Al, your professors have informed me that you have been taken out of class several times by men who appear to be government agents. Is everything all right? Is there something I could help you with?”

  “Thank you, sir, but there's nothing you can do. It's a family matter.”

  “Would you like me to contact anyone on your behalf?”

  “No, thank you, I'll take care of it.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully, perplexed but unwilling to pry further. At last he said, “Well then, you may go. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do to help me. I was one tiny part of a sweeping criminal probe. I understood the rationale for the prosecutions. What bothered me was the methods used to bring them about. It was Machiavelli pure and simple: The end justifies the means. Do whatever you have to do to put these people away, no matter how brutal or unjust. At least the Mob was honest about the way it did things. The government, on the other hand, hid behind a mask of fake piety. The witness-protection program, conceived as a way to protect the innocent, was becoming a retirement program for gangsters, men who were often worse than the defendants they testified against. Sammy “The Bull” Gravano was the most dramatic example. Not only was he responsible for dozens of Mob murders but he swaggered into the courtroom and bragged about them, unrepentant, in front of stunned onlookers. The local papers talked of little else. And when he was finished, he went into early retirement, courtesy of the federal government. The only apparent criterion for the witness-protection program was a willingness to say whatever the government wanted you to say. It didn't seem to matter if it was true, as long as a prosecutor got his conviction. In some instances I knew that individual informants were lying, and I watched a family friend go to prison for something he had never done. His only crime was having a social relationship with my father. I agonized over his sentence, knowing that I might be able to clear him. But to do so would have required that I implicate several other people, and I wasn't willing to do that. To this day I wonder if I made the right decision.

  The pressure on me to talk was relentless. Much of the time I could not figure out what they wanted me to say. I had never heard many of the names they brought up, and even when I did recognize a name or incident, my knowledge was very limited. I had been hearing unrelated bits and pieces at the social clubs and the Gemini all my life, but except for the money collections, my father had never shared the daily running of his business with me.

  Intellectually, I understood that I was caught up in a process that went far beyond me. My grand jury appearances were only a small part of a far-flung, complex investigation. The heads of all five New York crime families were being systematically prosecuted under Giuliani's leadership. Nothing close to it had ever happened before. During my sophomore year in college, Paul Castellano was murdered just in time to avoid a life sentence in prison. The year I graduated from college, John Gotti, one of my father's first business partners and the man who had murdered Castellano, became a media idol after his own arrest. The Mafia was not only wounded but crippled, the power it had once wielded permanently broken. The sweeping prosecutions of those years were wiping out what was left of my father's world.

  An encroaching sense of despair gradually became my daily companion. The passion and persistence of the ongoing federal investigations hounded my every step, literally and figuratively. I had buried my father, but I could not bury the heritage he had left me. My sisters, sheltered during his life from the knowledge of our father's other identity, remained sheltered after his death. Walter Mack never followed through on his threats to subpoena them, and I never told them about my own grand jury appearances. I let them believe that the continual legal intrusions were related to our father's murder investigation. Debra graduated from college with honors and married, putting her career as a textile designer on hold to have children in a home a few miles from where we'd grown up. My younger sister graduated from high school with honors and went on to college as well.

  My junior year of college, Mom sold the house my father had built on the water and moved to a new neighborhood. I knew she was desperate to escape the past, to begin a new life free of the pressure and misery of the last few years. I bought a condominium a few miles from my old high school.

  The personal toll of those years was tremendous for me. My relationship with my high school girlfriend was only one small casualty. Convinced I would never survive to marry or have children, I lived like a condemned man. When I couldn't escape the stigma of my father's Mafia image, I began to embrace it. During the days I went to class or to work, but at night, I became a wiseguy. I went into stores and ordered everything on the shelves just to prove that I could. I filled my condo with expensive furnishings and every technological gadget money could buy. I showered my friends with more luxuries than they wanted or could possibly use. I took a limo into Manhattan on weekends as I had in the old days, the seats filled with girls for me and my friends and the ice buckets brimming with thousand-dollar bottles of champagne. I was still offered the best tables in restaurants by people who either remembered my father or hoped for some of the cash I flashed around in rolls. On weekends I drank myself into oblivion, often waking in the middle of the night to find a naked stranger in my bed. I didn't remember who the women were, and I didn't care. The only thing that mattered was that I wasn't alone. My greatest fear was being sober and alone.

  Christmas of 1987 was one of the lowest points. Isolated and too depressed to accept my sister's invitation to dinner with her husband, I sat alone in my condominium on Christmas Eve, staring at the television screen and drinking to block out the ghosts of Christmases past. When the doorbell rang, I had to concentrate to maneuver to the doorway through the blur. I turned on the porch light and opened the door, and there stood Debra holding an eight-week-old Rottweiler puppy with a big red bow around its neck. With tears in her eyes, Debra put the puppy into my arms and said, “Merry Christmas, Al. I thought you could use a friend.”

  I put my arms around her and held her for a moment, the puppy squirming in my arms.

  “Are you sure you don't want to come for dinner? It's not too late.”

  “No, that's okay. I think I'd rather hang out here.”

  Looking at me with concern, she nodded and said she'd better get back home. I wished her Merry Christmas, and as she walked back down the path to her car, I called after her, “I love you, Deb.” She smiled wanly and waved back at me as I took the puppy inside to find him something to eat. I named him Luca, after Don Corleone's most trusted aide in The Godfather. He became my best friend.

  I did not understand what was happening to me. I had not cried once since the day I'd gone to the morgue to identify my father's body. I only knew I had to kill the pain, even if that meant oblivion. Many nights I longed for death; it would be a relief to get it over with. My father had chosen death. I deserved nothing more. I have no idea how I survived those years. I should not have come through alive.

  My last year of college brought an event that seemed inconsequential at the time. My mother received a letter from a crime reporter named Jerry Capeci, asking to interview her for a book he was co-writing. Parts of the book would make reference to my father, and he hoped she would supply him with personal information about the family. She called me about the letter, and I told her I would take care of it. I had her lawyer reply, politely declining to take part in the project on the family's behalf, and forgot all about it. It seemed unlikely that my father's auto theft operation would attract much interest in a book about the Mafia when hired killers like Sammy the Bull were still making headlines regularly.


  The final important event of that year was my last appearance before a grand jury. I had severed ties with Jay Silverstein by then. With most of my father's old crew dead or in prison, and with a track record of my own demonstrating my unwillingness to share information, the threat of a Mob hit on me was minimal. I had turned instead to a legitimate lawyer, a man who had handled my father's estate and other aspects of his legitimate businesses. Greg was highly respected, competent, and free of Mafia ties, and I was anxious to cleanse myself of the image my Mob lawyer had projected in the courtroom. Greg sought and obtained a renewal of my immunity agreement before agreeing to have me testify. My mother was also subpoenaed this time, but was excused after only twenty minutes of testimony. She invoked spousal privilege when asked about my father's business dealings, and as she really didn't know anything about them, she was quickly dismissed.

  On the evening before my final grand jury testimony, after prepping with my attorney all day, I ate dinner at The Palm restaurant in Manhattan with a friend. I was sitting at a table, relaxing over drinks, when I looked up and caught sight of a familiar face. There sat Anthony Senter, one of the Gemini Twins, just four tables away from us. I couldn't believe my past was still following me. He was out on bail pending the investigation I was testifying for. I had not seen him face to face since the night he had run me off the road and pistol-whipped me. He noticed me only seconds after I spotted him. He immediately looked away, pretending he hadn't seen me. I folded my napkin, excused myself, and walked over to Anthony's table. I stood there a moment, then said, “Hi ya, Anthony. How ya doing?”

  He looked up at me without replying, white as a sheet. He knew by then that I was well aware he had helped kill my father. I stood there staring down at him. A thousand memories flitted through my mind, ending with my father's face in the morgue, his eye blown out by the man sitting in front of me. For a moment I had an overpowering impulse to grab the steak knife from the table and push it right into Anthony's heart. The words I should have killed you myself ran through my mind. I didn't say them aloud. Instead I told him I'd see him around, and I returned to my table to finish my meal. He left the restaurant a few minutes later.

  The next day I entered the jury chamber and identified Anthony only as my father's friend, a business associate I used to see around the Gemini when I was a kid. My left temple throbbed as I testified, the fractures Anthony had inflicted still painful under stress. Prosecutors kept me on the stand all day, repeating my previous testimony, but when they finally excused me, they did so without warnings or innuendoes. After conferring with all parties involved, Greg told me that my long legal ordeal seemed to finally be over. The prosecution had no plans to subpoena me again. A few months later I read in the paper that both Anthony and Joey Testa had been given three consecutive life sentences for murdering men I had never heard of. I never saw them again.

  eleven

  THE ABYSS

  Blind,

  Like one whom sleep comes over in a swoon,

  I stumbled into darkness and went down.

  —DANTE, The Inferno

  I had spent every waking moment since I was seven years old learning to live in a world that had ceased to exist by the time I walked out of a courtroom for the last time at age twenty-three. In a sense, it had never existed to begin with. The underworld is as much the product of fiction as of any reality, even in the minds of those who dwell there. On screen, the life of the Mafioso is glamorous and exciting, filled with danger and intense, dark-eyed women. In the real world, the gangster is an exhausted middle-aged man who comes home at dawn to a disillusioned wife and a dog dish that needs cleaning. The shiny maroon Cadillac is the image. The frozen body in the trunk is the reality. I had never been an active player in that universe, but my existence had been trapped in its orbit for as long as I could remember. However illusory, it remained the only world I knew how to function in.

  I survived by embracing the hedonism of an existence where every day above ground is a good day. Every meal was my last meal. I lived every moment on the brink of death, addicted to the adrenaline rush that ensures survival. My father had raised me to be a soldier, and I'd spent every day for fifteen years poised for battle. What happens to soldiers when the war is over? They are released into a world for which no one has prepared them. When my father's war finally ended for me, I had no idea what to do next.

  All around me, the world was changing. My friend Nick had already married, and soon after, Tommy took a job and moved out of state. One by one, my party companions started careers, moved away, or began families of their own. My sisters were well and happy, with lives of usefulness and fulfillment. I had helped my mother get settled in a house near my older sister, where she could see her grandchildren as often as she wanted. After the long struggle, I was leaving my old life behind at last. I was finally free to do and to be whatever I wanted.

  I didn't have the faintest idea where to begin. So I did the one thing I had always been good at; I played a role. This time the role wasn't a wiseguy. It was that of a successful young businessman, a solid citizen. I decided to leave my old identity behind me forever and go into a witness-protection program of my own making. After five summers working on Wall Street under the guidance of my former neighbor, I turned to the stock market for a career. There, free from the old neighborhood and my former classmates, I could reinvent myself as a successful, upwardly mobile stockbroker.

  I was able to get a job in the financial district and quickly worked my way up the ranks, landing a job on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The intensity, the pace, the high stakes of life on the trading floor gave me an adrenaline rush I hadn't had since my days with my father, and I welcomed it. This time the rush I felt was legitimate, even profitable. Every now and then I felt a ghost walk over my grave when I came across a piece of my past in the newspaper. One Sunday the Post reported that Nino Gaggi had died of a heart attack in a prison hospital. A few months later I read that Freddy DiNome had been found hanged in a hotel room half a continent away. Police believed it was suicide. I wondered. Had my father's oldest friend succumbed to despair, or had the witness-protection program failed him? What had it all been for, all those years? All that remained were poverty, imprisonment, and death.

  I stayed in touch with Tommy and Nick, but I cultivated new friendships in the financial district as well, where no one knew about my past or my father's Mob connections. When I met a beautiful young girl working her way through college as a waitress, I fell in love on the spot. Carrie was just the sort of woman I had always admired: hardworking, grounded, with clear goals in life. I did not tell her about my father when I began courting her, but I felt obligated to share some information before I proposed to her. One night when we were talking about our families, I told her that my father had run an auto theft operation for the Mafia and that he had been murdered many years earlier. She was sympathetic but suggested that we keep that information to ourselves and quickly changed the subject. I didn't bring it up again. We married in 1991, a formal church wedding with all of our family and friends there. My family was thrilled for me, Carrie's family pleased that she was marrying such an up-and-coming young man. Only Tommy was hesitant, worried that she was more interested in my new image than in me. I didn't care; I liked my new image.

  For a while everything seemed to be working perfectly. But it's a strange thing about the past. The harder you try to leave it behind, the more closely it dogs you. I might have been ready to let go of my past, but it had no intention of letting go of me.

  It began harmlessly enough, with a resurgence of interest in Mafia movies. Sammy Gravano's revelations and John Gotti's sensational trial and conviction sparked an artistic renaissance for the Mob. The third Godfather movie had been released, followed shortly by GoodFellas, the ultimate paean to wiseguys. Then, by an odd coincidence, I found myself stationed next to a guy at the Exchange with his own Mafia obsession. Unaware of my personal history, he bragged continually that his son w
as the driver for the new don of a New York crime family. Every day when I came to work, I was treated to endless descriptions of the crimes his son knew about, the important gangsters his son drove around town. Each day as he told his tales to an admiring throng of my co-workers, I marveled at the man's breathtaking stupidity. If even a portion of what he was saying was true, he was putting his own life and his son's at risk with the Mob and the law by spilling every detail he knew.

  For a while my role-playing continued to work. My old identity remained a secret. Each morning I boarded the train from Long Island to Manhattan, got a cup of espresso under the towering arches of the Wall Street exit, bought my copy of the Wall Street Journal to read while I had my shoes shined, and joined my colleagues on the floor of the Exchange. In the evenings I took the train back to Long Island, got into the car where Carrie waited at the station, and kissed my beautiful wife hello. It was the best moment of the day for me. I loved the way she smelled. We would drive home together to the quiet of our beautifully appointed home in the suburbs, where Luca greeted us ecstatically at the front door. He had grown from a squirmy, clumsy puppy to nearly one hundred-sixty pounds of solid muscle in the years since Debra brought him to my door, but he was as sweet and affectionate as ever. I had built a two-story home for us less than a mile from my older sister's home, a downsized replica of my family's old home on the water, complete with marble floors and crystal chandeliers. At night, as Carrie lay sleeping in my arms, I would marvel at the place life had finally brought me.

  I was rarely happy, but I was safe, and that was enough. I bought Carrie jewelry and let her decorate our home, finding happiness in her excitement. I was still drinking heavily, but I confined my drinking to the nighttime hours. I was always sober by the time I left for work. Carrie couldn't understand my persistent insomnia or the nightmares that sent me to a bottle somewhere between 1:00 and 4:00 A.M., but it was easy enough for her to ignore as long as I continued functioning. The people in my new life saw my hard-earned facade and accepted it as authentic. I was liked and respected by neighbors and colleagues alike. There were days when even to me, my former life with my father seemed unreal, a strange phantom existence that recurred in my consciousness only in the reaches of the night.