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

by Albert Demeo

  He had been brought to the Exchange, trailed by news cameras and television reporters, to open the day's activities by ringing the morning bell that sent the market racing. It was an honor and a celebration of his election. The crowds on the floor were jubilant as he made the rounds, shaking hands and smiling for the cameras. In the midst of the excitement and the cheers, I pulled back to my station, intent on ignoring the festivities all around me. There were hundreds of people there that day, yet by a cruel twist of fate, a random surge of the crowd shoved the new mayor right up to my station, and I suddenly found myself looking into the face of the man who had haunted me for a decade. He smiled and held his hand out for me to shake, but I just stood there, staring at him, unable to move. For a moment he paused and looked at me, and in that fraction of a second, I imagined that he was seeing my father's face as he gazed at me. Then it was over, and he moved on, the crowds and the cameras surging forward with him.

  I have no clear memory of what happened next. Everything went gray, and suddenly I was eighteen years old again, sitting at a table with one hundred people staring down at me, the mobster's son; and Walter Mack's face, the vein on his neck throbbing with rage and contempt, bent close to mine. I clutched at my work station for support to keep myself from collapsing. Then I wove my way through a sea of sound and confusion and walked off the floor of the Stock Exchange for the last time. The door slammed behind me, and I was falling into darkness. The void opened and swallowed me up.

  The day I stumbled out the door of the Stock Exchange for the last time was the beginning of a long journey into the depths of mental illness. The flashback that had knocked me off my feet like a body blow was only the first of many. Night and day they came, a vicious form of déjà vu that made it difficult to breathe. The dual worlds I had been living in since I was seven years old had finally collided with seismic force. The locks on every compartment of my mind were blown off, and all the ghosts came rushing out.

  I had taken a leave of absence from work, a leave that turned into a permanent resignation. Ashamed of my failure as a man and a provider, I spent my days cleaning the house over and over, scrubbing and vacuuming, feeling it was never clean enough. It was the age of the day trader, and I continued to trade stocks from a home computer. I also had ongoing income from rental properties and market investments, so financially we were secure. Yet it never felt like enough. I felt useless, lazy. I had to find a way to bring home more money. Yet how could I do that when I couldn't even leave the house in daylight?

  So I started going out at night. In the nighttime, while prying eyes were closed in sleep, I could move about unnoticed. I went to the local boatyards, systematically collecting every scrap of recyclable material. Later I remembered the discarded film I had once collected with my father and began searching the roadways and culverts for scrap metal. I filled garbage bags with these treasures and piled my BMW to the roof with the precious refuse. I found a recycling center that was open twenty-four hours a day and began a habit of arriving before dawn, to redeem the merchandise I had collected during the night. If the night attendants thought it was odd that an unshaven man in a luxury automobile was delivering discards in the small hours of the morning, they gave no indication. To them I was just Al, and they accepted me at face value. Under the cover of darkness, in the company of these strangers, I felt safe. Carrie was horrified, mortified at the thought someone in the neighborhood might see me with a car filled with garbage. Despite her embarrassment I continued, for my collections began bringing in several hundred dollars a week in extra income. More important, it made me feel less useless.

  Gradually, though, even these nighttime forays became impossible. I became convinced that I was being followed, that the government was looking for me again, that the Mob had taken out a hit on me. My beautiful home, the symbol of my success, became a prison of my own making. Terrified that my wife would be killed in an attack, I armed the house. I had guns everywhere, and I patrolled constantly as I had in the year following the Colombian threat, a loaded gun in my hand and Luca at my side. When the nights came, I would crouch by the windows, gun at the ready, peering through the blinds, soaked with sweat. Fear rustled through the darkness, crept through any window I left unguarded. Everywhere I looked, I saw the faces of my father's old enemies, of the victims I had seen in courtroom photographs, of the families who wanted to kill my family to avenge the lives my father had taken from them. I would not let my mother or sisters come near my house for fear they would be killed, and I told my friends to stay away. Their only hope of safety, I believed, was to keep far away from me.

  Carrie was appalled at the change in me, and so was my family. They couldn't understand it. The successful young businessman my wife had married, the strong stoical son and brother who had always protected them, this man was gone. In his place was a terrified child who hid in unlighted rooms during the day, soaked in tears and shaking with terror, afraid of things only he could see. The world I had lived in for most of my life had always remained hidden from them. They had never known about the gun hidden in my clothing on the school grounds when I was twelve, carried to keep my sister safe; about the nights I patrolled the house in my father's absence while the family slept. When they came to visit me in the hospital after Anthony and Joey tried to kill me, they had thought they were visiting the wild son and brother who had run his car off the road in a drunken spree. I had never told them what really happened. They hadn't been there when the government followed me or interrogated me in police stations, and they hadn't been to the morgue to see my father. I had tried to protect them from all that. I had never even told them about my grand jury appearances. So now they looked at me in bewilderment, wondering what was wrong with me. “What are you talking about, Al, what are you talking about? What did Daddy's business have to do with you?” my sisters asked. “Pull yourself together, Al, be a man. What's the matter with you?” my uncles said. They didn't understand, and neither did I. Baffled and repelled by what they saw, they wanted the old Al back, the one who never cried, who didn't seem to be afraid of anything. So did I.

  I decided to end everyone's suffering. I was putting my loved ones in jeopardy, I reasoned, for I was the one my enemies wanted to hurt. Once the protector of my mother and sisters, I now believed myself a danger to them. I had become a burden to my wife, unable to function as a provider, and a source of shame and anxiety to her. It seemed clear to me that the only honorable thing I could do for the people I cared about was to leave their lives. And the only way I could do that was to give up my own, which had become a source of misery to me anyway. So I systematically set about doing it.

  Like my father, I had always had a number of insurance policies in place, including life policies that included coverage for murder, suicide, and disability. In the back of my mind, I had never expected to live out a normal life span. I knew what to do, for my father had trained me carefully in such matters before he went to his death. Without telling anyone what I was planning, I quietly made certain everything was in order, that the mortgage payments and bills were paid six months ahead, and that the house and car were in Carrie's name. I transferred enough cash into her personal account for her to live on for a year, until all the policies paid off and any assets were out of probate. I even checked to make sure the house was clean and my own belongings were in order. Then when she was out at a friend's house one night for a candle-making party, I locked the house behind me, got in the car, and drove down to the highway to end my life. I wanted to be with my father again, wherever that might be. Hell couldn't be any worse than what I was already living.

  The Mob had run me off the road years before when they tried to kill me. Now I would do it to myself. I took the same highway through southeast Long Island I had taken that night long ago. As soon as the road was clear of cars, I accelerated to over 140 miles per hour and veered off into the trees—I was not wearing a seatbelt. A few seconds later my car catapulted over the embankment and through the woods, r
olling over several times and eventually coming to rest against some trees. When the noise and confusion finally stopped, I was stunned to find myself still sitting in the driver's seat, dizzy but unhurt. Instead of being relieved, I was angry and disappointed. How could I still be alive? I couldn't even succeed at suicide. I felt trapped in a life that I could neither survive nor relinquish.

  Night after night in the weeks that followed, while Carrie slept in the bedroom, I sat in the living room with the barrel of a gun pressed up against my head, Luca's head resting on my knee. The cold metal, the smell of the gunpowder were comforting. They reminded me of my father, of being seven years old and learning to take guns apart in the workshop with him. Most of all, they reminded me that I had the power to end the pain just by flexing my trigger finger. I would execute myself, Mafia-style, with a bullet behind my ear.

  I did not want my wife to find my body, so I waited for her to leave me. I knew it wouldn't be much longer. I knew the marriage had disintegrated the night I crawled into bed next to her for comfort, and she pulled away from me with revulsion. We hadn't made love in weeks, and I suspected she was seeing someone else. I didn't blame her. A month after I wrecked the car she left for good, and I chose to make an end of things. Once again, I had planned carefully. I did not want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up, so I decided to do it in the garage. I took a large tarpaulin and laid it out on the garage floor so that the coroner could just wrap me up like so much garbage and put me in the van. “Put me in a garbage bag,” my father had told me. Once again I was following his example. Then I collected several towels so that the blood would not splatter all over and make a mess. It never once occurred to me that I was systematically reenacting what I had read about my father's murders at the Gemini, with towels and tarps designed to dispose of blood evidence. I thought only of eliminating a mess for someone else. Then I lay down on the tarp, wrapped the towels around my head, and slid the barrel of the gun in against my skull. I had put only one bullet in the chamber, though I intended to pull the trigger until the gun fired. I wanted the suspense, the adrenaline rush of wondering which chamber it was. The old adrenaline rush. I had never quite adjusted to living without it.

  I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. My hand was shaking, and my trigger finger was slippery with sweat, yet I felt more focused, more confident than I had in months. I prepared myself to empty the next chamber. But just as I did, I heard something moving in the garage. Had my wife returned? I lifted my head slightly and peered at the entrance into the garage from the house.

  It was Luca. Sensing something was wrong, he stood looking at me, worry carved into every line around his eyes. I ordered him to go back in the house, but he wouldn't leave. Instead he padded over to where I lay and whimpered. Then he stretched out next to me, shoulders on my chest and head tucked up under my chin. I started to sob. How could I do this while this faithful creature watched? He hadn't done anything wrong, yet he would think it was his fault, for it was his job to protect me. I laid the gun down, put my arms around the dog, and began to stroke his ears, comforting him. My escape would have to wait until another night.

  I don't know how much time passed after that. Night blended into day, and with no one there to mark the passage of time, it was all one to me. I lay motionless in the darkened house and waited for death to find me. I thought of my father, lying silently in the dark in our house by the water all those years ago. Luca cried, confused to find his mistress gone and his master immobilized. I knew that if I lay there much longer, I would die. The faces of my mother and sisters floated in front of me, then those of Tommy and Nick. I couldn't let this happen. I dragged my body into the kitchen and struggled onto one elbow until I could reach the phone cord. The receiver came crashing down as I pulled. There in the darkness on the kitchen floor, I dialed Nick's number. When I heard his voice on the other end, I said only, “Come get me.”

  He didn't hesitate. “I'll be right there,” he told me, and he hung up. Within minutes I heard the front door open and Nick's voice calling out for me. I told him where I was. Seeing me there on the floor, he asked no questions. He put my arm over his shoulder and walked me to his car. Too weak to raise my head, I leaned against the seat and closed my eyes. I felt the car vibrate as he drove away into the darkness. Sometime later the car stopped, and I felt him lift me once again. He walked me into the emergency room of the hospital and simply said, “My friend needs help.” And they helped me.

  The details are fuzzy after that. A doctor looked at me, and after some discussion, I was transferred by ambulance to a locked ward in a nearby mental hospital. I was considered a risk to myself. I signed the papers admitting me. I knew I would die if I didn't. At some point they wheeled me into a room with two beds in it. I heard doors slam and lock behind me. It was dark, but I could hear another man breathing nearby in sleep. Someone handed me a hospital gown and asked if I needed help putting it on. I said no; I just wanted to sleep. A nurse gave me an injection and left me alone to get ready for bed. I looked at the gown and the strange bed on which they had laid me. The orderly had already taken my belt and shoes. My clothing was the only familiar thing in the room. I did not want to take it off and lie naked in this strange place. So I dropped the gown on the floor by the bed, crawled under the blanket, and pulled the covers over my head. All was darkness and silence.

  Lying there in that cotton cocoon, I was too depressed to cry. When the medication they had injected me with finally began to take effect, I drifted into a fitful sleep.

  twelve

  LAZARUS

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting.

  —WORDSWORTH, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from

  Recollections of Early Childhood”

  There's a scripture that says that sometimes a man has to lose his life to find it. I had to let go of a life that had never been mine before I could find a new one. In that horrible place, in that ward filled with the sick and the insane, I began the long, slow process of rebirth.

  I had already met a therapist who would become the guide I needed on the long journey out of the darkness. Until then I had always presented myself to Erma as a young stockbroker struggling with depression and a failing marriage. It was only in my hour of extremity that I finally found the courage to confide to her the horrible secret I had been keeping for so long. “My father,” I told her, “was a gangster. He was in the Mafia.” I paused for her reaction, but she seemed to be waiting for me to continue. She apparently wasn't getting it, so I went on. “He murdered people. Maybe a lot of people.” That should be clear enough. I waited once again for the familiar, dreaded reaction: the horror, the revulsion, or worse yet, the fascination. She finally knew who I was—the mobster's son, not the respectable young man she thought I was.

  I could see a slight change in her face, but it was not the one I expected. Sadness, concern, and a sense of understanding flitted across her features. “That must have been so hard for you, Al.” I was touched and astonished. In that moment I knew that she did not see me as either the stockbroker or the mobster's son; to her I had always been, and always would be, just Al. That tiny, quiet moment was my first step on a long odyssey toward healing.

  Incarcerated in that madhouse, the last refuge of the insane and the desperate, I began to put my life in perspective. The first blessing of my sojourn among the mentally wounded was that I finally had a name to put to what was wrong with me. I was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, an illness once named “battle fatigue,” as it most often afflicts soldiers who have returned from combat. I had the same illness that had once kept Uncle Joe's veteran friend trapped in the mountains. PTSD commonly appears months, even years after the original experiences that caused it. The classic profile is the soldier who serves bravely and well, encountering death and destruction stoically, then returns home to disintegrate emotionally much lat
er, when it is safe to fall apart. The flashbacks, suicide attempts, survivor guilt, and inability to adjust to everyday life that I was experiencing were textbook symptoms. For the first time, I had a diagnosis that made sense to me. I had never served in a military unit, but I had spent most of my childhood and adolescence as a soldier in my father's war.

  I finally found the courage to look at my past, and for the first time I felt compassion for the nine-year-old who fired an empty gun at a counterfeit assailant; for the seventh-grader who was charged with the responsibility of protecting his sister's life with a gun; for the fifteen-year-old who prepared to put a gun to his father's stomach and pull the trigger to save his father's life. I began the process of loving and forgiving that boy for all the things he had done, and for all the things he had never done. And I took the first, tentative steps toward forgiving the father who had asked me to do them, and toward mourning his loss. Whatever else he had done, whoever else he had been, he had been my father, and I had loved him more than my own life. And he had loved me. Whatever the world thought of either one of us, I had to hold on to that truth.

  I also had to grasp at a new truth. I was not my father. I never had been. It didn't matter what other people saw when they looked at me. What mattered was what I saw when I looked at myself.

  When I left the hospital under my own power a few weeks later, I began the slow, painstaking process of creating a new life for myself, a life anchored in truth. I gave almost everything to Carrie as part of the divorce settlement. I didn't want those things anymore. Materialism had become a disease to me, and I wanted only the simplicity and safety of life's basics. I moved into a small apartment near Nick and his wife, not far from the neighborhood where I had lived as a child in Massapequa. I let go of the fancy cars and stopped wearing the diamond watch. Most important, I stopped carrying a gun. I didn't need it anymore.