Praise for Joseph Di Prisco
“Along with Joe Di Prisco, I rode that same sweaty Subway to California. But somehow, his was a local, with every stop an adventure: crime, passion, gambling, drugs, all the tantalizing stuff we goody-goodies missed.”
—Leah Garchik, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle
“Joseph Di Prisco writes with humor and a great sense of character, poking fun at things that would leave a lesser author cringing. Think Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Godfather. He interweaves all these elements with the skill of a master writer.”
—Anne Hillerman, New York Times bestselling
author of Spider Woman’s Daughter
“Great funny lines on every page. Am I recommending The Alzhammer? As the protagonist Mikey might say, ‘Eggs ackly.’”
— Jack Handey, author of Deep Thoughts
“A brilliant portrayal of a wise guy who faces his biggest arch enemies…time and Alzheimer’s. The last tango of power, fear, loyalty, and love is beautifully danced for us right to the very end.”
—Vickie Sciacca, Lafayette Library
“A beautiful, heartfelt, sometimes funny, occasionally harrowing story of a man making his way through the minefield of his own family history. Di Prisco has lived more lives than most of us, and managed to get it all down in this riveting book.”
—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and OG Dad
“Brimming with humor, heartbreak, and at times the feel an old-time Catholic confessional, Subway to California is a one-of-a-kind read.”
—Kathleen Caldwell, A Great Good Place For Books
“A book replete with all the rich unfolding and poetic reflection of a novel, and all the focused research and unsparing truth-seeking of biography.”
—Laura Cogan, Editor in Chief of ZYZZYVA
“What Di Prisco has written here is likely to become the standard-bearer for all future memoirs. This Subway ride is the real deal.”
—Steven Gillis, author of The Consequence of Skating
“An attention-capturing cliffhanger.”
—Judith M. Gallman, Oakland Magazine
“Told with enough tenderness and humor to elevate his pain-filled recollections to poetry at times, pure fun at others, Di Prisco brings us home—grateful our family is less volatile, or feeling less alone if we, too, survived a wild childhood.”
—Lou Fancher, Contra Costa Times
“A heartwarming and hilarious sharing of his dysfunctional family adventures, Joe said it best when he wrote: ‘Stories happen…to people who can tell them.’”
—Ginny Prior, Oakland Tribune
“A very fine novelist and poet who has now written a moving and actually quite funny memoir about life with two parents who should never have married, and once they did, should never have had children. But then we wouldn’t have Joe to tell us their story.”
—A. R. Taylor, author of Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion
“People struggling to find their place in the world often search for answers in a psychiatrist’s office, in love affairs, religion, illegal drugs, gambling, social activism, academia, work, and vicariously, through their children. Di Prisco visited all those places, and then, coming up short, found himself by writing a memoir.”
—Mercury News
“It’s rare to encounter a book so heartfelt and compassionate and yet so incisively hilarious at the same time.”
—Heather Mackey, author of Dreamwood
“Throughout Subway, Di Prisco evokes the past with vivid, often hilarious, prose, describing his Italian-Polish upbringing in Brooklyn, the flight to a strange world called California, his doomed and dramatic love affairs, and his colorful parents—the kind of parents you enjoy reading about and are grateful they were not yours!”
—Anara Guard, author of Remedies for Hunger
“What makes Di Prisco’s novel work is its narrative voice—poignant, rueful, and wise-crackingly sardonic…Readers of J. F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban and Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy should find their way to All for Now.”
—P. F. Kluge, author of A Call from Jersey and Gone Tomorrow
“It is especially moving to read a book that looks so broadly at the ubiquitous issue of Roman Catholicism and pedophilia…Di Prisco has given us a brave, bumbling, soul-searching hero whose wry humor only enhances his honesty.”
—Jan Weissmiller, Prairie Lights Books
“Catholic or not, religious or not, All for Now is accessible to everyone because mistakes and forgiveness are universal.”
—Seattle Post Intelligencer
“Confessions of Brother Eli fairly sparkles with humor that ranges from sophisticated to slapstick, in what some believe to be the most difficult writing to carry off.”
—Tucson Weekly
“With dry, sardonic wit, Brother Eli questions his faith and vocation, while recounting adventures that take place at his school…The writing and narrative voice in this book is some of the best I’ve come across.”
—Akron Beacon Journal
“With a wit that questions as it embraces, Poems in Which provides us with a strong, original voice.”
—Carl Dennis, author of Practical Gods
and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Brothers: Joe and John Di Prisco. Berkeley, California circa 1965.
This is a Genuine Vireo Book
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Di Prisco
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Minion
Printed in the United States
epub isbn: 9781945572364
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Di Prisco, Joseph, 1950-, author.
Title: The Pope of Brooklyn / Joseph Di Prisco.
Description: Includes bibliographical references. | A Genuine Vireo Book | First Hardcover Edition| New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA: Vireo Books, Rare Bird Books, 2017.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572111
Subjects: LCSH Di Prisco, Giuseppe Luigi. | Police corruption—New York (State)—New York. | Criminals—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Informers—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Organized crime—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /
Criminals & Outlaws
Classification: LCC HV6248 D52 .D5 2017 | DDC 364.1/323—dc23
To Patti
&
To friends relieved not to be mentioned
Also by Joseph Di Prisco
memoir
Subway to California
novels
Confessions of Brother Eli
Sun City
All for Now
The Alzhammer
poetry
Wit’s End
Poems in Which
Sightlines from the Cheap Seats
nonfiction
Field Guide to the American Teenager (with Michael Riera)
Right from Wrong (with Michael Riera)
You came from Greenpoint. Go back to Greenpoint!
—On the Waterfront (1954)
We a
ll have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
—Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”
Contents
17 • Conspiracies of the Past
23 • It Was True at the Time
31 • Down and Out in Brooklyn
43 • Upon Information and Belief
51 • Incriminations
59 • Infinitely Dropped
70 • 1961
85 • My Urban Plan
90 • Slouching from Brooklyn
92 • The Pope Meets Santa
105 • Dog in the Rain
108 • Testimony
117 • Divided Selves
122 • Star Witness
129 • Cutting Stone
145 • Turf
152 • Sealed Files
153 • The Fast Eddie F. Complex
159 • Mitzvah Madness
161 • Consideration
180 • Ciao, Bella
192 • More Alive Than Ever
197 • Between He and I
202 • Fresh Head
209 • Organized Crime?
214 • Sympathy for the Guy Sitting On My Phone Tap
220 • Morning Bells are Ringing, Morning Bells are Ringing
228 • Correspondences
253 • Mysteries of the (Hair) Salon
259 • She Don’t Lie, She Don’t Lie, She Don’t Lie
274 • What Larks
286 • One Happy Birthday
293 • The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Something Like the Truth
326 • Keeping Watch
337 • Records & Sources
Conspiracies of the Past
Fishing around on an ordinary online expedition, I landed more than I was looking for. I hooked a long-lost key to my life.
Alongside clickbait, listicles, celebrity trolls, and pestering pop-ups, the Internet does sometimes dish. Even so, I did not see this one coming. There was my name in bold face on the computer monitor, but it seemed to be mysteriously associated with fifty-year-old court records. How could I resist clicking on the links? Soon I realized these documents had nothing to do with me—but they had everything to do with me. These were transcripts of trials, and the star witness was a man who shared my first and last name, my father.
As I would come to learn, I had just discovered evidence of his untold, suspenseful life. The door into the past, which I assumed was sealed shut, was now unlocked. I was jolted. His testimony in these New York State Appellate Division proceedings spun a revealing and troubling tale, one that would resonate for generations in my family.
Technically, these were New York City police departmental hearings, with witnesses under oath, pertaining to the nefarious activities of dirty cops and his collaboration in their conspiracies. The trials, safe to say, have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon for over half a century. In the annals of American jurisprudence, then, not exactly O. J. or the Rosenbergs. In the annals of American me, different story. This was my old man, and the uncovered transcripts divulged an unobstructed, unfiltered glimpse. Who exactly was this enigmatic man? Did I ever know him? I now had some clues.
•
Giuseppe Luigi Di Prisco took the stand during that fraught epoch, the sixties, when the NYPD was generating frequent, embarrassing headlines as to corruption within the ranks. Buried in the court documents it is mentioned that the grand jury did not hand up charges against two of the cops he testified against; he was evidently considered unworthy of belief with regard to them. Those grand jury proceedings remain inaccessible, so there is no way to analyze the merits of their disposition. Meanwhile, three other police officers were drummed out of the force fairly totally on the basis of his testimony, or arrested, deemed culpable of committing shakedowns, and one of them ended up serving serious time on a related matter (extortion; burglary ring) that surfaced under questioning. My father’s unexpectedly available online testimony related to a handful of such crimes, but it seems naïve to assume that these officers’ reign of intimidation was restricted to that extent. It seems equally naïve to assume he wasn’t aware of, and didn’t play a role in, similar escapades he was not questioned about.
Informant may constitute an ignoble and perilous career option in the estimation of the genteel and the upright along with the incarcerated and the indicted, especially when the informant’s burden entailed, as it did for my dad, ratting out people he knew and borrowed money from to gamble, or to pay off loan shark obligations. Snitches do get stitches. If nobody would consider him a caped crusader for justice, the cops he did business with were definitely not choir boys, and neither were the bookmakers and gamblers with whom he consorted.
Although police misconduct and abuse of authority and criminality have recently been in the glare of the national spotlight, it was also in the sixties when the reputation of the mighty Blue Line cratered. It would not be long before the Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltrated the compromised New York Police Department, the Internal Affairs Bureau would be established, and the City would empower the vaunted Knapp Commission. That panel was dedicated to the restoration of the traumatized public’s confidence in law enforcement. To that end, personnel shake-ups and numerous arrests ensued.
That’s when Frank Serpico became a household name, the subject of a best-selling book and a wildly popular, critically acclaimed movie. In the eyes of the City, if most certainly not in the view of all his fellow officers, he heroically embodied the zeal to clean up the force: a brave, whistle-blowing cop who risked his life and paid a high personal price for exposing police sleaze and machination. When Serpico was working Narcotics and they were moving in on an arrest, he was shot in the head by a drug dealer. Chances were he may have been set up—by the other cops. As he lay in a pool of his own blood, his backups did nothing, did not radio “Officer down,” didn’t call for an ambulance, though a bystander did and thereby saved his life. Afterward cop message boards contained sentiments along lines that were anything but sympathetic. “If it wasn’t for that fucking Serpico,” a precinct captain later said, he “could have been a millionaire.” One police chief Serpico singled out as a “good guy” was Sidney Cooper. That’s a name that pops up in the unearthed transcripts, in support of my father. As for the Serpico shooting, it took place about a mile from where I grew up.
Years before Knapp was created, there was its forerunner: the Police Commissioner’s Confidential Investigations Unit. In 1961, as these trial transcripts dramatize, the PCCIU took up residence in my father’s boxers.
New York State Appellate Division
RECORDS AND BRIEFS
Q. Would you say, Mr. Di Prisco, that before April 18th, 1961, you were known among your friends as a big criminal?
A. No.
Q. Were you known as a little criminal?
A. No, sir.
Q. Were you known as any kind of criminal, big, little, middle, were you?
A. No, sir.
Q. You didn’t go bragging, or boasting, “I’m a criminal,” to people, did you?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did you ever [say] that you were a racketeer of some kind, did you?
A. I’m not a racketeer.
Q. You never were, were you?
A. No.
It Was True at the Time
When I was an altar boy in Brooklyn, priests and nuns taught us that the smoldering incense symbolized prayers lifting up to God. Me, I wasn’t sold. Usually I felt lightheaded from inhaling the sweet reek of curling smoke. Such wooziness often washed over me during the late fifties and early sixties, about the same time my father was a young man on the hustle. On the street, Joe Di Prisco was called “Pope.”
Clad in black cassock and bleached, starched white surplice, I was occupied lighting candles, genuflectin
g, tolling Sanctus bells. When the Mass celebrant intoned “Dominus vobiscum,” The Lord be with you, I’d reply as instructed, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” And with your spirit. My spirit and I had not yet acquired the inside information that my dad was a confidential police informant, petty criminal, scam artist, and stool pigeon. I was also unaware that felony indictments of his own would soon be hanging over his head. I never had an inkling he was discredited in open court as an “unsavory character” and a “known gambler”—which was the considered judgment of one presiding eminence. This was someone who added on the record, perhaps surprisingly, that he believed his testimony.
As a five- or ten-year-old, I myself hadn’t yet been christened with a street name of my own, unless Jo Jo qualified; that was the theoretically cute handle my family used for me but it made me cringe. Around our claustrophobic Humboldt Street shotgun walk-up in Greenpoint my dad wasn’t called Pope, and he wasn’t smeared with the “unsavory character” label. There he was better known as an “Italian barbarian” and a “fucking antisocial degenerate.” At least those were the terms of endearment screamed by his wife, my mother, in a voice to rattle the kitchenware.
Whenever I asked her, my mother with a trucker’s mouth, why they called him Pope, her stock answer was “Because he never shuts the fuck up.” That made no sense to me, but his own explanation of his name’s origins was more puzzling: once his crew observed him coming out of a church. This sounded peculiar if not dubious to me, because I myself had very sparse memories of his being inside a church and therefore could not visualize him stealing inside to light a votive candle or make confession.
Growing up and working the angles in the day: when I look back, I imagine such vocation might sound entrancing if not inevitable to somebody like my father. Ample evidence demonstrates that the calling resonated for him—much as it might do later on, in complicated, indirect ways, for me and my younger brother.
•
In one legal proceeding he testified against plainclothes police officers in 1961 on charges stemming from a shakedown four years earlier. The crime’s execution was somewhat convoluted, as with a lot of capers, though it wouldn’t ever be confused with Ocean’s 11 or The Sting. My dad was thirty-two the day he and the cops conspired to set up a bookmaker by the name of Sal Valenti for the purposes of squeezing some cash out of him.
The Pope of Brooklyn Page 1
