The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  On the street they accost Valenti, whom my father zeroed in on, and tell him to get in the car. The guy naturally fears for his life. He’s probably seen the movies, or maybe he has a three-digit IQ and he’s asking himself if obeying strangers instructing you to get in their car ever worked out well in Brooklyn or any other borough. Once the book is ushered into the backseat, he hears his options: door number one, the cops arrest him with those incriminating betting slips in his possession and run him in, which—if he was following the bouncing ball—would damage his enterprise and lead to fines and imprisonment; or door number two, the man ponies up cash and the whole thing never happened. The way the bookmaker should look at it, this could be his lucky day. That’s when they squire Valenti home and seize six hundred bucks, a lot of money in 1961, and later—what arrest?

  During that and every other trial, counsel for the cops’ defense relentlessly grilled my dad, who admitted fingering unfortunate bookmakers for the accused policemen to score. The fancy suit whittled away at Pope’s trustworthiness. It’s reasonable to assume this strategy must have appealed to him as much as shooting fish in a barrel. In one hearing, he harped upon an apparent inconsistency in his previous testimony, and the two conducted a tortuous, heated exchange, which featured this dispositive moment:

  Q. Do you remember being asked those questions and making those answers?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Was that answer true?

  A. It was true at the time.

  •

  His lie had been true at the time.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, meet my old man.

  As for the substance of his Pope-splaining declaration: Disingenuous? Evasive? Tactically ingenious? Epistemologically ridiculous? Cognitively sophisticated? Any chance factual or possibly honest?

  I’m going with All of the Above, and if you knew my dad—my unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged, sentimental, take-no-bullshit, shifty, tough, smarter-than-he-wanted-you-to-think, dumber-than-you-could-believe, hyperactive, attention-deficit old man, a rakishly handsome guy of supposedly few words whom my va va va voom mother excoriated as somebody who, and I quote, “never shut the fuck up”—so might you. Then again, I am not convinced anybody could take an oath that they really knew him—including me, himself, his immediate and extended family, as well as any and all representatives of law enforcement. My whole life I tried to pin him down and I usually failed. At the same time, like a winter cold, he was tough to shake off.

  •

  Conversation in the City with a New Yorker, asked if he grew up here.

  “No,” he said, and pointed, “one block over.”

  The Brooklyn where both my father and I grew up has little in common with the chichi Brooklyn of today. Nowadays Brooklyn is the home of cool television shows and movies, the home of the splashy Barclays Center, where Jay Z and Beyoncé and Spike Lee sit courtside for NBA games, the home of trendy restaurants that serve something other than the veal parm or pierogi that once used to dominate every menu, the home of a murderers’ row of authors, and base camp of hipsters sporting stingy brims, man buns, Civil War beards, hoodies, e-cigs, and designer sneaks.

  Wait, let me make an act of contrition. I think it’s now against the law to use Brooklyn and hipster in the same sentence—or lifetime. So nobody should say that anymore. You utter the word “hipster” and everybody knows you’re an idiot or, in other words, you probably come from California, where all you talk about is organic this and vegan that, the drought, the death of lawns, which—well, who cares about dumb lawns anyway? As for Brooklyn: nobody goes there anymore, it’s too popular. Sue me, Yogi Berra’s Estate. I miss Yogi, though not as much as my dad.

  My father didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close. It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones. That was when and where the Dodgers of Ebbets Field, the legendary Boys of Summer, ruled the borough and therefore the world and, depending on who you were or even more who you were not, the wise guys and the wannabes called the shots.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. Sergeant, I am going to show you a photograph of an individual. I want you to look at it carefully and state whether or not you have seen this person before. For the record Sergeant Ficalora has been shown a photograph of Joseph Di Prisco, B Number 18308, taken 9/26/61, in Berkeley, California. Sergeant, have you seen that photograph?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Have you had occasion to see the individual whose photograph I showed you?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. When was that?

  A. At the DA’s office in Queens on—that was Monday I guess, October 23rd.

  Q. Have you ever seen that individual before?

  A. Before then? No, sir.

  Q. Have you ever heard of anyone referred to as Little John, Joe Shots, Joe the Pope or Mopey?

  A. No, sir, not that I can remember.

  …

  Q. Did you ever hear the name Joe Di Prisco from your partner?

  A. No, not until this all happened.

  Q. Patrolman Tartarian never mentioned the name Joe Di Prisco to you?

  A. No, sir.

  Q. Did you ever have occasion to meet your partner and another man at Queens Plaza during the month of February, whereupon this man stayed in the car with you and your partner and made observations around Macy’s Warehouse?

  A. No, sir.

  Q. Do you know Sal Valenti?

  A. Sal Valenti?

  Q. Valenti, an employee of Macy’s?

  A. No.

  Down and Out in Brooklyn

  Even a clueless little pain in the ass grudgingly responding to Jo Jo couldn’t miss that something cataclysmic was up when we skipped out of Brooklyn. Our hasty, furtive exile took place under cover of night and ultimately deposited us on the opposite coast in the summer of 1961, a life-changing period for the Di Priscos.

  The abrupt departure happened the day when—what-to-my-wondering-ten-year-old eyes—the old man did disappear. He and I and my little brother had been walking down a Long Island country road on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and then, in a flash, he hightailed it into the woods that swallowed him up. Left standing on the road, I needed only a moment to conclude he was fleeing the long arms of the law. Plainclothes and uniformed officers had descended in force, lights flashing on their patrol car roofs, that late spring or early summer day, throwing a net around his parents’—my Italian immigrant grandparents’—farm in East Islip, a net he slipped that day. I loved that farm, because what city kid doesn’t love a farm with pigs and donkeys and chickens and rabbits and watermelons and tomatoes and corn, where Sunday suppers were feasts of abbondanza, but hold on a minute. Where the hell was he running, and why? It would take a while to find out where he thought he was going and much longer to understand why, not to mention how it related to me.

  •

  Indictments would be handed up on him that summer, and they eventually spurred his return to New York to testify against those cops—in an effort to avoid his own prosecution. Before that could happen, in the immediate term, and probably nothing’s more immediate than being on the run from law enforcement, he ended up anywhere but Brooklyn, which is another way to identify the California where his road trip thudded to a halt at the Pacific’s edge.

  That was the summer, while he was in the wind, detectives were knocking on our Greenpoint door looking for him. I can still see how my older brother, Eddie, smirked as he greeted them standing out in the hallway, not inviting them in for high tea, defiantly announcing to my mother in the next room: “It’s nobody, John Law.” Then they stopped appearing. And then surveillance outside our apartment ceased, and the guys who had been camped out in the unmarked car on Humboldt Street evaporated.

  Our street had been named for the founder of
geophysics, Alexander Humboldt, nineteenth-century German explorer of the Orinoco and Amazon. Law enforcement disappearance probably provided the opening for my mother to put me and my brother John alongside her on a plane so we could do our own explorations in California, leaving behind her two older sons from a previous marriage, Bobby and Eddie, ages sixteen and seventeen, to fend for themselves in Brooklyn.

  San Francisco was where we had our rendezvous with my dad, three thousand miles from home. He didn’t greet us inside the airport terminal. He and his wife had worked out logistics. We took a taxi to a gas station, where we found him keeping a low profile, not daring to get out of his old black Ford with black New York plates, frozen fretful behind the wheel. Next thing I knew, we hit the road, going—God knows where.

  The bottom line—or at least one of several bottom lines: my younger brother and I were shanghaied at eight and ten years old. Some think “shanghaied” isn’t quite PC, but I can’t see how the image implies an ethnic stereotype, and besides, when I was a little boy I wasn’t finished with politically incorrect Brooklyn, and California existed in my mind as nothing more than a sun-drenched movie set. I was offered no explanation for being uprooted, for abandoning my friends without a word of warning and leaving my home for what I presumed would be the longest goodbye. Young children implicitly assume their fate is in the hands of their parents, for good or ill, but this move amounted to a seismic shift.

  From the jump, I instinctively and righteously hated California, let me count the ways. Where do you get an egg cream, a knish? Where can you find a real bagel or a good deli or a decent slice? Because what they called bialy and a sub and pizza definitely did not qualify. Where were the stoops and the fire hydrant showers and the stick ball games? Where was the snow? More than anything else, where were my buddies? Here I was feeling isolated, a displaced little pious boy from Greenpoint. My ground was rocked, and I found myself in a state where the earth itself trembled what felt like continually, tectonically as well as psychologically. I wanted to trust my parents, naturally, but whatever was going on in my family was shrouded in shadows. It’s taken me over fifty years to shed some light.

  •

  Back in the day, back before I was conscious that there was a historical day back before, I had no glimmering as to his criminal life, and I was unaware of those legal proceedings in which he was the witness for the People; they came to light for me more than two years after he died in hospice care at eighty-six from complications due to Alzheimer’s and congestive heart failure, and less than a year after I published Subway to California, my first memoir. What also came to light was his criminal record in Brooklyn and Queens—by which I mean his criminal record did not come to light. Mysteriously, though, his trial transcripts were accessible online; fifty-some years later his files remained sealed in New York City. Why? And what could I do about unsealing them? It was destined not to be a simple task. When it came to my relationship with my father, nothing was ever without complication.

  All this will take some explaining, and because I’m the last one standing, here goes.

  •

  Since this isn’t my father’s book, or my mother’s or little brother’s for that matter, some questions continue to emerge for me.

  Questions about fathers and their sons. About brothers and their father. As was the case when I was a little boy, I have nothing but questions.

  Families sometimes appear bound together by the stories others weave about them as well as by the stories they spin themselves—when, that is, they aren’t torn apart. Stories may also be held together by families, even after the narrative threads fray. Another way to put this is that families are myth-making organisms. They inevitably construct the sometimes wordless tales that illuminate the ordinary experiences of everyday life, as well as the tumult and the crises. How did somebody like me, the obsessive-compulsive schoolboy, go about fashioning the sustaining myth when the unknown is central—unless, that is, the unknown is itself the generative myth?

  I wonder if I can ever with absolute assurance trace the arc of my father’s life. Of course, human beings can change, in theory. Experience might harden one, experience might soften another, experience might lead others to hard-won wisdom. Some people apparently learn their most powerful cautionary lessons at their peril. Did my father harbor regrets, did he make amends, and once in California—assuming conventional values ever appealed to him, which is itself a big question—did he straighten up and fly right?

  I could reply, probably so, or maybe sort of, but the reality is far more nuanced than that. If this is a tale of redemption, either his or mine, I might be the last to know. If my father heard such an accusation, my guess is he would change the subject or recommend I shut the fuck up.

  Furthermore, what effect did his criminal life have upon his family? In particular, what was the impact upon his two sons? Mercifully, fewer people these days seem to reference the once popular notion of role modeling. To me, it’s right up there on the clang-o-meter with closure and self-esteem building. Closure strikes me as being a bitter illusion as it relates to genuine tragedy; closure is to loss as intimacy is to pornography. And you know who enjoys self-esteem off the charts? Death-row inmates and gangbangers. And you know who just might have abysmal self-esteem? Artists.

  I’m not dreaming a closure dream and my own self-esteem has often been a horse running boxed-in on the rail and finishing out of the money.

  In any case, role modeling never failed to strike me as being anything but reductive. Since when is a child’s behavior the function of another person’s? How does somebody else’s inclination to angelic or demonic behavior control for the conduct and the choices of anybody else?

  But maybe not so fast. Are criminal temperaments or, for that matter, artistic temperaments in some sense heritable? Evidence seems at a minimum mixed, if not dubious. The human beings I meet while boarding a plane or on the freeway or in a restaurant or at a party or during Mass or in my classes seem, to state the obvious, pretty complicated, virtually unpredictable. Artists and criminals are hardly mutually exclusive categories; there exist avant-garde criminals and outlaw artists. That said, if you conduct research in libraries or on the Web for something like “heritability and sociopathic tendencies,” many, many books and longitudinal studies pop up, some suggesting the existence of some order of ingrained predisposition. Yet predisposition does not necessarily constitute destiny.

  Nonetheless, despite not being a cognitive scientist like Stephen Pinker, because nobody else is, I would ask this, specifically: did my father’s sons eventually come to follow, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps provisionally or experimentally, his career path? You may not be able to yet, but you will eventually see why I ask.

  Here’s a heads up: my answer is a definite yes, no, and maybe.

  To phrase this more generally: what do we know about a father by knowing his sons? And then: what do we know about his sons, and their relationship with each other, by knowing about their father? At various stages in my own life, I might have answered both those questions about me and my lineage in the same way: we know absolutely nothing. At other points: we know everything. Nowadays, I am going with: we may indeed know something, but what is it?

  I find Andrew Solomon instructive and chastening on this matter. He is the author of the magisterial Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity:

  Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis… Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement detractors…

  Because of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most children will share at least some traits with their parents. These are ver
tical identities. Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA, but also through shared cultural norms…

  Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a horizontal identity. Such horizontal identities may reflect recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences, or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors… Physical disability tends to be horizontal, as does genius. Psychopathy, too, is often horizontal; most criminals are not raised by mobsters and must invent their own treachery…

  •

  Decades ago I was a curious little boy who didn’t know what the old man did all day, or if he kept a job, or where he went when he shambled out of our shotgun Greenpoint apartment and shuffled down the flights of stairs and onto the street or hopped into a car that sped off. When I found occasion as a child to ask him my incessant questions, his invariable response was:

  Whaddayou, writin’ a book?

  Those were the days. A pillar of the Brooklyn ethos: never answer a direct question from a cop—or from a wife or a son. Gun to your ribs, respond with another question, ideally some wiseass variation on Who wantsta know? Nobody needed to know what nobody needed to know, get it? It’s logical to deduce the old man had not consulted helpful parenting guides encouraging and cultivating the natural curiosity in that precious wonderland known as childhood. Except for Dr. Spock’s, I don’t think there were many popular parenting books circulating for the edification of the Greatest Generation. They certainly weren’t trending in our home. Come to think of it, we didn’t have any of those exotic objects lying around, books.