The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  Star Witness

  A few years ago, I attended the memorial of a school friend. He had become an undercover cop in a rough part of the Bay Area, and he had made his rep by infiltrating the Hells Angels. We had talked about his experience a few times over the years. It was clear he didn’t escape without paying a serious psychic price. Big, tough guy, but a sweet man, and a beloved dad, too. I always liked Carlos. He died after an extended bout of excruciating physical suffering.

  His older brother approached us, school alums gathered together reminiscing about our old classmate. He thanked us for being there, many of whom he hadn’t seen for forty years.

  “Rich,” somebody said to him, gesturing toward me, “you remember Joe Di Prisco?”

  He studied me. “I sure do. But who’s this guy?”

  •

  So of course, we may change, by choice or by chance, and sometimes it isn’t pretty. I conceive of my own life as having an arc or two or three, along with a swoop and a crash and a whoosh or two—or ten. How come my father’s life didn’t? I can only conjecture. Am I striving to think in terms of what I presume to be his fixed ideas, or am I assigning to him my fixed ideas and preoccupations about him? And what if I flipped the basic storyline? Instead of his being a small-time criminal who cleaned up his act and went (comparatively) straight in his late-thirties—what if he, as a teenager and a young man, made some mistakes that endangered him and put him in hot water, from which he eventually extricated himself, transforming himself into a solid citizen in the process?

  Good guy, bad guy. Sinner, saint. Hood, hero. Scammer, searcher. All simplistic paradigms. Nobody’s life can be usefully viewed in black and white. And experience is not linear. More like circular, or parabolic.

  I could have a tiny clue as to a possible life-changing moment he experienced in 1961. Being cross-examined, he is asked about how he came to remember precise, crucial details as to a crime he alleged to have witnessed.

  A. I just came back from California.

  Q. Anything in California to refresh the memory?

  A. I left the family behind.

  Q. Now, how does it refresh the memory?

  A. At the time it did.

  •

  Could it be that he finally registered, long after the deeds he committed, how much he had jeopardized himself when he engaged in his criminal activities? Is it possible that for conceivably the first time in his life he was grasping how much he was going to lose—or how much he had already lost—namely, his freedom and his family, whatever that was, whatever it meant to him? And did this recognition dawn upon him once he was “safe” in California and therefore in greatest danger of seeing himself as he truly was?

  In the moment of being on the stand, when he curiously and awkwardly reached for a different narrative link to explain the functions of his mind and the acts of his will, was he attempting to conceptualize his life as a series of disastrous choices that might be rectified? Perhaps unconsciously, was he framing his decision to appear in court as a type of affirmation of some value or principle beyond himself?

  A. I left the family behind.

  Q. Now, how does it refresh the memory?

  A. At the time it did.

  There is a chance he was making a play for sympathy, as a dad and a husband seeking reclamation and rehabilitation, and that possibility should not be gainsaid. But equally likely, to me, there stood a chance while testifying that he was caught in the act of actively fashioning meaning, fresh meaning in what had thus far been the senseless catastrophe of a young man’s life. It would have been easy, for instance, to see the futility of his flight from justice, but that is precisely what he resisted. This recognition, if real, would relate to his bookmaking and playing the horses. Nothing feels emptier than the vacancy of gambling and losing. And as for his small-time criminal life, at some juncture at least he must have seen how utterly pointless that all was. Not that he possessed the language to express this thought, but Popey never gave in to the siren call of nihilism. If anything, he might have viewed himself as a type of hero questing for something beyond himself: I left the family behind and I’m trying to do right now. More than anything, I am not a victim, I am willing a free choice. Self-serving? Who knows, but judgers gonna judge anyway.

  Similarly, when the cross-examining lawyer pressed him elsewhere by asking if he gambled for a living, my father adamantly disputed the accusation:

  Q: You didn’t tell him, “I’m working as a stonecutter, but I’m really a big gambler,” did you?

  A: Well, he knew I gambled.

  Q: Well, was that your business?

  A: No, it was a vice.

  Q: It was a vice? You put bets on horses, is that it?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: You went to the track?

  A: Well, I went to the track and bet with bookmakers.

  Q: Is that all you do, bet on horses? Is that your specialty, your vice?

  A: Gambler.

  Being a gambler, he said in effect, was not a career choice; his gambling was, in essence, his “vice.” That is, he declined to view his gambling as a failed profit-seeking business venture. On numerous other occasions at home, during those knockdown drag-outs with my mom, he heard her call him a fucking degenerate, but the charge stiffened his spine, and he didn’t buy that label, either. As he states above for the record, he viewed his gambling as a moral failing and his falling. Admittedly, his singularly ready frame of reference for a defect on this order was not philosophy or medical diagnosis or mental disorder. If anything, the context for admission of vice was something like morality, or at least some pale sense of religiosity. His gambling might have been incurable, he couldn’t take a pill for that. And yet, maybe he was merely bullshitting, and it wouldn’t be the first time if he were. His language suggests his conceivable, diffuse awareness of an overarching ethical spectrum. And though he was no moral theologian or ethicist, a man named Popey who owned up in public to personal degradation might feel not blame so much as guilt. I don’t want to overstate this case, but maybe I am doing so anyway. A man who calls his gambling compulsion a vice also might catch sight of a hopeful glimmering of the flip side of the damnation caused by his wickedness: salvation. Again, did this move constitute an implicit, calculated appeal for sympathy? After all, who among us is not a sinner? he might have added. Then again, in the company of cops and criminals, he didn’t need to.

  •

  The older and frailer he got, the more helpless and the more dependent he begrudgingly became. His one-word routinely invoked mantra was family. This was understandable, and strategic. In his burgeoning anger and flickering dementia, he swung it like a truncheon to urge me to pay attention to him. It sounded like a foreign language, and I did my best to speak it.

  Am I conducting a sort of dialogue with my deceased parents? And to what end at this point in my life? But wait. Do we ever stop conducting conversations with the dead? And the dead? Are they truly, absolutely dead? Maybe they in some sense exist in the present because there is nothing but a present time for them—in our imagination.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. Did you ever try to set up a man by the name of Junior Loturicio?

  A. I don’t—I didn’t.

  Q. Do you know what I mean by the word “set up,” do you know?

  A. You can explain it to me.

  Q. Do you know what I mean?

  A. No, sir. You explain it.

  Q. You are a professional informer—weren’t you?

  A. What do you mean, “professional”?

  Q. Do you know what an informer is?

  A. Yes, but what do you mean, “professional”?

  Q. Got paid?

  A. Got paid for the information?

  Q. Got paid for informing—did you ever inform on a man by the n
ame of Junior Loturicio?

  A. No.

  Q. Did you ever suggest that you had information about Junior Loturicio?

  A. Yes.

  Cutting Stone

  I do not know how much schooling my father had, but it couldn’t have been a lot. Given that he was cannot-sit-still, jumpy-as-a-cat, I can imagine that for a youngster like him sitting in a desk would be unalloyed torture. So then, what is an uneducated, first-generation Italian American like him, fresh out of the service in WWII, supposed to do to make a living in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s? In his case, he works as a runner for a bookmaker and also a numbers operator; in 1947, he’s twenty-two, and he takes the pinch for the book when he is arrested. The judge sees through the young man’s guilty plea and dismisses the charges—or so my father told me.

  My dad and I used to talk in his assisted living apartment in California, a few miles from my home. At this time, he and I were spending the most time together since my earliest childhood. He required round-the-clock care, and his residence was a sophisticated, kindly operation. By then, he had lost interest in television, including sports, absolutely stymied by the challenge of the remote control. He would soon to be on his way to the euphemistically named memory wing for the seriously demented, from which he bailed almost immediately because he detested the joint, as well as the company of sad droolers and drifters and specialists of the non sequitur. One day, he was in a semi-garrulous mood with me, so I took the opportunity to ask him if he had ever been arrested. At the time, I didn’t know.

  “No,” he said.

  Count to three. One, two…

  “Once.”

  Yeah, that’s my old man.

  Records indicate that he was convicted on that 1947 occasion, given a suspended sentence. I do think it is possible he may have been confused, believing suspended meant dismissed. Beyond that, as I would come to discover from a rap sheet and other trial proceedings, he was actually arrested at least five times in his life.

  •

  Along with “don’t get involved,” “keep it to yourself” was another catchphrase of his, his response to anybody ever giving up inside, that is, emotional information, or venturing a report from the hinterland of feelings. Like the time my brother John, briefly in recovery, told him across a Thanksgiving table that he loved him. My father instantaneously countered: “Yeah, well, keep it to yourself.” Such displays of vulnerability must have struck him as being unmanly if not “embarrassing,” a prime term in his rhetorical arsenal. His most potent threat to me when I misbehaved as a child: “I’m gonna embarrass you.” Consistent with his lifelong commitment to keep things to himself, he said he never told his wife about that first conviction—information that came out in a much later case when he gave sworn testimony. That arrest took place before she divorced her first husband, yet I doubt she was in the dark. She didn’t miss much of anything until she started missing everything on account of her own Alzheimer’s.

  In general, he was not susceptible to the appeal of TMI. That was the prime reason my son and I were never really worried about a stranger scamming him when he was losing it. If some lowlife scum crooks on the phone tried to get him to give up his social security number and credit card, which they did indeed try to do, in the end he’d be more likely to get theirs. The last real argument Mario and I had took place when I appropriated my father’s credit cards. My son was indignant, complained that I was undercutting his grandfather’s self-respect, and contended there was no real downside to his keeping or using the credit cards. What’s the worst that could happen, if, say, he blew some money on something or other? To me it wasn’t about the cash burn, and I lost my temper, but after calming down, I did arrange for my father’s personal caremanager to go over with the grandson all the risks, which she contended were considerable, given his impaired mental capacity and his tendency to outfox his handlers and his proclivity to ramble away from the security of his residence when the handler’s attention wavered. That conversation, along with some books I gave him about Alzheimer’s insidious pathways, helped Mario change his tune and come around, though my father never did. He was furious. Furious until, finally, he lost that edge, too. But I should underscore that all of us were struggling to understand how to deal with him and his dementia. He had entered that twilight, upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland, surreal realm, and we were all on the fast track to incomprehension and frustration.

  As for his liquid assets, when he was in assisted living, he seemed to be rolling in cash. His care manager told me she had never had a client who threw around money like him, somebody who seemingly had thousands of dollars handy. He had a penchant for trying to tip out the staff. Employees’ accepting gratuities was strictly forbidden, but I don’t think house rules stopped him or dissuaded them. I can’t help but imagine that, for an old Teamster boss like him, he might have enjoyed the unionized fantasy of organizing the help. Once I took advantage of his having a dental appointment and searched his apartment. I went through everything and uncovered no stash of cash. He still had his chops. And he had more surprises up his sleeve—and in his pockets. Without prompting or a word of explanation, he one day transformed into an ATM before my very eyes. He reached into his right pants pocket, pulled out a roll of hundreds, and handed it to me. Good, I thought, maybe my message had gotten through to him, and maybe he was trusting me, and maybe he was giving over to an acceptance of his state. I told him I would put away the money for safekeeping. Then in a minute he reached into his left pants pocket and pulled out another roll of hundreds. And then a little while later, he reached into his back pants pocket and—yet another roll. I must have asked if that was it, and he must have indicated it was. I didn’t exactly believe him, because why start now, but I was yet again impressed.

  •

  During the war, he enlisted at sixteen in the Coast Guard and shipped out on a troop transport in the Atlantic, where he served as a fireman in the engine room. That sounded scary. But he also said he ran the dice games on the ship. When I asked him about how he managed that, he said he stole what he could. (Maybe not so coincidentally, my brother ran blackjack games in prison, where he took the unsuspecting players for everything he could—more about this, and John, soon.) Eventually my dad was honorably discharged, and late into his life he marched in war vet parades and wore pins on his lapels and proudly flew the American flag from his porch on patriotic holidays.

  When he landed in Naples, he said, he and some fellow sailors fell in with some locals who offered up their sister for their pleasure, and for the brothers’ profit. It seems the guys threw their money on the table, but then got cold feet. “It wasn’t right,” my dad said. He also said he stole some food from the ship and gave it to the impoverished Italians, who obviously needed help. He liked the ladies his whole life, and they reciprocated, but if he ever cheated on his wife (who probably cheated on him, if reports and my recollections are real), he never tipped his hand. He had a courtly, somewhat prudish, side. Once we all went up to Reno where we submitted ourselves to an inane casino show. The comic was performing a very blue act, and my father looked abundantly offended, if not nauseated. It took all his self-control not to run out of the place.

  Then there was a time we hired a professional companion to spend a few hours with him in his assisted living; this is fairly standard practice. We thought it would be beneficial for him to not be alone for long stretches, to talk with another person who was proficient at dealing with the elderly and demented. In short order, he dismissed her. He explained to the incredulous supervisor that the woman wanted to have sex with him, and he was upset. He reminded her he was a married man. That was when my mother had been dead for two years.

  As a young man home from the war in 1945, he took jobs at various times in a dairy and most prominently as a stonecutter, following in the steps of my naturalized-citizen grandfather who brought the trade with him from Fontanarosa, a picturesque but economical
ly depressed mining village a couple of hours outside Naples.

  A few years ago, Patti and I made an excursion to the town. I wanted to see what family records were accessible. The functionary on duty at first didn’t appear pleased to be of service, insofar as the sacrosanct lunch hour beckoned. But our Italian was in good shape, and before long, she relented cheerfully. She came up with my grandparents’ wedding papers and birth certificates. At some point, the postal delivery woman stopped in, nosy about the visitors, and made conversation; Americans in town, maybe this could be diverting. I asked her, in Italian, if there were any Di Priscos nearby. She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands and indicated the place was crawling with them. I didn’t look anybody up.

  As for stonecutting, it’s hard to imagine more strenuous, backbreaking, potentially injurious labor. I recollect one day being in a car picking up my nonno and dad from the stonecutter’s, and I can picture the coating of gray dust all over them and the blue rags they wiped their faces with. My father is eventually fired by this employer, and is arrested for pilfering stone from the shop. His rap sheet itemizes the arrest but gives no details as to the case’s disposition, but in testimony given during the dirty-cop trials he owns up to the larceny.

  Mostly, he bet the horses, thoroughbreds or trotters, whatever was in season. And therefore he was always looking for money, because he was not cleaning up at the track. He was a good handicapper, I would come to realize, but even good handicappers are not good enough to keep in the black. As one cop, later dismissed from the force, said in his testimony about him, “This man is in dire need of money at all times. He’d ask anybody, he’d give up his mother for money.”