The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  “Fast” Eddie Felson in The Color of Money says: “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” That’s from Richard Price’s screenplay, and, as with most things, he hits it out of the park. Nobody ever bothered to say that money lost is aromatic as cigar ashes, or that the memory of the occasional win ever counterbalances memories of the bad beats.

  •

  Here is as good a place as any to disclose that there was a time when I did business with bookmakers of my own, when I put money down on games and races in the premobile-phone era, including when I was an English graduate student instructor at Berkeley, where there was a convenient pay phone (remember pay phones?) outside my Wheeler Hall classroom and from which I could make, if so inclined, a bet or two during class breaks. Was I a gambler, did I have my old man’s vice? I was traveling in social circles, excuse the term, of guys who carried crisp stacks of cash in their Italian leather purses and bet very serious money, guys who knew stuff, smart guys, wise guys. I learned from them. This was a different sort of liberal education for a schoolboy like me. I never bet the favorite in my life, rule one of many good rules. Did I go broke? Not right away. Did I buy a house in Beverly Hills? Also no. Did I borrow from loan sharks? I wasn’t that irrational. I had other vices I preferred.

  I also played blackjack professionally for high stakes around the world for several years, in my late twenties and early thirties, bankrolled by big-money backers who recruited me when I worked as a waiter in one of their restaurants. I never considered that gambling, even while I was playing hands where thousands of dollars rode on the turn of the next card. To my mind and more importantly to the mind of my backers, I was adept in doing on-the-fly statistical probability analysis—that is, I counted cards in blackjack in numerous casinos in Vegas, Reno, the Caribbean, South Africa, Monte Carlo. I experienced it all. Offers to comp me Dom Perignon and call-girls. Big scores and equally big busts. Fast Eddie was right. Money won is indeed twice as sweet as money earned. I wish I had won more of it before I came to be barred, thanks to an international private detective agency, by what was then every casino in the world. But that is another story, told in Subway.

  I would not allege I dabbled in the fine arts of wagering in order to gain a window into my dad’s life, but it was something I acquired nonetheless. I knew what he thought about blackjack. He doggedly clung to crackpot strategies pertaining to hot decks and when to hit and when to stand and when to double down. All I recall is that everything he said was pretty much dead wrong. I tried to teach him, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hear me.

  I cannot say I enjoyed feeling superior to him. After all, he was no different from 99.99 percent of blackjack players in the world, who hold all sorts of dubious theories about the game. But was there a part of me that was internally gloating? He was a gambler, I was a player—in effect, an investor, an asset manager. I knew more than he did about playing cards. I don’t think I can absolutely deny feeling some primitive sense of competition. And was he proud of my career turn? My hunch is yes. Maybe my career confirmed some conception he held of being a young man, of the allure of the casino and the music of riffling chips on the green felt tables. His closest associate at the time was the younger brother of my principal backer, Johnny Francesco, so I assume he had plenty of inside information on the operation. One thing for sure was that my life as a counter playing blackjack around the world was something he could intuitively understand much better than my life as a teacher or poet or grad student. For a while, I could say the same about myself. As for his depths of understanding or empathy or curiosity, they were either nonexistent or inexpressible for the man called Popey. And he might have been fascinated by how I was playing with Other People’s Money, and not money I borrowed or stole, but money entrusted to me. And when I played with OPM (technically, a small share of it was mine) and I won, I got to claim some of it as my own (well, my percentage of it anyway).

  In the end, playing cards for money and gambling in general maybe wasn’t in my DNA. Except for the times when I took my father to the track in his waning years and kept him company and bet alongside him, I haven’t made a wager in thirty years, but I still pick the games for pure intellectual sport, the way other guys read the Racing Form every day, for pleasure. Take it from me: don’t bet the favorite, automatically going in on what appears to be the more talented team. The better teams can and do indeed lose, and teams are more evenly matched than records and statistics superficially show. Sometimes the favorite convinces itself that it’s the disrespected dog, and that’s different, so they play hungry, but it’s a subtle distinction hard to explain in the abstract. Underdogs almost always have more reason to play and to win, or at least to cover the spread, and that’s why getting the points is valuable. Not that that is reason in itself to bet. Because don’t forget rule number two: only losers robotically jump on a good team getting points, banking on covering. That’s fool’s gold. If you don’t really believe the dog can win the game outright, it’s usually prudent keeping your powder dry.

  •

  It’s one thing to understand a capo of the crime families, the John Gottis, the Sam Giancanas of the underworld, or the monsters who became murderers and are bizarrely, cinematically lionized. It’s another to understand the little guys who are doing all they can to scrape by. Hard to romanticize the kind of life my father led. And he was nowhere near a big fish. If he was offered Witness Protection and a new identity, I never heard about it.

  All the same, my father rubbed shoulders with some very infamous figures in New York crime annals, such as the very big-time Columbo Family underboss Sonny Franzese, who lived in our neighborhood. And he seemed to cross paths with a made guy named Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, who is credited with recruiting Franzese into the mob and who was arrested twelve times during the course of his criminal career on charges ranging from gambling to murder. My father told me he worked as a bartender in a local joint. I speculate that the bar was operated if not effectively owned by Aloi, and that my dad did business with dirty cops who worked for or with Aloi. He could hardly be in the dark about the goings on of bookmakers, fixers, number runners, robbers, stick-up artists, shakedown specialists, loan sharks, burglary rings, and truck and air cargo hijacking crews operating in the neighborhood.

  Along the way he also became acquainted with Mickey “Cheesebox” Callahan. Callahan enjoyed a reputation as being bookmakers’ as well as corrupt cops’ best friend. He was the notorious and preeminent “wireman” and the inventor of a device, the size of a pack of cigarettes, that could transfer phone calls so that bookmakers were able to take bets away from where the phone was situated. He would be the subject of a 1971 New York Times piece by the eminent journalist David Burnham (who broke the Serpico and Karen Silkwood stories), about Callahan the “inventor” going straight later in life. Before that career transformation, though, he was also expert at sabotaging official radio transmission of race results, so as to enable gamblers (like Al Capone, for whom he once worked) to past-post bets and clean up with bookmakers. (Al Capone!) He crossed the wrong guy, however, a mob associate of Aloi, who one night attempted to rub him out, only to shoot Callahan’s son instead.

  Sidney Cooper, with whom my father cooperated, was a captain in the Police Commissioner’s Confidential Investigations Unit. One night in April 1961, when he arrested Callahan, he crowed that he had heard a lot about the famous Cheesebox but never thought he’d get to bust him.

  “The pleasure is all yours,” said Callahan.

  Cooper told Callahan that he wasn’t his real target, it was crooked cops. He tried to recruit him to work with the PCCIU.

  “Captain, if you knew anything about me, you know I’d never be partners with cops. That’s like taking a bath with alligators.”

  That was apparently not a sentiment shared by my father, or maybe that is a sentiment he could not afford to share. At one point he testified against a cop who was a neighborhood friend
of his, Vincent “Jimmy” Santa, another associate of Callahan, who was known as the bagman of the Brooklyn Morals Squad. After Santa was drummed out of the police force, he reportedly became a full-fledged mobster, later convicted of truck hijacking, and did hard time. I always knew my old man was not exactly risk-averse, but I didn’t know the depths of his recklessness and desperation.

  As for his career paths, he did leave behind stonecutting. Silicosis is a very common affliction of a stonecutter. Silica is associated with lung cancer, and breathing it in over the long haul can lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, especially back when my father was cutting stone and fewer state-mandated labor precautions were in place. The dust buildup in the lungs can accumulate and set like concrete. That’s the sometimes deadly cost of making tombstones for strangers. My father’s whole life, he seemed to be rolling the dice, always trying to suck in enough oxygen to breathe.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  If Your Honor please, I don’t want to put you in the position of committing reversible error, there is a court of appeals decision, which I will bring to you before the next return date, which states I have the right to ask the witness as to any criminal activity which he has conducted…

  Now, this man is now apparently under arrest. Not out on bail, not in jail, he is being treated like a pet, he is being kept in a hotel because he can testify against cops. I intend to show that this is the motive to relieve himself of any punishment on the forgery charge he is presently facing, which prompts him to testify against these Respondents. You refuse to direct him to answer that question, puts me in the position of not being able to press this issue…

  If Your Honor please, the reason the indictment is not being pressed [against Di Prisco] is because I intend to prove he received a promise to testify against cops, that’s why the indictment is being held over his head.

  Turf

  Probably you’ve heard this one: there’s one thing an Italian with dementia will never, ever forget—and that’s a grudge. The folk wisdom might be confirmed by the science, and by my own personal experience: I am incapable of forgetting a real or perceived slight. Like father, like son?

  Brain researchers say that long-term memory is the last to be vitiated by Alzheimer’s; it’s the short-term that is friable. And my dad did hang onto his grievances and grudges like they were family heirlooms. Which they were, in a way, because he persistently claimed to have been betrayed by his own family, his two brothers and one sister, who, in his view, ripped off his legitimate inheritance.

  I overheard this accusation from early on, but was never presented the bill of particulars, so I never quite understood what his brief was against them. He was wronged, plain and simple. I knew it was disloyal of me, but I remained skeptical. And when his brothers or sister called on the phone, as they rarely did, my mother said he was walking the dog or something, even if he was sitting in front of the TV and even if we didn’t then have a dog. If I had to hazard a hunch, I’d say his family might have been burned by him in the past. Maybe he borrowed money from them he never paid back, which he didn’t pay back because he was entitled—he thought it was his birthright. Of course, the chance remains they refused to give him money he was entitled to because they were, in my mom’s phrasing, “Italian fucking barbarians.” Coin flip, I would say. It requires being a moron to bet on the outcome of a coin flip.

  Over the years, and over the course of his accelerating dementia, my father was unsurprisingly consistent in his remarks about his past. So when I asked him periodically about the reasons for the flight from Brooklyn to California, he maintained that he was in trouble in New York City because he “had a lot of information” about cops, and that he was being “protected” in exchange for his testimony. He was being “squeezed,” his term, by the FBI and the police. I asked him what he did to acquire that valuable information. He was evasive. No new development. He swam like a shark in a sea of evasiveness.

  It becomes clearer in these NYPD hearings, and in the contemporary newspaper accounts, what he was up to. As a young man, he was habitually broke and an incorrigible gambler, and he relentlessly, intrepidly hunted for the cash to put down on the horses and then, when he lost, the cash to pay back the loan sharks and the others from whom he had borrowed it. Yet once, in a vulnerable-seeming moment, he acknowledged to me that he asked a made guy in the neighborhood for a loan, but was turned down. Why? The made guy said he wouldn’t lend him the money because he liked him. The tale was spun as a point of pride.

  At one stage, it seems, he was in the hole three thousand bucks, in debt for at least half of that to loan sharks, whom he and everybody else called “shylocks.” Adjusting for inflation, that’s about twenty-five thousand in today’s dollars. Serious money, especially when you factor in loan sharks’ draconian lending rates, which could escalate to 50 or 100 percent—a week.

  He was also borrowing from at least three cops, and to pay them back he would engage in conspiracies to shake down bookmakers and parole violators. He would finger somebody, set them up, and then the cops would score them; that is, they would fake-arrest the mark, but would offer to make the arrest go away if they paid them off. Stakes were not trivial. In one instance, they shook down a couple of bookies for three thousand, quite a haul in the day. They paid my father $250 for his efforts.

  •

  Here’s where the story gets a little more convoluted, if not deviously clever.

  When I asked him what he did for the bookmaker he worked for, he would be less than clear. He wasn’t one of those guys in green visors taking bets on the phone, spouting off the odds in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he explained. Though he sometimes did that on Saturdays, as he defended himself in court. That’s when wiseass counsel reminded him that it was also illegal on a Saturday. And he also wasn’t delivering bags of cash on square-up days to the rare-as-white-elephant winners, or threatening to break the legs of those who didn’t or couldn’t square up. “Tough guys collect,” he said, implying he didn’t qualify.

  What he admitted to me was this: he was subverting the competition. That is, he took care of rival bookmakers who were, in his words, “stepping on our turf.” This sounds like Brooklyn bookmakers’ generally accepted best business practice.

  A man named Joe Loguerico testified that he played a crucial supporting role in the Sal Valenti shakedown. He had known my father “at least twenty years” from the “old neighborhood, Greenpoint section.”

  Q. Did there come a time when you had a conversation with Joe Di Prisco regarding Sal the bookmaker?

  A. Yes.

  Q. What was the conversation?

  A. He wanted to know who I was betting with and I told him and he said he’d like to have him arrested. I went along with it and I told him I’d come walking out the building with him the following night.

  Q. Was it mentioned by Di Prisco that you were to be paid for this?

  A. He said he’d take care of me.

  •

  So my dad would like to have a rival book arrested?

  The conclusion we might draw from Loguerico’s own words as well as my father’s statement that he had a job dealing with guys who stepped on his turf is this: he seems to have been using the cops to eliminate or at least curtail the competition. The cops collected the shakedown money from the guys who didn’t want, or couldn’t tolerate, the bust, perhaps because they were on parole. Then, they seem to have shared some of the profits with him. Therefore, as the cops were using him as a confidential informant ostensibly in the service of the public good, they were in truth doing business for themselves. That also means that, as they were exploiting him, he was playing them to do the dirty job on the competition. It’s easy to imagine—in fact, it’s hard not to imagine—he was also making some money on the side from the bookmaker who employed him. Nothing of his working both ends of the deal ever came out i
n his testimony during cross-examination.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. And did you ever give him any information upon which he made any arrests?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. How many?

  A. Quite a number of arrests.

  Q. Information that you gave him where he didn’t score, but made an arrest, is that right?

  A. Yes.

  Q. I mean, you didn’t go into this stool pigeon business in order to be a shakedown artist, did you?

  A. No, I just gave him the names of bookmakers, and how they worked.

  Q. What is that?

  A. I only gave names of bookmakers and how they worked.

  Q. Yes, but you didn’t do this because you wanted to help the police shake them down, did you?

  A. I didn’t do no shaking down.

  Q. You wanted to help them find these gamblers, who you were betting with, is that right?

  A. I just gave them names of bookmakers, how they worked, and they paid me for it.

  Q. They paid you. You were making a couple of bucks on the side, is that right?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Legitimately, is that right?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Pope and son; commencement.

  Sealed Files

  What did come out in the court records was that he had been extradited from California to New York City, and his rap sheet indicated pending charges in two jurisdictions, Queens and Brooklyn—numerous felony counts of forgery, burglary, and conspiracy. So where were his files, the record of the disposition of these charges? We found out six months after I delved into those trial transcripts on Google, around June 2015. The Brooklyn file seemed for now to be lost in limbo, but his case file in Queens, by an incredible stroke of luck, had survived a warehouse fire, where about half of the case files had been destroyed, but fortunately not his. When my industrious researcher, a former New York newspaper reporter, showed up in Queens, the court clerk said he did indeed have the file in his hand, but county counsel determined that the case file was sealed and therefore undisclosable to the public. How could that be? Why was the file sealed in the first place? I was determined to find out.