Five finger discount, p.24
Five-Finger Discount, page 24
During a break in the testimony, the fingered man, Richard “Bocci” DiSciscio of Bayonne, turned his head to get a look at the clock at the back of the courtroom and accidentally made eye contact with me. His eyes, dark and empty, bore right through mine to the back of my skull. I hoped I never bumped into him in a dark alley while throwing out the trash. I found myself rooting for the prosecution.
Bocci wasn’t the only one who made me nervous. The lead defendant was Bobby Manna, accused of being the head of the Hudson County mob and the consigliere, or number-three man, in the Genovese crime family. Manna was the guy who had been placed at Kenny’s disposal years ago, the guy whose father had shot Kenny in the ass. He was also the cousin of my high school boyfriend.
When my mother heard I was covering the trial, she got worried and said, “Don’t think he doesn’t know who you are. Those guys keep an eye on everybody.” But Manna never said a word. He never even looked my way, not like Bocci had.
Manna, Bocci, and their boys—a restaurateur named Marty “Motts” Casella, from Secaucus, and former Hoboken cop Frank “Dipsy” Daniello—were also accused of plotting to murder John Gotti and his brother Gene. Their associate, union leader Rocco “Rocky” Napoli, was charged with conspiracy and labor bribery. The Statue of Liberty was even dragged into the indictment. Manna and his cohorts were accused of instigating a territorial battle with New York unions over control of the Liberty–Ellis Island restoration project.
The least of the charges had to do with illegal gambling. An FBI agent took the stand and explained some of the phrases the jury would be hearing in the gambling portion of the trial. Runners, he explained, were at the bottom of the pyramid and dealt with bettors on a day-to-day basis. They would run bets into the office where the numbers were turned in. Uncle Henry had been a runner. Hit meant a win, and overlook meant that a bookie reneged on a payment. I could have explained all that to the jury.
The best part of the trial were the secretly recorded conversations, taped at the Village Coffee Shop in downtown Jersey City and at Casella’s in Hoboken, mostly in the restaurant’s “Chariot Room” and the ladies’ rest room—used as a private meeting place for the paranoid mobsters. It seemed that very few women frequented Casella’s, though I recalled eating dinner there one Christmas Day years ago with my family. My father, tired of the King’s Court and Top of the Meadows, had been on a new-restaurant kick and wanted to try Casella’s steak. The day we went, the dining room was empty, which we attributed to the holiday. But Casella’s was often empty, I learned. Now I knew why.
I wondered if our dinner there was secretly recorded, thrown on the pile of uninteresting, non-Mob-related conversation. Did they have my mother on tape complaining that the rigatoni was overcooked? My pregnant sister worrying aloud about the possibility of varicose veins? Or my father complaining that the wait staff was rushing us out of there?
Nothing so boring was ever played in court. The dialogue from the tapes we heard was right out of a Martin Scorsese movie. We listened each day with big headphones and followed along with a government transcript. On one tape, a government witness named Vincent “the Fish” Cafaro was overheard telling his wife that he recently had lunch with his mother—who had been dead for the past eighteen years. The defense used that tape as evidence that Cafaro was out of his mind, and therefore an unreliable witness.
Between discussions of hits, the murderous and the gambling kind, the defendants joked on tape about their sexual conquests. Rocky boasted about wanting to give his “mozzarella” to one of his female co-conspirators. Everyone in the courtroom burst out laughing. The only one who kept a straight face—barely—was the judge, Maryann Trump Barry—the sister of Donald Trump. She looked like her brother in a wig and black robe.
In another conversation Rocky complained that he wanted a hot typewriter from a guy nicknamed Trolley Car. “You tell that skinny bastard Trolley Car I want my typewriter. You got two. Richie got two. The other guy got two. And where’s mine? I want one.” After Rocky got his typewriter, he complained the next day, “Okay. Tell him I need a VCR. Two of ’em.”
The most controversial of Rocky’s conversations was with Judge Zampella, the guy who had always been such a good friend to Grandpa, the one who brushed my mother off after Grandpa tried to shoot us. The same one who had gotten Grandpa the job in the library, and had let him go that Easter week after he broke all the furniture.
On the Manna tapes, Zampella could be heard saying, “You know, I stopped the investigation and that man has never said thank-you for what I did.”
“Ungrateful kid,” says Rocky.
In other tapes, Rocky could be overheard discussing how he was getting Zampella’s help in expunging his criminal record. “I had Judge Zampella down here the other day,” said Rocky. “I know what I’m doing.”
He certainly did. In December 1987, Rocky was made an honorary deputy sheriff for Hudson County.
As a result of the tapes, Zampella was forced to step down. He was never charged with any crimes, but stopping investigations for your mobster friends and expunging their criminal records are not the activities a judge is expected to engage in, in his spare time. Not even a judge in Hudson County. My family saw Zampella’s fall as karma, his payback for being rude to my mother and Aunt Mary Ann and for failing to keep Grandpa behind bars. He got his. That’s what people said about Zampella.
All kinds of people were popping up in the government case: Hoboken policemen, Jersey City police officials, a Hudson County sheriff’s officer, an investigator from the Hudson County prosecutor’s office who was tipping off the mobsters during gambling raids. Just when I started to have some real fun at the trial, an all too familiar name appeared in the government transcripts. When I read the name, I held my breath and closed my eyes. I had to be seeing things.
I let my breath out, opened my eyes, and looked again. But there it was: cousin Mike’s name.
In the August 23, 1987, recording, an unidentified male looking for a lawyer is overheard asking where Mike is. Nothing more. Nothing criminal.
Though Mike wasn’t indicted, wasn’t on the tapes himself, and wasn’t a mobster, he had been a mayoral candidate and was therefore a public figure. I started to panic, right there in the courtroom, wondering if I was supposed to call the office and tell my editor that Mike’s name was mentioned in the transcripts. Where was my allegiance?
I suffered a crisis of conscience trying to decide whether to be true to my editor or true to the family. Would I embarrass a relative, one that I actually liked? The mere fact that his name was mentioned, even though it was innocent, could be embarrassing. But it was also news. I thought about those afternoons in Aunt Katie’s backyard and the long conversations I had had with Mike about his Norman Rockwell prints and books like Lord of the Flies. But that was a long time ago. Was it my responsibility to let the city editor—and the city—know that a former mayoral candidate’s name was mentioned in the Manna tapes? Or should I call Mike and let him know that his name was mentioned?
I did neither.
Instead, I did what Kunegunda did fifty years earlier. I kept my trap shut.
But it didn’t matter. Another reporter covering the trial realized who Mike was and wrote a front-page story about Mike’s name popping up in the transcripts. In the story, Mike denied any wrongdoing and said he often went to Casella’s for dinner, that lots of people did. He even said he planned on calling the prosecutor to offer any help he could.
The Mike story blew over as quickly as it had blown up. No one paid much attention. But I couldn’t wait for the Manna trial to be over. Neither could the jury. We were all relieved when Manna and his gang were found guilty. When the foreman delivered the verdict, jurors on either side of him held his legs so he wouldn’t fall over.
With the verdict in and the trial finished, I figured I was safe. But Mike’s name popped up again, in an AP story I read on the wire one afternoon. This time, Mike was disbarred for misappropriating client funds. Mike’s name and picture wound up on the front page of the paper. So did Paula’s long, Italian last name. The $20,000 used for the closing on our Summit Avenue house ten years earlier had been part of Mike’s “misappropriated funds.”
My sister and her husband had no idea that their money had been “misappropriated” and had no clue Mike was being investigated. According to Mike, the problem was discovered during an automatic audit on his account. His biggest crime was simply a matter of “commingling” of funds. In 1977, a law was passed that said lawyers couldn’t mix clients’ money with their personal money. With the $20,000 in trust, Mike had written checks from the same account.
“Whether you intend to rob them or not, even though no one loses a penny, it’s automatic disbarment,” Mike explained. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”
In his defense, Mike told the Supreme Court of New Jersey he had been having personal problems. His house—the one where we had visited Aunt Katie and where Beansie had been reared—burned down. The rumor was that a bookie threw a Molotov cocktail at it because either Katie or Mike owed him money. Not long after, Mike suffered a broken arm. He had two coronary operations. Chubby killed himself. Uncle Al got cancer. Aunt Katie would go to the Mayo Clinic with him and entertain all the patients on his floor. Many a patient died with a smile on his face because of Aunt Katie—Uncle Al included. Aunt Katie suffered a stroke, but she survived. As if that wasn’t enough hard luck, Mike also lost both legs to diabetes.
Mike “endured more grief within several years than many endure in a lifetime,” the court found, but “his suffering did not prevent him from knowing what he was doing when he misused client funds.”
When I went to visit Mike afterward at his house, the house rebuilt on the ashes of the fire, we chatted about his disbarment, about politics, and about Jersey City. He didn’t seem to care that much about being disbarred. He said he hadn’t practiced in years anyway, that he’d just done the house closing for Paula because she was a relative. What bothered him more was his inability to run for office because of his health problems. He knew he’d never be elected mayor, and had no plans of running again. But he still had tax-reform ideas that he hoped to share with the governor and other elected officials. Whenever friends and relatives dropped by or called, he tried to explain his complicated theories.
Every time the phone rang while I was there, Mike was very eager to answer it. But each time he rolled his wheelchair over to the phone, one of his prosthetic legs would fall off. I was a nervous wreck the whole afternoon.
“Want me to get that?” I exclaimed each time the phone rang, not sure if I meant the receiver or Mike’s leg lying in the middle of the floor.
“No,” he joked, bending over, his sense of humor still, miraculously, intact. “It’s the only exercise I get.”
It was getting harder and harder to decide what was newsworthy and what should be kept a family secret. My family popped up yet again in a story about Hudson County voter fraud. During the Secaucus City Council election, an especially scummy politician went a step beyond using the names of the dead to vote in his favor. Patients at Meadowview Hospital were registered to vote by absentee ballot.
Some of the people at Meadowview didn’t know who the president of the United States was. Some didn’t even know their own name. Michael Lari, the council candidate who uncovered the scandal and tried to get the votes thrown out, had a list of fifty mentally and emotionally disturbed voters from Meadowview who were taken advantage of. The names weren’t published. But The Jersey Journal had the list.
Political reporter Pete Weiss noticed a Stapinski name on that list and asked me if I was related. He handed it to me. When I saw Thomas Stapinski and realized what Pete was writing about, my face got hot. I had a vision of some Hudson County political operative conning my severely retarded uncle into scribbling his name and “voting preference” on a ballot. I swallowed hard, gulping down a strong urge to cry.
I hadn’t seen Uncle Tommy in a few years, but I knew his condition hadn’t improved. I could just picture his squinty eyes, like my father’s, and that sad, retarded smile.
After I regained my composure, the Beansie temper rose higher than ever before. I wanted to drive my Buick Skylark to Secaucus and keep driving until I ran over the council candidate responsible for this. Then I’d put it in reverse, back up, and run over him again.
When I calmed down, I decided against the hit and run. The pen was mightier than the Buick Skylark. I decided to write a column about the voter fraud, how disgusting the whole thing was. I could describe Uncle Tommy and my visits to him as a child, how he had looked the last time I saw him, at Thanksgiving dinner at our house on Summit Avenue. There was no way Uncle Tommy could voluntarily cast a vote for someone. I would write a column about it, and write it with the venom that could only come from personal involvement.
But my family asked me not to. They were embarrassed.
Uncle Tommy had been a dirty family secret for decades, and they didn’t want him trotted out, no matter how just the cause. What got me, though, wasn’t my family’s protests. I found out that this wasn’t the only time Meadowview had been raided for Hudson County votes. This had been going on for years. Uncle Tommy had probably been taken advantage of for decades. I just hadn’t been in a position to notice. I suddenly felt helpless and very small in the face of all that corruption. I was a footnote, incapable of change in such a fucked-up place.
Heartsick and disgusted, I buckled under the weight of Jersey City and my family. Instead of writing a column about Uncle Tommy, I decided to leave The Jersey Journal.
As I searched for a reporting job in the tri-state area, I grew more and more bitter. What I really wanted was to get away from my family, and living in Connecticut or Long Island wouldn’t accomplish that. But I didn’t know where to go or how to get away for good.
I moved within a five-mile radius three times in less than three years, in a desperate attempt to make myself happy. From Weehawken, I moved back to Jersey City, to a duplex apartment downtown. I loved the place, but I hated one of my roommates, a vegetarian who yelled at me for cooking chicken in her stainless-steel pots. I finally decided to move out after she went to Nicaragua on a monthlong humanitarian mission and stuck me with her three-hundred-dollar phone bill.
Next, I moved to a Heights basement apartment, in a house that my sister had bought as an investment. Every time it rained, my kitchen flooded. But what finally made me move were the upstairs tenants, noisy postal workers who played Lynyrd Skynyrd when they returned from their graveyard shift each night. The Oriental rug in the vestibule and the pictures on the hallway walls vanished. I was afraid my stereo speakers would be next or, worse, that they’d shoot Wendell when he went up and asked them for the tenth time to turn down “Free Bird.”
I considered moving in with Wendell, but I figured I’d just bring him down. I was so miserable, it was contagious. Instead, I moved to Manhattan, to a mouse- and roach-infested apartment at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, and commuted every day to Journal Square.
While I searched for a new job, my weekly column became sharper, more biting, and increasingly controversial. I lambasted the planning board for eating lavish meals at the expensive Casa Dante Restaurant, Frank Sinatra for marketing his own inedible spaghetti sauce in a jar, and a local Italian parish for not welcoming black people to its annual feast.
The pastor of Mount Carmel, the parish I took to task, delivered sermons about me on Sundays and sponsored a petition drive to try to get me fired. The paper’s only black columnist, Earl Morgan, and some white clergy members came to my defense. But things got ugly. In the mail, I got a dirty maxi-pad with my column wrapped around it. I got letters telling me I should shut up and get a proper woman’s job, as a nurse or a secretary.
My family was forced to defend me week after week. While out with his in-laws at an Italian dinner-dance, Stanley almost choked on his antipasto when one of the guys at the table said, “So what about that Stapinski broad?” He was the pastor of Mount Carmel and was about to launch into a tirade against me, not knowing Stanley was my brother. Dolores, my sister-in-law, had to practically sit on top of Stanley so he wouldn’t jump across the table and give the priest a black eye.
We laughed about it at the next family get-together, but it wasn’t really funny. Not only was my family affecting my writing, but now my writing was affecting my family.
My sister got a job as a teacher at P.S. 27, which was named, ironically, the Zampella School, after one of the judge’s relatives. In my column, I tried to stay away from the subject of education altogether for fear my sister would be fired. But it seemed that whatever I wrote about, there was some family connection.
Because of the attention my column was getting, Ma was transferred at work from the record room to central judicial processing court, where the bad guys were arraigned—and where there was less confidential information floating around. Working CJP was a much harder job for my sixty-year-old mother, and the prosecutor hoped that by transferring her down there, she would quit. He didn’t know her very well. She would not be manipulated. Anyway, she had seen much worse at the DMV. Many of her former customers were now the bad guys being arraigned. They’d wave to Ma as they were led away in handcuffs. “Hey, Motor Vehicle Lady,” they’d say. “What are you doing here?” Ma thrived at CJP, and became indispensable.
But her demotion was just another reason for me to get the hell out of Jersey City. If I left the paper, my mother’s job would get easier. I was no longer helping her by sticking around. She wouldn’t die if I moved away. Besides, her job at the courthouse was a conflict on so many different levels. Every week there was swag for sale in the court-house hallways: clothes, fine china, knockoff designer watches, radios, electric razors. I wasn’t sure if it was confiscated property from swag busts or if it was just plain swag that fell off the truck and directly into the courthouse hallways.
