Five finger discount, p.29
Five-Finger Discount, page 29
The first Republican in nearly a century, Schundler was elected the year I went to Alaska. He was an investment banker with money to burn, so corruption was no longer an issue. He didn’t need to steal money. He had enough. Finally, a mayor of Jersey City who had enough.
Schundler was all right in my book, Republican or not. Some people disliked him because he wasn’t Hudson County born and raised. The worst accusation they could dredge up was that he owned a house in Jersey City but lived most of the time out of town in a second home in the suburbs. They said the first chance he got, he’d leave Jersey City flat and follow his ambitions for higher office. But I didn’t think that was so bad. It was better than taking kickbacks and stealing taxpayer money earmarked for new schools and nontoxic playgrounds. In an imperfect world, I would take a politically ambitious, conservative commuter over a born-and-raised corrupt swindler.
Schundler was one of the legions of yuppies who had moved to downtown Jersey City in the mid-1980s. When he pulled up in front of his apartment in a cab in those first few months in town, the driver noticed the address and gestured to the front door. “My brother was shot to death right on your stoop,” he told him.
Less than a year later, the day before he closed on his brownstone, Schundler was walking in the neighborhood and watched as police cars zoomed past him and his wife. When they got to the house they were about to buy, they saw that the cop cars were parked out front. They had just arrested two kids who tried to rob the house. Schundler’s house.
Schundler thought twice about closing. But he went ahead and made Jersey City his home. Vice and all.
He knew, firsthand, that the city could be a tough place. At the turn of the new century, crime was down 40 percent from the time he took office. But it still had a long way to go.
There were still chopped-up bodies and floaters pulled from the Hudson River each spring. But times were changing. There was the lesbian-rough-sex murder case in Bayonne, and the Internet case, in which a Jersey City guy was accused of luring a California girl online and then murdering her. In the autumn of 1999, a Hudson County real estate baron who had bought Mayor Hague’s fourteen-room luxury Kennedy Boulevard apartment was allegedly gunned down by his disgruntled doorman, a three-hundred-pound former Board of Ed worker known as Big Daddy. The only witness to the murder was an eight-year-old boy. Bad news didn’t get much more colorful than that.
The crime story that fascinated me the most, though, happened the summer before. A time capsule placed under the Christopher Columbus statue on Journal Square was missing when the statue was moved for construction. The time capsule, including photos, newspapers, and other mementos, had been sealed at the base of the statue in October 1950 by Judge Zampella and Hudson’s other well-connected Italians.
The oblong copper box was supposed to be opened in the year 2000 and resealed until 2050. But when workers moved the bronze explorer from his perch on a hot August afternoon in 1998, to make way for a $7.5-million Journal Square face-lift, the box was nowhere to be found. The construction crew searched the base and dug through the construction rubble, but it was gone. Who could be low enough to steal a time capsule? It was almost as bad as stealing the Blessed Mother.
Jersey City was so corrupt it couldn’t even hold on to its history.
But then again, neither could I.
As a freelance reporter, I stole other people’s hard-luck stories and wrote about them. It was my job to sneak into their lives and take notes. Five-finger discount. Secondhand. I wrote about crime victims and celebrities battling cancer, infertile couples and union workers phased out from jobs they’d held for fifty years, people losing their businesses and kids dying of drug overdoses. They weren’t my stories. But I took them and put my byline on them. I made them my own.
My family’s stories were different. For years, I felt a sense of entitlement to them, the way rich kids must feel about the family fortune. True tales about stolen encyclopedias, lobster tails, a statue of the Blessed Mother, a hospital bed, rare coins, a quarter of a million dollars. They were my only inheritance—save for a few stolen objects that I got to keep along the way.
But I had been away too long, had missed too many family gatherings. Maybe it was that seven-year hiatus. Even the old stories were told less and less frequently, an eerie foreshadowing to what was happening to people like George and Gerri. The crime stories, funny at first, grew closer and closer to home, eating their way to the heart of the family, until they almost devoured us altogether. Gerri’s crime had nearly wrecked us. And no one wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t a funny story, and it wasn’t mine to tell, really.
I wondered if any of the stories were mine to take with me wherever I went, like the books from Aunt Mary Ann and the stolen dictionary that went with me whenever I moved. Now that I was gone, I felt like I had to steal the family stories back, bit by bit, phone call by phone call, like a thief in the night, my relatives rightfully suspicious of my motives.
I wanted my son to know those stories, to show him where his mother grew up, to see it, taste it, smell it. But the smells I smelled at his age, both good and bad, were all gone. No more coffee or chocolate, soap or blubber. The factories had moved out long ago. The restaurants Daddy took us to were gone, too. Lobster tails, I discovered, were very expensive and difficult to cook. Daddy, like a champion figure skater, had only made it look easy.
I wanted Dean to meet the good people of Jersey City, the few I encountered throughout my lifetime. Though many Jersey Citizens were not worth meeting, there were some who’d surprise you with their no-bullshit attitude and willingness to do you a favor.
I wanted him to know that Jersey City had prepared me for the world—a harsh place, filled with jerks and criminals, no matter how far you traveled. In Manhattan, I once tripped and fell and watched people step over me at the curb. In Brooklyn, my apartment was broken into three times. In San Francisco, a big fat guy stole my wallet on a bus, then treated all his friends to the movies on my credit card. In Hong Kong, people pushed me out of the way to get a seat on the ferry. And in Cairo, a guy tried to grab my butt as I walked past him. I punched him hard in the chest and told him to go paw his wife like that. He had no idea what I was saying. But he heard the tone in my voice, and looked apologetic.
Because Jersey City had been so tough, I was always prepared for what might come my way.
I wanted my son to know that Jersey City was the world in high relief, stark black and white, with no punches pulled. The bad was especially bad, so the good stood out. When you met a good person—a truly good person—in a place as ugly and as awful as that, it could choke you up and make you want to cry.
I wanted my kid to know that, to know the characters I knew, to show him where his mother played, the wall on which I slammed a handball at age five, the pole I climbed, the door to my building, where the junkies came to hide, the door to the Majestic Tavern that I had pushed open with hands as tiny as his. But the Majestic was replaced by a Pakistani restaurant. And those doors opened the way for stories that were barely mine anymore, told in an accent that was slowly, surely fading.
For Sissy and Babe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Ann Godoff; Tony Petrosino for his Web searches and for the poster of Journal Square; Jamie Vena Gottschall for her family research; Bob and Joseph Vena, Robert Vena, Jill Worthington, Susan Yenni, Edward and Elaine Stapinski, Michael Bell, Julie and Stephen Nowatkowski, Terri Gradowski, Mary Ann Koch, Mary Ann DelGreco, Eddie Meehan, Paula Muia, Colin Egan, Bret Schundler, Frank Culloo, Marcos Navas, Gene Scanlon, Anthony Cucci, Jaime Vasquez, Angie Wendolowski, Marybeth McGovern, Guy Catrillo, Bill Miller, William Rashbaum, Bob Leach, and Fred Friesendorf for their memories and expertise; to Pete Weiss, John Petrick, Olga Torres, Margaret Schmidt, Judy Locoriere, and the staff of The Jersey Journal; to Bessie Jamieson, Tom Boyle, Maria Schembari, Doug Roy, Brenda Tyson, Peg Latham, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, for giving me the space, both physical and mental; Sara Eckel, Laura Kriska, Jerome Gentes, Russell West, Kurt Jaskowiak, Andrew King, Luc Sante, Le Anne Schreiber, Kim Rich, Jodi Honeycutt, Jim DeRogatis, Deirdre Fretz, and Lauren and Paul Spagnoletti, for their encouragement; Ken French, Bruce Brandt, Charlie Markey, and John Norton in the New Jersey Room, Paula Spagnoletti, Stanley Stapinski, and Kathy and Walter Jamieson, for the answers to my many questions; my mother, Irene Stapinski, for her astounding memory and her nurturing skills; Dean Jamieson, for the luck and love he brought; and most of all, to my husband, Wendell Jamieson, for his countless edits, his boundless faith, and his incredible patience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Several books provided background and historical information. The most comprehensive was Thomas F. X. Smith’s Powerticians (Lyle Stuart, 1982). Dayton David McKean’s The Boss: The Hague Machine in Action (Houghton Mifflin, 1940); Richard J. Connors’s A Cycle of Power (The Scarecrow Press, 1971); George C. Rapport’s The Statesman and the Boss (Vantage Press, 1961); J. Owen Grundy’s The History of Jersey City (Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, 1976); and John M. Kelly, Rita M. Murphy, and William J. Roehrenbeck’s Jersey City Tercentenary 1660–1960 (1960) were also essential. Other important sources included Bob Leach’s Saloon Stories, his piece on Frank Hague, “To Touch His Garment,” his story on Newsboy Moriarty, as well as his Hague Picture Book (Jersey City Historical Project, 1998); Joan Doherty Lovero’s Hudson County: The Left Bank (American Historical Press, 1999); Kenneth T. Jackson’s Encyclopedia of New York City (Yale University Press, 1995), Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947), Helen E. Sheehan and Richard P. Wedeen’s Toxic Circles (Rutgers University Press, 1993). Also helpful were Randall Gabrielan’s Jersey City in Vintage Postcards (Arcadia Publishing, 1999); Robert R. Goller’s The Morris Canal, Across New Jersey by Water and Rail (1999), and Patrick B. Shalhoub’s Jersey City (1995), both from the Images of America series (Arcadia Publishing).
Several magazine and news articles were used as sources, including Thomas J. Fleming’s “I Am the Law,” from American Heritage, June 1969; William F. Longgood’s “Jersey City Is Hard to Be Believed,” from The Saturday Evening Post, April 3, 1954; an article on Hague from Life magazine, February 7, 1938; Brent Cunningham’s “The Newhouse Way,” from Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2000; Frank Gallagher and Debra Kindervatter’s story on the Central Railroad terminal, N.J. Outdoors, September/October 1989; Joan Cook’s February 26, 1979, New York Times obituary on Newsboy Moriarty; Ronald Sullivan’s December 2, 1970, story in the Times on the Mosquito Commission trial; and Frederika Randall’s September 3, 2000, Times story on Matera; the Hudson Dispatch’s June/July 1934 coverage of Uncle Andrew’s death; and Kevin M. Meyer’s December 31, 1989, corruption roundup in the Jersey City Reporter.
A legion of anonymous Jersey Journal reporters and editors provided me with a rough draft of Hudson County’s history: articles on the murder of Frank Kenny, from April 1916; the Black Tom explosion, from July and August 1916; Great-Grandma Irene’s death, from November 3, 1922; the Majestic heist, from October 1923; Uncle Andrew’s death, from June/July 1934; Grandpa’s crimes from April 1, June 14, and September 6, 1935, October 18, 1943, July 25, 1948, September 19, 1951, and August 5, 1970; the death of Uncle Sonny on August 10, 1944 (once I tracked it down); Kenny’s rally from May 6, 1949, his election, and Kenny’s own article, “Cork Row, a Bit of Heaven in Downtown”; the closing of the Stanley Theatre, from October 1953; and Frank’s DMV shooting, from September 1972 and July 1976.
A long list of bylined Jersey Journal reporters deserve credit as well. For information, I mined Peter Weiss’s incredible body of work, including, but not limited to, his February 12, 1999, story on the Medical Center; his and Patricia Ford’s coverage of the City Hall fire, from September 14, 1979; William Worrell’s “race riot” story from August 3, 1964; Patricia Scott’s jail coverage; Dan Rosenfeld’s September 9, 1991, story on contamination at Liberty State Park, among dozens of other articles on toxic waste; Bernie Rosenberg’s column on the Newark Bay Bridge accident; Joseph Albright’s October 5, 1991, article and Nat Berg’s March 29, 1965, story on cousin Mike; John Petrick’s, Earl Morgan’s, Emily Smith’s, Bill Campbell’s, and Peter Weiss’s coverage of the Manna trial; John Petrick’s October 19, 1991, story on his Medical Center tour; Deborah Yaffe’s November 18, 1991, story on Aunt Katie; Michael Finnegan’s, John Oswald’s, John Petrick’s, Peter Weiss’s, and Bill Campbell’s 1991 coverage of Mayor McCann’s indictment, trial, and conviction; Elaine Pofeldt’s, Kristen Danis’s, and John Petrick’s coverage of the Union Terminal odor stories; Agustin Torres’s, James Efstathiou’s, and Peter Weiss’s stories on the Secaucus Council election; Agustin Torres’s December 4, 1998, coverage of the Columbus monument; Stan Eason and Gilbert Martinez’s February 1996 stories on cousin George; Greg Wilson’s Secaucus election coverage; and Christina Joseph’s and Melody Tanti’s September 1999 stories on Barry Segall.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helene Stapinski began her career at her hometown newspaper, The Jersey Journal, and since then has written for The New York Times, New York magazine, and People, among other publications. She received her B.A. in journalism from New York University in 1987 and her MFA from Columbia in 1995. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.
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Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount
