Sons and Princes
Authors: James Lepore
Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to my daughters, Erica, Adrienne and Jamie, with love, and with gratitude for choosing me to be their father.
Sons and Princes
was not a secret as I was writing it, but only my editor, Lou Aronica, saw it in progress. The heart of the book is mine, but its shape and direction are the result of his patient and clear-eyed professionalism. Not to mention his loyalty. My wife Karen is the first angel to come along, Lou is the second.
Instead of thy fathers shall be thy sons, whom thou shalt make princes in all the earth.
—Psalm 46:16
Book I
Joe Black
1.
Joe Black Massi’s funeral had been a singular experience. His body, or rather sufficient parts of it to make it identifiable, had been found in a suitcase in the Gawanus Canal in Brooklyn on the first day of the year 2003. The old man, sixty-six and with a long list of enemies, had been missing for a month. One arm, one leg and the torso had been consecrated by the church and buried in a crowded cemetery in Bloomfield, the blue collar town in North Jersey where Joe and his wife Rose had settled after spending thirty-five years in the same apartment on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. There had been no wake or mass, just a ride from a local funeral home to the cemetery, where a rented but kindly priest had incongruously commended Joseph Massi Sr.’s soul to God. Under a forbidding gray sky, Joe’s sons, Chris, forty-two, and Joseph Jr., thirty-two, and his wife, Rose, her hand shaking, her face white and grim, had dropped white carnations onto the casket and watched as it was lowered into the ground, three hearts burdened with Joe Black’s legacy of anger and bitterness. Of the family and friends they had invited, only a handful had appeared. Joe Black was a solitary man, and his career as a Mafia assassin had created a wide gulf between him and even those who were close to him.
Now, four months later, Chris and Joseph were back on the same headstone-dotted hillside to bury Rose, felled by a heart attack on a bus ride to Atlantic City with a group of friends. For Rose, there had been a wake, modestly attended, her body surrounded by floral arrangements, prayed over; her friends and relatives chatting quietly for two days and two nights in the hushed rooms of the same funeral parlor that had dispatched her husband. It had rained heavily overnight, and the morning sun shone unfiltered onto the cemetery’s newly green lawn and burgeoning shrubs. The sky overhead, scrubbed clean by the rain, was a pale, diaphanous blue. Behind the mourners, at the crest of the hill and to their right, stood an old chestnut tree, its spreading branches reaching almost to Chris and Joseph, who stood side by side watching as thirty or so people filed past the casket, each laying a red rose on it before moving on. Among these people were Chris’ ex-wife, Teresa, his two children, Tess, sixteen, and Matt, about to turn fourteen, Teresa’s father, Anthony “Junior Boy” DiGiglio and his wife, Mildred. Chris, the eldest son, was the last to drop his flower, the last to say goodbye to Rose.
Turning from the casket, he saw Tess and Matt standing in the bright sunlight about twenty yards away. Beyond them, Joseph and Teresa were walking away, arm in arm. Chris had grown used to seeing Tess as a young woman. In her simple black dress, lightly made up, she was a replica of her mother, her high cheek-boned Mediterranean beauty needing very little to enhance it. Matt was a different story. Tall like his father, but gangly and coltish, he was transformed by his dark blue funeral suit, white shirt and simple tie into a startling preview of the man he would be. It put Matt in a new light, and, given his son’s attitude lately, that light was troublesome to Chris. He had watched his son carefully over the last two days. In unguarded moments he was, like any thirteen-year-old boy, awkward, shy, brash, dopey and vaguely panicked about his status between boy and man. When he thought he was being watched or when approached by people, (more than one of whom commented on the remarkable resemblance between Matt and his paternal grandfather, Joe Black Massi), he was a painfully obvious caricature of gangster coolness.
Chris reached his children, kissed them, then turned and walked with them to the limousine that would take them to Vesuvius, a Southern Italian restaurant on the Newark-Bloomfield border that Joe Black and Rose had begun to frequent when they moved to Jersey. There, a post-funeral luncheon was to be held.
The owners of Vesuvius, a couple in their fifties, the man pot-bellied and balding, the woman stout and amateurishly made up, had put on their best clothes and were waiting in the bright sun on the sidewalk out front when the limousines arrived. They were at the same time proud and very nervous at the prospect of Junior Boy DiGiglio, a true Mafia don, visiting their simple trattoria. Standing beside them were two men in the employ of DiGiglio who had spent the last two hours thoroughly going through the restaurant and the apartment above it. As the limos and cars bearing the mourners arrived, a gray van pulled up to the curb across the street and two men in tan suits emerged, each carrying a camera with a zoom lens attached. The don waited in his limo as his driver and bodyguard, both killers, got out, introduced themselves to the owners and greeted their colleagues. When Chris and Joseph emerged from their limo, DiGiglio did the same and allowed himself to be introduced to the owners by Chris before heading into the restaurant. The rest of the party had also arrived and were drifting inside in twos and threes. While this was going on, the men in the tan suits were taking pictures, concentrating on the famous Junior Boy DiGiglio, whose public schedule it was usually impossible to know in advance, but also snapping away at Chris, Joseph, Teresa, Mildred (who had arrived with her daughter) and even Tess and Matt.
Vesuvius, its facade drab and inconspicuous, in a neighborhood that had been slowly losing ground to urban blight for twenty years, was surprisingly elegant inside, with real linen and good silverware on the tables, each one of which was centered with a long-stemmed red rose in a simple glass vase. This last was a bit much for Chris, but it was Joseph’s idea so he said nothing. Later, when he learned that the owners, much taken by Rose and her imperious northern Italian ways, had supplied the flowers and vases free of charge, he was glad he had kept his counsel.
At the back of the room were French doors that led to a brick-walled courtyard, where less formal tables, painted black, were set around a tall grape arbor whose vines were just beginning to climb and go green. The day was warm and beautiful, the first after almost a week of rain, and the owners had thought that al fresco might be a welcome touch. They beamed when they saw that Chris and Joseph were pleased with their arrangements. A trestle table under the arbor was loaded with food, the bar inside was open, and soon people were drinking and talking while waiters in black slacks, white shirts and black bow ties were passing around trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres. The restaurant was closed to the public. Joe Pace, Junior Boy’s driver, stood quietly just inside the front door, while the don’s bodyguard, Nick “Nicky Spags” Spagnoletti, calm and alert, placed himself a few steps behind and to the side of DiGiglio, an attitude and position he would maintain the entire day.
Joseph Massi, now thirty-two, had been strung out on heroin on and off since he was eighteen. He claimed to be clean at the moment, and Chris believed him because he had come to learn the signs. He watched as his charming and handsome younger brother chatted up the DiGiglio faction, starting with Mildred, whose facade was, as usual, sweet and indecipherable, then moving on to Nicky Spags, who nodded absently once or twice before brushing him off, settling finally into a conversation with a thick-necked capo regime named Rocco Stabile, who had taken a liking to both Massi brothers when he first met them years ago.
Chris made his way around the restaurant thanking people, kissing second and third cousins he hadn’t seen in years and making small talk, some of it, as with the now dispersed faction from Carmine Street, enjoyable for the honest nostalgia it added to his otherwise confused mix of feelings. Ending up in the courtyard, he saw that Matt had joined Joseph and Rocco. He watched intently for a moment as they chatted under the far right corner of the arbor, the dappled shade cast by the grape vines overhead fluttering across their faces. Matt, his black hair slicked back, his suit hanging loosely on his reed-like body, nearly a head taller than Rocco, was making his usual transparent attempt at the studied casualness of the confident tough guy, a pose that grated on Chris even though he had seen it a dozen times in the last forty-eight hours. Then he spotted Teresa alone at a table in the far left corner, and walked over to join her.
“So,” he said when he was seated, “have you thought about it?”
“It’s not something I can decide in one night, Chris.”
“Look at him over there,” Chris said. “Who do you think he’s trying to emulate, the junkie or the Mafia thug?”
“Chris...”
The night before, Chris had joined Teresa on the funeral home’s wide, wrap-around porch, and, while she smoked, told her of the misgivings he had been having over their son’s recent behavior, much of it centered around his naive conception of the Mafia life and his perceived position within it. Worshiping the wrong heroes was bad enough, Chris had said, but Matt’s arrogance, the superior attitude he struck as the only grandson of the great Anthony DiGiglio, required immediate action, immediate intervention by both parents. His idea was for Matt, who was finishing eighth grade at a public school in North Caldwell, the bedroom community in Jersey where Teresa lived, to attend high school in Manhattan and live with Chris there starting in September. Teresa had noticed the same behavior in the boy. He was disdainful of his sister, most of his “straight” classmates and even his Mafia-related cousins, children of lesser gods, as it were. But he remained by and large respectful to her, and relatively easy for her to handle, and so she had not drawn the same dire conclusions as Chris had. And, of course, the remedy he was proposing had aroused all of her instincts to, as a mother, keep her son under her wing, and shred anyone who tried to take him from her nest.
“I didn’t ask you to decide,” Chris said. “I asked you to think about it.”
“He’ll never agree.”
“We don’t need his permission.”
“He’s fourteen. He’s not a baby.”
“He’s a baby when you want him to be, and he’s grown up when you want him to be.”
“You want me to give my son up for no reason?”
Teresa raised her voice when she said this, and her large brown eyes turned slightly feral, a look, Chris knew, that usually preceded the unleashing of an anger and a stubbornness in his former wife against which there was no hope of prevailing. Shaking his head, acknowledging to himself the stupidity of an ad hominem attack, he said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”
“That’s okay,” Teresa replied. “I know you love your son.”
“I just want you to think about it.”
“I will, but I’m not promising anything.”
Chris shook his head but said nothing. She would not think about it, he knew. Defeat had entered Chris’ life of late and stolen one of the linchpins that held his identity, or what he thought was his identity, together: his law license. The thought of another loss, this one involving his son’s very future, was not a happy one. Teresa’s mind had closed. These signs he knew, too. And why blame her? Why should she give up custody of her son because he was acting like a snob? Teresa excused herself and got up to join her mother at the other side of the courtyard. When she was gone, Chris sat quietly for a moment and contemplated his dilemma.
The Mafia life was open to Matt, but Chris had never considered the possibility that he would actually enter it until the last six months when the boy had started to turn a surly face to the world and carry himself like a prince. This behavior would have been only marginally worrisome in the average thirteen year old, but in Junior Boy DiGiglio’s grandson, it was a cause for great concern. What Chris had not spoken of to Teresa, either the night before or today, was the bottom line reality of what the “Mafia life” meant: there was no respect, no authority, no career unless you killed people. No one knew the rules better than Junior Boy, and he never broke them. No effete young man with unbloodied manicured hands would ever be allowed to join the club. No exception would be made for Matt because he was the don’s grandson. In fact, that would be the worst thing Anthony could do. Matt Massi would have to kill to make his bones, kill on command and as often as Junior Boy thought necessary to ensure that the boy was qualified and would be accepted in an organization whose bylaws spoke of violence and death as others spoke of quorums and proxies. For as long as he had known her, Teresa had been in denial about certain aspects of what her father did for a living. Even if he wanted to do such a thing, he doubted he would ever be able to break through her defenses to force the image of her son as a killer onto her brain. She was as grounded in the real world as anyone he had ever met, except when it came to her father’s business and her son’s innocence.
A hand placed on his shoulder broke Chris’ reverie. Turning, he saw that it belonged to his daughter, Tess.
“Can I join you?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Do you want me to get you some food?”
“No, I had some.”
Tess sat down next to Chris. She leaned close to her father, as if to speak in a whisper, but said nothing. Chris put his arm around her shoulder and drew her to him.
“I love you, Tess,” he said.
“I love you, too, Daddy. I’m sorry about your law license.”
“I am too, sweetheart.”
Chris kissed Tess on the forehead, then brought his arm away from her shoulder and sat facing her. In her sorrow, her face remained composed and her bearing proud. She looked like her mother, but her grit was Massi grit, and so was her very sharp mind. She placed her hands – young and flawlessly molded – palms down on the white tablecloth before her, and Chris noticed that she was wearing Rose’s engagement ring, a small but near-perfect diamond in a simple platinum setting.
“Is there anything you can do?” Tess asked.
“You mean to fight it?”
“Yes.”
“Except for the most unusual circumstances, it’s irreversible.”
At Chris’ request, Teresa had relayed the news of his disbarment to Tess and Matt, who were in school when he called three days ago. He had then become consumed by the wake and the funeral. This was the first either of the children had mentioned it.
“What were you and Mommy talking about?”
“Your brother.”
“Oh, Al Pacino.”
“Right.”