This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (12 page)

She started screaming like I’d hit her in the face. She called for her mother and then, like a child, began scooping up the dolls. She collected them quickly and put everything back in the closet. Then she turned to the housekeeper and screamed, “How dare you let
her
touch
my
dolls!” I will never forget the way she embarrassed me that day.

Aunt Della acted as if I’d been carrying some sort of infectious disease—as if some of my shabbiness and poverty might wear off on the dolls and perhaps she might be infected with something when she touched them. Everyone in the house heard her yelling and came running into the kitchen, deepening my humiliation. I remember my mother just glaring at Della, her half-sister.

My father wasn’t nearly as proper or restrained. He took my grandfather into the billiards room and let him have it. Apparently, just minutes before my aunt’s tirade, my grandfather had done a bit of showing off himself. In front of one of his neighbors, whom he’d invited for drinks, he got a little drunk and stupidly passed a comment—something along the lines of “All I know, Johnny Boy, is this: you better treat my daughter well or there will be consequences.” It was as if Mom had brought Dad home to meet her parents for the first time. Grandpa was trying hard to play the role of concerned father. It was a little too late for that as far as Dad was
concerned. My grandfather had had his chance years ago to be gracious and concerned—and he blew it.

My grandfather had delivered this line while showing off a rifle from his collection. For added effect, he’d pointed the rifle in Dad’s direction, aiming the tip straight at his heart.

When Dad grabbed Grandpa, he made sure Grandpa’s neighbor and friend were privy to what was about to happen. Then he shouted, “First of all, if your daughter ever yells at my daughter again, I’ll hand you your tongue on one of your fancy silver platters. Secondly, if you ever call me Johnny Boy again, it
will
be the last time. My name is Johnny—not Johnny Boy. And lastly, the next time you aim a gun at me, you’d better make sure you kill me, because I
will
kill you!”

My grandfather was both stunned and terrified. Our visit ended shortly thereafter, and we drove home listening to Mom and Dad bickering about what went wrong.

“We shouldn’t have come—period!” Dad shouted. “Even after all these years, they haven’t changed one bit. These people never wanted you when you were younger, what would make you think they’d want you now?”

This last remark deeply wounded my mother, and she began to cry. Predictably, the tears had a calming effect on Dad. Even at his angriest, he had trouble dealing with Mom’s tears. And so, in a much softer tone, he said, “Don’t you know what this invite was all about? Your father has a problem with one of the unions—something about a job he put in a bid for.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “He used you,” Dad continued. “He used both of us. He went through you to get to me, in the hope that I could somehow help him win the bid.”

Hearing this made my stomach turn, but it didn’t come as a surprise. I never knew that side of the family, never remembered them coming around on holidays or birthdays. They were never included
at family functions, like baptisms and graduations, and I grew up without any sense of their place in our lives.

O
DDLY ENOUGH, NOT
more than a few weeks later my mother received an unexpected call from her mother. After apologizing profusely for being absent for so many years, saying, “I just couldn’t locate you, my dear daughter,” Grandma announced that she was coming to visit.

Mom naturally had mixed emotions about this impending encounter. She wept openly; whether they were tears of joy, sadness, surprise, or anger, I haven’t any idea. But whatever she might have felt, it was not enough to prevent her from accepting Grandma’s overture, and they agreed to meet the following week.

Grandma had told Mom that she was still living in Manhattan—above a bar, appropriately enough, since Grandma loved her booze. This made Mom laugh, but it did nothing to quell her anxiety. She was a nervous wreck over the next several days, constantly cleaning and straightening and preparing. She made sure the furniture was dusted, the windows cleaned, the rugs vacuumed. Even Mom’s appearance was different: she got all dressed up, in an effort to impress her mother.

When my grandmother finally arrived, she presented each of her grandchildren with a small plastic toy. There was no logic to the choice of gifts—it seemed as though she had just grabbed a handful. I really don’t think she even knew how many grandchildren she actually had. Dinner was one of Mom’s finest: roast beef, rosemary potatoes, homemade cornbread, and a salad. Dad stayed home and joined us, despite the fact that it was Wednesday, the night he ordinarily played cards with the boys at the neighborhood social club.

There was little talk during dinner, mostly just a lot of nervous fidgeting, accompanied by the sound of silverware clanking against
plates. No one knew what to say. I’d never met this woman before, and so I tried to reconcile the photos Mom had shown us—photos of a much younger woman with long blond hair and big expressive eyes—with the much older, more haggard woman now seated at our dinner table. The years of hard living had taken their toll. The distended belly, the jaundiced skin, the capillaries snaking across her nose—all were visible signs of a serious addiction to alcohol.

As was always the custom in our house when adult guests came to visit, children were expected to make themselves scarce after dinner. Mom would politely say something like, “Okay, guys, it’s time to do your homework.”

Of course, my sister and I quickly did our homework and changed into our nightgowns. Our room was in the basement, so we snuck upstairs and listened to the “adult” conversation coming from the kitchen. Even though we were young, we understood what was going on. Grandma was in trouble. She needed help, just like Grandpa did. This time it had nothing to do with any union. Grandma needed money—lots of it. Ten thousand dollars, to be precise.

Ten grand was, in those days, an enormous amount of money—certainly much more than the Gottis had laying around at their disposal.

Still, Dad could never say no to anyone. Somehow he managed to raise the money; Mom guessed he’d borrowed it. When my mother questioned him as to why he gave my grandmother the money when it was clear that she had no intentions of paying it back, Dad just smiled.

“So be it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been stiffed.”

To this day, Mom doesn’t know whether he did it to impress my grandmother, or because he sincerely wanted to help her. I think Dad kind of liked Grandma—he’d always tell us that he got a kick out of her, and that he’d thought of her as “a real broad.” He meant it affectionately. Also, Dad believed what was done to my mother as
a child was more her father’s fault than her mother’s. Dad believed if my grandfather had bigger balls, he would have stood up to his parents and married my grandmother instead of running like a louse. I believe Dad felt sorry for Faye and wanted to help her.

I also believe it was more about pride than anything else. My father’s inability to turn down anyone—particularly a relative, even one of questionable character—combined with an insatiable need to look like a big shot at times left him holding the proverbial bag. Grandmother had told Dad she needed the money for unpaid bills, but it was no secret that she also liked to gamble. Even as a kid, I was willing to bet the ten grand was to pay off a gambling debt.

My mother was crushed by the way this entire affair unfolded. She had foolishly, perhaps romantically, believed that my grandmother’s intentions were good. My mom had fantasized about this reunion for years, dreamt of the day she would reconcile with her mother, and they would laugh and cry and hug. All would be forgiven.

Instead, she came away even angrier and more disillusioned than she had been in the past. My grandmother, just like my grandfather, reached out for one reason only: because she needed a favor. When Dad was young and wild, both grandparents disapproved of him. However, years later, when they needed his help, Dad was a wonderful guy. They knew he was in the mob, and that he had access to whatever they might need, favors or financing. In my grandparents’ eyes, this was neither a liability nor a cause for concern; rather, my father’s deepening foothold in a life of crime presented them with an opportunity. He was connected. He could help them.

I was just a little girl, but I could see all of this taking shape before my eyes, and I found it sad. Mainly, I just felt for my mother. Once again, both of her parents had let her down and broken her heart, and as young as I was it crushed me.

Mom was so hurt that she walked around in a fog for weeks. She
was used by her mother and father. I can’t imagine how she must have felt.

In the end, my father helped them both. He had honorable reasons for his behavior.

“It only makes the two of them look like bigger pieces of shit,” Dad explained to me at the time. “After all they’ve done to your mother, we are
still
willing to help them out. It only makes her stronger and them weaker. It shows what kind of people they really are.”

Dad was a complicated man, and sometimes it was difficult to comprehend the reasons for his behavior. Certainly he was compelled to perform acts of generosity. But he also craved power, and one of the ways to gain power over someone is to perform favors on their behalf. This was a big one for my father, and he knew that my grandparents would forever be in his debt—exactly where Dad wanted them.

I
was seven years old when I realized that my father was not like other dads. We were still living in Brooklyn, and unfortunately our financial situation hadn’t changed much. Dad repeatedly tried in vain to find a legitimate business opportunity; not so much because he had any ethical problem with being in the Mafia, but simply because he wanted to please his wife and provide his children with a sense of security. Anyone in the life knows that at any moment he could be whisked off to prison and separated from his family for a very long period of time; it comes with the territory.

Dad considered a few business opportunities that friends had brought to him. But let’s face it: there weren’t a lot of well-paying, respectable employment opportunities for a poor man from Dean Street. In addition to lacking a formal education, Dad had no
particular skill or trade. He’d never been taught how to paint or lay carpet or pour concrete. These were the jobs usually reserved for wops . . . grease balls . . . oil monkeys.

Dad tried to hide from his children the fact that he didn’t have a conventional job. There were various fabrications, the most common being his role as the powerful head of a local construction company. In fact, every day when he left for “work,” at the oddly late hour of 10 or 11
A.M
., he would tell us about some new project he was developing: a skyscraper one month, a three-story beach house or a suite of offices the next month. I remember how he used to bounce me on his knee and answer all of my silly questions about the construction trade.

I was fascinated with creativity—more specifically, building things from scratch. I was quite impressionable and for the most part believed just about anything Dad would tell me. For the longest time it never occurred to me to ask my father why he always wore a suit when he was going off to a construction site. I think back on it now and laugh at the notion of Dad ten stories up, checking out I-beams in his sharkskin suit, Merino wool turtleneck, and Italian leather shoes. He couldn’t possibly have looked more out of place.

I
T CAME AS
no surprise that my father was considered the Pied Piper of the neighborhood. Every morning when Dad left for “work,” most of the neighborhood kids would gather around the front yard and wait for him to emerge. Sure, it had something to do with the fact that Dad always treated the kids to ice cream, but after a few months of chocolate cones and Italian ices, it was apparent that they were even more impressed with Dad and his obvious charm than they were with his generosity. He’d walk out of the house, chat with the kids as if he were one of their peers, tell
jokes, even roughhouse with the boys a little bit. He was incredibly charismatic. I don’t really know of anyone who met him and came away unimpressed by his charm. It became a standing joke in our family that Dad was such a charming gentleman that even law enforcement officers swooned in his presence. And as with any joke, it contained a grain of truth. On more than one occasion, detectives were sent to the home to question Dad. Rather than take the house by storm, as they often did when dealing with prominent Mafia figures, law enforcement officials always treated my father with great respect and consideration, often waiting outside until Dad was ready to chat. I used to think it was because my father was so tough—I thought even the cops feared him. But as the years passed and I became more aware of things, I realized that their behavior had less to do with fear than respect, maybe even admiration.

Women, too, were captivated. My father, in general, mesmerized every female who crossed his path. Sure, he had movie-star looks, but anyone who met him understood that it was his old-fashioned charm and sex appeal that was most attractive.

Even the librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library fell under his spell. The moment Dad walked into the library—a mammoth building near Prospect Park on Flatbush Avenue—she nearly lost her breath. Dad would take me there weekly, until I was able to cross the street myself and began sneaking out to the library whenever I could. It was then, around the age of eight, that I decided my passion in life was to become a writer. The smell of the library, of the old leather-bound books, enlivened me. Even the feel of those old books made me so happy. I couldn’t wait to grow up and write a book myself. Part of this, I suppose, stemmed from my father’s constant chattering about the need for education, “in both areas: academics and street-smarts,” he’d say.