This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (37 page)

And Carmine found fault with all of them: one was too old, another too young; another a woman, and so on. Finally, we found one who shared his love of horse racing. Carmine took this as a sign. He believed he and the doctor were meant to be, and he thought this doctor was his savior. The doctor quickly diagnosed Carmine as a manic-depressive and confirmed my suspicions that he was a “rapid-cycler,” meaning my husband’s mood swings would change rapidly and without warning and then swing back again. He went from going on ridiculously expensive shopping sprees and bursts of happiness to a three- to four-day depression that often left him bedridden. The doctor prescribed medication for him. I found out later that Carmine wasn’t taking his pills on a regular basis and therefore there was little, if any, improvement.

Money became an issue for the first time in our marriage. Carmine came home one night, asking to borrow my entire savings (my “mad money”)—money I had saved over the years by investing wisely and writing novels. Over a million dollars’ worth. Carmine had tears in his eyes and rambled on about the new metal recycling shredder he was building. He let me know he’d invested all of our savings into the plant. He also let me know he was almost a million dollars short. He’d said if I didn’t lend him the money, we might as well kiss our future good-bye. I did as he asked. This would be something I would greatly regret just a few months later.

Jealousy also became an evil force in our marriage. As far as my husband was concerned, every man who looked at me a “certain way” wanted me, even our closest friends. Carmine accused me of everything imaginable, including an affair with my cardiologist. It was all untrue. We fought over this day and night. Depending on
my husband’s mood swings the fights ranged from minuscule to mammoth.

One night while I was serving dinner he said something that greatly disturbed me. I had a friend in those days that Carmine was not too fond of, an attractive, recently single woman who lived in Brooklyn. My husband considered her “too wild” and forbade me from even speaking to her. All because she had divorced her husband, a good friend of Carmine’s. So I stopped seeing her but did speak to her on the phone now and then. One night at dinner Carmine mentioned something this friend had said to me earlier that day, something no one else would know about a man she was dating. Carmine even knew the name of the guy and began to question me about it. I found this extremely odd and asked him how he knew about this. He didn’t answer, but only shot me a strange and unnerving glare.

That night I found it hard to sleep. I lay awake thinking, and suddenly things came together. Over the past few weeks he’d mentioned things that I knew I had not told him, not secrets, just things that were of no relevance to him. Yet, the fact that he knew these things and would later on question me about them unnerved me.

One such conversation was between my mother and me—we were discussing my husband’s illness—and how I was finding it more and more difficult to deal with him. My mother, who always had a soft spot for Carmine, tried to downplay the situation, explaining to me that my husband was like “a sick puppy in need of extra attention and care.” A day or so after that conversation, my husband made a comment during dinner, something to the effect of “So your mother thinks I’m a sick puppy, huh?”

I was surprised and I called my mother and asked her if she had mentioned any of the conversation to Carmine. She replied, “Of course not—are you crazy? Do you think I would betray
your confidence like that?” I didn’t, but things just didn’t make sense.

Lying in bed that night it finally hit me—my husband was listening in on my conversations somehow. I climbed out of bed and searched room by room looking for anything, some sign of a recording device. I used a dim flashlight so as not to wake any of the kids or my husband. After I’d searched the last telephone jack I was ready to give up, and that’s when it hit me. The main panel for all the phone wires was located in the basement, in the laundry room. I quietly made my way down the stairs, and that’s when I’d found it—a small tape recorder attached to a set of wires leading to the main panel. I opened the recorder, saw a tape inside, closed it, and pressed play. I was shocked and then stunned to hear every conversation I’d had earlier that day. I ripped the device from the panel and held it tightly in my hands. I dropped the flashlight and started crying.

The next morning after my husband left for work, I called my youngest brother, Peter, and asked him to come over right away. As soon as he arrived I showed him the recorder and told him what Carmine had done. When I pressed the play button and let Peter hear some of my conversations, he was beyond stunned. He paced the kitchen floor for ten minutes before he could even speak. Then he said, “This is bad—very, very bad. Is your husband that crazy? I mean does he know whose daughter you are?”

I couldn’t even answer—I just sat down and cried. Peter turned to me and said, “What else has been going on in this house? I want to know everything.” I told him about all the episodes and the fighting and even the threats. Lately, my husband had taken to terrorizing me by threatening my life, telling me he would kill me if I ever thought of leaving him. My first novel,
The Senator’s Daughter,
was finished and nearly ready for publication. As my excitement grew,
Carmine’s diminished. Gone was the support he’d always professed to have when it came to my writing and my having a literary career—and in its place was an ugly, green-eyed monster. He later admitted that he felt threatened that I might become successful and have no need for him or our marriage and would want to move on. I couldn’t believe my ears, and even after hours, even days of trying to convince him he was wrong, his jealousy continued. Things between us were reaching the point of no return.

Later that night I went to dinner with some of my closest friends to celebrate the publication of my book. Two women and one man. When Carmine found out, he became so jealous, so enraged, he drove to the restaurant and made a scene outside, yelling and pressing down on the car horn. When I refused to come outside, he did the unthinkable; he drove his Mercedes right through the restaurant storefront! Patrons ran for cover and left behind uneaten dinners as well as unpaid bills. While most of the staff hid safely in the restaurant kitchen, I stayed seated and just cried. It was one thing to be jealous, it was another to be insanely jealous—and insane he was! The man with me and my girlfriends that night was Michael, my openly gay friend of nearly ten years. Carmine knew he was gay. Michael never hid his sexual preference. And Carmine always got along well with Michael and never saw him as a threat. But that night everything changed and I saw a side to my husband that convinced me that he definitely was crazy.

My brother Peter was utterly disgusted by my husband’s behavior and for the first time he began to see qualities in my husband that he deemed intolerable. I certainly agreed. I asked my brother to get Carmine to leave the house, at least until I could sort things out. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. He checked into the Garden City Hotel later that night. For the next three days Carmine literally bombarded me with phone calls, flowers, apologies, and visits. He showed up at the house late one night, literally in tears. He
stood before me crying, murmuring things like, “I love you” and “You’re my whole life” and “Without you and the kids I’m nothing.” He ended his begging session with, “I swear, Vic, if you don’t take me back, I’ll kill myself—I swear I will.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
I’d discovered the bugging device, I left for a regularly scheduled visit to see my father; Peter and the kids came with me. The visit was pretty normal except for my “distant” mood. My father asked me a number of times “What’s wrong?” But all I did was shrug and say nothing. Dad looked first at me, then at Peter. Then he said, “Is Carmine okay? How’s his illness? Is he taking his meds?” I just shrugged. Peter stood still, expressionless. Dad grew angry and impatient. “Well, is someone going to tell me what’s going on?” I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I found it difficult to talk around the lump in my throat.

“Well, let’s have it. Obviously something’s wrong. Is Carmine at it again? Is he jumping into the backseat of the car, wondering where the steering wheel went? Is he standing outside the house late at night, howling at the moon? Tell me, what’s this moron done now?” It was my brother Peter who finally spoke up. He asked me to take the boys to the vending machine for a few minutes. I knew he was going to tell my father what Carmine had done.

I sat at one of the empty tables, far enough away from the small cubicle where my brother and father were sitting. I was careful to keep the kids far from earshot. I did not want them to hear anything negative about their father, nor did I want them to suspect anything was wrong with our marriage. They had enough to deal with as it was, given the fact that their grandfather was all over the newspapers and serving life in prison. Finally, Peter walked over and said, “Daddy wants to speak to you. I’ll stay here and watch the kids.” I nearly died.

Surprisingly, he didn’t say “I told you so.” Instead, with a sympathetic look in his eyes, he said, “I wasn’t aware that things were that hard for you at home, Vicki.” I stared back at him and after a few seconds found the courage to say, “Well, things are not exactly easy, Daddy—Carmine certainly has his moments.” By now I was fighting the urge not to cry so hard it nearly hurt my eyes.

My father then said, “I have to figure out how best to handle this. This is not some silly act of jealousy, Vicki, this is
really
serious. Does your husband understand he behaved no better than an FBI agent? Does your husband realize that invading someone’s privacy is a serious issue? How would he feel if someone did that to him? How would he feel if someone listened in on his most personal conversations and then played them back for the world to hear?”

My father cleared his throat and continued. “I can tell you firsthand it’s a sick feeling—a sick, sick feeling. We all say things in fits of anger that we don’t mean. But we never do so thinking the world is listening.” I was sure Dad was also thinking of himself at that moment—finding out, just after he was arrested, that the FBI had taped all of his private conversations and had played them in court, even leaked them to the press, for everyone to hear. “What if you were having a private conversation, something of a very personal nature with your mother?” I knew exactly what he meant and where he was going. One thing my father staunchly believed in was loyalty. Betrayal was not a word in his vocabulary—and what my husband had done was considered a betrayal of a serious kind. He asked me what my plans were. Was I going to stay with my husband or divorce him? Divorce? I hadn’t even thought about it—the word wasn’t in my vocabulary. I looked over at my three sons. They were innocent little boys and I had to take that into consideration. I had to put their welfare before mine. It was at that moment I decided to go home and give my marriage another try. This seemed to please
my father. Because, even though he had no love for Carmine and really believed we were an ill-fitting match, he too put the welfare of his grandchildren first. My father gave my brother his “marching orders.” Peter was to go home and have a serious talk with my husband. He was to let Carmine know that sort of behavior would not be tolerated—not one bit.

Putting the tape recorder incident behind me wasn’t easy, but I did make a great effort. Trying to put the pieces of my marriage back together was extremely hard.

Carmine and I still fought, even on our anniversary, which happened to fall on a weeknight that year. We hardly ever went out during the week because I had to get up with the kids in the morning for school, and Carmine had to get up for work. But, seeing as it was our anniversary, my father had gone out of his way to arrange a special dinner at a swanky Manhattan restaurant on the Upper East Side. He had one of his lawyers make the reservation. Dad also had one of his associates order a huge bouquet of “Black Magic” roses, my favorite flower, to be delivered to the restaurant once we’d arrived. But out of spitefulness mostly, my husband decided he was “too tired” to go out that night. I’d pleaded with him and begged Carmine not to embarrass me in front of my father—as he surely would have taken this as a personal slight. If we didn’t show up at the restaurant, word would surely get back to my father. So we continued arguing right up until two hours before the car (my father had sent a limo as well) was due to arrive.

We yelled at each other over the phone and my husband got annoyed and hung up on me the moment I brought up my father. Carmine was always very jealous of my father—and any time Dad did something nice for me, my husband would look for a way to ruin it. I called back in such a rage and while we were arguing I heard his secretary’s voice in the background saying, “Oh, just give in and take her out already.” There was a certain familiarity in her
tone, enough so alarm bells went off in my head. I became enraged and shouted, “Does the whole office need to know our business? Is there a reason why this stranger is involved in our argument?” Carmine didn’t answer and a silent pause took the place of words. He knew better than to anger me further—he also knew I was right and shouted something to the secretary like, “Mind your fuckin’ business.” But the exchange was a bit too familiar—too comfortable.

Carmine came home after work and we went out for our anniversary. We fought the entire night over the secretary’s remarks.

Many more incidents involving “the secretary” took place over the next few months—leading up to me giving Carmine an ultimatum: either she goes or I do. This was not open for discussion. Call it “woman’s intuition,” but I just knew something wasn’t right. It was obvious to everyone it seemed that she had a crush on Carmine. All he would say about the subject was, “Are you kidding me? Do you see what she looks like? She looks like a man, for Christ’s sake!” He was right. She was a heavyset woman, around thirty-five years old. She had mousey-brown hair that always appeared to be dirty. And she was always dressed in ripped leggings, an old, grease-stained T-shirt, and a pair of worn men’s work boots. I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on her. The one thing that stood out most was the dirt around both her ankles. Any woman with half a brain couldn’t possibly be jealous of her—still, there was something I couldn’t put my finger on. Something that just wasn’t right.