You've got to watch out for Lisa during lunch and breaks. I don't want your sisters to be scared and you've all got to go to school. I need you to carry your gun whenever you leave the house, and you can't let your sisters go anywhere alone. I've done everything I can, but I can't be with you all the time. I don't want you walking around on public streets. Freddy will take you wherever you need to go in a different car. From now on, I don't want any of you in the car with me. 'People are going to come and try and kill me. Sitting across from me, he explained what had happened. Dad told my mother as little as possible and said nothing to my sisters, but for the first time he broke one of the cardinal rules of his life - he brought me into the danger. He wanted us watched on closed circuit television every time we went outside the house. He cut down any foliage that interfered with the view from the surveillance cameras around our house and mounted spotlights everywhere outside, keeping it bright as noon 24 hours a day. Dad moved elderly crew member Cousin Joe into the basement to keep an eye on us, making up a story for my sisters' benefit about Joe needing someplace to stay for a while. The beautiful new house that my father had been so proud of became a fortress overnight. The changes in our home life were immediate and all-encompassing. Suddenly, our family was in imminent danger of being slaughtered. Never had my father intentionally done something that would put anyone other than himself and his crew at risk. They routinely murdered immediate families as a way of making their point. Decades before, the Commission - the 'legislature' of the five New York crime families - had declared that wives and children of their members were off limits. Unlike the Italian Mafia, the Colombians do not respect family boundaries. Worst by far, however, was what it meant for our family. What he didn't tell me that night was that Chris's blunder had put my father in imminent danger of being hit from within. When I asked him what was wrong, he said only that Chris had done something colossally stupid, endangering my Dad's entire operation. He came home late one night white with rage and locked himself in his study. At about the same time as Castellano found out what had happened, so did my father.įor the first time, I saw my father out of control. Neither did it take long for word to reach Paul Castellano that the DeMeo crew had murdered one of the Colombian Mafia's own, endangering the entire Gambino crime family in the process. It didn't take much effort for the Colombians to trace the name back to New York and from there to my father. Worse yet, he used my father's name in dealing with the Colombians. Instead, he killed the couriers and stole the money. He knew about a large amount of money that two Colombian drug couriers were bringing from Florida to New York. In the winter of 1979, Chris, a long-time associate of my father and member of his crew, decided to run a game without telling my father. They were also becoming reckless in their ambition. With my father's rise in the Gambino family, a great deal of money was changing hands. My father's crew was becoming increasingly ambitious. The truly fatal misstep occurred not long after my 13th birthday. We had been in the new house for two years when disaster struck. From the day we moved into the mansion by the water, our lives began to swerve out of control. Moving there was the beginning of a nightmare for our family. Building such a house was the pinnacle of the American Dream for a Brooklyn boy like my father. The neighbourhood we were about to enter was among the wealthiest on Long Island, with wide, curving tree-lined streets and mansions that housed an assortment of lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers - and mobsters. With his income expanding exponentially, my father began building his dream house on the southern shore of Massapequa. The year before, my father had been inducted into the Gambino crime family as a made man by 'Big' Paul Castellano. After that, my father was never able to piece the fragments together again.Īs I prepared to enter the seventh grade, our family was planning for another change. But in the early summer of 1979, something happened that shattered the bubble. For 23 out of 24 hours, he was just like any other father. Like other fathers, our father liked movies and music, good food and Sunday nights in front of the TV. Bad guys are not bad guys 24 hours a day. Inside the bubble, my father was a regular dad. My parents had a traditional marriage in most respects and my sisters grew up like the daughters of policemen and stockbrokers, worrying about grades and party dresses. From the inside, the bubble was a very convincing microcosm of the real world. As long as we stayed inside that bubble, we would be safe. For the first 12 years of my life, my father worked to keep our family in a glass bubble.
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