The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (11 page)

They met when my father first started dating my mother. But as they got older and my father got sick, that was when Morris showed his real feelings for my father. He stood by him. He helped take my father's mind off his illness.

Morris took everybody's minds off their problems. You could be sitting there crying, and Morris would walk through the door and you would just start cracking up. He would always say something or do something that was hysterical.

He was always so much fun. My brother and I loved it when he came to the house. Although he was there almost every day, we still couldn't wait to see him. Even when Morris had problems, he smiled. He was a great guy and my father really cared about him.

When my father was sick, Morris would eat, even when he didn't want to eat, just to make my father eat. Morris had to sit there and eat with him because my father didn't like to eat alone. He always wanted to have someone with him. My uncle Morris would come to the house with food, but my father would say he wasn't hungry. Uncle Morris would say, “Come on, just have a little.” He would sit there and eat with my father to help him build up his immunity and gain weight. Morris got fat, but my father wasn't gaining any weight. He really couldn't, since he didn't have an actual stomach anymore.

When my uncle got diagnosed with cancer, the whole family was devastated. It was a horrible experience for everybody. Uncle Morris was the life of the party. He was the life of the family. He brought laughter to everyone. It was a major setback for my father to lose him.

When Morris was gone, there was really nobody else. His lifeline to the normal world was gone and my father was alone again. He had us and he had my mother, but he didn't have his best friend, who had been there every day to keep him company, laugh with him and eat with him.

My father was so angry because Morris had to be buried in a simple pine box, according to Jewish tradition. He thought Morris deserved better. He wanted the best for Morris, but my father wasn't Jewish and didn't understand why it had to be that way.

So Uncle Morris was the only one outside the life to be there for my father when he was sick, and Carmine was the only person in the life who came to the house day after day to take care of my father. That's why my father was so committed to Carmine.

Even though he felt a sense of responsibility to Carmine, he was still on the fence because he had the AIDS virus and didn't know how long he was going to live. He didn't know if he really wanted to get involved in a war.

After Carmine left, my father talked to my mother in the kitchen. Then he pulled me to the side to talk.

“What do you think about this?”

“Dad, do you really want to get involved with this? What if something happens to you? What if you go to jail?”

“Linda, what do you think, I'm stupid? I don't go to jail.”

“Dad, if you're going to be in the middle of this, and people are killing, and you're killing people, you don't think you're going to go to jail. You're not above the law that much.”

He didn't like that. He got annoyed.

“I just want to know what you think.”

“Dad, I don't know. If you think this is something that you have to do.”

He wanted our permission. He wanted to do it, but he also didn't want to disappoint us if we didn't want him to do it. We really didn't want him to do it, but we didn't want to disappoint him if he wanted to do it. That's what was going on in the house.

“Dad, if you feel that you're going to be okay, you're going to be safe. . . .”

I didn't comprehend that it was going to be an all-out war. I had never been involved in a war.

“Okay, Dad. If that's what you want, just be careful.”

My mother told him to do whatever he wanted to do. She knew his feelings for Carmine. He said he had to think about it. But he didn't want people to think he was soft just because he had HIV. He didn't want people to think that he was washed up—that he was done. He had to show them who was boss. He was still boss and he could still do this.

“This is the hand that has been dealt to me. I'll play the hand. If I can outbluff the opponent, which is death, fine. If I can't, I lose the hand,” he said once. “I will show my enemies and my allies the bravado I have displayed all this time. I will show them that hey, this is still me. There isn't anything on this earth that I will hide from or back up from and I certainly won't do it with this, either.”

So that's what he did. He decided he was going to help Carmine.

CHAPTER 9

WIND BENEATH MY WINGS

As I've said, I always had a hard time meeting people. Everyone was afraid of my father, so I couldn't make real friends.

The only way I was able to meet guys was if they were from different neighborhoods and they didn't know who I was. And that was what happened when I met the person I married. He was a banker from Long Island, so he didn't really know a lot about my father.

The first time I met my now–ex-husband, my car had stalled on the side of the road on Eighty-Sixth Street in Brooklyn and he pulled over to help me. For a few weeks he kept calling me, asking me out. But I didn't really respond to going out with him.

My father kept asking me questions.

“Who is this guy calling? He calls every day.”

“Just somebody that I met.”

“Well, why don't you go out with him? He sounds like a nice guy.”

So I did, and he came to the house to pick me up. That's when he first met my father. My father liked him because he wasn't from the streets. My father wanted me to settle down because he was sick, and he knew that he wasn't going to be around much longer to take care of me. He felt that this guy would be able to take care of me and do the right thing.

In the beginning my ex-husband came across as a regular guy. But down the road I found out that he wasn't such a regular guy. He wasn't a made guy, but he was into the streets more than I knew. My father knew that about six months into our relationship, but it was already too late. I had my mind set on him, and he had his mind set on me—and that was it.

We went out for about a year and then we got married in 1990, when I was twenty-one. I had told him pretty much immediately who my father was, and he didn't seem bothered by it. He didn't seem to be scared at all. Then I got pregnant and we were staying away from anything that had to do with street life. After we got married, we were really separated from all that.

The problem was that nobody was happy that we were getting married. His mother wasn't happy, and my father wasn't happy, either.

A week before my wedding my father told me not to marry the guy.

“Don't you think it's a little too late for that?”

“Don't worry about anything. I'll take care of you and the baby. I just don't want you to marry him. He's going to make you miserable.”

“Dad, everything is going to be fine. Don't worry.”

The wedding was like a big blur to me. I was really sick for my wedding. I had very bad morning sickness. My father was sick, too. The morning of the wedding I was afraid that I was going to pass out, and he was afraid that he was going to pass out.

My father was telling me to calm down. He was trying to keep me calm because I was so nervous that I thought I was going to faint. I had fainted once before during the pregnancy.

We got married at The Shrine Church of St. Bernadette on Thirteenth Avenue. Right before he walked me down the aisle, he said, “Calm down. Don't worry. I got you. Everything is going to be okay.”

“You're telling me to calm down, and you think you're going to faint,” I told him, trying to make a joke out of it. The ceremony was beautiful, and my father and I both made it through.

The wedding reception was held at La Mer on Ocean Parkway—the same place where I had my Sweet Sixteen. The hall looked so beautiful. There were gorgeous flowers on the tables. My new husband and I were glowing. When they introduced my new husband, the DJ played the theme song from
Rocky.
He came into the hall with his hands up because he was the champ.

While we were planning the wedding, my fiancé wanted to invite Gambino family boss John Gotti because his family was friends with the Gottis. My father didn't like John Gotti, so he said he couldn't come. But my fiancé said out of respect we had to leave an open seat at the reception for John Gotti, so there was an open seat. All that Gotti gave us was $500 in an envelope, which my father thought was pretty cheap for the boss of a crime family. We did okay, though. We walked out of there with $50,000.

Until the father-daughter dance everything seemed to be going so perfectly. There was a little bit of tension at the reception because of my husband. I wasn't really all that happy, but I wanted to be. I was nervous and tense because he made me feel nervous all the time. For one thing he didn't like the fact that I kissed my father when we were dancing. He got really angry.

At that point he had a feeling that my father was sick with AIDS. He told me he had seen the medication my father was taking and it was medication for people with AIDS. But I didn't know it at that time. I thought he was crazy. I believed what my parents had told my brother and me—that my father had cancer. I didn't have any reason to doubt them.

“How do you kiss your father like that? That's disgusting.”

“What are you talking about? He's my father. He kissed me while I was dancing with him.”

It wasn't anything abnormal. It was a father-and-daughter kiss. That's why my father hated him so much at the end—my father knew that he was causing me all this stress.

I had a lot of regrets about my wedding. It didn't feel right. It wasn't done right. I felt that my brother was left out of a lot of it. He was in the bridal party, but that was about it. It was all about my ex's family. My father let that happen because he was trying to keep the peace, even though a week earlier he had told me not to marry him.

The song I picked for our father-daughter dance was “Wind Beneath My Wings” because of the words. My father was my hero. He was everything to me, so that was just the perfect song. But the funny part was that I couldn't figure out a song for my soon-to-be husband and me. I made the DJ pick it. He chose “All of My Life” by Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt.

It wasn't long before my relationship with my husband took a very big twist. Soon after we got married, things started getting strange.

We moved to Staten Island, and we were fighting like crazy over there. We were fighting all the time. My father was calling me every day to go to the house because he missed me. My husband was upset by that. He didn't want me to go. I'd bring him food that my father had cooked, but he didn't want the food from my father. He wanted me to cook. It was like he was trying to control me.

He was distancing me from my family. He was trying to keep me from them—that's why we fought. He wanted to move me to Long Island, but I wasn't ready to move there. I wanted to stay close to my father, because I didn't know how long he was going to be around.

When I was at my parents', I'd call my husband and tell him to meet me there for dinner after work. But he didn't want any part of it. He said he just wanted to go home. There was just not a good feeling. There was a lot of tension—it wasn't like a happily married couple having a baby.

That's not to say we didn't want my son. We did, very much. He was pretty much planned. We both knew what we were doing, but we were too young. We both knew that I was going to get pregnant. We were trying to get pregnant, although I'm not sure we knew why.

I guess we both wanted to get out of our situations at home. We really were not happy with our home lives. I wanted to get married—and in the beginning my father was kind of pushing me to get married. He was afraid that he wasn't going to be around long and he wanted me to find someone who would take care of me.

At the time I knew that he wasn't healthy, but I didn't know what he had. And I also knew that I didn't want to move far away from him, since I didn't know how long he was going to be around.

When I got pregnant with my son, I immediately told my parents. My mother was so excited and my father was, too. But he got all emotional, saying his baby was having a baby. When my son was born, my father came to the hospital to see the baby and me. He didn't even make it to the inside of the room.

When he saw me lying in the bed, he broke down and cried. He was so overwhelmed and filled with emotion. I felt how much he loved me at that moment, and I loved him for that. I understood that although he was so overjoyed he had a grandson from me, it hurt him to see me lying in the bed. After all, I was still his baby and now I had a baby. He couldn't stand to see me all grown-up. It bothered him to see me like that, just like it bothered me to see him going through something.

My son had to stay in the hospital for a small medical issue for five days after he was born and I was a wreck. Everybody was so upset. He was so loved, especially by my father and my mother. His father and I were there with him all the time. We didn't want to leave the hospital.

On my first Valentine's Day with my husband, I decorated the whole house for him. He wasn't happy about it at all and he was very mean to me. He didn't care that I did that. He wasn't a grateful person. I used to get very upset about everything he did, but I was trying to keep it together so he wouldn't get killed. I knew if I told my father everything my husband was doing to me, he definitely would have killed him.

I did tell my father about the shirts. My husband wanted me to wash and iron his white shirts myself. My father couldn't believe it.

“It costs a dollar to get a shirt done,” he said.

“Yeah, but he wants me to do them.”

“Fuck that, bring them to the dry cleaner's.”

“No, he's going to get mad if I do that. He doesn't like the chemicals.”

“Just do me a favor. Bring me your own hangers and I'll take them to the dry cleaner's and tell them no chemicals. He'll never know the difference.”

So that's what I used to do.

But it was obvious to my father that there were other problems. I was really unhappy and we weren't getting along. There were times when we would fight and my husband would somehow take both cars and leave me trapped in the house. I'd have to call my parents to come and get me.

It wasn't long before my husband and my father became almost like rivals—they didn't like each other at all. My father didn't want me with him anymore, and my husband didn't want me around my father. So I was put in the middle.

It was even more horrible because my father was sick. He would call me in the morning to go over to the house so he could make me breakfast. My husband didn't want me to go.

“You can't go. You have things to do around here. I don't want you there.”

Of course, I would go, anyway, because he was my father, and my husband wasn't going to stop me from going. But it caused a lot of problems in our marriage. It pretty much broke up the marriage. My father hated him.

My father was not really as possessive as you might think he would've been. He knew that I was married and had a child. And he knew that I had to kind of figure things out—he was trying to let me do that on my own. He knew that I wasn't stupid and that I knew what was right and what was wrong for me. He saw that I wasn't happy and he saw that I was trying to do something about it on my own. I wanted my father to stay out of it.

But he couldn't do that.

One day he said, “Linda, I want to kill your husband, but I need your permission. I don't want you to live with the guilt.”

“You can't do that.” I was horrified. My husband was the father of my son. But, ultimately, my father was right. My husband tormented me.

I felt that the reason my father made an exception not to threaten—or kill—my husband was because we had a child together. That was probably the only reason. He felt a very strong connection to and love for my son. Knowing that my husband was his grandson's father, he was probably very torn. Still, he didn't like the way my husband was treating me anymore. I also didn't like the way I was being treated anymore, so we got divorced.

The turmoil between my father and my husband basically caused the breakup of our marriage. That and the fact that we were both very young, and we both came from homes where we were pretty spoiled. We just didn't know how to make a marriage work at that time.

Unfortunately, we were too young to know how to stick it out and work it out. I loved my husband in the beginning, but then it became such a controlling relationship. He had to control everything that I did. When I went to the store, he wanted to know why I took so long. He was just too controlling, and I was too young to be controlled. Nobody should ever be controlled, anyway.

The marriage didn't even last a year. Looking back, if I knew everything then that I know now, I probably would have tried to make it work because the pain that it caused my son growing up was pretty bad.

Ten years after I was divorced, I met someone else—someone I had known when we were kids. But we had moved away from him when I was sixteen.

We met up again when I was in my thirties and we hit it off immediately. I felt such a sense of security with him. Here was somebody who knew my whole life story. He knew my family. Someone I didn't have to explain myself to—someone who was going to be good to me.

We ended up living together and I had three children with him. And during the time that we were together, he became extremely abusive. I became a victim of domestic violence. After all of the years of having everything, and being protected, and thinking that no one could ever hurt me, I was the victim of domestic violence. I was walking around on eggshells every day, waking up afraid.

This guy wasn't a street guy at all. He had been a straight-A student in high school. Very smart, good-looking, educated, went to law school. He was the person I went to when I needed help with homework as a kid. He wasn't from the streets, but there was something just not right with him. He would constantly bring up my father and call me names. He called me a rat and said I came from a rat family.