The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

father.
    One day when they were babysitting us, I was watching a movie. In the movie the girl’s father died. When my parents came home, I was crying my eyes out.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” my father asked, sitting down on the couch with me.
    â€œAre you going to die?”
    â€œWhy are you asking that?”
    â€œBecause I saw a movie, and the girl’s daddy died. Are you going to die?”
    â€œI’m not going anywhere.” He always used to tell me that and I really believed him, up until I was in my twenties. I didn’t want anything to happen to my father.
    Once when I young, he came home with bruises on his arms. I asked what had happened, and he told me that the bad policeman did that to him. I asked why and he said because policemen weren’t nice.
    Not long after that, I was driving in the car with my mother, and a police cruiser pulled up next to my side of the car when we were stopped at a red light. The policemen looked over at me and started waving. I opened my window and yelled at them.
    â€œYou’re bad. You hurt my daddy. I don’t like you.”
    My mother was horrified.
    â€œOh, my God. I’m so sorry. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She didn’t mean that.”
    The cops didn’t know what to think because here was this sweet-looking little girl yelling at them, telling them that she didn’t like them because they hurt her daddy.
    During this time my father was running his crew from the Wimpy Boys Social Club on Thirteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, an old Italian neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn. The club moved to a second location on Thirteenth Avenue later, but I really didn’t go there much.
    Back in the day there were Mob-run “social clubs” from different crime families on almost every avenue in Brooklyn. My father’s name for his club was, of course, ironic because “wimpy” was the exact opposite of what they all were.
    There were about thirty guys in his crew, either full-blooded Italian or of partial Italian descent. Some were made men, while others were young associates—mobsters in training hoping to become members of the Colombo crime family.
    There were Mob guys everywhere. They would just hang outside—sometimes on lounge chairs—drinking and smoking cigarettes. Everything was so open back then and everybody was just so free-spirited. No one was thinking about the cops. That’s just the way it was. That’s how I remember Brooklyn.
    My father usually left the house at 11 A.M. to go to the club and he’d be back by 5 P.M. for dinner. We all had to be in the house by that time and have dinner together. Dinner was at five, every day. He left whatever he was doing at the club to be home with us.
    No matter what they had going on—card games, whatever—he’d tell his crew: “Time for me to go.” If he wanted to have a talk with the members of his crew after dinner, they would have to come to the house. It was very rare that he went back out after dinner, unless he was going out with my mother.
    But during the day the social club was where they met to talk business, take care of business and play cards. They ran numbers from the club, gambled and lent money; I’m sure they planned a lot of hits there. The club was the place where they had to show face every day. Like a regular job, they had to be there.
    And they all had to be dressed appropriately. They couldn’t go there looking like slobs, because my father wanted everybody to be clean-cut. His crew had to look like they were ready to do business, not like they were ready to hang out in the streets. My father was very strict about it.
    A friend of mine, Sal, who used to hang out there, told me that he went to the club one day without shaving. My brother Greg told him he had to go home.
    â€œWhy do I have to go home?” Sal asked.
    â€œWhen you come back with a clean shave, you can come in