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To Dominick, Nino always described Paul and Carlo simply as “important men” it was an honor to know. Several times Dominick joined them and others for afternoon espresso, and by the way the men seemed to defer to Uncle Carlo, a quietly spoken man with a notably large beak, he sensed that Carlo was almost as important as Frank Scalise.
Once, as one of these sitdowns ended and Dominick said goodbye to Carlo, Nino described him as a smart boy with the speed of a deer. The boy never forgot Carlo’s reply: “Smart like a fox, that’s good. The fox recognizes traps. But a deer? It’s better to be a lion than a deer. The lion scares away the wolves. If you are a lion and a fox, nothing defeats you.”
As any boy would, Dominick accepted Carlo’s observations as original thoughts, and for several years quoted them to friends. Not until much later did he learn that Carlo was cribbing from the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian Renaissance statesman. Carlo had found a veneer for his life in Machiavelli’s famous treatise, The Prince: Whatever a ruler has to do to gain or hold power, he must do.
Through the mid-1950s, Nino’s body began showing the effects of a basically sedentary life. About the only exercise he got was taking his pet boxer “Prince” for a walk; he was still handsome, but now round-faced and jowly; he still had the smooth skin and inky black hair of his youth, but his muscles sagged and he had ballooned to about two hundred pounds, which did not lie well on a man five feet eight inches tall; he still drank only wine, but with a multicourse dinner.
With his broad shoulders, dark wavy hair, brown eyes, and high strong cheekbones, young Dominick was emerging as a chip off the Anthony Santamaria block—right down to the small gap between two upper front teeth. Even though active and athletic, he also was a bit chunky around the middle.
In school, the boy made friends easily and caught on quickly. One day in 1957, his tenth year, he came home all excited and wearing a blue button with the word “President” stenciled across it. He rushed to tell Nino how he had been honored by his classmates.
“Guess what happened!” he asked, so impatient he supplied his own answer, “I got elected class president!”
“What does the class president do?”
“I take care of the class when the teacher leaves the room. If anyone’s bad, I write their name down.”
Nino frowned. “That just means you’re a rat.”
“A rat?”
“A rat! A stoolpigeon! You can’t be a stoolpigeon. No one in our family can be a stoolpigeon. You go back and tell your teacher you can’t be no class president.”
“But I was elected,” Dominick said meekly.
“It isn’t for our family. Tell the teacher you can’t do it.”
The next day, Dominick did as ordered. His teacher asked why many times, but he never gave a straight answer. His evasiveness was proof that the lessons he received at home were having their effect. Telling the truth would have made him a stoolpigeon against Uncle Nino.
In Bath Beach, as when they lived on the Lower East Side, the Gaggi clan were members of the local Catholic parish, Saint Finbar’s, but as before, only the women and the children went to mass regularly. As Nino’s mother had with him when he was a boy, Dominick’s mother exposed him to the church’s doctrine and ceremonial rituals, but as with Nino, not to much effect. For instance, he never made the connection between his surname, Santamaria, and the Feast of Assumption, when Mary was said to have been assumed from earth straight to heaven.
When at his confirmation ceremony on May 5, 1957, Dominick became a “Soldier of Christ,” the day was more a revelation of familial relationships than a reflection of any religious significance. The ceremony began with him and other children lined up outside the church with the adults they had selected as their godfathers and godmothers, their protectors in life should anything happen to their parents. Home movies show that the man Dominick had chosen was wearing a nifty charcoal suit, a red silk tie, and a red carnation—and that he was fidgeting with his dark glasses, as if nervous. Nino Gaggi had not been in Saint Finbar’s for some time, but when a drum and bugle corps signaled the ceremony’s start, he put a godfatherly arm around Dominick Angelo Santamaria and marched inside.
* * *
Even though Dominick had begun to notice, after the family got its first television set, that Uncle Nino always cheered the villains, his mental picture of his godfather was still blurred. A few weeks after the confirmation ceremony, however, it was brought violently into focus by a sequence of events. One afternoon in June 1957, a distinguished-looking man, dapperly dressed in pale yellow slacks and matching shirt, was buying peaches at his neighborhood deli in the Bronx when an assassin came from behind and shot him four times. The victim, Frank Scalise, was sixty-two years old.
The next day, in his home, police found one hundred photos of him vacationing in Italy with Lucky Luciano, the former hero of Avenue A, who ten years before had been deported as an undesirable alien for helping bring the Mafia from Sicily to New York. They also recovered his loanshark “book,” a ledger of illegal loans that included the names of some twenty prominent officials.
In Bath Beach, Marie Gaggi told her son that Scalise had “passed away,” but at the wake in the Bronx, Dominick learned the harsher reality and overheard Scalise’s fiery brother Joseph vowing revenge. Not much later, the Gaggi family traveled to the Bronx again, this time to comfort the family of Joseph Scalise, who had disappeared.
“He left last Friday and just never came home,” Dominick heard one of the sobbing relatives say, as his highly agitated godfather huddled in a corner with many grave-looking men.
Some weeks later, with still no trace of Joseph Scalise, a gangster named Albert Anastasia was assassinated in a Manhattan hotel. The press reacted as though Mayor Robert F. Wagner himself had been killed. No one tried to shield Dominick from the radio or television coverage, and he concluded that the adults intentionally decided to let him learn the hard truths about Nino and the important men from strangers.
The news reports identified Anastasia as the leader of New York’s biggest criminal gang; his former righthand man was Frank Scalise, whose brother Joseph was also presumed murdered; all the murders were part of a war between two gangs; the new boss of the Anastasia gang might be Carlo Gambino, who was “sly like a fox.”
This last report struck Dominick like a thunderbolt, and he added a silent kicker: And strong like a lion!
After Anastasia was in the ground, Nino announced it would be best if the Gaggi family stayed inside the bunker a few days. Filled with new information, Dominick knew that a siege was on, and took it as a test of his bravery and loyalty. Holed up, the family passed the time as normally as possible by playing cards and games. The only discordant note was sounded by Dominick’s mother, whom he heard complaining to her parents about the stupidity of “that life” of her brother’s.
Although it was like sitting around waiting for a bomb to go off, Dominick managed to act as normal as anyone. The boy, who had lately taken an interest in music, even tried lightening the mood by singing for them his favorite song, “Little Darlin’.”
Naturally, no one ever openly discussed what was happening outside the bunker. One day, the siege was over and that was it. Dominick felt he passed his tests and had survived real peril. He began feeling wiser and somehow more special than his classmates at Public School 200; he was a keeper of secrets so big he could never even admit to having them.
The next two years were comparatively uneventful. If there was still a power struggle in the underworld, Dominick could not tell by the demeanor of Nino—nor Uncles Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, when he saw them at lunches and family occasions. It was a happy time of music, sports, and friends.
He added “At the Hop” to his repertoire and formed a neighborhood group, The Tuneups. His fireplug body was put to good use as a catcher in the Bath Beach–Bensonhurst Little League, and he stole a first kiss from a girl at Coney Island. He began to develop keen pride in his
Brooklyn heritage; he had come along at the peak of the borough’s fame—people from Brooklyn were making it big in every walk of life. He had heard Nino say many times, “If they’re not from Brooklyn, they’re farmers,” and he adopted the cocky saying as his own. Only cool kids came from Brooklyn.
When Dominick turned twelve, however, his mother announced stunning news. She intended to marry Anthony Montiglio, a man she had been dating, and move out of Brooklyn. Dominick liked his future stepdad. Like Anthony Santamaria, Anthony Montiglio was an Army Air Corps veteran; he had taken the boy sightseeing to West Point and given him a football. Still, the news was breathtaking. After the marriage, the couple was buying a house in Levittown, thirty miles east on Long Island, and she might even have a baby.
As the shock wore off, Dominick began looking on the move as an adventure. Without hearing her say so, he knew his mother was happy to put some distance between herself and “that life” of Nino’s, where people were killed or just disappeared. Though silently attracted to one aspect of Nino’s life—the daring uniqueness of it—he decided some distance was probably good for him too.
After his mother’s marriage, she asked him to use the name Dominick Montiglio when it was time to enroll in another school. Because he did like his stepdad and wanted to please his mother, and although he was not legally adopted, he agreed.
The new family left for Levittown in the summer of 1960, unaware that Nino was about to revenge a personal loss, close the books on an underworld power struggle, and become a made member of what was now the Gambino Mafia family—all in one vicious stroke.
In October, a lawyer for a gangster named Vincent Squillante told newspaper reporters that his client was missing. Squillante was president of the trade group representing the city’s private commercial waste cartel, and had been identified as a major drug dealer in testimony before the United States Senate rackets subcommittee in Washington. In Bath Beach, however, he had also been identified as the man who shot Frank Scalise and then lured a revenge-minded Joseph Scalise to the same fate.
Officially, the disappearance remained a mystery, but many times over the years Anthony Gaggi gave this account to people he trusted: “We surprised him in the Bronx. We shot him in the head, stuffed him in the trunk, then dumped him for good.”
Nino and his accomplices took the body to the basement of a building on Tenth Street in Alphabet City, Nino’s old neighborhood. There, in the building’s furnace, the former member of the Tenth Street Mob cremated the man who killed his childhood hero.
* * *
In Levittown, one of the nation’s first postwar-style suburbs, Dominick Montiglio became an all-American teenager. He delivered newspapers, flipped hamburgers at a McDonald’s, hung out at the mall, played varsity football, and lost his virginity in a grassy field behind school.
The only blemish was a period during his freshman year when he rebelled against his stepfather’s authority and began ditching school. After much pleading from his mother, he began to behave, but had missed so many classes that he spent the next three years making up credits. During that time, his mother gave birth to two children, Stephen and Michele, who grew up not knowing their busy older brother had a different father.
The activity Dominick enjoyed most was his music. His voice was now low and mellow, and at fourteen he joined some other boys who had performed at dances and weddings. They called themselves The Four Directions; they liked the songs of black singers, and that became their hook—white boys who sounded black.
One night, they tried out a new song in a shopping-center alcove that simulated an echo chamber. Two doors away, the owner of a liquor store chain was impressed; he offered to back them with money for stage clothes and expenses. In weeks, the boys were looking aces and singing in popular Long Island nightclubs, warming up crowds for concerts by The Shirelles and Little Anthony & The Imperials, premier black groups of the era. The Four Directions began getting stars in their eyes.
Anthony Gaggi, however, tried to keep Dominick’s feet on the ground. “The music business is a rotten dirty business,” he would say during family reunions in Brooklyn.
“I don’t care about the business, just the music,” Dominick would reply to no avail.
The Montiglios and the Gaggis got together nearly every Sunday, particularly after Nino’s father Angelo died of a heart attack in 1962. The Montiglios always went to Brooklyn because Nino hated driving on the busy Long Island Expressway. Marie Montiglio put up with it because otherwise she would never see her mother, now living alone in the apartment above Nino and Rose. Her husband Anthony put up with it too, for Marie’s sake.
Dominick thought his uncle’s attitude about the music business was hypocritical; the musicians he was meeting were saying that “Mafia people” were making moves on the music industry. He believed it because some Italian-American singers he regarded lightly seemed to be on the radio all the time. They were proof it was possible to manufacture a hit out of a bad song. All it took was enough cash to grease a disk jockey’s palm.
The Four Directions were certain of stardom when, after an audition, a record company agreed to record a song a friend had written, “Tonight We Love.” The words were original, but the music was a knockoff of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto.
Sales were modest, but the record got the group into another studio, where they sang backup vocals on an album by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, a popular group. The album included a big hit, “Sock-It-To-Me,” but the song Dominick liked most was, “A Face in the Crowd,” for which he did the vocal arrangement.
Friends said it was a fitting song because Dominick had impressed them as so unusual in one regard. Moving from singer to athlete to student to McDonald’s grill man, he seemed to take on a different persona at each stop. It was not just the clothes or the uniform that changed, it was the body language, speech, and manners. His friends called him a chameleon.
One night, the Four Directions got giddy on Thunderbird wine and decided to crash Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. The forty-five-minute drive sobered them up some, however, and they decided to just hang outside the Carnegie entrance. Doing so, they noticed an overhang that reminded them of the echo chamber created by the alcove at the shopping center where they sounded so good and the liquor distributor discovered them. It was an omen.
“Tonight, we love,” the boys began, straining their voices, banging Tchaikovsky’s notes against the concrete and steel. As they continued, a few people stopped and applauded. But as a conceit crowd poured out of the theater and swelled around, they suffered stage fright. They stopped singing and ran off.
A few blocks away, a limousine pulled alongside them; a chauffeur got out and said his boss was in show business and wanted to meet them. The Four Directions returned to Carnegie Hall and met June Havoc, hostess of a television variety show.
“I’d love you to be on my show,” she told them.
Just like that, the Four Directions made their television debut; it led to other shows—including an American Bandstand–type show in Cleveland, where the guests also included a young couple, Sonny & Cher. Dominick chatted with both, but the Indian-looking Cher, with her peculiar beauty and black hair to her buttocks so unnerved him he never remembered anything she said.
Promoting “Tonight We Love,” The Four Directions also played Arthur, a club in Manhattan owned by actor Richard Burton’s former wife, Sybil, and the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, a famous black club whose audience clapped them to two encores.
Still, The Four Directions’ act was limited.
To make it big, they had to have a runaway hit record and to establish their own image. They could not make it big singing only other groups’ songs. A friend in another group wrote them a song they thought would do the trick, but the label that had recorded them before was not interested. The limited success of “Tonight We Love” was not enough to overcome the perception that all they were was a warmup act. Dominick believed the real reason was that four other Italian
-American singers for the label, the very hot Four Seasons, did not want it promoting potential rivals.
Believing the group just needed one more break, Dominick asked Nino for help. He thought that with one telephone call to Uncle Carlo, Nino could make it happen. He believed Carlo already controlled a record company in New Jersey; in the clubs, he had heard such stories and in newspapers, read more. He felt guilty invoking his blood connection to “that life”—but not too guilty. He did have talent.
“All we need is this one little push, someone to make the record,” he told Nino.
“I don’t think that business is for you.”
“I told you it’s not the business, it’s the music.”
“All they do in that business is drugs and women. It’s not for you—forget about it.”
The patronizing attitude was infuriating. Dominick raised his voice against Nino for the first time. “Who are you telling me what’s good for me?”
“You came here with your hat in your hand.”
“So it would be cooler if I was a murderer and ran around the streets being a loanshark, is that it?”
Nino moved closer to Dominick. “I think you should watch what you say.”
“Loanshark is okay. Professional artist, forget about it.”
“You better leave now or I’m gonna pop you in the nose.”
Dominick left the bunker angry and humiliated. He detested everything his uncle was, and himself for trying to use him.
The Four Directions stayed together another year, but never went any farther than they had already gone. In their disappointment, they began to resent each other. They bickered over who had the best voice and the number of leads each sang. When Dominick was seventeen, they disbanded.