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Authors: Linda Scarpa

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BOOK: The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter
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“Dad, nobody likes me. Am I ugly?”
“Linda, do you know who your father is? Do you know who I am?”
“What does that mean? What does that have to do with what I'm telling you, Dad?”
“Linda, they're afraid of you because of me.”
Then I started to figure out that he was in the Mob. I was getting older, and it just made sense. Nobody ever said, “Your father is a gangster” or “Your father is in the Mob.” But as I got older, I got smarter.
I knew that he wasn't a professional gambler. He was a violent guy out on the street. I didn't get the whole Colombo crime family thing yet, but I did know that people feared him.
I never really got over what my father did to Greg. It stayed with me for a very long time. I ran into Greg when we were adults and we became friends again. I apologized to him a thousand times.
He said he didn't hate me anymore. “Linda, I was just a kid getting beat up by men. I don't know how I lived.”
CHAPTER 4
TURN YOUR WOUNDS INTO WISDOM
When I told Greg Vacca I was writing a book and I was going to include what my father did to him, he started telling me the whole story from his perspective. He reminded me of things I guess I forgot about, or maybe subconsciously didn't want to remember. His story is so powerful that I decided to ask him to tell you about it in his own words.
 
 
I was celebrating my sixteenth birthday with the guys I always hung around with—there were about five of them. We decided to have a little party in this apartment we had rigged up downstairs in an abandoned building in Brooklyn. It used to be the super's apartment. We rigged it up with electricity and everything.
We had a secret entrance. To get down to the
basement, you had to go around the side of the building in the back. There was a basement window that was all boarded up. We would take the boards on the outside off, but when we got inside, we would put the boards back up on the inside so the window still looked boarded up.
We decided to have Linda and one of her friends meet up with us there to party. When she arrived, she came up to wish me a happy birthday.Then she gave me a cigarette pack about half full of joints. It was just what I wanted. I asked her where they came from and she told me she took them from her dad.
Linda really wasn't an experienced pot smoker like us. She had tried it a few times, but she really wasn't doing it right. So that night she started smoking, and she still wasn't doing it right. I told her, “You've got to inhale it.” But when she inhaled, she basically coughed her brains out. She nearly puked, but she said she was okay.
We smoked for most of the night. Then she said it was getting close to her curfew so she was going home. I tried to talk her out of it.
“Linda, do not go home like that. Your father is going to pin you out right away.”
I knew her father was involved with the Mafia, but I didn't know how much he was involved.
“No, I'll be all right. I'm going to go to Argie's house.”
Argie was one of our friends. Argie's parents, especially her father, were really strict, too. I didn't really like him. So Linda left and we continued our party. Linda didn't come back, so I figured she must have made it home okay.
But when I got home, my parents were on the phone with Linda's parents. They were pretty much going at it on the phone. I found out that Larry had picked Linda up at Argie's and took her home.And her father pinned her out, just as I thought he would. So I got in trouble. I was pretty pissed at Linda because I was convinced that she had ratted me out to her father.
The next day my friends and I were supposed to meet at the indoor Avenue I Flea Market in Brooklyn and then play a game of softball. I was a huge baseball player.
We used to go to the flea market and party in the basement. We used to get in through this staircase that was pretty much broken down. We used to squeeze through the fence and go back there. We were crazy. We would party in places where nobody would even think of going.
My friends and I got wasted and then we decided to go upstairs to the flea market. While we were there, I saw Linda and her mother shopping, but Linda didn't look too happy. Linda's mother and I got into an argument. She called me a pothead and said I made her daughter do this and that. But that wasn't the case—I didn't make her do anything. And that's just what I told her mother.
“Who are you calling a pothead? I didn't make her do anything. She got the weed from you guys, so look who's talking.”
Big Linda was pissed because I pretty much embarrassed her in front of all the people at the flea market. That's when she grabbed me by the arm and started shaking me. I sort of pushed her arm off me,
but I didn't push her. She took a couple steps back and started screaming at me. “You just wait,” she said.
We were yelling back and forth. I never started any fights, but I wasn't a guy you wanted to pick a fight with. Then Linda and her mother left.
My friends and I started walking around the flea market. We were stoned as hell. Then next thing I knew, these two guys came out of nowhere and one of them hit one of my friends in the face. He just jabbed him out.
These guys weren't dressed like us; they were dressed like gangsters. It was a Saturday or Sunday morning and we were in softball gear and they were wearing Capezios—and when I think about it now—looking like Don Johnson in
Miami Vice.
So I was thinking these guys weren't just street thugs.
We started to retaliate and we ended up chasing them out of the flea market. When we got outside, the guys ran over to their car and I saw Linda and her mother in the backseat. My friend Stephen threw a baseball bat at the guys. It hit the back window of the car, shattering the glass. The last thing I heard before the car took off was Linda's mother screaming at me out the window, “You wait until tonight!”
After that, we went to play softball and everything seemed fine. Later on that night, I was at our apartment building hangout with my group, and we were partying as usual. We ran out of pot, but we knew some guys who used to sell weed at the bowling alley on Avenue I, about two blocks away. It was raining that night; so since I was the most athletic and the fastest, I said, “I'll go get it. I'll run.”
So my friends gave me the money. I'm trucking myself along, and about a block or so away, I see three cars with a lot of guys in them—there must have been ten or twelve guys—on the other side of the street. It didn't look right, but I kept running and didn't think any more about it.
Then, all of a sudden, a car pulled up next to me. There was a used-car lot on the other side, and there was a big fence. Behind the fence were Dobermans and other guard dogs, so I couldn't escape that way.
Then one car pulled up behind me and one in front of me. They pretty much boxed me in. I tried to jump over the hood of the car, but it was raining. I made it, but when I hit the roof, I slipped.
The guys were out of the cars by that point. One of them grabbed my leg, and I fell on my head. And they just friggin' pulverized me. They annihilated me. I ended up with a broken nose, a concussion, two fractured ribs, and the rest of my whole body was bruised everywhere. And my head was so swollen, I looked like the Elephant Man. It was pretty bad. These were grown men. They were dressed like gangsters and they all had guns. I was only sixteen.
When they first got me, they beat me up outside. It started getting a little out of hand, so they threw me in one of the cars and drove across the street to a pretty secluded gas station. Linda's father was in the driver's seat; her brother Greg was in the front passenger seat; I was in the backseat, in the middle, with a guy on each side holding me.
Her father turned around and hit me a few times. He had a good punch—he had a better punch than
her brother. I tried moving my head to head butt Greg Junior's hand. I was pretty sure I hurt his hand, because I moved my face out of the way. I took boxing when I was a kid, and they taught me to move my head and try and break the opponent's hand when it hit me, so that's what I tried to do.
The whole time they were hitting me, her father kept asking me, “Where's Stephen?” They wanted Stephen more than me, but I wouldn't rat. I wouldn't say anything. I just kept telling them that I didn't know.
“Where is he?”
“I don't know.”
Boom.
“Where is he?”
“I don't know.”
Boom.
This continued on for at least a good ten to fifteen shots.
Finally I said, “I think he's at the bowling alley.”
Crack.
“Where is he?”
“I think he's at the bowling alley.”
Crack.
But they didn't stop, until I said, “He's at the bowling alley,” not “I think he's at the bowling alley.” They wanted a definite answer.
These guys then took me from the gas station to the bowling alley, which was about half a block away. It was right on McDonald Avenue, which was famous for being a place where people got killed. When the elevated trains ran overhead, people would blow shots at you and nobody would hear the gunshots.
I was pretty much toast at that point. I was thinking I was dead. But they took me to the bowling alley in search of my friend Stephen.They stood me up outside, and they were bouncing me around the bowling alley wall like I was a pinball. They were smashing me against the wall.
Then they went into the bowling alley. It was a tough place to hang out because another gang of guys hung out there. But Linda's father's crew threw all those guys out when they were looking for Stephen. A couple friends of mine were there and they told me later they didn't know how I survived.
Greg Senior hit me a few times outside.Then he said, “Stephen is not in there.” I was thinking that they were going to take me for the ride at that point and finish me off. They're still bouncing me around outside some more.Then Larry Mazza said, “Enough, enough. Come on, enough already.”
I knew Larry before he got involved in the Mafia. He was a delivery boy and he used to deliver food to my house. He kept saying, “Enough is enough.” But that didn't help. The whole time I was wondering when it was going to end. All I could do was try and make it through.
I wasn't going to rat because I knew they were going to kill Stephen for sure. I knew where he was because I had just left him in that vacant apartment building.
I ended up on the ground, pretty much beaten to a pulp, with my head hanging off the curb. It was still raining and I looked down and saw my blood pouring into a puddle. I was alive probably because I didn't rat my friend out. If I had, they probably would have
offed me right there for being a rat. Maybe Linda's father wanted to see how much I could take.
Finally they left. I felt somebody pick me up and pull me into the bowling alley bathroom. He was a pretty high-up guy, so he had his connections, too. He was from a different crew and I think a different family. Other people I knew from the neighborhood had come in and they were taking care of me.
A lot of people knew me. I was the athlete. I did everything. I played baseball—I was a baseball star. I was a musician—I played the drums. I was also a party kid. But I also had a sense of honor. I wasn't the type of guy who would just screw you over for nothing. If you screwed me, I'd get you, but if you didn't, you had no problems with me.
So those guys told me to stay in the bowling alley bathroom and not come out. I guess they were making sure that Linda's father's crew didn't come back hunting for Stephen or me.
After a while, they said it was okay for me to leave the bathroom. I didn't want to leave, though. I was petrified. Finally they took me to my friend's house, and then they took me home.
My mother and sister almost passed out when I walked through the door.They both started crying. My sister had to sit down because she was so hysterical. My father was pissed.
“Who the fuck did this to you?”
I didn't want to tell him because I was scared of what was going to happen; my father had a high-level job with the federal government. But I finally told him.
“Come on, we're going over to the house.”
“You're fucking crazy! I'm not going over there. Dad, come on, he's a fucking maniac. He just told me if he ever sees me again, or sees me near his family, he's going to fucking kill me. And I believe him. So, no, I'm not going over there. You're crazy.”
“You're fucking going over there with me.”
When we got to Linda's house, my father made me stand right outside the door. He rang the bell. Greg came to the door and invited us in. Everything was respectful. My father was pissed, but he was still talking in a respectful manner. For one thing, my father was not dumb. He didn't want to get killed, either.
We were all sitting down on this little couch that was in the front room. My father and Greg were having a sit-down. They came to an agreement.
“Now the agreement is, they stay away from each other, okay? You don't touch my family,” my father told Greg. “And I won't touch your family.”
And they shook hands on it. That's when Greg called Linda downstairs. I was one of those nice guys. But once you screwed me, forget it. When I got involved with somebody, I really opened up to them. I gave them everything. I felt very betrayed by Linda because I thought she ratted me out to her father. So when she came downstairs, I looked at her pretty much like I hated her.
When Linda saw me, she screamed at her father. “I hate you.” And then she ran back upstairs. Then my father and I left.
Before all this happened, Greg liked me. First of all, I had the same name as him and she had the same
name as her mother. So it was, “Greg and Linda, Greg and Linda.” The fact that he liked me probably saved my life.
BOOK: The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter
7.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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