During that time, Mikey’s father, my Uncle Jimmy, took a RICO fall, along with Matty Maglione. They got ten years for bribing, then trying to extort a Pennsylvania trucking company owner who turned out to be wearing a wire. Mikey’s mom, Christina, died of cancer. My pop, Dominick, became acting head of the family business. Paul Castellano got whacked just before Christmas of ’85, and the so-called Mafia Commission Trial dragged on. Junior Persico was running the old Colombo outfit, which of course affected us LiDeccas, not exactly fans of the late Joseph.
Personally, I thought the worst part of those years was all the Chinese swarming into Little Italy. Overnight, it seemed. Weird people. Glass tanks of live fuckin’ frogs and turtles to cook. All these signs you couldn’t even read. Not hardly any Italian left. Just Italian for tourists, which is different. I hate change.
Personally, I tried to bring some style to things, the same way Joey did. I blew lots of money on clothes and dinner parties. I got to know the tabloid photogs, and they liked me. I have good, straight teeth and a kinda round face, so when you put both of them over an eight-hundred-dollar suit, I looked kind of lovable and wicked at the same time. Which is exactly what I was. Girls on my arms, but never my wife, of course. And I’d pop off to the reporters, give ’em good copy. I’d tell ’em what sports teams and casinos I liked, and what movies, and what the good wines and restaurants were, and I’d bad-mouth the feds every chance I got, take pity on ’em for being so dumb. The cops were okay, but the feds hated me. They harassed my family and threw charges at me to prove it, but what they couldn’t prove was me being guilty. I left courtrooms with a trail of dropped charges and not-guilty verdicts behind me. I loved every minute of it.
Mikey went the other way. Hardly saw him. Regina dumped him outta nowhere, took off on tour with a Jersey bass player. That killed Mikey, having tried to be a musician once himself. Which was exactly her purpose, I pointed out. She left their children—Danny and Lizzy—with him, which was the only good thing Mikey seemed to get out of those twelve years.
He called me Christmas Day of 1986. He sounded happy and desperate at the same time. “We’re going to California to live,” he said. “Danny and Lizzy and me. I’m out, Ray. I’ve worked it out with Pop and Uncle Dom and—”
I hung up on him because I was furious.
Later that day, Christmas Day, Pop told me they’d arranged to let Mikey out of the family for as long as Jimmy was alive. So, Mikey didn’t exist no more. Obviously, this was out of respect for Jimmy, and not his coward of a son. All I could say on the phone to my own father was, “I’m sorry, Pop—I’m sorry I was the one brought Mikey along and couldn’t teach him one bit of sense or even the most basic rules.” Mikey was my failure.
Not long after, in the summer of 1987, Mikey did something even worse.
The video was sent to me by a friend in L.A. At first, I figured it was some more good San Fernando Valley porno, but no, this was a PBS news story showing some meatball walking across the stage at something-or-other junior high school in Irvine, California. And the meatball is Mikey.
The auditorium is full of children. Mikey’s got himself a cheap-looking suit and a white shirt but no tie. He’s put on some weight. He’s got a real serious look on his face. A fat lady introduces him as Michael Ticci, and Mikey goes to the podium and takes the microphone.
And he tells the students he comes from a prominent crime family in New York, where he was born and lived for all his life until a few months ago, when he quit crime, moved to California, got straight. He doesn’t name the family business. He tells about growing up in Little Italy, how it was a wonderful place for a kid, but he always thought there was something wrong about it. Then he tells how his great-great-grandfather built up a “wholesale food and produce” business before not-completely-honest men took it over. He’s standing up there with this kind of frown on his face, talking shit about his own family. In public, on TV, to a bunch of children!
And you could see the emotion in him. His eyes go kind of squinty and he gestures with his hands and his voice cracks when he talks about “beating that man until he nearly died,” and “Uncle Lou coming back from prison white as a ghost, with black hatred in his eyes,” and how difficult it is to get the smell “of another man’s blood off your hands,” and “what it’s like to live in a world where men substitute love of money for love itself, where money and power are all that matter, where there are no laws or limits.” He said Little Italy was gone now, it was just a skeleton of what it used to be, because organized crime had eaten it out “like a cancer.”
I watched the whole thing with my guts in a knot. Mikey had finally found something to say. I’d have gotten on a plane to California that day if it wasn’t for the family. I’d have choked him to death bare-handed and pissed on his face when I was done. But the arrangement was the arrangement, and there was nothing I could do about Mikey while Uncle Jimmy was alive.
Ten years went by, and I’d like to say I didn’t think about Mikey out there in California, but I did.
I thought about him a lot.