Family & Fatherhood

My Father: The Murderer

When I was 14, I found out that my father had killed his first wife. Nineteen years later, on his deathbed, he opened up to me and told me the story, how he smothered her with a pillow in a jealous rage and did seven years in prison. He wasn't leaving me anything else, he said, and thought of his story as a gold mine. I wrote a book called A Safe Place about my father and his crime, and paid off his debts. He made quite a few horrible mistakes in his life, but he loved me unconditionally and taught me a few things.

I learned we're all capable of what he did. You're deceiving yourself if you think you can't. Everyone, under the right conditions—or in the wrong situation—can kill somebody. I had a temper when I was much younger, but watching his temper fly out for the most inane reasons, I learned how to control mine. You realize it takes a fraction of a second for your life to change. Violence is in all of us. I saw it in his actions. He couldn't control it. His only reflex was that of a caged animal.

He was old-school neighborhood. If you came home with a black eye, the other guy better have two. He taught me to stand up for myself and never let people get one up on you. Even though people might be in better circumstances financially and have gone to better schools than you did, it doesn't make them better, it just makes them luckier.

He showed me street honor. To him, this meant be true to yourself first—and don't care about what anybody says. To this day, I don't read book reviews, good or bad. It's nice to get good reviews, but I've had a lot of negative stuff written about me. None of those people know me, so I don't care.

His theory about racism, like everything about him, was simple. If around us they're using derogatory statements about blacks or Jews, the minute we're not there, they'll be saying derogatory statements about Italians.

He was a weird cat. He killed his wife, and he would tell me to respect women. He told me never to hit women, and he always hit my mother. I learned by watching him how not to treat women. The lesson for me, for my mother, was how to live through a nightmare all those years. I can't imagine how difficult life must have been for his first wife. There were a lot of other women in his life. It taught me that if you make a commitment to a person, to a wife—for me, looking at his example of not keeping it—you keep it. I never use the words he used toward my mother with my wife.

I saw that debt leads to panic. I was 16 or 17, and he went with me to Household Finance, where you went when you couldn't get a loan from anybody. And they charged loan-shark rates. He had me go in with him to plead the case. We had no money and tons of debt, and the guy turned us down. I remember the despair. My father's thing was total panic—"I gotta do something"—whether it was legal or illegal.