Sleepers Read online

  “A POWERFUL BOOK,

  HARD TO FORGET…

  Carcaterra is an excellent writer, changing pace here and there but never letting the reader go. So many fail with autobiographies, but this one is sensitive, humorous, and harrowing, featuring dialogue with perfect pitch.”

  —The Denver Post

  “SLEEPERS is so many things: a Dickensian portrait of coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen, a terrifying and heartbreaking account of the brutalization of youth, a shocking—and disturbingly satisfying—climax worthy of the finest suspense novel. A brilliant, troubling, important book.”

  —JONATHAN KELLERMAN

  “A hell of a read…Taut, compelling.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Lorenzo Carcaterra’s labor, his pain, and above all, his compassion as a man have given us the great gift of SLEEPERS. I ended reading this incomparable work with my heart crushed and my eyes blinded by tears.”

  —HARRY CREWS

  “READS LIKE JOHN GRISHAM-MEETS-GOODFELLAS.”

  —US Magazine

  “Lorenzo Carcaterra gives us a story of the fierce and undying loyalty and stoic courage that children seem to possess when adults do not. No one who reads this book will ever forget it.”

  —JAMES LEE BURKE

  “A once-in-a-lifetime tale … If the old Sicilian saying is true and revenge is a dish best eaten cold, then this is the story of the coldest dish of all.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Irresistibly readable … An extraordinary true tale … Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book … is disturbing and hard to forget.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The story is at once riveting and shocking, the writing is top-notch, and the characters—major and minor—are unforgettable. The themes are timeless. Lorenzo Carcaterra’s treatment of them is original and stunning.”

  —MICHAEL S. PALMER, M.D.

  “UNPUTDOWNABLE.”

  — Glamour

  “A ferocious story of loyalty, betrayal, murder, and revenge, told with such passion and honesty I felt I was looking into Carcaterra’s soul. He writes with the passion of Styron, the guts of Mailer, and the sting of James M. Cain. This book is not to be missed.”

  —WILLIAM DIEHL

  “Carcaterra tells with gripping force of his days growing up in the tough New York City neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s.”

  —Booklist

  “SLEEPERS is a book written with immense passion and devotion. It is compelling from start to finish, and its images—of friendship, brutality, and revenge—will remain with the reader long after it has been closed.”

  —JOHN KATZENBACH

  “Searing … Violent, gritty, yet always braced with humor and massive compassion … One of the most shocking and the most affirming books we’ve ever read…. Carcaterra has written a book that will be compared to In Cold Blood and the works of Norman Mailer.”

  —The Voice Ledger (Millbrook, NY)

  By Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  A SAFE PLACE: The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder

  SLEEPERS

  APACHES

  GANGSTER

  STREET BOYS

  PARADISE CITY

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue Winter 1993

  Book One

  Chapter 1 - Summer 1963

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 - Summer 1964

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 - Fall 1965

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 - Summer 1966

  Chapter 13 - Winter 1966

  Chapter 14 - Summer 1967

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 - Fall 1967

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 - Winter 1968

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 - Spring 1968

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 - Summer 1968

  Chapter 16

  Book Three

  Chapter 1 - Fall 1979

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 - Winter 1980

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 - Spring 1980

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue Summer 1966

  Copyright

  For sleepers everywhere

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without the support of the silent citizens of Hell’s Kitchen. I will honor their requests to remain anonymous voices and never forget their contributions.

  Through the years, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with many editors who have helped me in various stages of my career. None has had more confidence in my abilities than Peter Gethers. With this book, he made a leap of faith few editors are willing to risk. Then, he guided the work and shaped it and edited it as few can. He also supplied an endless stream of jokes that helped ease me through the rough spots. No writer could have a better partner.

  Any writer would love to have a great agent. I have three. Loretta Fidel was always there, always listened, and always cared. Amy Schiffman and Adam Berkowitz believed in me as much as they did in the book. Together, they kept the wolves from the door and the book on everyone’s front burner.

  Clare Ferraro found a place in her heart and on her Ballantine shelf for my first book. Then, over a terrific lunch, she fell in love with my second. Then, she waited and she waited and she waited. Through it all, she supplied patience, friendship, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Steve Golin and the people at Propaganda Films for their passionate belief in Sleepers, and Barry Levinson, Peter Giuliano, and the cast and crew of the movie for bringing that passion to life, and Dr. Paul Chrzanowski, Dr. Nancy Nealon, and my main man David Malamut at the Rusk Institute for their help.

  Then there are the cops—Steve Collura for the kind words; Joe Lisi for the laughter and concern; and, above all, Sonny Grosso, for everything he has meant to me throughout a friendship that now numbers in the decades.

  To my phone buddies—Hank Gallo, Carlo Cutolo, Mr. G., Marc Lichter, Leah Rozen, and Keith Johnson—for being there and for listening. To Liz Wagner for the laughs. And to Bill Diehl for the wisdom and the care.

  To my wife, Susan Toepfer, I owe everything. She has always had my respect, will always have my love, and will always be my friend.

  To my son, Nick, thank you for the smiles and the chance to forget my work for a period of time. To my daughter, Kate, thank you for showing me what a warm heart can beat beneath such a pretty face.

  And thanks to my crew of suspects—the Fat Man, Bobby C, Bam-Bam, Carmine, Doc, Big D., Mike Seven, and Sammy Weights. You were always where you were supposed to be. I never expected any less.

  Sleeper (colloq.): 1. Out-of-town hit man who sp
ends the night after a local contract is completed. 2. A juvenile sentenced to serve any period longer than nine months in a state-managed facility.

  “Let’s go say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”

  —Pat O’Brien to the Dead End Kids

  in Angels with Dirty Faces

  Prologue Winter 1993

  I SAT ACROSS the table from the man who had battered and tortured and brutalized me nearly thirty years ago. I had imagined him to be in his sixties—he had seemed so old to me back then—but, in fact, he was in his late forties, less than a decade older than me. His thinning hair was combed straight back, and his right hand, trembling and ash white, held a filter tip cigarette. His left clutched a glass of ice water. He looked at me from behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes moist, his nose running, the skin at its base red and flaky.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said in a voice devoid of the power it once held. “I don’t know where to start.”

  In my memory he was tall and muscular, arrogant and quick-tempered, eager to lash out at those under his command at the juvenile home where I spent nine months when I was thirteen years old. In reality, sitting now before me, he was frail and timid, thin beads of cold sweat forming at the top of his forehead.

  “I need to keep my job,” he said, his voice a whining plea. “I can’t lose this one. If any of my bosses find out, if anybody finds out, I’m finished.”

  I wanted to stand up and grab him, reach past the coffee and the smoke and beat him until he bled. Instead, I sat there and remembered all that I had tried so hard, over so many years, to forget. Painful screams piercing silent nights. A leather belt against soft skin. Foul breath on the back of a neck. Loud laughter mixed with muffled tears.

  I had waited so long for this meeting, spent so much time and money searching for the man who held the answers to so many of my questions. But now that he was here, I had nothing to say, nothing to ask. I half listened as he talked about two failed marriages and a bankrupt business, about how the evil he committed haunts him to this very day. The words seemed cowardly and empty and I felt no urge to address them.

  He and the group he was a part of had stained the future of four boys, damaged them beyond repair. Once, the sound of this man’s very walk caused all our movement to stop. His laugh, low and eerie, had signaled an onslaught of torment. Now, sitting across from him, watching his mouth move and his hands flutter, I wished I had not been as afraid of him back then, that I’d somehow had the nerve and the courage to fight back. So many lives might have turned out differently if I had.

  “I didn’t mean all those things,” he whispered, leaning closer toward me. “None of us did.”

  “I don’t need you to be sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t do me any good.”

  “I’m beggin’ you,” he said, his voice breaking. “Try to forgive me. Please. Try.”

  “Learn to live with it,” I told him, getting up from the table.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “Then die with it,” I said, looking at him hard. “Just like the rest of us.”

  The pained look of surrender in his eyes made my throat tighter, easing the darkness of decades.

  If only my friends had been there to see it.

  THIS IS A true story about friendships that run deeper than blood. In its telling, I have changed many of the names and altered most of the dates, locations, and identifying characteristics of people and institutions to protect the identities of those involved. For example, I have changed the location of the murder trial, which did not take place in Manhattan. I’ve also changed where people live and work—and made many of them a lot better looking than they really are. It is a story that has taken two years to write and parts of two decades to research, forcing awake in all the principals memories we would have preferred to forget. I have been helped in the re-creation of the events of this story by many friends and a few enemies, all of whom requested nothing more in return than anonymity. So while their deeds have been accurately documented, their names—heroes and villains—will remain unknown.

  However hidden their identities, this is still my story and that of the only three friends in my life who have truly mattered.

  Two of them were killers who never made it past the age of thirty-five. The other is a nonpracticing attorney living within the pain of his past, too afraid to let it go, finding reassurance instead in confronting its horror.

  I am the only one who can speak for them, and for the children we were.

  BOOK ONE

  “This much I do know—there’s no such thing as a bad boy.”

  —Spencer Tracy as Father Eddie Flanagan in Boys’ Town

  Summer 1963

  1

  LABOR DAY WEEKEND always signaled the annual go-cart race across the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the mid-Manhattan neighborhood where I was born in 1954 and lived until 1969.

  Preparations for the race began during the last two weeks of August, when my three best friends and I would hide away inside our basement clubhouse, in a far corner of a run-down 49th Street tenement, constructing, painting, and naming our racer, which we put together from lifted lumber and stolen parts. A dozen carts and their teams were scheduled to assemble early on Labor Day morning at the corner of 50th Street and Tenth Avenue, each looking to collect the $15 first-prize money that would be presented to the winner by a local loan shark.

  In keeping with Hell’s Kitchen traditions, the race was run without rules.

  It never lasted more than twenty minutes and covered four side streets and two avenues, coming to a finish on the 12th Avenue end of the West Side Highway. Each go-cart had a four-man team attached, one inside and three out. The three pushed for as long and as hard as they could, fighting off the hand swipes and blade swings of the opponents who came close. The pushing stopped at the top of the 50th Street hill, leaving the rest of the race to the driver. Winners and losers crossed the finish clothesline scraped and bloody, go-carts often in pieces, driver’s hands burned by ropes. Few of us wore gloves or helmets, and there was never money for knee or elbow pads. We kept full plastic water bottles tied to the sides of our carts, the fastest way to cool off hot feet and burning wheels.

  The runt of the litter among my team, I always drove.

  JOHN REILLY AND Tommy Marcano were spreading black paint onto thick slabs of dirty wood with color-by-number brushes.

  John was eleven years old, a dark-haired, dark-eyed charmer with an Irishman’s knack for the verbal hit-and-run. His clear baby face was marred by a six-inch scar above his right eye and a smaller, half-moon scar below the chin line, both the results of playground falls and homemade stitches. John always seemed to be on the verge of a smile and was the first among my friends to bring in the latest joke off the street. He was a poor student but an avid reader, a mediocre athlete with a penchant for remembering the batting and fielding statistics of even the most obscure ballplayers. He loved Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello movies and went to any western that played the neighborhood circuit. If the mood hit him the right way, John would prowl the streets of Hell’s Kitchen talking and walking as if he were Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners, proclaiming “Hiya, pal,” to all the neighborhood vendors. Sometimes, in return for his performance, we would each be given free pieces of fruit. He was born with a small hole in his heart that required regular doses of a medication his mother often could not afford to buy. The illness, coupled with a frail frame, left him with a palpable air of vulnerability.

  Tommy Marcano, also eleven, was John’s physical opposite. He had his Irish mother’s carrot-colored hair and his father’s ruddy, southern Italian complexion. Short and flabby around the waist and thighs, Tommy loved sports, action movies, Marvel comics, and adventure novels. Above all else, Tommy loved to eat—meatball heroes, buttered rolls, hard cherry candy barrels. He collected and traded baseball cards, storing each year’s set in team order inside a half-dozen
Kinney shoeboxes sealed with rubber bands. He had a natural aptitude for math and built model ships and planes out of raw wood with skill and patience. He had a sensitive nature and a feel for the underdog, always cheering on teams and athletes that were destined to lose. He was quick to laugh and needed prodding to loosen the grip on his temper. A botched surgical procedure when he was an infant forced him occasionally to wear a pad and brace around his right leg. On those days Tommy chose to wear a black eye patch and tie a red handkerchief around his head.

  Michael Sullivan, at twelve the oldest of my friends, was quietly hammering nails into a sawed-down Dr. Brown’s soda crate.

  The best student among us, Michael was a smooth blend of book smarts and street savvy. His Black Irish eyes bore holes through their targets, but his manner was softened by a wide, expansive smile. He kept his thick, dark hair short on the sides and long on top. He was never without a piece of gum in his mouth and read all the tabloids of the day, the only one among us to move beyond the sports pages to the front page. He was also never without a book, usually a rumpled paperback shoved inside the rear pocket of his jeans. Where we still favored the tales of Alexandre Dumas, Jack London, and Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael had graduated to the darker domain of Edgar Allan Poe and the chivalry and romance of Sir Walter Scott. He initiated most of our pranks and had a Cutting sense of humor that was doused with a wise man’s instinct for fair play. He was our unofficial leader, a position he valued but never flaunted and one that required him to care for and maintain our collection of Classics Illustrated comics.

  I was busily applying biker’s grease onto two stroller wheels taken off a baby carriage I’d found abandoned on 12th Avenue.

  “We need a better name this year,” I said. “Somethin’ that sticks in people’s heads.”

  “What was it last year?” Tommy asked. “I forget.”

  “The Sea Hawk,” I reminded him. “Like the movie.”

  “Seaweed woulda been more like it,” Michael said. That was his subtle way of reminding us that we hadn’t done so well in the previous race, finishing next to last.